Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning opened on the 2025 movies schedule over the weekend, once again pairing Tom Cruise with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie. Their professional relationship extends far beyond Ethan Hunt’s cinematic adventures, however, with the most recent example outside of that action space being that McQuarrie co-wrote Top Gun: Maverick. Given what a critical and commercial success the sequel was, it should come as no surprise that Top Gun 3 is in the works, and McQuarrie just gave an exciting update on the threequel’s progress.
In an interview on Happy Sad Confused, McQuarrie was asked by podcast host Josh Horowitz if “Top Gun 3 is harder to crack in some ways than Top Gun: Maverick,” and the filmmaker immediately responded:
No, it’s already in the bag. I already know what it is. It wasn’t hard. I thought it would be. And that’s a good place to go from, you walk in the room and go ‘Come on, what are we going to do?’ And Ehren Kruger pitched something, and I went ‘Hmmm, actually…’ And we had one conversation about it, and the framework is there. So no, it’s not hard to crack.
36 years passed between the release of the original Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick (both of which can be streamed with a Paramount+ subscription), but clearly Top Gun 3 can get rolling pretty quickly if/when the time comes. To be clear, Paramount hasn’t technically given the project the greenlight, but per Christopher McQuarrie, he and fellow Maverick co-writer have already figured out how to tackle Top Gun 3, and that wasn’t a difficult process. These two worked with Eric Warren Singer on the Maverick screenplay, but it’s unclear if he’s also involved with the threequel.
Christopher McQuarrie’s update comes after Tom Cruise said earlier this month that he and those involved with Top Gun 3 are “thinking and talking about many different stories and what could we do and what’s possible.” No doubt he’s in the loop on what McQuarrie and Ehren Kruger cracked, although it’s unclear if an actual script has been written. Regardless, this is another positive step towards Top Gun 3 becoming a reality.
Top Gun 3 officially entered development in January 2024, and the following July, Glen Powell, who played Hangman in Maverick, said that he already had a “date” for this film series’ next installment. Powell never clarified what he meant by that, though if he was talking about a production start date, I have to think that this is no longer etched in stone. Jay Ellis, who played Payback in Maverick, also said in February that the powers-that-be are “diligently working on the script and wanting to get it right.”
While I don’t anticipate Top Gun 3 being prepped fast enough for a 2026 release, I’m hopeful that once Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie and the rest of the creative talent involved approve of the threequel’s script, production can get underway pretty quickly. For now, following Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’s release, Cruise can next be seen in Alejandro G. Iñárritu untitled movie that’s opening on October 2, 2026.
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