Last year Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick” was seen as the saviour of cinema and of the Summer box-office – and ended up playing in theaters for months on end.
In 2023 however, Cruise is now yesterday’s boyfriend as far as exhibitors go it seems. According to ERC Box-Office, “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is already set to lose 1,130 screens in the U.S. in its third weekend.
The fourth through sixth “Mission: Impossible” films were consistent performers for Paramount. Those three films each cost between $145-178 million, and each made around $200 million domestically and between $485-571 million overseas, resulting in movies whose global box-office hauls totalled a healthy 4.5x their production budgets.
The ‘Dead Reckoning’ budget however blew out due to pandemic filming, resulting in a ‘Part One’ that cost nearly double that of its predecessors at $290 million.
In short, the film needed to go beyond the nom and do ‘Maverick’ size money of around $1.5 billion to be considered a major success. Whilst it opened to high numbers for the franchise, its opening days fell short of expectations and was more in line with a regular ‘Mission’ entry than a ‘Maverick’ breakout.
So it needed to have a good hold at the box-office, but that never came as the Barbenheimer phenomenon steamrollered over Ethan Hunt – leading to a large 65% drop in its second weekend.
So far ‘Mission’ has grossed $128 million domestically and $252 million overseas resulting in a $378 million worldwide haul at the end of the two-week mark. Meanwhile, “Barbie” is proving this Summer’s Maverick-sized phenomenon, having grossed $500 million worldwide in just six days.
Breaking even would appear to be the real mission impossible for the film. With the second part already half-done, the studio will continue on, but unless those involved can generate a real change of fortune, that movie could well be Ethan Hunt’s final mission.
