Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski gives exciting update on sequel
As work on the flim continues, director Joseph Kosinski has teased the Top Gun: Maverick sequel will be "much bigger" than the 2022 movie, and will see Tom Cruise's Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell get thrown into a "really existential crisis".
Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski has teased the sequel will be “much bigger” than the 2022 movie.
The 51-year-old filmmaker is set to return for the upcoming action blockbuster in what will be the next instalment in the story of Tom Cruise’s Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, and Kosinski has now revealed the Top Gun: Maverick follow-up will see the titular fighter pilot in a “really existential crisis”.
Speaking with GQ, the F1 director said: “I think we've found a way to do it, not only in the scale of what we're proposing, but the idea itself of the story we're telling.
“We're thinking much bigger than … It's a really existential crisis that Maverick has in this, and it's much bigger than himself.
“It actually … I'm trying to describe it without giving anything away. It's an existential question that Maverick has to deal with, that would make Maverick feel small, I think, as a movie, compared to what we're talking about.”
By the end of Top Gun: Maverick, the naval captain passes the torch to the next generation of pilots like Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw (Miles Teller), Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin (Glen Powell) and Robert ‘Bob’ Floyd (Lewis Pullman), though Kosinski teased there was “still more story to tell” about Cruise’s character.
The director said: “Yeah, there's still more story to tell for him. There's one last ride. So we're working on it now.
“Ehren Kruger, who wrote F1, is writing the script. Like all things, it takes a while to work things out, and we'll only do it if we feel like we've got a strong enough story.”
Top Gun: Maverick - which is the legacy sequel to 1986’s Top Gun and also stars Jennifer Connelly and the late Val Kilmer - follows Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Cruise) as he trains the next generation of TOPGUN pilots while they prepare to carry out a dangerous mission.
Producer Christopher McQuarrie recently said the plot for the Top Gun: Maverick sequel was “already in the bag”.
During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning director said: “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, ‘Mhm 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.”
While Top Gun: Maverick and its 1986 predecessor were praised for their outstanding action and impressive visuals, McQuarrie insisted “emotion” was the key to making a successful film.
He explained: “It’s 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.
“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.”
