Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise might be actors from different generations, but their contributions to Hollywood have spanned multiple generations. A lot of credit goes to their work on Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible, respectively, but unlike wine, these franchises haven’t aged well.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise, made its debut in June, and despite its star-studded cast, it was unable to pull enough people to theaters as the film massively underperformed. On the other hand, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise, made its debut last month, and though it was definitely a better film than Dial of Destiny, it still suffered the same fate.
As a result, both films are now expected to make massive losses for their respective studios, mainly because they both share one similarity: they are among the most expensive films ever made.
The production budget of Dial of Destiny is estimated to be between $295 and $300 million (and that’s not including marketing and distribution costs), and unfortunately for Disney, the film has only grossed $375 million globally. Dead Reckoning Part One cost $291 million to produce, and it has only brought in $523 million in ticket sales so far.
These box office figures are nothing to scoff about, but when they’re compared to the films’ production budgets, it becomes an entirely different story. In fact, both films could potentially lose nearly $100 million by the time their theatrical runs conclude, as highlighted by Variety.
Fortunately, streaming services that have largely taken over the space once dominated by video-on-demand offer a promising avenue for Indiana Jones 5 and Mission: Impossible 7 to break even (Dead Reckoning Part One merely needs to gross more than $600 million to offset costs).
While streaming services and film studios have maintained discretion over their earnings, the evident impact of Dial of Destiny in rejuvenating the appeal of earlier Indiana Jones installments on the Disney+ platform underscores the power of streaming services to steady the financial scales for studios.
Nonetheless, producing high-budget films has lost its viability for studios in the aftermath of the pandemic. Ever since theaters shut down across the world in 2020, films have struggled to reach the massive amounts of ticket sales they used to attain before, which means most studios are running losses on most film releases.
In fact, the achievements of Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie earning over a billion dollars with smaller production budgets compared to many other films demonstrate that bigger budgets don’t necessarily equate to greater box office success.
Furthermore, a substantial number of these high-budget franchises are grappling with franchise fatigue. For instance, Fast X, which is now among the most expensive films ever made with a production budget of $340 million, barely managed to break even at the box office, mustering a total gross of $719 million.
Ultimately, while Mission: Impossible seems to have been lumped together with Indiana Jones 5, its underwhelming box office performance can also be largely attributed to the bad timing of its release. The concurrent release of two of this year’s biggest blockbuster hits, Oppenheimer and Barbie, provided audiences with better cinema options (especially given the Barbenheimer craze), and the exclusive hold of IMAX screens by Oppenheimer further disadvantaged the Tom Cruise starrer.
There are some valuable lessons to be learned here, and hopefully, studios will be more prudent with the amount of money they spend on films from now on.
