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Christopher McQuarrie, the writer/producer/director of the last four Mission: Impossible movies, has shared a surprising update on Top Gun 3. McQuarrie, Tom Cruise’s go-to creative partner of the last 15 years or so, served as a writer/producer on the billion-dollar-plus grossing Top Gun: Maverick.
While out on the promotional trail for his latest film, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which opened this weekend, with a franchise-best $204 million worldwide, McQuarrie was asked about “cracking” the story for the third film in the Top Gun franchise and revealed that it wasn’t as difficult as he thought it would be.
“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 [co-writer] Ehren Kruger pitched something and I went, ‘Mm, 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,” McQuarrie said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
“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 addition to another Top Gun movie, Tom Cruise and McQuarrie are also making a sequel to his Tony Scott-directed NASCAR film Days of Thunder and are toying with ways to revive his iconic Tropic Thunder character Les Grossman.
“[I] totally [knew] what the premise of the movie would be, in five seconds I knew,” McQ said of the Days of Thunder sequel. “And I looked at the response to Top Gun: Maverick and immediately turned to Tom and said, ‘Days of Thunder.‘”
Cruise’s next project will actually not be with McQuarrie, but rather, Birdman and The Revenant filmmaker Alejandro Iñárritu, as he wrapped filming on the still untitled project back in May, which also stars Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Sophie Wilde, Riz Ahmed, Emma D’Arcy, Michael Stuhlbarg, and John Goodman, and is set to be released in theaters in October 2026.