‘Top Gun 3’ officially happening with Tom Cruise returning

Threequel 'in development with a script well underway,' Paramount co-head revealed at CinemaCon

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Published Apr 17, 2026  •  Last updated 12 minutes ago  •  4 minute read

Tom Cruise as Capt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in 'Top Gun: Maverick.' Photo by Paramount Pictures

Tom Cruise is hopping back into the pilot’s seat as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell for Top Gun 3.

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After rumours swirled around his return for a third go-round in his aviation thriller series, Paramount film co-head Josh Greenstein confirmed at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas that Cruise will reunite with producer Jerry Bruckheimer for the sequel.

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“Top Gun 3 (is) officially in development with a script well underway, reuniting Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer,” Greenstein said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

A director wasn’t part of this week’s announcement, but Cruise’s longtime filmmaking collaborators Joseph Kosinski (who helmed 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick) and Christopher McQuarrie (who co-wrote Maverick and co-wrote and directed the most recent Mission: Impossible movies) could both easily slip behind the camera.

Released in the summer of 2022, Maverick came 36 years after the original 1986 blockbuster. The film followed Mitchell as he trained a detachment of Navy pilots for a specialized mission to destroy a uranium plant in a heavily guarded secret bunker.

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The assignment found Cruise’s Mitchell reconnecting with an old flame (played by Jennifer Connelly) and mentoring the son (Miles Teller) of his late pal Nick “Goose” Bradshaw from the first film.

Jennifer Connelly and Tom Cruise in a scene from ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’ Photo by Paramount Pictures

Maverick was a worldwide box office phenomenon, earning nearly $1.5 billion at the global box office. It also helped turn supporting actors Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Monica Barbaro, Danny Ramirez, Jay Ellis, Greg Tarzan Davis and Manny Jacinto into breakthrough stars.

The film’s success led Steven Spielberg to credit Cruise with saving the theatrical industry coming out of the pandemic.

“You saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution,” Spielberg said to Cruise in a video that went viral on social media in 2023. The exchange left the actor blushing.

Originally slated to hit theatres in the summer of 2020, Cruise held Maverick back from streaming so it could play exclusively in cinemas when the Covid-19 pandemic eased.

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After it opened in May 2022, Maverick pocketed $1 million per day in North America for 75 consecutive days, and was the No. 1 movie at the box office over Memorial weekend and Labour Day Weekend. It was a feat that had never happened before.

In an interview with Postmedia in early 2020, Bruckheimer predicted Maverick would be a success with audiences, calling the film “enormously romantic and exciting.”

“There was a lot of difficult stuff to get this movie right,” he said at the time. “But Tom Cruise is one of the best … Tom, day and night, was focused on Top Gun. I’d get calls at six in the morning on a Sunday with some notes that he had. None of this comes easy and (he) works very hard at it.”

Talk of a sequel started almost immediately

After Maverick’s success, the film’s producers started teasing a third Top Gun adventure as well as a follow-up to another Cruise classic — 1990’s race-car drama Days of Thunder.

“Yeah, we’re thinking and talking about many different stories and what could we do and what’s possible,” Cruise told Australia’s Today last summer. “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.”

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Both McQuarrie and Kosinski said that a story idea for Top Gun 3 was “in the bag.”

“I already know what it is,” McQuarrie said last May during an appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast.

“It wasn’t hard. I thought it would be. And that’s a good place to go from. You walk into the room, going, ‘Come on. What are we going to do?’ And Ehren Kruger pitched something, and I went, ‘Mmm, actually…’ And we had one conversation about it. The framework is there,” McQuarrie said.

“Ehren Kruger, who is the writer on F1 and one of the screenwriters of Maverick, is over his laptop as we speak, typing away on a very ambitious idea,” Kosinski told Postmedia in an interview last December. “So that’s another one that’s in the hopper that we’re working on.”

Cruise will be back on screens this fall in Digger, a dark comedy from Alejandro Inarritu that follows the world’s most powerful man as he tries to save the planet from a global crisis.

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