Ryan Reynolds’ latest movie, Mayday, just dropped for those with an Apple TV subscription, and the Top Gun influence is unmistakable. It takes place in 1987 (one year after the release of the Tom Cruise classic), and it follows a hotshot U.S. Navy pilot on a big mission. And there’s even more than meets the eye regarding Mayday and Top Gun's similarities. When CinemaBlend spoke to Mayday’s writer/directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, they talked about the production process of filming those aerial scenes. While Ryan Reynolds didn’t go through the intense Top Gun bootcamp the cast of Maverick went through, one technical aspect was very close to the legacy sequel. Before the Mayday was even shot, they had a team shooting aerial footage in the South of France for a month before Reynolds got on set for a specific reason. As Daley put it: The reason why we shot all of that aerial footage ahead of time was then we had a volume stage in Montreal with a buck and a true F-18 cockpit that we were then shooting in front of real plates. And, it's sort of what they did on the Maverick movie, because on that I think they were also re-skinning a lot of the planes to look like they were in the front seat as opposed to the backseat. It was really fun to be able to sort of treat it as though, ‘Okay, let's try to keep the camera where the only realistic places it could actually be mounted. We didn't want like a video game camera, flying, because I think it just added to the sort of authenticity of it. I’m not surprised Mayday took a page out of Top Gun's playbook, because it was, of course, going to be compared to it no matter what way you sliced it. In the movie itself, Kenneth Branagh’s Nikolai Ustinov idolizes Top Gun and quotes the movie to Reynolds’ Navy pilot character, Troy Kelly, after he crash-lands in his neck of the woods – which also happens to be the Soviet wilderness. When a movie like Top Gun: Maverick does what it did in terms of immersiveness, of course Mayday had to opt for the realism it had. It didn’t by any means have the blockbuster budget of Maverick, but some of the same tech was there. As Goldstein added: And, we had actual two pilots as consultants who flew in the '70s and '80s and who are now in their 80s who were on set and advising us… It was amazing talking to these guys, and they were instrumental in making sure that everything that took place inside the plane was legitimate. If this BTS fact isn’t enough, I also learned from our sister site GamesRadar+ that they even got permission from Tom Cruise himself to use a clip from the original Top Gun. How cool is that? Daley and Goldstein penned Mayday while they were in post-production on their Dungeons & Dragons movie. As they told me, they thought the concept was a tough sell, but getting Reynolds on board helped them make it. Daley and Reynolds’ relationship goes way back to the early 2000s when they were in a movie called Waiting… together. They’ve stayed in contact for the past two decades and finally found the right project in Mayday You can check out the reviews for Mayday and stream the latest 2026 movie on Apple TV now.