Can ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Last at the Box Office Against the Power of ‘Barbenheimer’?
After its franchise record $235 million global opening, Paramount/Skydance’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” still has a long way to go to turn a profit at the box office against its COVID-inflated $290 million budget, but the overwhelming praise that it has earned from critics and audiences has put it in position to accomplish that mission.
That is, assuming that it can still maintain moviegoers’ attention after what is set up to be the most competitive weekend the box office has seen in years.
Along with the second weekend of “Dead Reckoning,” audiences will have two highly anticipated newcomers to choose from with Warner Bros.’ “Barbie,” which has seen overwhelmingly strong advance ticket sales, and Universal’s “Oppenheimer,” which has earned rave reviews from its Paris premiere and will be taking over the world’s Imax screens for the next three weeks.
There’s also a little film called “Sound of Freedom” that has taken the indie world by storm, passing A24’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once” with $85 million grossed after 12 days in theaters. While some have questioned whether Angel Studios’ “Pay It Forward” model has inflated the size of the audience for this film by allowing fans to buy tickets for others that may go unused, that’s still extra revenue that theaters wouldn’t otherwise see.
But while Chris Aronson, Paramount’s domestic distribution president, believes that all of these competitors will perform strongly next weekend, he says he has confidence that “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” won’t get lost in the shuffle.
“I think the results speak for themselves. The audience exit polls for this film are stronger than any past ‘Mission: Impossible’ film and are only exceeded among recent summer films by ‘Top Gun: Maverick,'” he told TheWrap. “We have seen past ‘Mission’ films play and play for weeks, and there are no signs that this installment will be any different.”
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Indeed, during a season where so many movies on this budget level have struggled to build the buzz needed to avoid flopping, “Mission: Impossible 7” is the envy of other studios. Along with an A on CinemaScore and Rotten Tomatoes scores of 96% critics and 94% audience, “Dead Reckoning” earned a spectacular 5/5 score on PostTrak with a 90% overall positive rating.
Only one other film this summer has earned metrics that strong in all of those categories, and that’s Sony’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the summer’s top grossing film in the U.S. with $368 million domestic from a $120 million opening weekend.
“Dead Reckoning” may not be able to get as high as “Spider-Verse” with its $80 million five-day domestic opening, but such strong word-of-mouth should be able to push it past the $220 million domestic total of its 2018 predecessor, “Mission: Impossible — Fallout.”
If it gets that far, it will be up to the film to have similar legs in other parts of the world. While “Mission: Impossible 7” couldn’t avoid the huge drop in China that other Hollywood films have suffered — a $25.4 million opening that’s down 66% from “Fallout” — it is up 15% in all other like-for-like markets over “Fallout” with a release in Japan still to come.
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As for premium formats, Boxoffice editor Daniel Loria points out that while “Dead Reckoning” will lose Imax screens, that’s not the only PLF out there.
“Every theater chain has its own in-house premium format, whether it is 4DX at Regal, UltraScreen at Marcus Theaters or Dolby-branded cinemas at AMC,” Loria said. “While Imax controls what is played on their screens, chains have more discretion over what is played on their own PLFs. Even if it has to share that time with ‘Barbie,’ I can’t imagine that these chains wouldn’t want to keep screening ‘Mission: Impossible’ on premium formats to maximize the profits from those surcharges.”
The best-case scenario for “Mission: Impossible 7” is that “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” draw in specific audience subsets over the long term, leaving a swath of moviegoers for “Dead Reckoning” to sell tickets to. If “Barbie” becomes a four-quadrant runaway hit like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” this past spring, that might eat into “MI7’s” legs.
There’s good odds that “Mission: Impossible 7” may end up performing similar to “Fast X,” earning a solid global run on par with its franchise’s track record, but with studio profits shrinking due to pandemic costs. But after what Cruise did last year with “Top Gun: Maverick,” it would be foolish to think he couldn’t beat those odds.
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