Top Gun for real

Practical effects took priority in Top Gun: Maverick, and so Tom Cruise and the rest of the Top Gun team went through lots of training before taking to the skies.

Cruise had the cast undergo a three-month aviation boot camp and flew in real Navy jets to capture the action, with the in-cockpit footage seen in the finished movie being all real.

Cruise later said: “We worked with the Navy. The aviation sequences had to be real.”