Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Earns $7 Million at Tuesday Night Preview Screenings

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One earned around $7 million at preview night screenings last night, ahead of today’s wide opening. It’s hard to guess how this might play out over the course of the five-day weekend, since Dead Reckoning is a Wednesday opening — something that’s become increasingly uncommon in recent year and has not recent precedent in the Mission: Impossible series. Still, it seems like a fairly strong sign for the box office, which has a wide range of projections from $60 million to $95 million for the first five days, according to the box office breakdown at Variety.

The movie also had “fan event” screenings around the country on Monday, which will make it even harder to get a bead on its opening weekend success — but producers wanted to make sure they got as much runway as they could before Oppenheimer and Barbie open up later this month, taking up a lot of the country’s biggest screens.

The movie’s plot is still fairly shrouded in mystery for the most part. The trailers have centered primarily on the movie’s action and setting its stakes, which include a seeming moral conflict between Ethan’s desire to protect the found family of his IMF teammates and Luther’s (Rhames) desire to complete the mission at all costs. Creatives behind the movie have revealed that it will plumb the depths of Ethan’s past, most of which is almost entirely unknown prior to the events of the first movie.

One particular stunt that has appeared in virtually every bit of promotional material is a motorcycle dive off a bridge into a paragliding stunt over the chasm.

Director Chris McQuarrie previously spoke about the meaning behind of the Dead Reckoning title, which was revealed at CinemaCon along with Cruise’s introduction.

“When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two,” McQuarrie told  Light the Fuse. “The title for the first movie was nearly … a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy – It wasn’t a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences. By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One. So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One stars Cruise and returning stars Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Henry Czerny, and Vanessa Kirby. New cast members include Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter) and Pom Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy), Rob Delaney (Deadpool 2), Charles Parnell (Top Gun: Maverick), Indira Varma (Game of Thrones), and Mark Gatiss (Sherlock). 

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is coming to theaters on July 12.