It will take a lot for Top Gun: Maverick to make as big a box office impact as the original Top Gun, as proven by a look at the 1986 cult classic’s financial performance. Top Gun was a huge hit upon release in 1986. Director Tony Scott’s military drama made a blockbuster star of its leading man, Tom Cruise, and more than recouped Top Gun’s surprisingly small $15 million budget.
After two years of release date delays, Top Gun’s long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick will finally arrive in cinemas in May 2022. Although Cruise returns as the movie’s leading man and his Top Gun co-star Val Kilmer return as Iceman, the odds that Top Gun: Maverick will be as big a hit as its franchise predecessor are minimal. This is due to numerous factors, chiefly inflation and the sequel’s higher budget.
To outdo the original Top Gun’s $357.1 million gross (in 1986 dollars), Top Gun: Maverick would need to earn a staggering $924.4 million in 2022 dollars. While this alone would be an incredibly impressive box office performance (for context, only a few dozen movies in cinema history have neared this gross), there is another element that makes this major Top Gun: Maverick challenge even harder to achieve. Top Gun: Maverick’s budget is around $150 million, ten times that of the original movie. As such, the sequel would need to earn over one billion to outdo the original Top Gun's profits.
That is borderline guaranteed not to happen because of several reasons. For one thing, Top Gun: Maverick’s many delays have impacted the movie’s hype and for another, the presence of actors like Jon Hamm and Jennifer Connelly does not change the fact that Top Gun: Maverick lacks huge star power (outside of the perennially popular Cruise). Not only that, but the lengthy stretch between Top Gun’s release and the sequel’s arrival also makes the franchise a lot less familiar to new viewers, many of whom weren’t born when the original Top Gun was at its most relevant.
However, Cruise’s Mission Impossible movies have been coming ever closer to the $1 billion mark in recent years, so it’s not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that Top Gun: Maverick will manage this incredible achievement. It is significantly more likely that the next installment in that spy thriller franchise will be the movie that finally sees Cruise cross a billion at the box office, due to the long-running series being more recognizably reliable to fans than the long-dormant Top Gun franchise. That said, Top Gun: Maverick could technically still be able to match the staggering success of its predecessor — provided cinemagoers have a billion dollars to spare on cinema tickets.
