Paramount Pictures has changed the release date of the highly-anticipated aviation sequel Top Gun: Maverick. Originally set to debut on June 26, the Tom Cruise-led film will now hit the theaters this year.
Even though Top Gun: Maverick’s release has been delayed the promotions team behind the film is still trickling out some behind the scenes footage to keep people’s interest in the film.
Top Gun: Maverick is set in a world of drone technology and fifth-generation fighters along with exploring the end of the era of dogfighting. Maverick (once again played by Tom Cruise) is now a flight instructor, who takes Bradley Bradshaw (played by Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s late partner Nick “Goose” Bradshaw, under his wing. The film also stars Jon Hamm, Val Kilmer, Jennifer Connelly, Glen Powell, and Ed Harris.
We got our first, official trailer for the movie in July 2019, and a second trailer arrived in mid-December. With Maverick currently scheduled to hit theaters in June 2020, here’s everything we know about the Top Gun sequel so far.
The most intriguing part of the second trailer that was released was a shot of a fictional hypersonic test jet literally blowing the roof off a guard shack during its departure, with Ed Harris looking on. You can read more about that trailer and the shot in question in this past piece of ours. Now, we get to see a bit more about how they captured that sequence, including using a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet to test and prepare for the shot.
The scene was filmed at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake and the guard shack shown is a set-piece designed for the movie. It is almost comical in its placement for those familiar with aviation as it sits right at the edge of the runway overrun. In the newly released video, you can see one of the Blue Angels’ jets, smoke on, doing a high-speed pass over the shack and the production crew at very low level, which results in concussive shock and a big swirling storm of smoke and dust.
The clip, which was first highlighted by The Warzone, is believed to have been filmed as preparation for a shot featuring a hypersonic concept jet roaring low over a guard shack and an onlooking Ed Harris.
Here is the trailer version. The scene in question is the dramatic bumper at the end at 2:10 runtime:
We also got another quick glimpse of the Blue Angel flyby in a previous behind the scenes extended video that was released.
It is most likely that the shot shown in the trailer had the hypersonic jet superimposed over a Hornet to capture the effect.
Innovative cinematography is guaranteed to thrill audience members when “Top Gun: Maverick” finally lands in theaters this December.
Tom Cruise returns as Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, somehow still active as a Navy aviator 34 years after the release of “Top Gun.”
He’s got a gig as an instructor at Miramar and aims to impart his wisdom to a new generation played by Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Jay Ellis, Lewis Pullman, Greg Tarzan Davis, Danny Ramirez and Monica Barbaro.
Joseph Kosinski (who directed Cruise in “Oblivion”) is behind the camera, and the star brought in his “Mission: Impossible” writer/director Christopher McQuarrie to work on the script.
The original Top Gun was directed by Tony Scott and also starred Kelly McGillis, Anthony Edwards, and Tom Skerritt. The film won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Take My Breath Away” performed by Berlin. In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
That we’ve now got two extra days to enjoy “Top Gun: Maverick” is welcome news in a week where noted tech “visionary” Elon Musk announced to a group of fighter pilots that their “era has passed.” Maverick is sure to disagree and will aim to prove that kind of nonsense wrong.
