‘Top Gun’ Is Still Tom Cruise’s Biggest Box Office Success – 36 Years Later
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It’s rather fitting that the blockbuster that could be Paramount’s biggest box office hit in over a decade is a sequel to “Top Gun,” the film that cemented Tom Cruise’s status as a global movie star and to this day stands as the biggest box office hit of his decades-long career, when adjusted for inflation.
When “Top Gun” came out in 1986, Cruise had already had his breakthrough hit with “Risky Business” three years prior. But at a time long before today’s front-loaded box office norm, Cruise wasn’t yet the sort of star who prompted millions to turn out on opening weekend. So on the weekend before Memorial Day in 1986, “Top Gun” opened to $8.1 million from 1,028 theaters, the equivalent of $21.6 million in today’s money.
But over the next month, word-of-mouth began to spread. Moviegoers were gushing about the riveting dogfights between the Navy’s top fighter pilots and an unnamed (but obviously Soviet) fleet of enemy MIGs. Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” slowly climbed the Billboard charts and became one of the songs of the summer.
And at its center was Cruise and his co-star Val Kilmer as rival aces Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, jawing off at each other in scenes that left critics wishing the film spent more time in the cockpit but turned the two actors into heartthrobs and gave “Top Gun” its eternal homoerotic reputation.
“I just remember how after that opening weekend, there was such a boost in the buzz around ‘Top Gun,'” Comscore’s Paul Dergarabedian told TheWRap. “There was this aura of cool surrounding everything Tom Cruise did in ‘Top Gun,’ and he’s spent the rest of his career maintaining that aura.”
At the end of its fourth weekend, “Top Gun” had expanded its screen count to 1,531 theaters and had quintupled its opening weekend total to a running count of $43 million. It wouldn’t see its weekend totals slip below $3 million for the remainder of the summer, and its theater count remained above the opening weekend tally of 1,028 theaters until mid-October.
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By the end of its initial theatrical run in February 1987, “Top Gun” had grossed $174.3 million at the domestic box office. That amounts to $460 million in 2022 dollars — making the film Cruise’s highest grosser of all time. It ranks as the 10th-highest grossing film of the 1980s, joining a list that includes pop culture classics like “E.T.,” the “Star Wars” sequels, “Back to the Future,” “Indiana Jones” and “Ghostbusters.”
In fact, of the films in that top 10 list, “Top Gun” stood alongside “E.T.” as the only films on the list to not be a sequel or to get a sequel… until now.
This Friday, “Top Gun: Maverick” will hit theaters on the heels of a wave of critical acclaim as a film that both on a narrative and meta level has been defined by how much has changed for Cruise, Maverick and the worlds in which they inhabit. Though he’s had his share of misfires, Cruise has remained a box office draw even as he nears his 60th birthday, helming a multibillion-dollar series in “Mission: Impossible” that stands as Paramount’s most critical box office tentpole.
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Meanwhile, “Top Gun: Maverick” will not last in theaters for eight months as its predecessor did. The sequel will play in theaters exclusively for 45 days before becoming a tool to increase Paramount+ subscribers, at which point its theater count will likely drop precipitously. Even before that, the film will face box office competition not from the likes of “Cobra” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” original films driven by post-release word-of-mouth and stars like Sylvester Stallone, but from franchise titles like Disney/Pixar’s “Lightyear” and Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion.”
But despite the competition, trackers predict “Top Gun: Maverick” will open to more than $100 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, a benchmark that Cruise has never achieved in his career. If that happens, “Maverick” would have a good chance to become the first Paramount release since “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” in 2011 to top $250 million domestically before inflation adjustment. None of Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” films have hit that mark.
Through “Maverick” Mitchell, Tom Cruise grabbed the attention of the world and bestowed a carrier-load worth of cash onto movie theaters. 36 years later, he’s about to do it again.
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