After smashing through the $1 billion mark at the global box office, Top Gun: Maverick continues to attract cinemagoers to theaters. The belated sequel to Top Gun stars Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell as he returns to train a group of elite young pilots to fly an impossible mission. Maverick has earned $1.1 billion worldwide since its release on May 27th, 2022, and has remained in the top three grossing movies every week, while other new releases, like Lightyear, have spent a much shorter period at the top.
Top Gun: Maverick’s impressive box office performance is unusual given it’s not a superhero movie or Disney property. In 2019, eight of the nine movies that earned $1 billion were part of Disney franchises, including the MCU’s Avengers: Endgame – with DC’s Joker the only other movie to reach the milestone. Following COVID-19 cinema closures, only Maverick and Spider-Man: No Way Home have reached the coveted ten-figure mark.
While Top Gun: Maverick has comfortably passed the global $1 billion barrier, few other movies have come close in 2022. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness saw solid returns with over $950 million in ticket sales, Jurassic World Dominion has surpassed $820 million, and The Batman has earned $770 million. But none of them have achieved the same level of success as Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise’s first billion-dollar movie.
Why Top Gun: Maverick’s Box Office Is Still Going So Strong
There are several reasons why Top Gun: Maverick continues to do so well at the box office. Firstly, it shouldn’t be understated how great the blockbuster is. Before its release, Maverick faced numerous delays, which made many fear it would be a flop given the track record of films that get stuck in development hell. But instead, Top Gun: Maverick is an expertly polished movie with groundbreaking stunts and a surprisingly emotionally charged storyline, making it an easy film to watch more than once.
Maverick has also been the beneficiary of plenty of hype. Top Gun: Maverick premiered at the 75th Cannes Film Festival, where it received a 5-minute standing ovation, and a wave of positive critical reviews followed. Maverick’s huge early praise made it the must-watch movie this summer, both for fans of the original Top Gun and curious moviegoers who may have otherwise passed up on the film. The plaudits show no sign of stopping either. Maverick already holds a 96% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is still gaining hundreds of positive audience reviews daily to add to its 99% audience rating from over 50,000 verified accounts.
Top Gun: Maverick’s success can also be attributed to nostalgia. Recent box office hits prove that nostalgia is usually a safe bet when it comes to making a profit. Spider-Man: No Way Home is the sixth-largest grossing film of all time, and most of its success can be credited to the return of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. Jurassic World Dominion has received mixed reviews at best, but despite that, it is currently the third highest-grossing movie of 2022, largely thanks to the appeal of seeing Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, and Laura Dern’s characters share the screen together one last time.
Similarly, Tom Cruise’s Captain Maverick is an iconic movie character; seeing him back on the screen is an obvious box office draw. But more than that, Maverick neatly incorporates the best parts of Top Gun both in terms of production value, with elements of the original score woven throughout the sequel and storyline, such as the introduction of Goose’s son, Rooster. The end result means that Top Gun: Maverick appeals to lifelong fans of the 1986 movie but also gives newcomers something fresh and exciting to watch.
How Much Will Top Gun: Maverick Make In The End?!
At the time of writing, Top Gun: Maverick is the 30th highest-grossing movie of all time. Of the films that have earned more than Maverick, 35% of the earnings, on average, have come from domestic sales. But 51% of the $1.1 billion that Maverick has made so far has come from the domestic box office, which, although high, may not be surprising given Top Gun and its sequel are both patriotically American films.
One of the underlying reasons for Maverick’s high share of domestic earnings is that the movie is banned in China, which makes Top Gun 2’s financial success stand out from the other billion-dollar films. Plans to change Maverick’s jacket to appeal to China were scrapped, so the country has not aired the movie, representing a substantial lost market for Maverick. For context, Spider-Man: Far From Home also made $1.1 billion and earned almost $200 million of that from the Chinese box office. If Maverick’s box office total is to continue to rise, then it’s likely that domestic tickets will keep on being the driving force behind it.
Going into its sixth week in theaters, Top Gun: Maverick is still performing well. In its fifth week, Maverick made $47 million domestically and continues to top the box office in smaller but still lucrative international markets like the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia. Maverick has outperformed the first Top Gun financially, and the sequel’s earnings are following a similar weekly trajectory as Black Panther and Jurassic World, which earned over $1.3 billion and $1.6 billion worldwide, respectively. So, $1.5 billion is a reasonable estimate for Maverick’s final box office earnings.
The only factor that could stop Maverick from reaching that figure is when Paramount decides to put the movie onto its streaming service. The pandemic made streaming platforms a more attractive platform for film studios, and Paramount typically give their movies a 45-day theatrical release window, the post-pandemic industry norm, before putting them on to Paramount+. It’s currently unknown whether this will be applied to the latest Top Gun, given that box office records Maverick is breaking and Tom Cruise’s strong feelings towards the movie being viewed in theaters. Still, Top Gun: Maverick has critically and financially exceeded expectations and become 2022’s highest-grossing movie in the process.