The need for speed! After much anticipation from both the cast and fans alike, Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick is finally hitting theaters this month.
Cruise, 59, who played pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in 1986’s Top Gun, announced back in summer 2017 that a sequel was in the works.
“We’re going to have the same tone that we had from the first,” the Jerry Maguire star told Access Hollywood in June 2017, revealing the official title. “Stylistically, it’s going to be the same.”
The original movie — which also starred Kelly McGillis, Anthony Edwards, Meg Ryan and Val Kilmer — followed a rookie Maverick as he attended the United States Navy’s elite fighter weapons school. Throughout the film, Maverick went head-to-head with Kilmer’s Iceman as they competed to be “top gun” a.k.a. the best pilot in the class.
More than 30 years later, Cruise’s Maverick will return to his old stomping grounds in Top Gun: Maverick to train the newest Top Gun recruits, including Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), who is the son of his late friend Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Edwards).
“Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears,” the film’s official synopsis reads. “Culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.”
While fans had to wait four years to see the sequel come to fruition, Glen Powell, who plays student Hangman in the new movie, teased the finished product in August 2020 after wrapping filming one year prior.
“Tom and I talked after I watched it, and I told him! I was like, ‘I literally have no more fingernails left. I’ve chewed off all of my fingernails.’ … You cry, you laugh. It’s got adventure. It’s got romance,” the Texas native, 33, exclusively told Us Weekly at the time. “It’s just like one of those movies, where you’re like, ‘Oh, God, why can’t all movies be this fun and great?’ It’s so rare.”
The Scream Queens alum confessed that he did shed a tear or two while watching the movie. “It was a manly cry!” Powell said with a laugh. “There were tears but they were dry and salty, you know!”
Scroll down for everything to know about Top Gun: Maverick:
