Maverick’ Is Finally on Streaming

It’s the top-grossing movie of 2022, both in the U.S. and worldwide. It’s on our list of the best movies of the year. It’s Top Gun: Maverick, the shockingly successful sequel to the era defining action film of the 1980s.

Much of Top Gun: Maverick’s success this year is due to the fact that it was billed as a theatrical event. The movie’s mind-boggling visuals were shot for the big screen, and best appreciated there. The box-office numbers ($718 million in the United States and $1.48 billion worldwide) prove that audiences agreed.

But now, finally, Top Gun: Maverick is available on streaming, specifically on Paramount+. How will it play at home? Probably pretty great — I rewatched the movie on a tiny screen on a flight expecting I might doze off while revisiting the film in that setting. Instead, I wound up getting sucked into the saga of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell all over again. I started the movie around 1AM and watched the whole thing.

Tom Cruise recently hyped the Paramount+ debut of Top Gun: Maverick by jumping out of a plane on the set of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One and casually chitchatting with fans about how much the film’s success meant to him as he fell to Earth at 120 miles per hour. As one does.

A Top Gun sequel was discussed for years after the first film, about trainees at the Navy’s most elite pilot school, became the biggest hit of 1986. The sequel was announced officially in the early 2010s, but suffered through an endless string of delays including the death of the original movie’s director, Tony Scott, and a bunch of screenplay drafts. Then the film was shot, only to sit on a shelf for two years because of the pandemic. When it finally came out in May of this year, it became an immediate smash, and remained among the highest-grossing films in theaters all throughout the summer. It only closed in theaters about a month ago — and was re-released earlier in December and made another $452,000.

But you don’t need to find a theater to see Top Gun: Maverick anymore; the film is now playing on Paramount+. So is the original Top Gun, for that matter.

Sign up for Paramount+ here.