Maverick’ Is The Biggest Action Movie Since ‘The Dark Knight’

With $578 million in domestic box office, Paramount and Skydance’s Top Gun: Maverick has passed the inflation-adjusted domestic total of Tim Burton’s Batman ($251 million in 1989/$576 million adjusted) and Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles ($120 million in 1974/$578 million adjusted) to become the 57th biggest grosser ever in terms of North American tickets sold. Among non-fantastical (no superpowers, no wizards or dinosaurs, no fighting robots, etc.) action-adventure movies, it sits somewhere between (depending on how you define an action movie) ninth and sixth. In terms of real-world action dramas, it has sold more tickets than any such Hollywood offering since The Dark Knight. That’s bitterly ironic considering Chris Nolan’s critically acclaimed, zeitgeist-shaping Batman/Joker epic (a huge-scaled drama mostly about city politics) was among the first comic book superhero movies to approximate established action genres.

Where Top Gun: Maverick sits among the biggest-grossing action flicks…

Top Gun: Maverick is currently behind (loose definition of a non-fantastical “action movie”) Around the World in 80 Days ($42 million in 1956/$591 million adjusted), Goldfinger ($51 million in 1964/$606 million adjusted), Beverly Hills Cop ($234 million in 1984/$616 million adjusted), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ($102 million in 1969/$646 million adjusted), The Dark Knight (a zero-superpowers action drama that grossed $534 million in 2008 for a $681 million adjusted cume), Thunderball ($65 million in 1965/$684 million adjusted), Ben-Hur (a religious drama that ends before Jesus is resurrected and climaxes with one of the most incredible action sequences in cinematic history which earned $74 million in 1959 for an $897 million adjusted cume), Jaws ($260 million in 1975/$1.172 billion adjusted) and Titanic ($659 million in 1997 and 2012/$1.2 billion adjusted). Your definition of “action movie” may vary.

The second half of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws has its share of “three scared men fighting a shark while in a boat in the middle of the sea” action sequences. Beverly Hills Cop opens with a frantic vehicle chase and closes with Eddie Murphy and his cop friends invading the bad guy’s mansion and just massacring the hell out of them. Around the World in 80 Days may be pushing it, but Top Gun: Maverick will be past that film’s adjusted gross by Sunday night. Heck, it’ll pass Beverly Hills Cop in the next week and change and might surpass the Robert Redford/Paul Newman action comedy western by the end of July unless it inexplicably drops dead. It’s more likely to keep going and going and pass $600 million by Sunday or Monday.

The Dark Knight was among the first comic book superhero movies to try genre appropriation.

It will then pass The Last Jedi ($620 million) and The Avengers ($623 million) to become the ninth biggest unadjusted domestic grossers ever. And if you think of action movies, fantastical or otherwise, as “the hero” fighting “the villains” with fights, shoot-outs, vehicle battles and related carnage? ell, then Top Gun: Maverick is the biggest-such non-fantastical offering (sorry, but T’Challa has superpowers) since Chris Nolan’s explicitly real-world Batman/Joker sequel 14 years ago. That film was groundbreaking not just because it was a terrific action thriller and piercing moral melodrama. It was an early example of superhero cinema approximating genre filmmaking. It still stands out as one of the few to wholly commit to the bit (it’s a genre flick first and a superhero movie second) right up to the “two guilt-ridden heroes stand atop rubble begging a villain for mercy” epilogue.

Kevin Feige made a point of selling the post-Avengers MCU movies as placing superheroes amid differing genres. He sold Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a conspiracy thriller, Ant-Man as a heist flick and Spider-Man: Homecoming as a teen coming-of-age comedy. It was a shrewd move and not entirely inaccurate. It helped diversify a slowly increasing number of MCU and DC Films comic book flicks and helped these films stand out from the tentpole competition. Why see The Mummy or Solo, which were retrofitted to be a conventional superhero origin story, when you could watch the genuine article, which also scratched a specific genre itch? That soon became “Why watch a western when you can watch Logan?” or “Why watch King Arthur and the Legend of the Sword when you can watch Aquaman?”

Top Gun 2 is the first real-world actioner to compete with MCU/DC flicks since Furious 7.

Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick is an all-too-rare example of moviegoers showing up in droves for the genuine article. It’s not entirely alone. Skyfall earned $304 million domestic in 2012. The Fast Saga has grown even more popular since Fast Five took the series in the summer of 2011 to A-level action spectacle territory, culminating in the $353 million-grossing Furious 7 in early 2015 just months after American Sniper earned $350 million domestic. Nonetheless, Skyfall was a decade ago, and moviegoers have mostly abandoned most pure genre films for the Marvel/DC superhero variety over the last several years. And, yes, I blame audiences at least as much as studios since the theatrical product (in terms of all genres, be they romantic comedies, westerns, social dramas, thrillers and musicals) has been there week in and week out.

It’s an optimistic sign or merely a bottle of water amid a blazing hot desert that audiences will show up for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and The Batman *and* Top Gun: Maverick. To be fair, it’s not entirely the fault of the superhero cinema industrial complex, as Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible II was the last “real world” action movie to top the global box office (with $545 million) way back in 2020. And even it lost the domestic crown to the $260 million-grossing The Grinch. After that, the top of the food chain was occupied by Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Optimus Prime and Spider-Man until Iron Man and The Dark Knight in the summer of 2008. It’s been an exceptionally long time since non-fantastical heroes ruled the domestic (let alone worldwide) box office.

Does Top Gun: Maverick represent a shift in moviegoing habits, or is it just lightning in a bottle?

Even in 2011, a year before The Avengers, it was a near-miracle that Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol earned $209 million domestic and $694 million worldwide (as Fast Five earned $210 million/$610 million) alongside the $350-$380 million/$1.1-$1.3 billion Transformers 3 and Harry Potter 7.2. Yet, in a grim irony, the 2020 slate was expected to be ruled mainly by the less-fantastical likes of F9, No Time to Die, Bad Boys for Life, Black Widow (which features mind control but few superpowers), Tenet (a tale of flesh-and-blood spies who use new time inversion science for otherwise conventional action set pieces), Mulan and Top Gun: Maverick. Yes, they would thrive alongside the more fantastical Sonic the Hedgehog, Wonder Woman 1984 and Eternals. The return of Pete Mitchell, James Bond and Mike Slattery was supposed to represent a comeback for real-world actioners.

Top Gun: Maverick, among the last of the Covid-delayed 2020 releases, certainly seems to be living up to (well, way above) its pre-Covid promise. Granted, the extent to which the Joseph Kosinski-directed film has scored with deeply irregular audiences, the ones who show up for the likes of (differing demographics aside) Black Panther, The Passion of the Christ and American Sniper, likely cannot be replicated. Ditto the robust business ($75 million-and-counting domestic) for Elvis showing that older/irregular audiences wanted an Elvis biopic as opposed to a newfound interest in old-school theatricals. However, if Bullet Train takes off in August and John Wick: Chapter 4 continues its upward trend next March, it could be a sign that there is a very real place for non-fantastical actioners outside of the (often impressive) VOD realm. That would be miracle number two.