‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Is About How Hollywood Failed To Replace Tom Cruise

Skydance and Paramount's movie should make $600 million.

Skydance and Paramount's Top Gun: Maverick earned $12.6 million on Monday, dropping just 56% from Sunday and 63% from its previous Monday. On the 11th day of its opening weekend, Aladdin earned $4.7 million, down from its second Sunday and first Monday totals. The Tom Cruise-starring legacy sequel sped past $300 million domestic, $308 million to be exact, which means it had $296 million domestic and $557 million worldwide as of Sunday. If the math is correct, it will pass $600 million tonight. It will pass War of the Worlds today or tomorrow to become Cruise's third biggest grosser.

If it sells more tickets in North America than the first Top Gun did, it will become Tom Cruise's biggest global grosser. South Korea is the last major unexplored territory. The last three Mission: Impossible movies all made over 50 million dollars in Korea. It's possible that a domestic cume closer to $500 million could be enough.

Hollywood has failed to create new movie stars according to thelegacy sequel.

Risky Business, Rain Man, A Few Good Men, The Firm and Jerry Maguire were some of the non-tentpole movies that helped Tom Cruise become a movie star. Even though Top Gun is an action movie, it is just as much a sports melodrama as days of thunder is. It was a big deal when he played Lestat in Interview with the Vampire and when he starred in Mission: Impossible. He gradually became an action hero. When he was promoting War of the Worlds in 2005, he said he needed to prove he was still a movie star. From 1983 to 2005 Cruise became an icon because of his action movies.

I have been complaining for a decade about how Hollywood tends to make handsome white guys look like Tom Cruise. Think, offhand, Taylor Kitsch, Charlie Hunnam, Armie Hammer, and Glen Powell. Hollywood took these young men and cast them in different versions of Legend like Prince of Persia, Battleship, The Lone Ranger, Fantastic Four, King Arthur and Snake Eyes. The last 15 years have seen less opportunities for would-be movie stars to make movies like The Color of Money or Born on the Fourth of July. We haven't had a new "can open a movie" movie star in a while. marquee characters are preferred by audiences. Chris Hemsworth is in any other thing.

Tom Cruise is forced to lead because the next generation can't.

I didn't like the third act of the movie, in which maverick goes from being a teacher to a group of young pilots to the team leader. It plays like a cross between School of Rock and Rise of Skywalker, where the journeys of the new characters are subverted or defined by original trilogy Star Wars characters. It worked best not as a straightforward legacy sequel or even a thoughtful recontextualization of the original Top Gun, but as a metaphor for how Hollywood works.

Pete "MAverick" Mitchell is the last of a dying breed as technology and reliance on unnamed drones threaten to make his kind obsolete. He makes his living as a test pilot because he feels that is where he thrives. Even though he broke the rules for the sake of the mission in the first Top Gun, he still continues because he knows what will happen to his colleagues if he leaves. Attempts to mentor and train a new generation of Top Gun champions for the sake of an important and dangerous mission goes awry because they aren't maverick. To show this new generation how to do the job and lead them into battle, he takes to the skies even at the risk of court martial.

Tom Cruise saved Hollywood in Top Gun.

The real-world action drama plays as a subtextual validation for Tom Cruise as one of the last movie stars. In the last few Mission: Impossible films, we saw a semi-autobiographical figure who suffered and pressed on fighting the good fight the right way, even as it cost him his life. Even as he faced disbelief from his supervisors, Hunt wondered if the price he paid and the relationships he damaged were worth it. Tom Cruise is celebrated as a movie star in a story that places him alongside and then ahead of the very sort of actors who failed to carry on his torch.

The likes of Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Will Smith are expected to remain as bankable as they were 25 years ago due to Hollywood's obsession with intellectual property. Most of the living legends are headed to streaming. In this world where star power only matters theatrically when that movie star is playing a marquee character, Tom Cruise is unwilling to accept that "promotion" and is staying where he is. He only makes big movies that are meant to be shown on big screens. The film becomes a saga of a guy who knows he is the only thing standing between himself and a dark future which will doom the next generation.

Where is Tom Cruise going?

If Top Gun: Maverick is the finale to Tom Cruise's 15 years of being only an action star, with the last two Mission: Impossible movies as an epilogue, I can only hope that he returns to the kind of movies that made him famous. He can remind us of how good he used to be when he proves that he is still one of the last big-deal movie stars. It's possible that Top Gun: Maverick will indirectly save movie theaters by drawing older and infrequent movie goers back into the theater to see a high-quality film. With Cruise realizing that he can't save Hollywood anymore, he can concentrate on winning the Oscar.