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With Tom Cruise making his exit from the Mission Impossible series this year, it sounds like he is ready to wind down one of his other iconic roles as well. Top Gun 3, the sequel to the box office behemoth that was Top Gun: Maverick, focuses on Tom Cruise’s Maverick having “one last ride.”

This comes from an interview that director Joseph Kosinski gave to promote the upcoming F1 movie. When asked how he was going to bring Tom Cruise back to Top Gun 3 when Maverick felt so much like a torch-passing moment, Kosinski said, “Yeah, there’s still more story to tell for him. There’s one last ride. So we’re working on it now. Ehren Kruger, who wrote F1, is writing the script. Like all things, it takes a while to work things out, and we’ll only do it if we feel like we’ve got a strong enough story.”

Don’t expect that “last ride” to be a pleasant one for Maverick. “It’s a really existential crisis that Maverick has in this, and it’s much bigger than himself… It’s an existential question that Maverick has to deal with that would make Maverick feel small, I think, as a movie, compared to what we’re talking about.”

With the team still working on the script, it will be a long time before we actually see Top Gun 3 in cinemas. However, it sounds like Tom Cruise may be in for a rough time in the third (and potentially final) movie in the Top Gun series.

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