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Will Top Gun: Maverick's Box Office Break The $1 Billion Barrier?
Top Gun: Maverick’s extraordinary success at the box office suggests that the Tom Cruise sequel will soar past $1 billion. The box office game has shifted considerably since the pandemic, where most films previously guaranteed to earn $1 billion fail to reach this goal. The highly successful Top Gun 2, on the other hand, hasn’t been limited by competition from superhero movies or theatrical fatigue, with the legacy sequel already beating The Batman and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to become the highest-grossing film at the domestic box office in 2022.
Premiering 36 years after the original 1986 Top Gun movie, Top Gun: Maverick brings back Tom Cruise in the title role as he trains a new generation of pilots for a high-stakes mission. They include Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of his late best friend and RIO, Goose. Top Gun: Maverick premiered on Memorial Day weekend 2022 with rave reviews from critics, performing better both critically and commercially than the original Top Gun. In only three weeks in theaters, Top Gun: Maverick smashed numerous box office records, including a few for star Tom Cruise as the biggest opening weekend and the highest-grossing film of his career.
As a sequel to a classic from 1986, Top Gun 2 wasn’t expected to be the frontrunner for 2022’s first film to cross $1 billion at the box office. Since 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, only one movie has achieved this remarkable feat: Spider-Man: No Way Home, which premiered in December 2021. Now, as it continues to exceed expectations and climb at the box office, Top Gun: Maverick is on track to join the billion-dollar club.
How Much Top Gun: Maverick Has Made At The Box Office
As of June 20, Top Gun: Maverick has earned over $885 million at the worldwide box office, placing it at fewer than $60 million behind Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s performance. On the domestic front, Top Gun 2 has brought in over $466 million, establishing the Tom Cruise legacy sequel as the highest-grossing film at the 2022 domestic box office. Top Gun: Maverick also opened to over $150 million at the domestic box office, which made it the biggest Memorial Day weekend opening of all time. Since that opening weekend, Top Gun: Maverick has maintained a remarkably steady performance at the box office, with its second-weekend drop being the lowest of any movie to debut at over $100 million.
Will Top Gun: Maverick's Box Office Pass $1 Billion (& When)?
While Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was predicted to be the first 2022 movie to cross $1 billion, Top Gun: Maverick seems to have sealed this accomplishment for itself. With fewer than $115 million until it reaches $1 billion, the box office total for 2022's Top Gun: Maverick could reasonably surpass this mark by the end of the first weekend of July. Top Gun 2 earned approximately $50 million over the Juneteenth weekend, suggesting it only needs about two more weekends of this steady haul and mediocre mid-week earnings to accumulate $1 billion worldwide.
Considering Jurassic World Dominion and Lightyear have yet to significantly decrease Top Gun: Maverick’s consistent box office performance, there won’t be worrisome competition for the sequel in theaters until Thor: Love and Thunder arrives on July 8. However, Top Gun 2 has a realistic chance of achieving $1 billion before Thor: Love and Thunder premieres. In fact, some estimates place the timeline of when Top Gun 2 will pass the $1 billion mark at the end of the 4th of July weekend. Paramount has yet to reveal exactly when Tom Cruise's high-earning Top Gun 2 will leave theaters, but it seems the studio is determined to see a $1 billion box office performance before the legacy sequel hits streaming services.
Why Top Gun 2'S Box Office Is So Impressive
Although Top Gun 2 was expected to perform relatively well at the box office, the movie has been anything but normal since landing in theaters. After impressively surpassing box office estimates for its opening weekend, Top Gun 2 saw the lowest second-weekend drop of any film opening above $100 million. And its subsequent two weekends also added to the 2022 movie’s record-breaking decreases. Before it premiered, Top Gun: Maverick was subject to concerns that its appeal was too little too late, as the sequel received numerous delays and the cult classic had debuted nearly 40 years beforehand.
Since the pandemic, the box office hasn’t been in a place where simple action-heavy legacy sequel movies like Top Gun 2 outperform Marvel. Top Gun: Maverick was the first non-superhero movie of 2022 to earn more than $500 million at the worldwide box office, with the only other film to come close to its performance being Jurassic World Dominion – which already had five high-performing installments in the franchise to assist its box office appeal. Top Gun: Maverick, however, was simply riding on the nostalgia of one 36-year-old movie with Tom Cruise in the lead, with a rare little to no amount of CGI being used in the sequel. From a filmmaking stance, Top Gun 2 is highly impressive in terms of the practicality of its techniques, which are quite timeless and remain faithful to the style of the 1986 original.
Top Gun: Maverick isn’t the type of movie that would be predicted to cross $1 billion at the box office before a massive MCU movie like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But its heartwarming, entertainment-heavy story was able to appeal to the masses in a manner that not even the original could achieve.
