If The Fate of the Furious is set to tear the Toretto crew apart this coming weekend, what’s next for Universal’s petrolhead series?
That’s the question /Film posed to screenwriter Chris Morgan, who proceeded to touch base on the future of the franchise beyond 2017. As previously reported, we know that the studio has already nailed down tentative release dates for both Fast and Furious 9 and 10 – April 19th, 2019 and April 2nd, 2021, to be specific – but Morgan stressed the ways in which The Fate of the Furious is designed to instigate one final trilogy for Dom and the crew.
With the exception of those proposed spinoff movies – Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs is all but set to headline his own standalone pic – that means Fast and Furious 10 would bring the curtain down once and for all, and here, Chris Morgan compared the ongoing saga to that of a cable TV show.
The way we tell stories over a long period of time really is more like a cable TV show. Every time we have a movie we don’t have to reestablish everything about the characters. People who come to the films generally know some of the backstory about the characters, so we can always forge ahead and let them grow. We don’t have to carry this obligation to reset everything for everybody. The problem is always the time. So you get essentially two hours every couple of years for one of these films, and a lot of that tends to have to be plot and we end up having a certain budget and things always get trimmed out for time or money.
In terms of those trilogy plans, the screenwriter conceded that it’s still early days, and although Universal has gone ahead and announced dates for each of the final two films, the scripts are yet to be completed.
Vin and I have talked about this one for a while, because the intent is to do 8, 9, and 10 and to make it a trilogy. So how do they all connect, what are we moving toward, what’s that final end point? We’ve been playing around with that stuff, and the studio has announced dates on it, but in terms of the script actually being written right now, we’re not at that stage yet.
The Fate of the Furious is booked in for release on April 14th, and may well screech past Furious 7 at the international box office.
