‘Mission Impossible-Fallout’ Rocks the Box Office

Tom Cruise’s sixth installment of the action packed Mission Impossible movie reigns over the box office in North America.

‘’Mission: Impossible — Fallout’’ easily took the No. 1 spot in North America this weekend. Paramount Pictures estimates that it earned $61.5 million from 4,386 theaters, AP reported.

Internationally, the film earned $92 million from 36 countries, which is also a record for the franchise.

After six “M:I” movies, 22 years, countless bruises and a broken ankle, Tom Cruise’s death-defying “Mission: Impossible” stunts continue to pay off.

The movie is the best of the long-running franchise, which has grossed $2.8 billion worldwide, and one of Cruise’s biggest too (just shy of “War of the Worlds’” $64.9 million debut in 2005).

In the film, a new mission is given to the leading character Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) team joins forces with CIA assassin August Walker to prevent a disaster of epic proportions.

Arms dealer John Lark and a group of terrorists known as the Apostles plan to use three plutonium cores for simultaneous nuclear attacks.

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, “Fallout” has scored some of the best reviews in the series and has been in the news cycle for almost a year.

Talk about the film started early, in August of 2017, when Cruise broke his ankle performing a stunt in London with a video to prove it.

  Importance of a Star’s Presence

“Paramount was strategically perfect in their marketing and publicity game,” said senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “They showed how important a star’s presence is in marketing the movie early on. Tom Cruise broke his ankle and they made that into a positive for the movie.”

Second place in the box office went to “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again,” which fell 57% in its second weekend in theaters, to earn $15 million ($26.6 million international). It was a much steeper decline than the first film, which dropped only 36 percent between its first and second weekends.

Denzel Washington’s “The Equalizer 2” slid to third with $14 million in weekend two, and “Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation” took fourth with $12.3 million.

The animated “Teen Titans Go! To the Movies,” a feature spinoff of the Cartoon Network television show about Robin and some of the lesser-known DC super-heroes, was the only major film to open against “Fallout.” The Warner Bros. release earned $10.5 million and landed in fifth place.

The film earned positive reviews from critics and younger audiences, but also faced a fair amount of animated competition from both “Hotel Transylvania 3” and “Incredibles 2,” which is still going strong in its seventh weekend and headed toward the $1 billion mark. As of Sunday the Disney/Pixar sequel had earned an estimated $996.5 million globally.