One is a chaotic pint-sized fugitive who’s too fast to catch, the other is an alien hiding out on Earth. We’ll let you make your own jokes with that one.
Crucially though, Tom Cruise and this particular Disney character have already opened against each other in cinemas once before. And it’ll happen again on 23rd May 2025, when Paramount’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and Disney’s Lilo & Stitch remake both have their first frame in US cinemas. Deadline reports that both films are tracking for $100 million-plus openings over the Memorial Day weekend.
Back in June 2002, one of the biggest box-office news stories of the year was that Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, the animated original, and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, a Cruise sci-fi vehicle based on a Phillip K Dick story, had a photo finish on their opening weekends in the US.
Both films earned around $36 million each in their first three days, starting Friday 21st June. 20th Century Fox, which released Minority Report, claimed a $36.9m opening weekend, while Disney’s estimate came in at $35.8m. By Monday morning, Entertainment Weekly and other outlets were still reporting that it was too close to call.
When Variety reported the final figures, ('Report’ squelches Stitch bitch – what a headline!) Cruise and Spielberg won with $35.7m to Lilo & Stitch’s $35.3m, with just $400,000 between them.
But when the smoke cleared it wasn’t that straightforward. Tom Rothman, who was then quite high up at Fox, famously said of Minority Report: “How are we marketing it? It’s Cruise and Spielberg. What else do we need to do?”
Read more: Minority Report, 20 years on: a movie that got a whole lot right
This vaunted collaboration came with a $100m budget, a massive ad spend, and a launch in more than 3,000 screens in the US alone. And for its money, the film actually opened below expectations.
Meanwhile, Lilo & Stitch matched the PG-13 blockbuster’s screen count and launched a creative marketing campaign with Stitch making a nuisance of himself in scenes from other hit Disney films like Beauty And The Beast and Aladdin. I remember this created some buzz at the time, in those early days of watching movie trailers online (ahh, RealPlayer, you wasted so much of our lives) as well as in cinemas. Accordingly, the animated film outperformed its tracking.
Some box-office reporters speculated that more people saw Lilo & Stitch in that first weekend, but because children’s tickets cost less than adult’s tickets, it wasn’t reflected in the gross. Added to this, creative accounting makes Hollywood go round, and other reports suggested that studios routinely inflate their figures to take advantage of the media reporting weekend estimates, but no one will call each other out on it.
One 2002 Forbes article directly references Robert Shaw’s line in 1973’s The Sting: “What am I supposed to do? Accuse him of cheating better than me in front of the others?”
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In the long run, Minority Report cracked the year’s top 10 highest-grossing movies worldwide with a $358.8m haul. Lilo & Stitch landed 17th with $245.7m but had longer legs throughout summer 2002. While other PG-13 blockbusters came and went, it held on in the US top 10 as family-friendly counterprogramming.
You know the rest. Cruise had an even larger hit with Spielberg on 2005’s War Of The Worlds. Disney’s traditional animated movies were never this big again. And the Mouse ultimately swallowed up Fox and stopped making their type of movies.
That was then, this is now… but we reckon the rematch might still wind up quite close, you know.
Double or nothing?
The clash of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and 2025’s Lilo & Stitch is not Barbenheimer. That was a one-time thing where the two biggest movies of 2023 both opened on the same day, and one comfortably out-performed the other.
Barbenheimer will still be front of mind for Paramount, because it happened one week after Mission: Impossible film, Dead Reckoning Part One, and the two bigger films hoovered up large-format screens and word of mouth for the next month. Inevitably, the franchise offering didn’t have the same box-office legs as previous entries Fallout, Rogue Nation, and Ghost Protocol.
Dead Reckoning Part One got it from both ends too. The 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes kicked off a week earlier, and studios stubbornly dragged this out until November. After umpteen delays and shutdowns, this finally stopped Dead Reckoning Part Two coming to cinemas 12 months after Part One. And so, Part One was rebranded as just Dead Reckoning while Part Two is now The Final Reckoning.
Meanwhile, Disney is coming off a run of box-office disappointments, most recently with another live-action remake, Snow White. Don’t start an appeal or anything, it’s still Disney, the studio will wash its face no matter what. Nevertheless, the narrative in the media is all about a studio that needs some hits.
We’re in a place where many of the reactions to Snow White's underperformance questioned its IP value when the original came out in the 1930s. It’s not ideal, but it’s where we are. Conversely, Lilo & Stitch is tapping the same well of millennial nostalgia as Universal’s How To Train Your Dragon in remaking a movie whose original fans are just old enough to bring their own kids.
Plus, it’s no exaggeration to call Stitch the last iconic character out of Disney’s hand-drawn animated canon. You could even call him its first meme-ready character. Even if you haven’t seen the film, you’ve seen a lot of Stitch in toy shops, online, even on adult pyjamas if you shop at Primark.
Here in the UK, the two movies both open on Wednesday 21st May, and with our pundits hats on, we suspect that the Primark factor might be one of the things that wins the weekend for Stitch on this side of the pond. In the US, where the rematch really “counts”, Mission’s Wednesday opening gives it a two-day head-start on the Disney film.
Disney is always chasing another billion-dollar live-action remake, and Lilo & Stitch’s $150m budget looks thrifty next to its obscene recent spends. Meanwhile, Paramount is in a slightly bigger hole with all the delays. If reports of a $400m budget are accurate, the eighth Mission is one of the most expensive movies ever made. As before, Disney is set up for a decent-sized hit, while Cruise has to meet a higher bar.
The ticket price gap will have closed too, thanks to inflation and various surcharges introduced since 2002. Mission has the IMAX screens this time, Lilo & Stitch will have 3D screenings, and both will have 4DX “experiences”.
Read more: When a grumpy middle-aged man accidentally watches a film in 4DX
Like we said, it’s not Barbenheimer – neither film is likely to top the global box-office for the year. Any fallout of them underperforming will be down to the studios involved, rather than the films or the filmmakers. If neither film breaks $100m in that all-important first weekend, Disney will not stop fracking its library and Paramount will definitely still make a sequel to Top Gun: Maverick once Mission is wrapped up.
Indeed, this silly bit of trivia is more than we like to discuss price tags next to movies here at Film Stories Towers. Forgive us if it’s basic, but we hope both movies are good. We’ve been itching to see Ethan Hunt best an A.I. since the end of Dead Reckoning, and we’re big fans of Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, the previous film from Lilo & Stitch 2025’s director Dean Fleischer Camp. All else aside, it will be good for cinemas and exhibitors if both movies do as well as projected.
This rematch isn’t destiny, more one of those “I’d have two quid, but it’s weird that it happened twice” things. In an increasingly competitive movie market, it’s a reminder that everything old – even a Tom Cruise movie going head-to-head with Lilo & Stitch – is new again.
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