Box Office: ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Passes ‘Black Panther’ With $701 Million Cume

As the prophecy has foretold, Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick has topped the Labor Day weekend box office. It earned $7. 9 million over the Fri-Sun part and fended off a surprising challenge from Sony’s reissue of Spider-Man: No Way Home ($6.

55 million). Its $6 million (+26%) Fri-Sun gross is second among all 15th-weekend grosses (unless I missed one) save for Titanic. James Cameron’s modern classic earned $15 million in weekend 15, fending off a challenge from Grease (for its 20th anniversary) just before losing the top spot in weekend 16 to Lost in Space in April 1998.

Speaking of milestones, it’s pretty much unheard of for a major Memorial Day weekend release to end up topping the Labor Day box office (Forrest Gump topped in 1994, but that was a mid-July release). However, it supplies a good book-end effect for a summer entirely saved by the blockbuster legacy sequel. As noted many times, the resounding overperformance of Top Gun: Maverick singlehandedly prevented total catastrophe for movie theaters amid a painfully undernourished season.

There were just six tentpoles ( Doctor Strange 2, Top Gun 2, Jurassic World 3, Lightyear, Minions 2 and Thor 4 ) in May, June and July, with about as many studio programmers ( Downton Abbey 2, Elvis, The Black Phone, Where the Crawdads Sing, Nope, DC League of Super Pets and Bullet Train ) from early May to early August. Lightyear bombed while Nope and Super Pets slightly underperformed, but Crawdads, Elvis and Black Phone both overperformed. The other films did as well as hoped.

Yet Top Gun: Maverick earning $701 million-and-counting instead of $150-$200 million (which would have still been sky-high for a non- Mission: Impossible Tom Cruise flick) was the difference between a summer down 22% from 2019 (despite 47% fewer movies) and one down closer to 35%. Speaking of $701 million, that puts Top Gun: Maverick above the unadjusted $700. 4 million gross of Black Panther to become the fifth biggest domestic grosser of all time.

I guess that makes Pete “Maverick” Mitchell Earth’s Mightiest Hero? Sorry, inside joke from early 2018. Anyway, while Top Gun 2 has a few weeks to reach T’Challa’s $715 million adjusted-for-inflation total, its new domestic total puts it over the adjusted totals of The Dark Knight ($534 million in 2008/$697 million adjusted) and Thunderball ($65 million in 1965/$700 million adjusted). That makes the Joseph Kosinski-directed legacy sequel the biggest ‘tickets sold’ real-world, non-fantastical action movie of all time.

It’s already the biggest grossing ‘part two’ sequel in domestic earnings, having passed Incredibles 2’ s $609 million cume months ago. It is now a week away from passing Frozen II ’s $1. 45 billion global cume to become the biggest such sequel worldwide.

The Paramount/Skydance flick has earned $1. 44 billion worldwide, without a penny from China or Russia, with a new likely cume of around $1. 49 billion.

The film’s stamina and a possible Oscar season campaign could push it past $1. 5 billion. It’s hard not to see the movie among the ten Best Picture nominees this season, with Cruise possibly sneaking into the Best Actor race.

Its success, along with rave reviews and white-hot buzz, qualifies as aspirational in a marketplace dominated by fantastical action films and superheroic melodramas. It’s also the ideal box office champion for summer 2022, celebrating the tenth anniversary of The Avengers by teaching Hollywood, yet again, that there was always more than one way to build a blockbuster and that audiences didn’t automatically crave superheroes and cinematic universes. Of course, they should have learned that in 2015 with Jurassic World and Furious 7 , but I digress.

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