Weekend Box Office Results: Fast X Screeches to the Top of the Box Office with a $67.5 Million...

Weekend Box Office Results: Fast X Screeches to the Top of the Box Office with a $67.5 Million Opening

Vin Diesel in Fast X (Photo by Universal Pictures) The second big title of the summer season opened this weekend, and the numbers are big for Fast X . Just not on the side you may be thinking. The 10th installment of the Fast and Furious Saga vroomed into theaters with a cast list bigger than any Ocean’s film or 1960s ensemble war film. As domestic grosses go, its opening was in the bottom half of the franchise. Its Thursday numbers were slightly better than F9’s, which feels like a minor victory given that the earlier film was released during...

Vin Diesel in Fast X (Photo by Universal Pictures) The second big title of the summer season opened this weekend, and the numbers are big for Fast X . Just not on the side you may be thinking. The 10th installment of the Fast and Furious Saga vroomed into theaters with a cast list bigger than any Ocean’s film or 1960s ensemble war film. As domestic grosses go, its opening was in the bottom half of the franchise. Its Thursday numbers were slightly better than F9’s, which feels like a minor victory given that the earlier film was released during the summer of the pandemic vaccine. Ultimately, chapter 10 could not quite get over the ninth film’s opening hump, but it has a far bigger hump to get over if this is not to be the first failure featuring the series’ core cast. King of the Crop: Fast X’s Impressive Cast Doesn’t Translate to an Outsized Fast Franchise  Opening Fast X’s $67.5 million opening is better than all but 42 movies to ever open in May. Ratio that down to six of the movies in the franchise opening stronger – two of them just over $70 million, but still. The return of Vin Diesel to the series in 2009 elevated its Tokyo Drift last legs (still the only film in the series to return a loss) up to its highest opening to date with $70.9 million. Dwayne Johnson’s entry brought it up to $86.1 million. Many still believe Fast Five to be the creative peak of the franchise and that brought No. 6 up to a $97.3 million opening. Then the tragic loss of Paul Walker saw Furious 7 rise to $147.1 million, its all-time financial peak. Since then, it has been a steady fall from $98.7 million for The Fate of the Furious, a $60 million for the presentation of Hobbs Shaw and then $70 million for F9. From the sixth film on though, the international totals have ranged from $550 million up to $1.16 billion. Just international. And it is there that Universal is now counting on to keep No. 10 afloat.
Remember all the hullabaloo when it came to the pre-release budget talks of Waterworld or any James Cameron film from The Abyss on becoming the most expensive film ever made at the time and how they were doomed to failure? Yet where are the headlines that Fast X came into this weekend with a reported production budget of $340 million? Avatar: The Way of Water came in somewhere around $400 million. Avengers: Endgame settled with $356 million. Fast X is next on that list. Those first two titles had no problem clearing a profit as they grossed well over $2 billion globally. But then ask No Time To Die and Justice League about their $300 million budgets and how $774.1 million and $657.9 million left some red ink on the books.
The average final gross of films opening in May between $65 million–$80 million is $233 million. Only two of those films (The Day After Tomorrow and X-Men: Apocalypse) had the kind of drops that the Fast Saga is known for in its second weekend. The smallest drop since the original’s 50 percent has been Hobbs Shaw’s 57.9 percent. The rest ranged from Tokyo Drift’s 59.1 percent to F9’s 67.2 percent. The latter had some pandemic summer implications, but part six’s 63.9 percent is nothing to get excited about either. The series has also not posted a final multiple of three (times its opening weekend) since the 2001 original (3.60). Second best was Hobbs Shaw (2.89), the third was Tokyo Drift (2.60), and fourth was 2 Fast 2 Furious (2.51). Sure, it is just a coincidence that those were Vin Diesel–free. Bottom line is unless Fast X has the kind of support that the new Guardians film has, it is very unlikely that it will hit $200 million in North America. That leaves about $800 million for the overseas market to make up for Universal on this one if it is expected to sell the theatrical release as a success. As of this weekend, it has added another $251 million overseas for a gl...