Quentin Tarantino loved Top Gun: Maverick, obviously

Everyone likes movies, but only a select few really love the movies—not sitting on your couch and picking something random on Netflix, but finding your preferred seat in a proper theater with a big soda and not getting up from your seat until you see the IATSE logo in the credits or you feel like you’re going to die if you don’t go to the bathroom as soon as possible. You know, the movies. Where we go to laugh, to cry, to care, and where, somehow, heartbreak feels good.

Of the people who love the movies, few have made it as much of their identity as Quentin Tarantino, so it’s hardly surprising that Quentin Tarantino has broken from a self-imposed restriction against critiquing current films to talk about how much he loves Top Gun: Maverick—a the movies-ass movie if there ever was one. Speaking with Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avery on the ReelBlend podcast (via The Hollywood Reporter), Tarantino acknowledged that he doesn’t like talking about modern movies because he either has to love it or it’ll be perceived as him “slamming someone,” but even he had to admit, “I fucking love Top Gun: Maverick.”

Tarantino says Maverick and the new West Side Story were a kind of “true cinematic spectacle” that he didn’t think anyone was making anymore for one thing, but beyond that he appreciated just how much Maverick felt like Tony Scott’s original film, saying that this is “as close as we’re ever going to get to seeing one more Tony Scott movie.” (Scott died in 2012, which set the development of Maverick back by a decade.)

Maverick director Joseph Kosinski did a “great job,” according to Tarantino, and the “respect and the love” for Scott was in “every frame” and “almost in every decision” made in the film. Tarantino also says that he asked Tom Cruise before Maverick came out about how they could possibly make a new Top Gun movie without Scott, with Cruise telling him “I know, that’s why I said no all these years—for that exact reason. We figured out a way.”

Top Gun: Maverick, in addition to just being a good-ass movie that feels a lot like a movie that everybody loved in the ‘80s, was also fully intended to be something you’re expected to see in a theater. Cruise refused to let it go streaming, despite its many COVID release delays, and he also said back in May that he’s not going to start making any other movies for streaming, either. “I make movies for the big screen,” he noted at the time, later adding, “cinema is my love. It’s my passion.” So a guy who loves the movies made a movie for people who love the movies, and a guy who famously loves the movies loved it. Sometimes things just work out.