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It's Not Just Top Gun 2, Paramount Is Winning The 2022 Box Office
Top Gun: Maverick has earned more than $1 billion dollars at the box office, leading the charge for Paramount's monstrous success at the 2022 box office. While the box office has traditionally been dominated by just a handful of studios, the post-pandemic box office is shaking things up and sees room for a few more winners than in years past.
Before the pandemic, big franchise IP was eating up the majority of the top domestic box office spots with Disney and Warner Bros. owning the biggest properties. Thanks to Spider-Man joining the MCU, even some of Sony's top 10 wins were Disney adjacent, and a number of big wins from 20th Century Fox in that period look different now that Disney owns that entire catalog as well.
Paramount has taken a big leap forward in 2022 to seize the top box office spot with the smash hit of Top Gun: Maverick, but thanks to Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and The Lost City, Paramount currently has more hits in the top 10 than any other studio. Paramount is no stranger to box office success, and technically even launched the MCU's box office reign, in addition to a number of big franchises to its name like Transformers, Mission Impossible, and Star Trek, but with the perennial domination of Marvel, Star Wars, DC, Harry Potter, and other big franchises, the studio has taken a back seat recently, but 2022 is its best year (proportionally speaking) in a long time.
It's not just Paramount's top 10 hits that make 2022 a big year for the studio, either. While the overall rankings of its movies is certainly the highlight of the studio's 2022 box office performance so far, the way those movies made their money is almost even more important. Top Gun: Maverick's box office performance was notable for the fact that it brought back an important older demographic to theaters, but The Lost City has a similarly strong performance from the over 35 crowd, albeit at a lower total revenue. In fact, Paramount is seeing strong performance across multiple demographics and currently owns the top spot for 2022's PG movies (Sonic the Hedgehog 2), PG-13 movies (Top Gun Maverick), and R-rated movies (Scream, which ranks 13th overall domestically).
Granted, part of the reason there's much more open competition when it comes to the year's biggest movies is because Disney and Warner Bros. have shifted their focus to streaming, sending movies to Disney+ and HBO Max when they still had box office life to drive subscriber growth from home viewers. It's not clear how much that impacted the performance of their top movies, but it's clear Disney and WB losing their shared stranglehold on the top 10 earners was hardly at the cost of the two giants.
The year is only halfway over and both Disney and Warner Bros. have a number of big releases yet to come like Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Adam, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Shazam: Fury of the Gods, so Paramount may not maintain its prominence through to the end of the year, but that shouldn't overshadow its big wins so far. As the box office continues to recover from the pandemic shutdowns, hitting across more audience demographics and earning a big chunk of box office domestically are some of the most important ways for studios to maintain healthy revenue, and so far Paramount's doing that better than anyone else.
