When a filmmaker or actor wants to revisit a franchise many years later, it’s usually done for what is (at least to them) a good reason: Bruce Willis appeared in “Live Free or Die Hard” for the money, “The Godfather Part III” was a thinly veiled attempt to get Sofia Coppola to move out of the house, and before the dawn of the 21st century, George Lucas never had the means to turn Yoda into the cracked out Pokémon he was always intended to be.
In an interview with MTV promoting “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” Tom Cruise stated that he really wants to make the much talked about sequel to “Top Gun,” explaining that “we all want to make a film that is in the same kind of tone as the other one and shoot it in the same way as we shot ‘Top Gun.’”
We're not exactly thrilled that Cruise doesn't want to try and take the sequel in any kind of a new direction, but if it ain't broke why fix it. Cruise remains coy whether or not he’s coming back, following the usual line of he'd love to work with [insert person]/if we get a story, saying, “I said to Tony [Scott], I want to make another movie with him. He and I haven’t made a film since 'Days of Thunder.' Tony and I and Jerry [Bruckheimer], we never thought that we would do it again. Then they started to come to us with these ideas of where it is now. I thought, ‘Wow, that would be…what we could do now.”
While McQuarrie has been said to be in the mix to write "Top Gun 2," Cruise confirms the recent reports that he won't be writing the sequel (that job has gone to "X-Men: First Class" writers Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz). "Chris is directing 'One Shot' right now, which I'm acting [in]. We've got to go back in January and finish it," he said.
In this writer's opinion, “One Shot” will a pretty high bar to jump over to be as awesome as McQuarrie's first film, “The Way of the Gun.” But Werner Herzog’s presence as the film’s villain should be a film geek's delight.
If you haven’t seen "The Way of the Gun," the opening scene featuring Sarah Silverman is a good litmus test as to whether or not your tastes are compatible with the rest of the film. And as for the "Top Gun" sequel, we’ll surely be hearing more speculation in the weeks/months/years to come.