Lilo & Stitch and Mission: Impossible Are No Barbenheimer

Last weekend was Memorial Day in the U.S. As an Australian living in Canada, this has no impact on me, but what I do know is that anytime there's a holiday weekend, the movie studios use it to plant some of their biggest blockbusters, hoping that crowds will choose to spend one of their extra days off at the cinema. And that's what happened. This was the biggest Memorial Day weekend in box office history, and it's all thanks to two films: Lilo & Stitch and Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning.

In the lead-up to Lilo & Stitch and Mission: Impossible 8, people had loosely been trying to paint it as another Barbenheimer. The meme-turned-cultural phenomenon that occurred in the Summer of ‘23, when Barbie and Oppenheimer, two cinematic juggernauts from completely opposing tones, were credited with saving cinema, is something both fans and movie studios have been trying to replicate for two years now. There've been multiple attempts - Glicked (Wicked and Gladiator 2), Saw Patrol (Saw X and Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie) and the upcoming Dunesday (Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Messiah) - but nothing has really recaptured the Barbenheimer effect.

Mission: Stitch, Stitchion: Impossible, Stich: Possible, whatever you want to call it, had the makings of another Barbenheimer. The two films were tonally opposite, one a high-stakes action thriller, the other a heartwarming family-friendly adventure. They're both summer blockbusters with large budgets, Hollywood studio backing and big box office potential. There was even the meta narrative around Tom Cruise going up against Lilo & Stitch for the second time (which happened in 2002 when the original Lilo & Stitch opened against Minority Report), which was enough to gain interest in the box office battle.

The results of the weekend have proved that Stitch: Possible was on a Barbenheimer level, financially at least. But the cultural phenomenon part was missing, and I think I know why.

I just so happen to love a double feature, and last weekend, I found myself in Winnipeg with nothing to do. So I decided to check out this latest sequel, reboot, blockbuster, conclusion fusion from Hollywood and judge whether it was a worthy double feature.

I started the day with Lilo & Stitch. I have fond memories of the animated film, but I chose not to rewatch it before the reboot, purely because I wanted to avoid disappointment. So often, these Disney live-action remakes fail to feel like anything more than cash grabs, remaking something for the sake of licensing retention or renewing interest in the brand. Very rarely do they introduce anything new or daring, and often they get by purely on nostalgia, and by making a passable version of a story that was already a proven winner. I would say Lilo & Stitch is better than most of these Disney remakes, but it still falls into the same camp.

The remake is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, with Chris Sanders returning to voice Stitch and newcomer Maia Kealoha as Lilo. Set in Hawaii, Lilo is a lonely young girl, struggling to make friends in the wake of her parents' deaths and inadvertently making life difficult for her older sister Nani (Sydney Agudong), who is trying her best to transition from sister to mother. Then Stitch, an alien experiment built as a weapon, on the run from his creators, crash-lands into Lilo's life. The two form a bond that transcends Stitch's programming for destruction and heals Lilo's family. It's a heartwarming tale with enough jokes, retro needle drops, and positive intentions to capture the spirit of the original, without marring it by making too many detrimental changes.

The fact that the film does this and thus automatically becomes one of the better Disney live-action remakes is more of a testament to how lacklustre so many of these classic remakes have been, rather than saying Lilo & Stitch is an exceptional movie. Nevertheless, I left the cinema sans a few tears and with a warm dose of nostalgia.

Next up was Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, which I opted to see in IMAX. My history with the Mission: Impossible franchise extends to the last three films, which I largely distinguish in my head via “Tom Cruise plane,” “Tom Cruise bike,” and “the one with Henry Cavill.” I already knew what the eighth M:I film had in store for me because the marketing simply can't resist spoiling what death-defying stunt Tom Cruise is doing next, but I did have expectations that this would be something of an event given the “final” subtitle.

The reality is that Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is just another Mission: Impossible movie. It has impossible stakes, largely forgettable villains, a lot of unnecessary Tom Cruise running and/or shirtless scenes, and stunt sequences that are so jaw-dropping you forget about those last three things. The story about Ethan Hunt and his team tracking down a world-ending AI known as the Entity was as interesting as it was in the first Dead Reckoning. But the second film stretched it out like taffy on a story thinner than baking paper, and it did not at all feel like a culmination of two decades' worth of action films. The Final Reckoning did get my blood pumping at times, mostly thanks to Tom Cruise's commitment to literally putting his life on the line for this thing, but it's no Avengers: Endgame.

The result of this double feature is that I came away feeling indifferent towards both movies. They were both enjoyable times at the cinema, but had none of the wow factor that Barbie or Oppenheimer did, let alone the cultural experience that was the Barbenheimer double feature.

There was potential for Stich: Possible to be another Barbenheimer, so why didn't it work? The answer, I think, lies in the inherent nature of these films. Barbie and Oppenheimer each felt like cinematic achievements. They had daring ideas from bold auteur directors. The stories were original and unexpected. Audiences were genuinely invested in seeing them succeed - or at least curious enough to go to a cinema and find out for themselves. They were experiences.

Meanwhile, Lilo & Stitch and Mission: Impossible feel like products. One is a rehash on nostalgia, and the other is the seventh sequel in a legacy franchise. There's nothing unexpected about either of them. You know exactly what you're going to get as soon as you sit down. Sure, there's a familiarity to those expectations that still makes the movies enjoyable. It's just hard to shake this undercurrent that you're just feeding the corporate movie-making machine that fails to invest in originality. And yes, Barbie and Oppenheimer are also both part of this system - the money ends up with the same suits at the end of the day. But there was a joy in the Barbenheimer experience that made it feel like cinema was still possible, and that simply isn't there with Stitch: Possible.

Lilo & Stitch and Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning will be remembered for the numbers they gained at the box office, but not as a memorable double feature.