MOVIE NEWS – It seems Tom Cruise and the rest of the cast have had some severe preparation during the making of Top Gun: Maverick.

A new ‘featurette’ has arrived for the upcoming sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, which shows the cast’s sheer dedication to bringing the spectacular cavalcade of aerial clashes back to life after all these years. The footage, featuring Tom Cruise, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Joseph Kosinski and others, gives an insight into exactly how Top Gun: Maverick was made.

“I wasn’t ready to make a sequel ’til we had a special story worthy of a sequel,” says returning actor Tom Cruise in the clip.

“And ‘til technology evolved so we could delve deeper into the experience of a fighter pilot.” Cruise is no stranger to performing death-defying stunts in the name of entertainment, but judging by the featurette, his desire to put himself in harm’s way has clearly rubbed off on everyone involved, as they all get as close as possible to a real fighter pilot.

Top Gun: Maverick picks up more than thirty years after the first Top Gun was released. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) has been in service as one of the Navy’s top pilots for just as long, and he feels he’s where he belongs, pushing the limits as a brave test pilot and avoiding the promotion that would force him to be grounded. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a special mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick meets Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), whose call sign is “Rooster” – the son of Maverick’s late friend and radar intercept officer, Lieutenant Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose”…

Faced with an uncertain future and ghosts of his past, Maverick is forced to confront his own deepest fears.

More footage was shot for Top Gun: Maverick than for the Lord of the Rings trilogy combined

Director Joseph Kosinski recently detailed how difficult it is to shoot such aerial poetry with fighter jets, revealing that Top Gun: Maverick produced more footage than The Lord of the Rings trilogy!

“Out of a 12- or 14-hour day, you might get 30 seconds of good footage,” the director explained. “But it was so hard-earned. It just took a very long time to get it all. Months and months of aerial shooting. We shot as much footage as the three Lord of the Rings movies combined. I think it was 800 hours of footage.”

Directed by Joseph Kosinski and written by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, Top Gun: Maverick is based on the story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks. Starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, who reprise their roles from the original 1980s film. The sequel also stars Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman and Ed Harris.

Top Gun: Maverick will have its world premiere at CinemaCon on 28 April 2022 and will be released in US cinemas on 27 May 2022.

Source: YouTube