Free Republic

STUART, Florida -- He's no Tom Cruise, but Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is definitely a "Maverick" in his latest campaign commercial which portrays the Republican as a "Top Gun" fighter pilot engaging in battle with deceptive national news media."Good morning ladies and gentlemen, this is your governor speaking," DeSantis begins, likening himself to Cruise's character Capt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in the popular summer film."Today's training evolution: dogfighting. Taking on the corporate media." Much of today's 'science' DeSantis commenced his lesson: "The rules of engagement are as follows: Number one, don't fire unless fired upon, but when they fire, you fire...

"Top Gun: Maverick" took to the skies in late May and hasn't looked back. Tom Cruise's latest release is now the ninth-highest grossing movie of all time at the domestic box office. "Maverick," the sequel to the hit 1986 film "Top Gun," has grossed nearly $650 million in the US alone, a feat that has only been accomplished by a handful of other films. Just last week, "Maverick" blew past 2012's "The Avengers" to take sole possession of ninth place on the list, and is within striking distance to pass No. 8 "Jurassic World" and seventh place "Titanic," according to...

Tom Cruise has sent a massive wake-up call to liberal Hollywood and “woke” celebrities as his pro-America movie “Top Gun: Maverick” soars past the $1.2 billion mark at the global box office. The “Top Gun” sequel is continuing to smash records and send a clear message to celebrities like John Cena and LeBron James, who infamously caved to China. Cruise and his producers refused to fill the film with “woke” messaging and snubbed the Chinese Communist Party when it demanded they remove pro-Taiwan and pro-America themes. As a result, the movie was banned in China. Despite the China ban, the...

Paramount and Skydance’s Top Gun: Maverick has passed $1.2 billion at the worldwide box office, including $605.5 million domestic and $602.5 million overseas sans a single penny from China and Russia. This makes the film, already Paramount’s biggest (sans inflation) domestic grosser behind Titanic ($600 million in 1997/1998 and $659 million counting the 2012 3-D reissue), Paramount’s biggest global grosser. It has passed the $1.105 billion gross of Transformers: Age of Extinction, which was the top grossing film of 2014 and sits behind James Cameron’s Titanic. However, the Kate Winslet/Leonardo DiCaprio romantic melodrama (which has grossed $2.2 billion global) was...

Tom Cruise's highly-anticipated film Top Gun: Maverick achieved another impressive milestone at the global box office this weekend as it crossed the $1 billion mark. In addition to becoming the 59-year-old Risky Business actor's most successful film of all time, the sequel to 1986's Top Gun became the first movie of 2022 to reach that rare benchmark after just 31 days in theaters. With those ticket sales, the movie dethroned Marvel's superhero film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ($943 million) as the highest-grossing movie of the year at the global box office. It's a particularly tremendous feat as...

As arguably America’s last remaining movie superstar, it’s hard to call any Tom Cruise movie a “surprise” hit, but Top Gun: Maverick has had surprisingly powerful legs in its second week at the box office. But much like the way they turned out en masse for Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, American audiences are thrilled to finally see a military-themed movie that’s pro-America. While it has its weaknesses, Top Gun: Maverick is superior to the original 1986 movie in many ways. I had never seen the original until last week, in order to get up to speed (pun intended) before watching...

“Top Gun: Maverick” is an absolutely outstanding movie. After not having time to catch the highly-anticipated sequel when it was initially released, I finally made my way to the theater Sunday afternoon to watch Tom Cruise return as the iconic fighter jet pilot Maverick. Ladies and gentlemen, the film can only be described as pure patriotism. The plot is very simple. Maverick has been tasked with training some pilots to take out an unauthorized nuclear reactor in an unnamed country. While the country is never named, it’s clear that it’s Iran for multiple reasons, including weapon capabilities, old aircraft and...

Satisfying sequel hits nearly all the marks while outdoing the originalThe 1986 smash “Top Gun” was both a movie and a pop cultural moment.The latter mattered more, given the tenor of the times. President Ronald Reagan lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW D.C., and his confidence buoyed the nation. Pop hits like “Danger Zone” and “Take My Breath Away” crushed the Billboard charts, and rightly so.The film’s star, Tom Cruise, couldn’t be more movie-star handsome or powerful within the industry — even if 1985’s “Legend” showed his commercial vulnerability.“Top Gun” was the right movie at the right time, even if...