Here's why it took 34 years for Top Gun: Maverick to happen. Tom Cruise was still a young up and comer when he starred in Tony Scott's original Top Gun back in 1986. He had only just worked with Scott's brother, Ridley Scott, a year earlier on the fantasy adventure Legend, which bombed at the box office before garnering a cult fanbase in the decades that followed. Luckily, for Cruise, he didn't have to wait so long for Top Gun to take off. The film was a box office success and ultimately went down as the highest-grossing title that year (domestically, that is).
Starring Cruise as hotshot naval aviator Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Top Gun was seen as a boon to the U.S. military's public image after years of dramas about the failures of the Vietnam War (like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now) had severely diminished its reputation. The Navy had even consulted on the film and was believed to be fully behind the development of a sequel, shortly after Top Gun became a commercial success. However, that seemingly changed in the wake of a major scandal five years later.
In September 1991, at the 35th Annual Tailhook Association Symposium at the Las Vegas Hilton, more than 100 Navy and Marine aviators allegedly sexually assaulted and harassed 83 women and seven men, forcing them to "walk the gauntlet" as aviators lined the hallways of the hotel's third floor and made them walk by in order to reach their rooms, groping and sexually assaulting them along the way. The scandal resulted in a massive inquiry by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and more than 300 Naval officers (including fourteen admirals) having to face consequences, with many being pushed out of the Navy. According to Medium, this also led the Navy to withdraw its support for the then-in-development Top Gun 2, on the grounds that the original movie had encouraged the behavior in the Tailhook Scandal (specifically, during a scene when Cruise as Maverick propositions Kelly McGillis' character, Charlotte Blackwood, by following her into a bathroom at a bar, shortly after meeting her).
Cruise, Tony Scott, and Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer would go on to (separately) churn out hit after hit in the 1990s and 2000s before ultimately revisiting the Top Gun sequel in 2010 (well after blowback from the Tailhook Scandal had died down). Scott expressed an interest in examining the shift from the Navy's dog-fighting era to modern-day aerial drone warfare in the film, and Cruise and Bruckheimer were reportedly committed to making his vision a reality. Of course, that changed when Scott died by committing suicide in 2012, which led to Top Gun 2 being indefinitely postponed in the aftermath of his death. It started to move forward again two years later, but didn't lock down a new director (Joseph Kosinski, who had previously worked with Cruise on Oblivion) and a 2019 release date until the summer of 2017. Finally, its initial release date was pushed back another year to 2020 after that, in order to give the production time to properly plan out and coordinate its aerial sequences.
It's safe to assume this summer's Top Gun: Maverick is a far cry from whatever Cruise and his collaborators had in mind, back when they first started development on a Top Gun sequel in the late 1980s. Naturally, the movie will take the passage of time into account with its storyline, which finds Maverick serving as an instructor to a new generation of Top Gun graduates and having to confront the ghosts of his past when it turns out one of his students is Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of his late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick "Goose" Bradshaw. Considering just how much the world has changed since Cruise originally felt the need for speed 34 years ago, it will be all the more interesting to see how Top Gun: Maverick is received by critics and general audiences alike.
