Did Old People Make Top Gun 2 a Hit?

Recently revisiting the matter of TV's JAG and its audience--its notoriously aged audience--and the way that military-oriented material of that kind is these days considered to be "dad thriller" stuff it seemed natural to also revisit the demographic makeup of the moviegoers who made Top Gun 2 one of the biggest hits of the post-pandemic period. After all, besides being a very dad thriller military action-drama this was a sequel to a movie from 1986 headlined by an actor who saw his stardom peak decades ago, and who was here playing not the cocky young jackass but the wise elder (as he was also increasingly doing in the Mission: Impossible series), with all that this implied for the interest of the young, which I suspect was hardly compensated by the inclusion of some young folks in the cast. (The age of the movie star ended before they came along, and no, I don't buy that 2022 Miles Teller was a substitute for 1986 Tom Cruise where pure and simple box office draw was concerned.) Moreover the studio went very, very hard for the nostalgia angle in a way that seemed to me risky given how '80s nostalgia was looking like it was by this point pretty well played out (if not toxic).

It would thus seem that the film was a lot more likely to draw its audience from among older viewers than young ones. People of the generation of, for example, Larry Summers, who was thirty-one when the original Top Gun hit theaters, such that he may well remember just how it was that the particular usage of the term "wingman" he made in a now-famous e-mail in reference to his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein originated. And this is in fact borne out by the opening weekend numbers. As the Hollywood Reporter informs us, on opening weekend less than 30 percent of the audience was under the age of 25, and rather less than half were under 35, while "38 percent [were] over 45 and 18 percent over 55"--in contrast with what we usually see for summer blockbusters, practically a Downton Abbey-type event). The situation was all the more remarkable given the slightness of competition for action movie fans young and old that particular summer (a factor, I thought then and still think now that Top Gun 2's extraordinary legs during the summer of 2022 had a lot to with the season's relatively thin release slate, such legs as much a cause as an effect of the young seeing the movie, because it hung around for so long).

Of course, I don't remember anyone joking about gray heads in the audience, and that doesn't seem accidental. In becoming a hit Top Gun 2 had a lot of help not only from those ways in which it was a plausible commercial prospect (iconic franchise with the star back in the lead role, flashy action, etc.) but also media Rah-Rah as the claqueurs claqued as they had rarely claqued before, with an obvious reflection of this the extremely favorable stance of the critics toward the movie on offer. After all, as some noted (usually not unaffectionately), Top Gun 2 was basically a reshoot of the first Top Gun--a movie that critics at the time dismissed in such ways as the remark in Steven H. Scheuer's Movies on TV guide that it was "the most vapid film ever to gross over $150 million," and the not uncommon view that it was less a movie at all than a two-hour Navy recruiting commercial. This has its reflection in how, as you see when you look at the first movie's Rotten Tomatoes page, the first one had a critics' score of 58 percent--and a still lower 56 percent from the "top critics." By contrast the critics' score for the new version that was Top Gun: Maverick was 96 percent--a 37 percent jump for basically the same movie!--while there was an even bigger jump in the case of the "top critics," whose score leaped from 56 percent to a near-perfect 99 percent.

That the do-over got so much more favorable treatment in 2022 than in 1986 may seem partly a matter of a generational shift as critical evaluation of commercial/music video-style high concept movies and of action movies in particular became more generous. (We are a long way from the days when Pauline Kael, looking at Raiders of the Lost Ark, described what Steven Spielberg was doing very lucidly while completely failing to see its appeal, and indeed that this was the future of popular American cinema.) Simply put, with Star Wars approaching the golden anniversary of its release, even those critics who actually know film, even the real veterans among them, with only rare exception, grew up on action movies and I suspect never lost their affection for them, taking their distinct "poetics" for granted, all as a broader "grade inflation" with respect to movie ratings likely did its part as well.

However, the change has been political as well. In 1986 militaristic jingoism and the right-wing values broadly associated with them, and very much evident in a film like Top Gun, were certainly pervading American culture--but not yet triumphant. The divisions the Vietnam War created in American society had not yet gone away, with those who saw the war as a colossal crime still having their say, and this informing the opposition to the escalation of American intervention in the wars ongoing in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and to the nuclear arms race and militarism more broadly (epitomized by the nuclear freeze movement winning the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize)--all of which had its reflection in film. Thus the year had Top Gun--but it also had Oliver Stone's Platoon, while Top Gun only had Cruise in the role because the actor who had been considered ahead of him for the role of Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Matthew Modine, elected to pass--precisely because he did not want to do a war-mongering movie--in favor of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which hit theaters the following year and became a new classic. And indeed, if Cruise did take the role Modine turned down, just a few years later Cruise himself expressed the view that taking it up a second time would be "irresponsible" given how it had played as simple-minded militaristic propaganda.

As Jerry Lembcke shows in his book The Spitting Image, the selling of the 1991 Gulf War quashed all of that, handing total victory to the proponents of jingoism --with it saying something of the totality of the victory that NBC gave Iran-Contra scandal figure Oliver North roles on shows like not just JAG, but the sitcom Wings (!), in the latter case explicitly identified as indeed Oliver North to Brian Hackett, who vocally lauded him for his actions. Of course, in the wake of the lies that led up to and the catastrophe that resulted from the 2003 Iraq War (eventually recognized and condemned by the right as well as the left) challenge to this resurged, but it never got very far. The new anti-war movement never approached the fire of its Vietnam-era, and perhaps not even that of its '80s-era, predecessor, but in line with the tendency to count their chickens before they are hatched and the illusions the Democratic Party and the media succeeded in fostering around Barack Obama they packed up and went home after his election thinking the war was over--only to see it go on and on, deepened and widened with kill lists, with new battlegrounds in Libya, and Syria, and Yemen, and much else that continues down to this day. Of course, if the movement never recovered there remained a measure of leeriness about pop militarism, such that Tom Cruise's reticence about getting back in the cockpit was slow to pass, while even after the project finally got out of development hell Forbes' Scott Mendelson (no leftie publication, this!) wrote that "If the film is a shameless nostalgia-driven fan bait enterprise, with no more nuance or commentary on the current military-industrial complex than its predecessor," then it would be not just "thin gruel," but "almost morally irresponsible considering the times we live in"--all as, I suspect, most of those thinking along anything like those lines would have dispensed with the "almost" in the "almost morally irresponsible" and just said "morally irresponsible." Nevertheless, such "morally irresponsible" "nostalgia-bait" and the "thin gruel" that Mendleson, speaking for many, thought such material must be, was exactly what Paramount delivered, not least in Mendelson's own opinion when he saw the movie, though this was not to criticisms but to hosannas from the press as a whole. In short, yes, the media was championing a jingoistic Top Gun 2 because it was a jingoistic film as what little political controversy was detectable in the mainstream press was over (in keeping with the eternal function of the culture war as a distraction from more substantive issues) whether the movie was "woke" or not as a right thrilled with a movie making no concession to those concerns of which even a Mendleson had recently been obliged to write being the hit of the year as their opponents lamely pointed to the "diversity" of the cast as "proof" that it was not the anti-woke delight they claimed--which rebuttal, if to be taken at all seriously, only goes to show that along with woke capitalism one can have woke jingoism and woke militarism. Amid all that there was reference to the number of older folks going to the theaters, but this was in a "Isn't it great that the older people more vulnerable to COVID--glad that's over, aren't you?--are going back to theaters? Surely the film market's recovering and we'll be back to pre-pandemic business in no time!" spirit, as against the "It's mostly old people watching this, younger people only being pulled in secondarily by the endless Rah-Rah amid a thin release slate" view that would not have been conducive to their narrative, their unity and vigor in promoting which seems to me as good an example as I know of just how much having the press in one's corner helps in selling a film.