Now that “Top Gun: Maverick” has zoomed past the $1 billion mark for the global box office, at least two of its stars have begun conversations on whether to make a follow-up film.
What Happened: Miles Teller, who plays Rooster opposite Tom Cruise’s Maverick in the Paramount PARAA release, told Entertainment Tonight that the decision to move forward on a third installment in the franchise is contingent on Cruise.
"That would be great, but that's all up to TC," Teller said. "It's all up to Tom. I've been having some conversations with him about it. We'll see."
Teller added that the experience of being part of the year’s top grossing film has been without precedent.
"For him to share Top Gun with me and a lot of these other young actors it's just been such a wild ride, and it's still going," he added.
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What Could Happen: The original “Top Gun” was released in 1986 — one year before Teller’s birth. It took 36 years before its sequel hit the big screen. Cruise had long declined efforts to do a sequel and the project was put on a two-year hiatus after original "Top Gun" director Tony Scott committed suicide in 2012. Cruise finally agreed to return to the Maverick character in 2016.
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The film was originally slated for release in June 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic shut down theaters. Paramount toyed with a July 2021 premiere, but audience attendance at the recently-reopened theaters was not at the level that satisfied the studio. Then there was a planned November 2021 release, but with the rise of the omicron variant of COVID, Paramount withdrew nearly all of its titles from an autumn 2021 release and repositioned “Top Gun: Maverick” to the Memorial Day weekend in 2022.
Cruise is currently working on the seventh and eighth installments of “Mission: Impossible,” which are scheduled for release in July 2023 and July 2024, respectively. The actor has no other announced projects beyond those two films.
Photo: Miles Teller and Tom Cruise in "Top Gun: Maverick," courtesy of Paramount
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