Top Gun: Maverick Director Details Evolution of Iceman's Role in Sequel

By Spencer Perry

It's hard to pinpoint the best scene in the biggest crowd-pleaser of the year, especially since Top Gun: Maverick has a ton of great moments, but the reunion of Tom Cruise's Maverick and Val Kilmer's Iceman is near the top of the list. The scene is one of the biggest emotional linchpins of the film and apparently was conceived as something much different compared to what we ended up seeing on screens. Speaking in a conversation with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery writer/director Rian Johnson for Variety, Top Gun: Maverick's Joseph Kosinski opened up about the movie and who that particularly scene changed throughout the development of the movie.

"One of the most memorable days on set, for sure. It was Val who came up with the idea of Iceman being ill," Kosinski said. "I thought it was a very brave idea on Val's part, but obviously then opened up this whole storyline for Iceman and Maverick that then we worked into the script. In the first versions, Iceman and Maverick had a conversation all the way through the scene – it was more spoken. As we got further into it, we changed it so that Iceman types out the first half of the scene....Part of it was...the difficulty to speak. But also, it really charged the moment at the end of the scene where Iceman does speak. We had a version where we didn't have the joke at the end and it was more a somber scene, but the joke made it in there."

Regarding their scene, Kosinski added: "Those two guys together, it wasn't a lot of takes. And what you see on screen was very much, you felt it in the room on the day. That's one of those days I'll never forget."

When is Top Gun: Maverick streaming?

After months of being in theaters and becoming the highest grossing film globally of 2022, Top Gun: Maverick is finally coming to streaming. Earlier this year Paramount+ confirmed Top Gun: Maverick will be available to stream on the service beginning Thursday, December 22nd in the U.S. as well as in Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and previously announced markets – the U.K. and Latin America. It will be available in South Korea and France in 2023. 

Top Gun: Maverick Synopsis

After more than 30 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.

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