With $662 million, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ surpasses ‘Titanic’ as the top domestic film of all time
Top Gun: Maverick, the seventh-highest earning movie of all time in American cinemas, has surpassed Titanic.
According to information from IMBb's Box Office Mojo, the 1986 classic's follow-up has made more than $662 million in the United States since its premiere while grossing more than $1.35 billion worldwide.
Due to these achievements, the film has already surpassed Titanic on Box Office Mojo's list of films with the highest domestic box office revenues; the latter earned more than $659 million from U.S. ticket sales since its 1997 debut.
According to Box Office Mojo, Maverick is the 13th-highest grossing movie of all time in terms of worldwide box office receipts, surpassing movies like Skyfall, Frozen, and the final Harry Potter installment.
When it was released in May, the movie broke box office records, earning $156 million during Memorial Day weekend in the United States, breaking the previous mark of $145 million held by 2007's Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.
The picture became the highest-grossing pandemic-era film that wasn't a superhero movie when it passed the $100 million mark.
Due to its commercial success, Tom Cruise's picture became the first in his career to surpass the $1 billion mark and had his first $100 million opening weekend.
A worldwide promotional tour, excellent reviews (it has a 99% audience score on movie review site Rotten Tomatoes), and nostalgia for the 1980s original all contributed to the film's box office successes.
In a pandemic age that saw movie theaters forced to close, the release of blockbuster titles—including the Top Gun sequel itself—delayed, and a significant shift toward streaming at home, Maverick is largely credited for salvaging the box office.
The success of ‘Top Gun :Maverick’
The popularity of "Maverick" was fueled by a number of things, according to Jeff Bock, a media analyst with Exhibitor Relations Co.
In addition to receiving excellent reviews from critics and drawing large crowds to the cinemas thanks to Cruise, "Maverick" faced many less rivals than a typical summer blockbuster.
There just wasn't much goods available, according to Bock. "Films that did well and had positive word of mouth have truly endured longer."
The lone competition for "Maverick" on May 27 was "The Bob's Burgers Movie," which, although earning $34 million over the previous two months, was unable to cover its production costs.
Experts in the field have noted that one aspect of "Maverick's" box office success that stands out is how consistent its ticket sales have been when compared to those of other popular movies. According to Bock, unlike most blockbusters, "Maverick" only had a reduction in ticket sales of about 30% between the first and second weeks and maintained weekly drops "in the teens, 20s, and 30s."
According to him, "Top Gun achieved what we really haven't seen in the blockbuster era: hold that audience week in and week out."
The Top Gun sequel's popularity has been attributed to a variety of things, including positive reviews, outstanding word-of-mouth, and the persistent infatuation with Cruise on a worldwide scale.
Its Memorial Day-coinciding spring release date in the US seems to have provided a favorable start, and the relative lack of other tentpole movies for exhibitors to schedule against it has ensured that it has lingered in many theaters throughout summer.
The majority of the big blockbusters, such as The Batman (March), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (May), and Jurassic World Dominion, were released before the start of the summer vacations in the US and the UK (June). Early in July saw the release of both Thor: Love and Thunder and Minions: The Rise of Gru, leaving many multiplexes scrambling to find new crowd-pleasers.
However, a second long-delayed sequel, James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water, which debuts in December, is sure to break several of the milestones set by Top Gun: Maverick over the Christmas season.
Even a 50% decline from the previous film's takings would still bring in $1.4 billion, according to pundits, who anticipate that the title would surprise its many detractors.
The new movie's teaser trailer, which was published, greatly outperformed former Star Wars movie teasers, receiving 148.6 million views in 24 hours.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise's upcoming movie, is scheduled to be out in 2023.
Tom Cruise.. the Last Big Screen Movie Star !
In the 36 years after Cruise's biggest success, "Top Gun," sequels and franchises have gained popularity. Examples include "Rocky," "Rambo," "Karate Kid," "Romancing the Stone," and "Star Trek." In comparison, "Top Gun" performed better than all of them except "Rocky."
Cruise was an actor, not a producer, thus his career wasn't fully in his hands at this stage. But at 23, he all of a sudden became famous.
His leading-man debut in "Risky Business" two years prior had hinted to a successful career. In 1983, he had trouble with the wrestling drama "All the Right Moves," and his potential was further dampened by Ridley Scott's "Legend."
The Color of Money, his next picture, had already begun production when "Top Gun" debuted. You might say that it was a sort of sequel (to "The Hustler," which came out in 1961 and took place more than 20 years earlier), but it took him 15 years and 13 films, all of which grossed more than $100 million at the time, before he released his first true sequel, "Mission: Impossible 2." This trajectory is now unthinkable.
Despite his reputation as a control freak, Cruise obviously has no problem working with talented directors. He has collaborated with seven Oscar winners for Best Director, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick, as well as Paul Thomas Anderson, Brad Bird, the Scotts, Ridley and Tony, and John Woo (the only non-white director among them). There have been less of these in recent years since it is more difficult to establish a directing reputation in an era that is more producer-driven.
Some of the Cruise movies weren't iconoclastic; examples are "War of the Worlds" and "The Color of Money," which were more for-profit, commercial productions. But "Born on the Fourth of July" by Oliver Stone and "Rain Man" by Barry Levinson were the winners.
When Cruise first entered the scene, pairing a budding actor with a seasoned veteran was more frequent. In "The Color of Money," Paul Newman was his first co-star. Then came Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man," Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men," Gene Hackman in "The Firm," and Meryl Streep in "Lions for Lambs." In the same year that Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for "Ray," he shared the lead role in "Collateral." Cruise's reputation as a man confident in his own abilities and prepared to share the spotlight was bolstered by his capacity to compete with titans.
Of course, there is Scientology. In 2016, he told ITV, "It's something that has benefited me tremendously in my life. "For more than 30 years, I have been a Scientologist. I wouldn't be where I am now if it weren't for anything. Therefore, it is a lovely religion. I'm just tremendously happy. In recent years, the association has received minimal news, in large part because he has had so little coverage overall.
Try to picture Cruise updating her Instagram or uploading TikToks. He avoids all interviews, whether they be for paper or a talk program. He is apolitical. He's the opposite of Dwayne Johnson, who has more than 300 million Instagram followers and enjoys surprising his admirers (or, in one memorable case, wedding officiant).
Cruise is essentially useless. His most recent MasterClass interview in Cannes, which was a part of the promotion for "Top Gun: Maverick," was criticized for its excruciatingly boring nature. Cruise cultivates an image that is more in line with earlier greats like Cary Grant and John Wayne, at a period when celebrities are encouraged to be accessible or otherwise "genuine."
Cruise, is the final celebrity in that mold. The film "Top Gun: Maverick" is very different from the one that came before it, and it also seems to be typical Cruise: Be unexpected, patient, and anticipate cutting-edge craftsmanship. Even while the movie still looks to be a little beyond the current type of box office success, it is consistent with his career.
