Tom Cruise's Insane Top Gun Salary is Enough to Buy a Lifetime Supply of Aviator Sunglasses
The sequel to the action drama about nonconformist ace pilot Pete Mitchell has become a true testament to the fact that successful movies must excel both story-wise and visually.
Top Gun: Maverick does that, and as a result, it was critically acclaimed and also became one of the highest grossing films of all time.
It's also the most profitable movie in Tom Cruise's long acting career, surpassing such films as Mission: Impossible (the latest installment, Fallout, is in second place), War of the Worlds, and The Last Samurai.
As Bloomberg points out, the movie has encouraged fans to actively buy the iconic aviators worn by the protagonist. So we decided to do a bit of fun math and calculate how many of these glasses the actor could have bought with all his Top Gun earnings.
(Though, who knows, perhaps he's already emptied the shelves with the glasses?)
According to the report, Top Gun: Maverick grossed an incredible $1,493,491,858, making it the 12th highest grossing movie in history. Despite these large profits, the base salary of the iconic ace actor was originally only $13 million.
However, it appears that Tom Cruise should have received 10–20% of the total net gross, so his total earnings for the movie fall in the range between $149 and $298 million.
Now back to the glasses. In both parts of Top Gun, the main character wears the classic Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, the RB3025 model. These cost $163 on the manufacturer's official website — expensive for a Navy pilot, maybe, but certainly not for one of the richest actors in the world.
All in all, he could have used his salary to buy — exhale, folks — between 900,000 and 1.8 million of these sunglasses. In other words, if you put the glasses in a row, the distance from buttonhole to buttonhole would be 123 to 246 kilometers, or 10 to 20 runways at Edwards Air Force Base. Insane!
Hopefully, this makes it a little easier to visualize the large numbers that Tom Cruise has earned for portraying the king of the air — and these calculations certainly prove just how incredibly successful Top Gun: Maverick was.