Fast & Furious 8 has raced to a global box office record for an opening weekend, taking an estimated $532.5m (£425m) worldwide.
The action thriller, which stars Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Dwayne Johnson as street car racers, reached that total despite a drop-off in opening weekend takings in North America from its predecessor. The latest instalment took $100.2m in the region, enough to top the US charts but significantly less than Fast & Furious 7, which made $147.2m in its opening weekend.
The figures for Fast & Furious 8 (titled The Fate of the Furious in the US) were boosted by takings in foreign markets. The film took $423.3m altogether, across 63 territories. A hefty proportion of that total came from China, where the film set a record for the biggest three-day opening weekend, taking $190m. (Although Chinese cinemas only give studios about 25% of ticket sales, roughly half of what they receive in most other major territories.)
The film’s global total was enough to take it past Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which made $529m in its opening weekend in December 2015. The only other film to break the $500m barrier is Jurassic World, which earned $525.5m. Fast & Furious 7 made $397.7 in its opening weekend.
Fast and Furious 8 has received mixed reviews. It has a rating of 56 out of 100 on the critic aggregation site Metacritic, based on 44 reviews. While some critics were won over by the film’s sense of spectacle, others were not so complimentary, with one particularly scathing review in the Wall Street Journal describing it as “soulless, graceless, witless, incoherent and brain-numbingly long”.
