After Tom Cruise had the biggest commercial success of his career with his last film, 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, which grossed nearly $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office, it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that Cruise’s hot box office streak would continue with his latest film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the sequel to 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout and the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible film series, especially since the new film has received the best reviews of any movie in the long-running series.
However, these factors haven't been manifested in the box office performance of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which is on pace to both fall far short of not only the box office performance of Mission: Impossible – Fallout but also the threshold for profitability. Indeed, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is on a clear trajectory to be the least commercially-successful Mission: Impossible film over the past decade.
Moreover, the new film’s disappointing box office performance has raised doubts about the franchise’s ongoing commercial viability, even as the next series installment, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, is slated to be released in June 2024.
A Worldwide Decline
In its first five days of release, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which grossed nearly $55 million in its first weekend at the domestic box office, grossed approximately $78.5 million at the domestic box office, and approximately $155 million overseas, for an opening weekend worldwide gross of just under $235 million.
While the $235 million worldwide opening figure fell short of the $250 million projection that distributor Paramount Pictures attached to the film, this was hardly a cause of concern, given the excellent word-of-mouth response that the film received and the slow-and-steady trajectory that Mission: Impossible films typically display at the box office.
However, in its second weekend at the domestic box office, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which has currently grossed just over $120 million at the domestic box office, plunged more than sixty-four percent to $19.5 million, far below the $25 million industry projection. In comparison, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation had respective drops of forty-two and forty-eight percent in their sophomore weekends.
The news was a little better overseas, where the film grossed $55 million for a current overseas total of approximately $252 million and a current worldwide total of just over $370 million. While the film’s overseas gross has more than doubled the domestic total, in keeping with the recent box office history of the series, the film’s overall box office decline is more precipitous than at any previous point in the history of the series.
The Barbenheimer Effect
Warner Bros.
As the Top Gun: Maverick effect has been seemingly non-existent in relation to the box office performance of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the internet phenomenon called Barbenheimer, a reference to the simultaneous release of the polar-opposite films Barbie and Oppenheimer, has clearly had a deleterious effect on Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which has gone from being the most talked-about film in the world to an afterthought in the span of one week.
While the blockbuster combination of Barbie and Oppenheimer, which combined to gross over $235 million at the domestic box office, and over $275 million overseas, in their first three days of release, had a galvanizing effect on the overall box office, it was punishing to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which has completely lost the public’s attention, as well as IMAX and large-format screens, to this seemingly unstoppable pop culture earthquake.
The Barbenheimer effect is also evident in how Barbie and Oppenheimer not only pushed Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One out of the top spot on the domestic box office chart but also caused the film to be relegated to the fourth position, behind the independently-released action-thriller film Sound of Freedom, which has now surpassed Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One in total domestic box office earnings.
Finally, the broad and seemingly incongruous demographic that Barbie and Oppenheimer have attracted suggests that the Mission: Impossible series, which has now spanned twenty-seven years, has possibly become too old to be able to continually appeal to the prized younger demographic that has so fervently embraced Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Mission: Very Difficult
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will struggle to even come close to equaling the box office performance of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which grossed over $790 million at the worldwide box office and currently sits as the most commercially-successful installment in the Mission: Impossible film series.
However, even if Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One were to reach this $790 million mark, the film would still struggle to reach a break-even point in its theatrical life, given that the film carries a mammoth production cost of more than $290 million, the highest of any film in the series, more than $100 million ahead of the cost of Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
While betting against Tom Cruise has long been a fool’s game, certainly in relation to the Mission: Impossible film series, the box office future for Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One looks bleak, especially as the film’s existing box office runway seems to be sparse, largely due to the seemingly impenetrable commercial saturation of Barbie and Oppenheimer.
With a projected break-even point of between $750 million and $800 million at the worldwide box office, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is definitely not a box office success and will almost certainly have to rely on its post-theatrical revenue streams to have any chance of reaching profitability.