As expected, Brad Pitt’s Bullet Train comfortably won the box office this weekend with a more robust than expected $30 million debut, but once again the biggest story coming out of the latest three-day frame is Tom Cruise’s unstoppable Top Gun: Maverick.
Despite having been playing in theaters for over two months at this point, Joseph Kosinski’s instant classic sequel shows no signs of giving up on its quest to barrel through as many milestones as humanly possible, and the latest one is a doozy. Having added another $7 million to the coffers, Maverick has now become the seventh highest-grossing domestic release of all-time.
Not only that, but a cumulative total of $662 million takes it past James Cameron’s Titanic on home soil, and it may even have enough left in the tank to move up to sixth and overtake the $678 million of Avengers: Infinity War. On the worldwide front, the return of Pete Mitchell has also become the 15th biggest hit in the history of cinema, after sliding past the $1.332 billion accrued by Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
The early buzz going into Top Gun: Maverick was overwhelmingly strong, but nobody in their right mind would have predicted that it would become one of the most commercially successful films ever made, an astonishing achievement when the effects of the pandemic continue to linger in the background.
Sure, the weekend may have belonged to Bullet Train, but it’s Cruise and his legacy sequel that have been stealing the headlines once more.
