It says a lot about the ground-shaking, bone-rattling appeal of Top Gun: Maverick that Hoyts chief executive Damian Keogh has watched it more times in cinemas than any other movie he has ever seen.
“I’ve seen it five times,” he says. “It didn’t wear on me. I enjoyed it every time I saw it.”
“I enjoyed it every time I saw it”: Hoyts chief executive Damian Keogh.Credit:Brook Mitchell
Keogh is the type of viewer the cinema industry was expecting to catch Tom Cruise’s return as ageing test pilot and flight instructor Pete “Maverick” Mitchell: an older male with fond memories of the original Top Gun in 1986.
But as the sequel has become a box office phenomenon, it has drawn a surprisingly wide audience who’ve also kept going back, helping the movie become the third-biggest hit in Australian box office history.
Eunice Stiboy, a 29-year-old epidemiologist, watched Top Gun: Maverick twice in two weeks. “I’ve never done that,” she says. “We came out of it and went ‘let’s go again’.”
Running for 29 weeks so far, Top Gun: Maverick has become the most successful movie in Australian cinemas this year – and it’s still selling tickets strongly despite being released digitally. Last weekend, the movie’s take reached $92.88 million. It only needs another $1.2 million to overtake Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($94.05 million) and be second only to Avatar ($116 million).
Even the movie’s distributor has been stunned by how popular it has been.
“We definitely thought it would be Tom Cruise’s highest-grossing movie in Australia,” the managing director of Paramount Pictures Australasia, Brian Pritchett, says. “But we never expected it to do $93 million.”
Cruise’s Mission: Impossible II took a then thumping $22.5 million in 2000, but since then, a number of controversies including the actor’s support for Scientology has lost him fans. Earlier this year it was not clear whether everyone was ready to come back to cinemas after COVID shutdowns, adding to the uncertainty about how the movie would perform.
The year’s biggest movie in Australian cinemas: Top Gun: Maverick.Credit:Paramount
But when Top Gun: Maverick screened for the first times in packed cinemas, Pritchett realised how well it worked as a big-screen attraction.
“That social interaction of people laughing together and just getting excited made us realise that this could be a huge surprise for us,” he says. “And there are people who’ve seen it six or seven times in cinemas.”
Pritchett says the appeal has been across generations, with cinema executives reporting audiences that included grandparents, parents and kids. “Some of the audience hadn’t gone to a cinema for five years or more,” he says.
Keogh, the Hoyts boss, say this wide appeal has been a key to the movie’s success: “I knew people who had fond memories of the original would check it out, but I was definitely surprised by how much my kids [in their twenties] and younger teenagers enjoyed it.”
It’s a movie full of familiar elements – from the plot to the fighter pilot action scenes, Maverick riding his motorbike, the sunsets and Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone on the soundtrack. But adding Miles Teller as Goose’s son Rooster, a romance with Jennifer Connelly’s Penny Benjamin and bringing back Val Kilmer as the ailing Iceman added to the emotion.
Even if there are also cheesy moments, the rip-roaring mission to take out a uranium enrichment plant is stunningly cinematic. Pritchett says the emotion of the movie and Lady Gaga’s theme song, Hold My Hand, have helped attract more women than anticipated.
Jennifer Connelly and Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick.Credit:Paramount
“They were the ones buying most of the tickets, according to some exhibition partners, weeks after the release of the movie,” he says.
Stiboy says she and her best friend, a 29-year-old nurse, enjoyed how well the action scenes were done; the dynamic between Maverick and Rooster; and the prominence given to a female pilot, Monica Barbaro’s Phoenix.
“And obviously, there’s a massive shirtless scene on the beach,” she says.
While there will doubtless be thoughts of a third Top Gun now that the second has taken almost $US1.5 billion ($2.2 billion) at the global box office, Maverick lacks one thing: the “quotability” of the original Top Gun. That iconic movie put such phrases as “I feel the need, the need for speed”, “you can be my wingman any time” and “talk to me Goose” into popular culture.
But Cruise will not be too concerned.
Variety reports that he is expected to earn at least $US100 million from his salary for the movie, ticket sales and his eventual cut of home entertainment rentals and streaming revenue.
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