Do We Want A New Top Gun Movie? Hell Yes

I feel like “I feel the need…the need for speed!” has just become Tom Cruise’s official lifelong tagline today. After retiring the Mission Impossible franchise, it’s clear that the man just cannot sit still anymore.

And so of course, Top Gun 3 is finally happening.

At CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday, Paramount co-head Josh Greenstein broke the news that Top Gun 3 is officially in development. There’s a script, Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer are back, and beyond these two crucial bits of news, we know nothing. There’s no director confirmation yet, no cast announcement beyond Cruise, and no release date.

But well, we have the announcement? Isn’t that enough? Because as Hollywood keeps learning the hard way, there’s only one pilot who matters here, and we all know who it is.

Ehren Kruger, who co-wrote Maverick, was brought on two years ago to crack the script.

Meanwhile, David Ellison (who produced Maverick through Skydance before absorbing Paramount entirely in a merger last year) has been calling Top Gun 3 a top priority since he took over the studio. Cruise, for his part, had already telegraphed where things were headed. "We're thinking and talking about many different stories," he said last year. "It took me 35 years to figure out Top Gun: Maverick."

The case for why this is a good idea begins and ends with what Maverick actually did. A sequel nobody asked for to a 36-year-old film, released in 2022 when half the movie business was still figuring out whether theaters were finished, and it made $1.5 billion. Got a Best Picture nomination. Spielberg told Cruise he'd saved theatrical exhibition, which sounds insane until you look at the numbers and realize it's basically true.

So Top Gun 3 is coming. Whether it can clear the bar Maverick set is the only interesting question left. But if there's one person you'd back to figure it out, it's the 63-year-old still doing his own stunts.