'Fate of the Furious' fails to surpass F7's box-office opening
Despite the revved up social media mentions of the "Fate of the Furious" before its Thursday's opening, it has failed to surpass the box-office opening sales of Fast and Furious 7.
Furious 7 grossed $147.1M on its opening day two years ago while industry estimates now for the "Fate of the Furious" aka F8 hit only a modest $74.7M based on the $44M advance ticket sales in China, on the maximum $11M domestic B.O. sales and the $19.7M log abroad Thursday night.
Furious 7 took $1.5B worldwide, placing second after Avatar - which made $2.8B, first placer in 2015. The Telegraph said that Furious 7 was faster but less furious but still the film made it because it was the tribute film to the actor who died due to car crash in 2013.
It looks like that F7 is hard to be surpassed by F8. Based on West Coast ticket sales alone, F8 made $10.4M Thursday night, another $35.1M on Friday and $45.5M and $32M estimated for Saturday and Sunday, respectively, or a total of $123M.
The $123M would be added by $82.2M sales abroad, plus China's separate haul of $64M, resulting to a total of $269.2M for F8 as of Friday.
F8's sales on Thursday to Easter weekend show a rather not so furious trend, which is not giving it a momentum to surpass F7 although there high hope is still there that F8 can draw a little tie with F7.
The revved-up social media mentions for "The Fate of the Furious" days prior the showing reached 412.8M in all social media combined. The official Fast and Furious Facebook page is already past the 60M total as of Thursday night.
"The Fate of the Furious" topped the social media chatter last week with more than 80,000 new conversations compared 26,000 conversations of Disney-Marvel's "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2", according to media-measurement firm comScore and its PreAct service.
In a review of the New York Times, F8 still evokes a "lingering existential crisis created by Mr. Walker's death" as "do the tears that fall in the story" even as the movie does what is expected, with its fantastic car chases and its assorted machines and locales.
(Fast & Furious/YouTube)
