Waiting decades to make a sequel to a beloved movie is often a recipe for disaster, but “Top Gun: Maverick” has proven that it doesn’t have to be. The blockbuster received rave reviews from critics and earned the biggest box office success of Tom Cruise’s career, proving there’s a real appetite for well-made legacy sequels. Some of Hollywood’s biggest names studied the film’s success in hopes of finding a way to incorporate the same magic into their own projects. Much easier said than done, but Reese Witherspoon is ready to try.

In a new interview with USA todayWitherspoon gave an update on “Legally Blonde 3and expressed his hope that the long-awaited sequel can strike the same balance of nostalgia and fresh faces that lifted “Maverick” so high.

“I’m still hoping ‘Legally Blonde 3’ will come together in the right way,” she said. “It’s like ‘Top Gun’: they’ve waited a long time to make another version of that movie, and I loved the nostalgic part that they put into it. So that definitely gave us a lot of inspiration on what we would like to do with Elle Woods and make sure we had all of those same touchstones that mattered to people. [back] then.”

Witherspoon added that, like Cruise, she’s extremely protective of Elle Woods and the franchise that helped make her a star. The long wait for the sequel to materialize stems from its extremely high standards for the series.

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