You can love movies as much as you want, but you’ll never love them as much as Tom Cruise, who also has the benefit of dedicating over 40 years of his life to making them. With that in mind, there must have been plenty of couch-jumping when he was informed that Top Gun: Maverick had reached the billion-dollar threshold at the box office.
It was already the highest-grossing film of the A-list megastar’s career, but he’s now finally joined the ten-figure club, something that plenty of his peers have contemporaries have accomplished several times over. The difference is that Cruise takes an incredibly hands-on role on either side of the camera each and every time he signs onto a new project, so he’ll be taking this as a major personal victory.
The actor laughed off the mere suggestion of Maverick being sent to streaming, with Netflix and Apple both approaching Paramount with bids during the pandemic, but it was never going to happen. Making a rare foray onto social media, Cruise (or his PR team, we can’t be sure) thanked fans and theaters everywhere for the overwhelming success of the Top Gun sequel.
In 99 percent of cases, a franchise-driven blockbuster hitting the billion-dollar mark would see the next installment instantly plunged into development, but we’d be surprised if Top Gun 3 ended up happening. After all, it would be hard to replicate the critical and commercial acclaim that greeted Maverick, and Cruise surely wouldn’t be too keen to sully his own glory.