At this point in time, long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick is still slated to hit theaters on the last weekend of June, but who knows what the future holds as the Coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the planet. Tron: Legacy and Oblivion director Joseph Kosinski’s sequel arrives a full 34 years after Tony Scott’s original, which has endured as a classic slice of 80s Americana that is still as watchable today as it was back then.
The footage we’ve seen from Maverick so far has definitely made it look as though the movie isn’t simply the latest in a long line of delayed sequels that rely heavily on nostalgia and callbacks to the original in order to draw in audiences, and there must have been something special about the project for Cruise to agree to reprise the role of Pete Mitchell, given that outside of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Jack Reacher has been the only other movie of his entire career to get a follow-up.
Given the actor’s penchant for pushing the boundaries when it comes to insane practical stunts, fans are expecting the latest Top Gun adventure to deliver in a big way, and in a recent interview, the 57 year-old explained his decision to return for a sequel, and admitted that he wanted to create aerial sequences the likes of which have never been captured on film before.
“We just started talking. And I realized there were things that we could accomplish cinematically. And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, ‘How do we do it?’. So I said to Jerry Bruckheimer, ‘I’ll do it if…’ meaning, I’m not going to do the CGI stuff. I said to the studio, ‘You don’t know how hard this movie’s going to be’. No-one’s ever done this before. There’s never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don’t know if there ever will be again, to be honest.”
It would be all too easy for Top Gun: Maverick to simply rely on CGI to create these sequences, and probably a lot safer, but that isn’t how Tom Cruise operates. He’s one of the last true movie stars left, and his desire to keep placing himself in increasingly perilous situations simply to heighten the realism and authenticity of his action scenes is one of the major reasons why he’s one of the few people left in Hollywood that can open a movie based on their name alone.