Tom Cruise Just Defeated One Of The Most Beloved Marvel Movies Of All Time
Tom Cruise is still climbing the box office charts with Top Gun: Maverick now overtaking a beloved Marvel movie
Well, Tom Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick have had quite the year. The need for speed was strong in this movie and the need for proceeds was strong as well. The flick, which hit the big screen at the beginning of the summer, has fired on all cylinders since its release and it continues to move up the charts even this late in the game. It’s been a remarkable run for a film decades in the making. And now Tom Cruise has toppled another Marvel movie on its move up the charts. According to Comic Book, Tom Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick have sped past Black Panther to become the fifth-best domestic box office take in history. It’s quite an accomplishment for a movie that isn’t part of a franchise of films and is a sequel to something that came out in the 1980s.
Seeing as how Top Gun: Maverick is still in select theaters, there’s still room for it to tick up the charts and that’s just what happened this past weekend for National Cinema Day. The movie was the best-performing film of the weekend with Tom Cruise and company selling enough tickets to move it up over Marvel’s Black Panther. As of this writing, Top Gun Maverick had $700.8 million at the box office in the United States and $1.4 billion worldwide. There’s a good chance it will, at some point, enter the Top-10 on the latter list if it can hang around theaters a little longer and maybe get a re-release at some point.
As far as the domestic box office returns are concerned, Tom Cruise has more Marvel movies in his sights with Top Gun: Maverick sitting behind Avatar ($749.8 million), Spider-Man: No Way Home ($804.8 million), Avengers: Endgame ($858.4 million), and the easy leader in the clubhouse Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($936.7 million). No Way Home also got a re-release for National Cinema Day this past weekend which helped tick its number up some. It will be tough for Top Gun: Maverick to enter the top four on this list because of how much ground it needs to make up, but stranger things have happened for sure. Marvel had owned three of the top five.
After a rough couple of years at the movie theaters with ticket sales almost non-existent in 2020 because of the pandemic and things only marginally improved in 2021, 2022 has been a bounce-back year for the box office. 2019 saw roughly 1.2 billion in movie ticket sales before dropping to about 200 million in 2020. According to Statista, ticket sales for 2022 are at about 800 million meaning a late fall and Christmas season push could get things back to almost where they were prior to the pandemic. Time will tell on that front, but for sure Tom Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick and Marvel too with their offerings deserve some credit here for igniting a fire in movie-going crowds across the nation and the world.
There is still time to catch Tom Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick on the big screen (where it should be seen) with the film playing in select locations into the fall.
