Mission: Impossible 7--Making Predictions About its Box Office Gross

In considering the commercial prospects of Mission: Impossible 7 (aka Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning) an obvious place to start is what the preceding films in the series made at the box office. Listed below are the box office numbers compiled from various sources (Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, etc.), with the current dollar figures presented along with the inflation-adjusted numbers in parentheses (with prices adjusted for May 2023 values using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index).

Mission: Impossible (1996)--Worldwide--$458 Million ($889 Million); Domestic--$181 Million ($351 Million)

Mission: Impossible II (2000)--Worldwide--$546 Million ($934 Million); Domestic--$215 Million ($368 Million)

Mission: Impossible III (2006)--Worldwide--$398 Million ($597 Million); Domestic--$134 Million ($201 Million)

Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol (2011)--Worldwide--$695 Million ($938 Million); Domestic--$209 Million ($282 Million)

Mission: Impossible--Rogue Nation (2015)--Worldwide--$683 Million ($867 Million); Domestic--$195 Million ($248 Million)

Mission: Impossible--Fallout (2018)--Worldwide--$792 Million ($958 Million); Domestic--$220 Million ($267 Million)

If one goes by these figures then in May 2023 terms the six films averaged $864 million at the box office--or, if one excludes the outlier of the low-performing Mission: Impossible III--$917 million.* The last film, unusually for a sixth installment, did better than any of the others, pulling in $958 million.

As it happens, Boxoffice Pro, going by its tracking, envisages $250 million as merely the floor--and $320 million as the ceiling.

Meanwhile the films have made, globally, between 2.5 (as the first 1996 film did) and 3.5 times (as Mission Impossible 6 did) their domestic gross.

Should the film's gross to fall at the low end of the range ($250 million domestically), with the global multiplier seen with the first film, we would have a gross in the vicinity of $610 million (about what Mission: Impossible III made). At the same time a gross at the high end of the domestic range ($320 million), combined with the international response received by Mission: Impossible 6 works out to a little under $1.14 billion--the series' first billion-dollar gross in current and 2023 dollars, and the first billion-dollar gross for any live-action Hollywood movie this year.

Splitting the difference one ends up in the vicinity of $900 million ($875 million or so)--again, about what the series has averaged from the start.

What would a more nuanced approach give us, though? If, for example, we went beyond averages and looked at trends?

As it happens, the picture gets more complicated. Just as with the Fast and Furious franchise, the series' domestic peak was quite some time ago, with foreign grosses increasingly important. Where the first two films in today's terms made over $350 million domestically, the four films since have consistently fallen short of the $300 million mark. Indeed, the fourth, fifth and sixth films averaged a mere $265 million--with the last film, Mission: Impossible--Fallout taking in just $267 million in today's terms, down a $100 million from Mission: Impossible II's gross eighteen years earlier.

This is part of why the domestic/foreign split in the gross fell from 40/60 with Mission: Impossible II to 30/70 with the fourth film, 29/71 with the fifth, 28/72 with the sixth. However, it is not the whole story, important to which has been China. Each of the last three Mission: Impossible films took in over $100 million there in current dollars ($101 million in the case of the fourth, $136 million in the case of the fifth, $181 million in the case of the sixth), with in today's terms 2018's Mission: Impossible--Fallout grossing over $200 million in just the Chinese market, accounting for 23 percent of that series-high global take (indeed, almost as much as North America. did), without which growth the movie would have done a lot less well.

Of course, 2023 is not 2018. On the one hand American films are facing a less receptive Chinese market. The downward pressure on U.S. films' grosses there varies considerably from movie to movie, of course, as a comparison of Ant-Man 3 with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 demonstrates. (In real terms Ant-Man 3 made only 27 percent of what Ant-Man 2 made in China--a significant factor in its underperformance--whereas Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has at this point made about 70 percent of what Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did. Likewise Fast X, a better analogy for Mission: Impossible given its genre, and its franchise's popularity in the Chinese market, made just 55 percent of what F9 did in real terms--$137 million versus the earlier film's $247 million in May 2023 dollars.)

At the same time, there is that possible boost in the North American market, into which the good will toward Tom Cruise from fans of Top Gun 2. This seems to me plausible enough--but of more domestic than international significance (given that Top Gun 2, predictably, was much more phenomenal a performer in North America than abroad, and certainly China, where it did not come out at all). It may also have something of a boost from weaker than usual summer competition (for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 will have long since faded, The Transformers only ever been a minor rival, and The Flash, and likely, Indiana Jones as well, underperformed badly, leaving people that much more ready to go and see this movie at the movies).

Accordingly, let us split the difference between the floor and ceiling of the Boxoffice Pro range--giving us a $285 million gross domestically. Meanwhile let us consider the average performance of the last three films internationally excluding China--which gives us an average in the $480 million range. And let us assume (perhaps optimistically) that the movie makes 70 percent of what the last Mission: Impossible film did in China--working out to $150 million or so. The result would be almost exactly that average for the series (excluding number three) of a gross in the $910-$920 million range. Were the movie to take in just 50 percent of what its predecessor did in China as the rest of the calculation was unchanged we would end up with--again--$875 million.

So, again, the more plausible calculations have us coming back again and again to the $900 million mark, give or take $25 million, though when making these estimates I am more comfortable with a $50 million margin north and south of that point to cover variations on the essential scenario (a little better abroad and a little less well at home, or vice-versa, etc., etc.). The result is that I am going to guess at a range of $850-$950 million for the film's global gross, not far from what has been seen from its predecessors, though with a stronger domestic contribution and a weaker foreign one to the final take.

* The movie came out in that patch when everybody was supposed to hate Tom Cruise because he jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch, or something. (Yes, the entertainment world is an extremely stupid place, and it has made the Internet stupider.)