“I’m still hoping that Legally Blonde 3 is gonna come together in the right way,” she said. “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.”

Witherspoon added, “I feel like these characters are my friends, so I safeguard them. I would never make the subpar, mediocre version of their story.”

Top Gun: Maverick finally made it to theaters in May, 36 years after Tom Cruise first starred as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in the original 1986 blockbuster.

Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, has crossed the billion-dollar mark at the worldwide box office–Cruise’s first film to do so–and earlier this month hit $600 million domestically.

Director Robert Luketic’s Legally Blonde introduced audiences to Witherspoon’s unlikely Harvard Law student, Elle Woods, when it debuted in theaters in July 2001.

A below-mediocre sequel followed two years later.

In 2018, Witherspoon said she wass in talks to reprise her role as Elle for Legally Blonde 3, and two years later, Mindy Kaling and Dan Goor signed on to write the script.

Later in 2020, MGM posted message to its official Twitter account announcing May 2022 release, but the project does not currently have a scheduled release.