Let’s just get this out of the way: Top Gun Maverick is one of the most important and successful movies we’ll ever discuss on this website.
Not only has this movie knocked out every other Memorial Day Weekend release so that it is now the top MDW box office success of all time. But up until this weekend, it was debatable just how big this movie was going to be. It certainly had much riding on it. Yesterday, Manu Lopez did a very good job of laying out not only why this movie is important but also set a 55% hold as a threshold for success.
Top Gun Maverick is an important film because it’s yet another highly successful box office winner that throws away the Hollywood playbook we’ve been seeing for a few years. The legacy character is strong and confident instead of forlorn and usurped. Identity groups and demographics have almost no part in the script. There are no postmodern insertions of gender theory. It’s just a solid, straightforward action movie about heroism.
Of course, we now know that the analysts were utterly wrong and instead of a big dip like many were predicting, Top Gun Maverick is holding on in a way that previously was unbelievable. In fact, the film has only dropped 33% in its second weekend! That is astounding, completely and totally astounding.
From Variety:
The studio is projecting an $84.5 million haul through Sunday, a stunning 33% dive from its $124 million three-day opening. A soft decline like that would be a superlative achievement, 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.
I suppose that means we should all consider this movie a multi record-breaker that we simply do not know where the ceiling might be. And given that the movie is unashamedly pro-America, pro-hero, and pro-confidence. This is a return to the hero archetype from the last decades before postmodernism came into being and all of our legacy characters had to be diminished. Maverick isn’t a weakling, Maverick is every bit as awesome and cool as he was the last time you saw him almost forty years ago. Racial injustice and sexual orientation aren’t a major part of the movie. Instead, this is about the individual. This is about knowing how much to protect someone rather than let them fly.
So this is a hugely successful film, but why is it so important? The reason is a line you might recall from another film: “show me the money.”
We all know that movies often copycat earlier movies that were greatly successful. Movie studios and production companies are very interested in figuring out where audiences are and what they can do to capitalize on things they perceive to be hot. So what has been hot lately? Spider-Man No Way Home was hot, hot, hot. Top Gun Maverick is hot hot hot. Guess what is not not not? Crowds showed up to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in droves. Then the crowd levels crashed — it had one of the worst drops of all modern Marvel movies, if not the worst, and that is a continuing trend with recent Disney-led Marvel movies. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is also another huge winner this year. The Batman is less so but still something studios can look to for signals of what works.
Eventually, studios are going to have to return to the Top Gun Maverick formula. There are hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars on the line if they choose to continue with the strategy they’ve adopted since about 2016. It’s ultimately a failed experiment. Top Gun Maverick proves it. Audiences are there and their wallets are ready if studios simply follow Top Gun, Spider-Man, Batman, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc. If studios follow Disney, a company that has dropped from the fifth-highest perceived global corporation to the bottom-half in just three years, let them have at it. But just like Obi-Wan Kenobi is failing, so too is Top Gun rising. If studios want to succeed, I know who they’re going to be chasing in the years ahead.
And that’s great news for all of us.
Now put those Taiwan patches back on all your leather jackets.
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