“It's already in the bag”: Top Gun 3 gets major update from producer Christopher McQuarrie

Top Gun 3 is a film that fans have reportedly been demanding for a while. People go to watch Tom Cruise return as flight instructor Pete Mitchell with Top Gun: Maverick, which was released 36 years after the first film, Top Gun.

The film was a major critical and commercial success, grossing over a billion dollars at the box office. Since then, fans have been reportedly waiting for a third installment. There is some good news from Christopher McQuarrie, who recently released his directorial venture Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. Referring to the film's story, he said:

"It's already in the bag."

Christopher McQuarrie shares an update on Top Gun 3

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Christopher McQuarrie, the writer and producer of Top Gun: Maverick, has shared an update on Top Gun 3. The director recently appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, where he revealed that he has the film's plot:

"Yeah, I already know what it is. It wasn’t hard. I thought it would be, and that’s a good place to go from is 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."

He further revealed that the emotion is more important than the action or any other factor in such films:

"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."

In January 2024, Paramount Pictures announced that they are going ahead with Top Gun 3 after the major success of Maverick. Joseph Kosinski, who directed the second film, will direct while Ehren Kruger will write the script. Besides Cruise, Glen Powell and Miles Teller are also expected to reprise their respective roles.

Top Gun: Maverick was helmed by Joseph Kosinski and followed Maverick training a new group of graduates for a potentially dangerous mission. The list includes the son of one of his late friends. The film was also Val Kilmer's final role before he passed away in 2025.