Details about Top Gun 2 have been trickling in ever since Tom Cruise grinned and announced it would be coming--and filming soon--three months ago. In the time since that announcement was made, Tom Cruise totally injured his ankle filming the upcoming Mission: Impossible 6 and there have been questions regarding whether or not that movie would stay on track for its July 27, 2018 release date. Theoretically, if Mission: Impossible 6 had to be pushed back, that could very well affect Top Gun: Maverick, but producer Jerry Bruckheimer recently spoke out to alleviate fears, noting,
I think we'll be OK. We weren't planning on starting [filming] until January or February. I think he finishes his picture now in December so we should be OK.
Whew, I'm personally pretty happy to hear that, and surely there are other Top Gun fans out there too who want the sequel project to stay on track and get made. According to what Jerry Bruckheimer told Yahoo, even with production having to shut down on Mission: Impossible 6 for some time before it is resumed, Top Gun 2 should be able to get off the ground when it was originally planning to. This should be reassuring for fans who have wanted to catch up with Maverick and the rest of the gang in the 30+ years since the original movie came out.
Still, Tom Cruise's ankle injury looked pretty bad and will be keeping him out of commission for quite some time. Production on the latest Mission: Impossible sequel has been shut down for nine weeks, so it's easy to see how rumors about Cruise's schedule getting shuffled around could be spreading like wildfire.
Since the injury was reported, there's been some back and forth about whether or not the shutdown will result in Mission: Impossible 6 changing its release date. Some outfits have called the move "likely," but director Christopher McQuarrie noted recently that it may not be as big of a disaster as it may seem. Because there is still quite a bit of time before M:I 6 is released, McQuarrie says he is just shifting priorities right now. Cruise and co. had shot a lot of the movie before production was shut down, and the director plans to go ahead and start editing the movie now, rather than waiting until the movie was done with production. That way, when they get back to filming, a lot will already be done on the post-production end, and hopefully, the movie will hit its premiere date, which is supposed to come during the lucrative summer months.
As for Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to the original movie doesn't have a release date, yet, but we've known for a while that Tom Cruise was planning to film it in 2018. Now, we know the movie is expected to start filming sometime after the holidays, and since the people behind the sequel don't seem to have a specific date picked out yet, I assume there's a little room to shuffle things around should there be more delays. On the bright side for Tom Cruise, Top Gun 2 aka Maverick should feature fewer running and jumping stunts than something like Mission: Impossible 6, simply because a lot of the action is in the air. Hopefully, however, this ankle injury won't keep him from shirtless volleyball.
