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Looking at the box office performance of Fast X in isolation might seem to portend an ominous future for the remainder of the franchise. A $67 million domestic opening and a 65% dropoff in its second week — Memorial Day weekend — in theaters? Hitting paid VOD just three weeks after its release? Hell, those are practically Black Adam numbers. Does this mean the next Fast movies will be doomed at the box office? Should Universal be worried?
The short answer: Nah.
Zooming out to consider the franchise as a whole reframes the above concerns in a much different context. “The performance of this film doesn’t spell, ‘Oh no, this is catastrophic for the next installment,’” Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore, told IGN.
“The performance is absolutely what everyone expected,” Boxoffice Pro’s chief analyst Shawn Robbins agreed, and speculated that “Universal probably even expected it.”
"The performance is absolutely what everyone expected.
“
Fast X, the most expensive Fast film, cost $340 million dollars to make. But it’s so far raked in $653.6 million worldwide to-date, and still might crack $700 million when factoring in the rest of its theatrical run and VOD sales. “That’s still a fine, if not a good result for the franchise right now,” Robbins said.
The Fast franchise has had incredible longevity, especially for one that’s running on original IP. Counting the spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, Fast X is the eleventh film in a series that’s been puttering on for more than 20 years. Its peak came about with Furious 7, the last movie that featured Paul Walker after his tragic death and “held a very special place for fans around the world,” Dergarabedian said. That film was the first in the Fast franchise to make more than $1 billion both internationally and globally, immediately followed by The Fate of the Furious. After that, the Fast movies have incrementally declined at the box office. But since Fast 5, none have made less than $600 million, and overall the franchise stands at more than $7 billion.
Even still, Universal does have to keep those ballooning costs – especially as blockbusters in general become more and more expensive to produce – in mind.
“It seems unlikely to me that [Universal] would expect to keep making a billion dollar-plus on this franchise indefinitely. No series has ever been built that consistently,” Robbins said. “But that does mean they have to look at how much they’re spending to produce these upcoming sequels and spinoffs and bake in the expectation that there is a regression or, best-case scenario, a leveling off of what the ceiling is for the films at the box office. And that’s not really a criticism; it’s just reality and the business of it.”
Going International
Another reason that Robbins and Dergarabedian don’t think the Fate franchise is flailing is because of the films’ international appeal. Ever since third installment Tokyo Drift, domestic box office turnout has been significantly overshadowed by the films’ performance overseas, fluctuating between 57% and 81% of total ticket sales, which has “inoculated this franchise from having diminishing returns,” Dergarabedian said. “That’s really how it’s been for the past decade with each chapter,” Robbins added.
The movies themselves have left their LA homebase and gone globetrotting, which Dergarabedian attributes to the international box office overtaking the domestic. ”Going international was the smartest decision that the producers and the studio ever made,” Dergarabedian said, “because it turns out that in the international marketplaces, this film still has immense popularity.” Robbins specifically pointed to China, which has “historically been part of this franchise’s footprint internationally and still was, relatively speaking, for this one.”
(Click on the image below to see a larger version of the chart.)
Its second-week performance over a holiday weekend was not really a notable sticking point either. This year’s Memorial Day was a crowded marketplace. The Little Mermaid opened and claimed the top of the box office, but the audience for Fast X and The Little Mermaid is vastly different. If anything, Robbins said that Fast X’s main competition was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 “because those two movies are male driven, especially young males,” and Guardians “was riding, and still is, this wave of really good word of mouth .
Neither analyst sees Fast X’s relatively quick release on VOD (though not subscription-based streaming services just yet) as a red flag either. “It’s a new world now,” Dergarabedian said about theatrical exclusivity windows. “Five years ago, in the days of the strict 90-day window, three weeks would maybe be a bridge too far. But in today’s world, it’s a different dynamic marketplace. These preordained ideas about what is the correct way to release a movie and how, when and where it should go to PVOD and how much it should cost, that’s all kind of movie-dependent and situational, not just cast in stone by some archaic or anachronistic modes of business behavior in the movie industry.”
"It’s about reading the marketplace and doing what’s best for the film.
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Universal, he added, is also particularly “nimble in terms of their plans for release, both before the film hits theaters and while a film is in theaters. It’s about reading the marketplace and doing what’s best for the film. You can put it on PVOD and there will still be people going out to see it on the big screen because it’s really a different experience for that movie.”
Robbins notes that PVOD rentals historically don’t necessarily have a major impact on the box office. “Even if it hadn’t been available for a $20 rental at home, its box office probably still would have been declining at this rate because that’s just where the franchise is at at this point,” he said. “It kind of goes back to that portion of the fans who, you’re either in or you’re out. At this point you’re probably not, without some significant changes to the franchise, bringing in a lot of new audiences.”
The Rock Factor
Over the years, however, the Fast movies have strategically tried to bring in those new audiences by adding star power with Dwayne Johnson — who called himself “franchise Viagra” in his SNL monologue in 2015 — Jason Statham, and Charlize Theron.
“Johnson, to be honest, has largely been credited as part of reviving that franchise when he joined Fast 5 back in 2010,” Robbins said. “That was the franchise’s top performer at the time and it kept steadily increasing for those next two or three movies and he was a part of all of them. Even the eighth film, after Paul Walker was no longer in the series, the franchise could still lean on both Vin Diesel and Johnson as the headliners and that meant something. And since [Johnson] hasn’t been in them, we’ve seen sharper declines in the overall performance of the films.” Not unpredictably, Universal announced another spinoff for Johnson’s Luke Hobbs, who appeared in Fast X’s post-credits scene.
Speaking of the mountain of cliffhangers at the end of Fast X, was splitting up the alleged final Fast movies into two parts a mistake that cost Universal ticket sales? Again, the answer is no. “At the end of the day, Universal’s going to profit on Fast X, and they’re going to profit on Fast X Part 2,” Robbins said. “Ultimately it will have been a good business decision.”
“They’re just trying to keep this thing going as long as they can, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Dergaraberian said.
