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By India McCarty
The TOP GUN movies are winging their way back to theaters next month in honor of the first movie’s 40th anniversary.
“If you feel the need…Two films. One big screen. Back in theaters, May 13th, for one week only,” Tom Cruise posted on Instagram.
Related: Tom Cruise Flies Back Into Theaters for TOP GUN 3
TOP GUN premiered in 1986, starring Cruise, Val Kilmer, Kelly McGillis, Anthony Edwards and Meg Ryan. Sequel TOP GUN: MAVERICK debuted in 2022. Cruise and Kilmer reprised their roles, joined by Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Jennifer Connelly, Monica Barbaro, Lewis Pullman and Jon Hamm.
MAVERICK went on to make $1.4 billion at the box office, making it one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
At this year’s CinemaCon, Paramount confirmed that a third TOP GUN movie is officially on the way. TOP GUN 3 has been in development since 2024, with producer Jerry Bruckheimer saying at the time, “We pitched Tom a story he liked. But he’s a very in-demand actor and he’s got a lot of movies lined up, so we have to wait and see.”
In 2025, Cruise updated fans on how TOP GUN 3 was going, telling Australia’s TODAY, “We’re thinking and talking about many different stories and what could we do and what’s possible. It took me 35 years to figure out TOP GUN: MAVERICK.”
Longtime Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, who co-wrote and produced TOP GUN: MAVERICK, told the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that the script’s story was “already in the bag.”
“It wasn’t hard,” he said. “I thought it would be, and that’s a good place to go from as you walk into the room going, ‘Come on, what are we going to do?’ And [MAVERICK co-writer] 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.”
McQuarrie continued, “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.”
There’s no word yet on when TOP GUN 3 will hit theaters, but in the meantime, check out TOP GUN and TOP GUN: MAVERICK starting May 13, for one week only!
Read Next: Why Paramount Is Prioritizing TOP GUN 3
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