How Top Gun: Maverick shocked the world (2024)

No-one expected much from the Top Gun sequel – and so its soaring global success came as a complete surprise. It was an emotional experience and a true one-off, says Nicholas Barber.

Scroll down a list of the highest grossing films per year since 2012, and you'll see two different Avengers sequels, plus Captain America: Civil War, which is an Avengers sequel in all but name. You'll also see a Spider-Man sequel, a Transformers sequel, a couple of Star Wars sequels, and a cartoon.

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No disrespect to any of them, but it's clear that cinema's biggest global hits are now science fiction and fantasy blockbusters, featuring superhuman characters and lots of flashy digital imagery. But not in 2022. This year's international box-office champion was Top Gun: Maverick, a Tom Cruise vehicle that featured real people in real planes – and has so far raked in almost £1.25 billion ($1.5 billion) worldwide. That's around £400 million more than the runner up, Jurassic World: Dominion.

Nobody predicted it. Top Gun itself may also have come top of the global box office in 1986, but when Rolling Stone magazine compiled its 100 greatest films of the 1980s this March, and Time Out compiled its 50 greatest this May, it didn't appear in either round-up. Many critics now see it as a relic: a shiny time capsule celebrating Reagan-era US military might, showcasing a rising star who was in his early twenties, and demonstrating the ad-industry stylings of its director, Tony Scott, who died in 2012. Why revive the franchise in the 21st Century, in a changed geo-political world, with a new director, and a star in his late fifties? Scott’s successor, Joseph Kosinski, also made 2010's Tron: Legacy, another belated sequel to a 1980s hit. It did well enough, as did some other films in that category, from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) to Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). But none of these was the film of the year.

To make matters even less promising, Top Gun: Maverick was postponed and postponed again. Shooting took place between 2018 and 2019, and a July 2019 release was scheduled. But additional shooting and the Covid-19 pandemic kept pushing that date back until the new Top Gun was in danger of seeming almost as dated as the 1986 one. Cruise's co-star Miles Teller, for instance, was no longer the hot property in 2022 that he had been when he auditioned years earlier.

Expectations weren't exactly sky high, then, when Top Gun: Maverick eventually opened in May 2022 – but that may have worked in its favour. Viewers were hoping for a nostalgic guilty pleasure. What they got was one of the best Hollywood movies in years – a film that earnt a Rotten Tomatoes score of 96% from critics, and 99% from audiences.

As written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Cruise's regular Mission: Impossible collaborator, Christopher McQuarrie, Top Gun: Maverick accomplishes an almost impossible mission itself. It continues a story that began in 1986, but it delivers as a stand-alone story, too. It keeps the structure and setting of the original by having a group of co*cky pilots training (and playing beach games) at a US Navy jet-fighter school, but it improves on the original in every respect. The plotting, the acting, the dialogue, the head-spinning aerial sequences – all of them are polished until they gleam. And, of course, the film's exemplary skill and efficiency are embodied by its leading man, back in the co*ckpit as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, doing more of his own stunts than ever, and looking better than he did in 1986.

The poignancy of time passing

Crucially, though, Cruise isn't just showing off his teeth, his hair and his daredevil piloting in Top Gun: Maverick. He also turns in the best dramatic performance of the second half of his 40-year career, largely because he is growing old gracefully – or growing middle-aged gracefully, anyway. As recently as 2017, The Mummy presented him as a rascally, rebellious youngster, but in Top Gun: Maverick, he finally accepts that he is over 40 – maybe even over 50 – and this acceptance brings poignancy to Pete's second-chance romance with his bar-owning ex (Jennifer Connelly). It's rare indeed for Cruise to have an involving love story in a film – but Top Gun: Maverick gives him two. Val Kilmer's character, "Iceman", had been treated for throat cancer, as had the actor himself, so his friendship with Pete is far more touching than anything in the original film.

None of this emotional heft would have been there if other Top Gun sequels and reboots had been made already. The 36-year gap ensured that Top Gun: Maverick was about more than just a nifty fighter pilot with a killer smile. It was about ageing and mortality, memories and regrets, holding on and letting go. It was about time passing – not just for Pete, or for us, but for cinema.

When Cruise was interviewed onstage at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the main theme was his tireless labouring over every detail that might make his films more entertaining. His constant questions, he explained, were: "How do we create these effects on audiences? Is what we're doing communicating?" But the other theme was his determination that his films should be shown in cinemas. "I make movies for the big screen," he declared. When asked if he'd let a screening platform have one of his films first, he chuckled in a Tom Cruise-ish way, "It's not going to happen – ever."

Compare and contrast Cruise's attitude with that of his namesake, Tom Hanks – perhaps his only serious competition for the title of "Last Hollywood Movie Star". Hanks has been in three films which went straight to streaming in the past two years, Greyhound, Finch, and Pinocchio. And how many of us are talking about those now? Cruise and his team, on the other hand, were wise to hold their nerve – to wait until they were sure that cinemas weren't just open again, but were staying open. In May 2022, audiences were ready to return to their local multiplex at last – and Top Gun: Maverick was waiting for them.

On its opening weekend in the US, it broke box-office records. It then had the smallest drop ever recorded on its second weekend for a film that opened over $100 million, lodged in the top five for 10 weeks, and then returned to the top spot in its 15th week; now this weekend, it is being re-released in US cinemas for two more weeks, to capitalise on the continued appetite for catching it on the big screen. Month after month, it has been possible to see Top Gun: Maverick at the cinema, to see it again, and to encourage other people to see it as well. That doesn't happen when a film makes a flying visit to the multiplex before retreating to your laptop.

The key to its wide appeal

And it didn't matter if you hadn't memorised the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It didn’t matter if you weren't a fan of horror movies, cartoons, or blockbusters about theme-park dinosaurs. Here was a romantic-comedy-drama-action-thriller – which is another way of saying that it was simply a Hollywood movie that everyone could enjoy. To people who had stayed away from cinemas since before the pandemic, Top Gun: Maverick felt like a warm welcome home.

Still, it was a bittersweet feeling – as if we were being welcomed home, but we had to leave again soon. Even while we were cheering, laughing and crying at the film, we were aware, on some level, that it was a one-off. Not only was Top Gun: Maverick terrifically well made, it was based on an intellectual property that was recognisable but not over-familiar, it boasted the movies' brightest superstar, alongside another actor poignantly returning to the screen in the wake of cancer treatment, and it came out just after the peak of a pandemic. How could any studio recreate a phenomenon like that? There have been articles asking what Hollywood could learn from the film's staggering success, but the answer is: nothing. Top Gun: Maverick won’t set any trends because it isn't part of a trend. It's unique.

After all, who else could have the lead role in an equivalent project? In November, Quentin Tarantino became the latest pundit to comment that "franchise characters" were now the stars, rather than the actors who played them. As if to back up this point, various Marvel and DC superhero blockbusters are still among the 10 highest grossing films in 2022, and the other top-10 titles – Minions: The Rise of Gru, Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Jurassic World Dominion – all fit into the digital-dependent science-fiction/fantasy/cartoon category. No Hollywood executive is going to read those numbers and decide that they'd be better off giving superheroes a rest.

The bittersweet feeling stirred up by Top Gun: Maverick came from knowing that it was a supersonic blast from the past. It was the last of its kind – just as its hero was the last of his. It marked the end of an era. But as long as the film was on the screen, we could tell ourselves that it hadn’t ended yet.

The screenwriters put it best. "The future is coming– and you're not in it," says Ed Harris's Rear Admiral Cain. "Your kind is heading for extinction."

"Maybe so, sir," says Pete. "But not today."

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