Christopher McQuarrie gives an update on Top Gun 3.

McQuarrie, who was a writer-producer on 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, was a guest on the most recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, posted on Monday, where he told Josh Horowitz that he already has the ideas set for the third installment.

“Is Top Gun 3 harder to crack in some ways than Top Gun: Maverick?,” Horowitz asked, to which McQuarrie responded, saying, “No, it’s already in the bag.”

Horowitz followed up by asking, “You’ve cracked it?” And the Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning director said, “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,” McQuarrie explains. “So, no, it’s not
hard to crack. The truth of the matter is, none of these are hard to crack.”

He continued, “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.”

Horowitz noted that what he remembers from the film (one of the many things) is at the moment end between Tom Cruise‘s Maverick and Miles Teller’s Rooster. By the end of Top Gun: Maverick, the characters reconcile after Rooster resents Maverick because he blames him for his father, Gooses’ death in the original ’86 movie.

McQuarrie said that the film is all about “getting to that place” and “finding the right emotional balance,” which is what he and Cruise were focused on, making sure audiences “feel affinity” for Rooster.

News of another Top Gun film came in Jan. 2024, when it was announced that Top Gun 3 was in the works at Paramount. The Hollywood Reporter reported that Top Gun: Maverick co-writer Ehren Kruger would be penning the script and sources said Joe Kosinski would direct again. It’s also intended that Teller and Glen Powell will return.