‘I’m crying’: Vin Diesel’s update on stalled Fast & Furious franchise’s final film
These movies usually come out like clockwork, but they just can’t seem to get their act together for the promised 11th and supposedly final movie.
You have to give it to the Fast and Furious movies, because they come at you fast and furiously.
Since 2001, the Vin Diesel-starring films about rev-heads have continued apace with reliable regularity. Every couple of years, a new flash of souped-up motors have raced across the big screen with as much vigour as Diesel’s earnest speechifying about family.
The way his onscreen avatar, Dominic Toretto, grandstands about family, you’d think he was running for American political office.
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That’s five Fast-free years. The movies have become such a barometer of time passing (oh, it’s been another two years?) we don’t know what to do with ourselves. Does anyone have a sundial we could borrow, or a calendar?
Within a month of Fast X’s release in 2023, Diesel, the franchise guardian, announced the sequel would land in 2025, as per its usual schedule.
The Hollywood strikes later that year put that plan out of action, and the following year, director Louis Leterrier said it had been pushed to 2026.
By mid-2025, not a single frame of footage had been shot, and Diesel said the production was now aiming for a 2027 release. Not so, the studio said later that year, with Universal confirming that there was now no release date. Since then, it’s been dated for 2028.
Fast and Furious, what are you doing?
There were some behind-the-scenes quibbles over budget and screentime – the Wall Street Journal reported in October that Universal wanted to budget to come in under $US200 million.
Fast X’s costs ballooned to a reported $US340 million and barely eked out a profit if any during its cinema run. It grossed $US714 million which sounds like a lot, but isn’t at that budget, and is half the ticket sales of its peak, Furious 7, which made $US1.5 billion.
Like most of Hollywood’s big screen franchises, it’s a case of diminishing returns as audiences tire of long-running series. The past three Fast and Furious movies have struggled to crack $US750 million (full disclosure, Fast 9 was released in 2021, a COVID year).
But at the same time, the films’ production budgets have blown out as the stunts became more and more ambitious (or preposterous) and more expensive actors such as Dwayne Johnson, Helen Mirren and Charlize Theron joined the franchise.
The later films now bear little resemblance to that first movie released in 2001, a $US40 million action-drama about an undercover cop who infiltrated a group of Los Angeles street racers who were secretly heisters.
If that sounds like Point Break but with engines instead of boards, well, you said it.
For the past 15 years, the Fast and Furious movies have become more like Mission: Impossible instalments as Toretto and his now globetrotting gang have been called on to foil terrorism plots and solve geopolitical quandaries.
They blew up Rome’s Spanish Steps, and two characters went into space. It’s been a lot.
Whether it’s because of budgetary necessity or because its filmmakers have recognised that the franchise was creatively spinning its wheels, the next and allegedly final film, Fast Forever, has promised to return to basics.
Diesel has said it will go back to LA, focus on street racing culture, and bring back Toretto’s original partner, Brian (played by Paul Walker, who died in 2013).
Over the weekend, while promoting the 25th anniversary release of the first film, Diesel posted that he had read the script for Fast Forever.
“It is the best script I have read in decades. I am still crying,” he wrote.
He added that the forthcoming instalment will tie into the original film, and that fans will “thank god you got to see the first one in the theatres this summer”.
Maybe that’s just bit of canny marketing, but it at least signals that they’re sincere about stripping Fast and Furious to its roots.
But first it still has to resolve where Fast X left its characters – falling off the side of a dam that’s been exploded and, uh, emerging from a submarine. Which is not exactly low key.
Fast Forever is due for release in March 2028, apparently
