‘Top Gun’ Experience Landing in Las Vegas

  • A ‘Top Gun’ experience will be built at the Strat casino hotel
  • It is expected to open in the summer of 2028
  • It will feature fighter jet simulators and a recreation of the bar from “Top Gun: Maverick”

Las Vegas will launch an attraction based on the “Top Gun” movie franchise. “Top Gun Las Vegas,” a working title, will be constructed on an undeveloped site at the Strat. The scheduled opening date is summer 2028.

The press release announcing “Top Gun Las Vegas” neglected to include any renderings of what it might look like. So we had AI render a photo of Tom Cruise taking off in a fighter jet from the Strat. (Image: GROK)

The attraction was announced Friday morning in a joint press release from Paramount Global, which owns the rights to the Tom Cruise-piloted movies, and venue development and management company Advent Allen Entertainment.

“We’re proud to unite with Paramount to bring this timeless, action-packed epic to life,” said Mark Advent, co-founder of Advent Allen Entertainment and creator of the New York New York Hotel & Casino. “We are pulling out all the stops and looking forward to bringing Top Gun to even higher heights on the Strip and beyond!”

The self-gushing press release was painfully long on hyperbole and short on specifics, describing its “Top Gun” attraction as “a revolutionary fusion of daring rides and cinematic storytelling” but providing almost no details.

One of the details is that fighter jet simulators will comprise at least some of those rides, and that the attraction will also include a restaurant and a reimagined Hard Deck Bar (from “Top Gun: Maverick”) that will feature live piano singalongs.

This is the latest example of Las Vegas de-emphasizing gaming in favor of the entertainment experiences reportedly preferred by Millennials and Gen-Zers.

Incidentally, the Strat, owned by Golden Entertainment, claims it is located on the Las Vegas Strip, but its location is one long block north of Sahara Boulevard, where the Clark County-governed Strip ends and the city of Las Vegas begins.

Corey Levitan joined Casino.org in 2022 after a long career covering Las Vegas. He currently covers entertainment, dining and gaming news in Las Vegas.

Corey spent six years covering the Vegas Strip for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, where he also wrote the most popular humor column in the city’s history. (For “Fear and Loafing,” he tried out 176 Vegas jobs, including poker player, blackjack dealer and Follie Bergere dancer.)

Corey has won more than 100 local, state and national awards for his journalism, which has also appeared in Rolling Stone, New York Magazine and the New York Post.

Corey is a New York native whose hobbies include playing guitar, trying to be a better husband, and arguing with strangers on Facebook.

Contact Corey at corey@casino.org.

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