Tom Cruise’s love letter to cinema is soaring to new heights this week as Top Gun: Maverick ascends past $1.2 billion at the global box office to become Paramount Picture’s highest-grossing movie of all time.
Impressively, even the behemoth Titanic‘s domestic first-run was sunk by Maverick, with the Top Gun sequel becoming just the 12th film ever to cross $600 million at the domestic box office, Deadline reports.
Just how quickly did it take Maverick to blast past $1 billion globally, you may ask? The box office version of Mach 10: 31 days. That is a watermark so high, it is Cruise’s first time reaching such heights.
In major overseas markets like Brazil, France, the UK, Australia, and 24 others, Maverick has the distinction of being the largest Paramount live-action film ever — full stop — and only the second pandemic-era movie to cross $1 billion globally.
The second-highest grossing global Paramount film could hardly be called cinema, in comparison, as the title goes to the Michael Bay-helmed computer-generated imagery-schlock-fest Transformers: Age of Extinction. In terms of the hard numbers, the box-office haul for Maverick breaks down thusly:
- $606 million from North America alone
- $602.5 million from 65 overseas markets
- $1.209 billion globally (combined) as of Thursday
Similar to The Godfather Part II and Terminator II, Top Gun: Maverick is one of those rare sequels that critics and audiences alike agree is actually superior to the original film. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but perhaps most of all it’s related to Maverick having both a stronger story with higher stakes than the 1986 original, and the technical achievements of in-flight filmmaking being considerably more advanced. The aircraft on display in Maverick also features cutting-edge technology compared to the original, making the film all the more compelling to watch.