Like the other seven films in the franchise, “Furious 8,” as Diesel called it in his announcement, will be made by the Universal Studios division of Comcast Corp. (NYSE: CMCSA). Comcast would certainly rather have completed its proposed merger with Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX), but another film in the hot-selling franchise is not a bad consolation prize.
Since its opening on the first weekend in April, “Furious 7” has raked in $300.53 million in domestic ticket sales and $857.86 million in foreign ticket sales, for a three-week total of $1.16 billion. The film has moved to seventh place in the ranking of the highest worldwide gross sales, and trails “Iron Man 3” by about $60 million.
“Furious 7” is very likely to pass “Iron Man 3,” and maybe even Walt Disney Co.’s (NYSE: DIS) fifth-place ranked “Frozen,” but it may take a while. In its opening weekend, U.S. sales totaled $147.19 million before dropping to about $60 million on its second weekend and $29.16 million last weekend. “Frozen” posted gross worldwide receipts of $1.27 billion.
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The movie’s real strength is overseas. In China, “Furious 7” sold $63.5 million in tickets in its opening week (April 6 to 12) and nearly tripled that number last week to $182.4 million, for a total of $245.9 million in just two weekends. In the United Kingdom, the film has grossed nearly $48 million in its first three weeks of release, and ticket sales in Australia totaled $29.3 million for three weekends.
Two years may seem like a long wait, but that has been the sequence spacing since the fourth movie, “Fast and Furious,” was released in April 2009. Like clockwork, every two years another Furious move has been released, and each one has earned more than its predecessors. No movie studio is going to mess with that kind of success.
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