McQuarrie Has The Story For TOP GUN 3

Top Gun is one of the classics from the 80s, half-naked men, jet planes, volleyball, more half-naked men, and more fighter jets. What’s not to like? That was all the way back in 1986.

Then, 35 year later, Top Gun: Maverick came out, and kind of blow everyone away. It was back to the original formula: men, fighter jets, and Jennifer Connelly. What’s not to like?

The problem was that Top Gun: Maverick was a big success and made a lot of money. This made the dollar signs of execs flash up in their eyes. Top Gun 3 was bound to happen.

Christopher McQuarrie co-wrote and produced Top Gun: Maverick, and has recently said he’s nailed the story for a third movie. On a recent podcast, McQuarrie was asked if Top Gun 3 was harder to crack than Maverick, and he said, “No, it’s already in the bag.”

“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 Ehren Kruger pitched something and I went, ‘Mhm 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.”

“It’s as you start to execute it, and as you start to interrogate it, as you start [to think] why these movies are made the way they are. 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.”

Do we need a lot of emotion in a Top Gun movie? We need big explosions and fighter jets.

Cruise and McQuarrie have been enjoying working together for a while now. McQuarrie wrote movies like Valkyrie, Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow, The Mummy, and 4 of the Mission: Impossible movies.

Even though Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning isn’t the most amazing movie, it does have some great action. If a new movie is going to work, it will need more of the same.