After a Memorial Day weekend for the record books, Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick” continued to bring in big business from positive word-of-mouth, and its second weekend might be even more impressive than its first.
The long-awaited sequel took in $25 million on Friday, which would be impressive for any movie, but is more so by the fact that it’s a second weekend Friday that doesn’t include previews. For a comparison, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” only made $17.1 million on its second Friday.
It was a great sign for “Maverick’s” second weekend, which ended up making an estimated $86 million, down just 32% from its opening weekend. For context, that was slightly more than the second weekend for “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which made $84.5 million its sophomore frame, and quite a bit more than the second weekends for both “Doctor Strange” ($61.8m) and “The Batman” ($66.5m). In fact, Tom Cruise has now followed his newly-set Memorial Day weekend record with a record for the smallest drop for a movie that opened over $100 million. In fact, “Maverick’s” second weekend take of $86 million is $20 million more than Cruise’s previous opening record.
More importantly, “Maverick” has now grossed $291.6 million domestically, absolutely smashing Cruise’s previous top gross for a movie, the $234.3 million made by “War of the Worlds” in 2005, as well as surpassing Cruise’s last movie, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout,” which made $220.2 million in North America. “Maverick” is well on its way to becoming Cruise’s first movie to gross $300 million domestically, which should happen sometime in the next couple days.
“Top Gun: Maverick” continues to do gangbusters overseas, where it took in another $81.7 million to bring its international total to $257 million. With that, “Maverick” has made over half a billion worldwide in less than two weeks, despite having to face-off against Universal’s juggernaut “Jurassic World: Dominion” in a few markets.
“Doctor Strange” is inching closer to $400 million, which would make it the first movie of 2022 to hit that milestone in North America. It remained in second place with $9.3 million, down 42% from last weekend. Its $389 million domestic gross, so far, makes it only the second movie since 2019 to make that amount, although the box office still has a ways to go before it’s back to any semblance of “normal.” In brighter news, Marvel’s latest has crossed the $900 million mark globally with the $520.7 million its made overseas.
20th Century’s animated “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” proved to be a one-week affair, as it tanked in its second weekend, dropping 64% from its opening to $4.5 million, though still remaining in third place. It has made $22.2 million domestically and probably won’t be in theaters very much longer.
DreamWorks Animation’s “The Bad Guys” bumped up to fourth place with $3.3 million over another Universal release, “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” which took fifth place with $3 million, down 48% from Memorial Day weekend. “The Bad Guys” has now grossed $87.3 million as it sustains its business with little family competition, while “Downton Abbey” only has made $35.7 million and is more likely to get dumped from American theaters to make way for the aforementioned “Jurassic World.”
Daniels’ quirky action-comedy “Everything Everywhere All at Once” crossed the $60 million mark with another $2 million (down just 18% from Memorial Day weekend) while notching back up to sixth place.
Also, a Tamil-language Indian release titled “Vikram” was released into 465 theaters this weekend, where it grossed roughly $1.8 million, enough for it to open in seventh place.
There were actually two other new movies in wide release, both horror movies, as David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart, took on Chloe Okuno’s “Watcher,” starring Maika Monroe (“It Follows”). “Crimes” opened slightly wider into 773 theaters (vs. 764 for “Watcher”), but it didn’t really matter, as Cronenberg’s movie only grossed $1.1 million over the weekend to just sneak into the top 10. “Watcher” opened outside the top 10 with $815,000, both averaging a little over $1,000 per theater.
For whatever reason, Sony decided to re-release Jared Leto‘s “Morbius” into over 1,000 theaters this weekend, maybe to take advantage of social media memes that weren’t meant to be complimentary. It did get a bump up from last weekend with roughly $300,000, but that was well outside the top 10, and it’s still struggling to get to $75 million.
Only 19 players had “The Bad Guys” beating “Downton Abbey” for fourth place in this week’s Gold Derby box office prediction game and only 28 players had “Top Gun” making more than $75 million in its second weekend. Those two things alone are going to make the difference with this week’s standings. Incidentally, no less than 63 Gold Derby players got a perfect 6 out of 6 score on last week’s game, although only three players (“Max,” “MonStar,” and “MellowDrama”) scored over 100,000 points.
On Friday (actually Thursday night), Universal releases “Jurassic World: Dominion” the long-awaited third chapter and conclusion to the blockbuster trilogy. Check back on Wednesday to see how it might fare against the seemingly unstoppable Tom Cruise.
Update (6/6/2022): Turns out “Top Gun: Maverick” did even better than the Sunday estimate. It actually grossed $90 million domestically over the weekend. That means the weekend-to-week end drop was really only 29%.
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