Top Gun: Maverick has wildly exceeded even overly optimistic box office predictions, prompting many to wonder just how much the long-awaited movie has made since its May 2022 release and how the project pulled this rampant success off. With 36 years between the original Top Gun and its sequel, Top Gun: Maverick proved to be more than worth the wait for its star Tom Cruise. Top Gun: Maverick is Cruise’s first billion-dollar movie, crossing that particular threshold at the end of June 2022.

While the sequel was always expected to perform well, Top Gun: Maverick’s myriad delays meant that few commentators predicted such an incredible box office performance from the movie upon release. Initially scheduled for release in July 2020, Top Gun: Maverick’s arrival date was pushed backed repeatedly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in an almost two-year wait being added to the already-lengthy 34-year gap between the original Top Gun and its first sequel.

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As a result of all these delays, the question of whether or not Top Gun could be able to rival Cruise’s other big franchise, Mission Impossible, was an entirely reasonable one. However, as of Monday, July 11th, 2022, Top Gun: Maverick has earned $1.184 billion at the box office, outstripping projections and proving that Cruise’s star power has not been dimmed by the passage of time. While some of Cruise’s earlier projects made over $500 million at the box office and the original Top Gun’s lifetime take is almost $900 million in 2022 dollars, Maverick remains the biggest success of Cruise’s career so far.

Why Top Gun 2 Is Such A Box Office Success

tom cruise in top gun maverick with stacks of money

The main reason that Top Gun: Maverick is so successful is reflected in the movie’s almost universally positive critical reviews. The sequel is superb, beating both the original Top Gun’s mixed reviews and the expectations of many reviewers alike. While the director of Top Gun: Maverick’s next movie, Spiderhead, has already been released (thanks to the delays faced by the sequel), its solid but unspectacular critical reception reflects another major aspect of Top Gun: Maverick’s outsized success; namely that Tom Cruise remains one of the biggest movie stars in the world and arguably the biggest non-MCU/DCEU affiliated actor alive.

While Top Gun: Maverick did leave viewers wanting to see more from its supporting stars (particularly Miles Teller and Glen Powell), the sequel is unabashedly a vehicle for Cruise’s charisma. Playing a more wounded, mature character than the cocksure rebel that made him famous in the original Top Gun, Cruise proved that he can still carry a movie to glory on the strength of a central performance. For all of its high-flying stuntwork, Top Gun: Maverick lived or died based on Cruise’s titular role, and its box-office success proves he remains a global superstar.

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