Top Gun: Maverick has entered the stratosphere, becoming the highest-grossing film ever to be released by Paramount. The film, which came to theaters on May 27, is a many-years-later follow-up to the 1986 hit Top Gun. Tom Cruise reprises his role as the hotshot fighter pilot Maverick, this time assigned to teach a brand new group of pilots as they prepare for a special mission. This includes Rooster Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick's friend Goose, whom Rooster blames for his Goose's death.
Top Gun: Maverick immediately showed its box office potential when it raked in a massive $126 million during opening weekend. This was not only the best opening weekend in Cruise's career, it was one of the few films to pass the $100 million opening mark since the beginning of the pandemic. Since then, it has continued to dominate the box office. In the weeks since its release, it has never dipped below #3 at the weekend box office, even when competing with major releases like Minions: The Rise of Gru and Thor: Love and Thunder.
Per Deadline, the success story of Top Gun: Maverick just keeps soaring to greater heights. The film has now earned $602.5 million in international markets on top of its domestic gross of $606 million, bringing its cumulative total to a whopping $1.2 billion worldwide. This total has made it the highest-grossing Paramount film of all time, beating out their previous reigning champ, Transformers: Age of Extinction, which earned $1.1 billion.
One interesting thing to remember is that the box office for Maverick is still weighted in favor of domestic, with the U.S. box office accounting for more than 50% of the film's global gross. This is not surprising, considering the fact that a film about the American military won't sell in certain international markets despite the film's efforts to keep the enemy soldiers from being labeled as being from any specific country. The margin between domestic and international has been closing as the film opens in more and more markets, but it's still entirely unusual for a film that is this successful to be driven largely by American audiences. To compare, Age of Extinction only earned $245 million domestic, with the rest of its enormous gross made up by its $858 million international gross.
On top of this Paramount record, Top Gun: Maverick is the highest-grossing film of the year so far, beating out Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. As it continues to rake in the cash, it is rising ever closer to joining the Top 10 domestic films of all time. It is just $14 million away from that point, at which point it would surpass The Incredibles 2 and Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi to earn the #10 slot.
Source: Deadline