Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Says to Count him Out of Fast and Furious Movies.
When we flashback to the year 2001, we meet a film that sparked something that not many saw coming. Sure, the movie led the box office that weekend in June but it didn’t seem to please the critics much. One critic even went so far as to call it “a numbing waste of celluloid, a bad, bad movie that can’t fake authenticity.” If that critic could only see what a worldwide phenomenon the franchise would later become, it leads one to wonder if they’d stand by such a harsh review.
In any case, battling with the sometimes sour critics didn’t stop the crew from taking a film about low rent crime and street racing before shaping and molding it into a franchise that would end up reeling in the North of $4 billion with all films considered. While some of the fans of the original seem to contest the way that the storyline has deviated from its roots and taken more of an “action/spy” type of guise on, the numbers at the box office paint this thing in a whole different light. In fact, the movies really seem to be trending upward with each release, for the most part, with each of the last two installments reeling in over $1 billion and finding their way into the top 20 with Furious 7 finding its way to the top 10 list of all time.
As time has gone on and it has all grown past what anyone could have predicted, we’ve even seen the likes of some of the biggest stars in Hollywood including Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jason Statham, and Idris Elba deciding to make their way to the ranks of the furious. However, it seems like, at least when it comes to the ninth installment of the movie, The Rock isn’t planning on making an appearance on screen.
Johnson says that the idea is to “Grow the Fast Universe” with movies like Hobbs and Shaw slated to come out August 2 of this year. He does tease the idea that we can’t quite rule him out of another Fast movie, though, as the potential for his character to return to the screen in the tenth installment still might be in the cards. In other words, his character, Luke Hobbs, will be able to be seen within the universe, just maybe not in the main films.
It almost looks like the Fast and Furious franchise might be taking a page out of Marvel’s book, emulating all of the storylines within the Marvel Cinematic Universe that collide in various movies throughout the timeline. Vin Diesel has recently been seen teasing a possible female-led spinoff to the series as well, going to Instagram and telling us about a pitch for a “Fast female protagonist driven spinoff” that he created, telling us that a meeting that he had about it was “VERY exciting.”
With all of the twists and turns that have taken this franchise in an unlikely direction, we can’t really say what should be expected next but it seems like the team has something up their sleeve to keep this ball rolling ahead.
