While it took decades for Spiderhead.
While Spiderhead’s twisty sci-fi story earned solid reviews, Top Gun: Maverick is the massive smash hit that made Kosinski a bonafide A-list director. The first Tom Cruise movie to earn over a billion dollars, the Top Gun sequel has continued to soar past expectations since hitting that milestone and is now nearing $1.3 billion as of early August 2022. Not only that, but Kosinski has also managed the tough task of making a blockbuster hit that is also a huge success with critics.
With reviews that far outstrip the agreeably corny but undeniably dated 80s original, Top Gun: Maverick is almost universally considered to be an improvement on the cult classic. While this is a huge achievement for Cruise, the part that Kosinski played in Oblivion, and his earliest pitch for the Top Gun follow-up is remarkably consistent with what made it into the finished movie. Despite inheriting the project from the late, great action auteur Tony Scott, Kosinski had a clear enough vision to make the Top Gun sequel entirely his own, as a look back on his pitch proves.
Tony Scott’s Original Top Gun 2 Plan
Before his untimely death in 2012, Tony Scott had long been ruminating on a potential Top Gun sequel. While his busy schedule and Cruise’s packed slate meant that production never started on Scott’s version of Top Gun 2, what is clear is that the proposed sequel would have been nothing like Top Gun: Maverick. A story that focused less on pilots as they existed in the 80s and more on the new phenomenon of drone warfare, Scott’s Top Gun 2 pitch centered on the phenomenon of remote pilots targeting enemies from the safety and comfort of American soil. The divisive issue of drone warfare and its ethical implications has since been addressed by dramas such as Good Kill and Eye in the Sky, but Scott’s story would have predated both these mid-10s efforts by some years if this version of Top Gun 2 made it off the ground. Instead, the project was ed on to Kosinski, who had a very different movie in mind.
Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick Pitch
Critics lauded Top Gun: Maverick’s Rooster/ Maverick relationship as one of the movie’s unexpected high points, so it may come as a surprise for readers to learn that this detail was a part of the project as early as Kosinski’s first pitch. Kosinski recalled in his Deadline interview that, in contrast with Scott’s politically charged, high-tech sequel story, he envisioned a more traditional plot that would pair up Goose’s son Rooster and Cruise’s older Maverick for a secret mission as well as involving Maverick testing a secret super-fast aircraft prototype. The opening sequence of Top Gun: Maverick, wherein Cruise’s hero takes an experimental Darkstar aircraft to Mach 10, was included in Kosinski’s pitch, which also suggested that Top Gun 2’s title should be changed to Top Gun: Maverick.
How Kosinski’s Pitch Shaped Top Gun: Maverick
As outlined above, Kosinski’s pitch shaped bring back Val Kilmer’s iconic Iceman in a way that didn’t reignite the rivalry between the two characters.
Why Kosinski’s Pitch Needed Top Gun: Maverick’s Opening Scene
The sequence where Maverick tests the Darkstar aircraft is thrilling in the finished sequel, but there is a vital thematic reason that Top Gun: Maverick’s earliest pitch needed to include a nod to this scene. While the sight of Maverick crashing and burning mid-flight is an unexpectedly dark way to open the sequel, this twist allowed Top Gun: Maverick to make the character nigh-on indestructible later in the movie without viewers complaining about implausibility. The Top Gun movies have always trodden a fine line between entertainment and sheer ludicrousness, which is why it was vital for the sequel to establish early on that Maverick was not wholly infallible. For all of Top Gun: Maverick’s escapism, the sequel has stakes because Cruise’s protagonist never feels fully in control, and that is thanks to the opening sequence’s decision to humble him early on.
Why Top Gun: Maverick Still Took So Long To Make
A diverse confluence of factors held up the development of Top Gun’s sequel over the decades. First and foremost, the atrocities of the Tailhook scandal in 1991 resulted in the Navy withdrawing its for the sequel’s pre-production (while it is fair to assume that producers, directors, and actors also didn’t want to be associated with the disgraced institution). After that, Scott’s tragic death resulted in the revived project being shelved in 2012, with Kosinski not gaining the job of directing Top Gun: Maverick in the summer of 2017. After the movie’s production, Top Gun: Maverick’s release date was then delayed numerous times by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent cinema closures, pushing the sequel’s release off by another two years. Fortunately for Kosinski, the lengthy production of Top Gun: Maverick did not result in his Top Gun sequel being denounced as over-hyped upon its eventual May 2022 arrival.
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