Hold on…I may have jumped the gun in projecting that Mission: Impossible III‘s weekend tally will top $50 million. I’m being reminded that sequels (almost) always have their peak day on Friday, and that the more likely weekend figure will therefore be around $46 million. The most telling comparison is with John Woo‘s Mission: Impossible II, which opened six years ago to $70,816,215 over a long Memorial Day weekend, and $57 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period. And that’s without factoring in a 15% inflation in movie-ticket prices since then. So the comparison is not even $57 vs. $46 million , which in itself represents a drop of $11 million. By the numerical standard of 2000 ticket prices and going by an assumption that M:I:3 will make $46 million this weekend, the adjusted weekend gross (compared to the first-weekend gross of the John Woo sequel) is $40,000,000. So it’s really $57 million vs. $40,000,000, which is roughly a 17% drop. Even if M:I:3 makes $50 million this weekend in 2006 dollars, you’re still looking at a fairly significant plunge. And the irony is that J.J. Abrams’ film is the best of the three.