Tom Cruise is still flying high at the box office with his latest, Top Gun: Maverick, which is not only the top film for its second week in theaters, it has experienced the smallest second-week decline of its category in decades.
Films that earn more than $100 million in their debut week usually lose fifty percent or more in their sophomore week in theaters, but Top Gun: Maverick has only declined 33 percent over its debut week, the lowest decline for such a film in decades, according to Variety.
Top Gun: Maverick has earned about $230 million in its two weeks in 4,751 theaters, easily topping the $180 million the original made during its entire run back in 1986. It also appears that the sequel film has quickly earned back its $170 million production budget.
Variety called the Cruise-starring action film’s 33 percent soft decline a “stunning” achievement.
“A soft decline like that would be a superlative achievement,” Variety wrote, “marking the smallest drop in domestic box office history for a film that opened above $100 million. To compare, recent high grossers like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and The Batman fell 67% and 50%, respectively, in their sophomore outings.”
Variety added that even Cruise’s other big hits, such as the Mission: Impossible films, saw declines of more than 40 percent on week two.
With Top Gun leading, the rest of the top five at the box office include Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, The Bob’s Burgers Movie, The Bad Guys, and in fifth place, Downton Abbey: A New Era.
Cruise’s sequel is unapologetically patriotic, choosing to embrace rather than deconstruct the first film’s heritage, and fans are responding with enthusiasm.
Upon its opening, Breitbart’s John Nolte enthused that Top Gun is “a masculine, pro-American, stridently non-woke blockbuster.”
Speaking of unapologetic, the film even restored the Taiwanese and Japanese patches to Tom Cruise’s bomber jacket after initial teaser trailers revealed that the patches that were featured on the 1986 jacket had been removed for the 2022 sequel.
The removal of the Taiwanese and Japanese symbols on the Maverick jacket was blasted as more evidence of Hollywood kow towing to Chinese censors. But the return of the symbols is notable.
Still, it is not yet known if the studio filmed two sequences, one with the patch and one without, for the Chinese market.
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