'Fate of the Furious' Heads for Decent $100-Million Opening Weekend

The box office gas needle for Universal’s The Fate of the Furious is currently staying steady with what we saw on Friday at 12 noon: $45.5M for today and $100.1M for the weekend at 4,310 theaters, the widest pre-summer release ever.

While that figure is at the lower end of where tracking saw the sequel (many forecasted it as high as $110M), there isn’t a major studio in town who would say that’s an awful opening for a movie, especially for an eighth title in an action franchise, one that’s specifically built around car stunts and crashes. Burt Reynolds could only wish that back in the day his 1980s cinematic car series Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run had the type of B.O. momentum that the Fast and Furious franchise possesses.

Furious 7 is a hard act to follow, and is organically the outlier opening wise in the Furious canon with $147.1M given how the pic’s anticipation was fueled not only by its production delay, but the fact that it was the late Paul Walker’s swan song. We saw a similar type of groundswell in ticket sales from fans when The Dark Knight opened to $158.4M following Heath Ledger’s passing. Audiences simply want to share in and watch a great actor’s final turn on screen in a legacy film. So, here we are with F8 in what looks like it’s the second-best opening of the series in the triple digit million range.

Read the rest of this article at Deadline.

Cannonball Run produced a sequel, Cannonball Run II, and established Burt Reynolds as one of the most reliable box-office stars of the early 1980s.