Mission: Impossible 7 (Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning, Part One)--What Does its Opening Weekend Gross Tell Us About its Longer-Run Prospects?

I previously made an estimate of Mission: Impossible 7's likely global box office gross. Working off of the grosses of past installments in the franchise, while taking into account Boxoffice Pro's tracking and the ways the market may have changed recently (with the usually strong market of China likely to kick in less, but Tom Cruise getting a bump from the success of Top Gun 2 elsewhere), I suggested $850-$950 million as the likely range for the global gross.

I made no prediction regarding the opening weekend, and certainly not the domestic opening weekend--but I did note Boxoffice Pro's initial estimate of $65-$80 million for the first three days of its run, and if Boxoffice Pro was quick in revising the figure downward, right before the opening weekend it still projected over $68 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period.

The movie actually made $56 million in the Friday-to-Sunday--and $80 million for the whole five-day period between the Wednesday release and Sunday (where as late as the preceding week Boxoffice Pro projected $100 million for the first five days).

It is a significant shortfall--about 30 percent below the earlier estimate's ceiling, and 14 percent below its floor, while the five-day take is a rough fifth down from the pre-weekend estimate.

Moreover, it is plausible that the opening weekend shortfall will translate to a commensurate shortfall over its longer run. Where Boxoffice Pro had the film making about four times its initial Friday-to-Sunday gross over the whole run, which gave it $250-$320 million domestically, quadrupling what the movie actually made would give it about $225 million. It is also easy to see this assumption of unusually good legs as optimistic. The immediately prior films have managed more like 3.6 times their opening weekend gross, which from a start of $56 million would work out to more like $200 million. This would put the movie on a level with the series low to date, Mission: Impossible III (the one that came out after the stupid fuss about Cruise's public couch-jumping). And the disappointing opening weekend numbers may hint at the film doing still less well. Should it merely triple its opening weekend gross over the longer run (as with the by-today's-lowered-standard-pretty-good performance of Guardians of the Galaxy 3) it would end up with a mere $170 million in the till.

Of course, the Mission: Impossible series has long depended on the international markets for its profitability. Still, even assuming the movie does relatively as well there as Mission: Impossible--Fallout, the movie will just multiply the domestic gross by a factor of 3.6 (funny how that number comes up here too) such an expectation could prove overoptimistic given how film franchises very well-received in China in the past (the MCU, Fast and Furious, Transformers) have recently done, with Mission: Impossible 7's performance here so far no exception. (Thus far the movie has collected a mere $31 million in China, as against the spectacular $181 million it made back in 2018, even before we think of inflation.) If we think more in terms of how Mission: Impossible 4 (which had respectable but still more restrained foreign numbers, in part because of a more modest boost from China), then the movie just triples its domestic gross. And for the time being the movie is doing less well than that, with a 35/65 domestic/foreign split--which is to say, a global multiplier of 2.8.

So where does that leave us?

My guess as to the domestic range is now $170-$225 million, with the multiplier for the global take in the 2.8-3.6 range. Rounding to the nearest $50 million that works out to a global range of $500-$800 million. The high end of that range (just a bit below the floor on my earlier guess) would not be too bad, especially if people came away from the film looking forward to Part 2 of "Dead Reckoning." But anything much below it would likely be a real problem for yet another post-COVID movie that saw its budget bloated by delays, inflation and interest rates as the box office softened, with it seeming to say something that Deadline has drawn a comparison between it and what is looking like the unmitigated financial catastrophe of Indiana Jones 5.

The result is that while the second weekend is always important in clarifying how a movie is likely to do in the end Mission: Impossible 7's weaker than hoped for start in a shaky market, and the particularly high expectations that come with a near-billion dollar franchise and a near-$300 million production budget, make it even more than usually so.

Expect a follow-up after the numbers for this weekend are in.