Top Gun: Maverick has hit another big milestone, surpassing $1billion (£813million) at the global box office.

The new sequel, which follows on from Tom Cruise’s 1986 blockbuster, has now overtaken Marvel‘s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness to become the highest-grossing film of the year, and is now Cruise’s first film to pass the billion mark.

• READ MORE: ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ review: an engaging if brainless return to the danger zone

It is also only the second film to pass the mark since the pandemic, alongside last year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Maverick began breaking records upon its release last month, achieving the highest-grossing opening on its debut weekend for a non-superhero film since COVID-19, taking in $248million (£196million) when it opened.

The film follows Cruise’s character Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell three decades after the events of the original film, as he trains up a new group of young pilots while confronting his past.

Miles Teller and Jennifer Connelly also star, the former taking on the role of Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw, the son of Nick ‘Goose’ Bradshaw.

Speaking recently about performing stunts for the film, Teller admitted recently that he thought he was “going to die”.

“I think when there’s that much adrenaline and a healthy bit of fear, I was able to hold [vomit] down. I guess that’s a secret skill I have,” he told LADBible.

“If anything I think it made me really appreciate how nice it is not to have to, you know, go 500 knots an hour all the time,” he added of his new appreciation for commercial flights. “I like a flight with very minimal G exposure.”

Teller continued: “I definitely had a moment where I thought I was going to die.”

In NME‘s three-star review of Maverick, we wrote: “Top Gun: Maverick does exactly what its intended audience wants it to do – pile on the airborne thrills and steely military heroics without knotting things up with too much moralising or complex character development.

“Its plot may just be an extended Rocky-style training film for the jet fighter equivalent of the bombing of the Death Star, but throwbacks to the original movie supply the emotional heart.”