Pawn Stars: Val Kilmer's Top Gun Jacket Sold For Much Less Than You May Think

If the $1.495 billion worldwide box office take and critics' reaction to "Top Gun: Maverick" in 2022 proved anything, it indicated that the nostalgia surrounding the film's 1986 predecessor, "Top Gun," was at an all-time high. As a byproduct of the nostalgia, any props connected to Tom Cruise's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell and Val Kilmer's Tom "Iceman" Kazansky from the original "Top Gun" accumulated financial value. Surprisingly, though, Iceman's white ceremonial jacket from "Top Gun" didn't fetch as much as you would think on a December 2022 episode of "Pawn Stars Do America."

In the episode, Rick Harrison heads to North Carolina, where he encounters Randall, a collector who wants to sell Iceman's jacket for $50,000. While Randall didn't have paperwork to verify the jacket's authenticity, his story about how he obtained the item in the 1990s seemed to add up. "I've had it in my collection for about 20-plus years. It came from one of the major auction houses," Randall told Harrison. In addition, a stamp from the auction house, Western Prop, was inside the jacket, and the abbreviated name "V. Kilmer" was written on the inside of the collar.

Harrison's Hollywood prop master friend, Hope M. Parrish, was able to validate the jacket's authenticity in a video chat. Unfortunately for Randall, Parrish valued the jacket at $30,000, which was much less than he was seeking. Harrison initially offered $15,000 because he needed to profit on the resale of the item, and he and Randall eventually settled on a $17,000 price tag.

While authenticating Randall's Iceman jacket for Rick Harrison on "Pawn Stars Do America," Hope M. Parrish told the seller and pawnbroker how she concluded that the item was real. "What you have there to me looks like something we did often in the '80s and the '90s, and still some prop houses and costume houses do it today — where they put your treasured pieces into a shadow box or framed them up on display," the veteran prop master said. "This has very possibly been on the walls of Western Costume or possibly in ['Top Gun' producer] Jerry Bruckheimer's office. One never knows."

As of August 16, 2023, Iceman's "Top Gun" jacket still belongs to Harrison's world-famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, where the home of the History Channel's longtime "Pawn Stars" series is listing it for $27,500.

While Iceman's white ceremonial jacket went for just over a third of what Randall was asking, other major props from "Top Gun" have been bringing in much bigger money in recent years. According to Esquire Middle East, a collector at Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction in August 2020 in Los Angeles bought Tom Cruise's Maverick helmet from the 1986 film for $333,000. In Entertainment Memorabilia's original listing, the piece of Maverick memorabilia was estimated to go for between $30,000 and $50,000.

Only time will tell how much props from the "Top Gun" sequel will bring in the coming years. For the time being, the memories the stars have of working on the film will remain priceless, including such heartfelt moments as Cruise crying over the return of Kilmer in "Top Gun: Maverick."