![]() Leading the pack despite mostly, unfairly atrocious reviews is Jurassic World: Dominion, the second highest-grossing film of the year with just under $1bn worldwide, a legacy sequel that like Maverick showed the nostalgic power of playing the long game (the “final” film of the franchise will surely not be so final now) and the Minions prequel not far behind with almost $800m. This week saw the company cross $3bn for the year so far, the first time a studio has done that since the before-times of 2019. While Paramount nabbed the top spot, of the summer and perhaps even the year, it was Universal that had ultimate bragging rights of the season. It’s an added relief for Paramount, with two exorbitantly priced Mission: Impossibles on the way, the first of which arrives next summer, a hope that he might be their billion-dollar man two years in a row. ![]() Then secondly, and most importantly, it showed the re-energised star power of Cruise, a reminder that audiences still gravitate en masse toward the 60-year-old when he’s in familiar territory, playing to type (charming, rule-breaking, complexity-free), something that also saw fellow 90s A-lister Sandra Bullock score a $190m global hit with adventure comedy The Lost City this Spring. It’s a film about planes and flying planes and people who fly planes and like the recent retconned Halloween hits, doesn’t rely on a convoluted backstory, such as the doomed Terminator franchise did (one could enjoy it as a standalone film without having seen the original). First, unlike other follow-ups to dusted off classics, the entry point for Maverick was far easier for younger, less familiar audiences. Rightwingers laughably claimed such success was down to the film being pro-America and “anti-woke” (a dumb assertion that fails to correlate with other monster hits that have embraced more diversity) but its popularity can be more easily traced to two things. ![]() So there were dropped jaws all around when back in May, it not only opened big but opened bigger than anything Cruise has ever starred in before, flying high for the rest of the summer, making $1.3bn globally and counting (it recently surpassed Titanic to become the seventh biggest film of all time in the US). Tom Cruise’s box office appeal outside of the Mission: Impossible films has been so spotty that he barely makes anything but Mission: Impossible films now and while the original holds a firm place in Hollywood history, it’s not received a noticeable second life with the advent of streaming. There was understandable caution surrounding the belated release of Top Gun: Maverick, an expensive, much-delayed sequel (announced in 2010, filmed in 2018) to an 80s film that wasn’t exactly calling out for one.
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