Last Friday was a monumental day in the pop culture pantheon on both the big and small screens, with a trio of massive projects all debuting on the same day, with each of them appealing to a massive fanbase that had been waiting patiently to see them for the longest time.
36 years after the original, Tom Cruise flew back into our lives as Pete Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick, which was riding the crest of a wave as one of the best-reviewed movies of the year. 17 years since Revenge of the Sith, Ewan McGregor made his hotly-anticipated return as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Disney Plus series bearing his name, which arrived with a bumper two-episode premiere.
Over on Netflix, Stranger Things returned after almost three years to deliver the first volume of the show’s penultimate season, with all three combining to take up at least 12 hours of your day if you were seeking to hit the trifecta. Based on the fact every single one of them ended up breaking records, that’s exactly what a huge number of folks did.
Maverick landed the biggest opening weekend of Tom Cruise’s career on its way to decimating the Memorial Day record that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End had held onto for 15 years, Disney revealed that Obi-Wan Kenobi had secured the most-watched original series debut in the platform’s history (no mean feat given the raft of Star Wars and Marvel content to have already landed), with Stranger Things 4 obliterating benchmarks as Netflix’s top-performing episodic effort of all-time.
We were wondering if there were enough hours in the day for all three, and that question has been rather definitively answered.
