Since Top Gun 3 will likely address Maverick’s retirement, the sequel should achieve this via Top Gun: Maverick’s wasted original story. While Top Gun: Maverick was a critical and commercial triumph, the sequel’s success was not easily won. Top Gun: Maverick arrived in theaters over thirty-five years after the original Top Gun, with the movie taking over three decades to complete production before leaving viewers waiting for another two years thanks to release-date delays. During that time, Top Gun: Maverick went through many different incarnations, and some of the movie’s early drafts were nothing like what viewers eventually saw.
Bizarrely, one terrible early Top Gun: Maverick idea would have seen Tom Cruise play a minor role, and this part wasn’t even the part of Maverick. However, not all of the Top Gun sequel’s early ideas were so potentially disastrous. Before his untimely death, action legend/ original Top Gun director Tony Scott had a plan for the sequel that would have melded real-life political commentary with Maverick’s career journey as a renegade test pilot. Almost all traces of this potential Top Gun: Maverick plot were erased from the finished sequel, but luckily, this means that Top Gun 3 could still address this plot line.
Tony Scott’s Original Top Gun: Maverick Pitch
Tony Scott envisioned a Top Gun sequel that addressed the waning relevance of real-life Navy test pilots thanks to advances in drone warfare. Fortunately, Top Gun 3 could revive this plot by seeing Maverick working with the drone operators who have come to replace a significant chunk of the Navy’s pilots. Scott’s Top Gun: Maverick pitch was about the drone pilots who fly unmanned drones and, specifically, how Maverick would interact with the new technology and its impact on his life’s work. As Scott noted, drone pilots are still considered test pilots, and some of them even manned drones when the crafts were first developed.
Why This Story Still Works For Top Gun 3
In the world of the Top Gun movies, Maverick’s retirement is overdue. This means it would make sense for him to take on a less involved role, like providing drone operators with his decades of experience as a test pilot. Not only that, but Maverick has just proven that he is a world-class strategist and an accomplished pilot, so drone operators could use his expertise as the Navy phases out manned aircraft. One throwaway line in Top Gun: Maverick alludes to this, but the sequel never really leans into the idea that Maverick is becoming a living relic.
However, if the character is one of the few living pilots who could pull off Top Gun: Maverick’s risky test run, then he would be an invaluable resource for drone operators. Part of what fascinated Scott about drone warfare was the detached nature of the conflict, with the director noting that a pilot could be sitting in a trailer in Nevada as they flew drones in “the Middle East or Far East.” Top Gun: Maverick ignored this technological breakthrough by introducing a rare mission that happened to still require manned aircraft, thus allowing the filmmakers to act as if drone warfare hasn’t rapidly replaced most in-person flying over the last decade.
Top Gun 3’s Drone Plot Could End Maverick’s Story
By depicting the Navy pivoting away from manned craft and toward drones, Top Gun 3 could give Maverick’s career a dignified ending. It is tough to see how Top Gun 3 will end Maverick’s story, but the last thing that the sequel should do is drag him back into another high-risk mission. While this might seem fun, Top Gun: Maverick’s life-or-death mission worked so well because Maverick had lived an incomplete life since Top Gun’s ending. He wasn’t able to open up to others or forgive himself for his role in Goose’s death even decades later, meaning that he never found peace.
However, Top Gun: Maverick’s ending changed that. Maverick ended up in a stable, happy relationship with his love interest, Jennifer Connelly’s Penny. He also managed to work through his grief over losing Goose by saying Goose’s son, Rooster, at the end of their mission and earning his forgiveness. As such, since Top Gun: Maverick’s romance and its Rooster plot line gave Maverick the closure that he needed, it wouldn’t make sense for the character to take another life-endangering mission. What would make sense would be for Top Gun 3 to see the hero of Top Gun: Maverick come to terms with his fading relevance, as Scott’s story suggested.