Following the release of a teaser trailer for Top Gun: Maverick, some eagle-eyed fans spotted a slight difference between the jacket worn by actor Tom Cruise in the upcoming sequel and that from the 1986 action film about renegade Navy pilots.
The trailer, which premiered at the 2019 ComicCon convention, shows the flight jacket worn by Cruise’s character, “Maverick,” has a different arrangement of patches than it did 33 years ago. The new jacket no longer bears the Taiwanese and Japanese flags that were part of Maverick’s “Far East Cruise.”
As China has recently taken over as the number one consumer of American-made movies and that revenue has become invaluable to Hollywood studios, rumors buzzed on Friday that the patches had been removed to placate a Chinese audience that might be uncomfortable with the visual of rival nations Japan and Taiwan.
The Top Gun reboot, which stars a 57-year-old Tom Cruise, is scheduled to hit theaters in 2020.
There’s a new Top Gun movie coming out. And Maverick is wearing the same leather jacket – only this time it’s Communist Party of China-approved, so the Japanese and Taiwanese flag patches are gone (screenshot on right is from the new trailer)… pic.twitter.com/gUxFNFNUKX
— Mark MacKinnon (@markmackinnon) July 19, 2019
