Mission: Impossible scores a decent victory at the weekend box office
Over its five-day opening, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 1 earned $80 million
Aux News Mission: Impossible
A couple weeks ago, Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny earned $60 million in its opening weekend, burying its competition but falling short of the expectations that come with a $300 million-ish budget. This weekend, the similarly-budgeted Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 1 earned a similar $56 million domestic gross between Friday and Sunday—a figure more than double the second-place movie, Sound Of Freedom. This may clock in as a similarly disappointing opening, but a couple of factors separate M:I’s earnings from Indy’s.
For one, the new Mission opened on Wednesday. With the Wednesday and Thursday grosses included, the film’s opening haul is more like $80 million. And, per Deadline, the global opening stands around $235 million—only about $67 million short of the total gross Indy has earned over the past three weeks.
Following M:I this week is Angel Studio’s Sound Of Freedom, which has attracted a crowd of people convinced that AMC is out to get them. While the picture has undeniably attracted a devoted, niche audience—earning about $27 million this weekend—part of the reason the movie continues to rank so highly is due to the studio’s Pay It Forward program, where patrons online can bulk-buy tickets to distribute them to movie-goers. This has apparently only contributed to the paranoia of some of Freedom’s more conspiratorially-minded fans. One TikTok went viral this week depicting a “sold out” but empty screening of the film—the insinuation being that the theater marked the showing as “sold out” to keep people from buying tickets, and not, you know, the result of people bulk-buying tickets that went undistributed.
Rounding out the rest of the top five are Insidious: The Red Door, which opened atop the box office last week, Indy 5, which came in second last week, and Elemental.
The full top 10, courtesy of Box Office Mojo, is below.
1. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1
2. Sound Of Freedom
3. Insidious: The Red Door
4. Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny
5. Elemental
6. Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse
7. Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts
8. No Hard Feelings
9. Joy Ride
10. The Little Mermaid
77 Comments
Let’s acknowledge the fact that Sound of Freedom’s box office gross INCREASED 26% over its debut weekend. How often do movies perform better their second weekend? The Pay it Forward campaign amounts to people who loved the movie buying multiple tickets to support it. It’s weird, but not that different than when people see a movie multiple times, or bring their friends or families along. At the end of the day, it’s all people voting with their dollars.
Just like buying season tickets and never showing up is just as good a way to show how much you support your favorite team as actually going to their games.
They can flush their dollars down the toilets all they want, Big Daddy Trump would still wipe off the dogshit on his leather uppers on their faces if he passed them by on the street.
What a batshit random response. Why bring Trump into the discussion about that movie? Because Gizmodo/AV or whoever owns this website now tells you how to think? Do you think only right leaning individuals are watching that movie?
Considering that Trump is personally hosting a special screening of it at one of his golf clubs this week and has been openly endorsing and praising it, yes.Mel Gibson, Ben Shapiro, Dana White, Elon Musk, and the family research council, have all endorsed the movie, so yes to that too about right-leaning individuals watching and endorsing it.
Not to mention Jim “Crazy pants” Cavizal talking about adrenochrome harvesting on the press tour. I understand the movie is not as Q-pilled as Jim makes it out to be but it still pretty much right wing propaganda
Yes, Specifically Q-pilled right wing nut cases
They’ve marketed it almost exclusively to right-wing audiences.
This is more like when conservative foundations or groups do bulk purchases of new book releases by conservative authors/celebrities/etc, so that the author can scheme their way on to the NYT bestseller list.
It’s pretty different, considering that you typically see a movie again because you want to see it, not because you think you’re making a difference in the world. These sold out showings are empty.
Less “weird”, more “exactly the same thing as sending money to a televangelist”. It’s sad people being scammed out of their money to make rich grifters even richer.
Actually, “better 2nd week than 1st week” happens a lot. However, gaming the system like Sound of Freedom did – that a rarity.Fortunatly, people who, you know, understand “facts” … also understand that this is complete bullshit.This movie is NOT popular. And no amount of gaming the system is going to make us believe that it is.
This is the “Matt Gaetz wrote a book that sold 100 thousand copies in the first 2 weeks” .,.. as long as we pretend that right-wing PACs didnt buy 999,999 copies of it.The movie is shit. The concept is shit. The script is shit. The “gaming the system to pretend it is popular” is shit. Everything about it shit. It’s “Elemental” except there is a bunch of dark money trying to make it seem like something that people actually care about
“Actually, “better 2nd week than 1st week” happens a lot.”Actually, it definitely doesn’t happen “a lot”.
Elemental has actually shown some decent legs after its poor opening; it may end up “merely” a disappointment rather than an outright flop. The Flash might be a better comparison.
How much does “gaming the system” matter if very few non-Q people are actually seeing this movie? It’s playing to nearly empty theaters.
they get a 2-4-1 deal – get to see a movie and then make a conspiracy theory tiktok about how the theatre was empty.
The vast vast majority of the time, “better second week than first” happens when a movie goes from a limited to a wide release, i.e. it starts in 5 theaters week one, then goes to twenty, then goes to 600. It’s usually reserved for indie/art/awards contenders that don’t have big natural four-quadrant appeal, and want to build word of mouth before they dump it wide. It almost never ever happens in standard wide releases such as this, which go wide to every theater they’re going to be in from the very beginning, aim for the first big weekend, and then ride the movie’s legs.I.e. it’s a function of theater volume.In the past, before the emphasis was on getting that first big weekend, wide releases did often improve week to week. But those days are gone.
I keep thinking that you can’t be this stupid, but given your post history, it’s quite clear that you can..
How often do movies perform better their second weekend? It happens. To use an example from this summr, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse debuted in first place, dropped to 2nd, then in its third week of release returned to first place via positive word of mouth.
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse debuted in first place, dropped to 2nd, then in its third week of release returned to first place via positive word of mouth.”
*sigh*
First weekend gross: $120,663,589Second weekend gross: $55,511,096Third weekend gross: $27,001,141
I’d LOVE to hear you explain how 27 is better than 120.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Yep just like people love L Ron Hubbard so much that the church of scientology makes them buy crates of copies of his books. That is just love and totally not a way to manipulate sales numbers and make something niche look far more popular then it is.
“Sound of Freedom’s” “pay it forward” campaign is the equivalent of sending money to Trump.
Does that movie have a republican agenda?
100% yes, yes it does
I see. I’ll be missing that one. Thanks.
If by Republican Agenda you mean bat shit Q-Anon propaganda then yes. It has it
As someone that’s actually seen the movie, the Republican agenda is mostly confined to the press tour. No politicians are shown in the movie itself, and despite what people keep insisting, it doesn’t push any of the QAnon talking points. It certainly has a conservative agenda – the idea that one man has not only the ability but the moral authority to pursue a crusade on foreign sovereign soil, but that kind of conservative agenda is pretty common in everything from Amazon’s Jack Ryan to The Dark Knight (despite what conservatives themselves would like to believe).Having said all of that… still isn’t really worth seeing.
I don’t know how “FBI specialists” actually handle child trafficking, but there are rules and procedures. I’m guessing Our Hero finds them problemmatic. I read a few opinions about how he shouldn’t be alone with a child like that, etc. The trailer looks like the typical Man Who Has to Take Matters Into His Own Hands – isn’t he brave, patriotic and handsome narrative. The music was so extra that my kleenex box was weeping. I think I’d probably see plenty of agenda there, but I’m not going to put myself through that unless someone pays me to write a review. Thanks for your input:)
Oh, I’m sure that some of it actually does. Recent history has repeatedly told us that where there’s stink, there’s Trump. .
Not even the equivalent any more. It’s directly now, considering that he’s personally doing a special screening of it at his private golf club in Jersey this week.
But will he hold up a bible?
(a bible, not his bible)
Since Caviezel is going to be there, he’ll have him dress up as Jesus again and they can hold up Bibles together.
Didn’t these same whackos accuse Disney of buying out theaters to inflate Captain Marvel’s box office?
Buying out theaters is both good, and bad, and doesn’t happen. Whatever the Narrative demands is The Truth They Don’t Want You To Know.
i mean i’m sure there’s a baked in number of tickets that ALL movie studios buy, it’s just rare to pass that spend onto the movie-going public!
“i mean i’m sure there’s a baked in number of tickets that ALL movie studios buy”
Because you’re a moron?
Remember, if you use the “Pay it Forward” then you are contributing to right-wing religiopolitical content and giving a non-refundable contribution to a for-profit pro-theocracy company. From their website: “Upon submitting my Pay it Forward contribution, I acknowledge and agree that Angel Studios will make reasonable efforts to use Pay it Forward ticket sales for the audience growth of the intended film or series. However, Angel Studios becomes the owner of all funds upon receipt and may use them at its sole discretion to further Angel Studios’ mission of amplifying light through impactful stories.”
I think if you’re falling prey to that scam, you’re not the kind of person who would peruse the AVC to begin with. Much less read the fine print. I’m just amazed at how they’ve further refined the Right Wing Grift. Previously you’d market this faith-and-family type stuff by engaging churches and convincing them that seeing this Important New Film was essentially a Holy Day of Obligation, and that the congregation should buy big blocks of tickets and make this a group outing. Now it’s just “Ask people who have already paid once to blind-buy more tickets in advance, actual audience demand be damned” – And it worked! I think that Angel Studios’ next step in “amplifying light through impactful stories” is for their execs to all buy luxury SUVs. They’re going to put Jesus Fish and Bootleg Calvin Praying window decals on the back; somebody will see those and be Saved.
Right-wing media and political figures have, for ages, been doing something very much like this when it comes to book sales. They get a book deal, have it ghost-written, buy a BUNCH of copies in bulk to push their book onto the bestseller lists, and then give away the books they bought as freebie swag at conferences, etc.And so they purchase the appearance of being popular. And book publishers are happy to oblige with the original deal, because they get bestseller money out of it even if there wasn’t much legitimate public interest in the book.
Left wingers do the exact same thing, then lean on unions to by ‘em as in kind political contributions.
The evil just courses through you and your people.Count on the girls (You’re all girls) at the AVC to hate the people that actually save trafficked children. I get it you’re all pro pedophelia and having your favorite past time exposed is uncomfortable. But there are people who do care. You’re just not those people. You’re the bad guys.
But I really want to know what FREEDOM sounds like! In my head it’s a bald eagle screaming while being choked to death, but I’m pretty sure I’m making up that sound as I don’t recall ever being exposed to something like that before.
Actually, it would be a red-tailed hawk being choked to death.
Fun bird fact: Bald Eagles don’t actually make that screeching call shown in movies. In real life, they have a pretty weak and chirpy call. That bad-ass “SCREEEEEE!” you hear is the call of a Red-Tailed Hawk, dubbed in post-production. Uncredited voice actors of the bird word.
typical Right Wing grift. “If you give us your money – thinking it might halp poor folk see this movie when they otherwise couldn’t … you are a dumbass”.we’re keeping this money and there isn’t a thing you can do about it! Thanks for funding our giant yacht for another year.
Are there any films employing a “Pay it Backward” scheme where, for some reason, they pay me just for seeing it?
I think that is the next idea for Moviepass.
$56 million is not bad for a Mission: Impossible film’s opening weekend. Fallout opened to $61 million domestically. Assuming the film has legs, it will probably earn out to $600-700 million, close to previous Mission: Impossible films.
Those legs will be up against Barbie and Oppenheimer next weekend…
Plus, the MI movies play well internationally, so I’d say it’ll more than recoup it’s money (but the studio will still claim it lost money when it comes time to pay residuals).
Under SAG-AFTRA contracts, actors are to earn residuals when a film gets to TV or home video regardless of whether it is profitable.Profit participation (‘points”) is not available to most actors but can be negotiated individually and is based on net or gross profits. Points on net are the most susceptible to chicanery, but only a select few can demand points on gross.
downside is this one cost a lot more than the previous ones, and i’m sure the cost of the sequel is ballooning with the strikes, too.700 million dollars is a lot of money, but it’s not great if you had to spend 400 million to get there. (300 million dollar budget plus at least 100 marketing).
They’ll still probably make a good profit on the back-end. That was probably always the plan to begin with – a movie that opens rather tepidly but has “long legs” usually does that, because the theater’s percentage cut of the box office revenue grows with each succeeding weekend.
i’m not entirely sure it’s gonna hit 700, either, but it’s obviously still very early days.
Big questions are if Oppenheimer or Barbie cut hard into its weekend gross. I doubt the former, but the latter possibly could since it’s aimed at a similar audience of teens and older people.
the double feature is gonna heavily inflate oppenheimer’s box office. and oppenheimer is pulling the premium screens so that’ll effect it either way.barbie is gonna be a smash, too. i think barbie might do mario numbers when the dust settles. i’m curious to what m:i pulls throughout the week. the response has been sort of muted compared to the other ones, too. people like it, but i think barbie is gonna take up a lot of cultural conversation air when it drops.
I think the “Barbenheimer” thing is overrated – double feature sales were reportedly only in the tens of thousands. Plus “Oppenheimer”’s tracking for the weekend has only gone up slightly, while “Barbie” has skyrocketed (it’s potentially looking at a $100+ million opening weekend).
So for all those dissing pay it forward??? Seriously. You guys are ridiculous. Pay it forward it a legit way of doing things and the only reason people are making a big deal of it cause for some reason the idiotic liberals and media are finding any way to did the sound of freedom movie. It shows how desperate they are they are they have to diss how it was made. Course of idiotic Disney didn’t shelve it in the first place and Netflix and Amazon didn’t say no either then the movie studio wouldn’t have to find alternative backing. Seriously. And it’s a really good movie that has made over 80 billion. So yeah. Don’t think ones negative opinion about it or smear campaign means didly squat.
They hate Sound of Freedom for the stupidest reason: it’s about pedophiles, the crazies of the far right are all about conspiracy theories about pedophiles, so anyone who speak against pedophiles is now a far right QAnon nutjob, of course. The logic of the left is as batshit crazy as the right.
The only thing I know about the new MI movie is that stupid jump they won’t shut up about. If thats all it has going for it then its time to kill it.
MI movies usually have legs contrary to most superheroes blockbusters. The rule is that big blockbusters make around 3 times what they earned the first weekend but other movies like the MI ones do 4 or 5 times. So with a $235 millions opening it can reach somewhere around $800 m – $1 billion.Indiana Jones will get somewhere between $350-400 m and be one of the largest flops ever (because of the production + marketing costs).
yeah i would be surprised if indiana jones outgrosses transformers.i am curious to see how MI legs out. this is a softer opening than i expected, but still very promising.
I’m fascinated by how Indiana Jones is tanking. I actually liked it – the story was reasonably tight, the action sequences held together (even if it bought into the 21st-century idea that you can’t have too many car chases), and it was funny in a distinctly Indiana Jones way. But I remember seeing the last one with my wife in a jam-packed theater where we had crane our necks to see the screen. That’s more or less the only thing I remember about it. I took my son to the new one, and we had a row to ourselves. He kept talking, and I didn’t even feel bad because the nearest people were like twenty feet away.
i think it was a few miscalculations all put together.first off, clearly there just wasn’t that much interest in indiana jones, which is the same miscalculation that flash put in keaton’s batman. the internet is loud, but it doesn’t always translate to ticket sales. (obviously flash had other things going on, but i think the prevailing thought was keaton’s batman was such a big deal it would override that. it wasn’t.)secondly, it is an INSANELY stacked year for big hollywood movies. there’s been no room to breathe. with a few exceptions, everything is cannibalizing everything else. there’s been 1-3 huge releases every week since…march? add in the fact that everyone knows in 8 weeks it’ll be on VOD…it’s easier than ever to wait.thirdly…harrison ford has returned to basically every major role he’s done over the last 10 years. the novelty of seeing him ‘back’ doesn’t work as well when A. we saw him ‘back’ 14 years ago and didn’t like it B. he’s been back as han solo (twice!) and rick decker already. fourth, i like james mangold fine, but obviously from a marketing perspective having ‘STEVEN SPIELBERG AND GEORGE LUCAS’ never hurt. you can say what you will about spielberg’s box office lately, but i think it would have helped if he had directed.
Yeah, I’m impressed by the sheer lack of interest, considering how much they can saturate the market with other Disney properties. I was also surprised when I recommended it to one of my coworkers (who is a vocal Mandalorian / Picard fan), and he basically said that he’s tired of digitally deaged actors, and he disliked the last Indiana Jones movie so much he lost interest. I definitely agree that Harrison Ford is everywhere, but I don’t think involving Spielberg would have made anything better, considering the job he did with the last one. I’m mostly amused that an Indiana Jones movie is poised to become kind of a cult item.
oh yeah, i just think from a marketing perspective ‘one last ride with spielberg and ford’ makes a little more sense than ‘one last ride with a brand new director’ is all. but overall yeah, people just do not care. i hope ford continues to take a lot of disney’s money, though. between star wars, this and captain america 4 he’s gotta have extracted like 200 million dollars at this point.
I did not see it and have only heard negative feedback (but one guy I know who loved it) so I can’t say. From the criticism I hear, the main points are:- Disney once again destroying a beloved legacy character and making him a sad broken old man.- Once again the “Strong Female Character” who has to be better and infaillible and belittle him, can’t have weaknesses, can’t be wrong, and is insufferable.- Over reliance on bad CGI.- Story that makes no sense.- Boring.
i saw this yesterday morning and it wasn’t great watching old men do action. i found it terrible and old fashioned.
I have no intention of seeing the Mission Impossible movie, but I saw the new Indiana Jones and found it pleasantly old fashioned. “Old man action star” is a weird trend for the summer of 2023.
Better or worse than a 75-year-old Robert DeNiro being called “kid” and taking part in the most awkward street fight in the world in The Irishman?
I just googled “Irishman street fight,” and wow does Deniro look like an old man wearing a middle aged man mask.
The thing is it didn’t have to look terrible. All Scorsese had to do was cast an age-appropriate actor to play the character as a young person. Happens all the time. Still could have cast DeNiro as his middle age and older self. But he insisted on only working with DeNiro, which turned a fairly standard mob drama with no other fancy VFX into a $250m movie because of the all de-aging CG that went into it, and still didn’t look good and was made fun of.
i think the most interesting thing is that american movies are basically non-starters in china now, whereas for a decade+ the market was bending over backwards to appease them.
For what it’s worth, I went to see MI:7 this weekend and the building was packed with people to see Sound of Fury. That theater was all sold out (and seemed to have a fair number of people going to it, although I didn’t go inside to see how many seats were taken up). Sunday afternoon for MI:7, though, was mostly empty.
With that said, I enjoyed the hell out of MI:7 and have no desire to see SoF.
Decent is not good enough. It’s a flop. Where is the alpha male homo now to defend Tom Cruise. Bring it!
I went to the movies this weekend to see Mission Impossible DR1 and while eating at a nearby restaurant I was approached by two different people offering “extra” tickets to the “sold out showing” of Sound of Freedom. To these people’s disgust, I politely declined and explained I was here to see MI. Out of curiosity, I poked my head into one of the showings of Sound of Freedom and the theater was less than half full.
I got around to seeing the new Mission: Impossible and I’m of two minds:1) It’s wildly entertaining and has an excellent pace that made me not realize that so much time had passed.2) What I feared about Fallout has somewhat proven to be true: for the action sequences and even specific plot beats, McQuarrie is reheating a lot of things we’ve already seen before. My partner and I binged the entire franchise before 6 and I was shocked just how much stuff is repeated from previous movies. And I gave it a pass for the last movie because, well, everything was done better than it had been before. Here, we see Tom on a motorcycle (which we’ve seen multiple times before) racing through the narrow streets of a famous European city again. We get a fight sequence on top of a train, just like the first movie. Even the party in Venice is very reminiscent of the party in France from the previous movie.I get that there’s only so much you can do with humans, vehicles, and locations. And my criticism is tempered by the fact that the movie is incredibly entertaining overall. But I don’t think it’s as strong as Fallout, and I don’t think watching it at home will give it the same impact.