Justin Marks to Pen Top Gun 2?

September 9th, 2014 by Dave Bowling Comments

Justin Marks, writer behind Disney’s new live-action version of The Jungle Book, is reportedly in negotiations to work on Top Gun 2.

The move, reports THR, will kick-start the long-awaited sequel and comes after the recent arrival of producer Jerry Bruckheimer at Paramount Pictures. After years with a studio deal at Disney, Bruckheimer moved to Paramount in April. David Ellison of Skydance is also producing, with the production company’s Dana Goldberg as exec producer.

Tom Cruise is slated to return as ace pilot Maverick in a story that will purportedly show the relevance of human pilots in a war environment that is rapidly becoming dominated by unmanned drones and electronic warfare.

Peter Craig, writer of Ben Affleck’s The Town, worked on a draft a few years ago but the project lost some jet fuel with the death of director Tony Scott in 2012. With Bruckheimer on board it now seems like things may be moving again.

Still not sure this is a good thing, though. Maybe the ‘classics’ should just be left alone. And since Tom Cruise was too short to see out of the cockpit of an F-14 I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t fare any better with the newer F-18E and F-35C…

Dave was born at an early age to parents of both sexes. He has been a self-confessed geek for as long as he can remember, having been raised through the 80s on a steady diet of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Red Dwarf and (sigh) Knight Rider. Throw the usual assortment of Saturday morning cartoons into the mix and we have something quite exceptional: someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of utter tosh; a love of giant robots and spaceships fighting; and the strange desire to leap tall buildings in a single bound while wearing his underpants over his trousers. The death ray is currently in the works and one day you shall all bow to him, his giant space station and fleet of funky orange space shuttles...