Now, what counts are the characters. Three actors have played Spider-Man and six have donned the Batman cowl on the big screen. The public has come to see them all. The Avengers may come together with big box office receipts, but what difference does it make who wears the costume?
Yet there is Cruise, moving forward as if the world hasn’t changed at all. For him, in many ways, he hasn’t. He was 24 years old when Top Gun made him box office royalty and he’s stayed there ever since, outperforming his contemporaries. She is the last world star who continues to make movies only for theaters. She has not ventured into streaming services. She has not signed a contract for a limited series. She has not created her own brand of tequila.
Instead, his promotional tour of Top Gun: Maverick, released on May 27, will last about three weeks and will run from Mexico City to Japan, with a stop in Cannes for the annual film festival. In London, she walked the red carpet with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. (The tour would have been longer and more extensive if the covid protocols didn’t make things so complicated and if I wasn’t in the middle of finishing two movies from Mission Impossible).
The actor continues to collect the first dollar of receipts, which means that, in addition to a large initial commission, he receives a percentage of the box office takings from the moment the film hits theaters. He is one of the last Hollywood stars to get such a sweet deal, thanks to his 44 films having grossed $4.4 billion at the box office in the United States and Canada alone, according to Box Office Mojo. (Most stars today are paid an up-front salary, with bonuses if the movie makes certain amounts at the box office.) So if his movies are successful, Cruise makes money. And right now, Hollywood is in dire need of a hit.
Audiences have begun to return to theaters since the pandemic shut them down in 2020. Box office analyst David Gross said major Hollywood studios are expected to release some 108 films in theaters this year, a 22 percent drop from compared to 2019. Total box office numbers for the year are still down 40 percent, but the recent performances of Batman y Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness they have theater owners optimistic that the demand from the public is still there. The question is whether the business is still going strong for more than special-effects-heavy superhero movies.
“You don’t make movies like this anymore,” Brian Robbins, the new CEO of Paramount Pictures, the studio that financed and produced, said in an interview. Top Gun: Maverick, which cost 170 million dollars. “This is not a big visual effects movie. Tom actually trained these actors to be able to fly and perform in real F-18s. Virtually no one has ever done what they’ve done in this movie. It has scale and scope and it’s also a really emotional movie. That’s not what we usually see in high-end movies these days.”
A huge box office hit for Top Gun: Maverick will depend largely on the public over 40 years. They are the spectators who most fondly remember the Top Gun original from 36 years ago and they are the ones who have been most reluctant to return to theaters.