Taiwanese flag goes missing from Maverick’s jacket in new Top Gun movie that has Chinese co-producers
- Twitter users spotted the flags’ removal in a new trailer released this Friday
- Jacket belonging to Tom Cruise’s character had Japanese and Taiwanese flags
- Chinese film distributor Tencent Pictures played a part in making the movie
Eagle-eyed viewers of the Top Gun remake trailer spotted that the Japanese and Taiwanese flags have been removed from the main character’s jacket.
The first trailer for the long-awaited sequel dropped on Friday this week to great excitement among fans of the original 1986 movie.
But soon afterwards fans noticed that the patches on the iconic leather jacket worn by star Tom Cruise no longer have the flags of Taiwan or Japan.
A shot from the original movie show’s Tom Cruise’s character wearing a jacket emblazoned with both flags
Twitter users speculated that the reason for the change was that the film was partly produced by Tencent Pictures, a Chinese film distributor and production company.
Mark MacKinnon tweeted: ‘There’s a new Top Gun movie coming out. And Maverick is wearing the same leather jacket — only this time it’s Communist Party of China-approved, so the Japanese and Taiwanese flag patches are gone.’
Tencent has previously been involved in the production of films like ‘Wonder Woman,’ ‘Kong: Skull Island,’ ‘Venom’ and the upcoming ‘Terminator: Dark Fate.’
But a former Navy Pilot tweeted that people should ‘seek no meaning’ into the patch change.
‘The patch assortment on flight suits and jackets in the Top Gun franchise has always been a running joke (among running jokes) for those in the #NavyAir business,’ Ward Carroll a former pilot of F-14 Tomcats tweeted.
In the new trailer released on Friday this week the patches appear to have been altered to remove the flags
‘They are random in where they are placed and commands they represent. Seek no meaning because there is none.’
China has a difficult diplomatic relationship with both Japan and Taiwan.
Although Taiwan is technically self-governed, China views it as a ‘renegade province’.
Beijing has invested heavily in films in recent years, and has sought to alter the portrayal of China in movies for the US market.
In 2010, after a script was leaked for a remake of the Cold War film ‘Red Dawn’ featuring China instead of the Soviet Union as invaders of the continental U.S., Chinese state-run media railed against attempts to ‘demonize’ Beijing.
In the end, MGM spent some $1 million digitally erasing evidence of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, frame by frame, and substituting in North Koreans and Russians in their place.
Eagle-eyed Twitter users noticed the change and blamed China’s government for imposing politics on the film