Top Gun: Maverick was always expected to do well at the box office, but original estimates look to have been on the low side.

Top Gun: Maverick has already made shockwaves by landing Tom Cruise one of his best movie ratings in his career, and was expected to bring Cruise his biggest box office weekend ever in the process, but even its Thursday preview showings have been breaking records. After pulling in $19.3 million from its previews, Top Gun: Maverick has not only given Cruise a new career-high but has also given Paramount its highest preview numbers in the studio’s history.

Top Gun: Maverick sees the return of Tom Cruise’s self-assured test pilot, who had been brought in to train a group of young fighter pilots, one of which is the son of Maverick’s deceased best friend Nick “Goose” Bradshaw. While Cruise is the only main player returning for the movie, Val Kilmer also makes a small reprisal of his role as Iceman, with the rest of the new-to-franchise cast including Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris and Monica Barbaro.

Paramount has some big movies on their books, including the Transformers franchise, so despite previews besting these and other movies to break Paramount’s preview record – which was $16 million for 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – although the one small note is that the released figures reported by Deadline also include some special previews that took place on Tuesday. However, to put this in a direct comparison with Cruise’s own Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which only made $6 million in previews, Top Gun: Maverick’s almost $20 million haul is a massive improvement.

Related: Top Gun: Maverick Sees Tom Cruise’s Rotten Tomatoes Career Average Soar to New Peak

Top Gun: Maverick is Now Expected to Open Even Higher This Weekend

Top Gun: Maverick was already expected to give Tom Cruise the biggest opening weekend of his career by breaking the $100 million, but now estimates have been revised upwards from the original $120 million estimation to $140 million. Considering Cruise’s biggest opening to date was 2005’s War of The Worlds with a domestic $64.8 million weekend, that is some jump, which shows the kind of love that is being shown to the belated sequel.

Legacy sequels have been coming thick and fast recently, whether as long-awaited movies such as Ghostbusters: Afterlife, or a TV series like Disney+ offering Willow. Top Gun: Maverick was not expected to be received quite the way it has been, both in box office returns and in critic and audience scores. So far, the film has hardly dropped a mark, with everyone seeming to have fallen in love with the sequel more than even the original managed.

Top Gun: Maverick has been hailed as more than a worthy successor to Top Gun, and many have even been calling it the best legacy sequel ever made. With the film expected to do well at the box office before the first reviews started to come in, it seems that the movie will now soar to new heights and could quite easily end up battling dinosaurs, sorcerers and Gods to be the biggest movie of the summer.

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