Tom Cruise honored the late Val Kilmer with a moment of silence on the CinemaCon stage in Las Vegas, asking the crowd of exhibitors and press to take a moment to remember all the great film moments Kilmer gave audiences in his career and the “wonderful times we had with him.”
“I’d like to take a moment to honor a dear friend of mine, Val Kilmer,” Cruise said. “I really can’t tell you how much I admire his work, how much I thought of him as a human being and how grateful and honored I was when he joined ‘Top Gun’ and came back for ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’”
Kilmer died on Tuesday at age 65, dying of pneumonia after having previously struggled with throat cancer that made it incredibly difficult to speak. He had recovered enough to appear in 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Cruise, who took the stage during Paramount’s presentation at CinemaCon to promote “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” also told a lengthy story about his friend Christopher McQuarrie, who is nicknamed “McQ,” and the enormous influence he’s had on the “Mission” franchise dating all the way back to “Ghost Protocol” and coming up with the “Blue is glue, Red is dead” line. McQuarrie was honored with CinemaCon’s Director of the Year prize at CinemaCon. Cruise even clarified that McQuarrie is not in fact Jonathan Lipnicki, the boy Cruise shared the screen with in “Jerry Maguire,” despite the two of them and their glasses making them look strikingly alike.
Cruise also shouted out his friend Brad Pitt for his work with “Top Gun Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski on the upcoming “F1,” saying that Pitt is a great racer and the two of them previously raced go-karts while on the set of “Interview with a Vampire.”
Hollywood showered the late Kilmer with praise this week, remembering his work in films like “Batman Forever,” “The Doors,” “Tombstone,” “True Romance,” “Heat,” and many more classics. Among tributes from Josh Brolin, Matthew Modine, Michael Mann, and more, Francis Ford Coppola, who directed Kilmer in 2011 film “Twixt,” wrote, “Val Kilmer was the most talented actor when in his High School, and that talent only grew greater throughout his life. He was a wonderful person to work with and a joy to know — I will always remember him.”
