During COVID, Paramount happily sold its movies to Netflix and Amazon. One film it would not sell to anyone: Top Gun: Maverick. Instead, the studio shelved the finished movie and let it earn nothing for nearly two years, betting theaters would come back.
At the time, this looked like a blunder. Cinemas were closed or half empty. Warner Bros. had stopped waiting and was dropping its entire 2021 lineup onto streaming the same day those films opened in theaters. And here sat a finished Tom Cruise blockbuster, with Netflix and Apple both asking to buy it. The Wall Street Journal reported the offers in early 2021. Paramount said no.
Nobody ever revealed how big the offer was, and it did not change the answer. The studio had decided the film was worth more in a cinema than in any single check a streamer could write. So it did the expensive thing and waited.
Sitting on a finished film costs a fortune. The money to make it is already gone, around $170 million, and every month it stays in the vault it earns nothing. Maverick had been delayed once already, in 2019, just to finish its flying scenes. Then COVID pushed it over and over, from 2020 into 2021 and finally to May 2022. By release, the movie had sat on a shelf for almost two years.
Then it opened. The first weekend alone pulled in about $160 million, the biggest opening of Tom Cruise’s life. And it did not fade after week one, the way most films do. It kept selling tickets all summer and into the fall. The final tally was nearly $1.5 billion worldwide, the first movie in Cruise’s career to cross a billion, and the biggest film Paramount has ever put in American theaters.
After covering marketing, the cast, and every other bill, Deadline figured the film cleared about $391 million in straight profit. Cruise, who takes a cut of every ticket sold, was reported to pocket at least $100 million of that himself.
The release dates are the clearest proof the gamble worked. Paramount had planned to send its films to streaming roughly 45 days after they hit cinemas. Maverick did not reach Paramount’s streaming service until December 2022, about 209 days, nearly seven months, after it opened. The studio left it in theaters that whole stretch for one plain reason: it would not stop making money.
So both things are true. Cruise does make his films for the big screen, and he said exactly that at Cannes, where he told the room a streaming release was never going to happen. The people holding the money ran a colder version of the same math and reached the same answer. A guaranteed payday today was worth less than the patience to wait. The patience came back as roughly $391 million.