’Top Gun 3‘ Is Happening, With Tom Cruise

It took 36 years for Paramount to release Top Gun: Maverick after Top Gun became the #1 movie of 1986 and one of the biggest films of the entire decade. How long will we have to wait for a Top Gun 3?

Maybe not that long. According to various reports, Paramount is already working on a third film in the franchise to follow Top Gun: Maverick, which became a massive hit when it finally arrived in theaters in 2022. The film is intended to star Tom Cruise once again as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and bring back some of the younger characters introduced in Maverick like Miles Teller’s Rooster and Glen Powell’s Hangman, with Joseph Kosinski also reportedly returning to direct the film and Maverick co-writer Ehren Kruger currently working on a draft for the screenplay.

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Even if it doesn’t take another 36 years to get Top Gun 3 — at which point Tom Cruise would be 97 years old — it might not be something we should expect to see in theaters next summer. Cruise is currently working on the second part of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, and he’s also working on a film that would see him go to actual outer space and the International Space Station instead of just working on a green screen or with CGI. Cruise also just signed a development deal with Warner Bros. to both star in and produce films for that studio — and at least for the moment, Paramount and Warner Bros. are two totally distinct corporate entitles.

So we’ll see if this movie ever happens. Then again, nobody thought Top Gun 2 would actually happen. And then it not only did happen, it exceeded all expectations. So I’m going to be cautiously optimistic about this.