Anthony Edwards may not physically appear in Top Gun: Maverick but he was one of the sequel's earliest fans.
The Golden Globe winner, 59, gave his seal of approval to the follow-up of his 1986 movie after catching an early screening with costar Tom Cruise, which he spoke about at Thursday's Tribeca Film Festival world premiere of Jennifer Lopez's Halftime documentary.
"If you do the first movie, you're lucky enough," Edwards told ET. "I was lucky enough that Tom called me up. He screened it for me in person."
Just Like in 1986, Sales of Aviator Sunglasses Are Up Because of Top Gun
To this day, everyone wants Maverick’s iconic shades.
By Eileen Cartter
July 19, 2022
Just Like in 1986 Sales of Aviator Sunglasses Are Up Because of 'Top Gun'
Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images
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Top Gun: Maverick, the 2022 sequel to the 1986 blockbuster that literally sent Tom Cruise into the troposphere, is hitting all the megahit landmarks: grossing a stunning $1.2 billion globally, becoming Paramount’s biggest worldwide release ever, and…reigniting a fervent public interest in aviator sunglasses?
According to Bloomberg, UK sales of the classic Ray-Ban RB3025 aviators that Cruise’s Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell wears in the franchise are way up since the movie hit theaters—a repeat of the scenario that followed the premiere of the original Top Gun in 1986, which reportedly boosted sales of aviators nearly 40% in the seven months after its release.
And certainly, of all the covetable elements from Top Gun (flight suits, glistening abs, the ability to fly a plane), snagging a pair of shades similar, if not nearly identical, to ones that Maverick wears in the franchise is the most attainable. Nearly identical, that is, because Cruise’s personal pair are meticulously, and characteristically, custom.
“Tom is a stickler,” Maverick costume designer Marlene Stewart told The Daily Beast in June. “We had many, many fittings for the glasses. These are classic aviator Ray-Bans…when we had a fitting with Tom, we knew of course that the aviators were going to be on board. That was never a question.” (Cruise, who also produced the film, was a stickler about many other aspects of its production, from its intensive aerial stunts to its military accuracy.) The style has also been Cruise’s personal shades of choice for the last few decades. Just this past weekend, the actor met up with the Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows aerobatic team in Gloucestershire, England, and all of them wore—you guessed it—aviator sunglasses.
Hollywood accused of kowtowing to Chinese censorship in Top Gun sequel
Will Pavia, New York
Saturday August 08 2020, 12.01am BST, The Times
The trailer for the next Top Gun film offers fans the reassuring sight of Tom Cruise as a fighter pilot who spends his spare hours gunning a motorbike down highways into the setting sun, wearing a stylish bomber jacket.
However, sharp-eyed viewers will notice there is something amiss. In the 1986 film the flags of the UN, America, Japan and Taiwan were stitched into the jacket. In the forthcoming Top Gun: Maverick, the Taiwanese flag is gone.
Viewers who noticed it wondered if it had anything to do with the Chinese company listed among the film’s production companies. A report by the freedom of expression group, Pen America, accuses Hollywood studios of acceding to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party. “Hollywood enjoys a reputation as a place uncowed by Washington, gleefully willing to speak truth to power,” it says. “This contrasts strangely but silently with Hollywood’s increasing acceptance of the need to conform to Beijing’s film dictates.”
The jacket alterations in Top Gun: Maverick show that studios are willing to change even films that are not made for the Chinese market, James Tager, the report’s author, said. “It’s hard to believe there is any other incentive to change a symbol on a jacket from a flag into a meaningless symbol,” he added.
Hollywood studios have “increasing business relationships in China that they don’t want to jeopardise”, he said. Disney holds a 47 per cent stake in a $5.5 billion park in Shanghai, and Universal Studios plans to open a resort in Beijing next year in partnership with Chinese state-owned companies. “Hollywood studios are scared and paranoid,” he said.
When he began researching the paper last year, interviewing Hollywood producers, he found that none wanted to speak on the record. One told him that “all of us are fearful of being named in an article even generally discussing China in Hollywood”. Another said: “It’s hard for people to speak on the record if they want to keep their jobs.”
The movie world’s power balance has shifted, according to Pen America. This year the Chinese cinema market is expected to overtake that of the US. The Chinese government controls the films that can be released, it says. Demands for alterations are made over the phone or in meetings but not in writing, Mr Tager says. “Film-makers are, by design, forced to become complicit in their own censorship.”
The US levelled sanctions against Hong Kong officials yesterday as diplomatic relations between the US and China worsened. Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, was among 11 officials sanctioned by the US Treasury as President Trump sought to punish China after Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law in June, restricting freedoms in Hong Kong.
UPDATED: MAY 31, 2018 11:07 AM ET | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: MAY 12, 2016 8:30 AM EDT
A Top Gun sequel has entered production, actor Tom Cruise announced Thursday, sharing a teaser image online. The movie comes more than thirty years after Top Gun hit theaters and took people’s breath away with director Tony Scott’s exhilarating Navy fighter-jet flying scenes and Tom Cruise’s displays of machismo as Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the pilot striving to be “top gun” at the Navy’s “Top Gun” school for pilots, while wooing his civilian flight instructor, played by Kelly McGillis.
It became the highest-grossing film of 1986, and as ticket sales soared, so did interest in the military, among both potential enlistees and Hollywood producers. It was that dynamic that TIME detailed in the Nov. 24, 1986, feature “The Pentagon Goes Hollywood.”
First and foremost, the movie raised the profile of “TOPGUN,” the real nickname of the Navy Fighter Weapons School that admitted its first class in 1969 — at the height of the Vietnam War — after a 1968 study found that U.S. pilots lacked sufficient aerial-combat training. The study, named the “Ault Report” after author Capt. Frank “Whip” Ault, was “a sweeping review of fighter system performance covering logistics, training and operations and is credited with raising the air combat kill ratio” from two Vietnamese planes downed for every American plane lost “to more than 12.1,” according to the Navy.
In preparing for his role, Tom Cruise shadowed these elite pilots at the school’s headquarters, which were in Miramar in San Diego at the time, and told TIME that an instructor told him that there were “‘only four jobs in the world worth having: an actor, a rock star, a jet fighter pilot and President.'” Kelly McGillis shadowed the woman who inspired the role, Christine Fox, a 30-year-old civilian employee of the Center for Naval Analyses, who, in 2013, went on to become the highest-ranking woman ever to serve in the Department of Defense when President Barack Obama appointed her to replace current DoD Secretary Ash Carter as acting deputy defense secretary.
As the magazine reported, producers paid the military a total of $1.8 million for the use of the real Naval Air station, real aircraft carriers, real planes and the flying services of real pilots—for which the film was billed $7,600 an hour. But the use of real equipment did more than make the film look realistic. Such “high-flying hardware” designed to face off against Soviet planes (“MiGs”) made the film seem like “a commercial for the Navy.”
Whether or not it was intentional, the message worked: Apparently thousands of Americans did “feel the need — the need for speed,” because military recruiters parked themselves outside theaters and reported a surge in calls about naval aviation officer programs. The number of uniformed personnel in all branches of the military increased by 20,000 over the previous year C about 16,000 of those were just in the Navy, according to an article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine Proceedings.
“By this point, the service was volunteer, so the Navy had to find ways to explain itself, and this film made people again want to go and join the military,” says Lawrence H. Suid, historian and author of Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film. “Top Gun completed the rehabilitation of the American military after it had been savaged in Vietnam. Films helped get us into Vietnam because there were all of these movies over the years about us winning, so the shock of losing was powerful. [After Top Gun], we felt like we could win again.”
Not only did more Americans want to join the military after seeing Top Gun, but more Hollywood directors and producers wanted to work with the military. TIME reported that the Pentagon was reviewing more than 200 screenplays by the autumn after Top Gun‘s release, a major increase over the years before. That review process also meant that the Department of Defense could request changes to screenplays, either based on accuracy or to save face. It had happened in Top Gun, too: the Navy complained that there were too many midair collisions in the original script, so filmmakers replaced a crash that was to have been a major plot point with another device.
Critics called this arrangement censorship. “People are going off to war and getting killed, in part because of some movie that they saw that was adjusted by the military,” David Robb, author of a book about this relationship Operation Hollywood, argued in a 2004 Mother Jones interview. Investigative journalist David Sirota denounced the system as the “military-entertainment complex” in a Washington Post op-ed and online discussion, arguing that there’s no incentive for either side to end the arrangement.
The latest incarnation of this relationship may be Secretary of State John Kerry’s February meeting in Los Angeles with Hollywood studio executives to “hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative.” And since the fight against ISIS is the main preoccupation of today’s Top Gun-style fighter pilots, it remains to be seen if and how this battle will be incorporated into the reportedly drone-focused Top Gun 2 that producers say is in the works.
Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth team played supporting role in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
Star Tom Cruise visited the company’s Fort Worth facility — the epicenter of the company’s F-35 production — in August 2018.
A team at Lockheed Martin is proud of Top Gun: Maverick. And there are good reasons for that joy.
A Lockheed Martin group, many of them in the aerospace company’s Fort Worth location, helped Tom Cruise and the creators of the story about U.S. Navy pilots establish one of the hottest films this summer.
Just last weekend, Top Gun: Maverick zoomed past the $800 million mark for global box office, ranking it as the highest-grossing film in Cruise’s career, according to Variety.
“The team who did a lot of the work watched it and it brought tears to their eyes,” said Brian Hershberger, a project manager at Lockheed Martin, in a telephone interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
Negotiations for the movie began in 2017, and Cruise visited Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth — the epicenter of the company’s F-35 production — in August 2018.
Cruise even flew his own P-51 to Tarrant County in 2018.
“It was an opportunity for us for a good business reason and recruiting,” said Jen Eller, a public relations leader for Lockheed Martin, in a telephone interview on Monday. “It was also going to be a way to get our brand out there.”
After landing in Tarrant County, Cruise spent hours researching for the film. He came to Fort Worth for an F-35 immersion to highlight the plane’s capabilities, tour the flight line and meet with mechanics.
Cruise even signed one of the bulkheads on one the F-35Cs (U.S. Navy version) that was in production. That aircraft is at the Naval Air Station in Lemoore, Calif., home of Top Gun.
Cruise “loves to fly,” said Al Norman, a Lockheed Martin test pilot, in a telephone interview. He was a fighter pilot adviser during the film’s production. “He got here late, and so the second shift got to see him. I was very impressed with him because he was a good aviator.”
Cruise researched the pilots, the planes and all phases of the program. In no time, Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin’s advanced development program, got called to get involved in the production of the movie.
Lockheed Martin designers, engineers and aircraft model developers in Palmdale, Calif. worked on creating the model for the Darkstar hypersonic aircraft featured in the film.
Lockheed Martin’s website says that all the work related to Darkstar was done in secret, with Skunk Works working with the Top Gun: Maverick production team to understand its needs and then quietly working on the design and build until the concept was revealed to the world in the film.
Lockheed Martin officials said that the stories are true that China rerouted one of its satellites to get imagery of the full-size model of the fictional plane at Naval Air Station China Lake.
It was a project that took five years as the movie was first scheduled to open in the summer of 2019, then during the Christmas holiday in 2019.
“Star Wars came that month, so there was another delay,” Hershberger said.
COVID-19 arrived in 2020, continuing the delay for Cruise’s movie until this year.
The sequel to 1986′s Top Gun has surpassed Cruise’s Mission Impossible-Fallout, which had previously been the actor’s most successful film, according to Variety. Top Gun: Maverick is the highest-grossing film of the year in North America.
“It was very good,” Norman said. “The flying scenes made it look real.”
Hershberger said there were some days that employees worked 17 hours.
“Seeing everyone recognized for this was great,” Hershberger said. “Skunk Works gave everyone in the world a chance to see the cool stuff.”
Tony Scott Spent Final Days Working With Tom Cruise on ‘Top Gun 2’
The duo were in Nevada late last week touring a Naval air station as part of their research for the movie.
BY PAMELA MCCLINTOCK
AUGUST 20, 2012 2:49PM
As late as Friday, director Tony Scott was meeting with Tom Cruise to research their planned Top Gun sequel for Paramount.
The duo, who first collaborated on Cruise’s star-making 1986 military drama, were in Nevada touring a naval air station as part of their research for the movie, a source close to the project tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Top Gun 2 was one of three directing projects on Scott’s plate that were in advanced development before the director jumped from a Los Angeles-area bridge Sunday in what authorities are calling a suicide. The popular filmmaker’s next directing gig likely would have been Narco Sub at 20th Century Fox, but he also was keen to make Top Gun 2 and Fox’s Lucky Stripe, according to sources close to him. Another possibility was a remake of The Wild Bunch for Warner Bros.
“Studios have to compete for directors who are in demand, and Tony was in great demand,” says one studio insider who met with Scott for lunch two weeks ago. “Hyper-qualified directors are really rare.”
THR has learned that Fox — where Tony and Ridley Scott‘s company Scott Free has its production deal — tapped writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff (Traitor) to rewrite the script for Narco Sub, about a disgraced American naval officer forced to pilot a sub carrying a payload of cocaine to America. David Guggenheim penned the original script, and Michael Bomback did a rewrite.
Paramount Motion Picture Group president Adam Goodman revealed plans for a Top Gun sequel in May during an interview with THR. “Jerry Bruckheimer would produce, with Tony Scott returning to direct. All parties are moving ahead,” Goodman said at the time. “We’ve hired Peter Craig to write the script.”
The original Top Gun catapulted Scott to fame and resulted in a lasting friendship with Cruise, who also starred in the filmmaker’s NASCAR-themed Days of Thunder (1990).
“Tony was my dear friend, and I will really miss him,” Cruise said in a statement Monday. “He was a creative visionary whose mark on film is immeasurable. My deepest sorrow and thoughts are with his family at this time.”
Scott, also a prolific film and television producer, leaves a slew of television projects in development through Scott Free, including an untitled diamond drama with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead scribe Kelly Masterson that is set up at AMC and Killing Lincoln at National Geographic Channel. Based on the best-selling book about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the two-hour documentary will include re-enactments and is slated to air in 2013.
Additionally, Scott is an executive producer on A&E’s miniseries Coma, which is scheduled to premiere on Labor Day.
Borys Kit and Lesley Goldberg contributed to this report.
Tom Cruise rides into the danger zone of solitude in 'Top Gun: Maverick'
May 26, 2022
Sean Burns
Tom Cruise is going to save the movies, even if it kills him. The daredevil superstar turns 60 in July, and with two more “Missions: Impossible” on deck he’s finally releasing “Top Gun: Maverick,” the long-delayed, 36-years-later sequel in which Cruise reprises his signature role as the smirking, ****-of-the-walk flyboy in aviator shades. It’s an outrageously entertaining picture, boasting some of the most exquisitely choreographed action sequences since “Mad Max: Fury Road” and a bruised-but-not-broken heart worn brazenly on its sleeve. This is the kind of massively-scaled, old-fashioned crowd-pleaser you probably thought Hollywood forgot how to make. Because they did.
The movie, like its main character, is an outlier — a relic from another era somehow still buzzing the tower of a world that’s passed it by. As Ed Harris’ none-too-happy admiral says in the prologue, “The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction.” Nicknamed “the Drone Ranger,” Harris is putting pilots out to pasture and has little patience for aging hotshots like Maverick. Since every Tom Cruise movie is to some extent or another a movie about Tom Cruise, it’s not much of a stretch to see the admiral pulling the plug on manned aircraft programs as a stand-in for the Hollywood studios’ pivot to streaming services and Cruise’s old colleagues settling comfortably into television careers.
This bravura opening sequence — a nifty little mini-movie of its own before the story proper starts — finds Cruise’s character performing an incredibly brave and stupid stunt, breaking orders and putting his life on the line to prolong the careers of his co-workers and crew, so they can all keep flying for just a little while longer. That’s “Top Gun: Maverick” in a nutshell. It’s not just a summer movie, but an act of faith in big-screen entertainment and old-school cinematic virtues that have become sadly outmoded in this degraded age of comic book multiverses and sloppy CGI sludge made to be watched on your phone. The clarity and classical craftsmanship of this film feel like anachronistic acts of defiance against contemporary blockbuster practices. As Cruise replies to Harris when taunted about his impending obsolescence, “Maybe so, sir. But not today.”
His latest act of insubordination might be Maverick’s last. Issues with authority over the years have kept him from ever progressing past captain, and he’s only still allowed in the Navy thanks to the semi-regular interventions of his classmate and former rival/hetero love interest Iceman, who now commands the Pacific fleet. (Val Kilmer’s health problems have been quite movingly written into the role, and while he cannot for obvious reasons appear onscreen often, that original performance remains so iconic you still somehow hear his voice in your head whenever Ice and Mav are texting.) Our hero would be grounded for good this time, except desperate times call for desperate measures, and much to the dismay of the brass, Maverick is ordered back to his old alma mater for one final assignment to close out his career.
There’s some gibberish about an underground uranium-enriching lab in what’s described as “a rogue state” known only as “the enemy.” (In keeping with the “Top Gun” tradition of being strategically vague about who and where we’re supposed to be fighting, the villains still wear black face shields so we can’t even see their complexions.) The point is that it’s a heavily defended target that can’t be reached by drones, requiring intricate aerial acrobatics at dangerously low altitudes with vertiginous dives and drops and assorted other complex maneuvers with which the new generation of Navy pilots has little experience. This gives Maverick a matter of weeks to train a new crew of ****y kids for a seemingly impossible mission (sorry) from which he worries not everybody will be coming home.
It’s a scenario similar to Clint Eastwood’s great “Heartbreak Ridge” — which coincidentally came out the same year as the original “Top Gun” — allowing a veteran star to test his mettle against some up-and-coming young whippersnappers and prove who’s still the boss. (Amusingly, both men were 56 years old when they shot these movies, yet Cruise somehow remains preserved in amber while Clint already looked older than dirt.) More importantly, it allows the star room to reflect on his advancing age and time passed by — something the preternaturally, insistently boyish Cruise has been loath to do onscreen before now.
“Top Gun: Maverick” is a surprisingly emotional experience in its evocation of the title character’s loneliness after a lifetime of burned bridges and breaking all the rules. With Cruise riding solo on his motorcycle and puttering around with old planes in an empty hangar, it seems the highway to the danger zone is a solitary one indeed. A wonderfully staged scene finds his class of new recruits bonding at a bar, busting each other’s chops and singing along to jukebox oldies. A lesser film would have found a way for Maverick to mix it up with the kids, but this one is content to let him look on, wistfully. Of all the things I expected from a “Top Gun” sequel, a melancholy undertow wasn’t one of them.
Maverick spends the movie haunted by ghosts of his past and the detritus of bad decisions. Foremost among them is Miles Teller’s resentful Rooster — son of his late sidekick Goose — a promising kid whose military career our guilt-ridden hero sabotaged because he couldn’t bear to see him put in harm’s way. There’s also a star-making turn from Glen Powell as Hangman, a swaggering know-it-all who physically resembles a mashup of Cruise and Kilmer back in 1986 and represents to Maverick everything he's come to hate about his younger, hot dog self. Finally, he’s reunited with Jennifer Connelly’s Penny Benjamin, the admiral’s daughter alluded to in the original film with whom our main character has conducted more than a few off-again-on-again flings over the ensuing decades, and his considerable charms have long ago worn off with her. (Connelly is terrific casting because not only can she hold her own against Cruise’s megawatt charisma, she’s likewise in her 50s yet still looks 35.)
Attempting to preside over all of this is Jon Hamm’s persnickety vice admiral, a perfect Margaret Dumont to Cruise’s ****pit Groucho. The man who Tina Fey once described on “30 Rock” as “looking like a cartoon of a pilot” spends the movie finding a thousand hilarious ways to be exasperated by Cruise and his refusal to do anything by the book. (In one of the movie’s more delightfully on-the-nose metaphors, Maverick begins the first day of class by tossing the flight manual into the trash.) Or maybe he’s just mad because nobody invited him to play shirtless touch football on the beach, during a winking reprise of the previous picture’s most notorious scene.
Director Joseph Kosinski doesn’t have the late Tony Scott’s lust for lacquered images, which is okay because the sequel is more of an actual movie instead of a commercial for being awesome. It’s got the easy camaraderie and rueful humor of an old Howard Hawks or a late-period Eastwood picture, which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise as Kosinski’s woefully underseen 2017 forest-firefighter drama “Only the Brave” (which also co-starred Connelly and Teller) borrowed all the right moves from Hawks’ “Only Angels Have Wings.” He brings an astonishing lucidity and precision to the midair stunt sequences, impeccably laying out the spatial geography at unfathomable speeds. Paramount put out a 50-page book for the press explaining all the unprecedented and insane efforts that were made to capture this footage over a shoot that began all the way back in 2018. But I didn’t want to read it, preferring to preserve the illusion of these breathtaking images whizzing by in IMAX. I’d rather believe my eyes.
Cruise is a believer, too. During the pandemic, it was reported that both Netflix and Amazon offered astronomical sums to stream the film, which the star vehemently vetoed, insisting that his baby be seen first exclusively on movie theater screens. If you buy what he claims in interviews, Cruise remains so in love with the moviegoing experience that he dons disguises and goes to multiplexes to watch films with regular audiences. (Everyone jokes about him wearing the “Mission: Impossible” pull-away prosthetics, but I prefer to imagine him at the mall watching “Morbius” in one of his old “Eyes Wide Shut” masks.) There’s no way Cruise could have known when they started shooting how much trouble theaters would be in by the time “Top Gun: Maverick” was finally released, but at a moment when even an alarming number of couch potato film critics are advocating for the end of the theatrical experience, it’s a relief to have an ally in The Last Movie Star.
“The world needs Maverick,” says a beloved character in the movie’s most shamelessly affecting moment. And the movie industry needs films like “Top Gun: Maverick” — big, splashy blockbuster entertainments to remind audiences that it doesn’t all have to be strange doctors and spider-men setting up Disney+ spinoff series in front of greenscreens on Atlanta soundstages. Sure, I could quibble about some choppy scene transitions and the hurried feel of the film’s first hour, but the fact remains that the last 45 minutes or so of this movie made me so ridiculously happy I couldn’t stop kicking the chair in front of me at the press screening. Apologies in advance to anyone who gets stuck sitting near me at future showings.
