Box Office: ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Makes a Stratospheric $124 Million Debut
Tom Cruise pulled off perhaps one of the most outrageous stunts in his career: getting people to see the movies for something other than superheroes.
” Top Gun” was a blockbuster movie that brought in $134 million in ticket sales from its first weekend. This record-breaking 4,732 North American cinemas saw it. Paramount, Skydance’s all American action adventure will bring in $151 million through Monday. This is a record breaking performance that also sets a new benchmark for Memorial Day opening weekends. The holiday record currently belongs to Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean – At World’s End” which opened with $153 million in a long weekend in 2017. This is a testament of dazzling reviews, heaping amounts of nostalgia, and getting Cruise back into the cockpit to perform real aerial stunts in pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell.
The international box office took $124 million to take the sequel to “Top Gun”, which was released in 1986. This is a remarkable sum considering the film doesn’t play in China or Russia. Worldwide, “Top Gun: Maverick”, has earned $248 million.
“Top Gun: Maverick”, Cruise’s highest-grossing domestic opening in his 40-year career, is also his first to exceed $100 million in its opening weekend. “War of the Worlds,” which opened at $64 million in 2005, was previously Cruise’s largest opening weekend.
It is also one of the most important pandemic-era openings, after “Spider-Man: No Way Home”, “Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness”, and “The Batman” (134 million).
Over 40-year-olds were the top target audience when Paramount released another “Top Gun,” and they turned out in large numbers (55% of ticket buyers), which is remarkable because this demographic has been the least likely to return to the theaters. The dazzling stunts in “Maverick,” however, managed to attract a substantial percentage of millennial moviegoers (45% of whom were 35 years old or younger) who weren’t alive when “Top Gun,” opened 36 years ago. Positive word of mouth should help the film reach younger audiences.
David A. Gross, the head of the movie consulting company Franchise Entertainment Research, described the film’s three day figure as “outstanding.”
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