There are summer blockbusters (大片), and then there's "Top Gun: Maverick."
The Paramount film, featuring Tom Cruise's return to the skies as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell over 30 years after the hit 1986 original, won the domestic box office (国内票房) over the Labor Day weekend — bringing in $7.9 million for the four-day holiday.
That makes "Maverick" the only film in history to take the top spot on Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend.
It's just one of the film's notable financial achievements. It crossed the $700 million mark in ticket sales, passing Marvel's "Black Panther" to become the fifth highest-grossing film in North American history, and has made $1.4 billion worldwide since opening in May.
In another sign of "Maverick" staying power, the movie boasts a box office multiple (倍数) of roughly 5.5, which means its current domestic haul is 5.5 times that of its opening weekend total. That's unheard of in contemporary Hollywood, as most big films have a multiple of around 2.5.
But "Maverick" fans kept coming back to theaters throughout the summer, so much so that the film made at least one million dollars a day for 75 straight days.
That type of financial longevity not only speaks to the film's quality — it earned a 96% score on review site Rotten Tomatoes — but serves as an old-school success story at a time when theaters really needed one.
"There are not enough words to describe the importance of the box office performance of 'Top Gun: Maverick' to the industry, having come at a time when naysayers (怀疑者) remained doubtful of the ability of the movie theater to draw audiences," Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore (SCOR), told CNN Business. "Truly a watershed event."
Hollywood simply does not produce summer blockbusters like this anymore.
While several recent movies have done quite well, like 2019's "Avengers: Endgame" and 2021's "Spider-Man: No Way Home," such releases are typically "front-loaded," meaning they open to huge numbers only on the first weekend.
