Box Office: 'Lilo' & Stitch' Nabs $14.5M Thursday as 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' Grosses $8.3M

Both of the big Memorial Day weekend titles got off to a relatively strong start.

So far, so good at the Memorial Day weekend domestic box office. As expected, Disney’s Lilo & Stitch remake led the proverbial pack with a whopping $14.5 million in Thursday previews. Paramount’s Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning came in second with a still-strong $8.3 million in advance day showings. The industry hopes to repeat the June 2002 match-up between Disney’s animated Lilo and Stitch and Fox’s Tom Cruise-starring Minority Report. Rank notwithstanding, both tentpoles performed well enough ($275 million globally on an $80 million budget and $358 million worldwide on a $102 million budget) to qualify as relative theatrical successes.

Both films have received relatively favorable reviews, with the live-action redo scoring a 70% fresh and 6/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, while the Tom Cruise action sequel earned an 80% and 6.8/10. These examples both illustrate how a high fresh rating can be accompanied by a lower average critic score, serving as a reminder that fresh simply means at least 60% of participating critics considered the film at least “pretty good, I guess.” That only matters if audiences like either film less than the critics. And, my own “old man yells at the cloud” thoughts notwithstanding, I’m not expecting much of a critic-audience divide.