‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Has 1 Scene Tom Cruise Always Wanted in the Original
The latest Tom Cruise blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick, brought summer movies back and set all the records. It even fulfilled a regret he’d had since the 1986 original. Maverick innovated new ways to film aerial sequences, by attaching cameras to the fighter jets. That wasn’t possible in 1986 so Cruise missed out on 1 shot from the first movie, but not this time.
Top Gun: Maverick is out on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UHD now. The 4K UHD is probably the closest you’ll ever come to having IMAX in your living room. The bonus features also give Cruise many chances to discuss the film, and he revealed the one shot he finally got 36 years after the original Top Gun.
‘Top Gun: Maverick’ got 1 shot Tom Cruise always wanted
Both Top Gun movies open with montages of jets taking off from an aircraft carrier. Both movies feature many more stellar aerial sequences throughout the movie. Only Top Gun: Maverick captures this shot, though.
“One of the first things that didn’t get filmed during Top Gun, the first one, was getting catapulted off of the aircraft carrier,” Cruise said. “So I did on this and I got to do that six times. It’s unbelievable.”
That wasn’t the only reason Tom Cruise waited 36 years for ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
The bonus features also include Cruise’s talk at the Cannes Film Festival. It was there that he explained the other reasons it took him 36 years to agree to make a Top Gun sequel.
“For Top Gun, they go, ‘Why 36 years?’” Cruise said at Cannes. “I wasn’t ready in ‘86. [Producers] Don [Simpson] and Jerry [Bruckheimer], I remember the studio, they wanted to make a sequel immediately. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do it. I need to grow as an artist, I need to understand what cinema is and I know what I don’t know.’”
What he learned making ‘Mission: Impossible’ sequels
Although Paramount and the producers wanted Top Gun 2, Cruise wouldn’t make a sequel until 2000’s Mission: Impossible 2. When Mission: Impossible became his franchise, Cruise started learning ways he could make a Top Gun sequel. Even Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski recalled Cruise still needed more convincing when they worked together on Oblivion.
At Cannes, Cruise further detailed how Mission: Impossible sequels paved the way for Top Gun: Maverick:
And I’m learning and some of the things that I’ve learned, in terms of Mission: Impossible, in doing sequels I learned that I can have a dialogue with an audience. I didn’t expect to have that. There’s this dialogue and investment in characters. They kept asking all around the world in every different language, ‘How do we do it?’ I’d go home at night and I would think about things. How could I do it? How would it happen? Jerry and I sat down, we’d talk about it. Chris McQuarrie and I for many years talked about, and [Top Gun director] Tony [Scott] and It talked about it. We sat down and I wrote down all the things I wanted, how I could deliver for an audience today that I felt would be worthy of that for them. You see those faces, and there’s generations, I don’t want to disappoint them. I want to deliver and I need something also artistically for me, it’s got to work.
Tom Cruise, Cannes Film Festival via Top Gun: Maverick bonus features
