Top Gun: Maverick · reception & legacy

2022 · Joseph Kosinski

How Top Gun: Maverick has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Landed in summer 2022 as the movie that 'saved theaters' after two years of pandemic gloom, grossing nearly $1.5 billion and riding word of mouth all the way to a Best Picture nomination. Four years on it's settled in as the gold standard people invoke whenever a legacy sequel is announced — the one that actually justified existing.

What's debated

The perennial fight: is it genuinely great filmmaking or just an immaculately engineered crowd-pleaser (with a side debate about whether it's military propaganda with a conspicuously unnamed enemy)?

Its footprint

Steven Spielberg telling Tom Cruise 'you saved Hollywood's ass' became the film's unofficial tagline, and Quentin Tarantino calling the flying sequences 'cinematic cinema' kept the discourse going. It's now shorthand in every 'theatrical experience' argument — the movie people mean when they say 'see it on the biggest screen possible.'

Where it stands

An instant modern-blockbuster canon entry and Letterboxd crowd favourite — the rare franchise sequel cinephiles admit to loving without irony.

★ Did you know? Tom Cruise designed a months-long aviation boot camp for the cast, and the actors were filmed in the back seats of real Navy F/A-18s pulling actual Gs — the Navy wouldn't let them touch the controls, so much of the cockpit footage is the actors genuinely enduring the flights.

Named by the director

Influences Joseph Kosinski has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Tony Scott — Kosinski spoke openly about honoring the original director's visual language — sunsets, silhouettes, kinetic aerial photography — and dedicated the film to his memory.
Star Wars (1977) — Kosinski acknowledged the climactic canyon mission was consciously modeled on the Death Star trench run.