Tom Cruise Celebration Set for Cannes Film Festival

Tom Cruise Celebration and ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Scheduled for Premiere at this Year’s Cannes

The movie will premiere on the Croisette on May 18th, ahead of its May 27th US release.

Tom Cruise plays Capt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in 'Top Gun: Maverick' from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films.

This year’s 75th Cannes Film Festival is preparing to feel the need. The need… For speed. Well, also still queuing, but with a planned Tom Cruise celebration scheduled alongside a premiere for his latest movie, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’.

According to Deadline, the plan to stage a celebration has been in the works for a while, with festival head Thierry Frémaux eager to get the actor and his new movie to appear. ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ will premiere as an Official Screening Selection on May 18, preceded by a tribute to the actor. He’ll sit down to discuss his long career with journalist Didier Allouch.

And the day has significance to Cruise – it marks 30 years to the day since he attended the closing ceremony of the 45th edition of Cannes for Ron Howard’s ‘Far and Away’.

Our biggest question at this point will be how the famously stunt-loving actor will choose to appear on the Croisette – while there’s every chance he’ll simply show up in a limo, wouldn’t it be more impactful if he lands a Harrier Jump Jet aircraft on front of an applauding crowd? Dangerous, schmangerous. He lives for this stuff.

Cannes will mark the launch of a typically packed (pandemic permitting, of course) tour schedule for the actor to promote the movie – known for his lengthy worldwide charm offensives to back his work, Cruise had been one of those pushing to delay the sequel so that he can jet off around the globe. Once that is complete, he still must finish up work on the eighth installment of the ‘Mission: Impossible’ franchise.

Tom Cruise plays Capt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in 'Top Gun: Maverick' from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films.

Cannes itself will run between May 18th and May 28th and will, as usual, feature a selection of movies from around the world.

A sequel to the 1986 action classic, ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ features the return of Cruise’s hotshot flyer Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. Despite clocking up a few more years to go with all the miles he’s flown, Maverick is still taking to the sky as a test pilot, determined not to let his superiors promote – and therefore ground – him.

Yet he’s still forced to confront his past when he’s put in charge of training a group of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission. Among them is Lt. Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick's late best friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards, in the original film).

Joseph Kosinski – who worked with Cruise on ‘Oblivion’ – directs the new movie, which also features Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Ed Harris and Monica Barbaro, with fellow ‘Top Gun’ veteran Val Kilmer also returning as Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, who these days is a four-star Admiral (and still probably considers Maverick a danger).

After that series of release date changes and delays, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ will be wheels down in US theaters from May 27th.