“F9: The Fast Saga,” the ninth installment of the franchise, is expected to earn $68 million this weekend, a respectable box-office result even by prepandemic standards.
5. Fine with “is likely to” and if we want to attribute it, we can say “Hollywood insiders” but I don’t think we need it. Is the box office back? Hollywood is hoping so as Universal Pictures reports that the ninth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise, “F9: The Fast Saga,” is expected to earn $68 million on 4,179 screens — the largest theater count for a single film since the pandemic shuttered the movie theater business in March 2020. The opening receipts for the series that began 20 years ago and has collected $6.2 billion in total global box office revenue falls within the range of previous iterations of the car-racing action series — which saw its peak in 2015 when “Furious 7” took in $147 million during its debut weekend, and its nadir in 2006 with “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” which earned only $23.9 million in its opening weekend. Internationally, the newest movie has already earned over $300 million with a majority of the ticket sales coming from China, where “F9” recently crossed the $200 million mark. For Universal Pictures, though, the opening success is vindication for a studio that in the early days of the pandemic decided to delay its potential blockbuster by an entire year — a move that was considered excessive when it was announced in early March 2020. “In hindsight, it turned out to be a really great decision,” Donna Langley, the chair of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, said in an interview on Saturday.
