Can a fat man on a Segway take on a bodybuilder in a $3.4m, 770-horsepower Dubai-made supercar, one of only seven in the world? OK, what if it’s a really nice Segway?
Friday’s box office hopefuls are reigning champion Furious 7, starring Vin Diesel, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and the late Paul Walker; and opening Kevin James comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, and both star cutting-edge, in-demand technology. It’s just that some of that technology is scooter-based.
Furious 7, the final installment in the popular drag-races-and-guns franchise, is on track to break $1bn this weekend if international numbers keep pace with the movie’s progress abroad. It stars a number of cars both American and foreign, not least of them the Lykan Hypersport, a car built by Dubai’s W Motors that looks like it’s just on the verge of turning into a robot. The movie had grossed $800m as of last week, and looks poised to break out even further.
And in the other corner, weighing in at 95lb, gyroscopically stable and recently purchased by Chinese robotics company Ninebot, is the Segway, the co-star alongside James of Blart 2. The first film wasn’t exactly a billion-dollar monster, but it did cost a mere $26m and return some $183m on that investment as it topped the US box office. The new film cost $30m to make and Variety is tracking its performance at above $20m for the upcoming first weekend – not bad at all.
While there’s no real way for Blart 2 to make more money than Furious 7, the last film with the Segway-dancing security guard is actually much more profitable in terms of return on investment: Universal’s film featuring a rubber-burning crew of action heroes will handily surpass its budget on Furious 7, but Blart made more than seven times Columbia Pictures’ outlay.
Key to Furious 7’s success is its overseas audience. Action movies tend to do well in China in particular and comedies tend to underperform – what’s funny doesn’t always translate, and the Segway is a perfect example of that problem. In the US, the Segway company’s two-wheeled device is probably best-known for publicly taking its lumps as a useless gadget for rich people (notably GOB Bluth on the Netflix-resurrected sitcom Arrested Development) and transit for shopping mall security, and for spawning a wide variety of cheaper imitators that can be seen everywhere from Toy Fair to the Consumer Electronics Show.
But it’s not a laughingstock everywhere. Ninebot received some $80m from investors to finance the purchase of the scooter company, according to Reuters. In China, the scooters are not such a ready source of humor. The US State Department’s office of diplomatic security warned about the vehicles in a 2013 briefing, citing a number of scooter-related dangers: “Electric scooters are numerous and maneuver through all available gaps in traffic in total silence,” said the report. “At night, operators of electric scooters and bicycles do not use any lights.” The Segway is often used by military and police forces in China. Perhaps they’ll feature in Furious 8.
