Why America Loves Top Gun: Maverick — And Clay Does Too

CLAY: Buck, while you were down in Bermuda, I was getting kicked out of Little League games and going to go see Top Gun: Maverick. I took all three boys on Friday afternoon. Top Gun: Maverick has now become the biggest, most successful, most lucrative Memorial Day movie launch ever. It is also the most successful Tom Cruise movie launch ever, and Tom Cruise obviously has been making movies for basically 40 years now, and it’s as good as everybody says it is, Buck. I don’t know what percentage of our audience went to see it or will see it in the near future.

I would bet almost a hundred percent, at least if you still go out to movie theaters at all. It’s so good. All three of my kids loved it. I took my 7, my 11, and my 14-year-old with me. We watched it in the IMAX theater here in our town, and it was so fantastic. All three boys gave it… Well, two of the boys gave it a 10. My youngest gave it a 9, ’cause he said he had trouble figuring out which pilot was which airplane. He wasn’t fast enough. You could read the call —

BUCK: Call signs.

CLAY: — yeah, on the helmets. He’s just a relatively young reader as a first grader so he was like, “I sometimes got confused as to which pilot was which one.” But the other three gave it a 10, he gave it a 9, everybody loved it. People were clapping. It was completely not woke. No political agenda other than, “Hey, the United States is awesome,” which I think there’s a desperate demand for. And it’s a good two hours to go take your family, if you’re looking for something fun to do.

BUCK: That’s great. I already have… Carrie and I are going on Friday. We’re gonna go one of the big theaters here in New York City to go check it out. We’re excited about it. I’ve heard from, as you know, her father is a retired Top Gun naval aviator instructor.

CLAY: You told us that he watched an early version of this and said it was great, like two months ago or something.

BUCK: Well, for a Top Gun instructor to tell you that the flying they do is really next level, that’s really saying something. He says they did not CGI it. They were actually up in those planes. I saw a stat, I think was on Fox this morning, that to fly the F-18s they were spending $11,000, I think they said, an hour, which is actually a little less than I thought it would be. But the Navy had to be reimbursed for the costs. They really were flying those planes is the point. It’s actual flying that you’re seeing. They go very close to the hard top, very low-flying planes.

CLAY: Fifty feet, in some places, from the ground.

BUCK: You blink and you’re in the dirt from what I hear. Again, I’m not a pilot but this is what he said. So that part I think is exciting. But it also speaks to I think, Clay, the broader trend that you’ve identified, we can all feel. Netflix has just gotten annihilated as a stock. By the way, I’m no longer a Disney+ subscriber, no longer a Hulu subscriber, about to cancel Netflix, by the way, ’cause the F1 show is over.

CLAY: You’re not gonna watch Stranger Things season 4?

BUCK: I couldn’t even get through the last season. I loved the first season. I even liked the second season. But the third season was like, “I don’t really see what’s going on here.” So I’m not a huge Stranger Things fan. I gotta keep Amazon Prime ’cause I got my Yellowstone I gotta get through, Clay, ’cause you got me on to that one. By the way, about 150 pages into Undaunted Courage.

CLAY: It’s good, huh?

BUCK: I’m now double timing it with that and the Keegan history of the First World War. It is very good, and I agree with your sentiment — this is what made me think of it — that it would be an excellent series. You could make this into a fantastic series. I think more than a movie.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: You need to do a series with it.

CLAY: It has to be like a multiyear series.

BUCK: It should be. If Netflix was serious about making great entertainment that people would love that would make them subscribe — or Amazon Prime or any of these companies that have so much money to do this stuff — they’d make a Lewis and Clark series and make it really good and really show us what the story is.

CLAY: I think it would be the biggest hit of any streaming ever. Like, I think that’s how popular it could be.

BUCK: People want to see stories that are inspiring, cool heroes, good guys, bad guys, and, yeah, in this country, want to see stuff that at least makes us generally feel good about America and being Americans and everything else. It is for entertainment purposes, right? I just feel like everything has turned into an opportunity for a political lecture in entertainment these days, and it’s tiresome. Enough people view it as tiresome that I hope the marketplace is gonna start to take it in a different direction now.

CLAY: Truly just a marketplace decision. If everybody else is making shows and movies and they just constantly are selling the idea that America sucks, our history is indefensibly bad, and you just pivot and say, “You know what? I want to make an ‘America is awesome’ movie or an ‘America is awesome’ television show,” there’s a desperate demand for it right now. I just… I feel it. I can pick up on it. Even Memorial Day, I’m sorry, a lot of us felt it. I felt like there’s almost more flags out than I’m used to in the past. Like, so many people want to be aggressively pro-America and patriotic and aren’t being served by the marketplace.

BUCK: I’m gonna go see it on Friday and give you my review. This book recommendation thing, Clay, we’re gonna put on ClayAndBuck.com. It’s gotta go both ways here, buddy. So, I got some in mind for you. The Shackleton voyage, Endurance.

CLAY: I would love to read that. I’m, in fact, jotting that down. You talked about that before.

BUCK: It is a crazy story about the voyage of Ernest Shackleton down in Antarctica. I highly, highly recommend it to anybody who hasn’t seen that.

CLAY: I’m buying it today. I just jotted that down. Endurance. I’m gonna buy it today. I’ll start reading it when it gets here.

BUCK: Clay and Buck books. ‘Cause I can say Clay’s rec on Undaunted Courage is fantastic.