‘Elvis’ Bests ‘Top Gun 2’ With $31 Million Weekend

In a kind of skewed “nature is healing” moment, two big movies scored strong Fri-Sun grosses and essentially tied for first place amid the last weekend in June. Paramount and Skydance’s poor, pathetic Top Gun: Maverick earned just $29.6 million in its fifth weekend, dropping 34% for a mere $521 million domestic cume after a month in theaters. What’s worse is that Tom Cruise’s Maverick’s $29.6 million gross is not the second-biggest fifth-weekend earner as estimates argued but merely the third-biggest behind such lightweights as Titanic ($30.1 million in 1998) and Avatar ($42 million in 2010). Yes, the $170 million legacy sequel cracked $1 billion worldwide over the weekend, but the most important variable is that it placed a sad, shameful second in its fifth weekend of release. Good luck keeping it off Paramount+ before 120 days now, Tom!!

Jokes aside, Warner Bros.’ Elvis topped the domestic box office over its opening weekend. Rank is almost always irrelevant; the raw grosses are what matters. Whether first or fifth, a $31 million launch for Baz Luhrmann’s 2.75-hour rock biopic is a win. The film, starring Austin Butler as Elvis and a deeply against-type Tom Hanks as Colonel Parker, earned solid reviews (78% fresh with a 6.8/10 average critic score from Rotten Tomatoes), an A- from Cinemascore and a 94% user score from *verified* Rotten Tomatoes voters (verified means they had to buy a ticket, so this wasn’t a review-bombing situation). The adult-skewing melodrama got a shot in the arm when Top Gun: Maverick soared to infinity and beyond partially by playing to older and irregular moviegoers who all thus saw the theatrical trailer for Elvis. Yes, Tom Cruise did Tom Hanks a solid.

Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of Stephen Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, a $7 million, R-rated economic mobility drama starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper that WB opened to $39 million. Since then (and before then with the likes of The Blind Side, The Hangover and Inception), The Dream Factory has movies like Gravity, The LEGO Movie, American Sniper, San Andreas, It, Dunkirk, Ready Player One, Crazy Rich Asians, A Star Is Born, Joker and (on a Covid curve) Dune into relative theatrical smash hits. When WB’s marketing is in the zone (see also: Godzilla Vs. Kong), nobody does it better. That this terrific debut arriving just over a year after a heartbreaking miss with In the Heights shows they’ve still got it. Elvis scored the biggest Covid-era debut for a non-franchise title, just above the $30.4 million opening of Paramount’s The Lost City.

Heck, Elvis earned the biggest opening weekend for any “drama” since Universal and Sam Mendes’ 1917 ($37 million in January of 2020) and the biggest launch for an action-lite drama since James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari ($31.5 million) in November of 2019. More importantly, it along with the $23 million launch of The Black Phone shows that theatrical recovery is possible (and in-progress) for more than just Marvel movies and character-specific action spectaculars like Top Gun: Maverick, F9 and No Time to Die. I dare not presume that the so-called “regular movie” will fare any better in the new normal then it did the last four years before Covid, as the shift to streaming among general moviegoers for non-event flicks won’t just magically revert. But if “event movie” can still mean more than just a Marvel/DC superhero movie, well, your move Nope.