Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One Crawls Past $500 Million At Worldwide Box Office

Last weekend, "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" was creeping up on the half-billion mark at the worldwide box office with a running total of $493 million. Now, the latest installment in the Tom Cruise-led franchise has passed that milestone, but the fact that it took a week to do it is not a great sign. Per Deadline, the global total will be $522.4 million through Sunday, with $159.55 million of that from domestic ticket sales.

"Dead Reckoning" is on its fifth weekend, whereas the previous entry in the series, "Mission: Impossible – Fallout," crossed $500 million on its fourth weekend — crucially, before it had even released in China. The Chinese box office ultimately added another $181 million to the global total for "Fallout," which rounded out at $791.1 million by the time it left theaters. Meanwhile, "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" has been in theaters across all major markets worldwide for weeks, and its momentum has slowed to a crawl. Domestically, it's lagging behind the pace of not only "Fallout," but "Rogue Nation" and "Ghost Protocol" as well.

For most movies, $500 million worldwide would be a huge win regardless of how long it took to get there. But with repeated delays and COVID-19 shooting requirements piled onto the already epic budget expected of a "Mission: Impossible" movie, "Dead Reckoning" reportedly cost $291 million to make before marketing and distribution costs. That puts its break-even point far north of half a billion, somewhere in the $650-800 million range, and at this point it's likely to fall a long way short of that goal. 

Between the pandemic-afflicted production and the unfortunate timing of release just one week before Barbenheimer, "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" was squeezed on both ends. So, is this downturn compared to the last three sequels just bad luck, or a sign that the franchise has gotten off track?

Though there are many factors that influenced the underwhelming box office results for "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One," I'll take a stand and say that the actual quality of the movie is not one of them. It has an A CinemaScore from audience polling, a 96 percent on Rotty T's, and experiencing it on opening day with a crowd was electric. I especially loved everything involving the little yellow car.

We've covered the Barbenheimer Effect extensively elsewhere, and there's no doubt that "Dead Reckoning Part One" losing all of its IMAX screens to "Oppenheimer" after just one week was a major blow. But while "Dead Reckoning" itself is full of top-drawer "Mission: Impossible" thrills, the marketing was pretty underwhelming, especially when compared to the trailers that made "Mission: Impossible – Fallout" one of the most-hyped movies of summer 2018. 

The main "Fallout" trailer had everything: a killer sampling of the franchise's main theme into Imagine Dragons' tie-in single "Friction," that fight scene moment where Henry Cavill reloads his arms, a shot where you can actually see Tom Cruise's ankle break, and a sense of finality (albeit a false one) in lines like: "The end you always feared is coming."

And just as crucial as what was in the trailer is what was left out. The wildest stunt in "Fallout," a HALO jump with Cruise and the camera team shooting a scene while falling towards the earth at 200 mph, wasn't featured in the main trailer at all, only in a behind-the-scenes featurette. By contrast, the big motorcycle cliff stunt for "Dead Reckoning" was shown very early in the marketing, and had lost its shine by the time the movie actually came out. With the added dead weight of "Part One" in the title, screaming (however inaccurately) "this is only half a movie" at audiences, it's fair to say that Barbenheimer isn't solely to blame for Ethan Hunt's misfortune.