The latest addition to the Mad Max cinematic universe, Furiosa is currently dying on the rocks of audience indifference and struggling to beat out a cat who hasn’t been relevant for more than twenty years. At the time of this writing, it looks like it is well on its way to failing to even come close to its projected opening of 40 to 50 million dollars, even though those projections were considered modest. And whichever one wins, the fury or the feline, it’ll be the worst opening for a “top grossing movie” since the 1995 release of Casper–a surprising development considering that the film is a spin-off / prequel to the surprise 2015 hit Mad Max: Fury Road. 

How has it done compared to its predecessor? Well, not good of course. 

According to sources, Fury Road had a domestic opening of 45.4 million dollars, whereas Furiosa has floundered around 31 million. Keep in mind, those were 2015 dollars, which if inflation calculators are to be trusted, amounts to about 60 million in today’s dollars, almost double Furiosa’s performance. Also, holy shit really? A 30% increase in less than ten years? Let’s hope that isn’t right.

So why has it failed? Online commentators have offered explanations, but none so far seem terribly satisfying. Some claim that audiences are no longer interested in seeing female leads, that the moment audiences catch wind of a strong, empowered female, they turn and run the other way. But as many have pointed out, this doesn’t really track when Barbiê broke box office records last year, and I’m afraid that while the cheeky assertions that the “real protag” of that movie was Ken might provoke a grin or a chuckle, it doesn’t carry much actual weight. 

The alternative explanation is that audiences have no problem with female leads, but they just aren’t interested in badly written movies. God knows we’ve had more than our fair share of those lately, but seeing as the critical and general reception for the movie has been largely positive on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, this explanation also fails to account for the lack of interest. 

It could be that audiences no longer trust these aggregate review sites or the critics that write for them. And it wouldn’t be without reason if that were true.  After the great kulture konflagrations of the 2010s surrounding Star Wars and probably other films—who can honestly say they remember them all?—after the Great Review Bombings and the censorship campaigns, it doesn’t seem that far fetched to think that even the normies might be getting a bit cynical about how much they can rely on those lusty, love-apples (that’s actually a real synonym by the way; I didn’t make that up). 

But I think there is a more interesting explanation. Furiosa isn’t just a movie with a female lead. It’s also not a new IP. It’s a very old and iconic IP with an iconic world, and an iconic hero: Max. And he’s also a hero who is now being cut out of his own story. 

I think that people are increasingly aware of this process of taking old beloved heroes and replacing them with some new Astro-turfed girl boss.  We have watched it happen so many times now that the formula itself is starting to get a bit stale. 

Make a sequel in which you bring in the new female protege. Try to center her as much as possible and also whenever possible, indicate that she’s just as good or better than her male counterparts. At the same time, try to make him look as pathetic as you can reasonably get away with without provoking riots in the streets. By the end of the movie, if you’ve done it right, it’ll feel like it’s more her story than his. Sure there will be some backlash, but who cares? Just call those guys losers and imply that they can’t get laid, hell you don’t really even need to imply it, you can just come right and say it. And then say the problem with X franchise is its “toxic fans” and this will incentivize all the good boys to put on their good boy pants and go to war in comment sections and across social media platforms. Pretty soon it’ll all be a wash, and by that time, you’ll have reaped the rewards from all that press attention. Wait two or three years (or nearly ten if the situation requires) and then release the sequel or spinoff that is entirely centered on your new female lead. Easy as. 

And enough people have finally arrived at the conclusion that while this is indeed easy and formulaic, it isn’t very fun anymore. It wasn’t fun when it happened to Luke Skywalker, and it wasn’t fun when it happened to Han Solo, and it wasn’t fun when it happened to Indiana Jones, or to Arkham Batman, or to that nice new Mandolorian fellow, and well, there’s just not a lot of continuing interest in the enterprise. 

The problem, as ever, are those pesky second-order consequences. What happens when you do this over and over, and each time you tell anyone who objects that they are losers for caring about how you treat these fictional characters in fictional worlds? Well, what happens is that eventually you get what you asked for: people stop caring. 

They stop caring about the story that you’re telling because that story is actually embedded in this other story about how studio executives keep taking their beloved characters and degrading and diminishing them so that they can pander to another identity group ceaselessly and without the slightest hint of subtlety or restraint. And even though these movies have never exactly been “high art,” they were beloved by millions of people because those people really connect with those stories and with those characters, no matter how flawed they might have been. So if you train them to see those beloved characters as disposable cogs in the commercial process of an IP being run to maximize profit at the top, well sooner or later, everybody starts to see things a little differently. Even if I did connect with the character, it’d be hard to like her knowing that she is just here to kill off and replace the character that I’d connected with before, all for the explicit purpose of pandering to another identity group.

Back in 2015, there might have been a bit of uncertainty around this process, but we’re nine years older and nine years wiser now, baby. And while Max’s usurpation by Furiosa in the series that bears his name is actually one of the more respectful examples that I can think of (Fury Road was basically Furiosa’s movie, but they did let Max keep his dignity), the process itself is obvious enough now that I’m not even the slightest bit interested in participating with my handful of pennies.

Maybe we haven’t seen the end of Max. There’s a good chance that he’ll turn up again, possibly as a cameo in his own series, but even should this happen, it won’t really change anything. At this point, I think enough of us know the score.