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After numerous delays due to the ongoing pandemic, Paramount's Top Gun: Maverick will officially arrive in theaters this Memorial Day weekend. The Tom Cruise-led film received glowing reviews in early screenings and looks to generate roughly $180 million worldwide, the best worldwide opening of Cruise's illustrious career.
Top Gun: Maverick is a sequel to the 1986 classic Top Gun, directed by Tony Scott and starring a 24-year-old Tom Cruise. The iconic film made $357 million worldwide and currently sits as the 398th highest-grossing film of all time. The brand-new film will focus on Cruise's emblematic character Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, who must train a detachment of graduates for a particular assignment while battling the demons and fears embedded in his past.
The positive momentum the Paramount film has generated started in late April at CinemaCon Las Vegas, but the spotlight shined brightest at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where the anticipated film received a five-minute standing ovation from those in attendance. The film currently has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, which will ultimately motivate moviegoers to see what Pete "Maverick" Mitchell has to offer in this new journey from Paramount. Per Deadline, Top Gun: Maverick looks to accumulate roughly $100 million domestically, which would give it the third-best opening weekend performance of the year, coming in behind The Batman and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
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The speculated performance internationally would put the upcoming film at $180 million worldwide, which would be the best for Cruise, whose previous opening high was the ill-received project The Mummy, which made $172.3 million globally. The box office is currently being dominated by Marvel Studios' Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which has maintained its coveted top spot domestically for three consecutive weekends. The Marvel Studios film has accumulated over $800 million and is inching closer toward the billion-dollar milestone, which only Spider-Man: No Way Home has successfully crossed since the start of the pandemic. Paramount's upcoming Top Gun sequel will look to unseat the Doctor Strange sequel in the domestic sector, but only time will tell if the much-anticipated project can claim the title of the year's highest-grossing film.
Alongside Cruise, Top Gun: Maverick will star Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, and many other talented stars. It'll be interesting to see where the Paramount film will be once the dust settles, but optimism has the film doing well by the conclusions of its opening weekend. The film, however, will compete with The Bob's Burgers Movie, which will also be debuting this Memorial Day weekend. The family demographic has been alive and well recently at the box office, but Top Gun: Maverick seems to be attracting the most attention.
Top Gun: Maverick will hit theaters on May 27, 2022.
Source: Deadline