Before I left to see the press screening of Top Gun: Maverick in New York this morning, I took a look at the box-office figures for the 1986 original. It earned $177 million at the domestic box office, or $472 million in today’s dollars, No. 1 for the year. So it must have had some opening weekend, huh? Opening-weekend receipts were $8.2 million, or $21.7 million in today’s dollars. By way of comparison, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness earned $187 million in its opening weekend, and will see a 60 percent or so drop-off in revenues next weekend.
Top Gun, on the other hand, earned $9.5 million in its second weekend, $6.9 in its third, $8.2 in its fourth . . . it played through Thanksgiving, on hundreds of screens. Summer blockbusters back then were expected to perform based on word of mouth rather than a titanic burst of marketing. This is a movie that cried to the world, “I feel the need, the need for . . . slow, patient, methodical audience-building.”
Point of trivia: Tom Cruise was not the first choice for the lead role. After Risky Business (1983), he was having difficulty creating a brand. All the Right Moves (1983) was a flop that fall. His next star turn, in the strange Ridley Scott fairy tale Legend (1985), was a disaster. So Matthew Modine was offered the role of Maverick — but turned it down because, as a lefty, he thought the movie was too jingoistic.