Top Gun: Maverick Review: The Sequel That Out-Flew Everyone

Top Gun: Maverick is the rare blockbuster sequel that beat its predecessor on every measure that counts. Joseph Kosinski's 2022 film sends Pete Maverick Mitchell (Tom Cruise) back to the flight line to train a detachment of graduates for a mission no living pilot has flown, against a script that spends its runtime on duty, guilt, and the man Maverick refused to become. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 96% from 476 critics with a 99% audience score from more than 50,000 ratings and an A+ CinemaScore, IMDb users rate it 8.2/10 from roughly 900,000 votes, and it grossed $1.49 billion worldwide to become the biggest film of Tom Cruise's career, checked October 24, 2026. It won the Academy Award for Best Sound and was nominated for Best Picture.

Spoiler-free verdict: The best action film of its decade and the rare sequel worth more than the original. Real flight footage, a lean script, and Cruise operating at peak commitment. Unreservedly worth watching.

What Top Gun: Maverick is about

Thirty-plus years after the 1986 original, Maverick is a test pilot dodging the promotion that would ground him, recalled to Top Gun to train twelve graduates for an attack run that has almost no chance of coming home. The mission binds him to the dead he left behind: Miles Teller's Rooster, the son of his co-pilot Goose, whose career Maverick quietly sabotaged out of fear. Jon Hamm's Cocky Pentagon adversary wants him out; Jennifer Connelly's Penny Benjamin is the local anchor he never stayed for; Val Kilmer's Iceman, in the film's single most affecting scene, is the friend holding the whole thing together.

The training structure gives the film its spine: each exercise fails until Maverick stops teaching rules and starts teaching instinct.

Cast and performances

Cruise is the engine, and the film knows it: he flew the jets for real, and the camera's proximity to his face in the cockpit is the performance. Teller carries the generational grief without overplaying it, Kilmer's wordless return earns the film's biggest emotional reaction, and Glen Powell's Hangman plays the brat who turns out to be right at the exactly correct volume. Connelly grounds the home front in one small role that never becomes a subplot tax. The ensemble serves the machinery, which is the point.

What works

The flight sequences are the greatest aerial action ever staged, for one simple reason: the footage is real. Kosinski had pilots train to military specifications for the actual shots, and the result reads at the visceral level no green screen reaches. The Hollywood Reporter's coverage during the run described the phenomenon precisely: critics blessed it at 96%, audiences gave it the rare A+, and word of mouth carried it past $900 million before anyone finished counting. The structure is efficient to a fault, the dialogue lands, and the film's treatment of Maverick as a man who was right to fly and wrong to leave makes the nostalgia land without leaning on it. RT named it the best-reviewed film of 2022.

What doesn't

The human beats outside the cockpit are conventional: the bar duet, the late romance, the authority figure who exists to say no. A contrarian minority made the case that the film doesn't deserve its 96% because the story is thin beneath the spectacle, and the criticism is not wrong so much as beside the point: the story is a delivery system for the flying, and it delivers it without wasting time. It is also unapologetically patriotic in a way that reads differently depending on where you sit.

What audiences say

This is where Maverick becomes a phenomenon. The 99% audience score on RT from more than 50,000 ratings, the A+ CinemaScore, and IMDb's 8.2/10 from roughly 900,000 votes, checked October 24, 2026, make it one of the best-graded wide releases of the century across every platform that measures it. TMDB has it at 8.2 from 11,771 votes. The box office agreed: $718 million domestic, $1.49 billion worldwide, and a run that rewrote what a legacy sequel could do without a cinematic universe attached.

Where to watch Top Gun: Maverick

In the US, Maverick streams on Netflix and Paramount Plus (Premium and Essential), plus the Paramount+ Amazon Channel, YouTube TV, the Paramount+ Roku Premium Channel, and Netflix Standard with Ads, with buy and rent on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, Google Play Movies, YouTube, and Fandango At Home. Checked on October 24, 2026. The full profile is at Top Gun: Maverick streaming options and member reviews. For Cruise's other peak of practical stunt work, see Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, and for military tension without the altitude, 13 Hours.

Verdict

Is Top Gun: Maverick worth watching? Without reservation. It is a properly built motion picture: the flying is real, the story is exactly as big as it needs to be, and the ending pays off a debt the original film left open for 36 years. The critics, the audiences, the Oscars, and the box office all reached the same verdict. So should you.

Rating: 8.6/10 (IMDb 8.2/10, Rotten Tomatoes 96%, TMDB 8.2/10; evidence-weighted, checked October 24, 2026)