The US Navy lent Top Gun: Maverick access to F/A-18 Super Hornets jets for the new movie, but the production had to pay a very hefty price. The long-awaited sequel to the 1986 film Top Gun is finally hitting theaters on Memorial Day weekend, following two years of delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Top Gun is clearly associated with fighter jets and state-of-the-art equipment, and for the latest film, the producers went to the Department of Defense, aka the DOD, to assist with the movie.
The DOD has partnered with many different films, ranging from Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Michael Bay's Transformers film series, to even the MCU with films like Iron Man and Captain Marvel. With DOD backing, filmmakers can get access to military weapons and vehicles at a lower cost; in exchange, the DOD is allowed access to the script and can ask for changes that the filmmakers can choose or not choose to comply with. However, if they choose not to comply, that can result in the access being pulled, as was the case with The Avengers when the DOD objected to SHIELD sending a nuclear warhead at New York.
In a recent report by Bloomberg, Paramount Pictures paid the US Navy $11,374 an hour to fly the F/A-18 Super Hornets for Top Gun: Maverick. Glen Roberts, the chief of the Pentagon's entertainment media office, revealed that Pentagon regulation bars non-military personnel from controlling a Defense Department asset other than small arms in training scenarios, so Tom Cruise was not allowed to touch the controls. Cruise insisted that all the actors portraying pilots fly in one of the fighter jets built by Boeing Co. so they could understand what it feels like to be a pilot operating under the strain of immense gravitational forces. The actors rode behind F/A-18 pilots after completing the required training on how to eject from the plane in an emergency and how to survive at sea.
The original Top Gun was a major turning point for the depiction of the military on film, as the movie helped rebrand the Navy in the public eye following the Vietnam War, and the movie resulted in a massive spike in applications to become Naval Aviators which reportedly jumped by 500%. This sort of close connection between the military-industrial complex and the entertainment industry has been called out by many. The depiction of war in Top Gun and its impact on viewers made Cruise hesitant to return for a sequel for years and possibly contributed to him accepting the role in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July which was a more critical movie about the military.
How much Paramount Pictures spent exactly just on this is unclear, but Top Gun: Maverick carries a reported production budget of $170 million. It seems though the investment may have paid off as Top Gun 2 scored the highest Thursday gross for any Paramount Pictures movie. It is also on track for one of the biggest opening weekends of Cruises' career and one of the biggest opening Memorial Day weekends. It will be interesting to see if Top Gun: Maverick generates the same sort of discussion about the film's close connections to the military that Captain Marvel did in 2019 or if the film's extremely positive critical reaction and good time summer movie mood will override the discussion.
Source: Bloomberg