Mission Impossible 7 saved from financial flop by insurance companies?
“Barbenheimer” weighed on the box office of Dead Reckoning – part 1. But Paramount assures that this blockbuster was not a flop.
Paramount, the studio that produced Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning Part 1, recently revealed that Swiss insurance Chubb paid $71 million on the pretext of delays in the film’s production due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the seventh opus of the franchise struggled to make a profit due to the tsunami “Barbenheimer”this providential intervention by insurance will limit the damage.
However, this operation was not as linear as it seems, relays Collider. Paramount first used its contract with Chubb insurance to claim a total of $100 million in compensation, using the argument of delays incurred during the pandemic. However, Chubb only decided to pay $5.5 million. Faced with this change of heart, Paramount is suing them in 2021. Chubb defends itself by asserting that there is no evidence showing that the cast and technical crew were prevented from doing their work, despite the epidemic. The trial is resolved in July 2022 and the verdict remains confidential to this day.
Will Mission: Impossible 7 be able to recover from the Barbenheimer?
But it is not the practice of studios to pass up a large sum of money, especially if it was written somewhere in a contract. To get around Chubb’s refusal, Paramount had already “planned the move” by founding a new company to produce Mission Impossible: Fallout, Dead Reckoning and its sequel.
This company was formed as a British branch under the name Jupiter Film, although it was in reality owned by Paramount. And we see that on December 31, 2022, Jupiter (Paramount) Film received an insurance payout of $58 million. Doing the math, we reach 63.5 million. We can assume that the remaining 7.5 million was the subject of the agreement obtained during the trial, reaching the total of 71 million revealed by Paramount. No more need for public to make entries, the insurance companies take care of everything.
All these details confirm in passing complicated manufacturing of the last two opuses of Impossible mission. Filming in several countries with a large crew turned into a nightmare in these times of global epidemic for Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie, and now, the second part of Dead Reckoning is on standby due to the writers’ and actors’ strike.
Mission: Impossible 7 was filmed for a budget of 291 million dollars (not counting its advertising) and it earned 560 worldwide, including “only” 170 in the United States. Its sequel had been validated by the studio even before knowing its box office scores. Its release is set for summer 2024.
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