Top Gun: Maverick Crushes A Personal Record For Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise is continuing his decades-long dominance of the box office and Top Gun: Maverick has given him to a new personal best.
Tom Cruise is definitely one of those actors who can get people to buy tickets off his star power alone. So when one of his movies outperforms expectations, it’s even more impressive. That seems to be the case with Top Gun: Maverick, which continues to soar entering its second weekend in theaters. With the way it’s going, the movie is set to crush Cruise’s previous personal record for domestic box office gross.
Top Gun: Maverick ended its first week with a whopping $205.6 million stateside. The projections are saying that the movie will be sitting at $273.6, with the chance to be even higher, after this weekend is over. This would easily make it Tom Cruise’s top-grossing movie at the domestic box office, beating out his previous record with War of the Worlds at $234 million. Right now, it looks like the sky is the limit for the high-flying film. These numbers also place Top Gun: Maverick squarely at #1 in the box office numbers for the week. The MCU blockbuster Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness came in second, followed by the Bob’s Burgers Movie, The Bad Guys, and Downton Abbey: A New Era.
This new box office accolade isn’t the first big record that Top Gun: Maverick broke for Tom Cruise. In addition to being well on its way to being his top-grossing domestic movie, it was also his biggest opening weekend of all time. The movie brought in an incredible $126.7 million after hitting theaters last Friday.
There are plenty of reasons why Top Gun: Maverick is performing so well for Tom Cruise. For one, Cruise was never going to compromise on releasing this blockbuster in theaters, so there was never a chance that it would have been a streaming release. Unsurprisingly, the movie faced release delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It seems like they waited the perfect amount of time, as plenty of people are heading back to theaters now, especially for the big-name blockbusters. Then, of course, you have the undeniable popularity of the 1986 original bringing in a built-in audience who was excited to see Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell back in action. Combine all these factors and you have a recipe for a smash hit.
Top Gun: Maverick is a direct sequel to the original, with Pete Mitchell still working as a daring test pilot for the US Navy. He’s tasked with training a batch of pilots for an extremely dangerous mission, including the son of his former late wingman, Goose. Tom Cruise reprises his famous role alongside Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, Monica Barbaro, Val Kilmer, and more. Joseph Kosinski directs the screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie, from a story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks.
Once Top Gun: Maverick smashes through the War of the Worlds numbers, it’s going to just continue to add to Tom Cruise’s record from there. It’ll be interesting to see how high the movie can go. You can check out Top Gun: Maverick in theaters now.
