Apologies to the Avengers, but the Tom Cruise-led Top Gun: Maverick has officially snapped Avengers: Infinity War out of their sixth place spot at the all-time box office chart as its 13th weekend in theaters kicks off. With the film's latest daily gross on Friday, August 19, Maverick has now grossed $679 million domestically, which is good enough to surpass 2018's Infinity War ($678 million). This puts Maverick, a sequel that came over three decades after the first, on the outside looking in on a top five consisting of other IP films such as Black Panther ($700 million), Avatar ($760 million), Spider-Man: No Way Home ($804 million), Avengers: Endgame ($859 million) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($936 million).

The news of Maverick's milestone comes shortly after Paramount announced a "Fan Appreciation Weekend" event that saw the film return to certain formats such as IMAX in select theaters. These screenings included bonus footage including a behind-the-scenes look at the film and some theaters gave out exclusive posters. Maverick has been a monumental success for both Paramount and Tom Cruise himself. The film is the distributor's highest-grossing film of all time domestically, passing the likes of Titanic ($600 million) during its theatrical run.

Since its record-breaking opening this past Memorial Day weekend, Maverick has continued to maintain success atop the box office; never dipping below sixth place on a given weekend. Even then, that sixth-place finish came a couple of weeks back during its 11th weekend open when it was competing against the likes of Bullet Train opening and Nope in its third weekend. Maverick is also the highest-grossing film of 2022 domestically, sitting comfortably at the top spot with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ($411 million) holding the second spot.

This milestone also comes after Collider reported the news of Maverick's digital and home media release dates. After over three months open in theaters, you will finally be able to purchase the film digitally on August 23. But for those who are physical media collectors, you will have to wait until November 1 to add the film to your collection. Maverick is directed by Joesph Kosinski and was penned by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie and stars Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Danny Ramirez, Monica Barbaro, Manny Jacinto and Val Kilmer alongside Cruise.

Top Gun: Maverick has successfully shot down a major Marvel Cinematic Universe bogey in Avengers: Infinity War, thereby procuring itself a prominent box office record.

In a development that was inevitable, the movie in which half the world's population is turned to dust has been effectively left in the dust by the juggernaut jet flown by the Tom Cruise-headlined sequel. Indeed, while Top Gun: Maverick spent the past few weeks tailing Avengers: Infinity War's sixth-place record for all-time domestic box office grosses, Fandango and RottenTomatoes' Erik Davis has reported that the 2018 MCU epic has officially been overtaken by the former, marking a major accomplishment. While the exact numbers are not available at press time, Maverick was recorded last week with $677.5 million against Infinity War's $678.8 million. Thusly, this weekend's record-breaking was academic.

BOX OFFICE: Congrats to #TopGunMaverick on passing the best MCU film, #AvengersInfinityWar, to become the 6th highest grossing movie ever, domestically. #TopGun arrives at home on Tuesday, but will still remain in theaters. pic.twitter.com/ukuchwixGO

— Erik Davis (@ErikDavis) August 20, 2022

Top Gun: Maverick has just officially become the seventh highest-grossing film of all time domestically, surpassing James Cameron's Titanic. The Tom Cruise-starring sequel just experienced its eleventh weekend of theatrical release, and earned $1.9 million on Friday. The film is expected to pull in a total of $6.7 million for the weekend. Top Gun: Maverick has now earned $662 million domestically overall, after being released on May 27. Titanic, which at one point was the highest-grossing film of all time, has accumulated a total of $659.5 million domestically. Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens currently holds the top spot for the highest domestically grossing movie of all time.

Even though Top Gun: Maverick did perform well this weekend, it fell out of the top five at the domestic box office for the first time since its release. This causes the popular movie to have the fifth most consecutive top five weekends of all time. E.T currently holds that number one spot with 27 weekends in the top five in a row. Top Gun: Maverick is expected to return to the domestic box office's top five as the weeks continue since August's releases don't hold many big titles, but it doesn't seem likely that E.T's top spot will be threatened. Top Gun: Maverick is already ahead of several notable additions to the list such as including Black Panther, The Sixth Sense, and The Force Awakens, which all were in the top 10 for nine consecutive weeks.

Brad Pitt-vehicle Bullet Train took the Friday top spot at the domestic box office with $12.6 million, with the studio expecting a $30 million weekend in total, although it may underperform by about $2 million. Other newcomers to the box office include Jo Koy's Easter Sunday, which took Friday's number six spot with a little over $2 million. Top Gun: Maverick sat at number seven, but its numbers may increase again with time since it's such a popular film. Top Gun: Maverick's success isn't surprising anyone, since its predecessor grossed $357.3 million against a $15 million budget and is considered a classic by many. Top Gun: Maverick was released close to 40 years after the original Top Gun, which hit theaters in May 1986.

At the beginning of Top Gun: Maverick, the years-in-the-waiting sequel to 1986’s Top Gun, we see Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) doing exactly what we might expect him to be doing, even 30 years later.

In a moment of audacious courage (and unflappable hubris), he decides to test if the U.S. military’s latest fighter jet can be successfully flown past Mach 10, against the orders of his superior, Rear Admiral Cain (Ed Harris). If Admiral Cain had his way, a fellow serviceman says, the budget for this cutting-edge jet would be redirected to the program developing unmanned war weaponry. Despite Maverick’s technical success, he comes crashing back down to earth to receive a scolding from Cain, who tells him that soon, there won’t be a need for pilots.

Cain tells Maverick that his skill set and beliefs are obsolete (“Your kind is heading for extinction,” he graciously says). In stating this as fact, the admiral poses a question not only to Maverick, but to the audience: What need has the world for humans when AI can get the job — any job — done? Are reckless humans of any use when AI entrenches itself in our daily lives, in a world where drone warfare and unmanned war games are played with greater and greater frequency, and where technology has become inseparable from its creators?

Thus, in these first moments as we are reunited with Tom Cruise’s daring character, Top Gun: Maverick establishes a daunting ambition: tackling our tech age.

And it couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. News broke June 1 that Russia has claimed to complete tests of hypersonic missile launches (which are essentially high-tech missiles that can move 1 to 5 miles per second). Not that Russia is the only perpetrator: closing one’s eyes and pointing at a map, you could produce numerous such examples of the advancements, and tragic shortcomings, of countries in our real world utilizing faceless methods of destruction. Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t shy away from this reality.

When the world-class aviators are first assembled, they are informed that the ever-anonymous “enemy” will present a series of technological hoops for the Top Gun team to jump through in order to even consider success: superior missile machinery and a dogfight with newer, better planes, to name a few. Maverick’s first instinct is, unexpectedly, realistic fear. “Someone’s not coming back from this,” he says.    

But as his bonds with his disciples strengthen, with confidence and poise we are explicitly told the answer to this robotic debacle: “It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot.”

This declaration reverberates throughout the film, as Maverick and the late Goose’s son, Rooster (Miles Teller) reckon with their guilt and fears, and eventually team up. All the while, we are led to fully believe the film’s mantra is airtight. Our heroes stave off enemy advances in lesser planes, attack precise targets through sheer concentration, and demonstrate that superior technology needn’t necessarily render them helpless. That is, until we come to the mutual sacrifice between Rooster and Maverick, and the subsequent stolen '80s-era plane situation. In the retro bird, Maverick and Rooster’s team efforts do impressively lead them past missiles and across the waters almost to the horizon of victory — but it isn’t enough. An enemy plane slips past their detection, and the aged mechanics of the '80s jet restrict Rooster from ejecting. In this moment, Top Gun: Maverick concedes that superior technology is a factor in success. But it doesn’t let us lament this fact for too long.

Enter Hangman (Glen Powell).

In a full-circle moment, orders are defied. Hangman leaves the aircraft carrier despite receiving instructions that he shouldn’t (at least it's implied that he defied his initial orders), and saves our heroes from certain destruction. It’s this uncalculated, unexpected human choice that secures victory, one that a machine alone cannot execute with a simple number-crunch. And this unselfish choice from a selfish character is the death blow in Top Gun: Maverick’s assault on the tech age, celebrating courage and critical thinking over rigor and robotics.

There are subtler indications at this partiality for all things human throughout the film. Early on, Rooster unplugs the jukebox and sits at the piano, engaging the whole crowd in some good old-fashioned analog fun. And even the way the movie was filmed speaks to this message: foregoing what could have easily been a CGI-dominated flick in favor of real, heart-pounding plane action.

What makes Top Gun: Maverick’s argument all the more compelling is that not every frame is filled with the echoed screams of luddites and delusional individualists. Technology does act as a connection between Maverick and Iceman (Val Kilmer), providing a very relatable instance of the human face of tech. It also serves as an asset to the Top Gun team as they map the canyon that they eventually must serpentine through. But the film banishes technology to the sidelines, and is the better for it.

Looking at the film’s central tech thesis begs another, tougher question for the audience. What relevance does a movie star such as Tom Cruise have in our tech-driven 2022 world? The unlimited accessibility of streaming technology has lessened the impact of would-be movie theater blockbusters. Meanwhile, a pandemic pushed back the movie release date by almost three years. Top Gun: Maverick braved this territory by asking, up front, if even its star was obsolete.

And yet again, Top Gun: Maverick answers with a resounding no.

The film shattered box office records in a time when most movies still blame pandemic-era attendance on poor performance, while simultaneously receiving praise from fans and critics alike. So despite our devotion to our phones and the tech that now facilitates our lives, the film suggests that there is still a prominent place for blockbuster films and bombastic movie stars.

Top Gun: Maverick, of course, is a work of fiction, and in a way, of fantasy. Perhaps it's consoling to watch an aging biggest-in-the-world superstar play the renegade, and to witness a country that has made so many missteps rise above itself by sheer power of will, rather than by the advancements of robots and the decisions of the elite hundreds of miles away.

But then that’s the beauty of Top Gun: Maverick. Whether it's the film’s leading man or the highly topical tech issues it addresses, it makes fantasy feel like the real deal.

In many ways, Maverick’s (Tom Cruise) story in 1986’s Top Gun feels like a story told with the hindsight of an older man reflecting on the foolishness of his youth. The original Top Gun is two hours of machismo, sweaty showoffs, and toxic personalities, centered around a careless character who eventually learns the dangers of his cockiness and shenanigans. Top Gun is the kind of story that one could imagine an older character sharing with the younger generation, a cautionary tale about how life isn’t all hot dogging in planes, oiled-up volleyball, and Kenny Loggins songs. It’s not hard to imagine an older Maverick telling people that he used to be a real piece of shit.

Maverick made choices back in his 20s, choices that still have reverberations to this day, that haunt him, that inform his decisions almost forty years later. With Top Gun, we saw Maverick as a selfish character who put himself before everyone else, and while he still lives up to his name, now, he’s more interested in what’s best for the group as opposed to what’s best for him. In Top Gun: Maverick, the staggeringly great sequel from director Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion, TRON: Legacy), Maverick has been living in the shadow of the choices that younger Maverick made, and now, 36 years later, this character is back, ready to confront the danger zone of a past that has haunted him since the first film.

The changes in Maverick are apparent from the very first action sequence. The former hotshot pilot is trying to prove that he can take a plane to Mach 10 in order to prove that a plane with a living, breathing person behind it is more effective than an unmanned drone. The Maverick we last saw in Top Gun would’ve attempted this feat simply to boost his own ego, an attempt to prove that he’s the greatest pilot in the world. Yet in this sequence, Kosinski shows us that this isn’t his focus anymore, but rather, if he succeeds, it’ll be better for his team, who will likely lose their jobs if he fails. This selflessness is a completely different Maverick than the character we’ve seen before.

But that doesn’t mean Maverick doesn’t still have the same daring and desire to push his boundaries. It’s this type of attitude that has left him at his current captain’s rank. As Vice Admiral “Cyclone” (Jon Hamm) tells Maverick, he can’t get promoted, he won’t retire, and he refuses to die. At the end of Top Gun, Maverick wanted to be a teacher, but after two months in the classroom thirty years ago, Maverick also couldn’t maintain that position. But Admiral Cyclone gives Maverick a choice: either he trains a group of Top Gun graduates for a highly-specialized mission, or Maverick will never fly again for the Navy. Maverick agrees, and heads back to Top Gun, where he trains an elite team of pilots, including the cocky Hangman (Glen Powell) and Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s late best friend, Goose.

As Maverick trains Hangman, Rooster, and the rest of these Top Gun graduates, Top Gun: Maverick finds a way to pay homage to the iconic moments of Top Gun, but in a way that doesn’t feel frivolous and serves a purpose in this new, more urgent story. For example, the sun-drenched beachside game this time around is used as a team-building tool, whereas this new gang getting together and singing at a bar leads to one of the film’s surprisingly emotional moments—of which there are several. Maverick finds a way to pay tribute to the past, but in a way that builds upon the film we know and adds weight to these moments.

Similarly, with Cruise returning as Maverick, Top Gun: Maverick feels like a character and an actor reliving their glory days in the most joyous way possible. Through Maverick, Cruise gets to explore one of his most infamous characters, but in a way that now has a significant amount of emotional heft. As Maverick, we get a reminder of just how many things Cruise does extremely well as an actor, and in some of these aspects, we’re seeing parts of Cruise in this role that we haven’t seen in years. Of course, Top Gun: Maverick allows Cruise to show that he remains one of the greatest living action stars, who—like Maverick—is willing to push his limitations to their breaking point. But Maverick also shows Cruise’s gifts at playing a compelling leading man, an effective romantic lead—alongside an equally wonderful Jennifer Connelly—a comedian with excellent timing, and an actor who can really make a film’s emotional moments sing.

Maverick, with its screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie, knows how to tap into that nostalgia for the original and find the emotional moments that would hit Maverick’s character hard, and Cruise plays these scenes with grace and power. There’s a clear love that Cruise, Kosinski, and this team of writers have for these characters and this story, and thanks in large part to Cruise’s performance, this love really shines through, especially in scenes where Maverick has to explore his past and the decisions that led him to where he is today.

The growth that this film shows over the original is arguably at its clearest with the new squad of pilots. Of course, there's still the arrogant pilot who thinks he's the best in Powell's Hangman, but especially with Teller's Rooster, we're seeing a character like Maverick, who is haunted by the legacy of this father and with something to prove, but without the smugness and pride. Through Teller's performance, we can see the weight of Maverick's past in human form, the pain he's caused, and the wrongs he wishes he could right, and some of Maverick's best scenes involve Rooster and Maverick having to reckon with this difficult past. It's also exciting to see a new crew with more diversity and more character than we're genuinely excited to spend time with.

Kosinski does all this in what also is likely to be the best action film of 2022, a tense and continuously exciting epic that knows exactly how to escalate the tension of every impressive action sequence. Top Gun: Maverick might contain some of the best plane scenes in the history of film, and soars over the stunts of the original. This is the type of white-knuckle, awe-inducing action film that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible, with an audience stuck at the edge of their seats. Yet again, Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t include action for action's sake, each remarkable action sequence serves a narrative purpose, and expands what we know about these characters when they are in their element in the skies.

When talking about Top Gun: Maverick, it’s hard not to sound hyperbolic, but this is the rare case where it absolutely deserves all the massive praise. Top Gun: Maverick improves upon the original in every conceivable way (well, the soundtrack doesn’t have Berlin, so that’s one strike against it), and does so in a way that might make this one of the greatest sequels ever made. It’s also hard not to say this might have some of the most exciting action scenes to ever hit the skies, and gives Cruise one of his best performances by returning to the role that made him a star. Top Gun: Maverick is a marvel of a film, one that will truly take your breath away.

Rating: A

Top Gun: Maverick opens in theaters on May 27.