Days of Thunder 2? Give Me a Break

Recently happening upon the news that Days of Thunder 2 is a go I found that it was easy to hypothesize what the studio executives might have been thinking when they made this call. Responding to the commercial crisis of American filmmaking not by changing their ways in line with market demand but doubling down on their accustomed behavior in that way that has them scraping the bottom of the barrel these days for anything they can sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, spin-off, multi-verse, in that I way so much remark here they noticed that they haven't done Days of Thunder yet, but think they should. After all, they thought, Top Gun 2 (aka Top Gun: Maverick) was a hit, so why not another do-over of a Tony Scott-Tom Cruise "adrenaline" movie from before half the planet was even born? And did Top Gun 2 not prove that Mr. Cruise remains a good old-fashioned star? And didn't 2025's F1 show a movie about car racing can be a hit? With room existing for Days because it's NASCAR, rather than Formula One? And isn't this a good time for a NASCAR movie, because Twisters showed that there is money to be made in pandering to the Red States, and don't those Red Staters just love their stock car racing? Indeed, with all the idea has going for it, we might have a new franchise on our hands, with Days of Thunder 3 following Days of Thunder 2, and maybe a series on streaming too! (And man do we need one, especially with the new owners up to their eyeballs in debt and breathing their fetid breath down our necks as we do nothing but crank out more Star Trek spin-offs no one is watching, and fund anything that pops into the head of a certain Dallas metro area cardiologist's drama club kid cosplaying as a cowboy.)

So what could be more logical than greenlighting a second Days of Thunder?

And yet on closer examination--what more foolhardy? After all, consider the difference between the original Top Gun and the original Days of Thunder where audience cachet was concerned. Top Gun was a genuine pop cultural phenomenon beyond even what the then-spectacular, #1-hit-of-the-year $177 million domestic gross implies, as seen in its launching Tom Cruise's career into the stratosphere; the long ubiquity of songs featured in its best-selling soundtrack such as "Danger Zone," and of course, the Oscar-winning "Take My Breath Away"; the entry of the term "wingman" into the popular lexicon (you know, as in Larry Summers relying on Jeffrey Epstein to be his wingman as he plotted an adulterous affair with his "protégé"); the endless imitation and parody that saw John Gardner turn James Bond into a Royal Navy Top Gun in his next continuation novel (Win, Lose or Die), and Jim Abrahams of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team fame devoting of one of his then very popular parodic gag comedies to riffing on just this one film, 1991's Charlie Sheen starrer Hot Shots!; and one might add, Tom Cruise's return to duty in another "New Classic" hit, A Few Good Men, supplying Donald Bellisario with his elevator pitch for his massively franchise-launching series JAG ("'Top Gun meets A Few Good Men'"). Indeed, for many years afterward it was a cliché of movie publicity to say that a major new release would be "Top Gun" for whatever group of people it was about. (Thus was that other Navy SEALs supposed to be Top Gun for that then-relatively little discussed branch of the Navy, and Backdraft supposed to be Top Gun for firefighters, and True Lies Top Gun for Marine aviation because of its use of the Harrier jump jet, etc., etc., ad infinitum and ad nauseam.).

One cannot claim anything close to that for Days of Thunder, which, if launched with a wave of publicity that said it would do for car racing what Top Gun had done for naval aviators, as the conventional wisdom among the entertainment press held that it would be the #1 action hit of its own summer season, ended up an underperformer even by the low standard of a season so packed with underperforming action movies that the to-be-obsolete-in-five-minutes hot take-supplying commentators told us the action movie had had its day. Then after its disappointing box office run (which did not suffice even for a place in the top ten at the American box office that year, the movie's mere $82 million take leaving it in the #12 spot) Days of Thunder did not prove one of those movies that enjoyed a greater success on video or cable, did not win some reevaluation that won it a cult, as it failed to become anything like the cultural touchstone Top Gun was. (I can't remember catching a single allusion to the movie in the decades since, even among obscurity-mongers like the writers of Family Guy or Psych, in line with the comparative meagerness of its mark on pop culture.) Or for that matter, other 1990 releases, like the aforementioned Ghost, or Pretty Woman, or GoodFellas, or even those fellow underperforming 1990 summer season actioners Total Recall and Robocop 2.)

The movie is thus a weaker basis for expecting an appreciable audience to be persuadable that a follow-up is "must see" viewing, all as one should remember the advantages Top Gun 2 had that a sequel to Days of Thunder will not. One is the long vacation so many took from moviegoing in the two years of the pandemic preceding the film's much-delayed release, which made people that much ready to respond to insistences that it is a "must see" event; and the media's cheerleading for the movie in that way that shows them to be dutifully claquing for a jingoistic-militaristic film. (You can tell this is going on when those who ordinarily make much of identity politics set this aside, and critics lower their usual bar, as seen in the craziness of the Rotten Tomatoes score, and how they would give the audience permission to not think too much about what they would see and just enjoy the ride, the pattern all too evident from their response to prior releases.) One may add that all this had a chance to go further than it ordinarily would have done due to Top Gun being released into the very uncompetitive summer of 2022, giving it more chances to be noticed, and more screens, than it would otherwise have had.

In discussing Top Gun 2's success the media has slighted the role of the exceptionally helpful conditions of the release, and its own cheerleading (precisely because they were cheerleading)--but anyone making financial decisions about this on that basis does so at their own peril, all as anyone counting on Days 2 getting as lucky is likely to be making a particularly big mistake, though that is not the only one I suspect they are making here. If the media decided to sing of Tom Cruise's star power rather than all the movie really had going for it, well, the lackluster performance of the latest Mission: Impossible films has made the limits of that all too clear. If F1 was a hit it was that on a far smaller scale than Top Gun--grossing about a third as much, while the movie also happened to cost a lot too. Meanwhile anyone betting on a "Red State movie" on the basis of the narrative surrounding Twisters makes as much sense as betting on a "feminist action movie" on the basis of Fury Road--the "hit movie" narrative disconnected from the numbers (with the fourth Mad Max film probably a money-loser, and the foolhardiness of following it up demonstrated by the flop Furiosa was, and Twisters possibly the same). The result is that while I will not go so far as to say that Days of Thunder 2 will definitely lose money, I will say that anyone expecting it to be "the next Top Gun 2" can expect to be disappointed the same way that the original's backers were when they put out the first Days of Thunder thinking they were looking at the next Top Gun 1. But for all the muddy thinking involved the making of a Days of Thunder 2 still isn't the absolute limit in pointless franchise-making. As I was drafting this very post Searchlight announced a sequel to the 2005 film The Family Stone, as the entertainment press rushed to tell us the movie is a "beloved" and "classic" film (another It's a Wonderful Life!) and pretend that there is popular demand out there for a follow-up a generation on.