There was a period, in the mid-aughts, when people turned on Tom Cruise. He started speaking openly about Scientology (and even tried to recruit Seth Rogen into the fold). He railed on psychiatry. He jumped on sofas. Suddenly films starring the biggest movie star in the world were underperforming, or worse. He’s fought hard to get back on top, in part by almost killing himself to entertain. And now, in 2022, he has the biggest opening of his career.
As per The Hollywood Reporter, Top Gun: Maverick, the belated sequel to the blockbuster that made him a megastar 36 years ago, is set to gross $151 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend. That makes it the second highest-grosser over the same weekend, after 2007’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which Hoovered up $153 million — a mere two million more. Of that $151, $124 million of it came in the first three days, and $51.8 million are from Thursday night and Friday alone, when it was already breaking records.
Despite being Tom Cruise, the actor’s films have never opened above $100 million. By contrast, the last Mission: Impossible, 2018’s Fallout, “only” made $61.2 million in its opening weekend. In its first three days, Top Gun 2 grossed almost double what War of the Worlds made in its opening weekend back in June of 2005. (For the record, none of this is adjusted for inflation.)
For years, Cruise didn’t want to make a Top Gun sequel. In 1990, he described such a film as “irresponsible,” acknowledging critics who derided it as “a right-wing film to promote the Navy.” He also pointed out that kids “loved it,” which made him nervous. “I want kids to know that that’s not the way war is — that Top Gun was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality.”
And yet here we are, with a nearly 40-years-later sequel that is considerably less jingoistic than the Reagan-era original, a more somber affair that reflects on its aging star’s past and future, even as it knows that he can still fly the hell out of a plane.
(Via THR)
