Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The film that made aviator sunglasses a fashion statement and sent a generation to military recruiting stations turns 40 this year, and Paramount wants you to see it on a big screen again.
Paramount Pictures is releasing theatrical reissues of both Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick this weekend, timing the double release to the 40th anniversary of the original 1986 film. It is an unusual bet on nostalgia, and an acknowledgment that both films have a pull that streaming distribution alone cannot replicate.
The original Top Gun started with a magazine. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer was flipping through the May 1983 issue of California magazine when he came across a story headlined “Top Guns,” accompanied by a photograph from inside the cockpit of an F-14 fighter jet. “I saw that cover and I said, ‘We gotta do this. This looks great,'” Bruckheimer later recalled. “It’s Star Wars on Earth.”
The film, directed by Tony Scott, became the number one movie of 1986. Tom Cruise was 24 years old. The Navy set up recruitment tables in theaters across the country and enlistments spiked noticeably in the months after its release. Aviator sunglasses and bomber jackets became mainstream fashion items. No film that year came close to matching its cultural footprint.
Scott died in 2012, and for years Top Gun: Maverick sat in various states of development before landing with director Joseph Kosinski and surviving a two-year delay caused by the pandemic. When it finally opened in May 2022, it became the highest-grossing film of that year globally, earning roughly $1.5 billion worldwide. As the BBC noted at the time, it outgrossed its nearest competitor by more than £400 million, an outcome almost no one had predicted.
The theatrical reissues place both films back in the same conversation, forty years after the first one changed what a summer blockbuster could look like. For Paramount, it is also a revenue opportunity at a moment when the studio is watching Michael dominate the weekend chart. Whether nostalgia alone can move tickets in a competitive frame remains the question, but the franchise has already answered that question once before, and more convincingly than anyone expected.
