With Top Gun: Maverick soaring high at the box office, it is not surprising that actor Jon Cryer has started calling for Hot Shots! 3. Back in 1991, Cryer starred with Charlie Sheen, Cary Elwes, Lloyd Bridges, and Valeria Golino in Hot Shots!, a movie that mercilessly parodied the original Tom Cruise movie, and also gained itself a sequel two years later. While Hot Shots! Part Deux upped its game from mainly poking fun at Top Gun and moved on to movies like Rambo, that doesn’t mean a third movie couldn’t return to its roots.
Top Gun: Maverick is a stunning return for Cruise, not only being hailed as a great sequel but possibly the greatest legacy sequel of all time, and the box office numbers and critic reviews have certainly backed that up. As nostalgia is such a big money-maker at the moment, it could be argued that now would be the perfect time to see Hot Shots! take off again, something that Cryer would certainly be happy to see. In a Twitter post, he said:
“Just saw Top Gun: Maverick. Think it’s time to reunite with Sheen for Hot Shots: Part Tres.”
Of course, at the moment, this is nothing more than a throwaway comment by Cryer, but we all know where that can lead once the interest latches onto an idea. Following in the vein of The Naked Gun and Airplane!, Hot Shots! was a style of comedy that has been mostly dormant of late, and it is one that many would be happy to see make a return, which Hot Shots! 3 could provide.
Top Gun: Maverick Has Surpassed All Expectations
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When it was announced that Tom Cruise would be returning to the role of Maverick in the much-belated sequel to Top Gun, there were a lot of questions about whether it would be worth it or whether it was too late for the franchise to make a successful comeback. However, after a two-year delay due to the Covid pandemic, the first critic reviews started to trickle in with nothing but good things to say about the film, something that continued into audience reactions and finally saw Top Gun: Maverick earn Paramount their highest ever opening weekend, broke Memorial Day weekend box offices and has become Tom Cruise’s biggest move of his career.
While making the sequel a success is one thing, someone doing the same thing with a new parody movie based on the franchise is a completely different prospect. Comedy comes and goes in waves, and while it has been a long while since the parody movie has been popular, news that Liam Neeson could be about to star in a revival of The Naked Gun could well help open the floodgates on the first new wave of such movies since Scary Movie revitalized the industry. For now, we can only live in hope of a Hot Shots! threequel, but for the real thing, Top Gun: Maverick is playing in theaters worldwide now.