From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is The Business.

A frighteningly lackluster summer box office,

human Scarjo dukes it out with open AIs,

definitely not supposed to sound like Scarjo's Scarjo,

and the movies making noise at this year's Cannes Film Festival,

not necessarily in a good way.

Yes, it's nothing but banter this week.

Stick around. It's the business from KCRW. I am joined by my partner in banter. Matt

Bellany. Hello, Matt. Hi there. So, this is Memorial Day weekend, yay. For the movie business,

maybe not so much, yay. We're looking at movies

that would have theoretically opened much bigger before the pandemic, and a lot of them are just

kind of not getting to those pre-pandemic numbers. In this case, Furiosa, and it's always hard to

say, is it tracking sort of in the mid-40s, I think, because people are sick of it.

People don't think it's going to be as good as the previous ones. Well, long and short is,

it's tracking much weaker than the previous ones. Yeah. And Garfield is at about 30, which I think is fine.

That one costs a little less. But neither of these movies is on par with the past couple years even. Forget pre-COVID.

I mean, Top Gun was a memorial release. Top Gun Maverick. And that one went to, I believe it was like

150 around there. And even last year, Little Mermaid, the remake got to about 110. And people

thought that was a disappointment. Right.

So, you know, box office this year is already way down.

We're heading into, we're almost down like 30, 40 percent from pre-COVID times.

This summer is kind of turning into a disaster.

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