Tom Cruise in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’Paramount and Skydance With rave reviews, an A+ Cinemascore grade and a jaw-dropping $160.5 million four-day domestic gross and $300 million worldwide as of yesterday, Skydance and Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick is messing up everyone’s summer movie betting pool and making me look quite stupid. To be fair, the latter isn’t hard to do, even as I’m sure that Top Gun: Maverick would have grossed quite a bit less (even while possibly still becoming a rate-of-return success) had it opened in summer 2020 in a non-Covid world as just another seasonal franchise exploitation/80’s nostalgia tentpole. The key was that, yes, audiences really did want to see Tom Cruise *as* Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in a Top Gun sequel just as they wanted to see Harrison Ford *as* Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr. In the summer of 2008 nearly a decade after Ford’s last non-IP opener (What Lies Beneath in summer 2000). What does this all mean? Well… Mark Wahlberg and Tom Holland in ‘Uncharted’Sony Tom Cruise is the new Tom Holland: Yes, Tom Cruise has been a relative “movie star” since Risky Business in 1983, and yes it was the first Top Gun (opening a year after his first real flop, Ridley Scott’s Legend) that turned him into a pop culture icon/global superstar. However, over the last 15 years, Cruise’s biggest hits, by a mile, have been Mission: Impossible movies whereb… Click below to read the full story from Forbes
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‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Box Office: Three Lessons From Tom Cruise’s $300 Million Debut
