Tom Cruises mission, should he choose to accept it, is to save the summer box office again.
After a lackluster start to popcorn season (The Flash, Indiana Jones and Elemental, were looking at you), Paramount and Skydances action-adventure Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One is hoping to bring people back to movie theaters across the globe. The big-budget tentpole is projected to collect at least $60 million between Friday and Sunday. Anything more than that would cement a new opening weekend benchmark for the long-running, globe-trotting spy series. Mission: Impossible Fallout currently holds the record with $61 million, followed by 2000s Mission: Impossible II with $57.8 million.
The seventh MI installment opens on Wednesday in part to take advantage of lucrative Imax screens before Christopher Nolans Oppenheimer monopolizes the premium large formats entire footprint for three weeks starting on July 21. In its first five days of release, ticket sales for Dead Reckoning Part One are expected to reach $85 million to $95 million in North America and $160 million at the international box office for a strong global start of $250 million.
Dead Reckoning Part One is the weekends only new wide release, and it wont have much competition from holdover titles, especially since interest has already declined for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which opened in late June and was dethroned byInsidious: The Red Door in its second weekend of release.
Mission: Impossible movies tend to have modest opening weekends, but they usually stick around on the big screen for a while. 2018s Fallout, the most recent adventure anchored by Cruises teflon operative Ethan Hunt, ended its run with $791 million globally to stand as the biggest earner to date. Dead Reckoning Part One needs to have that kind of endurance in theaters to justify its mammoth $290 million production budget, which skyrocketed due to COVID-related starts and stops and other pandemic-era safety measures. A sequel, Dead Reckoning Part Two, is already set for June 28, 2024, so Paramount needs audiences to be invested in all things happening with the Impossible Mission Force.
Theres also hope that Cruises goodwill from last summers enduring smash Top Gun: Maverick (which powered to $1.4 billion globally) will carry over to the Mission franchise and help to propel Dead Reckoning Part One to new franchise heights. Reviews and word-of-mouth should help to sell tickets for Mission: Impossible 7, which has been praised by critics as a worthy entry in the action-heavy, stunt-centric series. Varietys chief film critic Peter Debruge says the edge-of-your-seat stunts in this two-hour and 43-minute-long movie, in which Cruises Ethan Hunt defies death as he flies off a mountain on his motorcycle and scales a runaway train, keep this almost-three-decade franchise feeling cutting-edge.
Christopher McQuarrie returned to direct Dead Reckoning Part One, which follows a 60-something Ethan Hunt and his IMF team as they work to take down a mysterious, all-powerful artificial intelligence force called The Entity. Along with Cruise, the cast includes Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Esai Morales, Vanessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff and Henry Czerny.