It was a year ago that Paramount jolted the early stages of the COVID box office rebuilding process with “A Quiet Place — Part II.” This Memorial Day weekend, it is set to do it again with Skydance’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” a film that could become the studio’s biggest box office hit since the heyday of the “Transformers” franchise a decade ago.
As that Hasbro series saw its numbers decline in the latter half of the 2010s, Paramount became more reliant on Tom Cruise and his “Mission: Impossible” films to deliver the big bucks while the studio developed new franchises like “A Quiet Place” and “Sonic the Hedgehog.”