TOP GUN 3 Director Joseph Kosinski Teases "Ambitious" Idea With Help From the Navy and Lockheed

After Top Gun: Maverick rocketed past the billion-dollar mark and reignited the legacy of Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, the big question became: What’s next? The answer is starting to come into focus, and it sounds like something that could push the franchise into uncharted airspace.

In a recent interview with ScreenRant, Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski confirmed that Top Gun 3 is in active development, and it won’t be more of the same. He shared:

“Ehren Kruger is writing the script as we speak. It’s a big idea that I spent almost a year developing — working with some friends at the Navy and Lockheed. And yeah, Ehren’s into it now, so we’ll see how it comes along.”

I love that whatever he’s cooking for this third film required months of collaboration with actual Navy personnel and Lockheed engineers. It’s all because the idea was just too big to ignore. He added:

“It was about coming up with an idea that — again — felt like a new challenge. Something that opens up the story in a way you just can’t let go. And I think the idea is so ambitious. That’s what’s exciting to me.”

Kosinski isn’t the only returning name in the cockpit. Christopher McQuarrie, who co-wrote Maverick and has been busy steering the Mission: Impossible franchise, is also onboard, and according to him, the story came together faster than expected.

“It wasn’t hard. 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 Ehren Kruger pitched something and I went, ‘Mhm actually,’ and we had one conversation about it and the framework is there.”

That "framework" will build on the emotional and thematic core of Top Gun: Maverick, a film that found new depth in Maverick’s role as a mentor, his unresolved history with Goose’s son, and his brush with obsolescence in a rapidly modernizing military.

While details on Top Gun 3 remain tightly under wraps, the involvement of Lockheed and the Navy suggests that whatever Kosinski and team have planned, it’s going to lean heavily into the bleeding edge of aerial warfare, and probably ask some tough questions about the future of fighter pilots in an age of unmanned drones and AI systems.

Until then, Top Gun fans can take comfort in knowing that the next mission is in the works and that it’s being crafted with the same care, technical precision, and story-driven focus that made Maverick a modern action classic.