Released in 1986, the Tony Scott film Tom Gun considerably boosted the career of star Tom Cruise, had something of a springboard effect on the career of co-star Kelly McGillis, and went on to earn $357,469,522 at the global box office by the time of the eventual release of its 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick.
Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, building on the now unequivocal global star power of Cruise, and not including McGillis in the film, made $740,000,000 around the globe by the third weekend of its 2022 release. There is a story here about the gendered nature of Hollywood ‘stardom’ – and an intriguing one, at that, given that McGillis, as 1986s Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Blackwood, is both civilian contractor and an instructor to Cruise’s new, young air force pilot (what Cruise doesn’t know, McGillis does; and the film makes that clear on a number of fronts!). However, an investigation of mainstream cinematic gender partiality side, what’s the story of the 2022 sequel’s immediate success?
Nostalgia clearly plays a role here – as it does in many of the creative industries, where consumers (gallery visitors, cinema goers, audiences for music, and so on) connect not only to intellect stimuli but to emotional ones as well. CI products and experiences seek to highlight individualism, independence, personal decision-making and preference, even when aimed at mass popular audiences, and they do so by marketing that seemingly maverick notion that we humans consist of emotions and intellect, singularly and as a species. Audiences for Maverick today are reportedly made-up half of those who saw the original when it was released and half of those who didn’t (though many of those who didn’t apparently have been introduced to it by their eager parents – fathers especially!) Nostalgia, then, is a key Maverick driver; but the CI business model here contains some additional common yet thought-provoking aspects, given the 2022 context.
The sequel was announced in 2010, and an initial draft script completed by 2012. The death of the director of the original Top Gun, Tony Scott, in 2012 then put things on hold. A new director was finally in place by 2017, further scripting took place, and production started over the next year, with a projected film release date of July 2019. However, the nature of the action sequences in the film, and a recognition that audiences were both nostalgic for and generally expecting some spectacular flying, set the release date back. When it looked likely the film would be released in 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic had already taken hold and the release was set back again.
This film production history, while not all that unusual (for the most part, of course, given the particularity of enduring a pandemic), was mapped onto a marketing history that included announcements from the studio (Paramount), trailers at industry and public events such as Comic Con, CineEurope and CinemaCon, and references by the stars (or, primarily, the star: Cruise) in media interviews over the twelve-year development and production period.
What is distinctive about this history of Top Gun-Maverick is not, then, the marketing tools being used, or even the product itself - after all, the film is a relatively straightforward action-film sequel, featuring a not unexpected Hollywood star and following a common ‘return of hero’ narrative – what is distinctive is the way in which Maverick is an example of reference to both the human psyche and humans being psyched-up, a reference that many CI products seek to make. The human ‘psyche’ in that the film is a story of triumph, based on release from the bounds of history, displayed in large (Cruise, one of the producers, was adamant that the film would not be released on anything other than big screens, not on a small screen streaming platform) and aiming to thrill as audiences were encouraged to emerge from what had been over two years of pandemic isolation. Humans ‘psyched-up’ (to use that British term for mental preparedness) in that Top Gun: Maverick would return audiences to a world they knew before the COVID-19 pandemic, make a nod to the theme of success-over-the-odds to which much 1980s action cinema had also alluded, and include enough historical grounding that any emotional response to the film would be grounded in widely shared cultural knowledge.
If Top Gun: Maverick is indicative of the work of mainstream commercial film makers, it is also a perfect example of how the creative industries work generally – to varying degrees and in a multitude of ways – to bind our mental preparedness (perhaps aware of an art form or understanding the context of a particular creator or group of creators) to our psyches (our sense that what are receiving contains a psychological element of ourselves). Boldly we might say, Top Gun: Maverick is therefore much more than a high octane fly past, it is a powerful example of the CI flight itself.
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