As one of the most lucrative franchises in the history of cinema, with the recent ninth installment bringing combined box office takings up to almost $6.4 billion, Fast & Furious knows full well that the property’s signature brand of logic, physics and gravity-defying pyrotechnics is what puts butts in seats all over the world.
It’s also been a staunchly PG-13 enterprise since the very beginning, which is something that seems unlikely to change when you look at the numbers the series keeps pulling in, but Sung Kang would love to see The Fast Saga mix it up at least once. In a new interview with ScreenRant, the longtime star admitted that he’d be very intrigued to see what would happen were the shackles to be taken off.
“I’d like to see the Fast films, at least one of them, go rated R. Go super dark, to see where that could go. I don’t know which character that’s going to be, somebody has to go dark, really dark. And maybe it would be cool to see.”
The tenth and eleventh chapters will be sticking to the family-friendly rating, but there’s no reason why one of the many inevitable spinoffs and offshoots to follow in its wake couldn’t take things down a darker path. Given his history as en elite military intelligence operative who became a cold-blooded criminal killer, Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw reads as the ideal candidate, especially when the actor is no stranger to the R-rated action thriller.
Of course, he’s still on track to re-team with Dwayne Johnson for another Hobbs & Shaw outing, so we can probably take that one off the table. That’s not to say it can’t happen in the future, even if a gritty Fast & Furious movie with much harder edges than audiences have become used to seeing might stick out like a sore thumb given the increasingly loose grip on reality that’s characterized the franchise’s evolution over the last decade.