Top Gun: Maverick hit cinemas in time for Memorial Day’s kickoff of summer. Riding the lift of glowing reviews and a surge of moviegoers flocking to big blockbusters, it surpassed $1 billion at the box office worldwide to become the year’s top-grossing movie worldwide.
And in July, it eclipsed 45 days in theaters, the point when other movies by the same studio became available to stream.
But Top Gun: Maverick still isn’t streaming, even as other ways to watch it at home are set to land.
Where will Top Gun: Maverick stream first?
Top Gun: Maverick is expected to become available to stream as part of a subscription on Paramount Plus first. The movie is distributed by Paramount Pictures, which is owned by the same parent company as Paramount Plus.
When is Top Gun: Maverick’s streaming release date?
Paramount hasn’t set a streaming release date for the Top Gun sequel yet.
The movie finally has a release date for home digital: Tuesday. That’s when you can buy it straightaway through online stores like Amazon Video, Apple TV, Vudu and others. In most online stores, it costs $20 to preorder it as a digital download available Tuesday.
But its timing on Paramount Plus is still a mystery. Taking cues from the company’s past patterns and Paramount executives’ comments lately, it’s possible the company may hold the movie back from streaming even longer.
For past live-action movies, Paramount has tended to give them at least 45 days exclusively in theaters before making them available to stream on Paramount Plus. If Top Gun: Maverick had followed that 45-day timeline, it would’ve become available to stream on July 18, the day after it completed its 45th day in cinemas. Other Paramount movies — February’s Jackass Forever, March’s The Lost City and April’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 — all hit Paramount Plus on the 46th day after reaching theaters.
But Paramount doesn’t make films available to stream like clockwork. Scream, which hit theaters late last year, took roughly a week longer, at about 53 days.
More importantly, Paramount has said it wants to keep Top Gun: Maverick in theaters longer than those other movies.
In May, Paramount CEO Bob Bakish indicated that Top Gun: Maverick wouldn’t follow the 45-day timeline, according to a report by The New York Times. Bakish was echoing comments by the company’s financial chief a couple of weeks earlier. “There are certain movies that are really made for the theatrical experience. Top Gun is a great example of that,” CFO Naveen Chopra said at an investor conference. “You should see that movie in a theater, and it will stay in the theater for a longer period of time.”
How much longer that “longer period of time” will be is anyone’s guess, for now.
Will it be ‘free’ to stream?
Paramount Plus requires a paid subscription, so nothing on the service is literally free — unless you watch it while you’re signed up on a free trial. Paramount Plus offers a seven-day free trial standard for all new members. Otherwise, it offers a subscription supported by ads for $5 a month and an ad-free tier for $10 a month.
But some good news is that you aren’t likely to be charged anything extra to stream Top Gun: Maverick. Paramount Plus has never charged an additional fee to watch a movie on its service. And even though it has two different tiers, it’s never “paywalled” a movie behind the higher-priced membership level.
