Tom Cruise Is Thrown Under the Bus as Mission: Impossible 7 Fails at the Box Office
Dead Reckoning Part I didn’t perform nearly as well as it was expected to, and for its overblown budget and troubled production, the Paramount CEO seemingly blames Cruise and McQuarrie.
The latest Mission: Impossible installment was stuck in production hell for years, and its cost was overblown by a milestone — all thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. The restrictions and shutdowns ensured that a handful of money had to be spent to achieve very mundane things, and the cost of the movie skyrocketed up to $300M.
As you know, it takes roughly double the budget for a movie to break even, on average. For Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part I this effectively means that unless the worldwide box office revenue reached at least $600M, it lost money instead of earning, and currently, this is exactly what’s happening.
Currently, M:I7’s worldwide box office revenue ties up to just under $378.5M, and this is a financial disaster for the studio. There are many reasons why Tom Cruise’s latest entry underperformed so severely, and they all played their part in its failure.
If not for the pandemic, the budget wouldn’t have increased so grotesquely; if not for Barbie and (especially) Oppenheimer ’s releases, the theater screens wouldn’t have been lost for Mission: Impossible; if not for Cruise and McQuarrie’s idea to bring some extremely expensive scenes from Part II to Part I, the cost would’ve been lower.
These and many other factors affected the end result, but the Paramount CEO seems focused on the last one and puts the blame on director McQuarrie and Tom Cruise for further overblowing the budget by adding new scenes to the movie.
By adding the utterly expensive submarine scene, Cruise and McQuarrie had the budget cross the co-financing limit set by Skydance Media. It was at $240M that the company stopped co-financing the production and Paramount had to assume the costs itself, and once again, the final budget reached almost $300M.
“Let’s just say that the studio and the production and Tom were in a disagreement over direction, and there was a stalemate going on. We had to hit the pause button. <...> It was a production issue, and it was about the scope of what was being asked for. And the question we needed to ask was do we need this and why?” Paramount CEO Brian Robbins explains.
Financial issues like this have been plaguing the production of Mission: Impossible 7 since day one, and now they have translated into a disastrous flop after the immensely overblown budget. However, Tom Cruise was doing everything to perfect and promote the movie, so can one really blame the man for this failure?
Source: Variety