It nearly took forever, but Fast Forever — the eleventh and purportedly final entry in the long-running Fast & Furious movie franchise — is almost ready to begin production.
This was definitely not the plan for this Fast. The previous film, Fast X was initially announced as the first half of a two-part finale in the vein of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning. But Fast X came out in 2023 and three years later, audiences are still waiting for the resolution of its big cliffhanger — which appeared to show most of the main cast perish in a plane crash (they’ll be fine) while Vin Diesel’s Dom was about to be drowned by a dam collapse. (He’ll be fine too.)
Diesel says production is finally ready to resume. At a 25th anniversary screening of the original The Fast and the Furious this week, he told Variety they “start shooting in December, if I can make good on the request from the studio.”
He also added the production “had to go through four sets of writers, four years of development, to get to something that I felt would be worthy of a finale. And when I read the script a couple of weeks ago, [I cried].”
READ MORE: Every Fast & Furious Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best
Diesel blamed the delay on the script, which apparently cycled through four different writers over the last few years. (The last word we got is that Michael Lesslie was working on the most current draft.) But there’s another unspoken reason for the delay.
While the Fast franchise reached a peak with 2015’s hugely successful Furious 7, which earned more than $1.5 billion worldwide, each subsequent entry since then has grossed less than the movie before it — for four consecutive movies (The Fate of the Furious, Hobbs & Shaw, F9: The Fast Saga, and Fast X). And Fast X earned just $714.3 million worldwide — less than half of Furious 7. The reviews of these movies have been trending downward as well; Fast X scored a rotten 56 percent on the critical aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Most franchises with that kind of track record don’t get more sequels. They get retired.
The Fast movies have not gotten any cheaper to make, either. Presumably, if Universal is going to make one more of these, and spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the process, they do not want another disappointment, critically or commercially. Otherwise, they’ll be the ones crying, not Vin Diesel.
Fast Forever’s current release date is March 17, 2028. We’ll see if it happens.
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