In May 1986, Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, and Kelly McGillis roared into theaters in Top Gun. As the opening credits roll by, the screen reveals:

On March 3, 1969, the United States Navy established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to ensure that the handful of men who graduated were the best fighter pilots in the world. Today, the Navy calls it Fighter Weapons School. The flyers call it: TOP GUN.

Chances are, as people read that, they could almost hear the music that played as those words were revealed on the movie theater’s screen. The film was released the weekend of May 16, 1986, and grossed $8,193,052 on opening weekend (equal to $20.8 million when adjusted for inflation). It went on to gross $176.8 million domestically ($450 million adjusted for inflation) during its run in theaters.

Top Gun isn't a work of fiction — not entirely. The movie was actually inspired by an article in California Magazine which detailed the day-in-day-out life of the U.S. Naval Air Station at Miramar in San Diego, which is where the U.S. Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program, also known as Top Gun, was located until 1996.

Updated October 19th, 2022: This article has been updated following the record-breaking release of Top Gun: Maverick and its arrival on PVOD, and its upcoming home video release.

The film made Tom Cruise a bona fide action movie star and the film became an iconic film, introducing quotes and phrases that entered the public lexicon like “I feel the need…the need for speed!” The film was directed by the late Tony Scott and, like the fighter jets in the movie, it fires on all cylinders for the entire one hour and 50 minutes run time. 36 years later, and multiple delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the highly-anticipated sequel Top Gun: Maverick roared into theaters and shattered box office records.

Top Gun: Maverick became the highest-grossing film in Tom Cruise's career and the highest-grossing movie of 2022, beating out long-established franchises like the MCU, Jurassic World, and Pixar. Top Gun: Maverick not only worked as a great piece of summer blockbuster entertainment that audiences wanted to keep returning to but also a reminder that the original Top Gun was a well-beloved classic that audiences couldn't wait to relive again.

The Eye Candy - Volleyball

Is Top Gun 2 Getting a Volleyball Scene?
Paramount Pictures

Few other cinematic scenes are watched on repeat as often as the infamous beach volleyball game featuring Tom Cruise as Maverick and his fellow Naval Aviators. It’s a scene that any person who is attracted to the male form can appreciate. Next to the aerial scenes of the fighter jets, the iconic volleyball scene is one of the most talked-about parts of the movie. Kenny Loggins’ song “Playing with the Boys” just adds to the overall vibe of the volleyball scene in Top Gun. Director Tony Scott once admitted to The Atlantic that he had no idea what he was doing with that scene, "other than just doing soft porn."

The scene entered the wider pop culture, with it helping lend a queer reading to the film that was articulated in the movie Sleep With Me by a character played by Quentin Tarantino. Even if a viewer has not seen Top Gun, they likely know about the volleyball scene.

The Action Scenes – Fighter Jets

Top Gun 2 Won't Be Delayed by Tom Cruise's M:I 6 Injury
Paramount Pictures

It’s not just Maverick (Cruise), Goose (Anthony Edwards), Charlie (Kelly McGillis), Merlin (Tim Robbins), and Iceman (Val Kilmer), who are major characters in Top Gun: so are the fighter jets being flown by the characters. Remember, back in 1986, CGI was not incredibly advanced or used much outside of sci-fi, so those in-air battles between the U.S. F-14 Tomcats and Russian MiG-28 fighter jets actually had to be shot in real-time over the Naval Air Station in Fallon, Nevada. This similar approach would be used in the marketing for Top Gun: Maverick as Tom Cruise even assured fans that they would use actual jets as opposed to CGI.

Related: How Top Gun: Maverick Works as Military Propaganda

Director Tony Scott situated the cameras directly on the planes and also used a camera mounted on a Lear jet to achieve his astonishing shots. When the fighter jets land on the aircraft carrier – that’s actually the real USS Enterprise, which has been decommissioned and is currently in Virginia awaiting dismantling. The aerial shots from Top Gun are so iconic that they fueled a boom in military enlistments in the latter half of 1986, with the Navy setting up recruiting tables outside of cineplexes to catch people coming out of a showing of the film. The strategy paid off, and the Navy saw a 500% increase in enlistments in late 1986.

Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis – For Better or Worse

Top Gun
Paramount Pictures

The romance between Cruise’s Maverick and Kelly McGillis’ Charlie as it's shown in Top Gun is both a good and bad thing in this iconic film. On the good side is that sexy, shadowy kissing scene set to Berlin’s Oscar-winning song “Take My Breath Away.” On the bad side is pretty much everything else about their relationship, from when they first meet and Maverick is so cocky and aggressive with Charlie that he violates her privacy and follows her into the women’s restroom, to the fact that she neglects to tell him that she outranks him and is one of his instructors. Things between Maverick and Charlie (and his treatment of her) don’t improve despite his declarations of love (and lust).

This relationship setup is also very mid-1980s. Hollywood had not quite caught up to the fact that women can hold all the power – or most of it – in a relationship and, despite how Tony Scott shot the relationship between them, it is Charlie who really had all the power, not Maverick. Kelly McGillis was not asked to reprise her role in Top Gun: Maverick, with Jennifer Connelly, cast as a new love interest sort of undercutting the dynamic between the two characters in the original film.

Friendship – Maverick, Goose, and Iceman

top gun 1 maverick and goose geared up
Paramount Pictures

From the opening scenes of the film, the friendship between Cruise’s Maverick and Edwards’ Goose is apparent. The two fly their F-14 together and while Maverick may be the daredevil wildcard, Goose is his safety net. Their friendship is also full of warmth and genuine affection for each other, which is quite an accomplishment in a movie dedicated to showcasing the manly-man antics of hot-shot Naval aviators. Maverick and Goose are two peas in a pod. They love the Navy, they love to fly, and they love each other. It’s a beautiful look at a fully developed male friendship.

The movie also has a strong enemies-to-friends storyline between Maverick and Iceman, which plays out to strong emotional catharsis that is only made richer by Top Gun: Maverick. The strong conflict turned powerful friendship has become the inspiration for many films including the Kirk and Spock dynamic in 2009 Star Trek to Mike and Sully in Monster's University and much of it in modern pop culture can be traced back to Maverick and Iceman in Top Gun.

The Music – A Perfect Time Capsule

Meg Ryan in Top Gun
Paramount Pictures

From Kenny Loggins’ “Highway to the Danger Zone” to Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” and everything in between, the music in Top Gun was very much a dominating presence. The soundtrack to the film was a huge success and was certified Platinum nine times. When putting together the soundtrack, Paramount, the studio producing Top Gun, invited the trend of the current music industry to view a rough cut of the film and then propose the music they’d compose along with the scene they chose for.

Related: Top Gun Maverick: How Have the Original Characters Changed Over 35 Years?

Kenny Loggins was fresh off his hit song from the movie Footloose, and when he proposed a song for the iconic beach volleyball scene, “Playing With the Boys” was born. Loggins was also hired for “Danger Zone,” which is the most iconic song on the Top Gun soundtrack. Berlin was tapped to sing the Giorgio Moroder song “Take My Breath Away” after working with him on a previous track; that song went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Top Gun and American Patriotism - A Dated Celebration

Tom Cruise in Top Gun with American flag
Paramount Pictures

As previously mentioned, Top Gun fueled a surge in enlistments for the Navy. It also showed the military how powerful Hollywood could be in promoting patriotism. Top Gun was one of the first films to receive large-scale approval from the military to use its assets, but it was far from the last one. More than three and a half decades later, the celebration of American patriotism in Top Gun holds up as, albeit in a dated way.

In our 21st century world, hacking, biological agents, infiltrating foreign governments, and influencing major elections are the new F-14 Tomcat and Mig-28s, and are far more dangerous to a larger swath of the population than a random aerial flight high in the sky. Nonetheless, the film is an '80s classic, combining star power, sex appeal, action, music, machismo, and militarism into a uniquely American package quite unlike anything else. It might have even been that nostalgia for a simpler time that elevated Top Gun: Maverick for many film audiences, a return to an old-fashioned type of blockbuster, the kind that the original Top Gun is so emblematic of.