‘Lilo & Stitch’ and ‘Mission Impossible’ blow ‘Barbenheimer’ out of the water
“Stitch-ion: Impossible” may not have the memes, but it may have the memories
Audio By Carbonatix
[
{
"name": "GPT - Leaderboard - Inline - Content",
"component": "35519556",
"insertPoint": "5th",
"startingPoint": "3",
"requiredCountToDisplay": "3",
"maxInsertions": 100,
"adList": [
{
"adPreset": "LeaderboardInline"
}
]
}
]
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 movie theaters. 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 more than $200 million over opening weekend, while Lilo & Stitch pulled 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 these two 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 at all, which sort of 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 to be 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 I did 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 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 sinking into the depths of the icy ocean, quite literally there 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 considering the spectacle is why people go 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 kid 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.
There are two sequences in Final Reckoning that completely reminded me why the experience of movie theaters still matters: a ten-minute, dialogue-free underwater scene on a sunken submarine and the biplane set piece that’s in all the trailers. In the packed IMAX auditorium where I saw this, you could feel everyone holding their breath during the submarine sequence, and 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 hoped it would be, it was still lovely to see a packed theater, eagerly awaiting Cruise to sacrifice his body for our entertainment or to see a lobby full 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, the strangers in this dark room found themselves connected.
Lilo & Stitch
Grade: B-
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
Grade: B+
