Last week, Tom Cruise dominated at the box office like he’s never done before in his career. Thanks to hype from very positive reviews, Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick ended up being the star’s first movie to make $100 million in its opening weekend… and as though that weren’t enough, the film also set a new record for the Memorial Day holiday. But it’s not done yet: despite only being a week old, the blockbuster is now the biggest domestic hit of Tom Cruise’s career.
With zero new wide releases this past Friday, the runway was cleared for Top Gun: Maverick to once again dominate, and it was phenomenally successful in executing its mission. Check out the full Top 10 below, and join me after for analysis!
| TITLE | WEEKEND GROSS | DOMESTIC GROSS | LW | THTRS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Top Gun: Maverick | $86,000,000 | $291,604,011 | 1 | 4,751 |
| 2. Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness | $9,251,000 | $388,711,116 | 2 | 3,765 |
| 3. The Bob’s Burgers Movie | $4,500,000 | $22,240,149 | 3 | 3,425 |
| 4. The Bad Guys | $3,340,000 | $87,291,325 | 5 | 2,872 |
| 5. Downton Abbey: A New Era | $3,000,000 | $35,702,290 | 4 | 3,471 |
| 6. Everything Everywhere All At Once | $2,020,893 | $60,561,936 | 6 | 1,434 |
| 7. Sonic The Hedgehog 2 | $1,725,000 | $188,269,123 | 7 | 2,092 |
| 8. The Lost City | $1,380,000 | $104,012,149 | 8 | 811 |
| 9. Crimes Of The Future* | $1,100,000 | $1,100,000 | Row 8 - Cell 3 | 773 |
| 10. Watcher* | $815,000 | $815,000 | Row 9 - Cell 3 | 764 |
Top Gun: Maverick Is On Its Way To Being Tom Cruise’s Biggest Hit Ever
When movies make over $100 million at the box office, it’s common for the sophomore weekend to show a substantial dip in the numbers. Most people don’t go to see a single film in theaters twice, let alone in back-to-back weekends, and obviously the people who are most excited for any given title will go see it in its first few days. Matt Reeves’ The Batman, for example, saw its audience shrink by half week-to-week following its release in March. We saw Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness dipped 67 percent last month.
Top Gun: Maverick, however, is doing something very different.
The Tom Cruise movie made $126.7 million between Friday and Sunday last week, and the numbers you see in the chart above represent an audience shrink of just 32 percent. The additional $86 million brought in pushes its gross from the United States and Canada up to $291.6 million, which, as noted earlier, means that it has already made more money domestically than any previous Cruise movie. The record was previously held for 17 years by Steven Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds, which made $234.3 million before it was done playing on the big screen back in 2005.
On top of all that money, the blockbuster has also already earned $124 million overseas (according to The Numbers), but it isn’t quite time to declare Top Gun: Maverick as the biggest Tom Cruise blockbuster of all time. To date, the global gross of the sequel is $415.6 million, which means it sits in eighth place in the scope of the actor’s career. Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout remains king of that particular mountain, having earned $787.2 million when it played around the world in 2018.
That being said, the amount of money that Top Gun: Maverick has already made suggests that it will likely only need a limited amount of time before it becomes Tom Cruise’s greatest box office success story. It has some serious competition coming down the pike (more on that at the end of this feature), but it’s clearly having no issue drawing in audiences and transporting them to the Danger Zone.
David Cronenberg’s Crimes Of The Future Sneaks Into The Top 10
Hollywood’s theatrical release schedule suggests that the major studios knew to stay out of the way of Top Gun: Maverick and not try to steal away its audience – but this weekend did see the arrival of a couple of indie films in limited release, including David Cronenberg’s new body horror feature Crimes Of The Future.
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart, the movie premiered late last month at the Cannes Film Festival, earning some mixed responses and a few walkouts, and it managed to grab ninth place in its opening weekend, playing in 773 locations and making $1.1 million. That’s not a lot of money, but it had a solid per theater average ($1,423), and it’s not exactly as though David Cronenberg features are known to be blockbusters. Crimes Of The Future actually had the fifth biggest opening of the filmmaker’s career – behind 1983’s Videodrome (which made $1.2 million in its first three days) and ahead of 1999’s eXistenZ. To date, The Fly remains his biggest hit of all time, having made $7 million in its debut, and $37.6 million worldwide.
Morbius Bombs Hard… Again
One title that you most definitely do not see in this weekend’s Top 10 is Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius… though not exactly for lack of trying. The Sony movie ended up being a fairly notable disaster when it came out in early April – winning its opening weekend before then flopping hard due to horrific word-of-mouth – and on Friday the studio seemingly tried to get in on the joke by executing a “Summer of Morbius” re-release. It did not go well.
Morbius’ was added in over 950 new locations this weekend, but next to nobody turned up for the “fun.” The comic book movie made approximately $300,000 from admission sales in 1,037 theaters, which averages out to a total of just $289 per location. With the average ticket in 2022 costing $9.57, that means that each cinema hosted an average of 30 patrons. There’s no version of math that can be used to call that any semblance of a victory, and how Sony opts to move forward from here with the property inside their Spider-Man Universe is going to be a curiosity.
Clearly Top Gun: Maverick isn’t going to have to worry about a surge of Morbius fans flooding theaters and stealing attention, but the high flying blockbuster will have to deal with a much higher level of competition as we enter mid-June – specifically due to the arrival of the Colin Trevorrow’s new blockbuster Jurassic World: Dominion. How will Tom Cruise’s jets perform in a world overtaken by dinosaurs? You’ll have to head back here to CinemaBlend next Sunday to find out in our analysis of the full Top 10.
To see what else is coming to theaters in what remains of the year (and to also learn about all the original films heading to the different streaming services), you should head on over to our 2022 Movie Release Calendar.
