Box office: ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ passes ‘Titanic’ to become 7th biggest movie of all time
Tom Cruise continues his victory lap with one of the best years he’s ever had as an actor, all due to the decision to delay his long-awaited sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” until after business got to some semblance of normalcy during a pandemic. “Maverick” is a bonafide box office phenomenon, not only as the biggest movie of the summer and year domestically, but as of this weekend, it has now passed the $659.3 million grossed by James Cameron’s “Titanic.”
That number for the long-time record holder includes a number of re-releases after the $600 million made in its initial 1997 run. Considering that “Titanic” has long been Paramount Pictures’ highest-grossing release of all time, the studio probably won’t mind that it now has two movies in the all-time Top 10. “Titanic” went on to win 11 Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for Cameron.
“Maverick” has consistently been making history, first becoming the biggest opening movie over Memorial Day weekend, while at the same time being Cruise’s biggest opener. In less than two weeks it reached the $300 million mark, and by its third weekend it even passed Marvel’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” with an incredible third weekend of $51 million. It hit the rare $500 million benchmark in mid-June (the 17th movie to do so), and less than a month later, it became only the 12th film ever to cross $600 million domestically.
SEE August 2022 box office preview
For 10 weeks, it remained in the Top 5, which is absolutely fantastic, and this coming weekend will be the very first time the movie dropped below that. While that might not be unprecedented – “Titanic” was #1 for 15 weeks in its first release – it’s been a long time since we’ve seen such a phenomenon. “Maverick” has yet to have a single day when it didn’t make at least a million.
The next milestone for “Maverick” to pass is the $678.8 million grossed by “Avengers: Infinity War” in 2018, and that could very well happen, although it’s going to be a very slow crawl, despite there not being that many major releases expected for August.
Congrats to Cruise, his co-stars, director Joseph Kosinski, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and his co-producers, the writers (including co-writer/co-producer Christopher McQuarrie), and all others involved with producing a movie that has received so much overwhelming love and acclaim that it deserves every penny of its box office take. At this point, it’s going to be a long waiting game to see how it will do with Oscar voters in January’s nominations.