Tom Cruise should score his biggest box office opening of his career this week/end when he leaps, races, fights, falls, and climbs his way into theaters with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. The action-thriller sequel’s expected $250+ million global bow will surpass Cruise’s previous top opener, last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, which debuted to $248 million in worldwide receipts.
Tom Cruise stars in “Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning – Part One”
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, cowritten by director Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, is the best-reviewed chapter of the franchise (read my review here), continuing a generally consistent upward trajectory for the series. Likewise, the record opening expected for the series this weekend would continue a steady upward box office trend for Mission: Impossible. And even the audience scoring for the movies follows the pattern, steadily moving upward most of the time.
This should be pretty easy data to interpret and internalize, and it speaks to the fact audiences keep showing up loyally and in increasing numbers for Mission: Impossible because viewers have come to expect each new film to be at least as good if not better than the previous one. People trust Mission: Impossible, and that trust has been earned time and again.
Compare that to The Flash. Whatever else you or I or others think about the film (and I personally liked it a lot more than I expected to), it was a film about a superhero audiences hadn’t seen much of, with stakes the DCEU simply hadn’t built up enough for average casual viewers to feel invested in, featuring yet another change of actor in the Batman role that depended heavily on older viewers’ nostalgia, and carrying the baggage of five years of six failed DCEU movies in a row that tainted the brand severely.
Now add in the continued legal troubles of the film’s lead Ezra Miller, toxicity in the film’s online footprint due to nonstop angry fan arguments and hashtag wars, some dodgy VFX, and competition at the box office from superior entertainment, and you get what happened — an expensive face-plant to the tune of sub-$300 million worldwide. WBD managed to stain even Batman’s brand popularity.
And this will probably have bad domino effects for WBD and DC Studios. Future films that otherwise could’ve been expected to do blockbuster business could wind up carrying some of the stink from the DCEU and suffer from audiences deciding it’s not worth giving DC more chances after so many failures to deliver.
What happens if The Batman Part II and Joker sequel both underperform? I don’t expect that to happen to any significant extent as long as the films are great (which I do expect), but it’s far from impossible and is in fact increasingly plausible each time WBD whiffs with another DC project. Blue Beetle will probably be another $400+/- million performer, which could (and probably will) cost Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom some box office points, and I doubt either of those films will move the needle in terms of audience enthusiasm for DC movies.
The point is, when tentpoles don’t succeed, it has wider ranging effects. Other projects start to stumble by association, then studios get reactive and fearful, and that’s when bad choices get made by people in positions of power who don’t understand — and/or don’t respect — filmmaking (or how to run movie studios).
On the other hand, when the people behind a franchise keep hitting home runs and sending the message they hear what audiences want and are more than happy and capable of delivering it, then audiences keep showing up. It’s when studios and storytellers and franchises forget what people loved about their work, and when they start letting other considerations dominate their decisions as artists, that the films start to suffer and the audiences start to turn away.
That’s why Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will set another franchise record and has potential to be another breakout blockbuster exceeding everyone’s expectations like Top Gun: Maverick. These films never forget what they do best (even if it took them the first three films — which are all very good — to work out some kinks and figure out what portions of each approach works best in the final mix), they never stop thinking about how to live up to the standards they’ve set, they never lose sight of the character relationships and motivations, and you can see the commitment to getting everything as right as possible in every scene.
How many franchises can you really say that about, honestly? Even many (most?) of our favorites depend on some degree of leeway earned along with our loyalty. It’s rare to see everybody working their butts off to deliver 100% all of the time, and when you feel that kind of commitment on the screen it earns a lot of buy-in and good will. So, sometimes when something doesn’t work as well as hoped, it’s okay because it’s still pretty great, and that’s the sort of good will that’s earned instead of presumed.
It’s helpful (and sadly rare) for any series when the right performers and right filmmakers get hooked up together with the right material. Cruise and McQuarrie are a franchise match made in heaven, and theirs is the definitive incarnation of Mission: Impossible. With Dead Reckoning Part One, they begin the final story for Ethan Hunt, and I expect it to be a contender for the biggest film of 2023.
Be sure to check back soon for more updates and analysis, dear readers, as Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One hits theaters.
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