Maverick’ Tops $1 Billion, Becomes Biggest Hit of 2022

Tom Cruise’s career is definitely not in the danger zone.

His latest film, Top Gun: Maverick, was already the biggest hit of his entire career. But the movie keeps on grossing major bucks, week after week week. And this weekend, despite competition from Jurassic World: Dominion and the brand new Elvis biopic from Baz Luhrmann, it crossed the $1 billion threshold in worldwide ticket sales.

In doing so, it also passed Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to become the top-grossing film of 2022 worldwide. Per Variety, Maverick is just the second film of the pandemic to earn that much money. (Spider-Man: No Way Home was the first.) Obviously, that means it’s also the first Cruise project to cross $1 billion worldwide too.

Here are the five biggest movies of the year at present:

1. Top Gun Maverick
2. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
3. The Batman
4. Jurassic World: Dominion
5. Water Gate Bridge

Top Gun: Maverick’s success couldn’t have come at a better time for Cruise. He’s in the midst of starring in and producing the final two Mission: Impossible movies, Dead Reckoning, and the films have had a rocky production. Most of that was due to the difficulty of making a massive, globe-spanning movie in the middle of Covid, but the hassles resulted in a series of delays and skyrocketing budgets.

If Paramount was nervous about the reported $290 million they sunk into just the first one of these Mission sequels, they’ve got to be at least a little less scared now that the movies star the guy who is once again the biggest star on the planet, doing much of the same stuff that has made Top Gun: Maverick a surprise smash: Huge practical effects on the biggest scale possible.