'Top Gun 3' Is Officially Happening, Hopefully Lewis Hamilton Has Time To Be In This One
Great news for fans of fighter jet drama and action stars who refuse to age: "Top Gun 3" is officially happening. In an announcement at Thursday's CinemaCon in Las Vegas, Paramount boss Josh Greenstein said a third 'Top Gun' movie is "officially in development with a script well underway, reuniting Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer," per The Hollywood Reporter.
The last time we saw Tom Cruise fly an F-14 in IMAX was in 2022's wildly successful "Top Gun: Maverick," a long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic that made $1.5 billion worldwide and, according to many people including Steven Spielberg, may have been the movie to "save" moviegoing as a concept post-pandemic. With all that in mind, a sequel was almost inevitable. Not much else is known about Maverick's next adventure, but if we had one request for the moviemaking powers that be: Please let Lewis Hamilton be in this one.
For those unfamiliar with Hamilton-Hollywood lore, the seven-time F1 champ and Cruise have been buddies for more than a decade, and according to a 2024 GQ profile, Hamilton once asked to be in the "Top Gun" sequel, even if it meant a split-second cameo as "a janitor." When "Top Gun: Maverick" started production, Hamilton was actually offered the role of a pilot. But this being 2018, he was busy fending off Sebastian Vettel on track for his fifth world title and had to turn it down, a decision he apparently regrets after he saw the movie in 2022.
He already produced an Oscar winner
In 2026, Lewis Hamilton finds himself in a significantly different era. That eighth title is far from an inevitability. He's posting up at Daikoku PA in Ferrari F40s. He's dating Kim Kardashian. And he recently got a taste of filmmaking, serving as a producer on last year's "F1" movie, making sure it didn't stray too far from the realities of Formula 1 racing. Spoilers, but he also appears onscreen in that movie's final act, serving as the on-track antagonist.
"F1," by the way, was also directed by Joseph Kosinski and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, the same duo behind "Top Gun: Maverick," and was made with a deliberately similar "we filmed most of this wild stuff for real" approach as "Maverick." The upcoming third film has yet to have a director, but given Cruise and Bruckheimer are confirmed to be involved and that Lewis finds himself with a lot more bandwidth for this sort of thing now, it's about time we finally saw history's winningest F1 driver in the canopy of a fictionalized fighter jet.
Look, we've already come up with his callsign: Goat.