Top Gun: Maverick is poised to continue its epic box office run this weekend; with no major competition at US multiplexes, it’ll soon zoom past the $250m mark in domestic grosses alone, with $400m or more still well within its sights. It could wind up the highest-grossing movie of the year, at least until Avatar 2 drops. If you read the analysis of certain right-leaning pundits, Top Gun: Maverick’s triumph is their triumph, and a rebuke of “woke culture” – by which is meant, movies and TV shows that do not exclusively feature white men in their leading roles.
It is indeed true that Top Gun: Maverick does not go out of its way to celebrate inclusion and diversity in the sometimes-cloying, corporate way most closely associated with various Disney properties. (If there’s no “first gay character in Top Gun” that we know of, that’s OK; Disney will continue assigning similar designations to minor and/or desexualized characters for years to come!) It stars Tom Cruise, reprising his role as white man extraordinaire Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, fighter-pilot hero of the first Top Gun, training a new generation of recruits for a suspiciously Star Wars-like mission behind unspecified enemy lines. Many, though not all, of the trainees who get the most screen time are also white men.
