While I wouldn’t completely give them all the credit, the simultaneous release of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” on July 21, 2023, did a lot to revive interest in returning to the movie theater. While the movies were both critically and financially successful, it wasn’t wholly the films themselves that generated so much excitement; rather, it was the cultural prevalence of social media/meme culture and that attending the opening weekend of both movies felt like an unmissable event. Thus, “Barbenheimer” was born.
As someone who loves the communal experience of watching movies in a dark room filled with friends and strangers, I have a vested interest in the survival of theaters and genuinely can’t imagine living in a town without one. So, ever since Barbenheimer, I’ve been looking for that next big cultural event that will bring people back out to the movies. Many months ago when it was announced that the “Lilo & Stitch” live-action remake and “Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning” were both being released on May 23, 2025, I thought this could be it: “Stitch-ion: Impossible” could be so big as to save theaters for another few years.
While I don’t think either film has remotely captured the cultural zeitgeist the same way as “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” did, “Mission: Impossible” managed to make over $200 million opening weekend, with “Lilo & Stitch” pulling in an astonishing $341 million… both actually doing better than “Barbenheimer,” so maybe they’re more culturally relevant than I thought. Obviously, box office success doesn’t remotely equal quality, so I went to a double feature of both just to make sure.
I wasn’t a kid when the animated “Lilo & Stitch” was released in 2002, so I don’t have a nostalgic connection to it, which let me watch the live-action remake with a fairly unbiased eye. As a big fan of director Dean Fleischer Camp’s previous film, “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” I was pretty damn excited anyway, even though I find the voice of Stitch to be a bit obnoxious.
Funnily enough, I found the CGI version of Stitch in the remake much less annoying than the original. While he’s still a rambunctious agent of chaos, Camp does a lovely job investing the audience in this relationship with Lilo and her sister Nani and giving Stitch more depth to his lovingly animated self.
There are a few curious changes to the source material, but most of them make the movie feel more like a product of today than the more innocent days of 2002. There’s genuine tension here that Nani will lose custody of Lilo and that some convenient Disney magic won’t make it go away. Because of this, I found myself more invested in Maia Kealoha’s Lilo and Sydney Agudong’s Nani than their animated counterparts. That doesn’t track across all the characters, however, as Zach Galifianakis looks embarrassed to be playing the alien scientist Jumba and Courtney B. Vance’s Cobra Bubbles is wasted in a way the character wasn’t in the cartoon.
As much as I think Camp brought a good-hearted warmth to this live-action “Lilo & Stitch,” there is a generic flatness to some of the lighting and shot compositions that make the film look and feel like a cheap, direct-to-streaming remake. Still, even with its flaws, compared to the abysmal live-action “Snow White” from earlier this year, it’s a massive step in the right direction.
Next came “Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning,” which is being marketed as Tom Cruise’s last time stepping into the shoes of super spy Ethan Hunt. As someone who isn’t a fan of Tom Cruise as a human being, I still find myself amazed at his dedication to the craft of being one of the last movie stars left on Earth. Whether he’s long-distance power-running, hanging off the side of an ascending airplane, or getting into a knife fight in nothing but his chonies, there, quite literally, isn’t anything he won’t do to entertain an audience.
In a way, that’s the biggest strength and hidden weakness of the entire “Mission: Impossible” franchise: the spectacle outweighs everything else, including dialogue, plotting, character, and logic. This is fine to an extent since the spectacle is why people are going to these movies in the first place, but it makes it hard to critique the films as a whole because the spectacle is so jaw-dropping that it basically outweighs all the things that don’t work.
My main issue with “The Final Reckoning” is the same one I had with 2023’s “Dead Reckoning: Part One.” There is no world where this story needed to be split into two movies. With a combined running time of, I shit you not, 334 minutes, the entirety of both films could have been easily told in a single, three hour film. In fact, the entire first hour or so of “Final Reckoning” is spent retconning the entire franchise to make it all feel like one intertwined epic narrative. There are moments in the first act that feel more akin to the series finale of a TV show than the supposedly final film in a blockbuster action series.
Aside from “Mission: Impossible 2,” the last film, “Dead Reckoning: Part One” was my least favorite of the franchise, so “Final Reckoning” (which is very much just “Dead Reckoning: Part Two”) had an uphill battle to make the first part more interesting, which, to some extent it pulls off, but there’s still not a lot of story here. Ethan Hunt and his spy family have to find two parts of a cruciform key to shut down an evil AI bent on taking over the world. The 334 minutes of convoluted storytelling do nothing to make the plot (or central villain) compelling, but luckily, the action set pieces are still astonishing.
Two sequences in “Final Reckoning” completely reminded me why the experience of movie theaters still matters to me: a ten-minute, dialogue-free underwater scene on a sunken submarine and the biplane set piece in all the trailers. In the packed IMAX auditorium where I saw this, you could feel everyone holding their breath during the submarine sequence. When it was over, the entire theater erupted in spontaneous applause. In a hundred years, those moments will be treated with the same gravity as the work of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Jackie Chan. Yes, the movie is a mess, but it’s a glorious one.
While I don’t think “Stitch-ion: Impossible” was quite the cultural moment I thought it would be, it was still lovely to see a packed theater, eagerly awaiting Tom Cruise to sacrifice his body for our entertainment or to see a lobby full of the next generation of kids, carrying buckets of popcorn and dressed in Stitch onesies. Maybe what makes something a cultural moment shouldn’t be decided by meme culture or the traction it gets on social media, but by the memories it creates. Long after the last theater in the world closes its doors, I’ll remember that moment of awe-struck spontaneous cheering and how, for just a few hours, this dark room full of strangers found itself connected.
This article appears in Source Weekly June 5, 2025.
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