A few years back, filmmaker Joseph Kosinski, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and actor Tom Cruise teamed on “Top Gun: Maverick,” ushering in massive critical and commercial success that was widely seen as one of the post-pandemic box-office saviours.
This week sees the release of “F1,” the Brad Pitt-led racing car feature, which has Kosinski helming and Bruckheimer producing. Early reviews have been very good, and the hope is it will potentially recapture some of that ‘Maverick’ magic.
Cruise and Bruckheimer are also developing a ‘Maverick’ style follow-up to the 1990 NASCAR racing feature “Days of Thunder,” an early star vehicle for Cruise that followed his success with the original “Top Gun”.
Cruise and Pitt also worked together on Neil Jordan’s “Interview with the Vampire” back in the 1990s, with Cruise coming out to support “F1” and reuniting with Pitt on the red carpet of the film’s premiere the other week.
It turns out that all this behind-the-scenes interconnection may actually spill out in front of the camera as well. In a recent interview with GQ (via The Playlist), Kosinski was asked about pairing Cruise and Pitt together on screen again to which he revealed his dream pitch – a “Days of Thunder” and “F1” crossover:
“Right now, it’d be Cole Trickle [Cruise’s Days of Thunder character]. We find out that he and Sonny Hayes [Pitt’s F1 character] have a past. They were rivals at some point, maybe crossed paths… I heard about this epic go-kart battle on Interview with the Vampire that Brad and Tom had, and who wouldn’t pay to see those two go head-to-head on the track?”
Kosinski is said to be circling, or at least involved in some capacity, on the “Days of Thunder” sequel in development, and so this seems like a possibility – especially if F1 does well. That film is currently on track for a $40-50 million opening weekend.
As for a potential third “Top Gun” which is currently being written, Kosinski says:
“I think we’ve found a way to do it, not only in the scale of what we’re proposing, but the idea itself of the story we’re telling. We’re thinking much bigger than…It’s a really existential crisis that Maverick has in this, and it’s much bigger than himself.
It actually… I’m trying to describe it without giving anything away. [Laughs.] 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.
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.”
Kosinski currently has multiple projects in the works including a UFO mystery thriller with Apple, and a new “Miami Vice” film at Universal.
