MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7 - DEAD RECKONING PART 1 opening | Action thrillers | BO predictions and expectations | July 14 to 16, 2023 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: July 14 to 16, 2023
1) Mission: Impossible 7 - Dead Reckoning Part 1 opening
- This opening is roughly average for an action thriller at this point in its series. Including Wednesday’s and Thursday’s business, the 5-day start is solid. Of course, there’s nothing average about this film. It stars Tom Cruise, whose last picture opened to $126.7m over three days and finished with $1.496b worldwide, and it cost approx. $300m to make.
The foreign markets are where action movies excel, and the overseas openings are strong, with the exception of China, which is good-not-great. Tom Cruise is returning there after Top Gun 2 was shut out because in the film he wears a bomber jacket with a Taiwanese flag on it:
Audience scores and critics reviews are outstanding. The Mission: Impossible series averages a 4.1x domestic multiple (that is, the final domestic BO averages 4.1x the opening 3-day weekend), and Top Gun 2 finished with an eye-popping 5.7x multiple. Dead Reckoning is set up for a good run now, with little direct competition until early August.
The industry was looking for bigger here. John Wick 4 started with $73.8m over three days in March. In general, audiences are interested in more, more, more of the same, until they start getting satisfied and excited about the next thing. No one knows exactly when that’s going to happen.
2) Action thrillers
- Below is a list of the current top action thriller series — the human-scale kind, with human characters chasing human bad guys (not monsters/creatures, not sci-fi, not superheroes). Past episodes of James Bond and Fast & Furious have been bigger, but among the most recent releases, M:I ranks at the top. Dead Reckoning should keep it there when it’s done:
3) Box office predictions and expectations
- During the weeks leading up to opening weekend, the industry analyzes a mass of information measuring the impact of each marketing campaign, looking for insight into what's working and what's not, and how to improve it. The data come from moviegoer surveys, social media metrics, and advanced ticket sales.
When this started 40 years ago, the conversation focused on, "Is the marketing campaign doing what it's supposed to do, is it reaching the right audience, do we need to adjust it, and how?" But within a very short time — human nature being what it is — the conversation turned to
"HOW MUCH MONEY IS THE MOVIE GOING TO MAKE THIS WEEKEND???"
- Today’s BO predictions are the result of 40 years of work by the best programming minds in the business: PhD-level statisticians, applied mathematicians, computer scientists, and social scientists. The predictions are good some of the time, but they’re off on a regular basis, and sometimes they’re way off.
The numbers improve closer to the release date, but at that point, time is running out to do anything about it. Ultimately, after 40 years, this is as good as it gets. The movie business is simply too complicated and subjective to predict any better than what we have.
- All of this used to be a quiet, private process within the industry, but in the digital age, everyone's an expert and lots of people make predictions. For the blog-sphere, it provides endless material to chat about. The conversation itself has become a force — it amplifies the BO results, both positively and negatively:
On the upside, there's nothing better than a positive surprise. When a movie over-performs on opening weekend, it reinforces favorable word-of-mouth and buzz. Everyone loves a winner —
On the other hand, no one likes a loser. Falling short of expectations is bad. Reading the comment sections in the blog-sphere, you'd think it was evil, immoral, and a direct personal affront —
- This creates a dilemma for marketers and distributors. How do you manage expectations so that a movie gets a fair shot, especially when the predictive modeling is volatile and regularly inaccurate?
This post is long enough. There are two different ways to handle opening BO expectations, which we’ll outline during the next couple of weeks.