Top Gun: Maverick has the potential to make Top Gun as profitable a Tom Cruise franchise as Mission Impossible, but it will need to focus on the actor’s co-stars to do so. Despite decades of movie stardom, Tom Cruise has only one reliably successful franchise to his name in the form of Mission Impossible. The action-packed spy series has grown consistently over the decades since its first installment, the 1996 Brian De Palma effort Mission Impossible.
However, Cruise looks set to change this with the forthcoming sequel Top Gun: Maverick. Thirty-six-years in the making, the long-awaited follow-up to 1986’s original cult classic Top Gun will revisit the story of reckless test pilot Maverick and his wingman Iceman as well as introducing a whole crew of new faces to the franchise. After such a long absence from the big screen, the second Top Gun installment was always going to need fresh blood, but these new arrivals could prove key to providing Cruise another successful franchise.
If Cruise wants to get further adventures out of Maverick, Iceman, and company, the best move would be to use some of Top Gun: Maverick’s runtime to expand the focus of the sequel from centering solely on the feckless Maverick himself and establish his supporting cast as a diverse crew with distinct personalities and allegiances ala Mission Impossible. That series has survived and thrived in recent installments thanks to extending its cast to focus on more than just Cruise, and subsequent Top Gun sequels could be on the cards if Top Gun: Maverick can offer the likes of Miles Teller, Glen Powell, and Jenifer Connelly enough screen time to get viewers invested in their team dynamic.
Top Gun: Maverick has already secured the services of an impressive supporting cast, something the sequel needed with so few original stars returning. Many of the new characters are rumored to have concretions to the original Top Gun cast, with Glen Powell possibly being Cruise’s or Iceman’s son, and others are confirmed to have canon backstories that tie them to Top Gun, such as Miles Teller’s Rooster who is the son of the original movie’s Goose. However, the new arrivals at TOPGUN nonetheless need an opportunity to shine and highlight their abilities if the franchise wants to compete with Mission Impossible.
Despite Cruise’s famous charisma, a lot of what makes his Mission Impossible franchise so enduringly popular and such a bigger financial success than, for example, the otherwise superficially similar Jack Reacher movies, is the fact that the films center around the team that Ethan Hunt has assembled as much as the super-spy himself, thus giving viewers more character to connect with. Much like the Bond movies usually touch on figures such as Miss Moneypenny, Q, and MI6's head of operations M to make their hero less of a lone wolf figure, Ethan Hunt’s reliable stable of collaborators have their personalities and abilities, with Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson all contributing to the franchise’s enduring success. Subsequent Top Gun movies could repeat this Mission Impossible feat, but only if Cruise’s co-stars are offered the opportunity to be more than mere props to the star's story and get to develop personalities of their own.
