When it comes to the 2023 movie releases we’ve seen open in theaters thus far, a couple of major long-running franchises surprised this summer with underwhelming performances at the box office. In this case, we're talking about long-awaited Indiana Jones 5 starring Harrison Ford, and Tom Cruise’s stunt-tastic Mission: Impossible 7. As the summer movie season gets ready to close out, the ticket sales don’t stand to match the money spent on the action/adventure flicks, and its studios are going to actually lose money from them.
Let’s take a look at the numbers for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One as August soon transitions into the fall season. Coming off of Barbie continuing to dominate the box office at No. 1, now for a straight month, the two major studio films are losing money for its respective studios.
Why Is Indiana Jones 5 Losing Money For Disney?
Per Variety, the fifth Indiana Jones movie reportedly cost around $300 million before marketing costs, which reportedly is at least $100 million, and it's been out in theaters for seven weeks now. Across almost two months, the movie has made just over $375 million worldwide. With those numbers in mind, it doesn’t look like Harrison Ford’s last adventure stands to actually make money in theaters. To contrast, 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made $760 million worldwide against a reported $185 million budget.
Why Is Mission: Impossible 7 Losing Money For Paramount?
Now, let’s look at Tom Cruise’s latest sequel centering on Ethan Hunt. The sequel reportedly cost around the same as Indiana Jones 5, and across five weeks in theaters, it's made $522 million worldwide. Now, while things are looking a bit better for the Mission: Impossible movie, per sources familiar with the movie’s financial modeling, apparently the movie needs to make $600 million to break even for the studio. It’s an odd position for Dead Reckoning Part One to be in considering 2018’s Fallout made $791 million worldwide and Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick was one of three 2022 movies to break a billion at the box office.
Why Did Indiana Jones And Ethan Hunt Lose Out Summer?
In years past, both of these franchises have found massively successful places in box office history, so what happened? There’s a few things at play here, but the No. 1 reason Variety points to is their overblown budgets, in part due to shooting during COVID-19. Both movies reaching $300 million on the budget front make them some of the most expensive movies ever made. MI7 in particular reportedly led to clashes between the Paramount CEO, Tom Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie.
Another reason why these movies lost money is due to the monster that is Barbie and Oppenheimer. With MI7, it came out just one week before both movies broke a ton of box office records and continue to have legs during the summer season. Then there’s franchise weariness, which seemed to affect both of these movies. Perhaps because the last Indiana Jones movie isn’t beloved and Tom Cruise was the talk of the town in Top Gun: Maverick last year, so audiences were content to sit them out for more original movies during the season.
Who knew Barbie and Oppenheimer had the power to take down two franchise heavy-hitters? Either way, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One are still playing in theaters if you have yet to catch them on the big screen.
