Top Gun: Maverick was a massively huge movie thanks to incredibly practical action sequences, Tom Cruise star power, and, of course, shirtless beach football. Maverick made nearly $1.5 billion at the global box office, partly thanks to being released three separate times in theaters. So clerly fans wanted to watch it again and again. And it turns out that there’s even more to watch, because there was something like 800 hours of total footage shot for Top Gun: Maverick. That would make for one hell of an extended edition.
Top Gun: Maverick editor Eddie Hamilton recently spoke with Deadline and he revealed that he had an absolutely ridiculous amount of footage to work with when it came to cutting together the final film. This is because in order to get all the flight action the movie would need, dozens of cameras were running, sometimes all at once. Hamilton explained…
[We shot] 800 to 814 hours. It was quite honestly very overwhelming at times. There was one day in March 2019 when they had 27 cameras running because there were four jets up in the air with various cameras on them, and two units filming on the ground, which added up to 27 cameras. And I remember getting so much footage the next morning and just thinking this was going to be very difficult. Also, the days were very long when we were filming the aerial sequences, it was just really intense. And the thing is, when you’ve got a lot of footage like that and a movie like Top Gun, it has to be awesome from beginning to end, because the whole audience wants it to be awesome.
The vast majority of that 800+ hours of footage was clearly Maverick's jet flying action, both interior and exterior shots, which were apparently filmed months apart. We know that the cast and crew of the new Top Gun put a lot of work into getting the aviation scenes right. One can only imagine how absolutely insane it would be for somebody to try to work through hundreds of hours of footage and try to find a way to put it all together to make an exciting action sequence. Hamilton admits he didn’t sleep well at points because the footage was haunting his dreams, mostly because he wanted to make the best possible sequences.
While it’s unclear how much longer of a shirtless football scene we could get in a theoretical Top Gun: Maverick extended cut, we could absolutely see much longer flying sequences. Hamilton says that the first combat sequence, where Tom Cruise’s Maverick continually shoots down his students and forces them to do push ups, was at one point 15 minutes long, before being trimmed down to less than five. An entire movie of extended fighter jet action would probably be quite popular with fans.
