Talk about a hold. Paramount/Skydance’s Top Gun: Maverick‘s Mach 10 momentum at the domestic box office continued into Wednesday with $14.8M, repping a 6% dip from Tuesday’s take; a great weekday take.
The Tom Cruise movie’s cume now stands at $191.1M, having already bested the 1986 original film’s domestic box office ($180.2M), and Cruise’s Mission: Impossible ($180.9M). Today, Top Gun: Maverick will cross $200M, flying past Cruise’s 2015 Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation ($195M).
The pic’s second weekend is expected to gross $57M, -55% and will easily become the 3x Oscar nominee’s highest grossing movie ever in U.S./Canada, taking out 2005’s War of the Worlds ($234.2M). There aren’t any major studio wide openers this weekend to slow down Top Gun 2. NEON is going wide with their Cannes premiere Crimes of the Future from David Cronenberg; that movie garnering 80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
It’s clear summer moviegoing is in full effect, and with 46% K-12 schools out and another 88% colleges on break according to Comscore. While it’s clear Top Gun: Maverick has pulled in those older audiences who were reluctant during the pandemic, Paramount is jazzed by the sequel’s younger draw given that the 18-24 quad was the pic’s largest audience segment over the weekend at 21%.
Among Wednesdays in May, Top Gun: Maverick ranks fourth after Star Wars, Episode I – The Phantom Menace ($28.5M, May 19, 1999), Avengers: Endgame ($25.5M, May 1, 2019), and Avengers: Infinity War ($17M, May 2, 2018). Top Gun 2‘s Wednesday easily beats the first Wednesday of Disney/Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness which did $9.1M on May 11.