Paramount Hiring Writers For 'Top Gun 2'

Yep, the sequel/follow-up to Top Gun is still happening. Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz, who were jointly responsible for one of the middle drafts of X-Men: First Class, are in talks to write Top Gun 2 (or whatever it will eventually be called) for Paramount and David Ellison's Skydance Productions.

There's no plot to report at this time, and without the script we have no idea how casting might break down. This time last year we heard that there might be a small role for Tom Cruise in the sequel — Maverick could have grown up to be an instructor, for example. We don't know if that remains part of the plan.

Not long after that plan was announced, 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.

OK, not a sequel, then? (Keep in mind this is the same guy whose brother said Prometheus was no longer a prequel to Alien, which is pretty demonstrably false.) Somehow I expect that this will be marketed very much as a sequel, at the very least, especially if Tom Cruise gets involved. [Variety]