‘Mission: Impossible 7’ Opens Big With $80M at Box Office, But Not as Big as Expected

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has Tom Cruise, car chases and explosions, but it didn’t exactly set the domestic box office on fire.

The highly-anticipated Paramount and Skydance release opened Wednesday — to get a head start on the competition — and topped the box office with an estimated five-day total of $80 million and $56.2 million for the weekend, according to Comscore.

Those are definitely big numbers, but they fell below analyst expectations, which had the film debuting with at least $90 million.

The thriller played in 4,327 locations in the U.S. and Canada, for a per theater average of $12,988.

The plot for the seventh installment of the franchise finds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team taking on their most dangerous mission yet: to track down a terrifying new A.I. weapon that threatens all of humanity, and keep it from falling into the wrong hands.

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Esai Morales plays a terrorist aiming to use the weapon known as “The Entity” to rule the world. The cast also includes Ving Rhames, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Cary Elwes, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss, Pom Klementieff, Charles Parnell, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby.

Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed the film.

Critics embraced MI7, giving it an amazing 96 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Moviegoers also gave the film high marks with an “A” CinemaScore.

MI7 played bigger overseas, bringing in $155 million from 70 international markets, Comscore reported. Since it opened on July 12, the film has made $235 million worldwide.

Still, with a reported production budget of $290 million, plus millions in marketing, including glitzy red carpet premieres in Rome, London and New York, MI7 will need to bring in a lot more loot. Next weekend it faces tough competition with war epic Oppenheimer and the star-studded Barbie hitting theaters.

Elsewhere at the domestic box office, faith-based drama Sound of Freedom took second place with $27 million Friday through Sunday in its second weekend in theaters.

Insidious: The Red Door was third with $13 million in its second week.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny took fourth place with $12 million after two weekends. Fifth place went to Pixar’s Elemental with $8.7 million in its fifth week in theaters.