2022 Was the Year Movies Were Saved, and 'Top Gun: Maverick' Wasn't the Only Reason Why

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Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium's artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself.

Between the rise of artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, and the marginalization of the theatrical window, people are understandably not too optimistic about the state of movies as an art form and cultural object. However, perspective is everything, as if you recall what the film landscape looked like heading into 2022, things seemed especially bleak. Still reeling from the closure of theaters and delayed productions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, a brief respite in the summer and fall of 2021 was upended by the spread of the Omicron variant and complete collapse of mid-budget cinema. Unless your movie was Spider-Man: No Way Home, theatrical releases were dead on arrival.

Looking back three years later, 2022 made a miraculous turnaround by becoming the year that uplifted society from the perils of a pandemic-inflicted world and inspired us to proclaim, "Movies are back, baby!" Headlined by the signature film of the year, the everlasting savior in Top Gun: Maverick, 2022 is one of the most important years in cinematic history, and it can offer guidance out of these perilous times.

'Top Gun: Maverick' Revived the Theatrical Experience

Tom Cruise as Maverick flying a plane in Top Gun- Maverick’ (2022).

While everyone was acquiescing to streaming, one man staunchly believed in the power of the big screen and communal viewing: Tom Cruise. With the long-awaited legacy sequel to Top Gun repeatedly delayed, Paramount was dead set on punting it to VOD, because who knew when theaters were re-opening, or even if people were interested in paying for tickets anymore? Cruise, however, defiantly held his ground, fighting with the studio tooth and nail to be patient and wait for the world to get vaccinated and excited to return to the silver screen.

"Your kind is headed for extinction," Rear Admiral Chester Cain (Ed Harris) tells Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Cruise) after the rogue pilot defied orders. "Maybe so, sir. But not today," Maverick responds, a meta-textual rallying cry for the remnants of movie stardom. IP, superheroes, and streaming might be pushing out movie stars and cinema in the monoculture, but, as long as he's around, Cruise is not bowing down. Beyond the artistic quality of the blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick was the ultimate triumph for Cruise and theater-going writ large. Not only did it have a staggering opening weekend performance, but Joseph Kosinski's high-flying action spectacle also dominated the box office throughout the summer, holding strong through Labor Day weekend. It wasn't just talking heads celebrating Cruise as cinema's guardian angel. At an Oscars luncheon, Steven Spielberg was caught on video embracing Cruise. "You saved Hollywood’s ass, and you might have saved theatrical distribution," the director told Cruise, blushing from the praise. "Seriously, Top Gun: Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry," Spielberg continued.

How 2022 Invigorated Cinema as a Cultural Event and Reflected the Uncertainty of the Future

By the time James Cameron transported us back to Pandora in Avatar: The Way of Water to close out the year, the panic was temporarily eased. These two billion-dollar-grossing blockbusters proved that there was still an audience for mega-event-sized movies, and not just ones reliant on FOMO over cameos like No Way Home. While many people deck out their living rooms with 65-inch TV screens, 4K Blu-ray players, and surround sound, the theatrical experience, especially in a premium large format, is invaluable. The pandemic taught us to be isolated, but movies are one of the last bastions of societal convergence. Top Gun and Avatar, had they been sent to streaming, would have been quickly memory-holed. One of the year's early hits, The Batman, made its studio, Warner Bros., look foolish by sending its entire 2021 slate to HBO Max and theaters simultaneously as part of their day-and-date strategy.

The financial viability of original, mid-budget films is still ambiguous, but from time to time, a unique film that appeals to niche interests, such as the year's eventual Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once, can become an unexpected, word-of-mouth hit. The fantasy, time-bending, action-comedy by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert signaled a new film language, inspired by all sorts of international media, as well as the drastic evolution of the Academy Awards, whose voting body rejects our typical understanding of "Oscar bait." In a post-COVID climate, moviegoing has only been invigorated in subcultures, notably in the booming repertory theater audience. Thanks to a new breed of younger cinephiles who follow cinema with the passion of a sports fan, arthouse dramas like Tár and an Indian action epic like RRR can have mainstream credibility.

As projects and imaginations languished during lockdown, filmmakers began looking inward at their lives and careers, which explains the crop of movies loosely about filmmaking and Hollywood in 2022, including Nope, Empire of Light, The Fabelmans, and Babylon. Along with semi-autobiographical films like Aftersun and Armageddon Time, filmmakers seemed concerned that movies were "dying," and they had no choice but to realize their most personal efforts and treatises on the magic of the movies.

2022 underlined that movies were not just commercial properties and forms of mass entertainment. For some, movies are life itself, and that's conveyed in the spirit of releases like Top Gun: Maverick and the text of The Fabelmans. If movies survived a global pandemic, then the medium can survive any state of grave uncertainty.