By promoting action-packed stunts distinguishing it from CG-heavy superhero movies, the movie earns the franchise’s first solid A CinemaScore, which was enough to boost it above other installments in the series.
More than a decade after his couch-jumping incident on Oprah Winfrey’s show almost derailed his career, Tom Cruise, 56, has scored a major victory at a time when movie stars have been supplanted by visual effects and comic-book superheroes. His character of uber spy Ethan Hunt has at least one foot in the real world, while with the other the indefatigable star launches himself into nearly impossible action sequences that have become the franchise’s trademark.
Over the July 27-29 weekend, Paramount’s and Skydance’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout opened to $61.5 million at the North American box office and $153.5 million globally, a series high — at least without adjusting the grosses of the previous installments for the effects of inflation.
So why did the sixth outing in a 22-year-old franchise scale such big numbers?
One clue is the film’s A CinemaScore, a first for any film in the action-spy franchise chronicling the globe-trotting adventures of uber spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team. That’s in addition to the film’s widely publicized 98 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, likewise a franchise best and the top score any 2018 summer tentpole this year so far, including topping Pixar’s Incredibles 2 (93 percent). Also, it is the best Rotten Tomatoes rating of Cruise’s career.
In terms of the CinemaScore, Fallout is the first of Cruise’s movies to earn an A since The Last Samurai 15 years ago. A handful of his films since that time have earned an A-grade — including his last two Mission: Impossible installments — but in the parlance of CinemaScore, even the slightest grade variation can make a big difference in how a movie plays out as it’s buoyed by word of mouth.
