Tom Cruise's Maverick Featured in New Top Gun 2 Cover Images
Tom Cruise is looking good as Maverick in some new Top Gun: Maverick images that will grace the cover of Total Film Magazine. One image depicts Cruise's Maverick standing up in the cockpit of a fighter jet, with a majestic American flag-themed sunset skyline behind him; the other shows Cruise front and center by the jet, in a perfect homage to the iconic imagery of him from Tony Scott's original Top Gun movie in 1986. Thirty-six years of time just hits different when you're Tom Cruise...
Top Gun 2 is one of several big Tom Cruise projects that was utterly derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic – the others being his Mission: Impossible 7 film and its sequel. Maverick was originally supposed be released in the summer of 2019(!) but was pushed back to 2020 so that director Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion) could enhance the film's aerial sequences. Well that delay naturally landed Top Gun 2 in the middle of the pandemic, and Paramount has been shifting its release date ever since.
That all said, Top Gun: Maverick star Manny Jacinto has promised all the wait will be worth it:
"I was so fun. I mean, man, we shot that three years ago," Jacinto explained to Variety. "Before that, 30 years was the first one. 33 years people have been waiting ... I can't wait. I mean, Tom does not disappoint. It was incredibly fun to shoot it. If I can remember it [laughs]. It was the best experience... He just gives off this vibe, this energy of work ethic. It inspires you. You get on set and you make sure you give 110%. You can't help but do that."
"After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy's top aviators, Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: 'Rooster,' the son of Maverick's late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka 'Goose.' Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it."
Top Gun: Maverick is scheduled to fly into theaters on May 27th.