Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun: Maverick are the only pandemic era $1 billion hits, but the latter’s accomplishment is even more stunning.
Top Gun: Maverick‘s stunning box office haul is even more impressive than the higher-earning Spider-Man: No Way Home. One of 2022’s several delayed sequels, Top Gun: Maverick finally hit theaters in late May with said delays having no impact whatsoever on either its very strong reception or box office performance. Maverick also joins No Way Home as just the second movie since 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to break the billion dollar mark at the box office.
No Way Home stands at $1.9 billion as of this writing, while Maverick has amassed $1.1 billion. Despite coming in second to No Way Home, Maverick‘s accomplishment is more eyebrow-raising for a few reasons. To begin with, the nature of Maverick doesn’t lend itself to such incredible box office success as readily.
The original Top Gun, while a beloved cult classic decades later, is very much an ’80s relic, and it was a standalone movie for over three decades until Maverick got underway. This made Maverick a recognizable slice of nostalgia, but not necessarily one that portends every expectation in its path being shattered. Comparatively, the odds of $1 billion-level success favored No Way Home much more because of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
No Way Home Had Numerous Advantages That Maverick Lacked
While Top Gun was a singular entry in Tom Cruise’s career until the arrival of Maverick, Spider-Man has long been one of the most popular big-screen characters and franchises around. No Way Home‘s predecessor Spider-Man: Far From Home also surpassed $1 billion, so there was much more reason to expect No Way Home could repeat that success. With the added popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the return of numerous Spidey villains, along with past Spideys Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield slinging webs with Tom Holland, No Way Home had no challenges but the pandemic to contend with, easily succeeding in doing so.
Maverick had none of those advantages save for its own nostalgia hook, and even that was one of a very different sort with the movie arriving 36 years after Top Gun. With younger audiences more closely associating Tom Cruise with the Mission: Impossible franchise, that nostalgia was also much less widespread across different age demographics. In the end, Maverick had to battle the impact of the pandemic much more directly with how much it was pushed back, selling itself on its aerial thrills and Tom Cruise’s well-known stuntman’s grit.
Ultimately, none of those factors held back Maverick at all from become 2022’s summer movie hit to beat. The success of Spider-Man: No Way Home is undeniably historic and praise-worthy, the Wall-Crawler’s acclaimed adventure currently standing as the sixth highest-grossing movie of all time. Still, Top Gun: Maverick, in becoming a $1 billion success story with none of Spidey’s built-in advantages, is an even more astonishing achievement.
About The Author
