When “Mad Max: Fury Road” came out in 2015, it was met with a furious reception from audiences, in part due to the culture war battles surrounding it.
A handful of men’s rights activist bloggers found the film’s content disagreeable and questioned the fact that director George Miller had brought “Vagina Monologues” writer Eve Ensler in as a consultant to discuss the feminist implications of the film. Others criticized the downplaying of the titular Max character with the addition of the new character Furiosa and the removal of Mel Gibson from the starring role.
The film nominally underperformed — grossing $154.3 million domestically and $226.1 million abroad on a budget upwards of $150 million — yet firmly cemented itself as one of the most critically acclaimed films of the 2010s and one of the greatest action movies of all time.
Nine years later, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” a prequel to Miller’s most recent “Fury Road” film, has been met with a similar box office and culture war battle. The film’s reviews are glowing, but its opening weekend was a disaster, as it became the worst Memorial Day box office in 43 years — grossing the film $32 million domestically and $33 million abroad.
Twitter has been lively with discussions about why the film is bombing. Conservative movie fans are buzzing as to whether the film failed because audiences don’t like female-led action films or because fans seem to think it is bad going into it. Besides actual criticism of
