‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Projected to be Biggest Opening Weekend of Tom Cruise’s Career

While Tom Cruise may be getting ever closer to spending an entire four decades in the ranks of Hollywood’s top stars, he has yet to star in a film that has grossed over $1 billion at the box office. It’s doubtful Top Gun: Maverick will alter that, but it could still be another milestone for the action icon.

Tom Cruise’s biggest hit to date is Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which has earned $787 million since its release in the summer of 2018. Steven Spielberg‘s sci-fi disaster War of the Worlds has dominated the market since coming out with $603 million in 2005.

However, the most recent projections anticipate Top Gun 2 leaping out of the blocks and soaring higher in its opening weekend than any other Cruise film to date, which will undoubtedly be fueled by both reviews describing it as one of 2022’s finest blockbusters, as well as the desire on the part of audiences to witness the airborne adventure in IMAX.

Maverick is expected to gross around $92 million over four days, according to the most conservative projections. However, there’s a widespread belief that it may easily surpass the three-figure barrier and potentially net upwards of $125 million. Paramount isn’t planning on getting too optimistic, but there are plenty of indicators that Cruise’s return to the skies could give the studio its biggest commercial success story of the pandemic era, and by quite some distance, once more reaffirming the leading man’s place at the industry’s top table.