Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick has crossed the $1 billion mark, but what took him so long to accomplish this major accomplishment?
Tom Cruise has ultimately received his first $1 billion film with Top Gun: Maverick, thus it deserves to take a look back at the actor’s career to understand why it took so long. Since its May 27th, 2022 debut date, Top Gun: Maverick has been a resounding success, pleasing both critics and viewers. The movie is a perfect mix between blockbuster fun, 80s nostalgia, and fast-paced thrills by understanding the silliness of the first Top Gun while preserving its unique wider-than-life theme.
As a result, many industry experts were not surprised by the billion dollars Top Gun: Maverick has just grossed at the box office. Nevertheless, despite the actor’s numerous box office successes over the decades, Top Gun: Maverick is the first movie starring Tom Cruise to surpass the billion-dollar milestone.
Top Gun, Tom Cruise’s first big success, brought in more than $350 million dollars (or, after accounting for inflation, almost $900 million in 2022 dollars). The actor’s box office savvy was damaged by costly failures like 2017’s misjudged Tom Cruise horror film The Mummy, even if he has subsequently come close to replicating this remarkable impact. Even if the consistently profitable Mission Impossible franchise has steadily improved throughout the time, Mission Impossible: Fallout in 2018 was still its largest box office hit. With a gross of $790 million, that sequel’s statistics was high but fell short of Top Gun: Maverick’s gross. Before the much-anticipated sequel’s release in 2022, that figure remained Cruise’s best box office stats (except for an inflation-modified Top Gun).
Despite the actor’s enormously lucrative blockbuster career, Cruise’s absence of a reliable series apart from the Mission Impossible films has, up to this point, prevented him from realizing his billion-dollar dreams. Up until the release of Top Gun in 2022, Cruise only had the Mission Impossible franchise, and his efforts to turn the Jack Reacher series popular with viewers never really took off. Apart from those marginally lucrative spy thrillers, Cruise has acted in a number of lucrative stand-alone films, including Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow.
These types of one-off successes were favorably received by critics and achieved decent financial successes, but they were also standalone tales that discouraged the creation of sequels. For years, Cruise’s attempts to reach the magic number were stymied by the lack of a strong existing brand, despite the fact that a number of billion-dollar films, such as Avengers: Endgame and Minions, are spin-offs and sequels. Cruise’s own trademark was sufficient to pave the way for his movies to reach hundreds of millions of dollars; however, even with the character portrayed by Miles Teller, who shares the same spotlight in Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise still needs to rely on a popular nostalgic image to ultimately reach his billion-dollar blockbuster. It’s unclear if another Tom Cruise film will ever be capable of accomplishing the same mark.
