‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Still Taking Breath Away With Record $150M Memorial Day Opening, Best Ever For Tom Cruise

TOP GUN: MAVERICK: Exclaims social media monitor RelishMix about the pic’s wonderful shockwaves on social, “Timing is everything. It’s hard to imaging a more remarkable time in recent history to release Top Gun 2 in light of world events — not to mention Fleet Week is in NYC this weekend too. Social awareness runs hot, with a total social media universe of 417.5M including Skydance social at 5.8M at 3X over norms — fueled most on YouTube with a growing stack of 20+ owned videos clocking +275M views, a well fed set of Facebook videos at +31M views and a new wave of TikTok at 22M views.”

By comparison, Cruise last big tentpole, Mission: Impossible – Fallout had a social media universe of 245.5M which propelled a $61M opening. Currently close to 60% of Top Gun 2‘s social media reach includes Instagram and TikTok videos.

In Cruise himself, Paramount has one of the biggest marketing machines, and he has continually been selling this movie to his 40M fans. Jennifer Connelly counts close to 5M, Val Kilmer has 2.4M, Miles Teller 1M and Glen Powell with 352K social media followers across all platforms.

Nancy and I knew from the minute we saw this at CinemaCon, Top Gun 2 was going to be one of the owners of the summer box office, so it’s not surprise to hear that RelishMix saw “a conversation tone running positive with excitement and appreciation,” with BTS footage stoking social media.

“Fans describe their service in the Navy and aircraft that they piloted aircraft as well as missions of fathers and other family members in service of the US military. The on-screen authenticity displayed by Cruise have fans standing in line to see this film on the big screen. Younger fans describe how these trailers and featurettes are bringing their dreams of serving to life,” reports the social media analytics corp.

Huge on social was the bit of James Corden flying with Cruise on three planes. By Thursday the footage reached 7.2M views.

Also by Thursday, the Lady Gaga song from the sequel, “Hold My Hand” clocked 16M views.