Christopher McQuarrie says he’s cracked the code for Top Gun 3

With the new Mission: Impossible movie setting records for the series, talk has turned to another Tom Cruise franchise, with Christopher McQaurrie saying he’s cracked the code for Top Gun 3, and that the story is “already in the bag.”

In spite of the fact that Mission: Impossible 8 has just enjoyed a record-breaking opening weekend, the movie is subtitled The Final Reckoning, suggesting it might be the end of the road for Ethan Hunt.

But Tom Cruise isn’t an actor who stays still for long, and he’s currently working on an as-yet-untitled movie for Alejandro González Iñárritu.

While his longtime collaborator Christopher McQuarrie – with whom he’s made multiple M:I movies – has been dropping hints about a new Top Gun.

Christopher McQuarrie has figured out Top Gun 3

Christopher McQuarrie hasn’t directed a Top Gun movie, but he contributed to the Maverick script – alongside the likes of Eric Warren Singer and Ehren Kruger – and in a new interview, says he’s cracked the code for Top Gun 3.

Telling the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he’s figured the story out, McQuarrie says: “It wasn’t hard. I thought it would be, and that’s a good place to go from is 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 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.”

The writer-director continues: “It’s as you start to execute it, and as you start to interrogate it, as you start [to consider] why these movies are made the way they are: 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.”

Tony Scott directed the first Top Gun while Joseph Kosinski helmed Top Gun: Maverick, and while McQuarrie would be drawn on whether he’d take the reigns of Top Gun 3 – claiming he’s given it “no thought whatsoever” – he did add that “I have done a lot of research into how to make a Tony Scott movie.”