Top Gun: Maverick was so good it killed China’s attempt to make a copy

The bad guys in Top Gun: Maverick may have been explicitly vague other people from some other place with some other ideology in an attempt to make sure the movie would still play in countries that Hollywood has… historically offended. That mostly worked out, with the movie making a ton of money internationally, but it never did get a release in China for a few reasons. One of those reasons was the existence of Born To Fly, a movie that was supposed to come out in the country earlier this year and was pretty clearly designed to be China’s answer to Maverick—with all of the rah rah military propaganda that implies.

But there was a problem: Maverick was really goddamn good, and Born To Fly, apparently, was not. That’s according to a The Hollywood Reporter piece about China’s decision to quietly Zaslav the movie (Batgirl Zaslav, not HBO Max Zaslav, since the movie never came out) shortly before release in September, with the only official word about the cancellation being that the producers wanted to “present better production effects” and were delaying the release because of it.

Born To Fly was directed by Liu Xiaoshi (who used to make promotional videos for the Chinese military) and starred Chinese pop star Wang Yibo and was expected to make a big splash at the Chinese box office, but (supposedly) the producers realized that the stunts and effects in Born To Fly were so much worse than in Maverick that they “risked ridicule in comparison.” Some people are also saying it lacked the “spectacle” of other DC Comics movies and… oh, wait, that was Zaslav and Batgirl again.

On top of the ptoential for ridicule, members of the Chinese military were also “disappointed” that the movie did a bad job of hyping up their hot new J-20 stealth fighter—which the movie apparently refers to as a “fourth-generation” jet and not a “fifth-generation” jet. It’s like if Top Gun: Maverick made a big deal about how great Tim Cruise is, and then it didn’t even make Tim Cruise look very cool.

So, rather than risk any sort of embarrassment, the movie was canned. THR notes that “a source in Beijing close to the project” said that “no one knows” if the movie will ever come out now and that a new release date could either come “anytime” or “never come at all.”