Top Gun Maverick
After tumultuous two-or-so years that saw portions of the industry, fandom, and culture are large legitimately wonder if the movie theater business was dead and gone, #cinema returned in a massive way this year as three films grossed over $1 billion at the global box office. Those movies, however, are far from representative of the best of the medium.
Let’s wind the clocks back to 2008 when Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus The Dark Knight hit theaters. Given how much the movie industry — particularly the *superhero movie industry* — has changed in the nearly 15 years since, it can be easy to forget that the film was actually the first comic book movie to ever make over a billion dollars at the global box office.
And given that film’s legacy, it’s certainly worthy of such a monetary (and, somewhat unfortunately, cultural) distinction. Now, compare The Dark Knight to Jurassic World: Dominion, one of the three films to make over $1 billion this year. Do those two deserve to be in the same sentence in any way, shape, or form?
The other two billion-dollar-makers, to be fair, are far more compelling entries into the history of cinema: Top Gun: Maverick — Tom Cruise’s stunningly committed and legitimately excellent (and likely Best Picture-nominated) 36-years-in-the-making sequel to Top Gun — and Avatar: The Way of Water, the culmination of James Cameron’s 13-year-long odyssey to follow-up Avatar and to continue pushing the technological boundaries of the medium.
Still, there’s something inherently sad about the fact that a truly bad Jurassic movie in a franchise that should’ve been put to bed after Steven Spielberg walked away, a 3-hour long video game cut scene about blue people, and a sequel to a 1980s cult hit about a “man’s struggle with his own sexuality” represent what popular movie-going is these days. Sequels, sequels, sequels.
As for 2023, there are a handful of films that could cross the threshold, ranging from Marvel sequels to Tom Cruise suicide missions to Christopher Nolan epics. I’ll list those movies below from the ones I believe are most likely (to make over $1 billion) to least likely:
Top contenders:
Fast X
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One
Oppenheimer
Possibly:
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
The Marvels
Long shots:
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Dune: Part Two