Mission: Impossible suffers crushing box office defeat to hit Disney remake
The Disney remake had just a third of Mission: Impossible's budget.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning encourages viewers to ‘expect the impossible’, but it’s likely the filmmakers couldn’t have predicted this wild turn of events at the box office…
The eighth and most recent Mission: Impossible film was released last weekend, and sees death-defying stunts as action star Tom Cruise dives 500 feet underwater in arctic conditions and dangles off the wing of a biplane 10,000 feet in the air.
Despite the impressive stunts from Tom, 62, who has played Ethan Hunt for decades, starting the role in 1996, the movie has been pipped at the box office.
Variety reported that Lilo & Stitch launched to $341 million (£252 million) globally, while Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning made $200 million (£148 million).
Lilo and Stitch is now the second biggest opening weekend of 2025, after A Minecraft Movie made $313 million worldwide over three days when it was released in April.
Bizarrely, this isn’t the first time that Tom has gone up against Lilo in Stitch, as in 2002, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report also came head-to-head with the animated original movie.
In fact, this could be sweet revenge for Lilo and Stitch as the movie lost to Minority Report, which made$35.67 million while the cartoon made $35.26 million, just losing out on the winning title.
Sydney Agudong (R) stars as Nani in the movie (Picture: AP) Maia Kealoha stars as Lilo in the movie (Picture: AP)The movies both opened as two of the biggest films in the year, as Lilo and Stitch had a budget of $100 million (£74 million) and Mission: Impossible with an estimated $300 – $400 million (£223 – £295 million) budget.
Lilo and Stitch is a live-action remake of the animated 2002 Disney film of the same name, but it has been divisive among critics.
The film has earned just a 68% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics have suggested that the remake loses some of the magic that was present in the original film.
The Guardian commented: ‘ None of it really tracks unless you’ve already watched the cartoon.’
They also added: ‘With a running time expanded by more than 20 minutes (as these things so often are), there should at least be room for a substantial round of brand-new Stitch antics.
‘Yet the bits and pieces of new material barely seem to understand Stitch’s initially malevolent personality, recoding him as the untrained party animal he’s pretending to be. Occasional new ideas, like a ray gun that opens up shortcut portals, are squandered with first-idea-best-idea roughness.’
Sales for the movie have been the third most successful of the Disney remakes so far, falling behind 2017’s Beauty and the Beast and 2019’s The Lion King, both of which made over $1 billion (£738 million) during their overall release.
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Previous Page Next Page The film has a celebrity-packed cast (Picture: Paramount Pictures and Skydance)Like Lilo and Stitch, reviews for the eighth Mission: Impossible movie have been varied.
Metro’s Tori Brazier commented: ‘Sometimes the dialogue – always taking a second seat to the stunts, as freely admitted by tight-knit collaborators McQuarrie and Cruise – is so basic, clunky and on the nose that it’s funny by accident.’
She then added that there is still something special about the franchise: ‘After nearly 30 years making these films, it feels like the point at which Ethan Hunt starts and Tom Cruise finishes is virtually non-existent – but I’m not sure that really even matters?
‘Now more than ever, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning proves Cruise is the last of a dying breed, so utterly committed as he is to his calling as a movie star to thrill audiences. If this is the end of the road for this franchise, I don’t see anything like this coming around again.’
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and Lilo and Stitch are in cinemas now.
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