Top Gun: Maverick and the unstoppable rise of the ‘legacy sequel’

Next week, Hollywood will take an estimated $300m gamble on Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to a film released 36 years ago. Right now, one of the hottest projects at the Cannes film festival market, where rights are sold to as-yet-unmade films – is the sequel to This Is Spinal Tap, a film released 38 years ago. This Christmas we’ll get the sequel to James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, which in contrast is practically sprinting to the gate a mere 13 years after its first appearance. In between, this summer will see the arrival of The Railway Children Return, a sequel to the beloved family classic, 52 years later.

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Reboots, remakes and sequels have been Hollywood’s life blood for decades now, but the profusion of “belated sequels” appears to be reaching epidemic proportions, where even the most ancient material can be picked up and dusted down for a new audience. Top Gun: Maverick, in which Tom Cruise revisits his 80s hotshot navy pilot character in middle age, joins the likes of Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Jurassic World, Rambo, Mad Max and Star Wars in attempting to convert fan nostalgia for a successful franchise into a new mass-appeal blockbuster.

Steven Gaydos, executive editor of Variety magazine says the phenomenon is simply a new variant on Hollywood’s big-money plays. “Hollywood hates risk,” he says. “It’s in the risk-aversion business, so everything must be pre-sold. When we talk about ‘belated sequels’, we are talking about the giant need to invest in things that have already worked. The common denominator is risk reduction.”

Gaydos adds: “That they were a long time ago is not the point. If something ever worked in any form, ever, it has a better chance of getting greenlit as it has audience awareness. What Hollywood and the conglomerates who run it really detest is what we call originality.”

Top Gun: Maverick is following a well-established track for sequels to what Robert Mitchell, director of theatrical insights for box office analysts Gower Street Analytics, calls “legacy” films. The hope, he says, is that they will appeal to fans of the original, as well as a new generation who may have come to it later. “You definitely want to get the legacy audience who are already familiar with it and love it, and you also want to bring in a new audience who may not know or care much about the legacy characters – so you create new characters for them.”

“The economics of the film industry mean you can’t make enough money to break even just on the legacy audience. So Top Gun: Maverick has got a whole cast of young actors, amazing aerial footage, in-camera stunts, which are there to excite everybody – as well as Tom Cruise returning to his star-making role. The hope is that will be intriguing enough for people to come in huge numbers.”

Anna Smith, host of the Girls on Film podcast, also points out the generational shift: “I suspect part of it is that the Top Gun fans have grown up and gone into the industry and are helping to support these kinds of releases, whether they’re on the production side or journalism or elsewhere.”

Mitchell suggests that Cruise’s persona will be crucial to the film’s success. “The interesting thing is that Cruise is a marketing thing in himself. In the years since the original Top Gun, the films that have really kept him at the top are the Mission Impossible series, and they are renowned for Cruise doing his own stunts. People are psyched for this visceral element to Top Gun: Maverick, and sells it to people who may not be old enough to have seen Top Gun, but know him from the Mission films.”

The best-performing “legacy sequels” appear to be the ones that combine both elements of past and present: a toehold in the original, via familiar actors and narratives, alongside fresher, more up-to-date characters and cast. Mitchell cites impressive results for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, released in 2008, 19 years after the previous one, as a turning point – “there were a lot of people speculating at the time whether it would work, and whether anyone cared any more about Harrison Ford” – with the subsequent success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Jurassic World in 2015 cementing the trend. “Both were billion-dollar global mega hits, and both showed there was more ground to walk in these franchises – especially, in the case of the Force Awakens, if you could get the original cast back in.”

Mitchell adds: “This was some something that the Ghostbusters franchise learned. Unfortunately a lot of the reaction to the 2016 parallel universe was nasty and misogynist, but there was a lot of genuine reaction from fans who asked: how can you do Ghostbusters without the originals involved at all?”

Although many of these legacy sequels are based on already popular franchises with a mass fanbase, it is not always the case. The pop-culture dial can work in unlikely ways and benefit from long-term viral interest. The 2010 hit Tron: Legacy was a sequel to the virtual reality thriller Tron from 1982, a film that acquired a fervent cult following over the years but had only modest box office success – a far cry from Top Gun or Star Wars. Mitchell says that Tron: Legacy’s solid showing demonstrated that “studios could exploit different things in their catalogue”. Hence the arrival of films such as Blade Runner 2049 in 2017, and Bill & Ted Face the Music, released in 2020 – both of which derive from much-admired but commercially modest predecessors.

Avatar, on the other hand, appears to have a different path to release. As Gaydos says: “Avatar 2 has been in the works since Avatar.” In the wake of the film’s box office success, becoming the highest grossing film of all time, director James Cameron announced a series of sequels, which have continually been in active development since. Gaydos says: “You might think this dedication to the characters and world building is enigmatic and eccentric – if you can call someone so successful that – but Cameron has been making the Avatar sequels since he made Avatar. They are just taking forever to come out.”