Tom Cruise Set To Make Over $50 Million With ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

Top Gun was released on May 16, 1986, and eventually became a cult classic. The much-anticipated sequel to Top Gun finally released May 27, 2022, and it was a resounding success. It may come as little surprise to anyone, given how successful the movie has been, but Tom Cruise stands to make a humungous amount of cash from Top Gun: Maverick.

The sequel to the high-flying 1986 movie has soared away at the box office, grossing more than a billion dollars in total. It might be hard to believe, but this is Cruise’s first ever billion-dollar film, which means that he’s in line for one of the biggest paydays of his entire career.

In a new piece for Puck, entertainment reporter Matthew Belloni revealed that Cruise managed to crack a deal that saw him paid a whopping $12.5 million initially for reprising the role as Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell. Additionally, Tom also secured 10% of the first dollar gross “with escalators that increase his percentage at certain milestones” according to the report.

It’s seriously a huge achievement for Tom Cruise, given that he had said in the past that he didn’t even want to make a sequel. When accused of making the original Top Gun a “paean to blind patriotism” by a Playboy reporter in 1990, he described potential follow-up films as “irresponsible.” At the time, Cruise shared with the outlet that he felt Top Gun was too politically slanted for a sequel.

“OK, some people felt that Top Gun was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it. But I want the kids to know that that’s not the way war is — that Top Gun was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality.”

“I didn’t go on and make Top Gun II and III and IV and V. That would have been irresponsible.”

In terms of his financial remuneration, once Tom Cruise starts taking his backend pay, it looks as if he could be on for a payday of at least $55 million. That figure is just from the theatrical release of the movie. Cruise will also likely get a split of the home video, streaming, pay TV, and all other revenue streams for the film.

Needless to say, Tom Cruise is probably really happy that he finally agreed to do this sequel. Stay tuned to Thirsty for further updates.

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