Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation collected $56mn in US and Canadian theatres, Rentrak Corp said in a statement.
Bloomberg/Los Angeles
Mission accomplished for Tom Cruise. The 53-year-old box-office superstar staged a triumphant return to the No 1 spot with the weekend debut of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation.
The fifth instalment in Paramount Pictures’ action-adventure series collected $56mn in US and Canadian theatres, Rentrak Corp said on Sunday in a statement.
BoxOffice.com forecast $57mn. The weekend’s other new release, Warner Bros’ Vacation, placed second.
Despite his waning box-office power, with disappointments such as Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise reasserted his pull with Rogue Nation. The film scored with critics, garnering reviews that match the best of his Mission Impossible movies, and was the second-biggest debut in the series.
Even so, the strong showing owes more to the popularity of Mission Impossible than to Cruise himself, Jeff Bock, a senior box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations, said.
A “guy still around from the ’80s making No 1 films is still pretty rare,” Bock said by phone. “This definitely has more to do with this franchise.”
In Rogue Nation, Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt. This time the secret agent is out in the cold with the Impossible Mission Force disbanded. He and his former team, featuring Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, confront a network of highly skilled agents known as the Syndicate who threaten a series of terrorist attacks on world leaders. Hunt gathers his team and joins forces with disavowed British agent Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson, to beat the rogue nation.
The pull of the secondary actors and their characters also helped attract movie-goers, Bock said. BoxOffice.com had forecast $57mn in sales.
The film’s producers include Cruise, J J Abrams and David Ellison, son of Oracle Corp founder Larry Ellison. It cost $150mn to make, not including marketing costs, according to the studio.
Rogue Nation registered 93% positive reviews according to aggregator Rottentomatoes.com, which tallies critics’ notices. That’s a high mark for an action film, and matches the series’ previous best, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. The latest is one of two big summer releases for Viacom’s Paramount division, along with Terminator: Genisys.
“Cruise has played Ethan Hunt so often it would be understandable if he phoned it in, but one of the pleasures of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation is that he doesn’t,” Kenneth Turan wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
Ghost Protocol, the previous film in the series, collected $29.6mn in its first weekend of wide release in December 2011, according to Box Office Mojo.
Mission Impossible II, with its $57.8mn in its first weekend in 2000, has the top debut in the series, according to Rentrak.
Vacation, a remake of the National Lampoon picture, fared less well with critics and audiences. The film from Time Warner produced weekend sales of $14.9mn, missing a forecast of $17mn from Boxoffice.com.
Ed Helms, star of the The Hangover films, plays Rusty Griswold, who is hoping to recreate his childhood vacation with his own family by taking a cross-country road trip to a theme park, Walley World. Things don’t go as planned. Christina Applegate plays his wife Debbie and there are cameos from stars Chris Hemsworth and Chevy Chase, who played Rusty’s father Clark from the 1983 original.
The film garnered only 23% positive reviews, according to Rottentomatoes.com.
“No one expects originality, but the new movie may end up making history: it’s already looking like the worst movie of the year,” Stephanie Merry wrote in the Washington Post.
Weekend sales for the top 10 films fell 19% to $136.1mn from a year earlier, Rentrak said. Sales for the year to date have increased 8.3% to $6.8bn.
The following table has US movie box-office figures provided by studios to Rentrak. The amounts are based on actual ticket sales for July 31, August 1 and estimates for Sunday.
