Why This Acclaimed Director Hates ‘Top Gun Maverick’ So Much!

In 2022, Top Gun Maverick surpassed all expectations by becoming the second biggest box office hit of the year worldwide, following Avatar 2, with earnings of $1.5 billion. In France, this sequel to the iconic ’86 film starring Tom Cruise drew an impressive 6.6 million viewers, marking a resounding success.

Beloved by audiences and acclaimed by critics, the second installment of Top Gun managed to win over nearly everyone… except for Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me By Your Name featuring Timothée Chalamet.

Top Gun Maverick Miss?

During an event at the Il Foglio Innovation Festival earlier this week, the Italian filmmaker labeled Top Gun Maverick as a “very bad movie” before criticizing the current trend of nostalgia. According to him, Joseph Kosinski’s film failed to meet public expectations for a modern cinematic experience.

He also critiqued Disclosure Day, the new film by Steven Spielberg, which has been in theaters since June 10: “Disclosure Day is part of the nostalgia economy, which has been a fundamental theme of the last 20 years, right?”, he pointed out.

“The entire imagination is built, including politics, on nostalgia, thus on the way of reviving in us what we think we have lost in order to find it again,” analyzed the director of Challengers and After The Hunt.

I remember that during the filming of Challengers, I went to see Top Gun Maverick in a packed theater. It was a very bad movie.

Is Nostalgia a Curse?

“I remember that during the filming of Challengers, I went to see Top Gun Maverick in a packed theater. It was a very bad movie, but at the same time, it reprised, with today’s ideology, the forms of cinema from the past, those of the legendary Tony Scott film with Tom Cruise. The audience was screaming, throwing popcorn, and applauding; they were thrilled,” he shared.

Ultimately, according to Luca Guadagnino, “it was a sign of our times: the audience was thrilled because nostalgia seems to have become the only resource that all markets, whatever they are, manage to capture and monetize,” he lamented.

Following After The Hunt, the director will soon return with Artificial. This film will star Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman, retracing his controversial ousting and subsequent reinstatement as head of OpenAI in 2023. Ironically, he will act alongside Monica Barbaro, who was part of the cast of Top Gun Maverick.

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