Two things stand out about the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic, Top Gun: how long it took for the follow-up to arrive and that we're only a few weeks away from its premiere.
With Top Gun: Maverick scheduled to fly into theaters on May 27 following several delays, Paramount Pictures is ramping up the marketing to get fans hyped for Tom Cruise's return as the naval aviator, Pete Mitchell, better known as Maverick. However, a sequel to such an iconic film isn't complete without a healthy mix of fresh faces and legacy characters. Older audiences will love seeing Val Kilmer come back to reprise his role as Iceman with the son of Anthony Edwards' Nick Bradshaw, otherwise also referred to as Goose, who will be played by Miles Teller, among the newcomers for Top Gun 2.
According to the little confirmed information about Top Gun: Maverick, the upcoming movie will be set 30 years after the first film with Maverick training a group of graduates from the titular naval academy for a special mission.
Now, we have a brand-new look at Maverick and Rooster, the son of Maverick's best friend who passed away during the events of Top Gun.
We feel the need... the need for the #TopGun: Maverick issue of Total Film!
The new magazine flies onto shelves this coming Thursday, 31 March, and features exclusive interviews with Tom Cruise and the @TopGunMovie cast and filmmakers. Subscribers, your copy is in the post now! pic.twitter.com/82pH50GIbF
— Total Film (@totalfilm) March 25, 2022
Total Film magazine's exclusive images feature a much older Cruise sporting his character's signature Aviator sunglasses and an ecstatic Maverick, for some reason. One photo also shows Teller's Rooster attending a formal meeting just outside the cockpit.
Top Gun: Maverick is just one of a handful of Cruise-led projects that had to change course following the lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Top Gun 2 was initially slated for a 2019 release before being postponed. But, the delay wasn't all bad news, as the extra time gave the film's director, Joseph Kosinski, a chance to flesh out the complicated dogfight sequences that are sure to be the highlight of the movie.
For what it's worth, the first 15-minutes of Maverick wowed audiences at CinemaCon 2021, and when you factor in the new images, Cruise is glad to be back in the role that launched his career.
Hopefully, Cruise's enthusiasm rubs off on audiences later this year.
In other news, Mission: Impossible 7 is careening towards a record-breaking production budget of more than $300 million following reports that Cruise's insistence to fight through the pandemic caused the filming expenses to balloon to an all-time high. We're interested to see just what the final figure is going to be for the seventh Mission: Impossible movie as cast and crew prepare to film the eighth and presumably final installment in the series of spy films. Mission: Impossible 7 is expected to drop into theaters on September 30, 2022.
