Top Gun: Maverick is the highest grossing movie of the year, more than three decades after the first film was released. Clearly, there was a massive audience for the new movie and with a box office topping $1 billion, it’s hard to imagine that there isn’t at least some talk about making Top Gun 3, and while, at this point, we know nothing official, co-star Jay Ellis says there are plenty of reasons for everybody to want to come back.
Jay Ellis, who played Lt. Reuben "Payback" Fitch in Top Gun: Maverick recently spoke with People, and while he said he doesn’t believe there will be a third film, he also said that if there was another one, he would be there, and he thinks the rest of the Maverick cast would show up. He’s got a list of four reasons why he thinks everybody would be back. They’d love to just make another movie, to do so as a group, to do it with Tom Cruise, and of course, they all want to get back in those jets. Ellis says…
I mean, we would all love to work together. We’d love to do it again. We’d love to be with Tom [Cruise] again. We’d love to be in the back F18s again. So if we’re lucky enough to do it again, I’m sure every single one of us would be there.
It seems that the rest of the cast has clearly been bitten by the same flying bug that got Tom Cruise after the first Top Gun. This, despite the fact that the fighter jet boot camp everybody went through was reportedly brutal.
Cruise always insisted, even before there was ever a Top Gun sequel with a green light,, that any future film would need to use real jets rather than going with CGI tech. That decision appears to have worked out better than anybody could have dreamed. Certainly, a third movie would be afraid to do it any other way for fear of doing damage to the formula that worked so well here.
Considering that it took 35 years for Top Gun: Maverick to make it to the screen, it seems like a long shot that we’ll ever see a third Top Gun with Tom Cruise in the lead. But at the same time, Maverick wasn’t simply a successful movie. It’s the highest grossing movie of the year.
If it were any other movie the sequel would have a green light already and a script would be in development as I write this. One has to assume that Paramount would be happy to see Top Gun 3 happen, so perhaps there is a chance, if a small one that we could see it much sooner than 35 years from now.
