In terms of Mission Impossible, respectfully, you are wrong on both ends.
I agree that the fatigue is
not just for superhero films, it's with some blockbuster franchises in general, as there were indeed numerous examples pointing to that last year, but there were no actual signs that MI was one of them. The numbers speak for themselves.
Fallout opened at
155 million worldwide while Dead Reckoning, two days earlier, at
235. Which means it had a very similar if not better debut than its predecessor that ended up making almost
800 million. Reviews and word of mouth have been extremely good too. Now the
following week, which was the most crucial, it dropped at
65% but there's no doubt it happened because of the Barbenheimer phenomenon stealing both its hype and its screens. Oppenheimer ended up having IMAX exclusivity for over a month! You can see that it in
week 3 it had a
45% drop and
week 4 a
37%. Those were some damn good legs but by then it was too late.
It's clear that if it had opened at a date with less competition it would probably end up making something closer to what the previous two films did.
As for the ballooned (due to Covid)
291 million budget you keep mentioning ultimately doesn't matter because as I said it's the gross budget, whereas the net budget is
219 million because of a
71 million return the studio got last September by the insurance company. It was confirmed by Paramount itself and you can read about it
here. It happened with The Marvels as well, where it originally cost 275 million, got some money back and ended up at 220. So if The Little Mermaid broke even with a 240 million budget, Dead Reckoning eventually managed to do it as well.