Director Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is having a franchise-record opening weekend, as theaters enjoy a remarkable Memorial Day holiday shattering past records.
Pom Klementieff, Greg Tarzan Davis, Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, andHayley Atwell star in “Mission: … More
Mission: Impossible By The Numbers
Billed as Tom Cruise’s last appearance in the 34 year old action-packed Mission: Impossible series, The Final Reckoning is looking at a $65 million three-day domestic haul, $75-80 million four-day total. The previous franchise opening record went to Mission: Impossible – Fallout in 2018, at $61 million.
Audience graded The Final Reckoning an A-, while critics scored it at 80% via Rotten Tomatoes. The critical reception is obviously terrific and any film would be happy at that score, but it does represent the first sub-90% outcome for the franchise since the first three original films in the series.
The audience grade of A- is precisely the most common grade for the franchise, with four chapters earning that score, those being Mission: Impossible III, Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and now The Final Reckoning. Two others – Fallout and Dead Reckoning – landed at A grades, the best of the entire series, while the original 1996 Mission: Impossible was graded B+ and its immediate sequel in 2000 got a franchise-low B grade.
Outside of North America, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is playing equally well. Taking $75 million through Saturday, the film should end the holiday frame with a global cume of roughly $235 million, plus or minus a few or perhaps several million. On the higher end, I can see it finishing closer to $250 million, and lower-end might be perhaps $230 million. (UPDATE: Estimates for the international weekend are currently projected slightly lower, but with Monday’s foreign sales there is still plenty of room for the film to land where expected through the holiday frame.)
All of these outcomes are more than enough to be a rousing success, making for an all-time box office in theaters for Memorial Day weekend.
Mission: Impossible And The Future
After a record opening that could wind up 10% or more ahead of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, in a year proving happily healthier than expected for box office, with growing audience enthusiasm again for theatrical and room for multiple films to overperform, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning could be headed for a franchise-high grand total at the worldwide box office.
A $235 million opening and a simple 3x final multiplier gets The Final Reckoning north of $700 million. So an opening in $240 million range and a final multiplier of 3.2x would push it to nearly $770 million. And if it should hit $250 million with a 3.4x final multiplier, then we’re talking about a grand total in the range of $850 million.
Of course, a higher multiplier allows for lower opening global sales, and so on, but these rough estimations make the point that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is on course for a strong finish at the high end of the series’ past performances.
The worst-case at this point, which is of course highly unlikely at these audience and critic scores alongside a series-record bow, would still be something like a $230 million opening weekend and a 2.8x final multiplier, which results in about $645 million and fourth place among the rest of the franchise outcomes. Which is still pretty great.
We’ll see whether The Final Reckoning overperforms enough to push it into contention for a higher spot on the year-end box office lists.
Whether Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is really as “final” as the title suggests remains to be seen, but with these types of numbers it’s impossible to imagine a future where someone doesn’t choose to accept a new mission.
