Top Gun: Maverick Has Record Second Weekend Hold

I tried to think of an airplane pun, like "Top Gun holds altitude," but decided that I don't want to be that guy.

Top Gun: Maverick posts the best hold of any movie making more than $100 million. Its weekend-to-weekend drop -- how much box office dropped from its first weekend to the next -- was only 29%. For comparison, Doctor Strange 2 dropped 68% from the first weekend to the second. A 55% drop would have been considered "excellent," the next article linked below states.

The Paramount and Skydance tentpole, starring Tom Cruise, is doing massive business in its second weekend. The sequel earned $90 million to boast the smallest decline ever -- 29 percent -- for a movie opening domestically to $100 million or more. Shrek 2, which launched to $108 million, fell 33 percent, according to Comscore.

On Sunday, Paramount's estimate was $86 million but better-than-expected traffic drove that number up.

Yeah, this story originally said the drop was 32% but now it's down to 29%.

Top Gun: Maverick has now earned $295.6 million through Sunday in North America and more than $552 million globally. Top Gun 2 continues to fly high overseas, where it is likewise holding strong. It earned another $81.7 million this weekend for a foreign tally of $257 million.

On Saturday, Top Gun: Maverick became Cruise’s top-grossing film domestically, surpassing 2005’s The War of the Worlds ($243.3 million), not adjusted for inflation. That’s after zooming past the first Top Gun ($180.3 million) and Cruise's Mission: Impossible films, including the last installment, Mission: Impossible -- Fallout ($220.2 million).

Internationally, Top Gun: Maverick is already well ahead of the $176 million earned by the first Top Gun, not adjusted for inflation. The U.K. leads with $39.7 million. However, it is far from matching many of the recent Mission: Impossible films at the foreign box office. One reason -- the sequel isn't getting a release in China or Russia.

Cruise repeatedly pushed back the release date so that he could open the movie in a post-covid environment. I'm sure he also refused requests -- and pleas -- to just release the movie on pay-per-view, on Paramount Plus. It paid off for him, though I imagine his company has had to pay a lot of interest on debt while the movie remained on the shelf.

Despite being a box-office draw for... 40 years or whatever, Tom Cruise doesn't have any billion dollar movies. Maverick might be his first.

Nothing short of astonishment swept across Hollywood over the June 3-5 weekend when Tom Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick dropped a mere 29 percent from its Memorial Day launch thanks to spectacular word of mouth.

...

So what does this all mean? For the first time in his 40-decade career...

40-decade? Man, that Scientology is some powerful stuff.

...Tom Cruise, 59, has a movie that has a real shot at joining the billion-dollar club at the global box office. At the very least, it will ultimately become his highest-grossing film, not adjusted for inflation. (It already it is domestically.) And the $170 million film is already a profit maker for the studio, since the break-even was around $410 million to $420 million at the box office.

...

Box office sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Top Gun 2 is destined to gross north of $900 million globally, including $500 million or more in North America. They say the only reason it may not get to $1 billion is the absence of a China and Russia release.

BTW, there was some bad press for the movie years ago when promotional images for the movie showed Tom Cruise's Navy jacket prop with the Okinawa (IIRC) and Taiwan service patches digitally erased, so as not to upset China. Apparently those patches are visible in the actual movie.

One bad bit of press which I'm not sure is fair to attach to this particular film is Paramount Plus' sponsorship of drag events which target children. Tom Cruise has his own production company and usually a new corporation is created as the business which makes a movie; I'm not sure exactly what the studio does, but it's not hands-on as far as making the movie. I think the studio mostly does financing and "distribution," whatever that is.

Anyway, there's a difference between movies made by a studio and released through a studio.

I think I might see this tonight. It was recommended that it be seen on IMAX. I've never seen a movie in IMAX. Maybe I'll give this one a shot. (And to do that, I'll have to see it before the next Jurassic Park movie comes out on Friday.)

posted by Ace at 02:40 PM

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