Battle at the Box Office 5/30/22
Top Gun: Maverick went supersonic at the box office this past weekend, delivering a huge opening that was the biggest of Tom Cruise’s career.
Maverick took in $124 million for the weekend and is expected to bring in around $151 total if you include today’s Memorial Day holiday gross. Maverick is more than double what Cruise’s last biggest opening was, M:I Fallout, which made $61.2 million for its opening weekend back in 2018. The original Top Gun made $8.2 million back in 1986, which adjusted for inflation is just over $20 million in 2022 dollars. The original Top Gun eventually became the highest grossing film of 1986 and made over $357 million worldwide. Maverick has not really opened worldwide yet but it is, in one weekend, the fifth highest-grossing film domestically of 2022. It’s also the biggest Memorial Day weekend movie of all time now, topping Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and it was the widest release of all time domestically with the movie screening in 4,735 theaters.
Multiverse of Madness dropped to second with $16.4 million. It has $370.7 million domestically so far and $868.6 million worldwide. It is the highest grossing film domestically and worldwide for 2022.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie opened in third place with $12.6 million. Compared to its fellow Sunday night animation partner, The Simpsons, it’s well below what The Simpsons Movie made in 2007, which was over $74 million on opening weekend, but Bob’s Burgers is more of a niche, cult audience, and The Simpsons Movie was also 3 decades in the making.
Downton Abbey: A New Age and The Bad Guys rounded out the top 5, with Downton Abbey dropping a pretty steep 63% from last week’s opening, which doesn’t bode well for sustained performance but its older-skewing audience may have chosen Top Gun over it this past weekend.
Further down the list, despite being on Paramount+ for a few weeks now, The Lost City actually increased its box office from last week, bumping up 15% with $1.7 million.
Top Gun: Maverick also took the Per Theater average with $26,188 in each of those 4,735 theaters it played in.