Top Gun: Maverick is the gold standard of summer blockbusters. Tom Cruise’s return to the role of Pete Maverick Mitchell in the Paramount film, set decades after the original’s 1986 success, helped it reach the top of the domestic box office over the Labor Day weekend, with the film grossing $7.9 million.
Only Maverick has ever topped the box office on both the Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends.
It’s a big financial milestone for the movie, but it’s far from the only one. Since its May release, it has generated over $1.4 billion around the world, with ticket sales alone topping the $700 million mark, making it the fifth highest-grossing film in North American history and surpassing Marvel’s Black Panther in the process.
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Top Gun: Maverick Revenue Till Now.
Box office multiple estimates place Maverick’s latest domestic haul at about 5.5 times that of the movie’s opening weekend. That would never happen in modern Hollywood, where the average multiple for major movies is around 2.5.
Fans of Top Gun: Maverick, though, kept returning to theatres throughout the summer, helping the film earn at least $1,000,000 on 75 separate days.
This kind of box office success is not only a testament to the film’s brilliance (it has a 96% score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes) but also a welcome throwback to the golden age of cinema.
Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst at Comscore (SCOR), told CNN Business that the impact of “Top Gun: Maverick” on the box office cannot be overstated. The film’s success came at a time when skeptics still doubted the theater’s ability to attract viewers. That’s a game-changer, for sure.
You won’t find any more summer blockbusters as good from Hollywood.
Recent films like “Avengers: Endgame” (2019) and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021) have done well at the box office, but like many blockbuster releases, they tend to be “front-loaded,” or have a large opening weekend but then slow down the following week.
When Dergarabedian says that Maverick was “the most important film for theatre owners and Hollywood this summer,” he’s not exaggerating. The film was responsible for 13 percent of the year’s domestic box revenue.
And that doesn’t even begin to capture the symbolic significance of Maverick’s release at this pivotal time for the movie industry, which is trying to get back to normal after being devastated by the pandemic and where streaming services like Netflix (NFLX) and Disney+ have gained a larger audience by offering the kinds of expensive productions that were once seen only in theatres.
Maverick, on the other hand, necessitated the largest screens available and so brought millions of moviegoers back to the theatres after months or even years of absence.
Dergarabedian remarked that Tom Cruise and Paramount made a huge wager on the cinematic experience, which paid off handsomely and cemented Cruise’s status as arguably the last true movie star while also demonstrating that nothing can replace seeing a film in a theatre.
But the previous few weeks have been particularly slow for the summer box office, as many movies have been delayed by production problems in Hollywood or have gone straight to streaming. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: The Way of Water, both expected to be massive successes, won’t be released in theatres for another few months.
Time will tell if either of those movies can reach the same heights as Maverick, but for now, everyone in Hollywood and movie theatres are still loving this film that just won’t come down.
