A United States federal appeals court ruled on Friday that Top Gun: Maverick, the 2022 blockbuster starring Tom Cruise, did not violate the copyright of a magazine article that inspired the original 1986 Top Gun film.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California, held that Paramount Pictures’ Maverick was not substantially similar to Top Guns, a 1983 article by Ehud Yonay about the U.S. Navy’s elite Top Gun fighter pilot training program in San Diego.
Yonay had granted Paramount the rights to his article for the original Top Gun film and received a screen credit for it.
However, his widow, Shosh Yonay, and son, Yuval Yonay, heirs to his copyright, terminated the license in 2020 and argued they were entitled to a share of the profits from Maverick.
The sequel earned about $1.5 billion worldwide, making it the 14th highest-grossing film of all time, according to Box Office Mojo, and the biggest box-office success of Tom Cruise’s career.
The three-judge appeals panel said Maverick included numerous key plot elements absent from Top Guns, such as a romantic storyline and the return of Tom Cruise’s character, Navy Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, to train a new generation of pilots.
The court also noted that the Yonays compared the two works at an overly high level of abstraction, concluding that the claimed similarities were not protected under copyright law.
“Their claim of substantial similarity fails because what is protected is not similar, and what is similar is not protected,” Circuit Judge Eric Miller wrote.
The panel also ruled that Paramount was not obligated to credit Ehud Yonay in Maverick, as his 1983 agreement did not apply to the sequel.
The decision on Friday affirmed an April 2024 dismissal of the case by U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson in Los Angeles.
Separately, Paramount is facing a lawsuit in New York from screenwriter Shaun Gray, who claims he wrote several scenes used in Maverick and is seeking a share of the film’s profits. Jury selection in that case is set for March 9.
