Skip to main content

Top Gun: Maverick's Box Office Is Even More Impressive Than No Way Home's

Top Gun: Maverick's stunning box office haul is even more impressive than the higher-earning Spider-Man: No Way Home. One of 2022's several delayed sequels, Top Gun: Maverick finally hit theaters in late May with said delays having no impact whatsoever on either its very strong reception or box office performance. Maverick also joins No Way Home as just the second movie since 2019's Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to break the billion dollar mark at the box office.

No Way Home stands at $1.9 billion as of this writing, while Maverick has amassed $1.1 billion. Despite coming in second to No Way Home, Maverick's accomplishment is more eyebrow-raising for a few reasons. To begin with, the nature of Maverick doesn't lend itself to such incredible box office success as readily.

RELATED: It's Not Just Top Gun 2, Paramount Is Winning The 2022 Box Office

The original Top Gun, while a beloved cult classic decades later, is very much an '80s relic, and it was a standalone movie for over three decades until Maverick got underway. This made Maverick a recognizable slice of nostalgia, but not necessarily one that portends every expectation in its path being shattered. Comparatively, the odds of $1 billion-level success favored No Way Home much more because of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.

While Top Gun was a singular entry in Tom Cruise's career until the arrival of Maverick, Spider-Man has long been one of the most popular big-screen characters and franchises around. No Way Home's predecessor Spider-Man: Far From Home also surpassed $1 billion, so there was much more reason to expect No Way Home could repeat that success. With the added popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the return of numerous Spidey villains, along with past Spideys Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield slinging webs with Tom Holland, No Way Home had no challenges but the pandemic to contend with, easily succeeding in doing so.

Maverick had none of those advantages save for its own nostalgia hook, and even that was one of a very different sort with the movie arriving 36 years after Top Gun. With younger audiences more closely associating Tom Cruise with the Mission: Impossible franchise, that nostalgia was also much less widespread across different age demographics. In the end, Maverick had to battle the impact of the pandemic much more directly with how much it was pushed back, selling itself on its aerial thrills and Tom Cruise's well-known stuntman's grit.

Ultimately, none of those factors held back Maverick at all from become 2022's summer movie hit to beat. The success of Spider-Man: No Way Home is undeniably historic and praise-worthy, the Wall-Crawler's acclaimed adventure currently standing as the sixth highest-grossing movie of all time. Still, Top Gun: Maverick, in becoming a $1 billion success story with none of Spidey's built-in advantages, is an even more astonishing achievement.

NEXT: Will Mission Impossible 7 Give Tom Cruise Another Billion Dollar Movie?



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CBS' Ghosts: Every Main Ghost Time Period & Backstory Explained

One of CBS' newest sitcoms,  Ghosts , features a cast full of spectral characters that each hail from a distinct time period and come with their own unique backstory and death. Though each of the eight ghosts has a wildly different perspective based on their different experiences throughout history, they nonetheless form a sort of family, which is one of the show's greatest charms. After all, being stuck with the same people for all of eternity allows for plenty of time to get to know each other. Ghosts , which is an adaptation of a BBC show of the same name, stars Utkarsh Ambudkar and Rose McIver (who played Liv Moore on five seasons of  iZombie ) as Jay and Sam, a young couple who inherit a mansion in upstate New York. To their surprise, however, the house also comes with several ghostly inhabitants, who Sam is able to see after a near-death experience. These are Thorfinn (Devan Long), Sasappis (Román Zaragoza), Isaac (Brandon Scott Jones), Hetty (Rebecca Wisocky...

Horizon Forbidden West: 10 Best Quotes From The Game

WARNING: Major SPOILERS for Horizon Forbidden West discussed in this article. Upon its release on February 28, 2022, the massive open-world single-player video game Horizon Forbidden West continues to pick up steam among avid and casual gamers alike. The story continues the epic quest of Aloy to save humanity from global extinction, traversing a sprawling post-apocalyptic western United States to carry out a series of missions. RELATED: Horizon Forbidden West - Aloy's 10 Best Weapon Types Ranked From Worst To Best The cinematic nature of the game makes for a series of engaging monologues, quips, quotes, and important dialogues that advance the plot while also revealing something about the main characters. Whether it's Aloy, Varl, Reglla, or others, the most memorable quotes stand out for a reason. In a badass mission statement that immediately establishes who is boss and what her clear objectives are early in the content-rich open-world game , Aloy's heartfelt vow to ...

The 100: The 15 Saddest Deaths In Series History

The CW's post-apocalyptic sci-fi series The 100 featured a lot of loss throughout its 100 episodes, but these The 100 deaths are the saddest in the show. Because The 100 takes place during a time period when Earth is no longer fully inhabitable, the conflicts between characters were almost always a matter of survival, and death truly did lurk around every corner. The show was never one to hold back in terms of delivering emotional moments, and it certainly wasn't shy when it came to killing off pivotal characters starting in just the third episode of The 100 . In fact, many of the deaths changed things about the show as a whole.