Top Gun fans turned out in force last week with the release of the 1986 film’s long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. With Tom Cruise reprising his role from the original Top Gun, the Top Gun Maverick has skyrocketed to box office success, earning $282 million globally in less than a week. The film currently stands to be Tom Cruise’s highest-earning movie to date, which is no small feat, along with coming in behind Transformers: Age of Extinction as Paramount’s second-best movie release of all time.
In the original Top Gun, Tom Cruise appears as Navy Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a talented but reckless fighter pilot with a habit of dangerous flying and a long list of broken rules. Maverick and his best friend and radio operator, Nick “Goose” Bradshaw, are sent to TOPGUN, aka the Naval Fighters Weapon School, to learn new piloting techniques and hopefully curb some of Maverick’s more reckless tendencies.
Top Gun: Maverick picks up thirty years after the original film, with Maverick having long-since graduated TOPGUN and dodging promotions to stay in his current position as a test pilot. The sequel sees Maverick ordered back to TOPGUN as an instruction, tasked with training a new batch of elite TOPGUN recruits for a high-profile bombing mission. Maverick is initially against training the recruits, which include Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin and Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, Goose’s son who wants to carry on his dead father’s legacy.
‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Breaks the Box Office
Top Gun: Maverick first premiered at CinemaCon on April 28, 2022, with its US release following on May 27. In the four days since its release, the film has earned an astounding $282 million at the global box office, with $156 million coming in domestically and $126 million coming from foreign audiences. According to the Hollywood Reporter, this makes Top Gun: Maverick Tom Cruise’s highest-earning film yet, surpassing War of the Worlds (2005) at $234 million and Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) at $220 million.
Top Gun: Maverick is also the fifth success for Paramount Pictures in 2022, following Scream, Jackass Forever, The Lost City, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. According to Collider, the film is strongly expected to cross the $300 million mark by the end of its domestic release period and may even have a shot at the one billion mark. IMDb also currently rates Top Gun: Maverick as the seventh-highest earning film of 2022 thus far, with Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness topping the list.
