Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
- Despite a rocky opening weekend, Top Gun: Maverick went on to gross over 5x its budget thanks purely to incredible audience word-of-mouth.
- The studio almost pulled funding for Top Gun: Maverick midway through the shoot, convinced that the audience wouldn't connect with the unconventional tone.
Top Gun: Maverick is a 2022 American action drama film directed by Joseph Kosinski, a sequel arriving 36 years after Tony Scott's original 1986 Top Gun. Tom Cruise returns as Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, a test pilot who has spent decades deliberately avoiding promotion to maintain his flying career. Called back to the Top Gun school to train a team of elite graduates for a near-impossible mission against an unnamed enemy's uranium enrichment facility, Maverick must confront his past when he discovers one of his students is Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw, the son of his late best friend Goose, played by Miles Teller.
Top Gun: Maverick was a filmmaking achievement built on an extraordinary commitment to practical aerial photography — the actors underwent months of intensive flight training and actually flew in F-18 Super Hornets while performing their scenes, with custom-built IMAX camera rigs mounted inside the cockpits capturing real G-forces, real reactions, and real aerial footage. The resulting flight sequences were the most thrilling and viscerally authentic ever committed to film. Tom Cruise, who was 59 during filming, personally flew several of the aircraft and insisted on practical stunts throughout.
The film earned $1.49 billion worldwide, becoming Cruise's first billion-dollar film and one of the highest-grossing films of 2022. Top Gun: Maverick received six Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and won Best Sound. The film was widely hailed as proof that event cinema — made for the big screen with practical filmmaking — could still command massive audiences in the streaming era.
