More than a quarter century since “Top Gun” first flew into theaters, eventually grossing more than $350 million worldwide, Maverick, Goose and Iceman are riding back into the danger zone. Tony Scott’s classic 1986 dogfighting actioner will play exclusively in IMAX 3-D for a six-day run prior to its release on Blu-ray.
As the charismatic fighter pilots at the center of the drama set in an elite Navy flight school, Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards may have felt the need for speed, but Legend3D, the digital media technology company that converted the movie to stereo, didn’t. At a presentation late Friday night, Barry Sandrew, the founder, chief creative officer and CTO of the firm, said his team started working on the conversion in August 2011, finishing a full year later on Aug. 9, 2012.
“We worked with Paramount so that we wouldn’t have a release date,” he said. “We didn’t want a release date. We wanted to take our time and actually do this right.”
Doing it right meant spending “an inordinate amount of time” on preproduction, studying the film and creating a “depth score.” Just as a music score augments the action on-screen, “3-D is supposed to enhance the film,” Sandrew said. “It’s supposed to go with the beat of the film, but it’s not supposed to be the film, and we were very careful in making sure that that wasn’t going to happen. We wanted to make it as natural as possible.”
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