“It wasn’t hard,” McQuarrie shared. “I thought it would be, and that’s a good place to go from as you walk into the room going, ‘Come on, what are we going to do?’ And Ehren Kruger pitched something and I went, ‘Hmm… 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.”
Okay, king! Just dreamed up another cinema-saving blockbuster, it’s a mild day! But this conversation wasn’t mere bragging about how great he is at ideating. The difficulty comes “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 explained. “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.”
Paramount ordering a Top Gun 3 script was first reported in early 2024. The intention is supposedly to reunite Cruise and his movie star mentees Miles Teller and Glen Powell, as well as Maverick director Joseph Kosinski (though it’s not yet certain if Kosinski will direct or just produce the next installment). Obviously, Maverick writers Kruger and McQuarrie are returning as well. No word if their third screenwriting partner, Eric Warren Singer, is also part of the team. Singer’s cousin and assistant Shaun Gray is currently suing Paramount over the Maverick screenplay; Gray claims he helped write the script but wasn’t properly compensated for his contributions.