Reese Witherspoon compares the upcoming Legally Blonde 3 to Top Gun: Maverick

These days anyone in Hollywood can dust off some old intellectual property and trot it back out, but it takes real movie magic to make a truly successful legacyquel. With Legally Blonde 3 on the horizon, Reese Witherspoon has her eyes on the prize—a.k.a., the biggest box office sequel hit in recent memory.

That’s right, Elle Woods is taking her queues from Maverick (Tom Cruise) this go around. “I’m still hoping that Legally Blonde 3 is gonna come together in the right way,” Witherspoon says in an interview with USA Today. “It’s just like Top Gun: They waited a long time to make another version of that movie, and I loved the nostalgia piece they incorporated in it. So definitely that gave us a lot of inspiration about what we would want to do with Elle Woods and make sure that we had all those same touchstones that mattered to people [back] then.”

Perhaps—similar to Cruise’s Maverick—the film will return to Harvard and have Professor Woods usher in a new generation of female lawyers? Nostalgia wise, it’s a given that the Mindy Kaling and Dan Goor-penned script should include her little dog, lots of pink, and reprised roles for Luke Wilson, Jennifer Coolidge, and Selma Blair (who has expressed her desire for at least a cameo).

And by the way, Elle isn’t the only old IP Witherspoon plans on dusting off. She teases the outlet that she has another project in development that she “can’t really talk about,” in which she’s “reprising a character I played a long time ago.” Tracey Flick’s presidential election? Annette Hargrove with crueler intentions? Melanie Smooter reckons with the pro-Confederate origins of Sweet Home Alabama? Place your bets on which early-catalog Witherspoon comes next!

Whichever character joins the beloved blonde lawyer in getting the Maverick treatment, Witherspoon asks for your trust: “I feel like these characters are my friends, so I safeguard them. I would never make the subpar, mediocre version of their story.” (Please, erase Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde from your memory.)