Top Gun: Maverick may be having absolute blast at the box office since its premiere, but it turns out Tom Cruise's winning charm goes beyond movie theaters. Recent data shows the original Top Gun is edging out current streaming heavy hitters like Stranger Things and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Oddly enough, this milestone for Top Gun comes shortly after the movie left the library of Netflix, where it resided (at least in the United States) until May 31, just a few days after the sequel’s worldwide premiere. While not as universally loved by critics as Maverick, the first Top Gun movie was nonetheless an absolute commercial success, raking in over $350 million in earnings on a $15 million budget and driving a huge spike in recruitment for the Navy during that era.
Now, according to data released by Reelgood, Top Gun became Amazon Prime Video's number four title in the U.S. Once it landed on the platform on June 1, just after Night Sky, Outer Range and, of course, The Boys. Nevertheless, Cruise's appeal propelled the film all the way to first place overall to close off the week, with Top Gun beating the likes of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Stranger Things, The Lost City, The Lincoln Lawyer, Better Call Saul, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. This was all thanks to the combined user base of Amazon Prime Video and Paramount Plus.
Unlike the much more intricate data gathered by Nielsen, Reelgood's numbers come from tracking a diverse group of 5 million users in the U.S. And don’t outright rely on minutes watched. It may be far from the perfect indicator, but overall interest in Top Gun does seem to beat Obi-Wan Kenobi in several areas. This includes Google Trends searches, as more people care to find out just what happened before in Maverick's life.
Unlike so many other reboots and sequels pushed in recent times, Top Gun: Maverick can hold its own ground as a movie that doesn’t extensively rely on nostalgia, with only a couple of flashback sequences being slipped in to brief newcomers Captain Pete Mitchell's past. Even if some have accused this new Top Gun iteration of being just as overtly militaristic as the first one, it’s yet to be confirmed whether it has the same effect as the original when recruitment booths were placed right outside movie theaters.
Nevertheless, losing to a Cruise blockbuster should bring no shame to Obi-Wan Kenobi nor Stranger Things' mysterious season 4, and the same should apply when Top Gun: Maverick eventually heads to Paramount Plus.
Top Gun: Maverick is now playing in theaters.
Source: Reelgood