Top Gun: Maverick is continuing its domination over the domestic box office despite the industry as a whole having its second-worst weekend of the year. Maverick is a long belated sequel to the 1986 hit Top Gun, bringing back Tom Cruise as Maverick, the hotshot pilot who must now teach a whole new group of young pilots as they prepare for a particularly dangerous mission. A wrench is thrown into his new gig when it turns out that one of his students is Rooster Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of his fallen compatriot Goose, who blames Maverick for his father’s death. The cast also includes Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, Glen Powell, and Val Kilmer returning as Iceman.
Top Gun: Maverick has been having an absolutely dazzling run at the box office since its premiere on May 27. It currently holds the #1 slot for the year both domestically and worldwide. However, unusually for a modern blockbuster, nearly half of its $1.4 billion gross has come from U.S. theaters, which have earned it nearly $700 million, more than the mega-hit MCU film Avengers: Infinity War. This has landed it as the sixth highest-grossing domestic film of all time.
Per Deadline, Top Gun: Maverick has continued to hold strong on the charts, staying in the domestic top 10 for its 13th consecutive weekend, and maintaining a spot in the top 5 for its 12th total weekend (it slipped to #6 briefly on the weekend when Bullet Train premiered). This weekend, it took the #3 slot, again behind Bullet Train at #2, with the new vampire thriller The Invitation taking the #1 slot. In spite of these three films performing reasonably well, this is the second-worst box office weekend of the entire year, with all the movies that played in theaters only raking in a total of around $54 million.
The worst weekend of the year so far was January 28-30, when the new release Scream was in its third weekend, and Spider-Man: No Way Home had climbed back to #1 almost by default. This weekend’s $54 million is less than half the total that Top Gun: Maverick alone made in its opening weekend. This number was to be expected, considering that late August usually experiences box office doldrums as summer break ends for most schools, and especially taking the fact that there have been no significant blockbuster wide releases since Bullet Train at the beginning of the month.
So far, Top Gun: Maverick seems to be the only big film that people are still flocking to in theaters. The box office likely isn’t going to pick up significantly until late September, when the final two weekends bring Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, the LGBTQ+ rom-com Bros, and the horror film Smile. In the meantime, there is every chance that the Tom Cruise picture will continue to soar, getting ever closer to making a whopping total of $700 million domestic.
