Top Gun: Maverick director Joe Kosinski talks to Polygon about persuading Tom Cruise to make a Top Gun sequel

Tom Cruise and Joseph Kosinski. PHOTO: HECTOR VIVAS/GETTY FOR PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Tom Cruise had to be persuaded to make Top Gun: Maverick, according to director Joe Kosinski.

Cruise, 59, reprises his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in the recently released sequel to 1986’s Top Gun, which marked the biggest opening weekend box office of Cruise’s career after it hit theaters this past Friday.

According to Kosinski, 48, the veteran actor “really didn’t want to make another Top Gun” at first.

“I basically had 30 minutes to pitch this film, which I didn’t realize when we were flying over,” Kosinski said in an interview with Polygon of going to Paris to discuss the potential sequel with Cruise, who was shooting a Mission: Impossible movie in the French capital at the time. “But when I got there, I found that Tom really didn’t want to make another Top Gun.”

But luckily, “At the end of the pitch, he picked up the phone, he called the head of Paramount Pictures and said, ‘We’re making another Top Gun,’ ” Kosinski recalled. “It’s pretty impressive to see the power of a real movie star in that moment.”

Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Kids, don’t try this at home. PARAMOUNT PICTURES

As for what changed Cruise’s tune, Kosinski told Polygon that he “knew to start with character and emotion,” as he had worked with the actor in the past and knew that would appeal to him.

“I just pitched this idea of Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller) growing up to become a naval aviator, and him and Maverick having this fractured relationship that had never been repaired,” he added of the character who is the son of Maverick’s late best friend Goose, the latter of whom was played by Anthony Edwards in the first movie.

“With Maverick getting called back to train this group of students to go on a mission that he knows is very, very dangerous,” Kosinski said.

For the director, he felt that the conflict in the sequel “leveraged the emotion of the past film and those relationships that we all love, but took it in a new direction.”

Kosinski went on to tell Polygon that giving Cruise “an emotional reason to return to” his iconic character more than three decades later “was honestly the element that really grabbed Tom.”

“The second thing was, what’s Maverick been doing? You know, where do we find him?” the director added. “And this is kind of my own passion, you know, coming through and pitching the Darkstar sequence [in the beginning], just being someone who has always loved airplanes and aerospace and studied aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering and loved The Right Stuff.”

“So the idea of finding him as a test pilot on the bleeding edge of what’s possible seemed to me like the perfect way to find him, and Tom loved that,” Kosinski said.

Top Gun: Maverick is now playing in theaters.