Move over Ant Man, the world has a new tiny superhero and he has managed to defeat The Avengers almost single-handedly. The Tom Cruise-led, decades-late sequel Top Gun: Maverick has been strafe-bombing the box office all summer, earning a reported $623.3 million in North American rentals. That’s a number that also narrowly edges out the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes as the number 9 box office hit of all time.
The original Top Gun was a big hit in 1986, bringing in a B.O. of $357 million (just shy of a billion in 2022 dollars) on a budget of $15 million. It also came at the beginning of Cruise’s career, when he was still not such a big star that he was then considered an equal of co-star Val Kilmer.  Now 26 years later, Cruise is undeniably at the controls of Maverick, as the sequel focuses on his titular hot shot pilot returning to the prestigious plane academy setting of the original Top Gun.
With the film taking in another $620 million abroad, with a total take of over $1.2 billion, it seems unlikely that Maverick will edge out the the top box office filmmaker of all time, James Cameron, whose Avatar and Titanic sit atop the numbers one and three spots respectively. At number 2 are The Avengers in their Russo Brothers-directed opus Endgame. According to an article in Variety, Cruise’s take home pay for the film when his cut of all sales is added up will come to about $100 million, which will buy a lot of five-inch shoe lifts and apple boxes.
