‘Top Gun 3’ story ‘wasn’t hard’ to figure out, Christopher McQuarrie teases

Cue the Elle Woods “What, like it’s hard?” jokes.

Fresh off the success of their latest Mission: Impossible team up in The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie are in a good place to get back in the saddle together again with Top Gun 3 — in fact, McQuarrie teases the story is “already in the bag,” and it “wasn’t hard” to do it.

In a recent conversation on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, McQuarrie, who co-wrote and produced Top Gun: Maverick, was asked if a third film was “harder to crack” than the long-awaited Maverick, to which he quickly answered, “No, it’s already in the bag.”

“It wasn’t hard,” McQuarrie said. “I thought it would be, and that’s a good place to go from as you walk into the room going, ‘Come on, what are we going to do?’ And [Maverick co-writer] Ehren Kruger pitched something, and I went, ‘Mmm actually,’ and we had one conversation about it, 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.”

He added that it’s the emotion behind the story that is the most difficult aspect to get right.

“It’s as you start to execute it, and as you start to interrogate it, as you start [to think] why these movies are made the way they are,” he added. “It’s not the action, it’s not even the level of or intensity of or the scope and scale of the action [or] the engineering around the action, it’s none of those things — it’s the emotion.”

McQuarrie’s comments echo ones made by Cruise during an interview earlier in May, when he said both a Top Gun 3 and sequel to his 1990 racing film Days of Thunder were actively being discussed.

“Yeah, we’re thinking and talking about many different stories and what could we do and what’s possible,” Cruise told Today Show Australia at the time. “It took me 35 years to figure out Top Gun: Maverick, so all of these things we’re working on, we’re discussing Days of Thunder and Top Gun: Maverick.”

A sequel to the 1986 classic, Top Gun: Maverick was the epitome of peak summer blockbuster when it soared into theaters in May 2022. The film — which starred Cruise, Glen Powell, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, Jennifer Connelly, and more — earned $1.48 billion at the global box office, making it the 12th highest-grossing film of all time. It was also nominated for six Oscars, taking home the award for Best Sound. 

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Powell also previously hinted at his return as Hangman while visiting The Kelly Clarkson Show last May.

“It’s above my pay grade,” he admitted when asked if a third film was happening, “but, yeah, I have a feeling there’s probably a cockpit with my name on it.”

Puck first reported in January 2024 that a Top Gun 3 was in the works at Paramount, with Kruger on tap to pen the script, and Maverick director Joseph Kosinski in talks to return as well.