Despite being the film that was arguably the most affected by pandemic-related delays, Top Gun: Maverick continues to defy expectations, and has just broken yet another box office record for Paramount Pictures. After having just surpassed Titanic as the studio’s highest domestic-grossing film in their entire history, the film has now gone even further, crossing $600 million at the international box office to become Paramount’s highest grossing film globally — a record that, to quote the oft-used Berlin lyric, takes our breath away.
Maverick surpasses 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction to nab the top spot for Paramount, and continues to be the top earner for the studio this year, raking in cash as the summer’s biggest blockbuster, even against competition like Thor: Love and Thunder and the surprisingly successful Minions: The Rise of Gru. But not even the GentleMinions can compete with global audiences’ needs for speed, as Maverick has officially earned $602.5 million at the international box office, bringing its global total to a whopping $1.208 billion dollars.
The Tom Cruise-led action film, which follows titular captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell as he is tasked with training a new group of Top Gun graduates for a seemingly impossible mission, is the all-time biggest live action movie for Paramount Pictures in twenty-eight markets, including the United Kingdom, Australia, France, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and South Africa, among others. The film has been so successful that it’s made returns to both IMAX and XD theaters across the United States, which are usually notorious for their short viewings windows — though, if you’ve seen the film in IMAX, you’ll know it’s well worth the investment to see those stunning F-18 flight sequences.
Among other records, Maverick has also returned to the top spot at the international box office, and is one of only forty-nine movies in cinema history to gross over a billion dollars at the box office, joining giants like The Avengers, Jurassic Park, and Avatar. The fact that Maverick is only a legacy sequel and not part of a franchise like the many Marvel movies that have achieved similar box office fame makes its success even more impressive — for context, the original Top Gun grossed $353.8 million at the box office back in 1986, a fraction of what its successor has made.
Top Gun: Maverick, also starring Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis, and Val Kilmer, is playing in theaters now.