‘Lilo & Stitch’ Rockets to Memorial Day Box Office Record

Aloha to the holiday weekend box office champ! Disney’s lovable alien invader supplanted Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible farewell, as Lilo & Stitch came in at No. 1 for the four-day stretch and achieved the biggest Memorial Day opening of all time with $192.7 million domestic and $361.3 million worldwide. Mission: Impossible – The final Reckoning (Paramount/Skydance) opened at No. 2 with $79M d. / $191M ww (a franchise best). Lilo & Stitch‘s three-day total came to $145.5M domestically.

The live-action reimagining of the Disney animation classic, directed by Marcel the Shell with Shoes On helmer Dean Fleischer-Camp this time around, handily bested the previous MDW record holder Fast & Furious 6 (2013, $117M). Overall, movie attendance was way up for this frame across all demographics, fueling the biggest Memorial Day Weekend box office of all time.

Lilo & Stitch is also the second-biggest gross of all time for any four-day holiday opening, coming in just behind Black Panther (2018, $242M), and the third-biggest Disney live-action debut both domestically and globally, behind Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. On the critter’s furry blue back, Disney becomes the first studio to surpass $2 billion in ticket sales this year.

The success of this latest Disney remake was bigger than expected, with industry watchers earlier estimating a $120M opening. The film is Fandango’s biggest ticket pre-seller of the year so far, and is surfing on a 68% critics’ rating an d93% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Box office watchers credit nostalgia interest among Millennials and Gen Z audiences, as well as diverse audience appeal. The Hollywood Reporter points out that Latinos made up 33% of ticket buyers in the U.S., and the pic scored the biggest opening for a Disney live-action reimagining across Latin America.