Tom Cruise knows how to sell tickets—even to other people’s movies. “This summer is full of amazing movies to see in theaters,” the Mission: Impossible star wrote on Instagram recently, while he and director Christopher McQuarrie posed with tickets in front of posters for rival films. Cruise congratulated Harrison Ford for “creating one of the most iconic characters in cinema history” with Indiana Jones, and identified himself as one of the many people who’d make a double feature out of Oppenheimer and Barbie, which will go head-to-head in theaters as of July 21. His act of goodwill proved to be contagious, as he must have hoped it would. A few days later, Barbie director Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie tweeted their own photo shoot, in which they also waved tickets to their rivals: “Mission: Accepted!”

Summer box office used to be the ultimate showbiz blood sport. Now, publicly at least, it’s all kumbaya and collegiality, which says a lot about the industry’s enduring post-pandemic fears. Beneath the gracious social media shoutouts is a pervasive sense that if the public doesn’t fall back in love with in-person moviegoing for good now, the bottom will continue to fall out of the studio system and take stars down in the process. So far, summer 2023 has proven to be a bumpy ride. Sure-things have struggled, surprise sleepers have failed to emerge, and pressure is mounting on a handful of July titles to save the season.

Box office watchers are still predicting that movies like Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One and Barbie can help summer ticket sales in the US and Canada hit $4 billion, which would be taken as a sign that the industry has indeed recovered from an anemic three years. But a trail of early underperformers—including DC’s The Flash, Pixar’s Elemental, and Indy’s fifth and final outing, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—has only stoked worries. With his cheerleading post, Cruise, the man who “saved Hollywood’s ass” last summer with Top Gun: Maverick, is attempting to stage a rescue mission again. This time he’ll have some help from Barbie and the atomic bomb.

Hollywood power brokers are watching all this closely, to say the least. “I was very excited after Super Mario Bros., and then I got a little more concerned after the last four weeks,” says producer Jason Blum, best known for low-cost horror hits Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and M3GAN. “The movie business has in no way bounced back like the live events business has, but I really think that it’s a matter of time.” Few expect earnings to surpass summer 2019 levels—when 32 films brought in $4.34 billion—but anything close will be a win. The industry is used to absorbing bad news—and hoping for last-minute salvation. “Not everything works,” says another studio executive poring over summer ticket sales, “but that’s just the movie business.”

There are reasons to be at least optimism-adjacent. Moviegoers still want to see spectacle—and they are willing to pay extra to see it on premium large-format screens. “2023 has definitely been a much fuller slate than pre-pandemic times,” says IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond. “And for us, it’s even a little more intense because the audience has shifted more to premium on a global basis. IMAX’s market share went up by 50% in North America and it’s gone up by about 40% globally. So it’s not only more competition within the industry, it’s more competition for IMAX screens. We think our box office will be similar to 2019.”

Similar is the new amazing.

Moviegoers signaled that they were ready to return to theaters last summer when they showed up in droves for Top Gun: Maverick, the top performer of the year with a staggering $719 million in US ticket sales, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which outperformed 2016’s Doctor Strange. But the robust performance of a handful of titles belied ongoing challenges. Last winter, as one Oscar contender after another died gasping at the box office, a senior awards strategist told Vanity Fair, “the audience is just not there anymore for these sorts of movies.” One obstacle was simply a volume problem: Even though tentpoles like Avatar: The Way of Water were dominating the weekend, there just weren’t enough movies in theaters.

This summer, every weekend offers multiple options, and they’re often aimed at disparate demographics, as with the showdown referred to in some quarters as “Barbenheimer.” Since May 5, when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 dropped, there’s been a steady beat of new releases, among them The Little Mermaid, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. The major studios are expected to release 42 films widely across the country by Labor Day weekend. One studio executive moans about all this in a way that sounds almost nostalgic: “It’s such a crowded summer.”

Before Cruise began his goodwill campaign, the actor was involved in a behind-the-scenes fight for IMAX screens, according to Puck. His latest Mission: Impossible outing will play on IMAX screens for about a week, but then must give them up for Oppenheimer, which debuts a week later on July 21 and has all the screens exclusively booked for three weeks. That has little to do with earnings expectations, and everything to do with relationships. Nolan, a longtime IMAX champion, had struck a deal long before with the exhibitor to guarantee that his movie would play on those screens, regardless of who else parachuted into the market on a motorcycle.

IMAX’s Gelfond tells VF that he worked closely with Nolan and Universal on Oppenheimer’s release date more than a year ago. He visited the Mission: Impossible set and is “a huge fan of Tom’s,” he says, but this is the bottom line: “We made a commitment to Chris. Obviously, I think the movie’s going to be great, but irrespective, we honor our commitments.”

Executives worried about a crowded schedule are one sign that movies are back, baby. “We’ve had really big films since reopening from the pandemic, like Avatar and Top Gun and Spider-Man, but now we’re talking about many titles,” says Elizabeth Frank, the executive in charge of programming AMC Entertainment’s more than 10,000 screens. “People are saying, ‘Well, which one do you want to see first?’ And that’s a different level of excitement. In an industry where momentum is really important, it’s an opportunity for us to build back habitual moviegoing.”

In Hollywood, the weekend box office is treated with the same seriousness as the World Series. “I have a group of friends, we get together at the beginning of the year and we have a draft, we pick all the movies for the year, and points are awarded based on Metacritic score, based on box office, based on awards, and based on profitability,” says Blum, whose company, Blumhouse, has Insidious: The Red Door out on July 7. “We text each other every Thursday or Friday. I’m currently in second place.”

Guys like Blum no doubt pay closer attention to movie ticket sales than the average American, but even he has noticed that more people are following the money as they did years ago. “The box office derby is one of those things that everyone can be a part of,” says Paul Dergarabedian, an entertainment industry analyst for Comscore. “Not everyone has played professional sports or ridden a horse professionally or driven a race car, but we can all sit in a movie theater.”

More scrutiny, of course, means more headlines when movies stumble. For every winner like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (with its $356 million in domestic grosses) or Spider Man: Across the Spider-Verse ($346 million), there’s something like The Flash, which has pulled a meager $102 million in the US in spite of its reported $200 million budget, or Elemental, whose $29.6 million debut was considered a major flop for Disney’s Pixar. Meanwhile, Dial of Destiny, which reportedly cost $295 million, arguably needed to make a lot more over Fourth of July than it did. One bright spot? Studios are focusing more on profitability, which Blum contends, “everyone forgot about for about five years.” Now, he says, there’s more pressure to rein in costs: “The budget conversation was the last conversation when you were introducing new projects to buyers. Now it’s the first, which makes me happy because I think less expensive movies are often better and more interesting.”

Even before June gloom hit the box office, Hollywood had largely put its faith in Mission: Impossible, Barbie, and Oppenheimer to carry ticket sales. Now it’s even more imperative that all three titles find their audiences. Early tracking—which pegs the Mission: Impossible opening at around $90 million, Barbie somewhere north of $70 million, and Oppenheimer around $40 million—suggests that they will. Though Ethan Hunt will likely be the biggest star of the summer, media attention has focused squarely on the matchup between Barbie and Oppenheimer.

“I do think a rising tide lifts all boats,” says a top film agent. “When we have pictures in theaters that start to feel like they’re ‘watercooler’—which I really think the Barbie-Oppenheimer thing is becoming—it’s incredibly healthy for the box office, because what we’re doing is delivering an experience that people feel like was worth their time and money.”

AMC has been preparing for the summer movie season by extending operating hours at its theaters, hiring more staff, and making sure its Icee dispensers are full. “Increasingly, fans of different films are also looking for movie-themed merchandise and movie-themed drinks,” says Frank. “It makes the moviegoing experience that much more engaging and dynamic. It’s a little complicated, though, to be moving in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cups while you’re figuring out whether you’ve still got a bunch of people who want the Mission: Impossible ones or the Barbie ones.”

Predicting the box office has always been like reading tea leaves or tarot cards. Even IMAX’s Gelfond admits to fixating on the returns—from the first night to the last. “Like a junkie,” he says. “I hate to admit it, but yes. Most of our movies open on Thursday nights because they’re big blockbusters. So by Friday morning, I’m on the phone with our distribution and marketing teams trying to understand what the weekend’s going to look like and what’s working and not working and why and why not.”

If you want to know how summer 2023 turns out, you’ll have to wait for the final reel.