At this point, it’s hard to claim that Top Gun: Maverick did a single thing wrong. The Top Gun sequel made a billion dollars at the global box office and was nominated for numerous awards. The casting decision as well as bringing in Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski were clearly all brilliant in retrospect. It’s nearly impossible to imagine how the film could have been any better, except it’s possible that maybe it could have been; the movie could have been directed not by Joseph Kosinski but by Ridley Scott, the brother of the late Tony Scott, who helmed the original Top Gun.
It’s not hard to imagine why the producers of Top Gun: Maverick would have asked Ridley Scott if he wanted to direct the sequel to his brother’s massive hit movie. It would have been fitting to keep things in the family as it were. Scott tells THR that he turned the job for the simple reason that Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t his kind of film because he and his brother had very different tastes. Ridley Scott explained…
No. They asked me to [direct] it and I said, ‘I don’t want to follow my brother.’ Tony was always interested in today. A lot of my stuff is either historic, fantasy or science fiction. Tony didn’t like fantasy — things like Alien or Blade Runner or Legend. By the way, few people saw Legend, but Tim Curry was fantastic in it.
It’s certainly true that Tony and Ridley Scott did not make a lot of the same sorts of movies. Of all of Tony Scott's great films, the only genre movie he directed was his first feature film, The Hunger, a vampire movie starring David Bowie. After that, while the plots of Tony Scott’s films could be fantastic, they were all set in a modern-day “real” world.
By comparison, while Ridley Scott did direct modern stories (including Thelma and Louise, for which he would get an Oscar nomination for Best Director), the majority of his films are more detached from reality. Ultimately, Ridley Scott decided that the reason he was offered the film, being Tony Scott’s brother, was precisely the reason he didn’t want to do it. Ridley reportedly dismissed the Top Gun sequel after he saw it, perhaps because he was being extra tough on a movie that followed his brother's work.
Scott gets bonus points for praising one of Tim Curry’s best performances, the fantasy movie Legend, a movie in which Ridley Scott directed Tom Cruise previously. It would have been quite cool to see the two reunite once again, and on a movie that had launched the careers of both Cruise and Tony Scott.
Whether Ridley Scott would have made the movie better, there’s no argument that the director who took the job, Joseph Kosinski, did an amazing job. Kosinski is reportedly involved in the now-in-development Top Gun 3, but maybe if there ends up being a reason he can’t do it, somebody else would be interested.
