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Top Gun: Maverick

In “Top Gun: Maverick,” the breathless, gravity and logic-defying “ Top Gun ” sequel that somehow makes all the sense in the world despite landing more than three decades after the late Tony Scott ’s original, an admiral refers to Tom Cruise ’s navy aviator Pete Mitchell—call sign “ Maverick ”—as “the fastest man alive.” It’s a chuckle-inducing scene that recalls one in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” when Alec Baldwin ’s high-ranking Alan Hunley deems Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, “the living manifestation of destiny.” In neither of these instances are Cruise’s co-stars exclusively referring to his make-believe screen personas. They are also (or rather, primarily) talking about the ongoing legacy of Cruise the actor himself. 

Truth be told, our fearless and ever-handsome action hero earns both appraisals with a generous side of applause, being one of the precious remnants of bona-fide movie superstardoms of yore, a slowly dwindling they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to notion of immortality these days. Indeed, Cruise’s consistent commitment to Hollywood showmanship—along with the insane levels of physical craft he unfailingly puts on the table by insisting to do his own stunts—I would argue, deserves the same level of high-brow respect usually reserved for the fully-method sorts such as Daniel Day-Lewis . Even if you somehow overlook the fact that Cruise is one of our most gifted and versatile dramatic and comedic actors with the likes of “ Born on the Fourth of July ,” “ Magnolia ,” “ Tropic Thunder ,” and “ Collateral ” under his belt, you will never forget why you show up to a Tom Cruise movie, thanks in large part to his aforesaid enduring dedication. How many other household names and faces can claim to guarantee “a singular movie event” these days and deliver each time, without exceptions?

In that regard, you will be right at home with “Top Gun: Maverick,” director Joseph Kosinski ’s witty adrenaline booster that allows its leading producer to be exactly what he is—a star—while upping the emotional and dramatic stakes of its predecessor with a healthy (but not overdone) dose of nostalgia. After a title card that explains what “Top Gun” is—the identical one that introduced us to the world of crème-de-la-crème Navy pilots in 1986—we find Maverick in a role on the fringes of the US Navy, working as an undaunted test pilot against the familiar backdrop of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone.” You won’t be surprised that soon enough, he gets called on a one-last-job type of mission as a teacher to a group of recent Top Gun graduates. Their assignment is just as obscure and politically cuckoo as it was in the first movie. There is an unnamed enemy—let’s called it Russia because it’s probably Russia—some targets that need to be destroyed, a flight plan that sounds nuts, and a scheme that will require all successful Top Gun recruits to fly at dangerously low altitudes. But can it be done?

It’s a long shot, if the details of the operation—explained to the aviator hopefuls in a rather “It can’t be done” style reminiscent of “ Mission: Impossible ”—are any indication. But you will be surprised that more appealing than the prospect of the bonkers mission here is the human drama that co-scribes Ehren Kruger , Eric Warren Singer , and Christopher McQuarrie spin from a story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks . For starters, the group of potential recruits include Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw ( Miles Teller , terrific), the son of the dearly departed “Goose,” whose accidental death still haunts Maverick as much as it does the rest of us. And if Rooster’s understandable distaste of him wasn’t enough (despite Maverick’s protective instincts towards him), there are skeptics of Maverick’s credentials— Jon Hamm ’s Cyclone, for instance, can’t understand why Maverick’s foe-turned-friend Iceman ( Val Kilmer , returning with a tearjerker of a part) insists on him as the teacher of the mission. Further complicating the matters is Maverick’s on-and-off romance with Penny Benjamin (a bewitching Jennifer Connelly ), a new character that was prominently name-checked in the original movie, as some will recall. What an entanglement through which one is tasked to defend their nation and celebrate a certain brand of American pride …

In a different package, all the brouhaha jingoism and proud fist-shaking seen in “Top Gun: Maverick” could have been borderline insufferable. But fortunately Kosinski—whose underseen and underrated “Only The Brave” will hopefully find a second life now—seems to understand exactly what kind of movie he is asked to navigate. In his hands, the tone of “Maverick” strikes a fine balance between good-humored vanity and half-serious self-deprecation, complete with plenty of quotable zingers and emotional moments that catch one off-guard.

In some sense, what this movie takes most seriously are concepts like friendship, loyalty, romance, and okay, bromance. Everything else that surrounds those notions—like patriotic egotism—feels like playful winks and embellishments towards fashioning an old-school action movie. And because this mode is clearly shared by the entirety of the cast—from a memorable Ed Harris that begs for more screen time to the always great Glen Powell as the alluringly overconfident “ Hangman ,” Greg Tarzan Davis as “Coyote,” Jay Ellis as “ Payback ,” Danny Ramirez as “Fanboy,” Monica Barbaro as “ Phoenix ,” and Lewis Pullman as “Bob”—“Top Gun: Maverick” runs fully on its enthralling on-screen harmony at times. For evidence, look no further than the intense, fiery chemistry between Connelly and Cruise throughout—it’s genuinely sexy stuff—and (in a nostalgic nod to the original), a rather sensual beach football sequence, shot with crimson hues and suggestive shadows by Claudio Miranda . 

Still, the action sequences—all the low-altitude flights, airborne dogfights as well as Cruise on a motorcycle donned in his original Top Gun leather jacket—are likewise the breathtaking stars of “Maverick,” often accompanied by Harold Faltermeyer ’s celebratory original score (aided by cues from Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe ). Reportedly, all the flying scenes—a pair of which are pure hell-yes moments for Cruise—were shot in actual U.S. Navy F/A-18s, for which the cast had to be trained for during a mind-boggling process. The authentic work that went into every frame generously shows. As the jets cut through the atmosphere and brush their target soils in close-shave movements—all coherently edited by Eddie Hamilton —the sensation they generate feels miraculous and worthy of the biggest screen one can possibly find. Equally worthy of that big screen is the emotional strokes of “Maverick” that pack an unexpected punch. Sure, you might be prepared for a second sky-dance with “Maverick,” but perhaps not one that might require a tissue or two in its final stretch.

Available in theaters May 27th. 

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

• Tom Cruise as Captain Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell
• Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw
• Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin
• Jon Hamm as Vice Admiral Cyclone
• Glen Powell as Hangman
• Lewis Pullman as Bob
• Charles Parnell as Warlock
• Bashir Salahuddin as Coleman
• Monica Barbaro as Phoenix
• Jay Ellis as Payback
• Danny Ramirez as Fanboy
• Greg Tarzan Davis as Coyote
• Ed Harris as Rear Admiral
• Val Kilmer as Admiral Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky
• Manny Jacinto as Fritz
• Chris Lebenzon
• Eddie Hamilton
• Christopher McQuarrie
• Ehren Kruger
• Eric Warren Singer

Cinematographer

• Claudio Miranda
• Hans Zimmer
• Harold Faltermeyer
• Lorne Balfe

Writer (based on characters created by)

• Jack Epps Jr.
• Joseph Kosinski

Writer (story by)

• Justin Marks
• Peter Craig

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‘top gun: maverick’ ties as the all-time best reviewed tom cruise film.

‘Top Gun 2’ ties with ‘Mission: Impossible — Fallout’ to rank as the highest-scoring Cruise movie on Rotten Tomatoes.

By Pamela McClintock

Pamela McClintock

Senior Film Writer

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Hollywood summer tentpoles aren’t necessarily known for being critical darlings. There are always exceptions, of course. One of those is Top Gun: Maverick , which is finally hitting theaters today after being grounded for two years because of the pandemic.

From Paramount and Skydance, the pic ranks as the best-reviewed movie of Tom Cruise ‘s prolific career, alongside the most recent installment in the Mission: Impossible series.

The movie presently sports a stellar 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, the same score as Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018) . It’s possible the score for Top Gun 2 could move a point or two in either direction as final reviews are tallied.

The first Top Gun (1986) may have been a huge commercial success, but it didn’t garner the same respect of reviewers. Top Gun’ s score is 58 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Cruise’s lowest score on Rotten Tomatoes is 1988’s Cocktail (7 percent).

From Paramount and Skydance, Top Gun: Maverick   earned $19.3 million in previews this week , the highest preview number in Paramount’s history and the best preview for a Memorial Day release.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski , the long-awaited sequel to the iconic film returns Cruise as the ultra-gifted and confident Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell.

The film co-stars Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell and Ed Harris, while Val Kilmer also makes a brief appearance as “Iceman,” Maverick’s onetime nemesis turned pal. The film also features Lady Gaga’s ballad “Hold My Hand,” while the producing team includes Jerry Bruckheimer, who guided the original film.

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Top Gun: Maverick

The story involves Maverick confronting his past while training a group of younger Top Gun graduates, including the son of his deceased best friend, for a dangerous mission. The story involves Maverick confronting his past while training a group of younger Top Gun graduates, including the son of his deceased best friend, for a dangerous mission. The story involves Maverick confronting his past while training a group of younger Top Gun graduates, including the son of his deceased best friend, for a dangerous mission.

• Joseph Kosinski
• Jack Epps Jr.
• Peter Craig
• Jennifer Connelly
• Miles Teller
• 4.3K User reviews
• 439 Critic reviews
• 78 Metascore
• 108 wins & 235 nominations total

Top cast 97

• Capt. Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell

• Penny Benjamin

• Lt. Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw

• Adm. Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky

• CWO4 Bernie 'Hondo' Coleman

• Adm. Beau 'Cyclone' Simpson

• Adm. Solomon 'Warlock' Bates

• Lt. Natasha 'Phoenix' Trace

• Lt. Robert 'Bob' Floyd

• Lt. Reuben 'Payback' Fitch

• Lt. Mickey 'Fanboy' Garcia

• Lt. Jake 'Hangman' Seresin

• Lt. Neil 'Omaha' Vikander

• Lt. Billy 'Fritz' Avalone

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• Trivia At the insistence of Tom Cruise , minimal green screen and CGI aerial shots exist in the film, and even the close up cockpit shots were taken during real in-flight sequences. This meant that much of the cast had to undergo extensive G-force training sessions to withstand the physical demands of G-force pressures during flights.
• Goofs At 1h12'10" Coyote is in G-LOC, releases the stick and his aircraft falls towards the ground. Super-hornet are equipped with auto GCAS (automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System), which would react to the situation and take control to climb and level at a safe altitude with no obstacles.

Rear Admiral : Maverick. Thirty-plus years of service. Combat medals. Citations. Only man to shoot down three enemy planes in the last 40 years.

[Cain looks through pages of Maverick's records]

Rear Admiral : 'Distinguished.' 'Distinguished.' 'Distinguished.' Yet you can't get a promotion, you won't retire, and, despite your best efforts, you refuse to die. You should be at least a two-star admiral by now, if not a senator. Yet here you are: Captain. Why is that?

Maverick : It's one of life's mysteries, sir.

Rear Admiral : This isn't a joke. I asked you a question.

Maverick : I'm where I belong, sir.

Rear Admiral : Well, the navy doesn't see it that way. Not anymore.

Rear Admiral : These planes you've been testing, Captain, one day, sooner or later, they won't need pilots at all. Pilots that need to sleep, eat, take a piss. Pilots that disobey orders. All you did was buy some time for those men out there. The future is coming, and you're not in it.

[Cain faces the officer by the door]

Rear Admiral : Escort this man off the base. Take him to his quarters. Wait with him while he packs his gear. I want him on the road to North Island within the hour.

[surprised look on Maverick's face]

Maverick : North Island, sir?

Rear Admiral : Call came in with impeccable timing, right as I was driving here to ground your ass once and for all. It galls me to say it, but... for reasons known only to the Almighty and your guardian angel, you've been called back to Top Gun.

Maverick : Sir?

Rear Admiral : You are dismissed, Captain.

[Maverick proceeds to leave Cain's office]

Rear Admiral : The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction.

[Maverick turns around]

Maverick : Maybe so, sir. But not today.

• Crazy credits "Top Gun 001: Tom Cruise" is listed among the other pilots who worked on the film.
• Connections Featured in Conan: Tom Cruise (2019)
• Soundtracks Danger Zone From Top Gun (1986) Original Soundtrack Written by Giorgio Moroder & Tom Whitlock Performed by Kenny Loggins Courtesy of Columbia Records By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment

User reviews 4.3K

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• May 27, 2022 (United States)
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• $170,000,000 (estimated)
• $718,732,821
• $126,707,459
• May 29, 2022
• $1,495,696,292

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• IMAX 6-Track
• 12-Track Digital Sound

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Top Gun: Maverick named best film of 2022 by Rotten Tomatoes

‘the film is a true legacy sequel,’ clarisse loughrey writes in her review, article bookmarked.

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Top Gun: Maverick has been named the best film of 2022 by the American review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes .

The Tom Cruise sequel scored six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Editing, Sound, VFX , Adapted Screenplay, and Lady Gaga and BloodPop’s original song “Hold My Hand”.

Rotten Tomatoes revealed that the film landed a 96 per cent certified fresh grade from critics off 464 reviews and a 99 per cent fresh on their audience metre.

Other films that made it to the top 10 list are The Banshees of Inisherin, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, and Turning Red, among others.

Last year, Top Gun: Maverick surpassed Titanic at the North American box office and made history by becoming the seventh biggest film ever at the domestic box office, which counts the US and Canada, having earned $662m (£557m) in ticket sales.

On a global level, the film surpassed $900m (£737m) at the box office, and touched the $1bn threshold.

Maverick has enjoyed strong reviews following its release , with Cruise’s performance and the film’s aerial stunt work receiving particular praise.

In a four-star review for The Independent , Clarisse Loughrey said: “ Top Gun : Maverick really isn’t packed with the kind of craven nostalgia that we’re used to these days. It’s smarter, subtler, and wholly more humanistic.

“The film is a true legacy sequel.”

Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, Jennifer Connelly, Glen Powell, Ed Harris and Val Kilmer also feature in the film alongside Cruise.

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Last month, Connelly was pushing for Cruise to receive an Oscar nod for Best Actor.

“He’s extraordinary,” she said.

“He does an amazing job in the movie. He’s extraordinary as a person and fantastic as an actor, and I think that he is just perfect. He embodies that character so beautifully, and I think he absolutely deserves it.

“I think that the film is a really well-made film and it’s really hard to make a film like that,” Connelly continued.

“Also, thinking about Tom’s work, think of the things that he did for that role. Besides all the stuff on the ground and how wonderful he is in those scenes and creating those relationships… I think the relationship he has with Miles’s character is so beautiful and moving. But the work that he did to accomplish those flying sequences, it’s something else.”

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Top Gun: Maverick review: A high-flying sequel gets it right

The need for speed comes with a fresh young cast, but the Cruise control remains.

In Top Gun: Maverick 's opening scene, someone makes the mistake of asking Tom Cruise to take his fighter jet to Mach 9. He pauses, then flashes that megawatt Cheshire grin. Never mind that it's a practice run; there is only one Mach he knows, and it is 10 (or maybe 10.2). That's because he's a maverick, the Maverick — Captain Pete Mitchell of the United States Navy, a rogue's rogue for whom clouds part and Hans Zimmer synths soar.

He's also 36 years older than the cocky young lieutenant he played on screen in the 1986 original , a bare fact that the sequel (in theaters May 27) both elides and celebrates in a movie whose bright stripes and broad strokes feel somehow bombastic and tenderheartedly nostalgic at the same time. Imagine a world where motorcyclists scoff at helmets, all bars burst into jukebox singalongs, and the U.S. military is simply an unblemished agent for good. A few decades ago you didn't have to, because you lived in it; Top Gun: Maverick can because it never left.

Inevitably, a few things have changed: Lady Gaga is on the soundtrack now , and there's a whole new class of lion-cub recruits. But that's still Kenny Loggins' " Danger Zone " chugging over the title credits, and Maverick is still the fastest man alive in an F-14, even if he's never managed to exceed the lowly rank of Captain. "You should be at least a two-star admiral by now, or a Senator," Ed Harris 's Rear Admiral grouses early on, before grudgingly sending him off to the Top Gun base in San Diego. Maverick's constant insubordination and looming obsolescence should have gotten him discharged years ago, he reminds him; instead, he's been saved by an old friend, Iceman ( Val Kilmer ), now an admiral himself.

There's a reason for that intervention: a uranium plant in a heavily guarded secret bunker that needs to be eliminated before it becomes operational for the enemy. (What enemy? Don't ask, don't tell.) And only jets can infiltrate it, if the Academy's ten best recruits can be taught to thread the needle and get out of there alive. Leading the team is Maverick's new job, though the bossman there (a scowling Jon Hamm) is not exactly overjoyed to welcome him — and a promising young pilot called Rooster ( Miles Teller , in a kicky little mustache) even less enthused. That's because Rooster's parents were Goose and Carole (Anthony Edwards and Meg Ryan, who appear only in misty flashbacks), and all he knows is that Pete had something to do with him getting pulled from the fast-track flight program years ago.

Otherwise, Rooster's main rival amongst the new hopefuls is Hangman ( Hidden Figures ' great Glen Powell), a fellow pilot whose smirky antagonism recalls the last movie's Iceman rivalry in everything except the frosted tips (Powell is a more natural kind of blonde, but the square-jawed swagger and resting smug face play the same). Director Joseph Kosinski ( TRON: Legacy ) revels in the sonic-boom rush of their many flight scenes, sending his jets swooping and spinning in impossible, equilibrium-rattling arcs. On the ground, too, his camera caresses every object in its view, almost as if he's making a rippling ad for America itself: The unfurling snap of a boat sail; the gleaming Formica in a desert rest-stop diner; golden bodies playing touch football in the California surf while a magic-hour sun goes down.

That nationalistic glow extends to Maverick's courting of a former paramour, Jennifer Connelly , but there's a bittersweet sentimentality in their reconnection, the kind of unhurried adult romance that doesn't make it on screen much anymore. (A brief interlude with Kilmer, who has largely lost his voice to cancer , is also surprisingly moving.) Kosinksi, of course, has to make his Maverick work with or without the context of the original, and the script, by Peter Craig ( The Batman ) and Justin Marks ( The Jungle Book ) toggles deftly between winking callbacks and standard big-beat action stuff meant to stand on its own. Teller and Powell are breezily appealing, actors at the apex of their youth and beauty, though the movie still belongs in almost every scene to Cruise. At this point in his career, he's not really playing characters so much as variations on a theme — the theme being, perhaps, The Last Movie Star. And in the air up there, he stands alone. Grade: B+

Related content:

• Tom Cruise revisits Goose's Top Gun death in Lady Gaga's 'Hold My Hand' music video
• The sky's the limit for Top Gun: Maverick hotshot Glen Powell
• Val Kilmer says he feels 'a lot better than I sound' after tracheotomy due to throat cancer

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Review: Tom Cruise flies high — again — in the exhilarating ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

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“If you think, you’re dead.” That’s one of Tom Cruise’s more memorable lines from “Top Gun,” a cautionary reminder that when your engine flames out or an enemy pilot locks you in their sights, hesitation means death. Inadvertently, the line also suggests the best way to enjoy Tony Scott’s immortal 1986 blockbuster: Best not to think too long or hard about the dumb plot, the threadbare romance, the fetishization of U.S. military might or the de rigueur plausibility issues. The key is to succumb, like Cruise’s high-flying Maverick himself, to a world of unchecked instinct and pure sensation, to savor the movie’s symphony of screaming jets and booming Giorgio Moroder, not to mention all those lovingly photographed torsos and tighty-whities.

Jets still scream and muscles still gleam in the ridiculous and often ridiculously entertaining “Top Gun: Maverick,” though in several respects, the movie evinces — and rewards — an unusual investment of brainpower. I’d go further and say that it offers its own decisive reversal of Maverick’s dubious logic: It has plenty on its mind, and it’s gloriously alive.

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A lot of consideration and calculation have clearly gone into this long-aborning blockbuster sequel, insofar as Cruise (one of the producers) and his collaborators have taken such clear pains to maintain continuity with the events, if not the style, of the first film. That’s no small thing, more than 30 years after the fiery young Maverick lost Goose, made peace with Iceman and rode off into the annals of fictional U.S. Navy history. And rather than let bygones be bygones, the director Joseph Kosinski and a trio of screenwriters (Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Cruise’s favorite auteur-wingman, Christopher McQuarrie) have resurrected those threads of rivalry, tragedy and triumph and spun them into uncharted realms of male-weepie grandiosity.

Some of this continuity is a matter of basic story sense, rooted in a shrewd understanding of franchise mechanics and an equally savvy appeal to ’80s nostalgia. But it also has something to do with the 59-year-old Cruise’s close stewardship of his own superhuman image, a commitment that speaks to his talent as well as his monomania. And with the arguable exception of “Mission: Impossible’s” Ethan Hunt, few Cruise characters have felt as aligned with that monomania as Maverick. From the moment he entered the frame in ’86, sporting flippant aviator shades and riding a Kawasaki motorcycle, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell announced himself as a signature Cruise creation — a precision-tooled amalgam of underwear-dancing sex symbol (just three years after “Risky Business”) and the envelope-pushing, heights-scaling action star he would become.

These days, the need for speed still persists for both Cruise and Maverick, even if the latter does more flying than running. But for all the barriers he’s broken and all the miles he’s logged in his career as a Navy test pilot, Maverick occupies a state of self-willed professional stasis. Unwilling to be promoted into desk-job irrelevancy, he is a captain by rank and a rebel by nature. The opening sequence finds him playing Icarus with one of the Navy’s shiny new toys, thumbing his nose in the process at the first of the movie’s two glowering authoritarians. (They’re played by Ed Harris and Jon Hamm.) Old habits die hard, but so do the ghosts of the past, and Maverick, for all his reckless abandon in the cockpit, will soon find himself breaking his own rules by thinking more carefully, and tactically, than he’s ever had to do before.

Called back to the elite Navy training school where he flew planes, defied orders and irritated his peers with distinction, Maverick is charged with preparing the program’s best and brightest for a stealth attack on a far-flung uranium enrichment plant owned by some conveniently unidentified NATO-threatening entity. As impossible missions go, it makes the Death Star trench attack look like a grocery run — a tough assignment for Maverick’s 12 brilliant but still-untested pilots, played by actors including Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez and a terrific Glen Powell as a smug, know-it-all Iceman type. And then there’s the hotheaded Rooster (Miles Teller, sullen as only he can be), whose candidacy is complicated by the fact that his late father was Maverick’s wingman and best friend, Goose (the great Anthony Edwards, seen here in brief shards of footage from the first “Top Gun”). Talk about chickens coming home to roost.

Rooster’s background is a ludicrous contrivance. It’s also the perfect setup for the kind of rich, thorny cross-generational soap opera that — as much as its aspect-ratio-fluctuating flight sequences and its climactic surge of Lady Gaga — is this movie’s reason for being. Those planes may be powered by fuel, but “Top Gun: Maverick” runs on pure, unfiltered dad energy. Try not to smile whenever Cruise’s Maverick flashes a mischievous avuncular grin beneath his helmet and chases his young charges in F/A-18s all over the Mojave Desert, teaching them new moves while wasting no chance to reassert his own superiority. Back on the ground, Maverick and Rooster’s surrogate daddy-son tensions flare into the open, exacerbated by guilt, resentment and their recognition of their shared stubbornness.

The drama might have taken on an intriguingly Oedipal edge if the filmmakers had thought to bring back, say, Meg Ryan as Carole, Goose’s wife and Rooster’s mother. But here, with the exception of Monica Barbaro as one of Maverick’s most gifted proteges, women are few and far between, and even the more prominent ones get mostly perfunctory treatment. With no sign of Kelly McGillis as the Navy instructor who once took Maverick’s breath away, it falls to another flame, Penny (a lovely, underused Jennifer Connelly), to mix a few drinks, provide a flicker of romantic distraction and snuff out the first film’s lingering homoerotic vibes. Not that there are many such whiffs here, and more’s the pity: Kosinski, who previously directed Cruise in the shiny, empty science-fiction drama “Oblivion,” is a skilled craftsman with none of Scott’s horned-up filmmaking energy. (He does salute the original with an opening blast of “Danger Zone” and a rousing game of football in the surf, though the latter is more team-building than steam-building exercise.)

Scott’s admirers may miss that disreputable edge, the unrepentantly vulgar sensibility that made the original “Top Gun” a dreamy, voluptuous hoot. There’s some compensation in Kosinski’s fight and flight sequences, full of face-melting ascents, whiplash-inducing loop-de-loops and other airborne stunts that prove considerably more transporting and immersive than what the first “Top Gun” was able to accomplish. That’s only to be expected, given the more sophisticated hardware involved. Like any proper commercial for the military-industrial complex, “Top Gun: Maverick” teases the latest cutting-edge advances in aeronautics and defense technology, a field that has evolved roughly in step with an ever more digitally subsumed movie industry.

At the same time, thanks to Cruise and Kosinski’s unfashionable insistence on practical filmmaking and their refusal to lean too heavily on computer-generated visual effects, their sequel plays like a throwback in more than one sense. But the era that produced the first film has shifted, and “Top Gun: Maverick” is especially poignant in the ways, both subtle and overt, that it acknowledges the passage of time, the fading of youth and the shifting of its own status as a pop cultural phenomenon. The original was a risky, relatively low-budget underdog that somehow became a perfectly imperfect movie for its moment, soaring on the wings of its dreamy eroticism and recruitment-commercial aesthetics, a mega-hit soundtrack and an incandescent star. It ushered in a new era of decadence for its producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and for the many gung-ho American blockbusters they would keep cranking out.

“Top Gun: Maverick” is a longer, costlier and appreciably weightier affair, and its expanded emotional scope and heightened production values (including a score by the original film’s composer, Harold Faltermeyer) give it a classy, elegiac sheen; it’s like a hot summer diversion in prestige-dinosaur drag, or vice versa. As a rare big-budget Hollywood movie about men and women who fly without capes, it has a lot riding on it. Once set for a summer 2020 release but delayed almost two years by the pandemic, it arrives bearing the hopes and dreams of a tentatively resurgent industry that could use a non-Marvel theatrical hit. And as such, everything about its story — from the intergenerational conflict to the high stakes of Maverick’s mission to the rusted-out F-14s collecting dust at the periphery of the action — carries an unmistakable subtext. Is this movie one of the last gasps of a dying Hollywood empire? Or is its emotionally stirring, viscerally gripping and proudly old-fashioned storytelling the latest adrenaline shot that the industry so desperately needs?

It’s hard to consider any of this apart from Cruise, whose attention-grabbing actions during an earlier phase of the pandemic — shooting a video of himself going to see “Tenet” in a packed London theater , verbally lashing members of his “Mission: Impossible” crew for flouting COVID-19 protocols — suggest a man who’s placed the weight of an entire troubled industry on his own shoulders. His endless search for the perfect action vehicle has sometimes felt like a quest for some elusive fountain of Hollywood youth, and it’s led to gratifying highs ( “Edge of Tomorrow” ) and inexplicable lows ( “The Mummy” ). Like Maverick, to whom someone wise once said, “Son, your ego is writing checks that your body can’t cash,” Cruise just won’t quit, won’t give up, won’t listen to anyone who tells him no. As a sometime fan of Cruise’s egomania, at least when he’s dangling from a helicopter or literally running to catch a plane, I’m not really complaining.

And so there’s some irony and maybe even a hint of self-awareness in the fact that while Cruise owns just about every moment of this movie, another star winds up stealing it. As Iceman, Maverick’s old adversary turned wingman, mentor and ally, Val Kilmer haunts “Top Gun: Maverick” from its earliest moments but enters it surprisingly late, anchoring a perfectly timed, beautifully played scene that kicks the movie into emotional overdrive. Watching Ice as he greets and counsels Maverick, you may find yourself thinking about the actor playing him, about the recent toll on his health and the rickety trajectory of his own post-’80s and ’90s career, subjects that were illuminated by the recent documentary “Val.” In one fictional moment, he gives us something unmistakably, irreducibly real, partly by puncturing the fantasy of human invincibility that his co-star has never stopped trying to sell.

‘Top Gun: Maverick’

Rated: PG-13, for sequences of intense action, and some strong language Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes Playing: Starts May 27 in general release

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Named Rotten Tomatoes' Best Film of the Year

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This Action Epic Pitting Arnold Schwarzenegger Against Sylvester Stallone Arrives on Streaming Soon

David fincher’s notorious box office flop is now the most-watched movie on letterboxd, studio ghibli classic 'grave of the fireflies' has found a new streaming home.

Rotten Tomatoes has named Top Gun: Maverick the Best Film Of 2022, Deadline reports. The Tom Cruise -led feature holds a special place in fans’ hearts for so many reasons. It brought back their favorite character thirty years after the first movie came out, it hits the right emotional note with its emotional core and chemistry between Maverick ( Tom Cruise ) and Goose’s son Rooster (played by Miles Teller ). The dogfights, assembling of the crew, and high stake action only add to the overall story.

The movie is also commended by the industry for bringing the audience back to the theaters after the pandemic ravaged the business. Top Gun: Maverick had an initial release date of July 12, 2019, but was delayed as the world shut down. Many streamers tried to purchase the streaming rights to the film, however, Paramount and Cruise held back and insisted the film will be released exclusively in theaters. And their decision was for good as upon its May 2022 release the movie dominated the box office with $1.489 billion worldwide gross.

The feature is directed by Joseph Kosinski with a screenplay by Ehren Kruger , Eric Warren Singer , and Christopher McQuarrie from stories by Peter Craig and Justin Marks . The movie has bagged six Oscar nominations at the 95th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and has been named one of the top ten films of 2022 by the American Film Institute. The movie has a 96 percent certified fresh grade from critics and a 99 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes audience meter.

RELATED: 'Top Gun: Maverick' and 'House of the Dragon' Win Big at Golden Tomato Awards

The movie brings Maverick back to Top Gun 30 years after the events of the original feature. He’s tasked with training a detachment of graduates for a special assignment while he must confront the ghosts of his past and his deepest fears which culminates in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from him and his students.

Along with Cruise and Teller, the movie casts Val Kilmer as Iceman, Jennifer Connelly as Penny, Jon Hamm as Vice Admiral Beau "Cyclone" Simpson, Glen Powell as LT Jake "Hangman" Seresin, Lewis Pullman as LT Robert "Bob" Floyd, Ed Harris as Rear Admiral Chester "Hammer" Cain, Monica Barbaro as LT Natasha "Phoenix" Trace, Jay Ellis as LT Reuben "Payback" Fitch and more. The feature is produced by Cruise, McQuarrie, Jerry Bruckheimer and David Ellison .

Other movies in Rotten Tomatoes' top ten include The Banshees of Inisherin , Everything Everywhere All at Once , Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio , Turning Red , Happening , The Batman , Fire of Love , Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and Till .

You can check out our interview with Teller below:

Top Gun: Maverick Is Certified Fresh With A Near Perfect Score On Rotten Tomatoes

If you need to make a bona fide blockbuster in 2022, apparently Tom Cruise is still the man to call. First feedback to "Top Gun: Maverick" is finally here, and so far critics think the film has all the makings of a massive crowd-pleaser. The long-delayed "Top Gun" sequel is officially Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with a near-perfect score of 97% as of the time of writing.

Paramount Pictures celebrated the achievement yesterday with a Twitter post prominently displaying the aggregate site's coveted Certified Fresh badge. As of publication time, the title has 89 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, with only three that are overall negative. That's an impressive show of support for the sequel, and bodes well for "Top Gun: Maverick" when it opens in theaters May 27, 2022.

The sequel soars

In comparison, 2022's highest-grossing release so far, "The Batman," holds an 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes , and that's the best RT score of any major domestic box office hit this year. Among the rest of the year's top five biggest movies, "The Lost City" holds a 79% critical score, while "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" is at 74%. "Sonic the Hedgehog 2" was positively reviewed by 68% of critics, and "Uncharted" ended up with a dire 41%. Critics are considerably more gaga over "Top Gun: Maverick" than any of the year's most lucrative movies so far, and the movie seems poised to win big with audiences too. In a cinema landscape that's unstable at best, this sounds like a pretty resounding win for all involved.

"Top Gun: Maverick" follows a new batch of fighter pilot recruits as they train under Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Cruise), who is still stubbornly staying in the sky and avoiding his superiors' attempts to give him a job on the ground. Among them is Lieutenant Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick's late bestie Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (played by Anthony Edwards in the original 1986 movie).

It took Cruise over 30 years to strap back into the F-18 for one last ride, but it sounds like the actor held out for a sequel that honors the original in every way while presenting a new side of a familiar story. "The movie serves as a Maverick-esque act of rebellion against the very concept of time itself," Ben Pearson writes in his /Film review , "and a celebration of Cruise's continued commitment to risking his life on screen for our entertainment."

"Top Gun: Maverick" will soar into theaters May 27, 2022. Select locations are also offering early screenings on May 24, 2022.

• Entertainment
• The New <i>Top Gun</i> Is So Much Better Than the First One

The New Top Gun Is So Much Better Than the First One

I t no longer matters whether you like or dislike Tom Cruise : no matter how good he looks in his ultra-moisturized, deal-with-the-devil skin, his ship has sailed not just into the waters of middle age, but beyond them. Always a performer desperate to be liked, Cruise has entered a new era, one of potential irrelevance, which could be the best thing that’s ever happened to him. In a world where we’re all either captivated or annoyed by TikTok , freaked out about global warming and the loss of a woman’s right to choose , and trying to coax recalcitrant relatives into getting vaccinated, it’s not even worth the effort to dislike him. And that, if you’re a person who has never liked Tom Cruise, frees you to enjoy the myriad over-the-top pleasures of Top Gun: Maverick.

Top Gun: Maverick , directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a much better film than its predecessor was, and much better than it needs to be overall. Tony Scott’s 1986 jockstrap of a movie about hotshot Naval pilots—produced by fast-lane Hollywood players Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, who perhaps bear more responsibility for its numbnuts machismo than Scott does—is a caveman relic that has achieved enduring popularity, a high-fiving fantasy populated with dude bros before we even had a name for them. In the ’80s, we went to Jim Jarmusch movies to get away from these guys.

Yet it’s easy to make peace with the 2022 version of these men, Cruise included. Top Gun: Maverick takes place in a world where no one seems to be all that worried about the threat to modern masculinity. One of the pilots in the current gang happens to be a woman (she’s played by Monica Barbaro), but even if that’s a significant departure from the 1986 movie, made at a time when women weren’t allowed to fly in combat, it’s still beside the point. Without ridiculing or diminishing them, Top Gun: Maverick allows its male characters to have doubts and insecurities, to fear that maybe they can’t be the best, to worry about being too old to matter. At one point Ed Harris, playing a crusty admiral in a cameo role that nods to The Right Stuff, one of the truly great movies of the ’80s, practically snarls at Cruise, playing aging whippersnapper Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, for disobeying orders: “The future is coming, and you’re not in it.” Even if this is cartoon anxiety about being sent out to pasture, it still counts. Every generation gets the feeling of creeping obsolescence it deserves.

And Maverick is feeling it. Never having achieved a rank higher than Captain, knowing that climbing the ranks would only ground him, he’s been working as a test pilot for the Navy: in an early sequence, he gets his Chuck Yeager moment, climbing into a plane that’s like a space bird and pushing both it and himself to the limit. What has he got to lose? But it turns out that that proverbial one last job is waiting for him: His old friend and rival Iceman ( Val Kilmer , whose inability to speak has been deftly written into the role), who is now officially a big gun, has called him in to train a group of youngsters for an almost impossible mission. They’ll have to guide their planes through—not above—a twisty canyon, flying at dangerously low altitudes, with the goal of taking out an enemy airstrip and bunker. Jealous Navy dude and uptight authority figure Cyclone (Jon Hamm) doesn’t think Maverick is up to the task, which of course means he can’t turn it down.

So Maverick returns to the place where it all started, the Top Gun training site known as Miramar, a.k.a. Fightertown U.S.A. He makes the move, apparently, on his motorcycle, with nothing more than his trademark patch-adorned leather jacket on his back. Who needs a U-Haul full of sofas, toaster ovens, and pants and T-shirts when you can just jump, unhelmeted, on your bike and go? Even before his first day on the job, he encounters his 12 recruits as they whoop it up at the local watering hole, which happens to be run by an old flame, Penny (Jennifer Connelly), mentioned in passing in the first movie but now a woman, and a character, with a life of her own. She has a daughter; she loves to sail. In one scene, she gets Maverick out on her boat, where she navigates staunchly at the tiller while Maverick clings tentatively to a railing behind her. Isn’t he supposed to be in the Navy, she asks him? “I don’t sail boats, Penny,” he informs her. “I land on them.”

Thar she blows—wit! Or what passes for it when Cruise is doing the talking. But Maverick is dead-serious when he’s training his pilots, a group he must narrow down to six for the mission. The crew of eager aspirants include Phoenix (Barbaro), whose presence the guys accept, correctly, as no big deal; arrogant Hangman (Glen Powell), toothpick hanging from his mouth with the devil-may-care insouciance of a guy who saw a movie once; and, most significantly, Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s old flight partner and best friend Goose (played in the earlier movie by Anthony Edwards), who died during a training maneuver—a loss Maverick has never gotten over, and one he still feels responsible for, even though the Navy has absolved him.

There’s understandable tension between Maverick and Rooster. Rooster wants to charge forward at life; Maverick, though he can barely admit it, would prefer to hold him back just to protect him. This is the central conflict of Top Gun: Maverick, one that’s resolved in the movie’s multilayered and, typically for Cruise, over-the-top climax.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

If you haven’t already read a million things about how Top Gun: Maverick was made, and how solemnly Cruise accepted this mission, don’t start now. It’s not really worth it, and it could dull your joy in the fact that this is, at the very least, a feat of old-fashioned action moviemaking, light on CGI, and favoring human beings actually moving and planes actually flying. (Bruckheimer is, incidentally, one of the film’s producers. Simpson died in 1996.) The flying sequences are divine, sometimes tense and sometimes rapturously freeing, and they feel realistic because they’re minimally touched by CGI. (Cruise is an experienced pilot, and got extra training from the Navy on top of that; his fellow actors learned to fly as well.) But even its more casual sequences show definitive flair: at one point Cruise and the younger pilots, all in beachwear, cavort in the surf during a rowdy game of dogfight football. The sun glints off the men’s water-dappled pecs; their aviator sunglasses hide their inevitable squinting. Bruce Weber could have done it better, but Kosinsky—who has made two previous features, the 2010 Tron: Legacy and the 2012 sci-fi drama Oblivion, also starring Cruise—pulls it off even so.

It may be damning Cruise with faint praise to call him tolerable in Top Gun: Maverick. But even if he’s just playing at the indignity of aging rather than truly feeling it, he’s at least attempting to be less of a hologram and more a facsimile of a human. Early in Top Gun: Maverick, he sits at Penny’s bar by himself, looking on as the younger pilots swig their beers, taunt one another, argue with good or ill humor about who’s the best pilot. His gaze—affectionate, a little wistful—signals that he knows what’s coming for him, sooner rather than later. But first, to show these kids he’s still got it. Love Tom Cruise or hate him, he’s the only one we’ve got; his particular set of qualities have no equal. The day he stops needing to prove himself will be like the day a lion loses the will to roar. And only a cruel person would rejoice in that.

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The 'Top Gun: Maverick' Cast on Tom Cruise, Call Signs, and "G Faces"

Where to watch top gun: maverick.

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Screen Rant

One of tom cruise's best action movies lands on netflix's global chart 10 years later.

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14 Best Tom Cruise Action Movies (That Aren't Mission Impossible), Ranked

Emma stone's divisive black comedy becomes streaming success following disappointing box office, baz luhrmann's next movie announced as a historical biopic after the success of elvis.

One of Tom Cruise's best action movies, Edge of Tomorrow , lands on Netflix's global chart 10 years later. Directed by Doug Liman from a script co-written by Mission: Impossible 's Christopher McQuarrie (loosely based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka), the 2014 sci-fi action film follows a public relations officer with no combat experience who is forced to fight in a landing operation in an alien-occupied Europe and subsequently finds himself stuck in a time loop. With Cruise and Emily Blunt in lead roles, Edge of Tomorrow 's cast also includes Bill Paxton and Brendan Gleeson.

Now, 10 years after its theatrical release, one of Tom Cruise's best action movies has landed on Netflix 's global chart. Edge of Tomorrow ranks seventh on Netflix's Global Top 10 chart for the week of September 9-15 with 4.1 million views and 7.7 million hours viewed. It ranks just below The Day After Tomorrow and above The Union , The Shack , and Gemini Man on the lower half of the list.

Why Edge Of Tomorrow Is One Of Tom Cruise's Best Action Movies

It combines a clever premise with exciting action.

As an actor known for action movies, often performing his own risky stunts, Edge of Tomorrow manages to stand out as one of the best action movies of Tom Cruise's career . It received praise from critics, with Edge of Tomorrow reviews calling it exciting, expertly acted, witty, and smart. On Rotten Tomatoes, Edge of Tomorrow has a 91% score from critics and a 90% score from audiences, which are some of Cruise's highest scores of his career for an action movie outside the Mission Impossible franchise and Top Gun: Maverick.

Some of Tom Cruise's best movies of his career are action films, making his all-time list of the genre jam-packed with classics from major directors.

Edge of Tomorrow was also released at an imperative time in Tom Cruise's career , which makes it stand out among some of his other action movies. In 2014, Cruise was coming off a few misfires in the action-comedy Knight and Day and post-apocalyptic action-adventure Oblivion , and the resounding success of Edge of Tomorrow proved that Cruise was still capable of leading a blockbuster action movie. Edge of Tomorrow earned over $370 million at the box office, again, one of Cruise's highest totals for an action movie outside the Mission Impossible franchise and Top Gun: Maverick .

Our Take On Edge Of Tomorrow

Tom cruise's character has a dynamic arc.

While there are many Tom Cruise movies that offer exhilarating action, Edge of Tomorrow offers more than that. It blends sci-fi action with a clever time-loop narrative, reminiscent of Groundhog Day or Source Code , that pushes Cruise beyond his typical heroic roles like Ethan Hunt. Set during a futuristic war against aliens, the film's time-loop premise forces Cruise's character, a reluctant and inexperienced soldier, to relive the same day, honing his combat skills and developing from cowardice to heroism. This allows for thrilling action sequences and dynamic character development not seen in many of Cruise's other action movies.

Source: Netflix

Edge of Tomorrow

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Based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka's novel All You Need is Kill, Edge of Tomorrow follows Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), who finds himself drafted into humanity's ongoing war against a seemingly unstoppable race of hostile aliens called Mimics. Cage is killed in combat, but wakes in a time loop, reliving the same battle day after day. Gradually, he realizes that if he teams up with the decorated war hero Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), he can exploit the time loop to defeat the Mimic army and save the human race. 

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Weekend Box Office

Weekend box office: beetlejuice beetlejuice holds on to top spot, tim burton's sequel had no trouble taking no. 1 in its second week, even with a significant drop, as speak no evil led a quartet of lackluster new releases..

TAGGED AS: Box Office , movies , news

The Autumn movie season continues with one of its biggest hits ever this weekend. When Stephen King’s It helped the month of September have its biggest weekend ever back in 2017 (a title it still holds today), it was followed by a weekend whose top 10 fell off 33.7%. When It: Chapter Two opened the second-best September weekend ever two years later, it fell 21.5%, thanks in part to being joined by a $45 million opening for Hustlers . Last week’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice led the way for the new second-best September weekend ever. This weekend the top 10 is down 38.9% as scattered audiences moved around to a few R-rated films and one with a bigger, capital “R” to it.

King of the Crop: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Holds on to Top Spot

Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice easily hung onto No. 1 for a second straight week, but it did take a bit of a tumble. A 53% drop down to $51.6 million places the film with $188 million practically right in between Stephen King’s It after 10 days ($218.8 million) and It: Chapter Two ($152.6 million). BB’ s drop was also in the middle of the R-rated It films, which fell 51.3% and 56.5%, respectively. Family audiences could be gravitating towards Transformers and other Wild Robots in the coming weeks, dropping it a bit further. However it already maintains a $35+ million advantage over It: Chapter Two , including a $12 million higher second weekend. So $260 million is still very much in play, and even another 50% drop next week would keep it $8 million ahead of Chapter Two’ s pace, so it could still match our early projections. Right now, $250-270 million appears to be the landing. The film is over $264 million worldwide and should be well into profit as well.

Rotten Returns: The Killer’s Game Is Dead on Arrival

The Killer’s Game with Dave Bautista opened this weekend, in case you missed it — and it seems most of you did, considering it grossed just $2.6 million. Out of the nine films that Lionsgate has opened in over 2,000 theaters this year, this is the eighth to open below $10 million and the second to open below $5 million (second in a row, in fact, after the disastrous reboot of The Crow , which is not even going to gross $10 million total). Not to say that they haven’t had some success, thanks to low-budget horror like Imaginary and The Strangers: Chapter 1 doing well enough to turn a profit. But this is also the year of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and Borderlands , the only LG film to open over $10 million this year while also quite possibly becoming the biggest bomb in the studio’s history.

The Top 10 and Beyond: Speak No Evil Leads Pack of Lackluster New Releases

Opening in second place this week is the Blumhouse Productions remake of the Danish film (but still in English) Speak No Evil . One of the quicker turnarounds from original-to-remake, the 2022 film now refashioned by The Woman in Black director James Watkins grossed $11.5 million. The much darker 2022 film debuted at Sundance that year and got a very limited release by IFC Films. The 2024 version was put together for a reported $15 million, and reviews are solid, registering a Tomatometer score higher than the original’s (both are Certified Fresh). Films opening in this range this month usually end up in the $25-35 million domestic territory. A little sprinkling of international cash should move this into the win column for Blumhouse.

Falling to its lowest point to date in third place is Deadpool & Wolverine with $5.2 million. This is its eighth straight week in the top five, and it could join the likes of The Matrix , 2019’s The Lion King , The Sixth Sense , and the Jumanji sequels for a ninth go next week. That brings its total up to $621.5 million. Inside Out 2 finished its eighth weekend with $6.8 million and $626.9 million, which should secure it as the top film of 2024 unless a miracle occurs. This is the fourth time that a year has had two $600+ million grossers alongside 2015 ( Jurassic World , The Force Awakens ), 2018 ( Black Panther , Incredibles 2 , Avengers: Infinity War ) and 2022 ( Top Gun: Maverick , Avatar: The Way of Water ), and the second time since the pandemic. D&W is trending very closely with last year’s Barbie right now ($5.7 million eighth weekend, $620.2 million 52-day total), but bigger drops over the next two weeks could keep it from hitting the Gerwig numbers. D&W is up to $1.305 billion worldwide and is about a million dollars away from passing Frozen for 22nd place.

Box office cashiers are hearing more people ask a question than they would probably rather not engage with this weekend. Unless people are walking up asking one for “the Matt Walsh film”, they are just saying Am I Racist? Hey, that’s the name of the movie, folks, and $4.7 million went into that pocket so people from 1,517 theaters can find out the answer. Hanging around in sixth place is Sean McNamara’s biopic Reagan , with Dennis Quaid. Another $2.8 million has it getting close to its reported budget of $25 million. (The film has grossed $23.2 million in 17 days.) But hold on there! About half of that money must trickle down to the theaters, so its not exactly balanced yet and could leave theaters with a deficit that another film may need to clean up.

Alien: Romulus crossed $100 million this weekend with $2.4 million. The film may be coming in on the slightly lower end of expectations based on its first few weeks. But when you quadruple your budget as Romulus has done worldwide with $330 million, there is little to be disappointed about. Unless, of course, you wish you were It Ends With Us , which has quadrupled its budget – times three! – with over $325 million worldwide. It grossed another $2.2 million this weekend for a nearly $145 million domestic total. Rounding out the top 10 is The Forge in ninth place with $2 million, bringing its total to over $24 million, nearly five times its budget. Fathom Events opened God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust . All others paid cash to see it since its release on Thursday and it has grossed $1.8 million in that time.

Outside of the top 10, the Amazon/MGM release of My Old Ass debuted to $171,000 in just 7 theaters, just outside the year’s 10 best per-theater average openings. It will expand further in the coming weeks. Kevin Smith’s The 4:30 Movie grossed $115,000 in 245 theaters. The Front Room with Brandy Norwood fell 73% down to just $427,000. Its total stands at $2.6 million and will be the weakest showing for an A24 wide release in over 2,000 theaters to date. On the other side of things and still in the million-dollar category, Twisters made another $1.2 million, bringing its domestic total to $266.3 million. Despicable Me 4 also grossed $1.1 million, bringing its domestic total to $359.4 million and its worldwide haul to $940 million, ultimately coming up just a bit short (within $10 million) of catching The Secret Life of Pets to become Illumination’s top-grossing film in North America. Also on the animated front, GKids’ Dan Da Dan: First Encounter made $1 million in 610 theaters.

On the Vine: Transformers One Takes Fans Back to Cybertron

Next week, Paramount tries to reinvigorate the Transformers franchise by going back to where it all began – animation. Transformers One opens and should have the track to take the top spot away from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice . Also look for Lionsgate to try and get that $10 million opening for horror film Never Let Go with Halle Berry; the odds are not in its favor. A24 also opens another Sundance favorite, A Different Man , with Sebastian Stan. The film is already Certified Fresh with critics, while Transformers One looks to be on its way as well, with glowing early reviews.

Full List of Box Office Results: September 13-15, 2024

Erik Childress can be heard each week evaluating box office on  Business First AM with Angela Miles and his podcast Movie Madness .

[box office figures via  Box Office Mojo ]

Thumbnail image by Parisa Taghizadeh/©Warner Bros.

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