Wow: Top Gun: Maverick Was the Number One Film in America This Labor Day Weekend

Bear in mind, it started its run on streaming this past week.

So there's no reason to see it in the theaters... except you sort of have to see it in the theaters. It's one of the few movies that really justifies the bother of going to the theater.

It's the first movie in history to win both the Memorial Day weekend and the the Labor Day weekend -- it has made huge money the whole summer long.

There are summer blockbusters, and then there's "Top Gun: Maverick."

The Paramount film, featuring Tom Cruise's return to the skies as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell decades after the hit 1986 original, won the domestic box office over the Labor Day weekend -- bringing in $7.9 million for the four-day holiday.

That makes "Maverick" the only film in history to take the top spot on Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend.

It's just one of the film's notable financial achievements. It crossed the $700 million mark in ticket sales, passing Marvel's "Black Panther" to become the fifth highest-grossing film in North American history, and has made $1.4 billion worldwide since opening in May.

In another sign of "Maverick" staying power, the movie boasts a box office multiple of roughly 5.5, which means its current domestic haul is 5.5 times that of its opening weekend total. That's unheard of in contemporary Hollywood, as most big films have a multiple of around 2.5.

But "Maverick" fans kept coming back to theaters throughout the summer, so much so that the film made at least one million dollars a day for 75 straight days.

That type of financial longevity not only speaks to the film's quality -- it garnered a 96% score on review site Rotten Tomatoes -- but serves as an old-school success story at a time when theaters really needed one.

"There are not enough adjectives to describe the importance of the box office performance of 'Top Gun: Maverick' to the industry, having come at a time when naysayers remained skeptical of the ability of the movie theater to draw audiences," Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore (SCOR), told CNN Business. "Truly a watershed event."

You mean it's a good thing when Hollywood puts out a movie that isn't #WokePropaganda?

Will they learn?

Answer: No, they won't. Right now producers are trying to figure out how to convince Tom Cruise that Pete Mitchell's next adventure should be a Gender Transition.

But back to the success of non-woke fare: The film took the number one spot again, fifteen weeks into its release.

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, Top Gun: Maverick has dominated the summer. As the season comes to an end, the film added another pair of remarkable achievements to its legacy. First up, Maverick reclaimed the No. 1 spot at the box office in its 15th week of release, an achievement held in the modern era by the likes of only E.T., Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future, and Titanic. That is quite the list for Tom Cruise to join, let alone Paramount, who now owns half the films on that list. Top Gun: Maverick also has outgrossed all those films, as well as every domestically released film ever, save for only four.

Obviously it's also number one on all streaming/download lists.

It also passed the $700 million mark domestically. (It made another $740 million overseas.)

Fittingly, it just passed the #WokeAF and very overrated Black Panther to become the fifth-highest-grossing movie in history.

It beat the re-release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was released with 12 minutes of "new" footage to induce people to see it gain. Plus, Spider-Man got all the IMAX screens.

Maverick has been helped by the fact, too, that there haven't been any big blockbuster movies in August. The last really "big" movie was the Sad! and #Woke Thor sequel, way back in July.

In case you haven't seen the movie yet, there is a real reason for the fighter planes to invert when diving into the canyon at the end of the movie. A plane's wings provide upward lift when the plane is in its normal top-facing orientation. But when you flip the plane over, the geometry wings provide anti-lift, a natural dive force.

So there is, kind of, a reason for the pilots to execute the upside-down flying maneuver, besides it just looking cool and making the whole mission seem more dangerous and more exotic.

Kind of, again. Of course the real reason they do this is just to make the mission seem more dangerous and more exotic. But there is a background reason that makes it semi-plausible.

Update: ghbucky says you'd invert in order to reduce G-forces on the pilot.

Ace,

The reason they would actually invert to do a high G maneuver is because of the pilot, not the plane.

If they push the nose over, they would experience negative g-load, and that is bad!

Inverting and PULLING the nose down makes it positive G-load, and that is much better.

Negative Gs induce red-outs by causing all the blood to rush to the head and they can't tolerate very much of that.

Positive-Gs push the blood down, and they can tolerate much more of that
Posted by: ghbucky

BTW, I continue covering this kind of story in hopes that shareholders will begin holding executives' to account when they insist on losing shareholder value in the pursuit of Wokeness Gold Stars.

But that won't happen until people start getting fired, or companies start getting sued in shareholder derivative suits.

Speaking of:

"Overly familiar themes?" Like "OMG you guys, I just realized, wealthy suburbs are a prison for Wealthy White Women" and "I'm serious You Guys, no other group in history has been as oppressed as Wealth White Women"?

And note: Critics are very, very charitable towards this kind of movie, and any kind of "minority" director.

If they're saying it's "meh," that means it's dreadful.

Even the super-woke, super-leftwing AV Club gives it a drubbing:

Don't Worry Darling might have passed as mildly provocative in the '90s, before Truman opened the escape door & Neo took the red pill. But Wilde's film grafts these ideas to a pedestrian you-go-girl template that sadly feels all too basic in its feminism.

Yasss Kween Slay!!!

Scott Mendelson, the wokest "film reviewer" (he's actually just a shill for leftwing progressivism), gives the movie a six out of 10 rating -- which is bad -- but then claims this is a "positive" review for purposes of Rotten Tomatoes' tabulation.

They do this a lot with #YouGoGirl films. They did it with Ghostbusters 2016 -- in the actual review, they admit it's bad, but then for the purposes of Rotten Tomatoes, they assign it a "positive" rating.

And here's what this hack says about this Beefsteak Charlie's 6 of a movie:

The screenplay, courtesy of Booksmart co-writer (and sole screenwriter of Netflix's delightful rom-com Set It Up) Katie Silberman, is pretty formulaic. It's not like we haven't seen films like this countless times.

Well that's what I'm in the mood for -- a progressive screed that's "formulaic" that we've all seen "countless times" already.

Update: Ooof.

This review says the movie isn't "THAT bad," but then, shreds it:

The audience applause after the screening I attended [at the Venice Film Festival] was the most tepid I've heard at any festival, and it didn't get more enthusiastic when Wilde's name appeared on screen.

Hence, "Don't Worry Darling" has become the film on which to dogpile, and I'm not someone who approves of that syndrome. Unfortunately, while "Don't Worry Darling" isn't THAT bad, it's also not very good. People think that auteurism was founded on the principle that the director is the ultimate creative power on a film, but it was not. Rather, it held that certain directors were able to exercise a style which imprinted their personality upon their movies. In this respect, "Darling" really is an auteur picture, replete with traits Wilde has let fly in recent interviews. It's pompous (in its on-the-nose didacticism), humorless (satire doesn't have to be funny, true, and this is one unfunny satire), condescending (the racial dynamic here, in which the sole Black female with a speaking part is relegated to a martyrdom prop, is a doozy), entitled (the recurring Busby-Berkeley-meets-"Carnival of Souls" bit has no utilitarian value, save saying "nightmare," and it's clear Wilde shot this indulgence just because she could, okay fine), and more. On the other hand, every now and then it latches onto a groove of narrative momentum and goes with it to some purpose. The premise might have made for a memorable episode of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery." This picture is nearly two hours, so that's a problem right there.

Dude.

So what I'm getting is that it's a rip-off of Get Out, only with Wealthy White Women as the victims of the plot instead of black people.

posted by Ace at 04:04 PM

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