The long-awaited Top Gun sequel, Top Gun: Maverick was worth the wait, flying by box office records and becoming one of the biggest movies of the year. Maverick sat on the shelves while the pandemic raged on, and star Tom Cruise held out for an eventual theatrical return, something that paid off immensely.

　　Recently participating in Variety's ongoing Actors on Actors series, actors Kate Hudson and Maverick co-star Glen Powell focused partly on each other's most recent projects during the discussion, (Korean War drama Devotion and Glass Onion respectively) but mostly talked about Cruise and his methods.

　　"It took a year-plus to actually shoot the movie," Powell said of Top Gun: Maverick, in which he played Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin. "Tom's a perfectionist, and so he was like, 'we got to get it right.' And I saw the movie, and then COVID happened, and I was like, 'oh, man, we're sitting on this awesome thing.'"

　　And how awesome it was. Maverick was released back in May and was bombarded with acclaim with many critics calling it better than the original. It won Best Film from the National Board of Review and was also named one of the top ten films of 2022 by the American Film Institute. The film also received numerous accolades, including a recent Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture - Drama. Maverick also became the highest-grossing film of 2022, the second film released since the COVID-19 pandemic to gross $1 billion, and the highest-grossing film of Cruise's career ever.

　　"In true Tom Cruise form, the perfectionist that he is, he always wins," Hudson added. "I was in New York and I went to Union Square to see it on the big screen with an audience. It was like, 'thank God. These are the movies we need in the movie theater.'"

　　Top Gun: Maverick will hit streaming on December 22, as it premieres exclusively on Paramount+.