How Tony Scott and Tom Cruise built the ultimate kinetic double feature

For Tom Cruise fans, there has always been an irresistible feeling that Days of Thunder was never just a NASCAR movie. It felt like Top Gun with four wheels. And the more you revisit both films today, the harder it becomes to ignore that they are almost spiritual twins. One simply traded fighter jets for stock cars.

Released just four years apart, Top Gun (1986) and Days of Thunder (1990) were both produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, directed by Tony Scott, scored by Hans Zimmer in the latter and Harold Faltermeyer in the former, and powered by the same hyper-stylized filmmaking language that defined blockbuster cinema of the 1980s.