Tom Cruise Just Crushed The Marvel Cinematic Universe
Tom Cruise just zoomed past the Marvel Cinematic Universe with his latest movie and it's starting to break records now.
Tom Cruise is proving that you don’t necessarily need an ongoing, tentpole franchise of films to absolutely crush it at the box office these days. Sure it helps to have a little nostalgia in your back pocket and some of the coolest stunts you’ll ever see, but beyond that just making a high-adrenaline flick with a focus on the big screen looks like the secret recipe right now. That’s because Tom Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick just shot past the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness specifically to be the highest-grossing film of the year so far. According to Variety, Maverick crested over the $1 billion mark this past weekend making it the leader in the clubhouse right now.
As it stands right now, Top Gun: Maverick has Tom Cruise and company with the 49th highest-grossing movie of all time with $1.006 billion, and it is likely to pass movies like The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the next couple of weeks before it ends its theatrical run. While it isn’t likely to break into anything like the top-10, it does now rank as the second-highest box office number post-pandemic with only Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home ($1.9 billion) the leader in that particular clubhouse. Considering this movie isn’t part of a larger franchise though, it makes the number even that much more staggering for what it has been able to do at the box office.
And also according to the Variety reporting, this is the first Tom Cruise movie ever to pass the billion-dollar mark (Marvel has nine), quite the feat considering this guy has seen his share of blockbusters over the years. The actor has continued to push the envelope when it comes to stunts, especially ones he’s willing to perform himself with Top Gun: Maverick being no different. Cruise and the other pilots actually got themselves into the planes for this one and the footage was shot using all real aircraft at real altitudes. It comes through in a big way on the big screen.
For fans of the original Top Gun, this latest movie paid off a number of different storylines. It was most definitely worth the wait in terms of getting a follow-up movie to the titular Maverick. Setting itself 30 years after the events of the first movie, Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is still flying jets in the Navy, though of the experimental variety before he’s called back to Top Gun to train a young group of pilots on an almost impossible mission behind enemy lines. It’s a movie that pays homage to the past while also putting a pin on a number of different arcs from the first time around.
And fans weren’t the only group into what Tom Cruise and director Joseph Kosinski put together for Top Gun: Maverick. Critics have been on board as well. The movie is currently sitting at 97% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes with a crazy 99% Audience Score. In this day and age, it’s hard to find this kind of consensus. But when you do, it’s how billion-dollar movies are made.
