Not his kind of movie
Luca Guadagnino was blunt at a Venice event: Top Gun: Maverick didn’t win him over. He saw it while juggling his own project and left with a shrug rather than a standing ovation. Meanwhile, the crowd in the theater was losing their minds — which annoyed him even more.
The fast and the sentimental
Quick recap: the 2022 sequel brings back Pete “Maverick” Mitchell as an instructor tasked with training a new batch of pilots for a near-impossible mission. It’s equal parts high-octane dogfights and personal baggage — especially with Bradley Bradshaw, Goose’s grown-up son, in the mix.
Critic love vs. the lone naysayer
Despite Guadagnino’s cold take, the movie was a massive hit with most reviewers and viewers. On aggregate sites it scored overwhelmingly positive marks from critics and nearly unanimous praise from the public — the kind of numbers that mean popcorn counters chime like slot machines.
Nostalgia: the invisible co-pilot
Guadagnino pinned the audience frenzy on nostalgia. In his view, the modern film market runs on sentimental callbacks and familiar comfort food — and audiences lap it up. It’s not just a trend, he argues; it’s a feature of how studios sell movies now.
It’s not just Top Gun — Spielberg’s on board too
He even suggested that other big names are tapping the same vein. Guadagnino pointed to the latest Spielberg release as another example of filmmakers leaning into that nostalgic current. That Spielberg film recently opened in France, which Guadagnino sees as more proof the feeling is widespread.
Sequel news and Guadagnino’s own plans
Paramount has already greenlit another Top Gun entry, so the franchise will keep cruising the nostalgia highway. As for Guadagnino, he’s moving on from a recent project that didn’t land with audiences and is now developing a new film about the high-profile 2023 events around Sam Altman and OpenAI. No release date yet — but it sounds like a tonal U-turn from jet fighters to Silicon Valley drama.
Bottom line
One director’s disdain didn’t dent Top Gun: Maverick’s popularity, and that clash says as much about audience appetite as it does about taste. Whether you side with the cinematic contrarian or the crowd cheering in the theater, the takeaway is clear: nostalgia sells, and it’s not going away anytime soon.