Tom Cruise and ‘Mission: Impossible’ climbs to No. 1

Tom Cruise and his team have figured out a formula that works for these “Mission: Impossible” movies, and part of that is making sure they can top themselves each time out.

Paramount Pictures Vice Chairman Rob Moore confirmed the news to the news outlet. “We knew how good the movie was”, she said. At this point, Tom Cruise’s spy Ethan Hunt is more superhero than human.

“Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” headed into the weekend with expectations of a million opening in the U.S. and Canada, but Paramount Pictures on Sunday reported that its Tom Cruise film did even better, bringing in an estimated million.

Last week, Cruise shared during an interview on “The Daily Show” that he was soon going to reprise his role as Ethan Hunt for what he called a “sixth “Mission: Impossible“, which will begin production a year from now.

Co-produced by Cruise and J J Abrams, the fifth “Mission Impossible” also starred Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames and Alec Baldwin.

Last week, he made thousands of fans squeal with delight when he starred in an episode of Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Lip Sync Battle’. The action flick was one of the rare big budget films, with a $150 million price tag, that was moved forward in its schedule rather than backward this year. “He’s a marketing machine”.

Faring less well on the specialty market, Radius-TWC’s documentary “A Lego Brickumentary” built $42,000 from 93 movie houses for just $452 each.

If all that overtime by Christopher McQuarrie and co paid off, it was a different tale for Warner Bros. and its half-baked Vacation retread.

Not far behind was fellow animated film Pixels, about aliens who attack Earth after intercepting video games, earning $10.5 million.

But then people actually got to see the film.

Reviews of the $30m comedy have not been particularly kind and, according to exit polls, audiences gave the film a B Cinema Score.

“That was a tough opening”, he said.

Amy Schumer’s racy comedy “Trainwreck“, directed by Judd Apatow, about a boozy commitment-phobe who’s finally pinned down by a smitten doctor, fell to sixth place with US$9.6 million. Distributor A24 is expected to expand the release in the coming weeks.