The references have been deftly handled and incredibly subtle so you may not have noticed, but the Fast & Furious franchise has always been about family, although it’s not something Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto ever mentions out loud or anything.
Over the last 20 years, many new faces have been welcomed into the fold, and it appears to largely be based on whoever gets on best with the established crew behind the scenes, as opposed to any sort of logical storytelling method, which has never been one of The Fast Saga‘s creative driving forces anyway.
John Cena even admitted feeling intimidated walking onto the set for his first day as Jakob Toretto, despite being an absolutely huge dude that’s spent the majority of his entire working life performing live to audiences of thousands on an almost daily basis. Dwayne Johnson, meanwhile, may have called out some of the alpha male posturing on Diesel’s part, but we’re now hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us who he was playing in F9 long before it was confirmed – that Cena is set to follow the Jason Statham route of joining the family shortly after trying to violently murder them all.
Of course, the WWE star is Dom’s long lost brother, which means that in the most literal sense, he’s already family, so the narrative throughline dating right back to Rob Cohen’s 2001 original dictates that by the laws of Fast & Furious, science, nature, biceps and white tank tops, Jakob Toretto is obligated to be welcomed back into the bald bosom of his sibling once they’ve patched up their differences and put the whole ‘trying to kill each other’ thing behind them to team up for even more insane adventures.
