Top Gun Soars Into Theaters

Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic, just had a big opening weekend: the blockbuster brought in $156 million in the U.S. and another $126 million abroad over Memorial Day weekend, according to Box Office Mojo. That’s a box-office record for the holiday weekend.

But it doesn't mean the movie theater business is back to its pre-pandemic swagger. U.S. box office sales were more than $11 billion in 2019, and barely half that in 2020 and 2021 combined. This year is off to a strong start, and a packed slate of summer blockbusters should help get viewers back in theaters. Major films coming out in the next couple months include Jurassic World Dominion, Lightyear, and Thor: Love and Thunder.

But a return to pre-pandemic levels of theater attendance or box-office revenue isn’t likely this year—or ever again, for that matter.

Covid-19 didn’t kill the movie theater. The business will continue to exist—it will just be a smaller one, with big-budget, event films making up the lion’s share of the box office.

The new Top Gun exemplifies the role of movie theaters in the postpandemic media and entertainment landscape. It’s the kind of big-budget blockbuster that can generate hype, become a cultural event, and draw crowds to theaters’ massive screens.

For practically everything else, there’s streaming—either right from the start, or after an abbreviated theatrical run. 

Paramount Global reportedly spent as much as $170 million making Top Gun: Maverick, plus tens of millions of dollars more on marketing and promoting the film. Management postponed the film’s release several times during the pandemic, as movie theaters were closed, making the calculus that a theatrical release would be a safer bet at recouping those costs. That seemed to pay off. The film will eventually find its way to Paramount+ in time, but don’t hold your breath.

“There are certain movies that are really made for the theatrical experience,” Paramount’s CFO Naveen Chopra said at an investor conference on May 19. “Top Gun is a great example of that. You should see that movie in a theater, and it will stay in the theater for a longer period of time.”

The traditional exclusive movie theater window was 120 days, and movie theater chains including AMC Entertainment Holdings and Cinemark Holdings—plus some star Hollywood directors and actors—fought hard with studios to keep it that way. But the pandemic put an end to that arrangement. 

Now, some films may spend only 45 days exclusively in theaters, then move to other distribution avenues to better monetize the content. In-house streaming services are an easy solution. That’s what Paramount did with its other 2022 films that debuted in theaters.

Other studios have recently debuted big-budget films simultaneously in theaters and on streaming services, skipped theaters altogether, or experimented with paid streaming releases.

The movie theater model will continue to evolve, and it won’t be one-size fits all. Studios have more avenues to monetize their content than ever before, and consumers know they have options. Top Gun and its tier of films can still draw crowds to the cinema’s big screen—but not every film has the right to demand viewers pay $15 or more for a ticket.

Read more about the future of the movie-theater business here.