It took 36 years for Paramount to release the sequel to Top Gun, Top Gun: Maverick. If the studio gets their way the third film will arrive in a lot less time.
At their CinemaCon presentation this week, Paramount confirmed that they are working on a third Top Gun. There aren’t too many details at this point beyond the fact that Jerry Bruckheimer is expected to produce it, Tom Cruise is supposedly returning as ace fighter pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and that the script is currently in the works.
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Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, portrayed Cruise’s Mitchell as a hotshot dinosaur; a relic of a bygone era of high-flying pilots. When the U.S. military needs someone to train a new generation of recruits for an impossible mission, Maverick returns to “Top Gun” — the nickname for the Navy’s school for their most elite pilots — first as a teacher, and then, inevitably, as the guy to lead the mission.
The film was supposed to open in theaters in the summer of 2019, but delays pushed it back to 2020, when it was delayed even further by the Covid pandemic. To their credit, Paramount, Bruckheimer, and Cruise did not simply dump the film on Paramount+ or some other streaming service when theaters were shut down; they waited nearly two years before finally releasing it on May 27, 2022. Their patience was rewarded; Top Gun: Maverick became the biggest movie in the U.S. that year by far, grossing $718 million at the box office. (The #2 film that year was Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which only grossed $436 million.)
At that point, a third film — or at least an effort to make a third film — was probably inevitable. Meanwhile, Cruise will next be seen in Digger, a dark comedy from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. It opens in theaters on October 2.
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