Are you a fan of jumping off the deck? Shoving into overdrive? Then you’ve probably spent the last couple of decades wishing and hoping that Hollywood would finally engage the afterburners on a Top Gun 2. Well, now according to Vulture, it may actually happen, and with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Tony Scott and Tom Cruise all involved.
There’s nothing official from Paramount just yet – we’re pretty sure they’ll keep this one locked tight unless and until the big, splashy announcement is made about the return of an action icon. But word is that the studio has made overtures to all the major players, plus Christopher McQuarrie, who collaborated with Cruise on Valkyrie and has apparently cooked up a way to follow a new set of characters while having Pete “Maverick” Mitchell show up. And yes, we expect it’ll be something like him being the dad of a hotshot new pilot (daddy issues were big in the original, you may recall) or being an instructor at the Top Gun Academy - like Viper back in the day.
But we’ll have to wait and see – and that assumes it even comes together, since this is one of those rumours that keeps popping up on the radar, even though no one can seem to get a fix on it.
And while we’re waiting and seeing, we can also cross our fingers to see whether any of the other Guns could be tempted back. Could Val Kilmer be a gruff lecturer? Could Quentin Tarantino do a pass on the script to bring an entirely expected homoerotic subtext?
But as Bruckheimer has pointed out in the past, there might be an issue finding the same level of excitement in the academy’s program these days, with the focus much more on bombing runs than movie-friendly dog-fighting. Back in the day, the only real bomb Maverick dropped was telling Meg Ryan’s Carole that her hubbie wouldn’t be taking her to bed, or anywhere else for that matter, since he was more of a dead duck than a Goose. Too soon? C’mon, it was 1986…