Tom Cruise-starrer Top Gun: Maverick pulls in cinema-goers back to the theatres

The Hollywood actor’s latest blockbuster just debuted to $124 million worldwide

Peter Bradshaw, film critic for The Guardian ends his rather superb review of Top Gun: Maverick in a spectacular manner–asking for a repeat of Cruise’s infamous dance in his underpants from Risky Business (1983). It’s a line that had me chuckling madly and promptly took me down memory lane.

In the days of the popularity of the VCR and frequenting lending libraries, Tom Cruise burst onto the scene with a bunch of other contemporaries including C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Diane Lane, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy–dubbed the ‘brat pack’ of the 1980s. While all these actors have experienced varying degrees of success, it’s Cruise whose career is now touching stratospheric heights.

Retro crush

For many years, my bedroom wall had a life-size poster of Cruise posing in his American Air Force overalls, owing to my Pacific Ocean-like crush on the actor after I saw him strut the stuff in Top Gun (1986). The film–with its ripping soundtrack, simmering rivalries, deep friendships and a steamy love affair–drove my teenage hormones in overdrive mode. I was simply besotted. Everyone I knew was told crazy trivia about Cruise, gleaned from teenage magazines borrowed repeatedly from the neighbourhood library. I became a collector of Cruise memorabilia, filling out coupons from magazines to subscribe to fanzines and airmailing these with special payment proofs (no netbanking in those days!). This was the 1980s and with no Internet, the joy was coming home from school to find a parcel of magazines all devoted to the Cruise machine waiting for you.

My school library was a treasure den, and my love for print magazines probably stems from their superb collection of editions of Life and Time and other defunct publications that used photographs and words so splendidly. There was a particular issue of Life that featured Cruise and Paul Newman just before their film, The Colour of Money (1986), was released. I can’t, of course, remember the exact words but the writer’s profile of the two men and their newfound friendship had me reading the magazine on loop, until it was almost threadbare and had the librarian squinting at me most suspiciously.

Box-office magic

After a while, I grew out of ‘silly crushes,’ focusing my attention on some more attainable targets, failing miserably and then chasing other dreams. Cruise suddenly sounded really peculiar to me with his devotion to Scientology and his many dalliances. But then Cameron Crowe’s 1996 film, Jerry Maguire, had me smitten all over again, for a bit.

On a more serious note, Cruise’s four-decade-long-career has been that sweet and spicy mix of cinema and box-office magic. If Maverick was the part that shot Cruise to fame, then his role as Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible (1996 onwards) series simply proved that he was a bankable star again and again. But it was an earlier film–Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) that proved that Cruise had some serious acting chops. In the film, he plays a Vietnam War veteran, paralysed from his waist down,full of rage at his wasted life and the futility of war.

Back to the cinema hall

In December 2021, British tabloid The Sun released a leaked audio recording of the producer and actor shouting at crew members outside of London in an expletive-filled tirade, for breaking COVID-19 set safety protocols. The audio got him both bouquets and brickbats for his steadfast devotion to protocol and his determination to film through the ongoing pandemic.

Today, Cruise is being applauded for bringing back audiences into cinema halls–without playing a superhero. Maverick also desperately needed cinema halls to justify its hefty $170 million production budget. The two-year wait gamble to release Maverick has paid off rich dividends as the film is being enthusiastically viewed and reviewed. Now, just before his 60th birthday, Top Gun: Maverick is Cruise’s highest-grossing debut in his 40-year career. Its current rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a whopping 97 per cent. It’s also his first to surpass $100 million worldwide for an opening weekend.

The recently concluded Festival de Cannes paid special tribute to Cruise, with several standing ovations devoted to his session with the press. It’s no secret that the Cannes folks love films in cinema halls and Cruise won several massive brownie points for his declaration that the Top Gun sequel and Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (July 2023) will be released in theatres and not on OTT streaming services.The larger-than-life premiere at the Cannes Film Festival culminated with eight fighter jets flying over the Croisette, all of which were sponsored by the French government.

Show me the money

Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinki, is set decades after the 1986 original, and revolves around Maverick training a new group of cocky aviators for an important ‘top secret’ mission. The cast includes Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Jon Hamm, Jennifer Connelly and Val Kilmer, who played Maverick’s arch nemesis Iceman in Top Gun. So what’s reeling the audiences in? Is it only nostalgia? Or the numerous positive reviews? Or the fact that Cruise is a certified pilot who performs real aerial stunts just like Maverick? It’s all of this, plus Cruise/ Maverick’s lone ranger appeal–except his landscape is not the wild west but the great blue skies.

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