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From 'Top Gun' to 'Tombstone,' notable Val Kilmer films and where to watch them

Val Kilmer once proclaimed that he’s almost been fired from all his movies. Thankfully for us, he wasn’t.

But because of his contract with the studio, he didn’t have a choice, so he created his own depth and backstory of pain (deciding that his own father had ignored him) for the peacocking pilot who was obsessed with perfection and an antagonist to Tom Cruise’s Maverick. “Not playing Jim was not an option,” Kilmer says in “Val.” He’d already been making his own audition tapes for filmmakers he wanted to work with, like Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, and did the same for Oliver Stone and the producers, singing The Doors’ songs himself. Owen Gleiberman wrote in his Entertainment Weekly review at the time that Kilmer “captures, to an astonishing degree, the hooded, pantherish charisma that made Morrison the most erotically charged pop performer since the early days of Elvis.”

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