Top Gun: Maverick is the biggest box office hit of Tom Cruise’s long career and it’s the highest grossing movie of the year domestically by quite a wide margin. However, those are not the only records that Maverick has broken, as the film is now the second-highest grossing film in the history of Paramount Pictures. Only James Cameron’s Titanic has been more successful.
Considering that the studio that is Paramount has been around for over 100 years, and the only movie that has been more successful globally is the third highest grossing movie of all-time, that’s a pretty impressive place to be. According to Forbes, Top Gun: Maverick is just short of $600 million domestically and a little less than $1.2 billion globally, though the last couple of days of box office receipts have not been reported yet, so the movie is likely just past those milestones.
There was certainly an expectation that Top Gun: Maverick would be a big movie, fans of the original had been asking for a sequel for 35 years, but it still is somewhat surprising that the movie is doing quite as well as it is. The legacy-sequel trend has certainly had its successes when the audience that loved the earlier film comes out for it, but what Top Gun: Maverick has been able to accomplish is something else.
Top Gun: Maverick is still putting up solid numbers domestically, making over $40 million in each of the last two weeks. With numbers like that, it seems a foregone conclusion that Maverick will jump a couple more places on the box office charts before it’s all said and done.
The film is currently the 12th highest grossing film of all-time domestically, but it’s less than $10 million away from number 11, Incredibles 2, and about $20 million away from number ten, Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It will only take another $3 million on top of that to bypass The Avengers.
Based on the film’s current trajectory it seems likely Top Gun: Maverick will overtake those three films. From there it gets tougher as it would take an additional $30 million to get into the realm of Jurassic World, and then the aforementioned Titanic. It seems unlikely that Maverick will have quite the steam to get that far, but the movie has been surprising us at every turn, so it’s certainly possible it will continue to do so.
Top Gun: Maverick may not become Paramount’s highest grossing movie ever, but that may be the only record it doesn’t break at this point. It’s been an incredible run for Maverick, especially in the post-pandemic box office, where only Spider-Man: No Way Home has been more successful. With numbers like this it’s no wonder that Top Gun 3 is an idea that’s already floating around.
