Tom Cruise’s grand stunts in his Mission: Impossible franchise have played out incredibly well so far for the studios. But, what happened this time around? Compared to the behemoths that were released just a couple of days after – Barbie and Oppenheimer, Paramount Studios have some reconciliation to do.
Five weeks have gone by, and Tom Cruise’s latest – Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has been able to touch $522 million at the box office. Previous year’s Top Gun: Maverick hit close to $1.5 billion, but the seventh installment in his long-running franchise couldn’t perform as impressively.
Tom Cruise Clashed With Paramount Studios Over Budget
The budget for the film, according to sources close to the studios, was around $300 million. Variety, in a report focused on Paramount Pictures’ CEO Brian Robbins, said Tom Cruise was not in agreement with the mounting costs to make the film.
Even the director, Christopher McQuarrie was involved in the clashes. His [Robbins] statement to the publication was –
“Let’s just say that the studio and the production and Tom were in a disagreement over direction, and there was a stalemate going on. We had to hit the pause button.”
This, according to a Boxoffice Pro analyst, along with Covid pandemic restrictions ended up being the two major reasons for the staggering budget, as the film stands to lose $78 million.
Tom Cruise’s Dangerous Stunt Couldn’t Shoot The Sales
Studios, as per Variety, don’t generally divulge information about their complete financial trajectory, be it about their budget or their profits beyond the ticket sales at the box office.
Shawn Robbins (Boxoffice Pro Analyst) commented on the film’s inability to attract the crowds to the cinemas.
“These movies would have been a lot more economical if it weren’t for COVID,” he said. “But even if that meant their budgets were inflated, at the end of the day, these movies cost what they cost and performed how they performed.”
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) on a budget of $178 million punched $791 million. But, Tom Cruise, willing to strike that nostalgia chord among the audience with his life-threatening motorcycle cliff stunt in Dead Reckoning Part One at 60, couldn’t push the sales to break even at $600 million, as per sources.
Now, it’s up to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two which comes out June 28, 2024, to fix what went wrong with this one.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will soon be available for streaming on the Paramount+ platform.
Source: Variety
