Posted in: Movies, Paramount Pictures | Tagged: movies, Paramount Pictures, top gun: maverick

Top Gun: Maverick – "Going To Be Now Or Never," Says Star Tom Cruise

A sequel to Top Gun has been in active development since at least 2010, but there just hasn't been a moment that seemed to work for everyone involved. The movie is a cult classic, but nothing ever seemed to come from it. However, Top Gun: Maverick is finally coming out after many delays, some of which were beyond their control and pandemic related. When it comes to timing, star Tom Cruise expressed that at one point he wasn't interested in doing another movie, but that the idea for a sequel came to be way earlier, right after the first movie came out, according to a new interview with Total Film.

"Originally, I wasn't interested in doing a sequel," star and producer Tom Cruise tells Total Film magazine in the new issue, featuring Top Gun on the cover. "All over the whole world, people were asking for it, and asking for it. [Producers Don] Simpson and [Jerry] Bruckheimer – I remember back in '87, they had an idea. It was the germ of the idea, actually, that ended up with the concept of [Top Gun: Maverick]."

A lot has been made about Cruise and how he goes about making movies, but the man is getting older, and he can't go around riding motorcycles off of cliffs or getting into fighter jets for the rest of his life. However, he seemed to realize that this was very much a "now or never" situation when it came to Top Gun: Maverick.

"I had lots of discussions for years with Tony, with Jerry, with McQ [Christopher McQuarrie] about it, and when I was doing Oblivion, talking to Joe [Kosinski, director]," continues Cruise. "I just had to wait for that right moment. And I realized it was either going to be now or never. And basically, I liked the concept of the idea. And I was like, 'Alright…'"

It wasn't just the right timing on the part of Cruise, but also meeting up with the right person at the right time as well. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer explained that they had been toying with this sequel for so long, but it really took a good meeting and pitch with director Joe Kosinski to get this decades-long ball rolling.

"We certainly played around with it," says producer Bruckheimer of the decades-long development process. "But we never solved the problem of how to make another film." Things kicked up a notch when Bruckheimer and Cruise met with Joseph Kosinski in Paris, during the shooting of Mission: Impossible – Fallout. "Joe had an idea for the movie," explains Bruckheimer matter-of-factly. "And Tom loved the idea. And we loved it. So that's where it all started."

We got a chance to see the opening see for Top Gun: Maverick at CinemaCon last August, mere days before they decided to delay the movie from November 2021 to May 2022. Paramount hasn't been taking a lot of chances when it comes to the big movies that they have in the works when it comes to the pandemic. They seem much keener to let it sit on the shelf to wait for a bigger box office than risk an underperformance.

Summary: After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy's top aviators, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: "Rooster," the son of Maverick's late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka "Goose." Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.

Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, stars Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis with Ed Harris. It will be released on May 27, 2022.

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