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Having completed over a month of release in theaters worldwide, Paramount’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning isn’t shaping up to be the mega-hit that it was supposed to. The movie was marketed as the final installment of the long-running action franchise; the decision was designed to boost interest in the tent pole despite there being zero official communication to this effect. Paramount pulled out all the stops, seeing the massive benchmark that the movie had set for itself with its bloated reported budget of $400 million. Costs escalated because of the pandemic and the industry-wide strikes a couple of years ago. In effect, The Final Reckoning has been in production for half-a-decade.
With nearly $180 million domestically and another $362 million from overseas markets, the movie’s cumulative global haul currently stands at $540 million. It needs to generate around $800 million worldwide in order to break even. The Final Reckoning has now overtaken the $535 million lifetime global haul of Guy Ritchie’s $125 million sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Mission: Impossible – Fallout remains the franchise’s top-grossing installment, with a global box office haul of over $790 million. This is the number that The Final Reckoning needs to beat, but as things stand, it’ll most likely fall short. In happier news, it managed to overtake its direct predecessor, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, at the domestic box office this week, as it aims to overtake it globally as well.
Released in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie a couple of years ago, Dead Reckoning could never recover. It cost a reported $300 million to produce, and grossed only around $565 million, falling short of every previous installment directed by Christopher McQuarrie. The longtime collaborator of star Tom Cruise seemed to have perfected his on-the-fly filmmaking style, but the risky strategy appears to have run its course. The Final Reckoning opened to divisive reviews, although its 80% Rotten Tomatoes score doesn’t accurately reflect this divisiveness.
Cruise Seems to Be Stepping Away from Action
McQuarrie and Cruise have worked on four of these movies now, with the fifth and sixth installments both grossing nearly $700 million and $800 million worldwide each. Cruise has re-established himself as something of a savior-figure for theatrical filmmaking, after the grand success of his Top Gun: Maverick a few years ago, and his insistence on presenting his movies exclusively on the big screens. He’s poised to step away from the action genre now, with a movie directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu lined up next. You can watch The Final Reckoning in theaters, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.