Finally, Tom Cruise enters the inaugural $100 million club.
Playing at 4,735 locations, Top Gun: Maverick, the widest theatrical release in domestic box office history, is expected to earn $150 million over the weekend. On a three-day scale, Paramount expects $123 million. It’s a new record-breaking debut for Cruise, whose previous best debut — the $64.8 million opening 2005 “War of the Worlds” — is in the dust.
The old sequel to the original 1986 Tony Scott movie started with a bang, pulling in $51.8 million on opening day, including $19.3 million in Thursday previews. That’s a record for Paramount Pictures, which topped $51.2 million on its 2010 opening day for Iron Man 2. “Maverick,” co-financed and produced by Skydance, originally carried an expected opening of between $85 million and $100 million. dollars over the long weekend, although momentum has only grown since then.
“Top Gun: Maverick” was originally set to premiere in the summer of 2020, setting a release date long before COVID-19 entered audience slang. As the pandemic has caused studios to overhaul theater schedules, many major releases have found new homes on streaming services. Paramount sold films such as Academy Award finalist Aaron Sorkin “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and Michael B. But Maverick was not up for sale, a decision Cruz confirmed he was adamant about. After sitting tight for two years, the Paramount egg now hatches and turns into a golden goose.
Cruz reunited with “Oblivion” director Joseph Kosinski for Top Gun: Maverick. Val Kilmer reprises his role as the “Snowman” contender in Part Two, while Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm and Ed Harris also star in the title role. The rest of the cast is filled with the likes of Miles Teller, Glenn Powell, Louis Pullman, and Monica Barbaro, playing a crew of young pilots whose Cruz Maverick trains to fight.
If expectations for “Maverick” continue to expand, the movie could become the best Memorial Day opening ever, potentially canceling Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” debut that made $153 million in 2007.
The words on the street couldn’t be more auspicious for “Top Gun”. Paramount has been launching preview shows for weeks, starting with its full premiere at CinemaCon in April, giving itself plenty of runway to build engagements. Critics were almost generally positive, with 97% of critics collected by Rotten Tomatoes giving their approval. The movie is also loved by the audience, with Maverick receiving a maximum score of “A+” in CinemaScore.
in diverseIn a review, chief film critic Peter Debruge gave his own glowing endorsement, writing that Cruz “would not get an Academy Award for stoicism like this that swallows your pride, though… [he] It’s worth one for everything else the role requires: If the flying scenes here impress you, it’s because so many of them are the real deal, putting audiences right there in the cockpit along with a cast who learned to drive their parts. “
With word of mouth and the weekend ahead, there’s still plenty of room for a “dissident” to grow. It remains to be seen how the film’s opening weekend will start, although it may seem safe to assume that “Maverick,” a sequel to a decades-old action movie, does not carry the same phrase “as soon as the ‘potential urgency'” among audiences interested as a fanbase for an adaptation The average comic book “Maverick” has a hefty production budget of $170 million, not to mention the accrued costs from a blitzkrieg marketing campaign and two years of delay in release, but the returns are solid so far.
While “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” doesn’t quite live up to “Maverick,” another new wide release this weekend wasn’t bad at opening either.
More is coming…
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