It may come as little surprise to anyone given how successful the movie has been, but Tom Cruise stands to trouser 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, too, which means that he’s in line for one of the biggest paydays of his entire career.
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To be fair, they've spent a fair bit of money making the movie, as you can see from the trailer below:
Entertainment outlet Puck suggests that Cruise managed to crack a deal that saw him paid not only a whopping $12.5 million initially for reprising the role as Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, but he also then secured 10 percent of the first dollar gross ‘with escalators that increase his percentage at certain milestones’ according to the report.
So, given that the film is now beyond the huge milestone of one billion dollars in gross – less than 50 films have ever achieved that – and still doing well in cinemas, that could leave Cruise much better off than he was before.
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Not bad, 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’.
Cruise said: “OK, some people felt that Top Gun was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it.
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“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.”
Anyway, in terms of his financial remuneration, it looks as if he could be on for a payday of at least $55 million, once he starts taking his backend pay – which is usually given once a film becomes profitable to the production company.
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With Paramount set to rake it in hand over fist, he can be pretty sure of that pay.
That figure is just from the theatrical release of the movie, too.
Cruise will also likely get a split of the home video, streaming, pay TV, and all other revenue streams for the film.
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In the end, he could end up earning way more than the already large cut he’ll take from the theatrical stuff.
Oh, and if he decides to do a sequel, he can probably negotiate a better deal even than that.
If you still haven’t seen Top Gun: Maverick, you can catch it in cinemas now.
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Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, Tom Cruise, Money
Tom Wood