Top Gun: Maverick’s Glen Powell Reveals He Has a Start Date for Third Movie

It took 36 years for Top Gun, Tom Cruise’s career-defining action blockbuster, to finally get a sequel. Now that Top Gun: Maverick has become one of the highest-grossing movies in Paramount’s history, though, it won’t take nearly that long to get the next one moving. According to star Glen Powell, there’s already a start date in place for the production — although speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, that’s all he would say, refusing to get himself fired for the scoop. The issue came up during a conversation in support of Twisters, and it wasn’t just host Josh Horowitz who got excited.

Recounting the conversation, EW characterizes Powell’s Twisters co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones as “perking up” and asking if it was indeed Top Gun Powell was talking about. But it was fruitless when Horowitz pushed for specifics. 

“Absolutely not,” Powell said, later joking, “Uh, Josh, we should go to the next question.”

The revelation comes just a month or so after producer Jerry Bruckheimer said it “will be a while” before fans have a movie to watch. Of course, there’s also a very long production timeline on some of these blockbusters — especially when getting the cast back together will require some schedule jockeying on the part of some of Hollywood’s biggest names.

While Top Gun 3 is only in the early stages, Bruckheimer has previously indicated that the third film in the franchise would include Cruise, though he admitted that Cruise’s schedule did leave questions about when Top Gun 3 might get made.

“It will be Tom Cruise,” Bruckheimer said in March. “Tom is amazing. We spent time with him. We have a story. [Director] Joe Kosinski had a wonderful story idea for it, and he [Cruise] said, ‘I really like that’, so we’re developing it. But you never know when it’s going to get made because Tom is so busy. He’s doing Mission: Impossible right now, he’s got a picture after it. Hopefully, we’ll get a screenplay that he loves, and we’ll back in the air again.”

In Top Gun: Maverick, after more than 30 years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose.”

Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.