Top Gun: Maverick sinks domestic box office record held by Titanic

Top Gun: Maverick just keeps climbing higher and higher.

Tom Cruise's legacy sequel is now the seventh-highest-grossing film ever at the domestic box office, a distinction previously held by Titanic. Maverick hit $662 million over the weekend, putting it just ahead of the $659 million pulled in by James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster. This milestone makes Maverick the biggest movie ever put out by Paramount, which also released Titanic.

Cameron's romantic epic still reigns at the global box office, however, having earned $2.2 billion internationally. It stands at third on the list of highest-grossing films of all time, just behind Avatar and Avengers: Endgame. 

Maverick is poised to surpass earnings for Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War, which ranks sixth at the domestic box office with $678 million. If Cruise can surpass that, his fighter jet will be nipping at the heels of Black Panther, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Avengers: Endgame, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Paramount Pictures; Merie Weismiller Wallace/Paramount

Directed by Joseph Kosinski, Top Gun: Maverick revisits Pete "Maverick" Mitchell decades after the events of the original film as he trains a group of budding aviators for a critical mission.

EW's Leah Greenblatt praised the film as a "high-flying sequel" that "gets it right."

"Imagine a world where motorcyclists scoff at helmets, all bars burst into jukebox singalongs, and the U.S. military is simply an unblemished agent for good," Greenblatt wrote in her review. "A few decades ago you didn't have to, because you lived in it; Top Gun: Maverick can because it never left."

Debuting over Memorial Day weekend in May, Top Gun: Maverick opened with a record $160.5 million and continues to pull in audiences in the U.S. and overseas. The fate of movie theaters is still a concern, but Maverick's bravura box office offers some hope for their future.

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