Last year, theater owners and industry professionals wrung their hands as Memorial Day box office performance tanked. This year could not be more different.

It’s a Memorial Day weekend for the box office record books. Movie theaters across the country were jamming as “Lilo & Stitch” and Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” fueled the largest Memorial Day holiday in history — and established several other benchmarks in the process.

Impossible - The Final Reckoning is setting records over Memorial Day weekend. The former is a live-action remake of the 2002 Disney animated movie of the same name, following latchkey kid Lilo (Maia Kealoha) befriending the mischievous alien Stitch (Chris Sanders) after he escapes captivity and crash lands in Hawai'i.