Mamma Mia 2 Beats Mission: Impossible 6 at U.K. Box Office

Screen Rant

By Michael Kennedy

Published Jul 30, 2018

While Mission: Impossible - Fallout is doing great at the box office overall, it took a backseat in the U.K. to Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again.

While Mission: Impossible - Fallout is doing great at the box office overall, it took a backseat in the U.K. to Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. To say that Tom Cruise is familiar with box office success would be an understatement, as - aside from a few brief ebbs and flows - Cruise has been a consistently reliable performer ever since he broke out in the 1980s. Films featuring Cruise have in total grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide, and there's no end in sight for the eternally youthful 56-year-old actor.

In recent years, Cruise has seen lots of acclaim from both critics and audiences for his efforts leading the Mission: Impossible action franchise, which debuted back in 1996. Cruise has since starred as IMF badass Ethan Hunt in five sequels, including this past weekend's Fallout. While lots of attention has been paid to the fact that embattled movie subscription service MoviePass opted to block its users from using their cards to see the film, that didn't hurt the box office, as Fallout posted the best opening weekend in franchise history, with $61 million domestic, and a current worldwide total of $153 million.

Coming in at #2 on the domestic box office chart this weekend was sequel Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, which earned $15 million in its second weekend stateside. While that's a pretty large gap between #1 and #2, in the U.K., the roles were actually reversed. According to Screen Daily, Mamma Mia 2 won the U.K. box office for the second weekend in a row with a £7.1 million haul, dropping only 27% from its opening. Coming in second was Mission; Impossible 6, with a still quite respectable £5.4 million take.

Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible Fallout

There could be several factors in play as to why Mamma Mia 2 is presently performing better across the pond than it is in the U.S. Perhaps the U.K. just enjoys musicals more, or just prefers Meryl Streep to Tom Cruise. While it's easy to forget sometimes - since it's been an entire decade - the first Mamma Mia film was a surprisingly massive hit, earning $144 million in the U.S. and a gargantuan $609 million worldwide, on a budget of only $52 million. A whole $94 million of that came from the U.K., which does point to moviegoers there having an above-average interest in the ABBA-inspired property. Here We Go Again is already on its way to being a pretty big hit overall in its own right, even with a slightly increased budget of $75 million. By the time it leaves theaters, the sequel could easily end up topping or at least equaling the original when it comes to earnings, having already raked in $167 million worldwide.

Whatever the reason for Mamma Mia knocking Ethan Hunt down a peg in the U.K., both films will undoubtedly be fine when it comes to finances. The two projects couldn't be any more different in tone, style, and intended target audience. Fallout is here to satisfy Tom Cruise fans and action junkies, while Here We Go Again is here to serve as a breezy, fun way to spend two hours. There's more than enough room for both options to thrive.