Tom Cruise is fueling up the jet for Top Gun 3

Still feeling the need, the need for speed, Paramount confirmed that the follow-up to 2022's Top Gun: Maverick is taking off.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  April 16, 2026 | 4:21pm
Screenshot: YouTube
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Tom Cruise is fueling up the jet for Top Gun 3

Despite all the talk of death dreams, Maverick is back for another barrel roll. Reporting from CinemaCon, Variety says that Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer are heading back to pilot school for Top Gun 3. The long-awaited follow-up to the legacy sequel, which made $1.5 billion, won an Oscar, and revived the militaristic jingoism that we’re still enjoying today, has been in the works since 2024. At one point, Maverick star Miles Teller claimed to be pitching Top Gun: Rooster, based on his character, but it’s unclear whether Paramount is still flying with that idea or will end up making something about Maverick. So long as they save the title Top Gun: Need 4 Speed for the fourth movie and leave the late Val Kilmer out of this, we’re in good shape. 

Last year, Christopher McQuarrie took a break from adding more exposition to Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning and announced that he had cracked the third movie, claiming that, actually, coming up with an idea for it was easy peasy. “It wasn’t hard,” McQuarrie told Happy Sad Confused in 2025. “I thought it would be […] You walk into the room going, ‘Come on, what are we going to do?’ and [co-writer] 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.”

 
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