Going by Tom Cruise’s social media accounts, production has just taken off on Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to the 1986 classic summer blockbuster. Cruise posted a shot of himself as elite Navy flying ace Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (see it below) looking back at a fighter jet and overlayed with part of one of the original film’s most famous tag lines, “Feel The Need.” In the caption, Cruise wrote #Day1 and tagged producer Jerry Bruckheimer and David Ellison’s Skydance Media. Paramount Pictures will release the sequel on July 12, 2019 domestically with international rollout beginning just ahead of that.

Joseph Kosinski is directing in a reteam with Cruise — they previously made sci-fi pic Oblivion together. Cruise is again Maverick who’s now a flight instructor in the modern Navy. There is still no word on co-stars, but Cruise said last summer, “It’s going to be a competition film like the first one, and it’s going to be in the same vein and the same tone as the first” with “the need for speed and big, fast machines.” And, yeah, “There’s gonna be jets.”

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A sequel to the 1986 Tony Scott-directed action drama has long been in development and got close several years ago. But Scott’s untimely death shelved the project. Paramount has long been in the Tom Cruise business (it’s releasing Mission: Impossible – Fallout on July 26) and this gives them another big summer marquee title with a built-in fanbase.

The original, which also starred Anthony Edwards, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Tom Skerritt and Meg Ryan, made $357M worldwide, won an Original Song Oscar for “Take My Breath Away,” spawned a 9x platinum soundtrack, boosted the sale of Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses by 40% and breathed new life into the Porsche 356 Speedster and The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”

Here’s Cruise’s tweet from today: