Tom Cruise, #GentleMinions Mania and the Endurance of ‘Elvis’: How Summer Movie Season Rebounded From COVID

variety.com:

Tom Cruise, who wouldn’t dare to let Paramount Pictures release his decades-in-the-making sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” on a streaming service in the height of the pandemic.You don’t have to closely follow the box office to know the action-packed blockbuster became a big-screen sensation, generating $663 million in the U.S.

and $1.3 billion globally to date and exciting audiences in a way that would’ve even been rare before COVID. By the time the “Top Gun” follow-up leaves theaters, it’ll be within striking distance of “Black Panther” ($700 million domestically), which stands as the fifth-highest grossing movie in North American history.But Cruise, who returned to the cockpit 36 years after the first “Top Gun” electrified the box office in 1986, wasn’t the only hero to galvanize moviegoers.

Marvel’s “Thor: Love and Thunder,” Universal’s “Jurassic World Dominion” and Illumination’s “Minions: The Rise of Gru” were among the summer’s triumphant tentpoles, while mainstream movies like director Baz Luhrmann’s extravagant musical biopic “Elvis,” the Blumhouse thriller “The Black Phone” with Ethan Hawke and Sony’s literary adaptation “Where the Crawdads Sing” quietly kept theaters busy in between blockbusters.

Popcorn season has generated $3.027 billion so far, according to Comscore, which puts ticket sales 17.5% behind 2019 (the last pre-pandemic period) and up 134.6% from the same frame in 2021.