If one could somehow travel back in time to the dawn of the pandemic era and tell people that one film would ultimately save the theatrical movie-going experience, very few people would have believed that said film would be Top Gun: Maverick. After years of uncertainty, outbreaks and near-bankruptcies, the Tom Cruise-starring sequel did the impossible and brought general audiences of all kinds out to the theater in droves. No other film broke into the mainstream public consciousness quite the same way and turned movie-going back into a commonplace routine. So what made Top Gun: Maverick so special and allowed it to save movie theaters?
The COVID-19 pandemic officially began with the World Health Organization's declaration on March 11, 2020. This led to wide-reaching ramifications on people and businesses of all kinds, movie theaters very much included. With movie theaters temporarily out of commission, viewers exclusively got new films from streaming platforms on their televisions. Not only did this accentuate platforms such as Netflix's cultural impact, but it also led studios to strongly consider streaming as a viable release strategy for films that were slated for theatrical release. Even once theaters reopened, this shift had drastically affected their business. Nearly every film that went to theaters following March in 2020 had a day-and-date release with a concurrent premiere on a streaming platform, with Christopher Nolan's Tenet being the notable exception.
Delayed multiple times by the pandemic, Tenet was released exclusively in theaters in September with the massive burden (fair or not) of needing to 'save movie theaters.' Obviously, it did not do that. But now, nearly two years later, Top Gun: Maverick has truly succeeded where Tenet failed, ushering in newfound stability for theatrical releases. In the months since Top Gun: Maverick's release, subsequent theatrical exclusives such as Elvis, Jurassic World Dominion, Minions: The Rise of Gru and The Black Phone have all outperformed expectations and delivered substantial, leggy box office runs.
A huge factor here is how Top Gun: Maverick targeted entire swaths of the general audience (read: older audiences) that simply do not go to the theater anymore. The films that had been performing best post-lockdown but pre-Top Gun were the usual suspects: Marvel Cinematic Universe films. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness both performed very well, while Spider-Man: No Way Home performed so well in December 2021 that it helped usher in a new stage of COVID variants. But MCU films target a younger audience, one that has grown up alongside them and is thoroughly invested in the backstory and plot machinations of the franchise's sprawling narrative.
Top Gun: Maverick was made for an audience that couldn't care less about these things. Whereas No Way Home leaned heavily upon audiences having a pre-established overt familiarity with the characters and events of prior stories in the guise of nostalgia, Top Gun: Maverick plays best to an audience that has a passing memory of seeing Top Gun in cable reruns. That's not a slight against Top Gun, but praise for it. Director Joseph Kosinski and co. crafted an indelible legacy sequel that was profoundly rooted in adoration and reverence for Tony Scott's 1986 original but also distinctly made as a standalone feature.
Instead, the draw of Top Gun: Maverick was the core nostalgia of seeing a sequel to the beloved classic and some earnest Tom Cruise-starring spectacle. All the marketing went as hard as possible on selling this as a big screen spectacle that viewers could not replicate at home. The reliance on extensive practical effects only further accentuated this idea that Top Gun would be providing the biggest bang possible for the audience's buck.
Another crucial element to Top Gun: Maverick's success is how it brilliantly took advantage of streaming platforms, turning them from seeming competitors into one of its primary marketing assets. In the weeks leading up to Top Gun: Maverick's Memorial Day weekend release, the original 1986 Top Gun was put on Netflix and gradually climbed the ranks of its top-watched list. In the final week before Maverick's release, as gushing reviews for the sequel poured in, Top Gun shot to the number one spot on Netflix, where it remained until it was taken off of the streaming service at the end of the month.
This ingeniously became a symbiotic relationship for Paramount. By putting Top Gun on Netflix, it reaped the rewards of generating further buzz and anticipation for Top Gun: Maverick. Then, as Top Gun: Maverick's buzz grew to astronomical heights, it led audiences back to the original Top Gun. Having Top Gun projects as both the number one film on streaming and the number one movie in theaters led to it absolutely dominating the larger pop-cultural conversation, even as the streaming platforms released some of their biggest projects concurrently (Disney+'s Obi-Wan Kenobi and Netflix's own Stranger Things). And in achieving this kind of multifaceted success with the original Top Gun rather than releasing Top Gun: Maverick to streaming, Paramount and Cruise were able to have their cake and eat it too.
Now, movie theaters are thriving. It's perhaps telling that one of the few films to underperform at the box office since Maverick's release was Lightyear. It was the first Pixar film to get a theatrical release in three years after Disney sent the studio's three intermediate projects (Soul, Luca and Turning Red) straight to streaming. This unintentionally conditioned audiences to watch new animated features on streaming rather than in theaters. By staying true to its intentions of theatrical release all through the pandemic and waiting until it was safe to return to theaters, Top Gun: Maverick avoided the pitfalls films like Tenet or day-and-date releases fell into and became the savior of movie theaters.
Top Gun: Maverick is still in theaters.