Hacker Cinema
Top Gun: Maverick
2022 · Film · 131 min
Part of Top Gun Collection
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell finds himself training a detachment of TOP GUN graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen.
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71 comments on Hacker News
> Project Hail Mary was predominantly practical effects
Don't drink the Kool Aid. The studios love to make this sort of claim — recent examples include F1: The Movie, Top Gun: Maverick, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and you'll see interviews where the main actors say it was all real — but it's just marketing.
Project Hail Mary leans heavily on CG. For example, while they did hire a puppeteer (he ended up voicing the alien!) to control a neat physical puppet on set, almost all of it was replaced with CG in post production, and only used for reference. Corridor Crew has a great breakdown [1]. They frequently provide a good counterpoint against fraudulent "no CG" claims.
[1] https://youtu.be/l9zqIo8KtjI?is=e7-3Wz_mnMdl2Yp8
No True Cinephile would enjoy a movie like Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession or Project Hail Mary.
/s
Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary
Those movies might be good, but cinema are they not.
Cinema traditionally has meant movies like, À bout de souffle and Citizen Kane.
> Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.
Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.
Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.
I actually learned about what a ramjet is after looking up the definition of “scramjet” when watching the _Top Gun: Maverick_ movie with my son. This is at the beginning of the movie when he is flying the Dark Star plane designed in conjunction with Skunk Works from Lockheed Martin. Well, we are obviously a ways away from Mach 10 reached in the film by the SR-71 Blackbird descendant, the new technology pushing Mach 5 and into high hypersonic is pretty impressive.
> A scramjet is a variant of a ramjet airbreathing jet engine in which combustion takes place in supersonic airflow. As in ramjets, a scramjet relies on high vehicle speed to compress the incoming air forcefully before combustion, but whereas a ramjet decelerates the air to subsonic velocities before combustion using shock cones, a scramjet has no shock cone and slows the airflow using shockwaves produced by its ignition source in place of a shock cone - Wikipedia
>Top Gun: Maverick and Taylor Sheridan’s nostalgic, libertarian-inflected Yellowstone. And a longstanding Christian culture industry has backed projects like the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, a dramatization of child trafficking that grossed more than $242 million for Provo’s Angel Studios. The Christian drama The Forge earned $30 million on a $6 million budget last year.
There’s good evidence that this is an untapped market which normal studios are too afraid to tap.
I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all. If you listen to people on the right they have felt unrepresented in popular entertainment for a long time, and these successes are evidence that they are willing to pay for entertainment which aligns with their values.
I know you're joking, but it's women that get the short end of the stick in media.
Men are (within reason) considered handsome in media even in old age. Wrinkles and gray hair can be seen as sexy (again, within reason), but only in men.
Women are discarded or relegated to sexless granny roles (except maybe for comedic purposes, where sexuality is the butt of a joke). Actresses are replaced by younger women because they are not sexy enough even when their male equivalents aren't (looking at you, Top Gun: Maverick).
I'm not saying there aren't exceptions in particular movies that deal with this topic; I'm talking about the general trend.
I have seen and enjoyed quite a few Val Kilmer movies, but his special appearance in 'Top Gun:Maverick' was heartwarming (the scene where he jovially asks Maverick, "who was the better pilot between the two of us").
Tombstone and Saint were such nice movies too. Underrated, with a distinct comedic touch. A talent gone before his time.
> Your only market was selling to other masculine-identifying customers, if you didn't in some way pander to male obsessions then you'd usually struggle to find a market.
You are wrong on all levels with this statement.
Firstly, males are ~50% of the world population, that's a hell of a large market to sell to. And secondly, you can also make separate games specifically for girls as the target market to get the other ~50%, you don't have to feminize or water down traditionally male games/franchises hoping they'll appeal to women because it never works like that.
Top Gun Maverick was a hit because it was mostly geared towards male fantasies and that's fine. The Barbie movie was a hit because it was movie targeted specifically to women and that's fine. Imagine they'd make the Barbie movie all about Ken in order to appeal to men as well. Who would watch that? Nobody. Well, that's exactly what modern game dev, story telling and writing is doing today, and then wondering why it's failing. Trying to make an entertainment product to appeal to absolutely everyone is doomed to fail from the start.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with having entertainment made specifically for one gender or the other, because they're biologically different and therefore have different fantasies, and gaming is a lot about living personal fantasies and escapism from reality, not about having narratives you don't empathize with, shoved down your throat.
>Along with the advent of smartphones, "casual" gaming became the norm and less masculine obsessive titles got funded. For the first time perhaps in the history of gaming, you can make more money targeting a more inclusive audience from the start.
And that's good, but that's because of creation of new gaming genres like Farmville, Candy Crush or Flappy bird, that have mass appeal, not by modifying established "male dominated" franchises to give them mass appeal.
>I empathize with that perspective
You may empathize with it but you clearly don't understand it nor does a large part of the modern industry it seems. Or they understand it but reject it because in their mind women >= men at everything, therefore they must be forced to enjoy the same entertainment. Refusing to acknowledge that men and women are different and into different things (aka "wokification") is what's killing modern entertainment.
>Unless your game is so blatantly offensive that it crosses into parody again (eg. Wolvenstein or C&C Red Alert)
What was blatantly offensive about such games?
>you can't really make a non-woke game nowadays without looking like a moron
Yeah you can. Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, Black Myth Wukong, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, etc
It’s not even about “offensive” or “cancelled.” It’s about the pure economics of in-theater movies.
The whole business model of comedy movies released to theaters was that they had mediocre theater box office numbers but the theater release would drive a crazy home rental business for years after the movie came out.
That entire business model doesn’t work anymore. After a comedy movie leaves the theater it’s basically worthless and does nothing to drive streaming subscriptions.
Examples like Rogan, South Park, Chappelle, do not apply here.
Rogan’s podcast is not a comedy. And he’s a terrible standup comic.
Chappelle’s comedy specials only require a stage and a microphone to produce. There is no budget besides paying Chappelle.
Eminem is a musician. And, he’s not actually offensive to the general public, especially not anymore.
South Park is a TV show. Trey Parker and Matt Stone haven’t made any movies since the DVD rental era that I talked about. It’s also very inexpensive to produce compared to a comedy movie.
Finally, the elephant in the room. You should really get out of your conservative reality distortion field. This whole idea that Disney’s their wokeness is ruining everything is utter bullshit. My man, they own 20th Century Studios, 20th Century TV, and ABC Studios. They are the majority owner of Hulu. Disney isn’t just “woke politically correct family movies” or whatever conservative weirdos think they are. They are a giant media conglomerate. They finance shows like The Great, full of swearing, violence, and nudity. [1]
Let’s also not forget that Disney is still a box office machine and knows exactly what they are doing.
The top grossing movies in the United States in 2024, 2021, and 2015-2019 were all Disney.
In 2022 Avatar 2 beats out Top Gun Maverick in the worldwide box office.
This idea that Disney has lost its way and doesn’t understand the movie business is baloney. Disney’s stock didn’t tank because of “cancel culture” or “wokeness,” it tanked because half of the company’s revenue is theme parks and Covid-19 wrecked their business. Its movie business is also heavily skewed to in-theater big blockbusters. Seriously, look up the stock, all the downturn happened in 2020-2022. Disney stock is up 5% this year.
Disney struggles with streaming for the same reason the other networks struggle with it: streaming replaced cable but nothing replaced DVD sales and rentals.
[1] I have also noticed that conservative weirdos always bring up South Park, Rogan, Chappelle, and Eminem specifically as great examples of anti-cancel crusaders. The funniest part about that to me is that conservatives are so behind the times that they don’t realize that Eminem isn’t “slim shady” anymore and isn’t offensive to the general public. Somehow Rogan is supposed to be proof that a show that elevates conservative voices can break through an anti-conservative system, when really all he proves is that conservative talk radio is as good a business as it ever was. He is effectively now no different than Rush Limbaugh, except with a format where he has guests on the show. And then there’s South Park which is basically coasting on a fan base just like The Simpsons.
Finally, Chappelle. Let’s be real be real here: a good portion of Chappelle’s white male audience enjoyed the original show because they took his show to be jokes about Black people, at the expense of Black people. Just like the people who didn’t realize that Colbert on The Colbert Report was satire, they didn’t really see any of the satire or social commentary. So it’s not surprising to me that those same mostly conservative white men enjoy watching an hour of trans hate jokes.
Top Gun Maverick movie starts with reenactment of that scene. Totally worth watching.
Sad part of the story is that the other pilot of the original Blackbird incident didn't survive. The surviving pilot saw his companion's parachute and was thus (thinking that he survived) motivated to fight for his own life.
It sounds like you’re saying you knew the Top Gun Maverick shots were CGI because you know a lot about planes, not because the footage looks wrong.
Barbie was chroma keyed - they discuss it in the aforementioned YouTube videos.
And, yes,I know blue aliens don’t exist. But parts of that movie are composited mixtures of CGI and humans in body paint. The point is that you can’t distinguish the digital from the physical.
And, really, what about Brokeback Mountain?
Or stream it once for $4.99 or less if you're patient and are willing to wait a couple months after Blu-ray/streaming release.
It seems like after Endgame, there have only been a few 'event' movies like Oppenheimer, Top Gun Maverick, and Dune 2 that would be worth experiencing in a movie theater.
And even then, those movies are pushing 95-100 dB during some scenes, making me not really want to do the 'IMAX' experience again, it's just too loud and too big. A 40-60" OLED from 5-10' away and near my fridge and bathroom—with a pause button so I can get up halfway through a nearly 3 hour movie—is too tempting.
It'd be nice if there were 1.5 hour movies that cost $10 a ticket in a nice, normal theater.
Really? You could tell the planes in Top Gun: Maverick were all CGI over reference footage? You could tell the Barbie movie car sequences were shot in front of a green screen (as opposed to a matte painting, which is how it appears)? You could tell that almost all the racing shots in Gran Turismo were CGI?
This wasn't an example given in the video series but what about a movie like Brokeback Mountain? Can you tell which of the sheep or which of the mountaintops are CGI? If you can, that's absolutely shocking to me.
Take a look at this shot: https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/z8wbv4/whats_the_consensus_on_this_shot_from_the_avatar/
Can you tell which parts are CGI and which are practical?
Here's the answer: https://imgur.com/a/Q7UUn2G
As others in this thread have already pointed out: look at Top Gun Maverick, or the latest Mission Impossible.
In the former case, they filmed jets and jet cockpits, but all of the jets and cockpits are replaced by CG ones, only the actors remain if they are visible.
In the latter, in the motorcycle chase scene and when Tom jumps over the edge, aside from him and the bike, basically everything else is digital, e.g. digital train, terrain, trees, ground and everything.
They jumped the train off a bridge FOR REAL at the end of the chase, but then paint it over completely with a digital train. The only thing that stayed is some water splashes, that’s it.
This is intentionally concealed by the studio marketing saying it “was practical”. Yes they did do it “for real”, but it erases the work done on all of the digital effects that end up making up the majority of what you see in the movie.
That’s just dishonest, and what people are upset about.
Strictly speaking, your example qualifies as a VFX shot.
However the line between practical and VFX/CGI can still feel very fuzzy. Top Gun Maverick was marketed as having filmed all the jet sequences "practically". And while it is true that nearly every shot of a jet started life as a shot of a real jet, the jets themselves were replaced with CGI in the final product. You couldn't tell, of course, because CGI has gotten very good, and the actual shot composition is still grounded in the reality of shooting with a physical camera looking at a real airplane.
This approach happens a ton in the industry, where they film a "practical" effect, then replace it with CGI. The benefit to this is that you get an exceptional reference for the lighting and physics of the effect. When executed well, nobody can tell the difference. In Top Gun's case, they were able to shoot scenes with real fighter jets you can fly today, then replace those jets with whatever fictional or historical jet they really wanted for the scene.
This kind of for-show pretend logic is aggravating. News is filled with it and people are suckers for it:
predicted that the Internet would fragment attention and consumption would shift into the “tail.” But Top Gun Maverick generated over $700 million at the domestic box office last year
Why is there a "but" in there? Those statements don't obviously contradict each other. You have to do some mental arithmetic to work out what proportion of the population that is, and know the price of a movie ticket and size of the population. How about just say "20% of Americans watched Top Gun Maverick"? Or better, compare it to the fragmentedness of historical movies. Maybe there's still a downward trend in popularity of hits. We're supposed to feel like we learnt something without actually having a clue.
>This entire "zomg bad film + female character = woke mind virus!!11" is just silly.
Nobody is saying this. (Strong) Female main characters have been in many successful movies and video games before and nobody bat an eye, quite the contrary, they loved them: Sarah Connor - Terminator, Trinity - Matrix, Ripley - Aliens, Lara Croft - Tomb Raider, Blood Rayne, Salt, Black Widow, Lucy, Charlie's Angles, etc, I could go on and on, and I'm no movie/video games enthusiast to know all movies with female leads.
The big difference is that those females were always written as the main characters in their own stories from the start, whereas what Disney is doing, along with Gemini and other woke corporations, is they try to replace established male characters of beloved IPs with female leads in the worst way possible, by disrespecting the original character that made the franchise popular and shoehorning a fake Strong Girl Boss™ stereotype with no personality and no character arc in his place, and then when the movie inevitably flops they blame the CIS white male audience for being incels "unable to handle strong females".
Do you think people would go to see James Bond or Top Gun Maverick if they replaced the male lead with some female actress that's trendy right now? Or would they see Tomb Raider if they replaced Lara Croft with Tom Holland? You can try for diversity's sake of course, but the audience and bean counters might stop you.
Tom Cruise had a great success with Top Gun: Maverick by just pressing the Fan Service Button very hard, over and over and over. If instead he made a movie about the tough young woman fighter jock who rescues sad old Maverick from his complacency, the movie may have done better as a tax write off.
> Tom Cruise finished filming Top Gun: Maverick years ago, but people are still streaming, renting, and purchasing that movie bringing in massive profit for the studio.
This is also true of the original Top Gun, released ~37 years ago. Very little software has that kind of long-term earning power, further supporting the idea that software work is not all that unique as work goes.
This is exactly like the entertainment industry and it is the whole reason the Hollywood unions have fought so hard to get and maintain ongoing compensation via residuals.
An actor usually spends a few weeks working on a movie and then the studio profits in perpetuity off that work. Tom Cruise finished filming Top Gun: Maverick years ago, but people are still streaming, renting, and purchasing that movie bringing in massive profit for the studio.
> This kind of stuff is the future of film making.
> Imagine adding "yourself" into a scene like this, moving around as you > were/are from a video you just created of yourself. As in: film yourself > walking around your bedroom with your phone. Then use an app like this to > add you and your movement (cropped from the video) to a different > background scene.
> Goodbye, Hollywood elites!
As someone working in this arena, statements like this make me chuckle.
Don't get me wrong-- I think this is really cool. I get that people are excited about new tech, and technical people always overestimate the value of technical advancements in creative workflows, but no: people being able to place a perfect hyper-realistic replica of themselves in a film wouldn't kill the film industry any more than RPG Maker + generative AI would kill the games industry. I'd wager it probably would not even leave a dent.
Firstly, there would need to be a film to begin with, and that requires a lot. A whole hell of a lot.
Secondly, characters matter. A lot. Especially main characters. Do you replace the name of the main character with your name in stories you tell? How about doing a global search-and-replace in the ebooks you read? It's not like we don't have the technical capability. I could see this being a novelty feature in some action movies, especially superhero movies, and more likely in games and porn, but one of the biggest draws a movie has is who stars in it-- and if you look at the rest of the human population, you'll notice that we're not choosing representative samples. The fact that it's someone else with a personality and back story and motives and strengths and flaws-- a character-- is a pretty important part of stories. Their appearance matters, too. Most people don't even like staring at themselves for a few minutes, let alone for an entire feature length film. In most situations, I think it would be distracting as hell. Sure, people might find it amusing to see themselves in Top Gun Maverick, but would they want to see themselves getting bullied by an IRS agent in Everything Everywhere All at Once? Getting a box cutter held to their throat in Emily the Criminal? Would replacing Jon Hamm's appearance with their own really make watching Madmen better? Do most people want to see themselves beat to a pulp in Fight Club? I'd wager that few would.
Thirdly, most people aren't particularly interested in putting in the thought and effort to customize their phones: I'm pretty sure they're less interested in putting thought and effort into customizing their passive entertainment. They just want to hit play and have a nice little escape.
So, no. As long as people will continue to seek entertainment for the reasons they've always sought it, this is not going to fundamentally change the art of storytelling anytime soon.
Op-Ed: Why does the Pentagon give a helping hand to films like ‘Top Gun’?
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-30/top-gun-maverick-memorial-day-tom-cruise-pentagon-propaganda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theaters_of_War
Pay No Attention to the G-Man Behind the Curtain
https://www.theatlantic.com/membership/archive/2018/03/pay-no-attention-to-the-g-man-behind-the-curtain/555839/
In the ‘90s the U.S. Government Paid TV Networks to Weave “Anti-Drug” Messaging Into Their Plot Lines. Here Are the Worst Examples.
https://www.columnblog.com/p/in-the-90s-the-us-government-paid
Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law
https://web.archive.org/web/20100722051019/http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-01-06-williams-whitehouse_x.htm
https://www.gao.gov/products/b-305368
> Last year, Top Gun: Maverick took a similar approach and it paid off
I’m inferring from this statement that the movie was somehow more successful due to its reliance on practical effects. That seems like a pretty good incentive to lie.
>Does the Oppenheimer movie include a lot of CGI? >No. Director Christopher Nolan told Collider that Oppenheimer has "zero" CGI shots. This includes the bomb tests, which were recreated without CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery). "I think computer graphics, they're very versatile, they can do all kinds of things, but they tend to feel a bit safe," said Nolan. "That's why they're difficult to use in horror movies. Animation tends to feel a little safe for the audience. The Trinity Test, ultimately, but also these early imaginings of Oppenheimer visualizing the Quantum Realm, they had to be threatening in some way. They had to have the bite of real-world imagery. The Trinity Test, for those who were there, was the most beautiful and terrifying thing simultaneously, and that's where we were headed with this film." Last year, Top Gun: Maverick took a similar approach and it paid off (although a limited amount of CGI was used in the Tom Cruise blockbuster).
This can't be. I had read the statement but the final shot where he and Einstein talked near the pond, where we see the visions inside Oppenheimer's mind, had to have been CGI. Also, though I am not sure how they filmed the Trinity test practically, it had to be a smaller explosion made to look bigger, so it had to have required some compositing work. The rest of the movie did not really have all that much in terms of VFX since almost every other was scene was dialogue heavy and was mostly shot inside closed spaces. The scenes where Oppenheimer was giving a speech and was experiencing visions of an explosion also could have been done 100% practically.
This is not a slight on the movie or on Nolan, cause it would have been much easier for him to do the trinity test or the scene of Oppenheimer dreaming about atoms via CG (which I recently read was done by using an aquarium and glass balls). It was just Nolan doing his best to market his movie, considering the fact the cast nor his writers were available to market the movie.
As a side note, I want to add that I felt the scene with the Trinity test was fantastic, especially the fact that the hall went dead silent for a few seconds,but the actual shot of the mushroom cloud paled in comparison to the actual footage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfK9G7UDok&ab_channel=atomcentral
https://youtu.be/hyiXpECM7eg?t=224
This I felt that whenever we saw the actors reacting to the explosion, they are being bathed by the light from the explosion, but seeing the actual explosion itself did not live up to how Oppenheimer himself said that it looked like a thousand suns shining in the sky at once. But with the excellent music, acting, writing, direction, shot composition etc. it is easy to forgive.
You're just confirming what I said: "In exchange for all that factory military hardware". But we're conflating multiple uses of the word "propaganda" here.
Sure, the movie advocates the interests of the military, that's why they accepted to share the equipment, and they wouldn't share if the movie was against their aims. In the US, you can create movies for or against the aims of the government. Private initiative here was seizing an opportunity to do business with the government and pay less for realism.
These two movies wouldn't exist without military approval due to their planned use of military resources for realism/quality. It's a business deal to get low cost, top quality props. Have you seen Maverick? It looks awesome, even if you disagree with the theme. Actually, getting approval from the military is a good thing for the business purpose of the movie, it gives the movie credibility. If I was creating a movie about military success, I'd beg the military to approve it formally!
But in reality, the movie wouldn't exist if the filmmakers hadn't had the idea to produce it, rather than a government commissioning a literal propaganda movie to further their aims. It's a somewhat subtle, but major difference.
We need to immediately end the false moral equivalency between China and the US. It's very easy to come with a fallacious argument and say "it's all the same here as it is there". It's not. Go create a major blockbuster movie in China documenting the government's failures like, let's say, the old "Born on the 4th of July" with the same Tom Cruise and see what happens.
Movies like Maverick are indeed propaganda. In exchange for all that fancy military hardware, the Navy was able to exercise editorial control over the script. In fact ‘ Jerry Bruckheimer, a top producer, said that “Top Gun” and 2001’s “Pearl Harbor” simply wouldn’t exist without military approval.’
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-30/top-gun-maverick-memorial-day-tom-cruise-pentagon-propaganda
I disagree. No way in hell Dune Part 2 is going to make more than Guardians of the Galaxy 3 this year. Not that I think this is a good thing but I think the public has voted with their dollars and Hollywood is stepping in producing what is selling. I saw around 10-12 films in theaters in 2022 and the only films besides Super Hero/Children's/Video Game related movies I saw were Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick.
Indeed, but for certain movies, at a good cinema, it's still worth it IMO. Top Gun: Maverick is a movie I've seen at home and in the theatre. The theatre experience was superior I felt. That movie is probably suited to the experience but I really enjoyed the open atmosphere and distance from the huge screen and the room that audio had to work with.
But yeah, for most things a sweet system (which is very attainable for most people today) is often fine.
All the time.
Recent films that I can remember: John Wick 4, Top Gun: Maverick, NOPE.
All of them had the forced break.
> they are financially ill advised to put so much effort into a market that provides minimal returns
What effort ? Removing a character or shrinking it on the movie poster here and there... That is taking their audiences for morons.
Hollywood is losing its battle in many parts of the world and this is because of their mediocre production since a decade. Why korean and indian movies, or even thailand & indonesian ones are booming? Because they are made with the audience in mind and often appeal to higher values, shared by most humans.
People either watch movies to be entertained or to experience something. Not to be lectured or shoved some propaganda down their throats. Especially when this propaganda has nothing to do with their own cultures. Hollywood can chose to center on the US or to keep aiming for the world market. But not both, with its current mindset.
The recent hits of Top Gun Maverick and Mario Bros compared to the failures of all Disney movies, among others, fairly clearly proves my point.
Your claim "they complained to their governments to ban the superior competition" is evidence free.
Hilarious that you claim that Huawei is superior tech and yet they have horrible code in the same comment.
Btw, US did find backdoors.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/us-finds-huawei-has-backdoor-access-to-mobile-networks-globally-report-says/
1. So China banning Google, FB, Instagaram and others is China banning superior tech? Got it.
2. China even bans US movies routinely. E.g, Top Gun Maverick was banned due to a tiny Taiwan patch but funnily when the Chinese copycat couldn't live up to it, they did a self ban on it. https://gamerant.com/top-gun-maverick-ripoff-china-canceled-explained/
> I can see $5M per person being possible. $20M is the absurd part. 5 years with such a comp leads one to a net worth that is borderline filthy. Like elite, world renown athletes and actors level of wealth.
5 years at $20 million equals the highest paid FIFA player’s single year pay (or Tom Cruise’s pay for one movie, Top Gun: Maverick), or about two years of the highest paid NFL players, so it won't catch up the their wealth over that time (assuming similar lifestyle) as its losing ground to them every year.
(And the claim was total, not per person, salary, anyway.)
Nope.
For comparison, a recent movie that performed well at the box office was Top Gun Maverick.
$1500M box office on a $170M budget - that involved flying and filming an awful lot of hours in "rather expensive to run jets."
Hahaha, I expected the criticism of my comment to be that too much of what I was counting as good is "high brow", in fact. Too artsy-fartsy. Leaning too much toward "The Green Knight" and not enough toward "Jaws".
[EDIT] Here, lemme just list the 2022 movies that I think were worth a watch if you're at all into the kind of thing they were doing:
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Glass Onion Top Gun: Maverick Bullet Train All Quiet on the Western Front Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Crimes of the Future Death on the Nile Everything Everywhere All at Once White Noise Nope Prey The Sadness You Won't Be Alone Dual The Northman The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (arguably just a less-exciting RRR, but hey, it makes up for it by also being shorter and non-horror comedy *is* a bit weak lately, so it gets in) Watcher Dashcam (one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time—you may hate it, but you'll feel *something*, damnit!) The Banshees of Inisherin
This is just ones I've seen (I usually manage, like, 1/2 of the films in a year that I want to watch, at best) and excluding a few that did in fact suck or that I didn't think quite merited inclusion (e.g. The Menu) or that are good for what they are but are pretty narrow in appeal (Violent Night). Like, I hear Cyrano is great, Emily the Criminal, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Whale, and a bunch of others, but haven't made it to them yet (and, inevitably, I'll end up never watching some of them).
"Quite a few of those are sequels, remakes, or adaptations! White Noise was a book! Death on the Nile! One of those is a marvel movie!" yeah, I know—good luck finding an era in Hollywood when a ton of the films, and even a ton of the good films, weren't such. I reject that as, specifically, a complaint about this moment in cinema (it has more merit as a criticism of cinema in general)
You mention Jurassic Park, but the fact is that movie wasn’t doable with animatronics alone. The most memorable shots in that film are CG.
I also contest your assertion that the results are more impressive than todays CGI. That’s some rose tinted nostalgia, but there’s no way to replicate some of the advanced motion and realism like the latest Planet of the Apes or Avatar with animatronics. The range of motion required is just not safe to do or cost effective.
Safety is a big one. Having an animatronic T-Rex chase a car at speed in the rain is not physically safe to execute in the same space as your main actors. The requirements are at odds. To work in rain requires materials that are hard to move, to move fast requires lighter materials and heavier motors. All of that is a giant weight hurtling at your talent. Use of lighter materials also makes them less durable or more expensive.
Furthermore, most animatronics and practical effects in film today are replaced. As much as people sell the allure of “this film is done practically”, the majority of it gets replaced with CG in post. The new star wars films tried that angle with BB-8 and Top Gun Maverick claimed the same, but they practical elements people laud were CG in the final film.
Maybe you're just totally misguided on what a producer does, which may be the joke you're trying to make that nobody knows what a producer does. The producer would be closer to the president of the board while the director would be the CEO.
This is false. It seems you don't know what you're talking about. OTOH, I have worked with multiple studios including Fox (now 20th Century), Searchlight, Vendome, Canal+, and Lightstorm.
The executive producer is similar to the CEO or other executive; hence the "executive" in their title. They are in charge of the overall production, but not the creative aspects of the film or episode, and usually are not involved in the day-to-day operations. A regular "producer" can be anyone involved with the day-to-day operations of this production, and this title was once given out like candy. (Look at the credits for Top Gun: Maverick, for example: David Ellison is credited with a "producer" title despite having no actual involvement with the movie beyond being the CEO of one of the studios funding the production.)
The director is not involved with hiring crew, unless they also act as a producer (aka, the "auteur" school). These days, many directors also executive produce their own films (e.g., Nolan, Cameron, etc.), but many don't (e.g., almost all Disney movies). The director gets to provide input as to who gets hired, but quite frequently the main crew and cast will already be attached to the film. Notably, directors can and do leave films all the time (e.g., Rogue One, Justice League).
Who the creator/founder equivalent is really differs between projects. Sometimes, the producer has the idea and staffs around it. Sometimes, the director has the idea and also acts as a producer or just staffs the producer out to someone. Sometimes, it's the studio's idea and staffs everything out.
This is true for a few films, but the vast majority of films start with a screenplay that has come across the producer's desk. Auteur directors might produce their own ideas (e.g., Lucas, Shamalayan, Nolan, Cameron), but even they will usually start with an idea they acquired from someone else (Shamalayan: Old and Cabin at the End of the World, Gunn: Guardians of the Galaxy, Nolan: Insomnia, The Prestige, Batman Begins, Spielberg: almost all of his films, etc. Look at IMDB to see the production credits they have far exceed the films they actually direct).
2022 had 2 of the top 20 biggest box-office movies of all time (Avatar 2 and Top Gun: Maverick) and the last 5 years have seen 9[1]. There are still big-budget movies being made and raking it in at the box office. I think, covid, the rise (and seeming decline) of streaming services and the tightening of belts generally are going to affect the movie business and probably it will and should change. But is it finished? Of course not.
[1] https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cumulative/all-time
Don’t be so sure! Top Gun Maverick made more money than any marvel movie last year.
If there's anything I know about 1998, it's that Steven Tyler was dreaming of me, and didn't want to miss a thing. I can't think of the last time a movie moved the cultural dial the way they used to in the 90s. I guess Frozen? It seems to be a lot rarer nowadays.
For me at least, a movie just isn't a spectacle the way it used to be. Going out to see Top Gun: Maverick, and seeing The Batman at a drive-in cinema is probably the closest I've been to that feeling since the original Avatar. Maybe I'm not giving enough credit to the Avengers movies.
There's an irony in complaining about "progressive" signalling in movies while praising Top Gun: Maverick, a movie so woke that they made the baddies an unidentifiable country just so nobody would get offended.
>7 Marvel movies will be released in the next 19 months.
Disney-Marvel is now the Taco-Bell of entertainment.
In fact, most modern Hollywood productions are absolute trash. Just poor quality remakes, sequels, spin-offs of once popular franchises where they shoe-horn various modern-day identity politics and "progressive" topics trying to appeal to Twitter critic mobs, expecting people are NPCs who should just mindlessly consume whatever their corporate machine craps out of their "creative" board-room meetings.
Top Gun Maverick was for me the only movie worth watching in 2022, which is ironic since it followed a very simple recipe that has been battle proven all the way till the '90s but for some reason Hollywood decided to actively reject it now in most modern productions thinking that some sliver spoon executive detached from reality knows better than the fans who buy the tickets. Tom Cruise seems to be one of the last few in show-biz who knows how to give fans exactly what they want.
These days, I find much better quality stuff is coming out of Korea, Denmark, France, Finland, etc.
Top Gun Maverick only recently became available to stream, similar to the amount of time it would take for a DVD. It also did INCREDIBLY well in theaters. This will likely be the model given it's success for the big players.
There is nothing forcing streaming platforms to release movies right away. Now that the pandemic is over, you're going to see streaming platforms claw back where they can. They're already starting - banning multi-logins, forcing more ads, etc.
> People have been complaining about the cost of going to the cinema for years, it's not a new complaint, I don't think it explains why behavior suddenly changed this year. I think Streaming with its massive quantity of content does, you won't have to wait long for a movie you're kind of interested to be available and there's plenty to watch in the meantime.
Behavior changed because of the pandemic. Now that it's over people are going to the cinema for good movies - again, see top gun maverick, or spiderman no way home. But they're not going to go for just anything. It's too expensive to go all the time. So for a B movie, yea, why bother when it's on netflix? But the cost is too high to go see that movie in theaters.
Which is also an excellent counter-example to almost every other action movie which all rely on almost completely CG everything. No that MM:FR didn’t have its share of CG, but the practical effects create an authentic anxiety to much of the action.
Also: Top Gun: Maverick
EEAO is very unusual; it's an "indie" "arthouse" film that's stuffed full of references to other bits of non-Western cinema, as well as having lots of SFX action sequences. It had a budget of under $15m (per wikipedia), which is much less than the $170m of Top Gun: Maverick. I'm very glad that somehow it got made, but there's a real drive to not make any middle-budget movies like that any more.
> Top Gun: Maverick feels like it could have come out thirty years ago.
I've not seen it, but to what extent is that because it's a remake of a film that came out 30 years ago?
The Mission Impossible films have maintained high quality despite an absurd number of sequels.
I’d also compare _Everything Everywhere All at Once_ favorably against a lot of old blockbusters.
Modern technology aside, Top Gun: Maverick feels like it could have come out thirty years ago.
I don't think it's ethical for our economic system to incentivize all these high-budget productions, so I like to "vote with my dollar," for what that's worth. Is it really good for humanity if billions of dollars are spent a year on Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 3: The Golden Spork or Top Gun: Maverick's Last Stand: The TV Show?
Various streaming apps are simply very difficult to use for me. Plus other issues: Netflix's 4K is inconsistent and has banding and artifacts that it shouldn't, for one example. There's a long, long list of dark patterns and whatnot which turn me off. You can't even screenshot in mainstream apps!
But with all these IPs being taken down and lost forever (esp. HBO), piracy and seeding feels like I'm contributing to the maintenance of a library. If we're going to spend billions of humanity's resources on these things, they should at least continue to be accessible somewhere.
The pros and cons list ends up pretty imbalanced!
Owning a physical copy of a movie hasn't gotten any cheaper since the 90s. A Top Gun Maverick blu-ray is $25. Netflix streaming has gone up in price significantly from debut and has a worse content library, due to "the streaming wars." Streaming access is not fair to compare to ownership --it's closer to rental, but without any of the supply-side cost of making and distributing physical media, so value to consumers should be better, based on that. The subscription services aim to lock in some or all of your entertainment budget to maximize per capita revenue month to month. If you want access to the full gamut you need to pay 5+ different ways and end up spending more than what's reasonable for a month full of viewing content (with next to no distribution cost.) IMO, it's only a good deal then if you're spending absurd an amount of time streaming, and there probably isn't enough good content to keep you busy. Quantity and variety of niche shows/films available has gone up over the years, but you can definitely argue quality has gone down apart from format fidelity and CGI quality.
Games haven't really gone down in price either, and now since so many of the games themselves are "live service" things, many of them expire after a few years when they turn the servers off. $25 cosmetic "virtual goods" are often sold in game, representing an absurd markup on the time of artists. You get manipulated/harassed to spend (maybe more like burn) money in them, often after having spent $40-70 to get in the front door.
Monetization is awful, and that shouldn't be too surprising. Businesses endeavor to extract what the market can bear most profitably, and to have a bigger piece of that pie, not so much to give the benefit of progress to the people paying.
They aren't necessarily. Rings of Power season one had a budget of almost $500 million. That's almost 3x what Top Gun: Maverick cost and twice what Black Panther: Wakanda Forever cost.
I could quibble with some of those, but it's a good exercise. Something not listed that I've been thinking of since this debuted is the impact of CGI on moviemaking VFX. People still build and paint miniatures, still create physical costumes, still film on location and build sets, but it is less than before as a proportion of all VFX (given 100% used to be physical). I'm not sure the work itself actually happens less, though, so much as more movies totally filled with VFX are being made now. The old work continues, but a whole lot of new work was created that is being done via CGI.
And, of course, the CGI is not fully autonomous. People are still employed to run the software that paints those scenes.
Labor impact seems like even more overall jobs, but they got shittier.
Quality about the same. Far more VFX, but they rarely hold up to good practical effects. Jurassic Park, Alien, even Space Odyssey still look better than a Marvel movie, and a huge part of the positive response to Top Gun: Maverick was seeing how awesome practical effects can still be.
Pro-war fiction? That's like the standard movie for several decades from Rambo to Michael Bay's epics and Top Gun Maverick, and in movie form that has far wider appeal, 10000x the audiences, and is way more glamorous! "weird pro war fiction" would be very low in effectiveness...
I guess you haven't seen Top Gun: Maverick or The Northman, to mention a couple movies from this year?
I want to watch Top Gun: Maverick. I go to the Amazon Store page.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0B213HG4N/ref=atv_hm_hom_4_c_dR69uw_brws_2_2
I see "By ordering or viewing, you agree to our Terms[link to terms]" Huh maybe I should look at what I'm buying before I click checkout.
https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=content-only
Hmm, what's relevant to this. Ah, Digital Content, generally.
The Service may allow you to: (i) ignoring subscription talk (ii) ignoring rental talk (iii) purchase Digital Content for on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time ("Purchased Digital Content")
So obviously even "buying" the movie only gives it to me for an indefinite period of time. I wonder when it might not become available then. Let's scan more section headers to see if it talks about that.
i. Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.
I don't get how this is an "undue burden" to read this before forking over $14. It is not fine print, the default styles render it pretty clearly on my screen but you can feel free to resize it to render however you wish. Its not a long document. It has obvious sections. The link to this document was a few pixels away from the Buy button on my screen and was easily visible. It took me less than a minute to understand what I would be buying if I clicked "Buy". They're not hiding this away behind some far away unrelated site or only giving you this after requesting it by mail with legal letterhead. This is pretty out there and open.
To me, suggesting that people can't read this might as well be the same as arguing people shouldn't be required to read what's on the face of a ticket. The information is right there, it is not hidden in the slightest.
> Event tickets are an established practice
Maybe to you, but maybe I've never bought one before.
If you're going by "event tickets have been sold for a while", well, so have digital movies with DRM that can make them unavailable. This isn't something that just came out this year, I bought a movie from Amazon Unbox sixteen years ago which had these limitations. How long does it have to exist before it is an "established practice"?
One of the things that was most interesting to me was the linked Ringer article that shows the advancing age of leading stars in movies: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/6/27/23181232/old-actors-aging-tom-cruise-top-gun-maverick
I think this is pretty fascinating, and I think points to what I call "The age of data optimization". That is, starting in the early 00s, pretty much all businesses everywhere started to have much more actionable data on consumer trends and preferences, primarily due to the Internet.
This culture of "neverending analytic optimization" is by its very nature risk averse - these data algorithms don't deal that well with a completely "new" input, like a young, untrusted actor.
So, instead, these algorithms are fundamentally biased towards "what worked before", meaning actors that were able to come of age before all this data analysis started. And to be clear, I'm not saying movie studios have a single algorithm that they run that says "pick me a leading actor". But major studios have all gotten much more "data driven" in general in the past 25 years', where before that time movie making was much more of an "artistic" and personality-driven affair.
I cant remember the last Marvel film I watched, it may have been Endgame. I find them to be rather grey, passionless affairs, lacking in any depth or decent character development.
I watched Top Gun Maverick last week and it was so much better as an action/adventure film than the multitude of Superhero films released over the last 15 years. The ariel dogfights were a hundred times more exhilirating than anything in a Marvel film.
Some of this is just the lag time between filming and when you actually see an actor. Top Gun Maverick isn’t even out and it was filmed between 3 September 2018 - July 2019.
Add some time between when you actually see a movie and you see an actor in real live and they may have been 5+ years younger when it was actually filmed.
> I kinda like the '[discipline X professional] reacts to [relevant movie clips]'-type videos (like 'Navy pilot reacts to new Top Gun movie').
Those are exactly the ones I'm talking about
> You find them so terrible?
Yes. All noise, no signal!
If you want to watch videos about Navy pilots doing their jobs, go right ahead. Why watch Navy pilots "reacting" to a Hollywood movie?
The average Navy pilot must know as about as much about filmmaking and acting as Tom Cruise knows about actually flying a fast jet (as opposed to being filmed sitting in the back seat and not being allowed to touch anything[0]) ?
[0] https://fortune.com/2022/05/26/top-gun-maverick-studio-paid-navy-11000-hour-fighter-jet-rides-tom-cruise-not-allowed-to-touch-controls/
That's a curious inversion of cause/effect. You're suggesting people have latched onto this movie specifically and are trying to "claim" it as non woke even though it's not? There are plenty of movies that do well at the box office yet get panned for being super woke, why this one specifically?
No no, that's all wrong. A typical Hollywood woke Top Gun Maverick would have looked very different. The movie would be oriented around a female hero who is constantly being harassed or undermined by jealous men, who then get told they're dinosaurs and a relic of a previous non-woke era. At some point a frustrated white man would attack one of the women who would inexplicably turn out to be a black belt in karate (never previously mentioned), and the much larger and stronger man would thus end up on his back within three seconds. The commanders would all have been black (instead of just one in a relatively minor supporting role), and Maverick himself would either have been Chief Dinosaur, relegated to a loser's watching position at the end for his white male crimes, or - just as likely these days - replaced by a black actor without comment.
Top Gun Maverick is being more or less universally described as a non woke film. The fact that it has women and black people in it doesn't change that, because - and this is really important - anti-woke people are not racist nor sexist. That's the core reason for the whole culture war! The racism and sexism comes from woke people who are really open that they hate "white men", yet who claim it's everyone else animated by racial/gender hatred. That's why you're struggling to understand why a film can be hailed as non-woke yet still feature a mixed cast.
Maverick is non-woke for a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly, the cast is realistic. The US military is primarily made up of American men, and most American men are white with a large minority of Latino and African-Americans. Maverick depicts this reality accurately, or at least, accurately enough for film goers to accept it as such. Most of the pilots and Navy staff are white men, with a minority who aren't. They are usually married and if they aren't, they'd quite like to be married. Likewise, although women are now allowed in historically that wasn't the case and so it seems realistic that there's only one. None of them are inexplicably better than the others for identity reasons.
Secondly, the script lacks ideology. The characters don't make speeches about how the world should be. They don't try to remake the own world in a 'better' image, mutiny for moral reasons or any other of the stock clichés of woke storytelling. The characters are just professionals who focus on training, and ultimately just soldiers, so they complete the assigned mission without asking too many questions.
This lack of ideology is not merely replacing woke ideology with another. It is a genuine lack. Although the military in question is without a doubt the American military, there is almost no USA! USA! rah-rah. Baseball talk is kept to an absolute minimum. It's not a woke leftist film, but it's also not a Republican dream movie either. The pilots just ... train and fight. It's thus very interesting that you picked the unnamed enemy as a woke script aspect because it didn't seem that way to me at all. Woke people are never shy about naming the groups they hate! It's a slightly jarring stylistic choice, at least at first, but I don't think the script could have worked any other way. For the story to make sense you have to believe they're (a) not in the middle of WW3 (b) they're fighting an enemy that doesn't have nuclear weapons and won't start WW3 if their airspace is violated and yet also (c) has more advanced fighter jet tech than the USA. There are no countries that match this set of criteria. The best match for the unnamed enemy is IMHO clearly Iran: the extreme tactics used to prevent uranium enrichment, the mountainous terrain etc. But it's unbelievable that they'd have military tech than the USA. Someone else I talked to who saw the movie thought it was clearly meant to be China. The enemy ends up being a blank slate because filling it with details would have reduced the movie's focus on the action and created irreconcilable plot holes, not because woke people are so caring and reluctant to pick a fight!
I really don’t think this is a coincident either. But I think it is more nefarious then you suggest. I blame the USA military. Too many movies that come out today are paper thin propaganda/recruitment tool for the USA military. If your story involves the military in some way, includes some military tools in the set design, etc. and you want the military to help you with that, then you must hand over editorial rights to the military (i.e. you must opt into censoring).
This creates an interesting phenomena where you are either more creative with your screenplay (and restrictive with your budget) or you cave in to censorship. I feel like most of the time Hollywood picks the latter.
That said, Hollywood is still making good original action movies (the most recent being The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), they are just really scarce among a plethora of military propaganda and/or superhero sequels (e.g. Top Gun: Maverick).
Two things come into play here.
A) not all movies break even, most lose money, so the "hits" are needed to keep the lights on. It's not unlike VC investing.
Ironically small movies tend to lose money because they're small, telling small stories, with small ambitions. Ultimately these don't attract much of a cinema audience, and even those who enjoy them won't necessarily encourage others because (B). Streaming is a new, and perfect market for these with a very wide global audience - but making it for streaming takes out all the upside, even further constraining the budget.
There is no "community" (aka audience) already in place for some random new action movie. It costs a fortune to make, and returns are highly variable.
Contrast this with star-*, marvel, James bond, Tolkien etc. There's a pre-established market for these. If your gonna spend North of 100 million (or a billion for LOTR) there better be some expectation there.
Which brings us to (B). B) - why go watch it in a cinema? Growing up my TV was tiny, sound was rubbish, quality was bad. And cinema was cheap. It really was "better on the big screen". Now my TV is huge, sound is amazing, I can pause to go yo the loo. And a month on streaming costs less than a single movie ticket.
Sure there are still movies made for the big screen - Top Gun Maverick is grand in scope and beautifully filmed, and imax worthy. And Tom worked hard for 3 years convincing people to go see it (spoiler: worth the wait.) it's a sequel, barely, not a franchise - but we very much know the movie we are going to see.
The point being that that is the first time I've been to a cinema in 3 years. Before that I've seen maybe one a year, much less an average. I figure 99% of the movies I watch now are at home.
To those complaining about all movies being Marvel, well clearly they aren't. But if you want variety in movies then the cinema is not the place to look. The variety is now on streaming where small movies with modest budgets can better reach a wider shallower audience.
I felt that it went against several of the popular things in movies these days. It was comparatively low on CGI. It had a prominent male lead character without a female character supporting in the main plotline. Someone else mentioned on this discussion about Chinese funding. They took a decision than angered the investors there and, I believe, caused them to pull out https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/02/media/top-gun-maverick-taiwan-flag-reinstated-intl-hnk/index.html
Maybe I'm overthinking it. I saw the first one as a kid and spent a lot of time doing dogfights with my toy planes since. The nostalgia hit me quite hard and it genuinely felt like a nice sequel which retained the macho 80s spirit of the original. I've never felt that with other modern movies.
You cannot spend your way into scaling an original content business. Period.
Every MBA wants to create predictable success with a recipe or a formula but it doesn't work that way. And if you do stumble into an an Ozark, it doesn't mean you can just create 100 Ozarks. Quibi tried to spend their way into original content. It failed spectacularly then.
Many shows were cut short. Without the direct feedback loop of ratings it can be extremely difficult to know what to renew and what not to renew. The wrong metrics can lead you astray. Some shows had too much money. Others not enough.
And the real big lesson in doing all this is that the economics of big budget movies completely fail without theatrical releases. You just cannot recoup production costs otherwise. There's a reason Top Gun: Maverick delayed release 2-3 years.
And if you overspend the only way to recover that is by raising prices. Do that too much and it becomes a vicious cycle just like cable TV of ever-increasing price hikes to balance out the inevitable subscriber losses.
I've seen and enjoyed quite a lot of those and, yes, there have been many great action-oriented films outside of Marvel (thankfully!). Mad Max: Fury Road is a real stand-out. Amongst the rest I've seen, I agree with you that they're better than at least the vast majority of Marvel movies, and I suspect the ones I haven't would also be better.
Still, my bigger point, is that I suppose I thought I was past the point where a movie could really wow me. Top Gun: Maverick completely disabused me of that (although I suppose it mostly means the bar is that much higher).
To return to Mad Max: Fury Road - it was fantastic but didn't leave me feeling blown away by the sheer spectacle of the thing like Top Gun: Maverick did, even though it was a spectacular movie, or like The Matrix had done 16 years before. Those flying and cockpit scenes in TG: Maverick, you really felt like you were there. I saw it on IMAX (which I'd highly recommend) and was on the edge of motion sickness it was that good.
I hope that makes more sense of what I'm trying to say: I wouldn't describe myself as a film buff, by any means, but I am someone who pretty regularly sees films at the cinema because, despite developments in home theatre, it's still tough to beat a screen that's 72 feet wide.
What particularly struck me about Top Gun: Maverick, which I didn't expect at all, is that it held a very unflattering mirror up to the Marvel dross that's being endlessly churned out by showing how to make an absolutely great action movie. Yes, I know it's a sequel, and yes, there are many aspects of the story that are hardly groundbreaking, but it's just incredibly well done.
(I realise TG: Maverick isn't going to be everybody's taste but it's the best film I've seen at the cinema in a long time, and the first time I've walked out of a movie feeling absolutely wowed since, perhaps, The Matrix came out in 1999.)
Ah yes and this was more noticeable in Top Gun Maverick compared to the original. Almost the whole second movie is about training a team of pilots for a specific mission.
One of the interesting things about TOPGUN is that it wasn't there to train pilots. It was there to train flight instructors. TOPGUN graduates were expected to give presentations on flight technique, tactics, and principles and were graded very strictly by a panel of judges: if you couldn't make the Navy's latest knowledge of aircraft weapons systems pellucidly clear to the average pilot, you didn't pass. The idea was that the best pilot in a unit would be sent to TOPGUN, then return to their unit to teach the other pilots how to fly to the needed standard.
We see Maverick do this in Top Gun: Maverick, but both movies seem to reinforce this notion that TOPGUN's purpose is to train elite pilots to fly difficult missions when that's not really the case. It's kind of like Interpol in the movies, when you see "Interpol agents" going undercover or conducting investigations. Interpol doesn't have field agents of its own; its job is to coordinate communication and collaboration between national law enforcement agencies.
I'm always fascinated by $/hr of entertainment.
Video games are generally extremely cost efficient entertainment. A $20 Minecraft purchase can lead to hundreds of hours of entertainment. $20 to see Top Gun: Maverick in IMAX is 2 hours of entertainment.
Everyone has their spending habits, but for me I don't think twice about going to see a movie with my family of 6. But I'm pretty selective about buying games.
CSI: $LOCALE, NYPD Blue, Brooklin 99, Law & Order, Homicide: Life in the Streets, COPS, etc are basically "copaganda". This shit goes all the way back to Dragnet and FBI-glorifying movies like The Untouchables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda
> Copaganda, a portmanteau of cop and propaganda, is a phenomenon described by critics of law enforcement in which news media and other social institutions promote celebratory portrayals of police officers with the intent of swaying public opinion for the benefit of police departments and law enforcement...
Movies like Top Gun: Maverick that are made with the cooperation of the DOD should be called what they are: propaganda. When Hollywood makes movies that glorify the military, they are part of the military-industrial complex. When they make movies critical of the military, they are part of capitalism commodifying resistance and selling it to people.
In related corporate censorship, the Top Gun remake altered the physical leather jacket worn by Tom Cruise to remove the flags of Taiwan and Japan.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/top-gun-maverick-trailer-sparks-controversy-tom-cruise-jacket-1225993/
> This is an increasing factor in the US motion picture industry.
In the first Top Gun movie Maverick's (Tom Cruise's) jacket had the flags of Japan and Taiwan. Images from the upcoming sequel show that they're gone:
* https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/tom-cruises-jacket-taiwanese-japanese-patches-in-top-gun-maverick-trailer-1202160078/
* https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/19/tom-cruises-top-gun-jacket-shows-how-key-china-is-to-film-industry.html
I wonder if they'll be any modifying done for the final release: one set of flags for China print, another set of flags for not-China.
> Also, owning some of Western popular culture is a decent geopolitical chip.
Tencent is co-producing the Top Gun sequel, and Maverick's jacket no longer has either the Japanese or Taiwanese flags on the back:
* https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a28479683/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gun:_Maverick
> Maybe it’s not as great as a nuke, but China can use popular video games to raise the next generation of kids to be more friendly to China.
K-pop seems to be helping Korea:
* https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/16/16915672/what-is-kpop-history-explained
Though they're not a totalitarian state. I think if people get too friendly or sympathetic a couple of articles will bring reality back:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests