Christopher McQuarrie says the plot of 'Top Gun 3' is 'already in the bag'

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The plot of Top Gun 3 is “already in the bag,” according to Christopher McQuarrie.

The filmmaker, who co-wrote and produced Top Gun: Maverick, recently appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, where he talked about the upcoming sequel to the 2022 smash hit film.

McQuarrie told podcast host Josh Horowitz the film is “already in the bag” and that he “already know[s]” its story.

“It wasn’t hard,” McQuarrie said of figuring out the script. “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.”

The writer/director then explained why that is.

“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,” McQuarrie said.

Joseph Kosinski directed Top Gun: Maverick. When asked if McQuarrie would direct the third Top Gun movie instead, the filmmaker said he had given that “absolutely no thought, no thought whatsoever.”

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