Top Gun: Maverick on track for best opening box office of Tom Cruise's career

Tom Cruise’s big, wide, shiny teeth are about to take a big ol’ chunk out of the box office, Deadline reports: Early box office previews for Cruise’s planes-go-fast sequel Top Gun: Maverick are already the best of the actor’s career, and the best ever for studio Paramount. All told, the film’s Thursday winnings (plus returns from a Tuesday preview event, and discounting the international box office, where it’s also doing well) amount to $19.3 million, setting up what’s expected to be at least $80 million, and maybe quite a bit more, across the whole Memorial Day weekend.

There are a whole bunch of factors propelling Maverick to this dominant position, not least of which being Paramount’s extremely strong desire for it to do so: The film is getting the widest release in North American theaters ever, landing in 4,735 theaters this weekend. That’s in addition to a marketing blitz that has done everything in its power to transform the idea of a Top Gun sequel 26 years after the first movie Kenny Loggins’d its way to victory into a cultural phenomenon, instead of the joke it might be expected to be.

Which is not to discount the critical buzz around the film, which has been strong since the moment it first whooshed into theaters with a preview screening at CinemaCon back in April. Director Joseph Kosinski and the film’s supporting cast have come in for praise for their execution of both the film’s high-speed aerial stunts and its ground-based drama, but it’s Cruise—still, for all his faults, one of the best people in the planet at almost dying to make something cool-looking happen in a movie—who’s drawn the lion’s share of praise.

(Also: It’s Memorial Day weekend, and we’re all in a fairly robust period of “Pretending the pandemic is over,” and, again, they really are marketing the shit out of this particular instance of planes-go-vroom.)

The big question now is how much of this momentum Maverick can take into the holiday weekend; it’ll have to really push if it wants to beat the current record holder for a Memorial Day opening, which, for some reason, is 2007's Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, at $139.8 million. (Big win for Jerry Bruckheimer, producer on both films, either way, of course.) It’ll have a much easier time scoring the spot of biggest opening of Cruise’s career; its major competition there is Steven Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds, which opened to $64.8 million back in 2005.

Meanwhile, despite being Goosed (sorry) by both the long weekend and Cruise’s star power, Maverick almost certainly won’t score the biggest opening of the year, period; Cruise is powerful and all, but this is still a Paramount movie, and it’s not going to knock Disney’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness ($187 million domestic) out of its top position unless something straight-up miraculous happens.