Tom Cruise on Top Gun: Maverick: “I don’t know if a movie will ever be made this way again”

Break out your beach volleyball set and your jet fighter (OK, that might be a bit of stretch), because Top Gun: Maverick is winging its way towards us this summer. (At least, at the time of writing.)

Tom Cruise reprises his role as Maverick, the cocky fighter pilot who first dazzled us with his smile and aerial exploits back in 1986. The original Top Gun movie was one of the defining films of its era, directed by Tony Scott and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer with an eye towards maximum testosterone.

Bruckheimer is back collaborating with Cruise on the sequel, while the late Scott has been replaced with Joseph Kosinski, who worked with Cruise on 2013's Oblivion. The titular Maverick is now schooling a group of ace new cadets, including Bradley (Miles Teller), son of our hero's former wingman Goose (Anthony Edwards).

But hey, the story is a load of hot air, right? What we want to hear about is the hardware. And Cruise is promising something that will really push the boundaries.

"We just started talking," Cruise tells Empire Magazine. "And I realized that there were things that we could accomplish cinematically. And I started getting excited about this big challenge of, ‘How do we do it?’ So I said to Jerry, ‘I’ll do it if…’ meaning, I’m not going to do the CGI stuff."

Cruise continues: "I said to the studio, ‘You don’t know how hard this movie’s going to be. No-one’s ever done this before. There’s never been an aerial sequence shot this way. I don’t know if there ever will be again, to be honest."

This coming from the man who learned how to fly a helicopter specifically for that breathless climax in 2018's Mission: Impossible - Fallout. However, it's not just empty talk – Bruckheimer himself backs Cruise up every step of the way.

Bruckheimer recalls: "What’s different about this movie is that [in Top Gun] we put the actors in the F-14s, and we couldn’t use one frame of it, except some stuff on Tom, because they all threw up. It’s hysterical to see their eyes roll back in their heads. So everything was done on a gimbal. But in this movie, Tom wanted to make sure the actors could actually be in the F-18s."

No doubt that's got you all fired up for a return to Top Gun academy. Top Gun: Maverick is scheduled for release this July, so tweet us @Cineworld if you're excited.