Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning opens to lower-than-expected $74.3m in North America

LOS ANGELES – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh instalment of the action franchise starring Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise as an elite spy, took in US$56.2 million (S$74.3 million) in the United States and Canadian theatres over its debut weekend.

That compares with projections of US$61 million to $75 million in ticket sales for the Friday-to-Sunday period from forecaster Boxoffice Pro.

The movie generated US$80 million over the five days since its release last Wednesday. Paramount Pictures, which distributed the film, had projected US$90 million for that stretch. 

Previous instalments of the Mission: Impossible films took in US$44.9 million to US$78.8 million in their first five days, according to data provided by Comscore. International sales came to US$155 million, the studio said in a statement on Sunday. 

The new Mission: Impossible movie has been one of the theatre industry’s most-anticipated of 2023. It scored positive reviews, with critic and audience scores sitting at 96 and 94 per cent respectively on Rotten Tomatoes.

In the movie, Cruise, 61, races to find a powerful weapon that threatens to destroy humanity. He stars alongside actors Ving Rhames and Hayley Atwell. 

Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick was the highest-grossing picture in North America in 2022. 

The weekend’s second highest-grossing film was Sound Of Freedom, which has grossed more than US$85 million over its two-week run.

The low-budget action picture, in which a former American government agent rescues children from a sex-trafficking operation in Colombia, is a major success story for the two-year-old distributor Angel Studios.

It sold more than twice as many tickets in the US and Canada last weekend as Walt Disney’s Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, which cost an estimated US$300 million to make. 

A number of high-profile releases this summer have disappointed, including Walt Disney’s Elemental and Warner Bros’ The Flash.

Bloomberg Intelligence analysts downgraded their predictions for the theatre industry’s revenue to about US$9 billion in 2023 as a result. Before the pandemic, the domestic box office regularly topped US$11 billion annually. 

Mission: Impossible cost US$290 million to produce, a number high even by the standards of Hollywood blockbusters and one likely to fuel debate about whether budgets like that are sustainable given the ongoing weakness in ticket sales. 

The balance of summer moviegoing now rests on two highly anticipated releases this weekend – Warner Bros’ Barbie and Universal’s Oppenheimer.

Barbie is projected to bring in as much as US$426 million in North America, and Oppenheimer as much as US$194 million, according to Boxoffice Pro. BLOOMBERG