Tom Cruise wins the award for multiplex superhero of 2022. One of the few old-school movie stars left standing, he pushed back on the salvage-yard business strategy suggesting “Top Gun: Maverick,” in limbo amid a series of pandemic release delays, ought to settle for Paramount’s streaming service. That would’ve been a plus (or, rather, a Plus) for the streaming service but the latest setback for bigger screens worldwide.
Cruise pressured the studio to wait for a pause between pandemic variants, and rolled the dice in May. $1.5 billion worldwide later, the 36-years-later sequel to “Top Gun” flew high all summer. Maybe more sequels should wait 36 years between releases, though merely typing such a sentence gives the Marvel Cinematic Universe the vapors.
The film medium’s need for speed, its addiction to high-velocity propulsion, was there at the beginning when the train pulled into the station in the Lumiere brothers’ “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” the smash hit of 1896. With the conspicuous whirligig exception of A24′s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” not part of any franchise universe except its own, the movies that got by in theaters this year hit the sweet spot where velocity meets branding.
