The recent announcement of a Top Gun 2 fueled almost entirely by corporate vanity certainly doesn’t scream “innovation,” but that’s exactly what director Tony Scott intends to do with it. In an interview with HitFix, Scott vowed that his return to what we can now call a franchise would be neither “remake” nor “reinvention,” but rather an all new movie examining the “the end of the era of fighter pilots”—specifically, the fact that RayBan-sporting flyboys doing mid-air acrobatics to a Kenny Loggins soundtrack have more or less been replaced by “computer geeks—these kids play war games in a trailer in Fallon, Nevada and if we ever went to war or were in the Middle East or the Far East or wherever it is, these guys can actually fly drones. They are unmanned aircraft. They operate them and then they party all night."
Scott seems to be basing all of those assumptions about what the modern-day Navy is like on a random encounter he had with a hungover pilot he met coming back from Vegas one time, but at least he says he plans to head down to Fallon soon to research said computer geeks in person. However, don’t get too excited yet: Scott says the sequel is not an immediate priority for him, meaning it’s still at least a few years away, giving Tom Cruise plenty of time to grow out his Tom Skerritt mustache.