The editor of Top Gun: Maverick, Eddie Hamilton, has shared that the film has over 800 hours of unused footage, a staggering number that makes the film even more impressive than before. Top Gun: Maverick was the long-awaited sequel to 1986's Top Gun, and focused on the return of Pete "Maverick" Mitchell to the titular Navy program to train recruits for a daring mission. The film was delayed many times due to the COVID-19 pandemic before its release in May 2022, which saw it become one of the highest-grossing films of the year.
While the film clocks in at 130 minutes, a respectable runtime for a modern-day film, the man responsible for cutting this together recently shared details of his time working on the film. In an interview with Deadline, editor Eddie Hamilton revealed that he had over 800 hours of footage to sift through when working on box office behemoth Top Gun: Maverick's final cut. This is a bewildering amount of footage for any editor and highlights Top Gun: Maverick's impressive achievements.
Top Gun: Maverick’s Unused Footage Highlights Its Biggest Strength
One of the more standout achievements highlighted by this is Top Gun: Maverick's emotional depth. One of the prevailing aspects of the film is how big the emotional impact is, whether through Maverick and Rooster's relationship or Maverick and Iceman's. Both are highly impactful and make for some of the film's most moving scenes. The fact that Hamilton had over 800 hours of footage to work through, majoritively made up of aerial sequences, proves how easy it would have been for the filmmakers to indulge themselves in astounding yet emotionally empty action scenes.
In choosing to ground the film's characters in a story that never forgets to keep the audience emotionally invested, Hamilton and Top Gun 2 director Joseph Kosinski wisely avoided the potential pitfalls that could come from having over 800 hours of action-based footage. Not only this but Top Gun: Maverick as it was released proves Hamilton's skills. Having to comb over this amount of footage could have led to many a mistake, and a lack of focus on the film's characters, something that the film's final cut proves was not the case.
Why Top Gun: Maverick Has Over 800 Hours Of Unused Footage
This begs the question, however, of why exactly Top Gun: Maverick has this astonishing amount of footage in the first place. In the interview, Hamilton confirms that this was largely due to capturing the aerial sequences of the film to the best of the crew's ability. Hamilton confirms that, on one specific day of shooting, Top Gun: Maverick had 27 different cameras filming concurrently, adding up to a stunning amount of footage. Top Gun: Maverick's dedication to real, practical aerial action performed in-camera was the cause of this, making a film already regarded as one of 2022's best even better in retrospect.