Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch defied all expectations by leaving Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning in the dust with a record-setting Memorial Day weekend opening of $182.6 million, and $392.

Director Dean Fleischer Camp and producer Jonathan Eirich tell EW that cutting the villainous Gantu deepened the storytelling.

The loss of Captain Gantu isn’t just a bummer for fans so much as it recalibrates the whole moral thrust of Lilo & Stitch. Gantu and social worker Cobra Bubbles (played in the