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Tom Cruise Dishes On ‘Top Gun: Maverick’: ‘There Were Things That We Could Accomplish Cinematically’

By Shakiel Mahjouri.

Release Date: December 23, 2020 Preceding Film: “Top Gun” (1986) Years Between Films: 34 Tom Cruise is heading back into the danger zone, reprising his role as the cocky fighter pilot Maverick who, 34 years later, is now instructing a new set of recruits. A smash hit, the original film was the top-grossing movie of 1986. Val Kilmer will also return as Iceman in the sequel. Originally scheduled to be released in June, the pandemic has pushed the release back to December meaning we'll have to wait just a little while longer for Maverick to take to the skies.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

There was a lot that got Tom Cruise excited for another go at “Top Gun”.

Cruise dished on “Top Gun: Maverick” in a new interview with Empire magazine. “Top Gun: Maverick”, which is scheduled to premiere on June 24, comes 34 years after the original.

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“We just started talking,” Cruise shared. “I realized that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically. I started getting excited about this big challenge of, ‘How do we do it?’ So I said to Jerry [Bruckheimer, producer], ‘I’ll do it if…’ meaning, I’m not going to do the CGI stuff.”

Cruise said there were limitations that prevented the first “Top Gun” film from reaching its true potential.

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“What’s different about this movie is that [in ‘Top Gun’] we put the actors in the F-14s and we couldn’t use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up,” he shared. “It’s hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads.”

“So everything was done on a gimbal,” Cruise concluded. “But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s.”

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