Paramount are starting over with their plans for a Top Gun sequel. The Hollywood Reporter say Peter Craig, writer of Ben Affleck's thrilling heist movie The Town, has been hired to put together a brand new screenplay for how the 25 years later sequel will go. All previous ideas have been chucked out with Thor scribes Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz's work presumably chucked in the trash. Having gone back and forth on whether Top Gun 2 should be a Tom Cruise starring vehicle, I'm guessing the huge $675 million worldwide box office from Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol made up their mind for them. It seems inconceivable now that the movie will be anything other than a true Maverick led sequel to the 80's pop culture smash hit now that Cruise is back in the drawing audiences game. Original director Tony Scott was attached at the early stages of development (back when Cruise's new favourite screenwriter/director Chris McQuarrie was writing the film) and spent some time conducting research on how modern aviation warfare has changed and will likely direct. Cruise seems to be insisting on it; I said to Tony , I want to make another movie with him. He and I havent made a film since Days of Thunder. Tony and I and Jerry , we never thought that we would do it again. Then they started to come to us with these ideas of where it is now. I thought, Wow, that would be what we could do now. I hope we can figure this out to go do it again. If we can find a story that we all want to do, we all want to make a film that is in the same kind of tone as the other one and shoot it in the same way as we shot Top Gun Were working on it. Scott on his research; These 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. The movie could be a go project in 2013 for a release in 2014. Obviously no plot details just yet but you can probably look closely at the Tony Scott research for what direction it is heading in. Jerry Bruckheimer Films and David Ellison's Skydance Productions are producing.