Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is now available for advance booking in India in multiple premium formats — save for 3D. Ticket sales are now live across BookMyShow and PayTM, with first showings starting as early as 8am in select theatres. While the MI franchise is undeniably huge, it hasn’t gone the same way as the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe films or the more recent Avatar: The Way of Water, which kicked off at 12am midnight onwards. Releasing on Wednesday, July 12, the film has reportedly sold 25,000 tickets in PVR and Inox cinemas. Out of those figures, 12,000 sales are allegedly for the opening day alone. The release being on a normal working day, the numbers highlight the demand for such blockbuster action epics from Tom Cruise.
The leading man, after all, carried much of 2022’s theatre business with Top Gun: Maverick, which earned $1.495 billion (about Rs. 12,362 crore). The feat was so significant that acclaimed director Steven Spielberg thanked him at the Oscars nominees luncheon for saving Hollywood. “You saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously, Top Gun: Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry,” he said (via Variety). The initial critic responses for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One point toward a similar fate, with a 98 percent score on the review aggregator website RottenTomatoes.
In addition to standard and IMAX 2D screenings, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will be available to watch in 4DX and MX4D formats, which add some practical effects and motion seats for better immersion. The film will also be screened in 2D ScreenX, which expands the silver screen canvas on either side, and ICE (Immersive Cinema Experience), which in addition to the side panels, uses colour lighting panels to add continuously-changing lighting effects that match the on-screen content.
With the aforementioned numbers, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has the potential to surpass Fast X’s worldwide box office collection, which itself became the first Hollywood film in India to break the 100-crore mark, within 11 days since release. As per The Hollywood Reporter, Cruise’s action epic is tracking toward a franchise-best $90 million (about Rs. 744 crore) range within the US and Canada within its first five days. That’s a big start for the July tentpole, considering that in the following week, audiences would be driven to watch the much-hyped, Margot Robbie-led Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. For now, 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout is the highest-grossing film in the franchise, making $791.1 million (about Rs. 6,539 crore) globally.
Hollywood has trained our minds to believe that too many sequels are a bad thing, which while true, surprisingly doesn’t apply to the Mission: Impossible franchise, which has only gotten better with each entry. In Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his spy crew are on a globe-trotting mission to track down a bioweapon, before it falls into the wrong hands. If that wasn’t stressful enough, enemies from his past, including the former IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) from the first film, are catching up to him and putting the task in jeopardy. Joining Cruise on his crusade (no pun intended) are returning stars Rebecca Ferguson as former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust, Ving Rhames as the IMF computer technician, Simon Pegg as IMF field agent Benji Dunn, and Vanessa Kirby as arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis.
Save for Hayley Atwell (Agent Carter) as Grace, the ambiguous, pickpocketing frenemy to Hunt, most new actors lean toward the villainous side. We’ve got Esai Morales (Titans) playing the terrorist Garbiel and Pom Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) as a clown-like French assassin called Paris, who threaten Hunt and his allies’ lives. He must accept that the mission is more important than protecting the ones he cares about.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One releases July 12 in theatres worldwide. In India, in addition to English, it will be available to watch in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu language dubs.