Christopher McQuarrie provides Tom Cruise update on Top Gun 3

The barnstorming success of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning cements Tom Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie as a powerhouse collaboration. Will it indeed be the final reckoning for the franchise? Who knows. What is certain is that the Cruise/McQuarrie partnership is just getting started.

In a recent interview with Josh Horowitz, McQuarrie confirmed the status of Top Gun 3. It’s pitched as the much-anticipated sequel to Top Gun: Maverick, the 2022 smash starring Cruise and co-written by McQuarrie. Like an implacable fighter jet coming in for landing, McQuarrie says the film is on track.”

“It wasn’t hard,” he told Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Deadline), adding, “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 [co-writer] Ehren Kruger pitched something and I went, ‘Mm, 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.”

McQuarrie’s ideas of things being hard to crack are clearly different from ours. After all, during the riveting climax of The Final Reckoning he dangled Cruise from a biplane.

“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,” the director added. “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.”

McQuarrie remained tactful when pressed as to whether he would serve as director: “I have given that absolutely no thought, no thought whatsoever … However, I have done a lot of research into how to make a Tony Scott movie.” The late Scott launched the original Top Gun to success in 1986 and boosted Cruise to super-stardom.

And what of the much-mooted Tropic Thunder spin-off centred around Cruise’s mogul character Les Grossman? Cruise stole the show in Ben Stiller’s riotous 2008 satire with his atypical performance: all fat hands, foul mouth and dancing to Flo-Rida’s ‘Low’.

“Everything is a priority, everything will — in one way or another — happen,” McQuarrie explained. “It will not necessarily happen in the time or place you think it will. They’re all things we’re talking about, they’re all things we have ideas about, the conversations we have had about Les Grossman are so f—ing funny.

“We’re talking about it, man, we’re having very serious conversations about it and how best to do it and it ultimately comes down to what that character is.”

Don’t catch your breath just yet. Behind all of this is the spectre of the Days of Thunder sequel. The original film was released in 1990, centred around stock car racing and was the first movie to pair Cruise, playing top racer Cole Trickle, with eventual wife Nicole Kidman.

“[I] totally [knew] what the premise of the movie would be, in five seconds I knew,” McQuarrie explained, “and I looked at the response to Top Gun: Maverick and immediately turned to Tom and said, ‘Days of Thunder.’

“We’re thinking and talking about many different stories and what could we do and what’s possible,” McQuarrie told Australia’s Today show. “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.”

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is on release now.