'Mission: Impossible 7' Box Office Could Open With $90 Million

Tom Cruise’s mission, should he choose to accept it, is to save the summer box office… again.

After a lackluster start to popcorn season (“The Flash,” “Indiana Jones” and “Elemental,” we’re looking at you), Paramount’s action-adventure “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is hoping to bring people back to movie theaters across the globe. The big-budget tentpole is projected to collect at least $60 million between Friday and Sunday. Anything more than that would cement a new opening weekend benchmark for the long-running, globe-trotting spy series. “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” currently holds the record with $61 million, followed by 2000’s “Mission: Impossible II” with $57.8 million.

The seventh “MI” installment opens on Wednesday to take advantage of lucrative Imax screens before Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” monopolizes the premium large format’s entire footprint for three weeks starting on July 21. In its first five days of release, ticket sales for “Dead Reckoning Part One” are expected to reach $85 million to $95 million in North America and $160 million at the international box office for a strong global start of $250 million.

“Dead Reckoning Part One” is the weekend’s only new wide release, and it won’t have much competition from holdover titles, especially since interest has already declined for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” which opened in late June and was dethroned by “Insidious: The Red Door” in its second weekend of release.

“Mission: Impossible” movies tend to have modest opening weekends, but they usually stick around on the big screen for a while. 2018’s “Fallout,” the most recent adventure anchored by Cruise’s teflon operative Ethan Hunt, ended its run with $791 million globally to stand as the biggest earner to date. “Dead Reckoning Part One” needs to have that kind of endurance in theaters to justify its mammoth $290 million production budget, which skyrocketed due to COVID-related starts and stops and other pandemic-era safety measures. A sequel, “Dead Reckoning Part Two,” is already set for June 28, 2024, so Paramount needs audiences to be invested in all things happening with the Impossible Mission Force.

There’s also hope that Cruise’s goodwill from last summer’s enduring smash “Top Gun: Maverick” (which powered to $1.4 billion globally) will carry over to the “Mission” franchise and help to propel “Dead Reckoning Part One” to new franchise heights. Reviews and word-of-mouth should help to sell tickets for “Mission: Impossible 7,” which has been praised by critics as a worthy entry in the action-heavy, stunt-centric series. Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge says the edge-of-your-seat stunts in this two-hour and 43-minute-long movie, in which Cruise’s Ethan Hunt defies death as he flies off a mountain on his motorcycle and scales a runaway train, “keep this almost-three-decade franchise feeling cutting-edge.”

Christopher McQuarrie returned to direct “Dead Reckoning Part One,” which follows a 60-something Ethan Hunt and his IMF team as they work to take down a mysterious, all-powerful artificial intelligence force called “The Entity.” Along with Cruise, the cast includes Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Esai Morales, Vanessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff and Henry Czerny.

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