Hobbs & Shaw is the newest entry in the Fast and Furious franchise, but it's also very much its own movie. The spinoff only includes a couple characters from the main series, and much less automobile based action. However, one place where the spinoff certainly wanted to emulate its predecessors was in the area of box office success.
While Hobbs & Shaw is still in theaters, the film has certainly done most of its box office business around the world, so what's the verdict for the spinoff? As is frequently the case, how the numbers add up depends largely on how you look at them, but for the most part Hobbs & Shaw has done the franchise justice, but it's not the smash we've seen from Fast & Furious in the recent past. .
Hobbs & Shaw is the ninth Fast & Furious movie to date, and as far as the domestic box office goes, the film has landed smack in the middle of the pack. It ranks fifth of the nine movies, with a total currently just short of $160 million. This makes it the highest grossing movie in the franchise that did not break the $200 million mark.
Globally, the film fares slightly better, as it finds itself in fourth place in the franchise with a worldwide take an excess of $680 million. It's a full $100 million short of Fast & Furious 6, however, so it won't be going anywhere in the ranking.
However, both of these numbers are not adjusted for inflation. When the movie's $160 million domestic total is adjusted, the numbers look a little bleaker. Hobbs & Shaw falls to eighth place of the nine movies. It's well ahead of The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift, which is the movie at the bottom of the heap, but it's also well behind the rest of the franchise.
At the end of the day, the only two numbers that really matter are a movie's budget and its box office. If a movie made more money than it cost to produce, than it's a win. If it made a lot more money than it cost, then you can be pretty sure that sequels are on the way.
Box Office Mojo lists Hobbs & Shaw's budget as $200 million and if we add another $100 million to that for marketing, the movie still more than doubled its money globally. The movie clearly isn't a success to the level of the last two Fast & Furious films, both of which crossed the $1 billion mark, but it's certainly no failure.
Movie franchises exist, because movies that were successful once tend to be successful again. Spinoffs happen because, eventually, there's a point of diminishing returns, and a franchise has to do something different now and then or run the risk of stagnation. But steer too far from the formula, and things can ultimately fall apart.
Perhaps Hobbs & Shaw faltered for only showcasing a couple of the beloved characters. Perhaps fans are still waiting for #JusticeforHan. Whatever the reason that Hobbs & Shaw didn't make a billion dollars, it still did pretty well, so it may very well have another chance to do just that.
