Paramount Looks To 'The Town' Writer For New 'Top Gun 2' Approach

For a little while now, we've known that Paramount, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and potentially director Tony Scott want to make a sequel of some sort to Scott's mid-'80s Tom Cruise blockbuster Top Gun. Last year Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz, writers who contributed to X-Men: First Class, were tapped to craft the new Top Gun script. As it turns out, they never actually wrote anything for the film, but that doesn't meant that the dogfighting sequel has crashed and burned.

Now Paramount has hired a new screenwriter: Peter Craig, the chief screenwriter on The Town, will now script for David Ellison's Skydance Productions, Bruckheimer and Paramount.

Variety has the news of the hire and not much more; we can go forward with the supposition that Scott and Cruise will be involved in some manner with the new film, but we don't yet know how. Too bad the hire of Christopher McQuarrie to write, which we heard about early in the news cycle for the sequel, never seems to have happened.

A little while after the point when McQuarrie's name was being thrown around a bit, as news started to break that this might really go into development, original Top Gun director Tony Scott said of this new project,

It's not even a reinvention, it's not even a sequel. It's a re-thinking. What inspired me is that the world today is great, it's so different from the world we touched originally. It's really run by guys sitting in Nevada on computers playing war games. So it's a mixture of that, and it's the end of the generation of fighter pilots. Not in a complete end to the generation, because these guys they go up in F-35s and they carry 10 drones with them. [But] it's a very different movie.

Whether any of that holds true, and whether there may still be a small part in the film for Tom Cruise remains to be seen. I'd guess hopes for the Cruise appearance remain high, if Craig can write something of which the actor approves, because the actor's public image is a lot better now than it was a couple years ago when this project started to percolate.