The Memorial Day box office is already delivering in a major way and the long holiday weekend hasn’t even begun.
Disney’s live-action redo Lilo & Stitch and Paramount’s latest Mission: Impossible movie, which marks Tom Cruise’s swan song as stealth spy Ethan Hunt, both did sizeable business in Thursday previews.
Lilo & Stitch grossed a huge $14.5 million in previews, the largest preview gross of the year to date and a Memorial Day record for Disney’s live-action studio after besting The Little Mermaid ($10.3 million) and Aladdin ($7 million), not adjusted for inflation. In terms of Disney’s larger film empire, it also beat Memorial Day entry Solo: A Star Wars Story ($14.1 million). And it outshone recent animated Disney blockbuster Moana 2 ($13.8 million).
Three weeks ago, NRG’s four-day opening number for Lilo & Stitch was $120 million. Now, it’s $165 million, a jaw-dropping gross that would, in an ironic twist, see Lilo & Stitch supplant Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick ($160 million) as the biggest Memorial Day opener of all time, not adjusted for inflation.
Stitch isn’t just drawing interest from families; it’s popping big time among teenage girls and younger women — i.e., Gen Z and younger Millennials — who grew up on the first 2002 movie and resulting TV show about a Hawaiian girl with a fraught family life who adopts an adorable, albeit trouble-making, dog-like alien. Box office pundits say the nostalgic factor is running high, just as it did among Millennials and Gen Z’ers for the live-action Aladdin, which made $1.1 billion in global ticket sales after getting families, teens and younger adults. Rideback produced both lilo and 2019’s Aladdin, which went on to earn $1.1 billion at the global box office
The live-action Lilo & Stitch was originally intended to to go straight to Disney+, helping to explain its modest $100 million production budget It has a current Rotten Tomatoes score of 72 percent.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning set its own preview record in earning a franchise-best $8.3 million, ahead of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One ($7 million) and Mission: Impossible — Fallout ($6 million.)
The film, with a current RT critics score of 79 percent, is expected to more than make up for the lackluster $54.7 million bow of Dead Reckoning the series, as well as supplant the $61.2 million three-day launch of Fallout to set a new franchise opening record by a mile.
A major challenge in terms of the film’s financial success is its $400 million net budget before marketing — making it one of the most expensive films ever made — although Paramount insiders note that each new installment increases the value of the entire library, including a spike in home entertainment sales and rentals of previous titles.
The two movies are expected to fuel the biggest Memorial Day of all time in terms of ticket sales. While the mash-up isn’t expected to be quite the same cultural phenomenon that Barbenheimer was, the potent combo of the two movies can’t be ignored. Parents may take their kids to see Lilo one day, then ditch them and go see Mission sometime else over the long holiday weekend (as for a moniker, how about “Stitchin: Impossible”?)
More to come.