Top Gun sequel's box office numbers, the newest Tom Cruise movie proves the market for theatrical movies may not have changed as much as everyone thought it did after the abysmal hit caused by the pandemic shutdown.
36 years in the making, Spider-Man: No Way Home), and it was immediately apparent its box office success wouldn't follow the same trend as 2022's other box office hits.
Tom Cruise hyping up Top Gun: Maverick as a sort of savior of cinema after a depressed post-COVID box office may have become a bit of a meme, but if the movie keeps performing the way it has at the box office, Cruise's hype may hold some merit. Of course, it'll take more than one movie for the entire box office to recover to anywhere near its pre-COVID levels, but movies like Top Gun: Maverick certainly don't hurt that objective and could inspire the production of more movies targeting similar audience behavior.
Top Gun: Maverick Has An Older Audience Demographic Than Most of 2022's Box Office Hits
The only recent movies with a domestic box office opening weekend comparable to Top Gun: Maverick's $126 million opening weekend are return to theaters after they re-opened from pandemic shutdowns.
The only other movie with a similar audience makeup in 2022's top 10 domestic earners is The Lost City with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, which saw an audience that skewed 47 percent over age 35 and also 60 percent female. The Lost City only opened to $30.4 million, though, highlighting the full significance of Top Gun: Maverick's blockbuster performance. Not only does the 35+ crowd not normally make up such a significant portion of the audience for a movie earning as much as Top Gun: Maverick, but they also don't typically show up opening weekend, highlighting just how motivated the movie's audience has been.
Top Gun: Maverick's Second-Weekend Drop is the Lowest For 2022 Blockbusters
Top Gun: Maverick's box office sees another major benefit from its skew towards an older audience: legs. While the 35+ audience seems to have shown up early for Top Gun: Maverick, that demographic is historically known to increase after the first two weeks of a movie's run, so unless that particular audience segment behaves differently from normal, Top Gun: Maverick should benefit from really strong box office legs, as indicated by its low second-weekend drop of just 32 percent.
No 2022 movie with an opening weekend higher than $24 million has seen a second-weekend drop of less than 47 percent , with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness dropping 67 percent, The Batman dripping 50 percent, and Spider-Man: No Way Home dropping 67 percent. While Top Gun: Maverick's opening weekend gross was lower than all those movies, its second-weekend gross of nearly $86 million is also bigger second weekend draw than any other 2022 movie, meaning it should outperform most other 2022 movies week-to-week for the remainder of its run.
If Top Gun: Maverick continues to see low drops, it'll quickly climb and potentially Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and The Batman at the domestic box office, and may even pose a threat to their global box office standing as well.
Top Gun: Maverick is 2022's Best Performing Movie at the Domestic Domestic Box Office
Top Gun Maverick's opening weekend box office may not have outperformed the recent comic book movies it's up against, but its strong legs mean it'll end up beating them out in the long run. Not only will it gross more domestically than any of 2022's other top box office contenders (released so far) in the long run, but its domestic earnings make up over 53 percent of its total earnings, which is a higher percentage than every other 2022 movie other than The Lost City (56 percent), which only earned $104 domestically, significantly lower than Top Gun: Maverick's performance so far.
Domestic earnings are a significant statistic because studios keep a larger percentage of domestic ticket sales than they do for the international box office, meaning Top Gun: Maverick's box office is far more profitable than 2022's other top movies, especially with it's more-moderate $170 million budget (compared to $200 million for movies like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness). In many ways, the long legs and domestic slant of Top Gun: Maverick's box office performance is a bit of a throwback to the pre-2000's box office, before ticket sales started to gradually shrink over the past two decades.
Despite its disproportionate domestic box office percentage, Top Gun: Maverick also has a strong performance at the international box office, bringing in $257 million so far, meaning it's global total could still remain competitive throughout 2022.
Top Gun: Maverick's strong performance is a really good sign for the overall box office, but it's not necessarily going to result in an immediately noticeable increase in ticket sales for other 2022 movies. Hopefully, Top Gun: Maverick is a sign for future movies that there's strong audience interest and profit potential in movies outside the normal box office contenders, which could impact the kind of movies that enter production in the next few years.
With a number of major blockbusters on the way in 2022, including Avatar: The Way of Water, and more, Top Gun: Maverick may struggle to snag quite as high of a spot on the list at the end of the year, but the ranking doesn't tell the whole story, as Top Gun: Maverick is likely to end up one of the most lucrative movies of 2022.
