The US Navy lent Tom Cruise F/A-18 Super Hornets for the new Top Gun movie. The only catches: the studio paid as much as $11,374 (about R178,000) an hour to use the advanced fighter planes — and Cruise couldn’t touch the controls.

The Mission Impossible star, famous for performing his own stunts, insisted that all the actors portraying pilots on the long-delayed Top Gun: Maverick film fly in one of the fighter jets built by Boeing so they could understand what it feels like to be a pilot operating under the strain of immense gravitational forces. Cruise, 59, had also flown in a jet for the original Top Gun, a smash hit in 1986...