Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie think they’ve found a way forward for Top Gun 3. More on the story here.
With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning finally out in the world, we can’t imagine anybody concluding that we’ve seen the end of the long-running – not to mention rather fruitful – creative partnership that Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise have built over the years.
McQuarrie has ghost-written for Cruise’s films, written them, and of course directed the actor across several movies with the filmmaker clearly understanding how to get the best out of Cruise’s unique star power. Even when that star power took a hefty dint in the decade following a series of damaging PR blows in the mid 2000s.
At one point, the duo were supposed to be reuniting as director and star on The Gauntlet, a remake of the Clint Eastwood film that would have co-starred Scarlett Johansson.
While that project may have gone by the wayside – for now at least – McQuarrie is actively working with Cruise on the sequel to 2021’s Top Gun: Maverick, co-writing the project as he did with Maverick with the possibility present that he could yet step into the director’s chair if Joseph Kosinski’s busy slate rules him out.
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, McQuarrie seemed bullish about working with co-writer Ehren Kruger on the script for Top Gun 3, stating that the premise for the film had long been cracked:
“It [the premise] is already in the bag…Yeah, I already know what it is, wasn’t hard. I thought it would be, and that’s a good place to go from…Ehren Kruger pitched something, and the framework is there, so, no, it’s not hard to crack. The truth of the matter is none of these are hard to crack. It’s not the scope or scale of action, the engineering of the action, it’s none of those things, it’s the emotion. I’ve given that absolutely no thought whatsoever.”
Given that Top Gun Maverick's premise was essentially a re-do of the original Top Gun, simply with an added legacy twist of generational relationships written in, we’d imagine that the premise of a third film wouldn’t be too different.
However, much of Top Gun: Maverick's emotion also drew from the first film’s plot, a plan that will surely only offer diminishing returns should it be repeated again. Plus, between Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, we’ve seen the allure of Tom Cruise doing something ‘one last time’ played out, pretty much to the hilt so that seems like an emotional cul-de-sac too.
With that in mind, we’re curious to see just how McQuarrie and Kruger eventually work out how to give us ‘the feels’ with the next film. McQuarrie was also asked about directing the project, to which her replied: “I have done a lot of research into how to make a Tony Scott movie. I’m not the kind of director who gets squeamish about making a sequel to a Tony Scott movie.”
That’s certainly not a straight-up ‘no’, is it? When we do hear more regarding the status of Top Gun 3, we’ll let you know right here.
