SASKATOON - Hi, folks, and welcome to another Cairns on Cinema, coming to you today from my desk at the First Ministers Meeting in Saskatoon.
However, right now I am not talking about the Prime Minister or Premiers, or about getting pipelines built or any of that riveting stuff. Instead, I plan to provide a brief update on where we sit with the summer movie box office -- and there is already runaway early leader.
That movie is Disney's Lilo & Stitch, the remake of the 2002 animated classic. It seems like Disney has put out a lot of live action "remakes" lately, some of which have not gone over well (ie. Snow White). But the numbers for Memorial Day weekend for this latest Disney effort were something else.
Lilo & Stitch dominated the four day Memorial Day weekend with a domestic haul of $182,600,626, easily swamping Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning with $79,041,120. The overall domestic haul was $327,992,319.
Following this past weekend, Lilo & Stitch has hauled in $280,121,482, well ahead of Mission:Impossible's $122,618,108. Clearly, it is on track to win summer blockbuster season as it stands. As for all of 2025, right now it is second for the year behind A Minecraft Movie at $422,955,168, but looks to be on track to surpass that number easily. Worldwide, the haul so far for Lilo & Stitch is $610.8 million, and I have seen estimates of a potential worldwide haul hitting $1.2 billion.
So as usual, my box office predictions for 2025 hit the trash can. My forecast of big things for Mission:Impossible is officially down the tubes. What's interesting to me is that the opening weekend for Lilo & Stitch also beat the Memorial Day weekend box office record for Tom Cruise's previous Top Gun: Maverick of $160.5 million in 2022, and that was a movie that had the best box office of the year.
So this is Cruise getting beat not once, but twice by Lilo & Stitch. As another bitter pill, this eighth and final Mission: Impossible movie cost a fortune to make, roughly $400 million by some estimates. It will be lucky to make its money back.
I guess the lesson here is never discount the family audiences, and never discount the popularity of that wild and goofy alien Stitch, a character insanely popular in the toy stores everywhere. The Disney marketing and merchandise department must be delighted. And this is a generational opportunity for the parents to pass their love of Stitch down to their kids.
There's still a ways to go in the summer movie season, but Lilo & Stitch will be hard to top. It's hard to imagine whether any other summer movie could challenge it. Among other things, I have seen reports online of problems in test screenings for Superman, with some major changes ordered to the movie before its release later this summer. Usually these sorts of stories are not a good sign, but maybe the changes do work out. We will see how this all shakes out in the end.
This movie column is kind of abbreviated this week as I have been busy covering the First Ministers Meeting, being held at TCU Place. This location reminds me that the old Pacific Cinemas used to be located right across the street from here, where the Holiday Inn now sits. Come to think of it, this whole block is kind of a movie theatre graveyard in Saskatoon: Midtown Plaza used to be the home of Midtown Cinemas, which of course is long gone, and across the street from the mall is the old Capitol 4 which has been converted into an office complex.
Memories, memories. Anyway, that's all for this week.
