The Mission: Impossible franchise has truly aged like a fine wine. Twenty-two years ago it launched and was instantly successful, but as the sequels have continued to come out the scale of the action has only gotten bigger, and so has the response. Now we have Mission: Impossible - Fallout, the second chapter in the series written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, and it turns out that its the most massive success yet, with a larger box office haul in its first three days than any previous chapter. Check out the full Top 10 below, and join me after for analysis.
Back in 2000, John Woo's Mission: Impossible II managed to make $57.8 million in its opening weekend, but now nearly two decades later the crown is changing heads. Mission: Impossible - Fallout has been riding on huge buzz for weeks, thanks in particular to an overwhelmingly positive critical response, and it has translated to some nice dividends for Paramount Pictures. In addition to sporting an awesome 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (another best in the franchise), the movie also has fans over-the-moon with the adventure, as it has earned an "A" on CinemaScore.
Impressively, Mission: Impossible - Fallout's domestic numbers are only half the story... and, in fact, it's actually less than half. The blockbuster has simultaneously had an amazing opening weekend around the world, and has already managed to pull in $92 million from foreign markets. That brings its global total up to an impressive $153.5 million already, and that's just the start. Given that August tends to be kind of a dead month, there is a very real likelihood that you will still see the film's name in the box office Top 10 when September rolls around.
The other big new release this weekend was the animated Teen Titans Go! To The Movies, though its performance was not exactly the success story that Mission: Impossible - Fallout was. It was fortunately able to still make eight figures - which had the effect of matching its reported budget - but it's hard to imagine Warner Bros. being over-the-moon with the turnout. After all, in both the superhero and animated realms this is the summer that has brought us Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Incredibles 2, and Ant-Man And The Wasp, and all of those did much better than just $10 million. The positive side of things is that critics dug it, and it got a "B+" CinemaScore, so it may be able to stick around for a while and make a bit of extra cash thanks to word of mouth.
Beyond the two new entries, there really weren't many surprises - with no big drops or surges to be found. Ol Parker's Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again managed to flip places with Antoine Fuqua's Equalizer 2 after opening ranked two and one, respectively, last week; and while J.A Bayona's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is approaching $400 million domestically, it wasn't able to quite get there this weekend (though it has become the third movie this year to make over $1 billion around the world).
Coming up we have our first August weekend, and it will deliver a trio of three very different films: Aneesh Chaganty's thriller Searching; Susanna Fogel's action-comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me; and Marc Forster's family-friendly Christopher Robin. It should lead to some interesting changes in the rankings, so join me next Sunday to see how the Top 10 shifts!
