'Lilo & Stitch,' 'Mission Impossible' make for monster Memorial Day box office

“Lilo & Stitch” teamed with Tom Cruise for a monster Memorial Day box office weekend.

Disney’s live action version of “Lilo & Stitch” earned a staggering $145.5 million in North American theaters, according to studio estimates Sunday, the second biggest domestic opening of the year after “A Minecraft Movie.”

This weekend as a whole blasted past last year, when the Memorial Day box office saw just $132 million for all films in the Friday-through-Monday span. And it appears that it will top 2013 as the best Memorial Day the industry has had, with an estimated overall total of $325 million.

"Lilo" is a faithful remake of the 2002 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 $185 million opening of “The Lion King” in 2019 and outshot all projections, wowing box office observers.

“Lilo & Stitch” surpassed Cruise’s 2022 “Top Gun: Maverick” as the biggest domestic Memorial Day weekend earner ever, and global estimates put it past $300 million.

Paramount Pictures’ “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” the eighth and (probably) last appearance of Cruise as Ethan Hunt in a nearly three-decade run, was a distant second, but still brought in a franchise record $63 million through Sunday, outearning “Mission: Impossible - Fallout,” which opened domestically to $61 million in 2018.

The previous film, 2023’s “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” launched with a franchise-best $80 million over five days in a July opening, though it came in shy of industry expectations with a $56.2 million haul over a three-day weekend.

Critics were wearying of Disney’s live action and CGI remakes of its animated classics. Mark Kennedy of The Associated Press called this “Lilo & Stitch” “utterly unnecessary.” There were signs audiences were agreeing. “Snow White” opened to a sleepy $43 million in March, and several similar releases were tepid.

But this film tapped into a latent love for oddball pairing.

It also furthered a trend that includes “A Minecraft Movie” of PG-rated films outpacing the PG-13 movies that usually dominate, made all the more impressive by the lower kids’ ticket prices the more family-oriented films bring.

Dergarabedian credits a strong lead-up