Vin Diesel Confirms Fast and Furious 7
Posted 12.21.11 by Ryan
Fast Five's massive box office take ($626 million worldwide) proved that audiences weren't done with the franchise, and neither was the studio. After the success of Fast Five, Universal Pictures quickly hired screenwriter Chris Morgan, who wrote Fast Six, as well as 2009's Fast and Furious and 2006's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, to write a sixth installment. Morgan will have to write a seventh as well.
Actor Vin Diesel helped launch the franchise but took a break for 2003's 2 Fast 2 Furious, then returned for a cameo in Tokyo Drift before settling back into the franchise with Fast and Furious. Now officially a producer of the series, Diesel told THR that when he, Morgan and director Justin Lin sat down to discuss Fast Six (or Fast and Furious 6 or what ever it may be called), there was too much (story?) to put into just one movie.
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. The studio said, "You can’t fit all that story in one damn movie!"
Diesel said that the two scripts are being written simultaneously, but did not reveal whether the sequels would be a two-parter or would be stand-alone movies. Fast Five brought back several supporting characters from the previous installments, with Tyrese Gibson already publicly campaigning for a bigger role in Fast Six. It's likely even more characters would return for the next two sequels.
There is one actor who will definitely be returning, and that's Paul Walker, who also told the outlet that he feels the franchise has grown beyond the simplicity of the original movie. "It’s not about the action and the cars, which initially appealed to me when I was 25 years old," said Walker. "Because if that’s all it was, it would have fallen off a long time ago."
Some may argue with Walker over that last point, but, it doesn't matter: Fast Six and Fast Seven will soon be revving their engines, with Fast Six scheduled for a May 24th, 2013, release date.