‘Top Gun: Maverick’ earns $86 million in big second weekend

• “Top Gun: Maverick” grossed an incredible $86 million in its second weekend.
• The film has grossed $291 million in North America and $548.6 million worldwide.
• It has already surpassed 2005’s “War of the Worlds” as Cruise’s highest-grossing domestic film.

Tom Cruise’s all-American action thriller grossed an incredible $86 million in its second weekend of distribution from 4,751 North American theatres. Those figures place them among the top ten highest-grossing second weekends in domestic cinema history.

Whether it’s because of the pandemic or not, the Paramount and Skydance film is eclipsing important box office milestones at a breakneck pace. “Top Gun: Maverick” has grossed $291 million in North America and $548.6 million worldwide in only ten days on the big screen.

Ticket sales for “Top Gun: Maverick” decreased only 32% from its $160 million premieres over the lengthy Memorial Day holiday weekend, thanks to great word of mouth, enthusiastic reviews, and premium screens. According to Comscore, it’s the smallest second-weekend drop for a film that debuted with a gross of $100 million or more.

Even for a reviewed film, that’s an outstanding threshold, considering blockbusters like “Maverick” are notoriously front-loaded, with sales dropping by at least 50% after the first weekend. In comparison, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and Marvel’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” both dropped 67 percent in their second weekends, while Robert Pattinson’s “The Batman” dropped 50 percent and “Eternals” lost 62 percent.

Read more. Movie Review: Top Gun – Maverick

Surprisingly, “Top Gun: Maverick” has already surpassed 2005’s “War of the Worlds” ($243 million) as Cruise’s highest-grossing domestic film.

“It has never been more appropriate to say ‘the sky’s the limit’ for ‘Top Gun: Maverick,'” Paramount’s president of domestic distribution Chris Aronson wrote in a note to the press.

Though filmmaker David Cronenberg’s body horror picture “Crimes of the Future” was released in limited release, few films wanted to compete with “Maverick” for attention. From Neon, the film grossed $1.1 million from 773 theatres, a respectable $1,423 per site. The grisly “Crimes of the Future,” which opened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, stars Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart.

Without any new releases from major studios, “Top Gun: Maverick” enjoyed free rein over North American box office charts. Holdovers titles “Doctor Strange” sequel, “The Bob’s Burgers Movie,” “The Bad Guys” and “Downton Abby: A New Era” took spots two through five.