Christopher McQuarrie teases ‘Top Gun 3’: ‘It’s already in the bag’

Top Gun 3 might be taking flight sooner than fans expected, as Christopher McQuarrie recently revealed that the story is already wrapped up.

During an appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, McQuarrie, who co-wrote and produced Top Gun: Maverick, shared that the next installment in the high-flying franchise has come together with surprising ease.

When asked if getting a story for Top Gun 3 was more difficult than working on the 2022 blockbuster sequel, he responded, “No, it’s already in the bag.”

“It wasn’t hard,” McQuarrie said. 

“I thought it would be, and that’s a good place to go from as 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. So, no, it’s not hard to crack. The truth of the matter is, none of these are hard to crack.”

He added, “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.”

Hints about a third Top Gun film have been dropping recently. 

Earlier this month, Tom Cruise confirmed that he's not only involved in talks for Top Gun 3, but also working on a sequel to his 1990 racing drama Days of Thunder.

“Yeah, we’re thinking and talking about many different stories and what could we do and what’s possible,” Cruise said. 

“It took me 35 years to figure out ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, so all of these things we’re working on, we’re discussing ‘Days of Thunder’ and ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’”

While no release date has been set just yet, it sounds like Top Gun 3 is well on its way to becoming a reality.