To say Top Gun: Maverick was a massive hit back in 2022 is an understatement. It landed a 96% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and went on to shockingly earn almost $1.5 billion worldwide after one of the longest theatrical runs of the post-pandemic era. Of course, Paramount Pictures wants to keep the now-series going, but Tom Cruise’s schedule was a bit of a problem. Now, Twisters co-star Glen Powell, who had a major secondary role in Maverick, is giving us some hope that the threequel may happen sooner rather than later.
Earlier this year, Powell didn’t play into online rumors about the threequel heating up at Paramount and Skydance. Now, however, his tune has changed (via Variety), seemingly signaling that things are starting to move fast.
“I mean, I have a date,” Powell said regarding a return to fighter jets for Top Gun 3 during the episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast with his Twisters co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones. Whether that means he’s starting physical prep or going back into pilot school well ahead of filming remains to be seen, but it’s worth noting, as everyone was under the assumption that the next Top Gun would take a while to get going. In fact, producer Jerry Bruckheimer recently told everyone to calm down.
“There is going to be some fun stuff being announced soon…but it was confidential to me. I talk to [Joseph] Kosinski, Cruise and Jerry [Bruckheimer] all the time. There is stuff happening and it sounds very exciting. I don’t know when I’ll be going back…I’m sure there is a jet waiting for me sometime in the future,” he added. Mind you, a script won’t be ready for a while, but the studios might be gearing up to hit the ground running as soon as they’re happy with a draft. Maverick’s pre-production and production, the latter of which started all the way back in 2018, were notably difficult, given all the training and prep needed to shoot the actors inside real fighter planes and coordinating with the U.S. military.
Expectations around the threequel are the cast of younger characters, spearheaded by Miles Teller and Powell himself, will become far more important and take some narrative weight off Cruise’s shoulders. That said, expect the 62-year-old madman to stick around. For now, we’re just waiting for him to be done with the eighth Mission: Impossible movie, which has hit all sorts of road bumps in its way to the big screen despite initially being planned to shoot back-to-back with last summer’s Dead Reckoning: Part 1.