Top Gun: Maverick was without a doubt one of the biggest films of 2022. With a return of $1.5 billion in box office earnings, it was the second-highest grossing movie of the year. Only Avatar: The Way of Water did better, as it grossed well north of $2 billion. Still, there are a few factors that make Tom Cruise’s action drama sequel the bigger success in a commercial sense.
To start with, The Way of Water cost nearly double the amount of money it took to make Maverick. With marketing and other costs included, the former was actually required to hit the $2 billion mark just in order to break even.
At the 95th Academy Awards on the evening of March 12th, Top Gun: Maverick was also well represented, with a total of six nominations. These included nods for “Best Picture,” “Best Adapted Screenplay” and “Best Film Editing.” Jennifer Connelly — who starred in the picture — felt that Cruise at least deserved a nomination for “Best Actor.” The team did at least walk away with the gong for “Best Sound.”
Another major accomplishment of the Top Gun: Maverick production is that it elevated some previously not-as-well known actors to the global spotlight. Before featuring in the film, for instance, Insecure star Jay Ellis had worked more as a model. It was a similar story for actress Monica Barbaro, who had only featured in two other movies before Top Gun: Maverick.
Monica Barbaro Was ‘Stoked’ To Land Her Role In Top Gun: Maverick
Top Gun: Maverick was a sequel to the 1986 action film Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise as Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a naval aviator who is known for his skill and recklessness in the cockpit. The movie is set 34 years after the events of the original film, and follows Maverick as he navigates the changing landscape of aerial combat and his own personal demons.
Monica Barbaro featured in the picture as Lieutenant Natasha “Phoenix” Trace, described as a naval aviator trained on the F/A-18F Super Hornet and a graduate of the the United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Program, TOPGUN. Before this film, her only prior big screen experience was in the movies Bullish in 2013 and The Cathedral in 2021.
Speaking to Elle in June 2022, Barbaro explained her joy at learning she had landed such an important role in such a major production. “I was super stoked because of the fact that I got to play a pilot, and that my part in this classic action movie was not going to be that of a love interest,” she said.
How Did Monica Barbaro React To Meeting Tom Cruise For The First Time?
Monica Barbaro was born in San Francisco in June 1990. That was literally four years and one month after the release of the original Top Gun movie. In that same year of her birth, Tom Cruise earned his first ever Academy Award nomination, as “Best Actor” for the movie Born on the Fourth of July. At that point, he had been active in the industry for at least one decade.
Suffice to say, then, that Barbaro would have grown up watching Cruise’s ever-burgeoning career as a Hollywood superstar. After finally getting to work together, the pair then appeared in an episode of The Late Late Show with James Corden, where she explained how she completely fumbled her first meeting with him.
Barbaro thought that she could be as cool as can be when introducing herself to Cruise, but when he appeared, she completely lost her mind.
“We were all standing in the hallway, being cool,” she said. “He walks down the hallway, and suddenly, I couldn’t feel my legs!”
Monica Barbaro Was So Star-Struck Meeting Tom Cruise That She Forgot Her Own Name
Not only did Monica Barbaro go weak in the knees at the sight of Tom Cruise, she also literally forgot his name. “[He] shakes my hands, looks deep into my eyes, and I just forgot my name,” she told James Corden. It was a rough first meet-up, but she quickly learned that while he has a mad work ethic, he was also relatable and approachable.
Watching Cruise in his element was a masterclass for the budding Barbaro. “That was the most interesting thing I think about all of this, is that we got to watch him operate at the level that he always does,” she said in the interview with Elle. “His expectations of everyone around him are through the roof, as they should be, because everyone is able to show up and do incredible things with that belief and trust in them.”
When Barbaro watched the initial Top Gun for the first time, she knew she would one day want to be in a movie like that. She didn’t expect, however, that she would actually be cast in the sequel, until the opportunity actually came her way in the end.
