Top Gun: Maverick is not short on breathtaking aerial sequences, but even some of the relatively short action scenes were extremely time-consuming to edit. While speaking with Deadline, the movie’s editor, Eddie Hamilton, explained how the first dog fight scene of the film may have only been on-screen for less than five minutes but took a year to complete. He revealed:
"The first dog fight scene, where Maverick’s shooting the pilots down and they’re doing the push-ups, started out at about 15 minutes long. In the finished movie it’s like four minutes, 50 seconds, so you can imagine it just got compressed and compressed and compressed and compressed, so only the very, very best shots were left at the end. I was editing that sequence for about a year, I would say, on and off almost every day, and it was the last thing we finished in the last week of the final mix. We always wanted it to be this kind of punchy, exciting, dynamic, fun, entertaining sequence.”
Along with the strong sense of nostalgia, Top Gun: Maverick’s success was partly down to the movie’s dazzling stunts. While it may seem excessive to spend more time editing one sequence than many movies take to shoot and edit an entire feature, there is no doubt that it was time well spent considering the colossal box office that the high-flying sequel drew in.
Top Gun: Maverick Became an Unexpected Post-Pandemic Hit
Back in 2020, things didn’t look good for Top Gun: Maverick. As one of the movies caught up in the Covid pandemic shut-down, the movie was hit with numerous delays as Paramount risked everything to ensure the film ended up being seen in theaters and not landing as a streaming exclusive.
After a two-year delay, Tom Cruise’s cocky pilot finally had his chance to soar and took it in a way that surprised everyone. Over the summer, Top Gun: Maverick broke records and sped up the list of highest-grossing movies to pass every other release of the year, including Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Jurassic World: Dominion, and Minions: The Rise of Gru, ending its run on a staggering $1.49 million worldwide gross. To put the success of Top Gun: Maverick in a little more perspective, the domestic box office of the movie alone was higher than the total gross for all but the top eight films of the year.
Even after ending its theatrical run, the film continued to break records with its Paramount+ debut becoming the most-watched title ever on the platform, beating the previous record-holder, Sonic The Hedgehog, by over 60 percent.
This success has obviously led to much talk about a potential Top Gun 3, and while it seems there are some ideas being thrown around, there has been nothing yet confirmed or entirely ruled out. While it is clear that there are a lot of Top Gun fans who would like to see more from the franchise, the current schedule of Cruise and the requirement of a script that can live up to its predecessor are things that would need to be negotiated before Top Gun could fly again.