This is going to be quick as I have a brief moment to bring you this weekend’s box office results with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation taking number one with a strong, $56 million showing. This is the second best opening for a Mission films since Mission: Impossible II opened with $57.8 million back in 2000. Then again, it’s not really fair to compare to Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, which had a staggered release back over the Christmas holidays in 2011. What it does say, however, is the Mission franchise is alive and well as Tom Cruise is already teasing a sixth installment filming as early as next summer. Overseas the film opened to an additional $65 million for a worldwide cume of $121 million.
In second was a bit of a floundering effort for Vacation, which opened on Wednesday to $3.8 million, but it didn’t improve from there as the film finished the three-day weekend with $14.8 million, a “B” CinemaScore and $21.1 million in total for its first five days.
After a lackluster opening last weekend, Adam Sandler‘s Pixels dropped 56.7% for a $10.4 million sophomore weekend, bringing its total to $45.6 million on that $88 million budget. Worldwide the film is up to $102 million so far.
Southpaw had a modest opening last weekend, but a 55% drop this weekend for $7.5 million this weekend brings the film’s cume up to $31.5 million on a $30 million budget. Not much to write home about.
Finally, Paper Towns took a deserved nose dive in its second weekend, dropping 63.6% for a weekend of only $4.6 million.
It will be interesting to see how Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation holds over with an “A-” CinemaScore and superheroes hitting theaters next weekend. Fox will deliver what appears to be a troubled Fantastic Four next week along with TriStar’s Meryl Streep bit of counter-programming with Ricki and the Flash, then you have a new kids feature in Shaun the Sheep Movie (which I don’t expect will do all that well) and finally a little August thriller in The Gift.
