Top Gun 3 in the Works With Tom Cruise and More Returning

The Top Gun franchise is preparing to take our breath away once again. As first confirmed by a new report from Puck News, a third Top Gun movie is officially in the works. Franchise star Tom Cruise is expected to return, alongside Top Gun: Maverick co-stars Miles Teller and Glen Powell. The script for Top Gun 3 is currently being worked on by Maverick co-writer Ehren Kruger, with producers Jerry Bruckheimer and David Ellison involved. Maverick director Joseph Kosinski is expected to return to either direct or produce. Accordin to reports, Top Gun 3 could be Cruise's next movie after the forthcoming Mission: Impossible 8. 

This comes just days after it was announced that Cruise has signed a development deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, where he will work with Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group's Co-Chairs and CEOs Michael De Luca & Pam Abdy to develop both original and franchise feature films. Depending on how Cruise's schedule shakes out, there is reportedly a chance that his projects with Warner Bros. would be delayed into late 2025 or beyond.

What Would Top Gun 3 Be About?

Amid the smash success of 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, there was a lot of speculation that a third film could tentatively be in the works. While Bruckheimer has repeatedly played coy about the possibility, Kosinski previously hinted that there is more story to tell with Cruise's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell.

"Is there another story that is compelling enough that we need to go back?" Kosinski asked. "It seems to me at the end of this film that Maverick has some gas left in the tank. He's not settling down." 

What Is Mission: Impossible 8 About?

Mission: Impossible 8 is expected to continue the narrative of 2023's Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, which saw Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) face off against one of his most personal enemies yet. Late last fall, Mission: Impossible 8 was officially delayed to 2025, and also dropped the Dead Reckoning subtitle.

"When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two," director Christopher McQuarrie explained in a previous interview with Light the Fuse. "The title for the first movie was nearly ... a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy – It wasn't a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences. By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One. So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One."

"And yet, Dead Reckoning didn't really apply as well to Part One as well as it did to Part Two until we started to play with the beginning of the movie, and kind of recognize that Dead Reckoning, while it sounded cool, what did it really have to do with the movie?" McQuarrie continued. "And over the course of our, really starting to dig down into the arc of the character journey for Ethan [Hunt], it took on deeper and deeper meanings as we went. And you'll see just how thematic and how it represents, how it's conceptually represented in every character's journey in this film we're in."

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