Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh installment of the action franchise starring Tom Cruise as an elite spy, took in $56.2 million in US and Canadian theaters over its debut weekend.
That compares with projections of $61 million to $75 million in ticket sales for the Friday-to-Sunday period from forecaster Boxoffice Pro.
The movie generated $80 million over the five days since its release on July 12. Paramount Pictures, which distributed the film, had projected $90 million for that stretch.
Previous installments of the Mission: Impossible took in $44.9 million to $78.8 million in their first five days, according to data provided by Comscore Inc. International sales came to $155 million, the studio said in a statement Sunday.
The picture has been one of the theater industry’s most-anticipated of the year. It scored positive reviews, with critic and audience scores sitting at 96% and 94%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes. Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick was the highest-grossing picture last year domestically.
The second highest-grossing film of the weekend was Sound of Freedom, which has grossed more than $85 million over its two-week run. The low-budget action picture, in which a former US government agent rescues children from a sex trafficking operation in Colombia, is a major success story for the two-year-old distributor Angel Studios and sold more than twice as many tickets in the US and Canada this weekend as Walt Disney Co.’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which cost an estimated $300 million to make.
In Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise races to find a powerful weapon that threatens to destroy humanity. He stars alongside Hayley Atwell and Ving Rhames.
A number of high-profile releases this summer have disappointed, including Walt Disney Co.’s Elemental and Warner Bros.’ The Flash. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts downgraded their predictions for the theater industry’s revenue to about $9 billion this year as a result. Before the pandemic, the domestic box office regularly topped $11 billion annually.
Mission: Impossible cost $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 next weekend, Warner Bros.’ Barbie and Universal’s Oppenheimer. Barbie is projected to bring in as much as $426 million domestically, and Oppenheimer as much as $194 million, according to Boxoffice Pro.
--With assistance from Thomas Buckley.
(Updates with ‘Sound of Freedom’ performance in sixth paragraph)