Tom Cruise told the hosts of U.K. TV show Sunrise on Tuesday that he was making a sequel to his 1986 fighter jet/beach volleyball extravaganza Top Gun, and expected filming to start “probably in the next year,” Deadline reports. Here’s the clip, in which he’s visibly thrilled to be returning to the role of Maverick after three decades:
It’s far from the first time talk of a sequel to Top Gun has been floated, but it’s only been the last few years that anyone involved thought it was a good idea. In 1988, Cruise told the Los Angeles Times that a Top Gun sequel symbolized everything he didn’t want from Hollywood:
I understood the trappings of being a poster boy, but I didn’t allow that to happen. You reach a certain point of success and you have to take responsibility for that success and not do Top Gun 2. That would have been a different way to go, but it wasn’t what I wanted.
In 1990, producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson were similarly unenthusiastic. Asked by the Los Angeles Times about Paramount executives who had mentioned the film as a possibility, Simpson called them “exceedingly misinformed,” adding, “If Paramount has a Top Gun 2 in mind, I’m interested in buying a ticket to it—because it certainly won’t be starring Tom Cruise … or produced by the guys who invented it.” Simpson said at the time that he and Bruckheimer had agreed to never do sequels—with an exception for Beverly Hills Cop II, which they thought of as part of a “series.” Simpson died in 1996, never having produced another sequel. Bruckheimer, on the other hand, went on to produce Bad Boys II, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. And now, it seems, Top Gun 2.
The film’s current incarnation first made the press in 2012, when a Lockheed Martin executive announced—seemingly without approval from Paramount—that the movie was being built around the famously troubled F-35 fighter (and also, although this was less important from the perspective of Lockheed Martin, Tom Cruise). Things stalled out again that summer when original Top Gun director Tony Scott killed himself, but by 2013, the film was back on Jerry Bruckheimer’s slate, prominently mentioned when he left Disney for Paramount. In 2014, Bruckheimer told the Huffington Post that he and Don Simpson had been “trying to get that movie made for 30 years,” past statements notwithstanding, and said the plot would revolve around drones:
The concept is, basically, are the pilots obsolete because of drones. Cruise is going to show them that they’re not obsolete. They’re here to stay. It’s just getting to the starting place. Fortunately for Tom, he’s very busy, so you have to find a slot he can fit into and get a budget that Paramount feels they can make the picture.
It seems the stars have finally aligned—or at least are close enough to aligning that Cruise feels comfortable talking about it. All he needs now are a director, a release date, and, most importantly, script approval from the Pentagon.
