Tom Cruise also flew the jet for the original “Top Gun” movie. (File)
The US Navy loaned Tom Cruise an F/A-18 Super Hornet for the new “Top Gun” movie. The only perk: The studio paid up to $11,374 an hour to use the advanced fighter — and Cruise couldn’t touch the controls.
The “Mission Impossible” star, best known for performing his own stunts, insists that all the actors who played the pilots in the long-delayed “Top Gun: Maverick” movie flew on a single plane. in fighter jets manufactured by Boeing Co. make it so they can understand something. It feels like becoming a pilot operating under the strain of immense gravity.
Cruise, 59, also flew jets for the original “Top Gun,” a resounding success in 1986.
According to Glen Roberts, the Pentagon’s chief of staff for media and entertainment, Cruise ended up flying more than a dozen sorties for the new film, but a Pentagon regulation forbade military personnel from taking control of a property. Department of Defense in addition to small arms in training scenarios. . Instead, the actors rode behind the F/A-18 pilot after completing mandatory training on how to eject from the plane in an emergency and how to survive at sea.
Roberts said the Navy allows production using aircraft, aircraft carriers and military bases, although he says Top Gun pilots are not really the complacent rule-followers depicted in the book. movies, who “will never exist in naval aviation.” Instead, they are studious air-bots who toss for hours in the classroom and participate in intense training flights at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada, the site of the actual Top Gun school. .
A movie “doesn’t have to be a love letter to the military” to win Pentagon cooperation, says Roberts. But it “needs to maintain the integrity of the military.” Filmmakers need to have funding and distribution for their project and be willing to submit their scripts for military review. Although the Pentagon can request changes, Roberts said he’s not aware of anything in “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Roberts says that in his years working for the Pentagon’s communications office, he has never seen the level of excitement generated around “Top Gun: Maverick.”
The film is expected to gross Cruise the first $100 million domestically. It could generate about $130 million in US and Canadian ticket sales over the weekend, excluding Memorial Day, according to estimates from Boxoffice Pro. That would make it one of the biggest movies of the past two years.
Paramount Pictures said in the production notes for the film that Cruise created his own demanding flight training program for the film’s young actors so they could withstand the nauseating rigors of the film’s young actors. aerial maneuvers and performed his role with “real Navy pilots putting them in the car of their lives.”
The film will be released this week after being delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Footage was filmed aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in August 2018 during an exercise involving the military’s F-35C Lightning II fighter jets, Roberts said. Production was also filmed at Naval Air Station Lemoore in Central California.
The Super Hornet, a jet known as the “Rhino,” gets the highest paying in the movie, said Roberts, compared with the more advanced F-35C built by Lockheed Martin Corp because that’s what his script is for, Roberts said. movie request. He also noted that the F-35 is a single-seat aircraft, so actors cannot sit on it.
The filmmakers will reimburse the Pentagon for any aircraft unless they have been used in a previously scheduled exercise or the flight can be counted toward the pilot’s requested time when control. In 2018, when the bulk of filming for “Top Gun: Maverick” was underway, the ticket price for the jet was $11,374.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
