'Top Gun: Maverick', released in May this year, is the highest-grossing movie of Tom Cruise's career.
Actor Mickey Rourke has branded fellow Hollywood star Tom Cruise as "irrelevant". He made the comment on TalkTV's Piers Morgan Uncensored programme, weeks after Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick raked in $1.2 billion.
Mr Morgan asked the 69-year-old actor how it feels to see Mr Cruise at the topping the box office charts with Top Gun: Maverick, the follow up to 1986 movie Top Gun. Mr Rourke replied, "That doesn't mean sh** to me. The guy's been doing the same effing part for 35 years. I got no respect for that."
"I don't care about money and power. I care about when I watch Al Pacino work and Chris Walken and De Niro's early work and Richard Harris' work. That's the kind of actor I want to be," Mr Rourke is heard saying in the clip of the interview posted by Piers Morgan Uncensored on its official Twitter handle.
"You don't think Tom Cruise is a good actor?" asked Mr Morgan. "I think he is irrelevant in my world," the Iron Man 2 actor replied.
Top Gun: Maverick revolved around the titular character as he tried to deal with his past while training a group of younger Top Gun graduates. Besides Mr Cruise, the movie starred Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Monica Barbaro, Lewis Pullman, and Ed Harris. Joseph Kosinski directed Top Gun: Maverick off a screenplay from Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie.
If its $1 billion collection, nearly $521 million (about Rs. 4,078 crore) came from the US and Canada markets, while the remaining $485 million (about Rs. 3,796 crore) came from markets elsewhere.
The Top Gun sequel became only the second movie, after the Tom Holland-starrer Spider-Man: No Way Home, to cross the $1 billion milestone since the start of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.