‘Lilo & Stich’ delivers a box office boom 

Lilo Stich teamed with Tom Cruise for a monster Memorial Day box office weekend Disney s live action version of Lilo Stich earned a staggering million in North American theaters according to studio estimates Sunday the second biggest domestic opening of the year after A Minecraft Movie The movie is a faithful remake of the original s story of a six-legged alien and a Hawaiian girl that has created a big cult following in the decades since But the duo was no little brother and sister to the better-known figures in Disney s parade of live-action remakes It was second only to the million opening of The Lion King in and outshot all projections wowing box office observers This overperformed by a huge margin announced Paul Dergarabedian senior media analyst for Comscore Lilo Stich surpassed Cruise s Top Gun Maverick as the biggest domestic Memorial Day weekend earner ever and global estimates put it past million Paramount Pictures Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning the eighth and supposedly last appearance of Cruise as Ethan Hunt in a nearly three-decade run was a distant second but still brought in a franchise record million through Sunday outearning Mission Impossible Fallout which opened domestically to million in And the spy thriller with Cruise s frequent partner Christopher McQuarrie in the director s chair for the fourth time in the franchise was the top global earner with million Cruise has been a relentless global promoter of his movies and he s been the industry s loudest cheerleader for going to theaters This film like its predecessor in the series premiered at the Cannes Film Festival The spectacle of what Tom and McQ put on the screen it screams theatrical disclosed Chris Aronson Paramount s president of domestic distribution The product they put out just screams This has to be in theaters ' The previous film s Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One launched with a franchise-best million over five days in a July opening though it came in shy of industry expectations with a million haul over a three-day weekend This weekend as a whole blasted past last year when the Memorial Day box office saw just million for all films in the Friday-through-Monday span And it appears that it will top as the best Memorial Day the industry has had with an estimated overall total of million