Top Gun: Maverick soars in North America

LOS ANGELES • Hollywood star Tom Cruise may have pulled off one of the most daring stunts of his career - getting audiences to go to the movies for something that does not involve superheroes.

Top Gun: Maverick pulled in blockbuster ticket sales in its opening weekend, collecting US$134 million (S$183 million) from a record 4,732 North American cinemas.

Paramount and Skydance's all-American action adventure is expected to collect US$151 million including yesterday's takings, defying expectations while also setting a new high-water mark for Memorial Day opening weekends.

That is thanks to dazzling reviews, heaping doses of nostalgia and getting Cruise, 59, back in the cockpit to perform real aerial stunts as pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell. Top Gun: Maverick is the highest-grossing debut in the actor's 40-year career and his first to surpass US$100 million on the opening weekend.

War Of The Worlds, which opened to US$64 million in 2005, previously stood as his biggest opening weekend.

Audiences over 40 years old, the people who were top of mind when Paramount green-lit a sequel to 1986's Top Gun, turned out in force, which is impressive because that demographic has been the most reluctant to return to cinemas.

The film's positive word of mouth should be helpful in reaching younger audiences, who were not yet born when Top Gun opened 36 years ago.

Mr David Gross, who runs movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research, called the film's three-day figure "outstanding".

"The source material remains strong, the execution is excellent and Tom Cruise makes it work impeccably well," he says.

Despite countless delays (the sequel was scheduled to open in mid-2020 until Covid-19 scrambled those plans), Cruise was adamant that Top Gun: Maverick not be released on streaming services.

The two-year wait has paid off since the film has been rapturously reviewed. It has a 97 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an "A+" CinemaScore.

Joseph Kosinski directed the PG13-rated Top Gun: Maverick, which picks up decades after the original and sees Maverick train a new group of cocky aviators for a crucial assignment.

The cast includes Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Jon Hamm, Jennifer Connelly and Val Kilmer, who plays Iceman in the first Top Gun.

Top Gun: Maverick also needs theatres to justify its hefty US$170 million production budget, which does not include the tens of millions of dollars spent on promoting the movie to audiences worldwide.

Those efforts included a splashy premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which culminated in eight fighter jets flying over the Croisette (the French government paid for those).

Skydance Media co-produced and co-financed the film.

REUTERS