Mission: Impossible for Tom Cruise: Meeting Hollywood expectations

Ticket sales for Mission Impossible were not as spectacular as Hollywood had hoped, adding to studio dread about the effect of the actors’ strike on the rest of the summer slate. Photo / Mark Abramson, The New York Times

The seventh film in the 27-year-old movie franchise was No. 1 at the box office, taking in $126 million over its first five days. But the movie industry was hoping for more.

Tom Cruise’s seventh Mission: Impossible spectacle, which arrived in theatres last week and cost at least US$400 million ($632 million) to make and market, was supposed to mark a turning point at the troubled summer box office. Death-defying stunts! A new love interest! That thrilling theme song!

Ticket sales were solid. But the spectacular (and perhaps unrealistic) result that Hollywood expected did not materialise, extending concern about the movie capital’s overreliance on ageing franchises — and adding to studio dread about what kind of damage the actors strike might have on the rest of the high-stakes summer slate.

As an added vexation, a low-budget movie from outside the Hollywood system, Sound of Freedom (Angel Studios), which some critics have attacked as a recruiting tool for the far right, became a box office phenomenon.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, directed and co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, took in US$56.2 million ($88.9 million) over the weekend in the United States and Canada, for a total of about US$80 million ($126 million) since it opened. Overseas, the 163-minute movie collected an additional US$155 million ($245 million), for a global total of about US$235 million ($371 million), according to Paramount Pictures.

Analysts that track moviegoer interest and use complex formulas to forecast ticket sales had predicted that Dead Reckoning Part One would generate about US$250 million worldwide over its first five days, with the United States and Canada contributing at least US$85 million. “The industry was looking for bigger here,” said David Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers.

“This opening is roughly average for an action thriller at this point in its series,” Gross said about the ultraexpensive Dead Reckoning Part One, which received sensational reviews. “Of course, there’s nothing average about this film.”

Cruise, considered white hot as a box office draw after last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, promoted Dead Reckoning Part One with his usual globe-trotting, walking red carpets for premieres in Rome; London; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Seoul, South Korea; Sydney; and New York. Early last week, he made surprise appearances in movie theatres at preview screenings in cities such as Toronto, Atlanta and Miami.

The blistering promotional campaign for Dead Reckoning Part One will be Hollywood’s last until a consortium of studios can come to terms with SAG-AFTRA, as the powerful actors union is known. On Friday, the union went on strike for the first time in 43 years, saying it was fed up with exorbitant pay for entertainment moguls and worried about not receiving a fair share of the spoils of a streaming-dominated future.

In the coming weeks, studios such as Universal, Sony and Disney have movies set for release that will have to do without the promotional star power of people such as Denzel Washington (The Equalizer 3), Owen Wilson and Tiffany Haddish (Haunted Mansion), and Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx (Strays).

For the weekend in the United States and Canada, Dead Reckoning Part One played on 4,327 screens and was No. 1, with premium-priced IMAX and other large-format venues contributing 37 per cent of ticket sales. “Based on exit poll ratings and recommendations, which were out of this world, this was the best-received Mission yet, which speaks volumes about the viability of the franchise,” said Chris Aronson, Paramount’s president of domestic distribution.

Aronson made several other glass-half-full observations, including that, over the first five days, Dead Reckoning Part One was comfortably outperforming the franchise’s previous chapter, Fallout (2018), in most countries overseas.

Astoundingly, given its cost (about US$15 million) and low-wattage marketing campaign, Sound of Freedom placed second, taking in US$27 million from 3,265 standard screens, for a two-week total of US$86 million. The horror film Insidious: The Red Door, a similarly low-budget offering from Sony Pictures, finished third, collecting US$13 million, for a two-week total of US$58 million.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Disney-Lucasfilm) epitomised a problem that Hollywood has encountered this summer with franchise spectacles, trundling along behind the top three with about US$12 million, for a three-week total of US$145 million (US$302 million worldwide).

That’s a lot of money, but not nearly enough for a movie that cost at least US$400 million to make and market. Since box office revenue is split roughly 50-50 between studios and theatres, Dial of Destiny would need to be performing more than twice as well for Disney to make money.

Domestic ticket sales total roughly US$5 billion for the year, down about 20 per cent from the same period in 2019, the last year before the pandemic severely disrupted moviegoing. And franchise sequels are part of the reason for the decline. After decades of pumping them for profits, some of the tires on these properties are threadbare.

The third Ant-Man movie, the 10th Fast and Furious chapter, the fifth Indiana Jones instalment, and the 12th (Shazam! Fury of the Gods) and 13th (The Flash) films in the DC Extended Universe have all disappointed, certainly in comparison with their costs.

“In general, audiences are interested in more, more, more of the same, until they start getting satisfied and excited about the next thing,” Gross wrote in his Sunday newsletter.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Brooks Barnes

Photographs by: Mark Abramson

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