Here's why it took 34 years for Top Gun back in 1986. He had only just worked with Scott's brother, Ridley Scott, a year earlier on the fantasy adventure Legend, which bombed at the box office before garnering a cult fanbase in the decades that followed. Luckily, for Cruise, he didn't have to wait so long for Top Gun to take off. The film was a box office success and ultimately went down as the highest-grossing title that year (domestically, that is).
Starring Cruise as hotshot the development of a sequel, shortly after Top Gun became a commercial success. However, that seemingly changed in the wake of a major scandal five years later.
In September 1991, at the 35th Annual Tailhook Association Symposium at the Las Vegas Hilton, more than 100 Navy and Marine aviators allegedly sexually assaulted and harassed 83 women and seven men, forcing them to "walk the gauntlet" as aviators lined the hallways of the hotel's third floor and made them walk by in order to reach their rooms, groping and sexually assaulting them along the way. The scandal resulted in a massive inquiry by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and more than 300 Naval officers (including fourteen irals) having to face consequences, with many being pushed out of the Navy. According to Kelly McGillis' character, Charlotte Blackwood, by following her into a bathroom at a bar, shortly after meeting her).
Cruise, Tony Scott, and Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer would go on to (separately) churn out hit after hit in the 1990s and 2000s before ultimately revisiting the Top Gun sequel in 2010 (well after blowback from the Tailhook Scandal had died down). Scott expressed an interest in examining the shift from the Navy's dog-fighting era to modern-day aerial drone warfare in the film, and Cruise and Bruckheimer were reportedly committed to making his vision a reality. Of course, that changed when Scott died by committing suicide in 2012, which plan out and coordinate its aerial sequences.
It's safe to assume Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of his late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick "Goose" Bradshaw. Considering just how much the world has changed since Cruise originally felt the need for speed 34 years ago, it will be all the more interesting to see how Top Gun: Maverick is received by critics and general audiences alike.
