Top Gun: The Goose Is Loose (eh, probably not) has been greenlit at Paramount.
I was pretty meh on Top Gun: Maverick, but I was in the minority on that one, given it made a sweet one and a half billion dollars at the global box office, more or less single-handedly saving theatrical exhibition in the early post-lockdown era and reminding us all that Tom Cruise is the Last Movie Star, for good or ill.
That means that sequel was destined for a sequel – something that the powers that be have been beavering away at since at least 2024 (I suspect the first conversations happened when the opening weekend receipts arrived in 2022). Ehren Kruger, who co-wrote Top Gun: Maverick with Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, has been on scripting duties, because filling in the gaps between dogfights and winning smiles is a grind.
But now Variety is reporting that we are cleared for take off, as both Tom Cruise and legendary action producer Jerry Bruckheimer (the holy trinity of The Rock, Con Air, and Armageddon) are returning for Top Gun: Whatever Goes Here. Paramount Pictures made the announcement at CinemaCon in Las Vegas.
That’s a pretty quick turn around for a Top Gun sequel. 36 years passed between the release of the original film in 1986 and Maverick hitting our screens. There’s no word of whether the director of the latter, Joseph Kosinski (F1) is returning, nor any of the cast, which included Jennifer Connolly, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, Ed Harris, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Monica Barbaro, Danny Ramirez, Jay Ellis, Greg Tarzan Davis and Manny Jacinto – a pretty incredible ensemble, given a couple years’ perspective.
But it’s worth noting that Teller, who played Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s doomed navigator, Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards), in Maverick, apparently did pitch a film titled Top Gun: Rooster in 2022, a fact I did not know when I wrote the gag in the subtitle. Great minds, etc etc.
