The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected a copyright lawsuit claiming that Top Gun: Maverick infringed on a 1983 magazine article that inspired the original Top Gun film.

The court, based in Pasadena, upheld a lower court’s dismissal on January 2, 2026, ruling that the 2022 sequel did not substantially copy protected elements of “Top Guns,” an article by journalist Ehud Yonay that profiled the U.S. Navy’s elite fighter pilot training programme in San Diego.

Yonay sold Paramount Pictures the rights to his article in 1983, and the original 1986 Top Gun credited him. He died in 2012. In 2020, his widow, Shosh Yonay, and son, Yuval Yonay, terminated the licence and later sued Paramount, seeking a share of profits from the sequel, which has earned about US$1.5 billion globally.

The Yonays argued that Top Gun: Maverick borrowed plot points, character traits and themes from the article. But the three-judge panel said those similarities were either too general to be protected or not present in the film. “Their claim of substantial similarity fails because what is protected is not similar, and what is similar is not protected,” Circuit Judge Eric Miller wrote, according to Reuters.

The panel said the sequel contained many significant plot elements not in the article, including a romantic subplot and Cruise’s character, Navy Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, returning to train younger pilots. It also said the Yonays described both works at “such a high level of abstraction” that the alleged similarities were not protectable.

The court also found Paramount had no obligation to credit Yonay in the sequel because the original agreement did not cover future films.

Paramount welcomed the decision, calling the claims “without merit.”

The ruling does not affect a separate lawsuit in New York, where screenwriter Shaun Gray alleges he contributed scenes to the sequel without credit. That case is scheduled for trial in March.

Top Gun: Maverick, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Joseph Kosinski, was released in May 2022 and became Cruise’s highest-grossing film, praised for its aerial sequences and nostalgic tone.

- Cathy Li