“This overperformed by a huge margin,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore.
“Lilo & Stich” surpassed Cruise’s 2022 “Top Gun: Maverick” as the biggest domestic Memorial Day weekend earner ever, and global estimates put it past $300 million.
Paramount Pictures’ “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” the eighth and (probably) last appearance of Cruise as Ethan Hunt in a nearly three-decade run, was a distant second, but still brought in a franchise record $63 million through Sunday, outearning “Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” which opened domestically to $61 million in 2018.
And the spy thriller with Cruise’s frequent partner Christopher McQuarrie in the director’s chair for the fourth time in the franchise was the top global earner with $127 million.
“The spectacle of what Tom and McQ put on the screen, it screams theatrical,” said Chris Aronson, Paramount’s president of domestic distribution. “The product they put out just screams, ‘This has to be in theaters.’”
This weekend as a whole blasted past last year, when the Memorial Day box office saw just $132 million for all films in the Friday-through-Monday span. And it appears that it will top 2013 as the best Memorial Day the industry has had, with an estimated overall total of $325 million.
But this film tapped into a latent love for oddball pairing.
It also furthered a trend that includes “A Minecraft Movie” of PG-rated films outpacing the PG-13 movies that usually dominate, made all the more impressive by the lower kids’ ticket prices the more family-oriented films bring.
“I can’t think of a better lineup of films to ignite leading up to Memorial weekend to ignite the spark that got us this record-breaking holiday frame,” he said.
With final domestic figures being released Monday, this list factors in the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore:
