OBLIVION 
TOP GUN: MAVERICK 
SPIDERHEAD 
Joseph Kosinski’s first meeting with Tom Cruise about directing a sequel to the 1986 blockbuster “Top Gun” was in 2017. Five years later, “Top Gun: Maverick” finally opened, after the pandemic led Paramount to delay its 2020 release until May of this year, when it could play to a global theatrical audience — and did it ever, earning nearly $1.5 billion worldwide.By contrast, “Glass Onion,” writer-director Rian Johnson’s sequel to 2019’s “Knives Out,” came together quickly after Netflix snapped up the rights...
Joseph
Kosinski
With “Top Gun: Maverick,” Kosinski not only pulled off the rare feat of crafting a sequel widely regarded to be better than the first installment (1986’s “Top Gun”), but he restored Tom Cruise — with whom he previously collaborated on 2013’s “Oblivion” — to the top of the box-office heap, giving the star his first film to break the billion-dollar mark and Paramount its biggest hit in 25 years. But the year wasn’t a nonstop victory lap for the filmmaker. The brouhaha surrounding “Top Gun,” which had its released delayed two years due to the pandemic, overshadowed Kosinski’s latest directorial effort, Netflix’s “Spiderhead,” a sci-fi thriller starring Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller, about a luxurious prison where inmates are guinea pigs for emotion-manipulating drugs, which debuted in June 2022 to largely negative reviews.
