Indiana Jones 5 and Mission: Impossible 7 could potentially lose $100 million

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.