‘Top Gun’ Passes ‘Titanic’ on All-Time Box Office List

Top Gun: Maverick is still flying high, more than two full months after its release.

Last weekend, Top Gun: Maverick grossed another $7.0 million in U.S. theaters. That’s a drop of just 16.4 percent from the week before, in an era when most big movies routinely drop 50 to 70 percent every single weekend until they just vanish from theaters. Instead, the long-awaited Top Gun sequel keeps making money week after week after week.

In fact, that $7 million brings the film’s domestic total to $662.5 million. That makes Maverick the seventh-highest grossing movie in the United States ever — and puts it ahead of James Cameron’s Titanic, which for many years was the biggest hit of all-time. (Titanic’s domestic gross stands at $659.3 million.)

With Top Gun now having passed Titanic, here’s the current state of the all-time box office list in the United States:

Top Gun: Maverick passing Titanic is an impressive achievement — and frankly, a shocking one. But it also needs a little bit of context. When you look at worldwide grosses, Titanic is still way ahead. It grossed $2.2 billion internationally, compared with Top Gun: Maverick’s $1.3 billion. (So far — Maverick is still making money.) Titanic currently stands as the third-biggest movie ever worldwide behind only Avatar and Avengers: Endgame, while Top Gun sits at 13th overall.

Plus, Titanic came out 25 years ago this fall. When you factor inflation into its totals, Titanic’s domestic box office gross would become $1.2 billion in 2022 dollars, far more than Top Gun’s current total. (For perspective: No movie in history has made $1.2 billion in the U.S. alone.)

Still, these are absurdly good numbers for Top Gun: Maverick. Be honest: When 2022 started, did you think that Top Gun would be the #1 movie of the year at the end of the summer— ahead of stuff like Doctor Strange, Jurassic World Dominion, and The Batman — by hundreds of millions of dollars? I would not.