They make an unlikely tag team: an irrepressible, indestructible surfing alien and the wing-walking, couch-jumping living embodiment of Hollywood superstardom. But over the weekend, Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch remake combined with Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning to break all Memorial Day box-office records.
The Hawaii-set kids flick kowabunga’d past pre-release “tracking” estimates, opening to a massive $183 million in North America. And the more adult-skewing M:I8 sold $77.5 million (a franchise best for the 29-year-old Paramount superspy series that tops Mission: Impossible — Fallout’s $61.2 million debut), helping pack in audiences over a four-day holiday release corridor that grossed a cumulative $322 million. (That figure is taken in conjunction with several new films, including Friendship and The Last Rodeo, as well as older hits still in wide release: Thunderbolts*, Final Destination: Bloodlines, and Sinners.) Such a showing not only topped the previous cumulative Memorial Day record of $314 million set in 2013. Lilo shot down none other than Top Gun: Maverick to claim the biggest single-film opening over that all-important summer battleground weekend in history.
The upshot? The analytics firm Comscore now predicts that Hollywood is indeed on track for a $4.2 billion summer at the box office thanks to the variety, quality, and sheer volume of impending blockbusters finally hitting screens after years of Hollywood’s strikes-related disruptions. Final Reckoning’s eye-watering, potentially most-expensive-movie-ever-made price tag — a reported $400 million in production costs, thanks to pricey action set pieces and lengthy shutdowns due to the strikes, with at least another $100 million spent on marketing — means that film will remain in the red for the foreseeable future, even while its global gross stands at $204.5 million. But Disney, at least, looks to have another billion-dollar hit on its hands with Lilo & Stitch. That’s an especially welcome victory after the commercial and critical misfire of another live-action remake earlier this year — Snow White, which reportedly cost between $240 million and $270 million and grossed a dismal $205 million due to toxic word-of-mouth buzz.
Where Lilo grossed an astonishing $314.7 million worldwide this weekend, last summer, Pixar’s animated coming-of-age caper Inside Out 2 opened to a comparatively muted $295 million before going on to collect $1.69 billion globally for the House of Mouse. And where some of Disney’s previous live-action reiterations of classic animated fare failed to get cineplex turnstiles similarly spinning — 2021’s girl-bossy One Hundred and One Dalmatians spinoff Cruella took in $223 million on a $100 million budget; Mary Poppins Returns grossed $362 million on a $130 million budget in 2018 — Lilo is again proving that non-animated redos can be colossal business. That’s no doubt an immense relief to Universal, which is trotting out a live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon on June 13, already has a sequel in the works, and has made a HTTYD “experience” with roller coasters and stage shows a cornerstone of its newly opened Florida theme park, Epic Universe.
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Recreating a movie by utilizing the same characters, plotting, fantastical elements, and title is the textbook definition of a cynical Hollywood cash grab. So why do studios keep pumping out live-action remakes, and why do audiences reward this “the same but different” content recycling with butts in seats?
Ultimately, the creative calculus behind studio executives’ decision to green light a remake like Lilo & Stitch comes down to certain data sets. According to Deadline, the Lilo & Stitch franchise — which encompasses the original theatrical film, direct-to-video movies, a TV series, and several other animated spinoffs — drove over half a billion hours of viewership on Disney+. The franchise is also an evergreen merch-mover, with retail products including collectible figures, dog collars, and pillow buddies that reliably rake in billions of dollars globally. (They generated $2.5 billion in 2024 alone.) Factor in no small amount of millennial nostalgia and you have precisely the kind of prerelease awareness that delivers blockbusters. Which makes it all the more wild to recall that upon its announcement in 2018, the live-action Lilo was intended as a straight-to-streaming release to bolster the studio’s then-nascent OTT service Disney+.
Part of Lilo’s success also comes down to the difference between its approach to the term “live-action” and what you see in films like Snow White and Cruella and Mary Poppins, which feature mostly real actors onscreen, give or take a CGI dwarf or seven. “Live-action films that place an animal or fantasy creature in live-action settings are really hybrids,” notes David A. Gross, who publishes the FranchiseRE entertainment-industry newsletter. “They combine fantasy creatures and human characters in realistic settings and that opens up the storytelling visually. It stretches the imagination and makes the spectacle bigger and funnier.”
That hybrid classification extends to recent hits such as Minecraft and Sonic the Hedgehog, which combine live actors with CGI beasties. On the other hand, “animated fairy tales are not translating to live action well because retelling those stories diminishes the fantasy,” Gross continues. “It makes the stories smaller. The emotional range is narrower and less expressive. They’re struggling right now.”
It was only last month that Disney publicly announced a plan to produce fewer live-action features based on its animated classics. After this weekend, however, things are looking better than ever for next year’s Rock-produced, Lin-Manuel Miranda–soundtracked live-action redo of an animated movie that only came out nine years ago: Moana. After that? Who knows how far they’ll go.
