Top Gun: Maverick was one of the biggest movies of last year, so it’s no surprise that there are still a lot of questions about whether or not we might get a follow-up, preferably one that doesn’t take three decades to complete. It turns out one person who might have the ability to convince Tom Cruise to make a third movie is his Maverick co-star Glen Powell, because, oh by the way, it turns out the two are good friends now.
Tom Cruise is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, so he almost certainly has a lot of people asking for his time, but apparently, Glen Powell gets some of it. He recently told Extra at the premiere of Anyone But You that he and Cruise actually talk “all the time” and it’s apparently not about business, as they haven’t discussed a new Top Gun. Powell said…
I talk to Tom all the time, but we don't talk about Top Gun 2. He and Jerry [Bruckheimer], if they want to make Top Gun 2 — or 3, technically — he has my number.
We knew that Cruise and Powell had become friendly enough that he made Cruise’s Christmas list last season. Every year Tom Cruise sends people a particular cake as a Christmas gift, and Powell has talked about the party he has when the cake arrives. But based on reports he sends the same cake to just about everybody he has ever worked with or met, so that on its own wasn’t a clear determination of the relationship the pair have.
It sounds like they really became friends on the set of Top Gun: Maverick if they actually talk frequently, and about things that are not specifically Top Gun-related. It seems unlikely that Tom Cruise talked to everybody in the Top Gun: Maverick cast that often. Now I want to know what they do talk about. Do they have similar hobbies? Do they talk about other movies they've seen? Of course, if plans for Top Gun 3 ever did move forward it seems likely that would become a primary topic of conversation between the two of them.
The film’s billion-dollar success certainly has to be enticing to everybody who made money from the last Top Gun, but the good news is that nobody is rushing to cash in on a sequel quickly without thinking things through. While we certainly won't be seeing Top Gun 3 on the 2024 movie release schedule, there have to be people who are at least contemplating a Top Gun 3, and maybe, if they come up with an idea that gets buy-in from Cruise, it could happen.
Even if we never get another Top Gun movie, that’s okay. We got Maverick, which is an excellent film that took decades to actually produce, and if it hadn’t happened then Tom Cruise and Glen Powell wouldn’t have become besties, so clearly everything worked out.
