The movie flopped because people are tired of the girl boss trope

I don't think that is true. I think it flopped because most people aren't interested in a Mad Max story. This type of movie has limited appeal and there are no big named stars in it. I like girl boss movies. I would rather watch a movie with a beautiful young woman kicking ass than some middle aged man beating up a bunch of people.

I do want to go see it. I think on the surface it might look a little too close to Fury Road. I am tired of the trope of women who are barely 100 pounds and beating up on guys two to three times their size. It's unrealistic and dangerous propaganda.

And yet Barbie, the ultimate on-steroids example of that made almost $1.5 billion.

The movie flopped for the same reason nearly every movie is flopping lately: people have abandoned cinema-going in favor of streaming. Each year, it seems a couple movies capture the public zeitgeist and become a "must go" movie, but so far there has been no one trend that unites the films. Dune 2 is the only film to have done that so far this year, though the new Godzilla film did so to an extent. Neither film has truly been a phenomenon, and it remains to be seen if 2024 will actually have a proper BIG film.

In 2023 it was Barbie, an angry feminist diatribe with cute songs, Oppenheimer, a lengthy, intellectual art house biopic, and Super Mario Brothers, a feminist reworking of the classic video game, in which the princess helps a hapless Mario rescue Luigi from a cage. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse also did well, though primarily as sequels to previously successful Marvel films.

In 2022 it was Top Gun: Maverick, which I didn't see, but I believe was a fairly standard military action film that rode the coattails of the original Top Gun, along with a handful of MCU films: Spider-Man: No Way Home (a late 2021 film, I know), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love and Thunder, along with other franchise entries, Jurassic World Dominion, The Batman, and Minions: Rise of Gru.

It feels like 2022 was the last year that a film from a big franchise could expect to perform well at the box office simply based on the franchise.

2022 was also the last year in which the quality of a film had seemingly no bearing on its box office success.

Another thing worth mentioning:

The Fall Guy's box office performance seems to disprove your theory. That film is more or less everything we're told people are clamoring for:

It's not a superhero film.
It's not a sequel.
It isn't a reboot.
It isn't a part of any existing franchise.
There isn't the faintest hint of wokeness to it.
DEI doesn't enter into the equation at all.

It's a hit with audiences (86% fresh) and critics (81% fresh) alike, and yet it's made less than $74 million in 25 days.

It's simple. The movie theater experience is dying.

They still have a bunch of people fooled into thinking they have to go spend hundreds of dollars to see their favorite dumb summer movie 4-5 times but that is fading fast.

Most people know better, they don't bother going to the movie theater ONCE, let alone 2x or more.

Sorry but I'm laughing out loud at our coleagues from this thread who are claiming "cinema is dying"...

In what planet is cinema dying?!

Cinema movies just keep breaking records after records and yet some people claim "cinema is dying" only because some movies that are aimed at niches have "flopped" or being close to flop?

Hahahahaha!

The wokeness is definitely a large part of it, but I think the fundamental problem is that Miller actually bought into his own hype as this visionary auteur, which is hilarious when you take the briefest look at his actual filmography.

No one cares about Furiosa, mostly because there's nothing there to care about in the first place. She was basically a nonentity in her first film, whose entire character can be described as having a robotic arm, scowling all the damn time and being really good at shooting people. Contrast that with Max from The Road Warrior, whom the film intro itself describes as "a shell of a man;" a man constantly haunted by pain he simply cannot cope with, who violently rejects any overtures of genuine human contact because he can't bear the mere possibility of adding more loss to those he already carries with him every single day of an aimless life he goes on living out of sheer habit.

If red mohawks, leather assless chaps and crashes between modified muscle cars were all there was to Mad Max, there'd have been dozens of films just as good since the 80's. But while there was the odd Le Dernier Combat (1983) or Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1989) among the entire subgenre it spawned, there's never really been another Mad Max.

People are arguing against this, but it's precisely the reason I won't watch it. I'm not a woman so I won't watch films made for women.