top gun: maverick, part 1, or your kind is headed for extinction
in which tom confronts the end of cinema
It’s 2005. Tom Cruise is on the press circuit for his second and final collaboration with Steven Spielberg, War of the Worlds. It’s a disaster. His cherished public persona is crumbling in front of his eyes. Nobody is talking about the movie, and everyone is talking about whether this is the end of Tom Cruise as a movie star.
It’s 2023. Tom Cruise is at an Oscar nominees luncheon, and he sees his old friend Steven. They hug, and Steven tells him that Top Gun 2 might just have saved the theatrical experience.
What?
No, seriously. What? We’ve covered much of Tom Cruise’s journey since the mid-2000s flop era in this series, but nothing we’ve talked about to date covers that. As of Fallout, he had made his way back towards being a profitable and respected movie star, but the saviour of cinema itself? I mean, gosh. That’s a mighty title to bestow on anyone, and a mighty figure doing the bestowing.
He’s right, I think. There is, indeed, a very good argument to be made that the ultra-belated 36-years-later Top Gun sequel saved cinema as we know it.
But how the actual fuck did that happen?
Well, it’s a long story. Longer than a long newsletter, actually. This is part one of that story. Part two will be with you all next week. My apologies.
Welcome to Top Gun: Maverick. It saved cinema.
We’ve had a nice linear track going on to date, but the story of Maverick begins a little further back in time. Bear with me.
In 1986, Top Gun represented the true beginning of Cruise’s blockbuster status, which he would eventually parlay into decades of stardom and the Mission: Impossible franchise. Through those decades, like with any beloved classic, a Top Gun sequel was idly chattered about, but never seriously explored. Cruise had other fish to fry, and his own franchise to keep up.
Fast forward to early autumn 2010. Cruise is mired in his flop era and beginning shooting on Ghost Protocol, which was still a potential handover film at the time. Suddenly, a nostalgic legacy sequel seems like a good bet. He gets Jerry Bruckheimer back to work his magic. And what do you know? Tony Scott, still working frequently in the blockbuster space, is game. Murmurs and rumours begin about drone warfare and Maverick acting as a mentor to a new generation. The flight deck is prepared.
The sequel pootles around in development for a little while, and then, in 2012, it stops. It has to.
On 19th August 2012, Tony Scott took his own life. It’s likely that he was fighting cancer, but nobody knows for certain why it happened. Only that it did. He spent some of his final days scouting locations with Tom Cruise.
Tony Scott’s legacy has, I think, grown in stature in recent years. It’s easy to pigeonhole him as an unsophisticated helmer of action dreck - he never had the breadth of genre or the prestige his brother Ridley had. But within his shlocky little wheelhouse, Tony created some remarkable, tense, exciting, innovative spectacles - from Crimson Tide to Deja Vu. His final film, Unstoppable, proved that his filmmaking instincts were as crisp as ever, and that he was still a whiz and a half with fast-moving vehicles. Tony never lost it.
Top Gun 2 fell by the wayside for a few years, rudderless without the man who had brought the insane sunset-soaked Ray Ban advert vibe of the original. Still, Hollywood rarely kindly stops for death. The project was delayed significantly, but it was never going to be cancelled outright, not even without Tony.
That’s not a criticism, by the way. The finished Top Gun: Maverick, years later, would finish with a moving tribute to Tony Scott, and in its sleekly modern, only-slightly-orange vibe, there was a respectful deference to the house style of the original, an acknowledgement that there was no good reason to try and replicate what Scott had done. The melancholic aura of mortality that saturates the film has a lot of sources, but he’s chief among them.
The sequel crawled back into production by increments - a writer hired in 2014, Cruise signing on in 2016, and finally the hiring of Joseph Kosinski as director in 2017, at which time a summer 2019 release was set. Kosinski comes, naturally, from the school of McQuarrie, in that he had built up a decent journeyman resume before hitching his wagon to Cruise with 2013’s Oblivion. That project, a mostly forgotten sci-fi gumbo, was enough to induct him into the inner circle. Tom trusted him.
Every now and then, Hollywood gets its knickers in a twist over a big movie role that attracts white men in their 20s and 30s like a fleet of bees. Currently, it’s the main role in Superman: Legacy. In the summer of 2018, it was Goose’s son.
It was kind of a no-brainer, the Goose’s son thing. Watching Top Gun for the first time last year ahead of Maverick, I was honestly surprised that Goose Jr. was already established, Tony Scott having laid in the premise for a legacy sequel almost by accident. It was a ready-made premise for a sequel. Duh. Things may have changed a little over the years - at the beginning of the sequel’s development, there was some chatter about Cruise stepping out of the way a little, suggesting Goose Jr. could have been the lead - but this was always going to the big new role to be cast.
Thus, the casting call went out, and the generically handsome white men of Hollywood answered in their droves. The final three, all of whom did a chemistry read with Cruise in June 2018, was a who’s who of frequent blockbuster auditioners. They’ve all had a chequered history before and after.
Poor Nicholas Hoult. His story of quiet failure made headlines recently when he spoke out about his history of close-run auditions for major roles in an interview. Hoult has had a good Hollywood career - Fury Road, Beast in X-Men, The Favourite, The Menu, a cushy series regular gig on a Hulu show - but it could have been better.
In 2009, he auditioned for the role of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones, and didn’t get it. In 2019, he was in the final two for the lead in The Batman, and lost it to Robert Pattinson. In 2020, he was cast as the main villain in the Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning movies, and had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts. Oh, and in 2018, he was in the final three for Goose Jr., and didn’t make it.
Alas, Kentucky. Alas, vanity. Undeterred by failure, Hoult is currently filming in the lead role of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, and he’s auditioning for either Superman or Lex Luthor, depending on who you ask. You shoot your shot, king. Fifth time lucky.
Glen Powell. Oh, Glen. In the summer of 2018, Mr. Powell was riding high, having starred in the rare good Netflix romcom, Set It Up (watch it if you haven’t, it’s a treat). Seeing the opportunity for his big break, the Top Gun fan tried out hard for Goose Jr., and narrowly lost it. Cruise was so impressed with his audition, though, that he slotted Powell into the role of Hangman, which was subsequently expanded in the script.
These days, Glen Powell is best known for cheating on his stunning model ex-girlfriend with Sydney Sweeney on the set of another romcom, Anyone But You. Once a beloved icon of film Twitter, Powell’s profile with online hipsters took a swift nosedive when he made a genuinely baffling press appearance at CinemaCon with Sweeney in April, at which the two were practically tonguing one another in front of the cameras. This act was so powerful in its cringe value that it single-handedly changed the perception of Hollywood infidelity scandals from “cool” to “not cool”. We’ll see how it goes for Glen, with the proviso that nothing that happens on Twitter matters.
The winner was Miles Teller.
In the summer of 2018, Teller was probably the least beloved of the three. He had been around in Hollywood for years, his profile boosted by his magnetic performance in Whiplash, but his choice of big roles had been somewhat suspect. Things came to a spectacular halt with the Fantastic Four reboot, the least successful major superhero movie until Morbius and Shazam! Fury of the Gods (illustrious company).
Teller didn’t star in a single film from 2017 until Maverick. In parallel, he had established a reputation as being a huge dick in interviews, so nobody liked him very much, to the point where he was briefly stuck with an antivax scandal that he had to go out and publicly deny himself. His casting in Maverick did not seem auspicious.
But, really, did any of this seem auspicious?
The eight years between the conversation starting and Maverick rolling cameras had seen Hollywood change. Legacy sequels were a thing circa 2010 - Kosinski himself made his directorial debut with the aptly named Tron: Legacy, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a thunderclap on the nostalgia-driven horizon in 2008. It’s true, though, that they were less of a thing. Hollywood was certainly addicted to reviving old IP, but straight reboots and remakes were, arguably, higher up in the playbook.
Sometimes, Hollywood’s big changes are an accumulation of various events, and sometimes it’s just one huge movie. For legacy sequels, it was the latter. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in December 2015, proved that there was nothing in this world or the next more lucrative than hauling out the old guys from storage and putting on the same costumes. The comfort-blanket of seeing your old heroes with grey hair saying the same lines and doing the same stuff? Anaesthetically good.
(It’s regrettable that Hollywood glommed onto The Force Awakens and not the other legacy sequel of late 2015 reviving a franchise that began in the 70s - Creed. Ryan Coogler’s near-masterpiece Rocky revival is the perfect blueprint for how to introduce new characters and perspectives to an old story, to the point where it outgrew the character of Rocky altogether in its second sequel. Society if Hollywood obsessed about replicating Creed would be the “society if” meme.)
Now, I must exempt certain legacy sequels from the point I want to make. Doctor Sleep, Blade Runner 2049, The Matrix Resurrections and Mad Max: Fury Road, you may leave the room.
Okay. Now we can go.
I fucking hate legacy sequels. They anger me more every day. I try to keep my worrying about capitalism’s corrosive effect on art to a minimum, but I saw a promo clip discussing Michael Keaton’s return as Batman in The Flash, and it ruined my mood for an hour. As I write this, they’re rolling cameras on a Beetlejuice sequel during a writer’s strike.
A bunch of anhedonic Gen Xers are in the control room of our culture, and they’re taking everyone hostage. The boardrooms of Hollywood are clustered with bean-counting morons determined to separate and then replicate the aesthetics of old stories rather than what they were actually about. As long as 70 year old Michael Keaton is strapped up in rubber and saying the lines, it doesn’t matter that we’ve copy and pasted him into a loading screen from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 that makes his chin look weird.
Sorry. I got on my soapbox again.
The point being, Top Gun: Maverick fits the lega-sequel tag to a tee. There doesn’t seem to be any real reason to revisit this. The original Top Gun, as we covered at the start of this series, is quintessential 80s bullshit, neon-soaked military worship that Trojan Horsed a Judith Butler book’s worth of homoeroticism into a Reaganist recruitment ad. The phrase “product of its time” was invented for Top Gun.
What use would a legacy sequel be aside from the usual nostalgia bait? Why bring back Maverick if not to administer cinematic Xanax to a flock of ennui-stricken Kendall Roys longing for a childhood that never existed?
Anyhow, they were making it. The first bump in the road was a minor one - amidst production at the end of summer 2018, the release date was nudged back from its original July 2019 release to June 2020 in order to allow more post-production time. There wasn’t a reason to think much of this - the original release was a tight schedule, and the extent of the practical stunts was already becoming pretty clear. No harm in waiting another summer, right?
Oh, there goes that fucker again.
I’m sorry that we keep ending up here. The downside of covering franchises that run up to the present day is that they end up running into the big old wall that was March 2020. I do not enjoy discussing the novel coronavirus, but that is the world into which we were all cast, and it is the world we must deal with.
Also, spoiler alert, but this is a feel-good story. This is about how Tom Cruise fought a viral pandemic and won.
Like virtually every blockbuster scheduled for release in 2020, Top Gun: Maverick was swiftly kicked down the calendar once Hollywood realised the virus wasn’t going away. It found multiple dates refuges along the way - December 2020, July 2021, November 2021 and finally its eventual release in May 2022. Funnily enough, these shuffles were happening in tandem with the Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning films, which also ended up with two-year delays once all was said and done.
The fate of a pandemic blockbuster was a varied one (for more on how summer 2021 shook out, we covered that ground in the F9 newsletter!). Some would go full streaming (the de-facto fate of Wonder Woman 1984, which I somehow did see in its week-long theatrical release in the UK), some would go day-and-date, and some would simply sit and wait for a time where a fully theatrical release was possible again. Maverick would sit in the third category, but that wasn’t always certain. It wasn’t certain if that option would even exist anymore.
Let’s talk about the future of theatrical distribution, shall we?
Now you’re seeing why this thing couldn’t help but be two parts. My bad.
In my defence, I think this framing is relevant to Top Gun: Maverick, because its release ended up being an existential thing. Hollywood was holding out for a hero - “the saviour of cinema” - and this turned out to be it. It really needed the save.
Back in March 2020, as Tom Hanks caught the virus and everyone realised the reality of an incoming pandemic, the industry’s attitude seemed to be cautiously optimistic. Early delays like No Time To Die, Mulan or A Quiet Place Part II - movies so close to their intended release that tickets were already on sale - positioned late summer to early autumn of 2020 as a likely relaunch for theatrical releases. In short, everyone seemed to generally think this virus thing would blow over in a few months.
Obviously, it didn’t. Gradually, as the year crept on and even as societies cautiously returned from full lockdown, it became clear that true normal life was some time away. As a result, those 2020 hopefuls began to skitter away to 2021, where they’d await further delays once the winter 2020 lockdowns hit. Cinemas in major markets remained shut, or re-opened with massive capacity restrictions.
In the event, the theatrical landscape in the US was almost entirely barren for the rest of the year, barring some smaller films that received token releases, the stunt-released Russell Crowe actioner Unhinged (notably only for being the first major studio film to brave an all-theatrical release in early July 2020), and Tenet.
Ah, yes, Tenet. Christopher Nolan’s misunderstood tour de force, exploring what happens when guys hang out together. Also, a lightning rod for the war of theatrical distribution in 2020. Nolan is, famously, a bit of a nut about the theatrical experience, and his desire for his latest blockbuster to be kept off streaming for as long as possible led to a truly odd situation.
As all other boats fled the horizon, Tenet stayed firm in its planned July 17 release, eventually opting for a couple of laughably short delays which placed it at the end of August. By this time, cinemas were open in large parts of the world, and most of the US (excluding New York and California, markets known for containing millions of coastal elite nerds who would ordinarily love to see the new Nolan, which remained shut). Technically, then, there was a rationale for releasing Tenet at this time. Technically.
The main reason - sometimes said out loud, sometimes left implied - was that Hollywood had begun to get itchy. Nobody wanted to be the first guy back through the doors, but everyone wanted there to be a first guy through the doors. The movie that would sweep away the COVID cobwebs and bring audiences back to the movies began to assume this mythic quality, somewhat distanced from the ongoing reality of a multiple-wave pandemic and generally skittish audiences now understandably anxious about the prospect of spending time in enclosed and unventilated spaces.
By accident, design or both of the above, Tenet wound up assuming that title. In that respect, it was set up to fail - not just because it’s, diplomatically, not a hugely accessible movie (they didn’t understand it), but because no movie was ever going to save cinema in the summer of 2020. Come on, man.
These days, the general tenor of conversation on social media is pro-movie theatres. We cheer when a movie like Evil Dead Rise, originally intended for streaming, pops off when it’s released in cinemas instead. Streaming is here to stay, but when you drill down to it, few people really prefer watching a new movie at home. It’s light outside, your TV’s sound sucks, and your phone is always there.
Because of this, it can be easy to forget how different the conversation was around Tenet’s release. The movie - and more specifically Nolan - assumed a sort of villainous role. It wasn’t a good idea to go to the cinema at the time, but here Tenet was, encouraging audiences to flock to the dark windowless room and breathe all over each other. This was tone-deaf and thoughtless: business interests above public health. It was not a flattering look.
By contrast, streaming was so ideally placed to succeed during this time because it could assume the guise of not only the most financially logical option, but also the healthy one. Studios releasing their films for audiences to watch at home could enjoy the perception of being inclusive and democratic, of compromising with the times. It’s that kind of logic that, presumably, led to industry-shaking decisions like Warner Bros.’ “Project Popcorn”, where every one of their major releases during 2021 was put on HBO Max the same day as cinemas, or Disney+’s Premier Access experiment.
Audiences were learning not to go to the movies, and behaviour, once unlearned, can be difficult to relearn. And, in the foggy and uncertain days of 2020, who was to say whether they would want to go back, even when it was supposedly safe? It was already becoming clear that “safe” was a matter of perspective, and that it was in good business interest for the Western corporate world make that definition of ‘safe’ quite liberal. People were starting to make their own decisions, and the theatrical industry was starting to feel the pinch. Just because cinemas were open didn’t mean anyone would go to them.
Top Gun: Maverick was always, as the marketing would eventually hammer never-endingly, meant to be a big-screen experience. That was always the plan.
But plans change. In 2020, Apple TV+ and Netflix, having already sniffed out several once-theatrical releases for their swelling streaming libraries, approached Paramount with an offer to take the distribution rights for Maverick and put it on streaming.
Tom Cruise loves movie theatres. This much is clear. But he also loves people seeing his movies. This is also clear. Maverick wouldn’t be the first, nor the last major blockbuster to make that compromise.
Next time: Oh, we’re done? Ending abruptly like that - what are we, Fast X?
Next week will be our last of the Tom Cruise series, finishing our journey back to TOPGUN by taking a look at how Maverick became the surprise hit of summer 2022, and how Tom Cruise saved movies.
See you then.