Hook, line and sinker. “Top Gun: Maverick” has toppled “Titanic” as the seventh-biggest film ever at the domestic box office, earning $662 million in ticket sales.
For Paramount, “Top Gun: Maverick” has also overtaken “Titanic” as the studio’s biggest film in its 110-year history. However, James Cameron’s disaster epic is still outpacing Tom Cruise’s fighter-jet adventure outside of North America with $1.5 billion at the international box office and $2.2 billion globally.
Impressively, “Top Gun: Maverick” has sold a similar number of tickets overseas as it has domestically, with the film’s international tally standing at $671 million. Without playing in China or Russia, the blockbuster follow-up to 1986’s “Top Gun” has grossed $1.3 billion to date.
Thanks to glowing word-of-mouth and repeat customers, “Top Gun: Maverick” is pulling in audiences in a way that would have been monumental even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it’s close to reaching Marvel’s epic superhero mashup “Avengers: Infinity War,” which currently stands as the sixth-highest grossing domestic release ever with $678 million.
Beyond that, the list of the top five domestic releases ever consists of “Black Panther” ($700 million), “Avatar” ($760 million), “Spider-Man: No Way Home” ($804 million), “Avengers: Endgame” ($853 million) and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ($936 million).
Since “Top Gun: Maverick” debuted in May and cleared a new Memorial Day weekend opening record with $160.5 million, it has remained a box office force. The film didn’t waver from the top five on weekend charts for ten weeks. “Maverick” is Cruise’s first movie to surpass $100 million in a single weekend and his first to reach $1 billion at the worldwide box office.
Joseph Kosinski directed the long-delayed “Top Gun: Maverick,” which picks up decades after the original and follows Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell as he trains a young group of aviators for a dangerous mission. The cast includes Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Jon Hamm, Jennifer Connelly and Val Kilmer, who played Iceman in the first “Top Gun.”