Yet there is Mr. Cruise, who trots on as if the world has not changed at all. In many ways, that is not the case for him. He was 24 when “Top Gun” made him box office royalty and he has actually stayed there, longer than his contemporaries. He is the last remaining global star who still only makes movies for cinemas. He has not ventured into streaming. He has not signed up for a limited series. He didn’t start his own tequila brand.
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Instead, his promotional tour for “Top Gun: Maverick,” which begins May 27, will last nearly three weeks, stretching from Mexico City to Japan with a stop in Cannes for the annual film festival. In London, he walked the red carpet with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. (The tour would have been longer and more extensive if the Covid protocols hadn’t made things so complicated and if he wasn’t busy finishing two “Mission Impossible” movies.)
The actor still demands the first dollar gross, meaning that in addition to a significant upfront payment, he will receive a percentage of the gross from the moment the film hits theaters. According to Box Office Mojo, he is one of the last stars in Hollywood to have earned such a deal with such a sweetheart. (Most stars these days get a paycheck up front, with bonuses if a movie makes certain amounts at the box office.) So if his movies score, Mr. Cruise money. And right now Hollywood desperately needs a hit.
Audiences have started creeping back to theaters since the pandemic shut them down in 2020. Box office analyst David Gross said the major Hollywood studios were expected to release about 108 films in theaters this year, down 22 percent from 2019. The year is still about 40 percent behind, but the recent performances of “The Batman” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” have left theater owners optimistic that audience demand is still there. The question is whether the company is still working for anything other than superhero movies full of special effects.
“They just don’t make movies like this anymore,” Brian Robbins, the new CEO of Paramount Pictures, the studio that financed and produced the $170 million “Top Gun: Maverick,” said in an interview. “This isn’t a big visual effects movie. Tom really trained these actors to fly and perform in real F-18s. No one has ever practically done what they did in this movie. It has scale and scope, and it’s a really emotional movie too. That’s not typical of what we see in marquee pole movies these days.”
A big box office for ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ would depend in large part on the audience of more than 40 years. They’re the moviegoers who most remember the original “Top Gun” from 36 years ago — and they’re the ones most reluctant to return to the cinema.
To bolster his commitment to the industry, Mr. Cruise delivered a video message to theater operators at their annual conference in Las Vegas late last month. From the set of “Mission Impossible” in South Africa, standing atop a biplane in mid-air, Mr. Cruise new footage from his spy movie and the first public showing of “Top Gun: Maverick”. “Let’s make it a great summer,” he told his director, flying his own biplane next to Mr. Cruise, yelling “action,” and the two planes flying through the sky.
