It’s been a while! Life has been happening with a capital H, but I couldn’t stay away from a topic as juicy as Top Gun. Thanks to all who encouraged me to get back to it and have patiently waited for a new bloopers and breadcrumbs.
This is a spoiler-free newsletter, so read with abandon!
I feel the need… the need for speed! Sue me– I haven’t been immune to the Top Gun hype. After several COVID delays, I finally flocked to the theater, along with the rest of the world, to see the much-vaunted, long-awaited Top Gun: Maverick. I walked out of that Regal with a grin and a question I couldn’t shake: is this the best sequel of the IP movie era?
We are in a glorious age of IP in Hollywood. Look around: the MCU, multi-film book adaptations (Hunger Games, Twilight, Divergent), and even true crime dramatizations are all signals of a cultural shift in movies. The absolute dominance of IP at the box office is undeniable. Of the top ten domestic grossing films in 2021, five were Marvel films, one was part of the Fast and Furious franchise, one was a Bond film, one was a Ghostbusters film, and one was A Quiet Place II. The last film and only original screenplay was Free Guy, which now has a sequel in development. Audiences go to the theater for IP that they recognize and studio executives have taken note. Only franchises receive sky-high budgets. Original screenplays that see success inevitably become franchises. Marvel is, you know, Marvel.
Like any art form, film inevitably goes through trends and shifts. And even more than other art forms, film’s trends are inextricably linked to its commercial prospects. With even a small film easily costing north of $5 million, movies are an investment, and investors expect a return. But even though it’s well-known that movies are expected to make money, there’s a particular cynicism about the business side of things that has accompanied the rise of IP.
People are now hyper aware that films come with monetary strings attached to their artistic vision. Fans keep tabs on actors’ long-term contracts, speculating that characters will or won’t die because their actors are slated to appear in future films. People weigh in on story differences between directors and studios, trying to identify where money impedes art and sometimes rallying around a particular director’s right to final cut (e.g., Justice League). Sequel announcements are decried as “cash grabs”, relentless exploitation of IP nostalgia to generate return. IP films themselves often seem to follow a formula: fan service here, callback there, and say hello to new box office records. This hyper-awareness and endless discussion of the ways movies and money intersect has made IP filmmaking a dirty phrase in the culture– a symptom of all the ways our creativity has been watered down and commodified.
This is a brutal environment to make a sequel in. Audiences are knowledgeable, and their knowledge has made them cynical. They know studios see them as checkbooks. They know that the studio and director had “creative differences”. With the internet, they know more about a movie before it even comes out than any other audience in history. A movie-watcher going into a sequel has all of this swirling around them, whether the filmmaker behind that sequel wants them to or not. It’s an uphill battle for any sequel to justify its own existence– how can a film navigate that prejudice to stand on its own as a work of art?
A sequel like The Matrix Resurrections offers one kind of answer. The revelation of a new Matrix sequel was a shock, as Lana Wachowski famously refused to do a fourth Matrix movie for years. It was later revealed that Warner Bros. was willing to move ahead with the Matrix, Wachowskis or no, due to the IP’s “money making capability”. There was a powerful sense that The Matrix Resurrections was going to have to work hard to justify why it should exist beyond profit. And instead of ignoring that cynicism, Lana Wachowski fully committed to it. The result is the most self-aware, meta, IP-film-that-knows-it’s-an-IP-film to ever hit theaters.
The Matrix Resurrections not only plays off its audience’s nostalgia for the original 1999 film by re-creating its opening scene, it also makes the commodification of meaning - in the form of art - one of its central themes. A scene with Jonathan Groff’s Agent Smith pushing for a new Matrix video game explicitly mirrors Warner Bros. own threat to Lana Wachowski. Extensive scenes of corporate boardrooms trying to committee-circle their way into the magic of The Matrix underscore the commercial cynicism underlying not just the film, but the whole industry the film is situated in.
While The Matrix Resurrections is an extreme version of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge many IP films give viewers, it’s also the completely natural and utterly unnatural byproduct of our IP era. You know that The Matrix Resurrections partially exists for money. The Matrix Resurrections knows that you know that. You know that The Matrix Resurrections knows that you know that. The Matrix Resurrections knows that you know that– you get the idea. In this uncomfortable spiral of pessimistic self-awareness, I walked out of The Matrix Resurrections wondering where IP could even go from here.
It turns out Top Gun: Maverick is one promising destination for IP. With a 97% Rotten Tomatoes rating and box office returns that haven’t been seen since before the pandemic, Top Gun: Maverick is a success by any standard. What piques my interest, however, is the fact that Top Gun: Maverick is not just a good movie, but a good sequel. In this era of IP dominance and IP hatred, Top Gun: Maverick has managed to find a loophole that even The Matrix couldn’t.
Top Gun: Maverick is a deeply un-cynical film, one brimming with the optimism and sincerity of its predecessor. It’s uncynical not just in its politics, but in its filmmaking: it makes callback after callback to the original film unironically, lingers sentimentally over objects that have become iconic (jacket, motorcycle, etc.), and pushes the audience unrelentingly towards a state of heightened emotional nostalgia. The opening scene is a re-creation of the original Top Gun’s down to the legendary music, not unlike The Matrix Resurrections’ opening scene recreation, but completely different in intent and effect.
Oddly enough, this naked emotion is never tied to a sense of spontaneity– Top Gun: Maverick has clearly been planned to within an inch of its life. You can almost sense the coffee fumes of the writer’s room as they try to figure out how to get Maverick from Point A to Point B, how to write in key callbacks, how to facilitate emotional resolution. And yet, the brilliance of Top Gun: Maverick is that this studiousness, a hallmark of IP franchise films made by committee, never compromises the authenticity of its nostalgia. How is it that Top Gun: Maverick’s callbacks never feel like pandering? Goose’s ghostly presence never feels maudlin? The easy emotional resolutions never feel cheesy?
I think the answer isn’t only that Top Gun: Maverick is a well-written and well-acted film, although those things are both true. Instead, the answer lies in the audience and the environment that Top Gun: Maverick is being released into. The original Top Gun, released nearly forty years ago, occupies an odd place in the cultural consciousness. Even prior to the existence of its sequel, Top Gun was already seen through a nostalgic lens that loved its enthusiastic embrace of all things 80s.
Crucially, when Top Gun came out, it represented the peak of macho cool– Maverick’s hot-headedness, Iceman’s posing, and abs-forward volleyball on the beach were all meant to exude a particular standard of hyper-masculine sex appeal. By the time my generation saw Top Gun, the love remained, but the understanding of its appeal had fundamentally changed. People no longer watched Top Gun sincerely but with a layer of irony. Its hyper-masculinity had transformed into a powerful homoeroticism, and its narrative “save the day and get the girl” simplicity represented the charming best of 80s movie-making.
Compared to a movie like The Matrix, whose “cool” is, to this day, still understood as actually cool, Top Gun rapidly acquired an odd and contradictory fan love: one that simultaneously understood the distinct absurdity of the movie, but loved it in spite of and because of the movie’s original belief in achieving what it thought was macho cool at the time.
In short, Top Gun: Maverick’s audience was uniquely primed to process paradox: this sequel could be corny and cool, pandering and sincere, profit-driven and authentic, all at the same time. Top Gun: Maverick is a good movie, yes, but its status as a good sequel can be attributed less to its own success and more to the nature of its predecessor’s. This might be the absolute best IP can be– a sequel released to an audience that, through a unique combination of factors, has it in their hearts to be open to a sentiment sorely lacking in today’s Hollywood: sincerity.
It’s not a disparagement of IP to say that Top Gun: Maverick is the best version of it. Top Gun: Maverick has shown itself to be a strong film in its own right, and I’m glad it exists. It does, however, feel like a rare phenomenon. It’s a film that owes its success to sidestepping the self-awareness vs. sincerity conversation that has dominated IP filmmaking for years, as neatly as a fighter jet weaving through heat-seeking missiles. Sidestepping a conversation, however, is not the same thing as having it, and it raises the question: if this is the best IP can be, how many other films can really hope to fly through the same loophole to success? There aren’t that many Mavericks out there, and for all that Top Gun: Maverick hits the expected beats, it might just be unique.
Culture Crumbs
Austin Butler is officially playing Feyd Rautha in the Dune sequel. Disappointed, but consoled by the fact that Florence Pugh has been cast as Princess Irulan
Friends know I have a staunch loyalty to odd-looking actors who are weirdly hot (see: Adam Driver), and I now present Jeremy Allen White in The Bear as my (and the Internet’s) next “not-hot but actually really hot?” candidate
Persuasion is… a flop! Might still watch it though…
Lea Michele is replacing Beanie Feldstein in Funny Girl. Does art imitate life? Or does Lea Michele insist on life going her way until it imitates her art?
For anyone in New York, MoMA is running a horror movie series until September, featuring categories like “Horror and Gender”, “Horror and Race”, and “Folk Horror”. I saw Carrie, but there are plenty of classic, modern, and indie films yet to come: Get Out, The Wicker Man, Saint Maud, and so much more!
That’s it for this issue! Thank you for reading!