Top Gun 3’s Story Is “Already In The Bag,” Christopher McQuarrie Says
We may get a follow-up to Maverick sooner than we think.
It took over 30 years for Tom Cruise to find a way back to Top Gun — but all that effort produced Top Gun: Maverick, one of the best action sequels of all time, so fans are understandably prepared to wait a bit for a Top Gun 3, if it comes to that. Fortunately, Cruise has been open to cracking another sequel to the 1986 film as soon as possible, as are the cast of young pilots that his upstart aviator trains in Maverick.
“We’ve all been talking about the possibility of this from the moment we started filming our movie,” Monica Barbaro, who plays Natasha “Phoenix” Trace, told Inverse in 2024. “We’re all in communication. We’re all friends. I don’t have any news to report... [but] that would be a very exciting prospect.”
That excitement seems to have fueled Cruise and his longtime collaborator, Christopher McQuarrie, into developing the story for Top Gun 3 sooner rather than later. With their latest team-up in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning finally out in theaters, the duo now has time to focus on the next chapter of the Top Gun saga, and according to McQuarrie, they’re already well on their way.
McQuarrie recently appeared on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, where he revealed that the story for Top Gun 3 is “already in the bag.”
According to co-writer and producer Christopher McQuarrie, a “framework is there” for Top Gun 3.
“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.”
McQuarrie co-wrote and produced Maverick alongside Kruger, and he admitted that the story is rarely the most difficult part of the film to crack. “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.”
With the framework more or less established, it hopefully won’t be that long before McQuarrie and Kruger can tap into the same emotional core that made Maverick so compelling. This update is certainly promising, but it may still be a few years before Top Gun 3 is ready to fly. Cruise and McQuarrie are working are multiple projects, including a potential sequel to Days of Thunder, and there’s no telling which will get the green light first. Ideally, though, we won’t have to wait too much longer to see Cruise’s Maverick reunite with his Top Gun recruits.
