Goodness gracious — headway has been made on some upcoming collaborations between Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie, the director shared.
Among the films due to come is the sequel to 2022’s blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick, which the Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning helmer said is “already in the bag,” adding that he “already know[s]” what the story is.
“It wasn’t hard,” McQuarrie told Josh Horowitz of cracking the script in a new episode of his Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I thought it would be, and that’s a good place to go from is you walk into the room going, ‘Come on, what are we going to do?’ And [co-writer] Ehren Kruger pitched something and I went, ‘Mm, actually,’ and we had one conversation about it and the framework is there. So, no, it’s not hard to crack. The truth of the matter is, none of these are hard to crack.”
McQuarrie continued, “It’s as you start to execute it, and as you start to interrogate it, as you start [to think] why these movies are made the way they are: It’s not the action, it’s not even the level of or intensity of or the scope and scale of the action [or] the engineering around the action, it’s none of those things — it’s the emotion.”
When asked if he would step into a director role for the threequel (Joseph Kosinski helmed Maverick from a script co-written by McQuarrie, with the original directed by the late Tony Scott), he replied, “I have given that absolutely no thought, no thought whatsoever … However, I have done a lot of research into how to make a Tony Scott movie.”
The Oscar-winning writer also provided updates on a potential Tropic Thunder spinoff for Cruise’s foul-mouthed studio executive character Les Grossman, an idea the dynamic duo has been floating around since 2022.
“Everything is a priority, everything will — in one way or another — happen,” he explained. “It will not necessarily happen in the time or place you think it will. They’re all things we’re talking about, they’re all things we have ideas about, the conversations we have had about Les Grossman are so f—ing funny. We’re talking about it, man, we’re having very serious conversations about it and how best to do it and it ultimately comes down to what that character is.” McQuarrie added that, thus far, he and Cruise are in a brainstorming stage of sorts, saying they would often “play with scenes” in their downtime amid filming Final Reckoning.
As for the Days of Thunder sequel, McQuarrie also stated, “[I] totally [knew] what the premise of the movie would be, in five seconds I knew … and I looked at the response to Top Gun: Maverick and immediately turned to Tom and said, ‘Days of Thunder.‘”
McQuarrie echoed what Cruise himself shared earlier this month, when the four-time Oscar-nominated action star affirmed he’s in development on followups for both Maverick and his 1990 racing drama.
“Yeah, we’re thinking and talking about many different stories and what could we do and what’s possible,” he teased on Australia’s Today. “It took me 35 years to figure out Top Gun: Maverick, so all of these things we’re working on, we’re discussing Days of Thunder and Top Gun: Maverick.”
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