Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick”
Source: Paramount
LOS ANGELES – “Top Gun: Maverick” skyrocketed to $124 million in its opening weekend, giving Tom Cruise his biggest domestic debut.
Outstanding actor, who made a name for himself as a fearless stuntman, has grossed more than $4.2 billion at the domestic box office since 1981 but has never had a movie before. which has more than $65 million in sales.
The Paramount and the film Skydance also grossed $124 million internationally, bringing its opening weekend total to $248 million. The studio expects the film to hit $151 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend. The film is likely to hold out for the next few weeks as it faces limited competition at the box office until Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion” release on June 10.
“The summer movie season is back,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “The performance of ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ is a great reminder that when you combine one of the ultimate true movie stars with great classic storytelling, audiences of all ages will flock to theaters to be part of a larger community than the movie-going experience of a lifetime.”
The grand opening for “Top Gun: Maverick” is a positive sign for the box office, which is still recovering from the ongoing pandemic. The film has attracted an older audience, a demographic that has coveted returning to cinemas more slowly since they began reopening in mid-2020.
About 29% of tickets sold on weekends are for shows before 3 p.m. and 35% for shows between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., according to EntTelligence. This suggests that a significant portion of ticket sales are for matinee screenings, a period when older audiences are more attracted.
Only 11% of tickets were sold for shows after 9pm. According to figures from Paramount, 55% of the audience is over 35 years old.
According to EntTelligence, around 9 million moviegoers are expected to see “Top Gun: Maverick” in its first three days in theaters. This is more than four times the number of two million patrons who saw the original “Top Gun” in theaters when it premiered in 1986.
Excluding Thursday’s pre-shows, 32% of tickets were sold for premium format shows, with an average ticket price of $16.32. Non-premium tickets cost an average of about $12.86 each, EntTelligence reported.
The film’s strong achievement also comes just weeks after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway reveal it already purchased 68.9 million shares of Paramount to build a $2.6 billion stake by the end of March.
Paramount was Berkshire’s 18th largest stock at the end of the first quarter. New stakes add another streaming property into the portfolio of Berkshire, whose top holding is Apple.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal is the distributor of “Jurassic World: Dominion.”
