'Top Gun 3' on the horizon: Story for Tom Cruise's next aviation adventure 'in the bag'

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Tom Cruise’s return as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell might be closer than you think.

Christopher McQuarrie, who co-wrote 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick and co-wrote and directed the most recent Mission: Impossible movies, including this month’s release Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, says a story for a third Top Gun film is “already in the bag.”

During an appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, McQuarrie was asked if a story for the threequel was “harder to crack” than writing Maverick, which came 36 years after the first Top Gun.

“No, it’s already in the bag … I already know what it is,” McQuarrie said. “It wasn’t hard. 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.”

McQuarrie said matching Maverick’s emotional storyline, which found Cruise’s Mitchell reconnecting with an old flame (played by Jennifer Connelly) and mentoring the son (Miles Teller) of his late pal Nick “Goose” Bradshaw from the first film, was the biggest challenge.

“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,” he said.

The Oscar-winning writer wouldn’t comment on whether he’ll direct the movie (Cruise teamed with his Oblivion helmer Joseph Kosinski for Maverick), but did offer up that he’s been studying the style of the late Tony Scott, who shot the original.

“I have given that absolutely no thought, no thought whatsoever (to directing) … However, I have done a lot of research into how to make a Tony Scott movie,” McQuarrie told Horowitz.

McQuarrie also sounded off on another sequel Cruise is considering — a follow-up to his 1990 race-car drama Days of Thunder.

“(I) totally (knew) what the premise of the movie would be, in five seconds I knew … and I looked at the response to Top Gun: Maverick and immediately turned to Tom and said, Days of Thunder.”

His comments echoed Cruise’s own teasing of a third Top Gun and a new Days of Thunder movie.

“Yeah, we’re thinking and talking about many different stories and what could we do and what’s possible,” Cruise recently told Australia’s Today. “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.”

The two are also eyeing a long-rumoured Tropic Thunder spinoff that would revive Cruise’s foul-mouthed movie executive, Les Grossman.

“The conversations we’ve had about Les Grossman are so f—ing funny,” McQuarrie told Horowitz. “(Cruise and I are) talking about it, we’re having very serious conversations about it, and how best to do it. It ultimately comes down to what that character is.”

During breaks on their Final Reckoning shot, the pair would talk about the project and endlessly muse on revisiting the hilarious character together.

“Just to be sitting at a breakfast table, not talking about the movie we’re making for a minute, is such decompression. And just riffing with Tom playing Les Grossman at the table, it was one of the real joys of making this movie. It was all the stuff we were doing, planning the future while slugging out the present,” he said.

Earlier this month, McQuarrie, who has been a close collaborator with Cruise as they’ve worked together on 11 movies over the past 18 years, spoke to Postmedia about how the two became creative soulmates.

“There’s no pride of authorship. We don’t have creative conflicts. I’m asked all the time if Tom and I argue and I say, ‘Yes, we argue everyday on (the audience’s) behalf.’ The only real debates Tom and I have is over what an audience needs or doesn’t need,” McQuarrie said. 

mdaniell@postmedia.com