Lilo & Stitch remake and Mission: Impossible 8 earns more than Barbenheimer

The movie business is breathing a sigh of relief with the Lilo & Stitch live-action remake and the eighth Mission: Impossible film earning more than half a billion US dollars this past weekend.

Lilo & Stitch mopped up $US341 million globally while Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning did $US190 million. In Australia, Lilo & Stitch made $9.27 million while Mission: Impossible did $5.05 million, however, M:I8 also sold $6.88 million worth of tickets during previews last weekend.

The combined global box office of $US531 million puts the two movies a touch ahead of Barbenheimer in 2023, when the Barbie and Oppenheimer opening weekend scored a global total of $US511 million.

However, it is not exactly a like-for-like comparison. Those numbers are not adjusted for inflation, and in the US, it is Memorial Day long weekend, so the figures also take in Monday, which Barbenheimer did not. The Mission: Impossible box office includes some international markets such as Australia which released the film last weekend as early previews.

The Lilo & Stitch box office has already surpassed the original 2002 animation’s entire run, which ended on $US271 million. Its $US183 million opening in North America far exceeded expectations. Three weeks ago, it was projected to take $US120 million while last week, that had been revised up to $US165 million.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, in the US, the Disney movie is doing well among not just families, the expected audience for the movie, but also young women in the Gen Z and Millennial demographics who had grown up with the 2002 animation.

Lilo & Stitch had originally been conceived as a straight-to-streaming project, and much like Moana 2, which was slated for Disney+ as a series and later reconfigured as cinema feature, the decision to divert it to theatrical has paid off. Moana 2 earnt $US1.05 billion.

It is a big, necessary victory for Disney which saw its Snow White live-action film bomb when it was released in March. Lilo & Stitch also had a relatively modest production budget at $US100 million compared to Snow White’s reported $US209 million cost.

For Mission: Impossible, the box office is a franchise-best result, beating Fallout, the sixth instalment in the Tom Cruise series of action flicks. It has a much higher hurdle to clear than Lilo & Stitch with a production budget that is reportedly around $US400 million.

The global box office is projected to hit $US33 billion in 2025, according to Gower Street Analytics, up 8 per cent from 2024, but it is still well behind the 2019 takings of $US42.6 billion.

The cinema business has not fully recovered from the Covid pandemic, hit by a combination of closures and the acceleration of audiences moving from theatrical experiences to streaming.

While several blockbusters still perform strongly, it is far from guaranteed, and the success of mid-range films have fallen off, unless it’s genre-fare such as horror.

Only one movie has reached the billion-dollar mark in 2025 - the Chinese animation Ne Zhe 2 with worldwide takings of $US1.89 billion. The second highest grossing movie of the year so far is A Minecraft Movie, which is sitting on $US940 million, followed by a pair of Marvel movies, Captain America: Brave New World with $US415 million and Thunderbolts with $US355 million.

Blockbusters still to come this year are the Superman reboot, Fantastic Four: The First Steps, Avatar: Fire and Ash, F1, Zootopia 2, Wicked: For Good and Jurassic World Rebirth.