raigraphixs
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Reports say Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (Valkyrie) is working on an idea for Top Gun 2, and Paramount is eager to get the project up and running, with offers out to the original producer/director team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott to return. McQuarrie has even devised a way to include Tom Cruise in a minor reprisal of his role as Maverick, by all accounts he is ready to return.
Paramount would no doubt like to see Top Gun become a franchise, too: The original film grossed $353 million worldwide, or roughly $699 million in today's dollars.
But why the move to make a sequel now, all of sudden? We're told that a big part of the reason is the influence of David Ellison, the 27-year-old son of Oracle Corp. founder — and world's sixth-richest man — Larry Ellison. Despite being only three years old when Top Gun first strafed theaters, Ellison clearly became a big fan of the film on VHS, and went on to become both an aerobatic pilot and instrument-rated commercial pilot before attending USC's film school and then ;aunching his own production company, Skydance. His first production was the 2006 World War I drama Flyboys, in which he also starred. It bombed, but Ellison didn't lose his taste for the movie business: Just this August, Ellison the Younger left his Skydance offices (located at Santa Monica Municipal Airport, where Ellison still keeps several small aircraft), swung by JPMorganChase, and raised $350 million to co-finance much of Paramount's slate of films. The first of which will be…wait for it… Mission: Impossible 4, starring Tom Cruise.
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