Summer blockbuster season is already underway, but unless something drastic changes, the biggest winner of the entire year is going to be Joseph Kosinski’s spectacular Top Gun: Maverick.
While there’s every chance one or two upcoming titles are poised to earn more money at the box office than Tom Cruise’s return to the cockpit, it’s very unlikely that they’ll win more critical and audience acclaim. Maverick has been setting records, passing benchmarks, and blowing past milestones on a weekly basis, and it’s added yet another one to the list.
Through its fourth weekend in theaters, the highest-grossing movie in Cruise’s entire career hauled in a solid $44 million, an incredible number for something that’s been playing on the big screen for close to a month. Not only that, but the return of Pete Mitchell also added another major notch in its belt that can only be bettered by James Cameron’s Avatar, also known as the highest-grossing title in the history of cinema.
That number gives the Top Gun sequel the distinction of scoring the second top-earning fourth frame of all-time, with our first visit to Pandora the only title to have exceeded Maverick with its $50.3 million tally back in early 2010. The acclaimed aerial epic should also pass $900 million globally in no time at all, with the coveted billion-dollar threshold looking more and more like a formality with each passing day.
Top Gun: Maverick simply can’t be stopped, and it couldn’t have happened to a better and more exhilarating motion picture.