How Mission: Impossible 7’s Shutdown Was Actually Good News For Top Gun: Maverick

Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick
(Image credit: (Paramount))

One of the first Hollywood productions to shut down back in March was Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible 7 back when Italy was a major focal point for the current health crisis. As Ethan Hunt starts gearing up to get back to mission accepting later this year, Top Gun: Maverick’s composer Han Zimmer has pointed out a positive aspect of the movie’s delay. In his words:

I used to have a sitting room, a living room, but I built a studio [at home]. I was working in London until things got really bad, then I came back here, around the beginning of March. I was working on Top Gun: Maverick there. Tom Cruise and that whole team was supposed to start Mission: Impossible 7, but they couldn’t start their movie, so they all came back, and we started playing around on Top Gun a bit more. In fact, I’m doing something on it today.

According to the Oscar-winning Lion King composer, the shutdown of Mission: Impossible 7 has actually allowed for some additional attention to be put toward Top Gun: Maverick’s finished product. Christopher McQuarrie is also the co-writer on the sequel and Tom Cruise is a producer to the sequel to the ‘80s classic – it must help Hans Zimmer to have them around Los Angeles to consult them on the music instead of everyone having to juggle two major productions at once.

These days, so many big-budget movies are constantly running on an impossible deadline to meet before they hit theaters. If there’s a glass-half-full approach to this situation in terms of the movie industry, a ton of filmmakers have had extra time to look at their work and polish it, including with Hans Zimmer’s upcoming work. The composer has a lot on his plate right now, not only working on Top Gun, but Denis Villeneuve’s Dune as well. As Zimmer also told Variety, he’s currently doing “all these experiments” and being “obnoxious” while working on the score for the sci-fi adaptation.

Top Gun: Maverick was originally going to hit theaters this weekend on June 26, but has since been shifted back all the way to December. It will now come out just a week after Dune, Coming 2 America and West Side Story if things hold. The film will pick up with Tom Cruise’s Maverick over 30 years after the original film and feature a ton of awesome practical effects and technological advancements the original didn’t have going for it.

Val Kilmer is back to play Iceman, Whiplash’s Miles Teller will play Goose’s son (Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw) and the rest of the cast includes Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris, Monica Barbaro, Charles Parnell, Danny Ramirez and Manny Jacinto.

Mission: Impossible 7 is eyeing a return to set in September ahead of its planned release date on November 19, 2021. Stay updated on what’s hitting theaters next with CinemaBlend’s 2020 release schedule.

Sarah El-Mahmoud
Staff Writer

Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. Now she's into covering YA television and movies, and plenty of horror. Word webslinger. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over.