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.

“Lilo & Stich” teamed with Tom Cruise for a monster Memorial Day box office weekend. Disney’s live action version of “Lilo & Stich” earned a staggering $145.5 million in North American theaters, according to studio estimates Sunday, the second biggest domestic opening of the year after “A Minecraft Movie.”