Vin Diesel has pretty much put rumours of a sixth and seventh Fast and the Furious film to rest this week by stepping out of the shadows to pretty much (two important words there) confirm them.
Speaking on the writing process of the much touted sixth film (a process that I’m sure is ably aided by a veritable surfeit of Hot Wheels miniatures and a lot of vroom vroom sound effects) he has stated:
With the success of this last one, and the inclusion of so many characters, and the broadening of scope, when we were sitting down to figure out what would fit into the real estate of number six, we didn’t have enough space. We have to pay off this story, we have to service all of these character relationships, and when we started mapping all that out it just went beyond 110 pages.
To this he added that the studio said “you can’t fit all that story in one damn movie!” which for my money is Universal braying for two films worth of box-office, what with their engine currently running on last year’s Fast Five dollars and all.
Director Justin Lin is confirmed for the sixth and everyone seems to be assuming that he and the cast will return for both new outings considering that most of them are pretty much box-office poison outside of the franchise (and by most of them I ironically mean the two leads stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker). Even so that’s no bad thing because as long as you lobotomised yourself on the way in Fast Five was undoubtedly rollicking good fun.
It’s yet to be seen whether the two films will be stand-alone pieces or whether they will form one two-part contiguous story but either way I’m excited. Whilst they won’t be anything like The Hobbit or Harry Potter 7 they will definitely rival them as pieces of all out entertainment.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
