Top Gun: Maverick is the gold standard of summer blockbusters. Tom Cruise’s return to the role of Pete Maverick Mitchell in the Paramount film, set decades after the original’s 1986 success, helped it top the domestic box office in Labor Day weekend, with the film earning $7.9 million.

Only Maverick has ever topped the box office on both the Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends.

It’s a big financial milestone for the film, but it is far from the only one. Since its release in May, it has generated over $1.4 billion worldwide, with ticket sales alone reaching the $700 million mark, making it the fifth highest-grossing film in the history of -North America and surpassed Marvel’s Black Panther in the process.

Top Gun: Maverick Revenue Till Now.

Multiple box office estimates place Maverick’s latest domestic haul at about 5.5 times that of the film’s opening weekend. This never happens in modern Hollywood, where the average multiple for major movies is about 2.5.

Top Gun fans: Maverick, however, kept returning to theaters throughout the summer, helping the film earn at least $1,000,000 in 75 separate days.

This kind of box office success is not only a testament to the film’s brilliance (it has a score of 96% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes) but also a welcome throwback to the age of cinema gold.

Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore (SCOR), told CNN Business that the impact of “Top Gun: Maverick” on the box office can’t be overstated. The film’s success came at a time when skeptics were still questioning the theater’s ability to attract viewers. That’s a game changer, for sure.

You will not find more summer blockbusters this good from Hollywood.

Recent films such as “Avengers: Endgame” (2019) and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021) have done well at the box office, but like many blockbuster releases, they have a tendency to be “front-loaded”, or have an amazing opening weekend but then decline the following week.

When Dergarabedian says that Maverick was “the most important film for theater owners and Hollywood this summer,” he isn’t exaggerating. The film was responsible for 13 percent of the year’s domestic box office revenue.

And that does not even begin to capture the symbolic significance of Maverick’s release at this critical time for the film industry, which is trying to get back to normal after being devastated by the pandemic and where services of streaming like Netflix (NFLX) and Disney+ have gained a larger audience by offering the kinds of costly productions that were once only seen in theaters.

Maverick, on the other hand, required the biggest screens available and thus brought millions of moviegoers back to theaters after months or even years of absence.

Dergarabedian pointed out that Tom Cruise and Paramount made a big bet on the cinematic experience, which paid off well and cemented Cruise’s status as arguably the last true movie star while also proving that nothing can replace seeing a movie in a theater.

But the previous weeks were specially slow for the summer box office, as many films were delayed as a result of production problems in Hollywood or went straight to streaming. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Avatar: The Way of Water, both expected to be big hits, will not hit theaters for a few more months.

Time will tell if any of those movies can reach the same heights as Maverick, but for now, everybody in Hollywood and in movie theaters still loves this movie that just will not go down.