Top Gun 2's Best Scene Copies A Box Office Bomb From The '80s
The Mach 10 sequence that opens Top Gun: Maverick pays homage to a scene from The Right Stuff, which commercially bombed when it was released in the 1980s. This is in sharp contrast to Top Gun: Maverick's hugely successful, and still ongoing, box office run as the biggest film of the year so far. Despite being commercially ignored at the time, The Right Stuff became a critical success in its own right and helped to influence the best scene in Top Gun: Maverick.
Top Gun: Maverick reintroduces Captain Pete «Maverick» Mitchell (Tom Cruise) to the audience as a Navy test pilot, preparing to fly the prototype Darkstar jet at Mach 10–10 times the speed of sound. Maverick faces opposition from Rear Admiral Chester «Hammer» Cain (Ed Harris), who wants to shut down Darkstar in favor of his drone program. Maverick flies the prototype to Mach 10, without permission, to save the program and the careers of the people he works with. Flying at Mach 10 makes Maverick the fastest man alive. However, Maverick decides to push Darkstar beyond Mach 10 and, as a result, destroys the aircraft. Despite crashing, Maverick emerges from the wreckage, having successfully saved the program from Hammer for now. This scene directly parallels The Right Stuff's climax.
Related: Wow, When Will Top Gun: Maverick's Box Office Domination Stop?
In The Right Stuff, after having been left behind by the pilots in the Mercury test program, the real-life pilot Chuck Yeager (played by Sam Shepard) takes up the Lockheed NF-104A, an aerospace training aircraft. Yeager attempts to break a record, like Maverick flying Mach 10, by flying higher than anyone before him. When Yeager pushes the plane to the very edge, similar to Maverick going beyond Mach 10, things start
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