Oh, boy. We already know that “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” carries a massive $400M budget, and that it was always a long shot to break even at the box office — but these early numbers aren’t encouraging.
‘Final Reckoning’ pulled in $8M from Thursday previews and is tracking toward a $65M opening weekend. Honestly, it feels like the Mission: Impossible movies have hit their ceiling — there’s just no higher they can go. When all is said and done, and much like the others, it’ll likely top out around $200M and call it a day.
It doesn’t help that the reviews, while generally decent at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, are the weakest the franchise has seen since 2006’s Mission: Impossible III. This one doesn’t have the kind of buzz that Ghost Protocol or Fallout carried.
Tom Cruise has been promoting the hell out of the film — late night, endless interviews — he knows Paramount is desperate to stop the financial bleeding. Quite honestly, it’s hard to see another Mission: Impossible movie happening after this.
A studio that is smiling right now is Disney as their live-action “Lilo & Stitch” movie racked up $15M on Thursday and is headed towards a whopping $160M weekend.
It’s about to beat the 4-day Memorial Day record in just 3 days — wild, but honestly not surprising. Showings have been completely packed, mostly with adults since it was a school day. Many of them were no doubt wearing Stitch merch or carrying plushies.
The lesson here: Disney really has an unmatched grip on the industry. No other studio can turn its IP into box office gold quite like they can. Their animated classics carry so much nostalgic weight that people keep turning out for every new live-action remake, no matter how many come along.