If Top Gun 3 is going to be as moving and engaging as Top Gun: Maverick, then it needs to bring back a key legacy character from the 1986 original.
Since the unexpected $1.4 billion box office success of Top Gun: Maverick, there has naturally been a lot of discussion of a third movie. Paramount probably won’t wait another 36 years to make it happen. As soon as Tom Cruise is done with the two-part finale of the Mission: Impossible series, the studio will likely pressure him to return to his other action-packed franchise. If Cruise is willing to get back in the cockpit for a third high-flying, high-octane Top Gun movie, then there’s one key legacy character from the original film that needs to make an on-screen return. When Top Gun 3 inevitably gets made, Cruise isn’t the only cast member who should come back.
Top Gun: Maverick brought back Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, now a captain, as the lead character, and featured a poignant cameo appearance by Val Kilmer as his rival-turned-wingman Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. Other than Maverick’s new love interest Penny Benjamin, who was mentioned in an off-hand remark in the first movie as “the admiral’s daughter,” everyone else in the Top Gun sequel is an original creation. It would be great to see a lot of these new characters return in a potential Top Gun 3 if there’s room for them in the story – Glen Powell as Hangman, Monica Barbaro as Phoenix, Lewis Pullman as Bob – but the one character the threequel needs to succeed is a deep cut from the Tony Scott original.
The plot of Top Gun: Maverick revolves around the titular renegade fighter pilot becoming a reluctant father figure to his late best friend Goose’s son, Lieutenant Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw, played by Miles Teller. Rooster’s mother Carole Bradshaw, played by Meg Ryan in the original 1986 movie, is a significant presence in Top Gun: Maverick. Maverick promised her he’d keep Rooster out of the Navy and ended up reluctantly breaking that promise, but Carole herself never appeared on-screen. For Top Gun 3 to have the same emotional impact as Top Gun 2, it needs to bring back Ryan for a powerhouse performance as a widow trying to save her son from the same fate her husband met.
In an interview with Screen Rant, Teller pitched a third Top Gun movie that would revolve around his character: “I’m trying to get a Top Gun: Rooster. I’ve been pitching it. We’ll see what happens.” Rooster could take the torch from Maverick and become the new lead of the franchise as Maverick retires to a Ben Kenobi-style mentor role. If Rooster takes center stage in Top Gun 3, then there’s no excuse to not feature his mother in the main cast – or, at the very least, in a brief but powerful Iceman-style cameo appearance. It didn’t make sense to not include Carole in Top Gun: Maverick. She looms large over the sequel’s story as the reason Rooster’s military career is being held back, but she doesn’t appear in a single scene (except for archival footage from the original movie). The threequel can make up for Carole’s absence from the first sequel with a big role in the second one.
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