By pretty much any measurement, Top Gun: Maverick has been a huge success. The summer blockbuster has already made well over 1.25 billion dollars at the box office, and audiences and critics have been on board with Top Gun 2. However, it was a long road to get here, and Top Gun stars like Miles Teller and Glenn Powell, as well as director Joseph Kosinski, have shared their thoughts on the extended wait for the Tom Cruise starrer’s theatrical release.
Speaking at CinemaCon earlier this year, Joseph Kosinski shared during a panel that the whole thing has been “surreal.” At the time, he had just seen the movie in an early showing in front of a room of movie fans and exhibitors and he shared what that experience was like afterward:
It’s surreal. Like I said, it’s been two years since we finished this film. I wish everyone who worked on the film could be here to watch with an audience because that was a really special experience to experience that, finished, with 3,000 people. It was really unique.
A lot of people related to the movie have been asked about the wait, and Miles Teller is no exception. After he’d actually started doing early press work for Top Gun: Maverick at the start of 2020, the whole flick’s rollout was paused. And while he’d seen the movie at that point and talked about the Top Gun sequel’s “emotional payoff”, he and the rest of the cast were forced to wait through several more covid-related movie delays before the movie finally hit theaters as part of the 2022 release schedule.
Now he’s back on the press circuit, and he told Late Night with Seth Meyers that it was honestly a bit of a bummer to have to hold off, though he didn’t have some of the concerns other people in the cast did.
I’d done a lot of movies beforehand, so I didn’t feel I needed this movie to ensure future work. But some of the actors in it, you know, this was such a big showcase for them. And I think if anything, I was just bummed for the fans. Because the fans we found are just insane. They’re so ravenous and they’ve been waiting…I couldn’t wait for them to see it because as you’ve seen the movies just been a rocket so.
Those other people include a slew of relative newcomers like Glen Powell, Danny Ramirez, and Greg Tarzan Davis, among other names. While Powell famously played John Glenn in Hidden Figures, Top Gun: Maverick was a project in a whole different stratosphere for the actor. This is basically what Miles Teller touched on in his own comments, but Powell also gave his unique perspective during the panel at CinemaCon.
I mean, yeah, it’s a bit of a bummer when you have to kind of wait for your career to start. It’s a great secret, this amazing thing that you can’t show to anybody. But it is really a great feeling knowing you are sitting on a winner, you know, knowing that you’re working with the best filmmakers.
Luckily, it seems that Powell — and hopefully some of those other newcomers — really kept the right attitude while they waited for Paramount to unleash Maverick on the world. Once the studio did, the movie has been unstoppable, not only at the domestic box office, but also worldwide. Of course, that’s led to questions about whether or not there could be a third Top Gun movie, and it’s been discussed already.
For now, you can catch Maverick in theaters, or the original 1986 Top Gun streaming.