The newly-christened Fast Saga has traveled an awful lot of miles since its earliest days as a story about illicit street racing based on a Vibe magazine article titled “Racer X” to its current status as the ninth-highest-grossing film series of all time, closely tailgating the X-Men series, which it will pass when Fast & Furious 9 debuts this Memorial Day weekend.
The chronologically-complex franchise (The third movie happens sixth? The fifth one happens fourth? Justin Lin’s 2002 crime-drama Better Off Tomorrow is a retroactive prequel for a character that’s returning in the ninth one, which is also technically the tenth?) finally launched its first spinoff last year, teaming antagonists-turned-antiheroes Luke Hobbs (a Diplomatic Security Service agent who first appeared in 2011’s Fast Five) and Deckard Shaw (a rogue United Kingdom Special Forces agent who first cameoed in 2013’s Fast & Furious 6) on a CIA assignment to prevent the release of a genetically-engineered super-virus by a cybernetically-enhanced operative.
Hobbs & Shaw, starring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham, is lightyears removed from the franchise’s comparatively humble beginnings, and now our sources – the same ones that told us six months ago that Han Lue, long believed dead, would be returning and that John Cena would be playing the long-lost brother of Vin Deisel’s Dominic Toretto, both of which were confirmed in this week’s first official trailer – are indicating that the spinoff is actually meant to be the opening installment of a self-contained trilogy of its own.
One of the franchise’s most expensive entries (second only to 2017’s The Fate of the Furious), the sci-fi action film grossed roughly $760 million worldwide, making it the third least profitable pic in the series (ahead of only 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift), but the story’s finale not only set up a continuation, it practically required one. After being lured to Samoa and ultimately defeated, villainous super-soldier Brixton Lore was summarily decommissioned with the activation of a remote cerebral kill-switch by his handler at the terroristic Eteon organization.
The faceless, distorted voice of Lore’s former employer then addressed Hobbs, Shaw and Shaw’s sister Hattie directly, commending the three for outperforming their “analytics” and assuring them that they’d put themselves on Eteon’s radar. The voice also made reference to a mutual forgotten history with Hobbs, then terminated the communication after promising “one hell of a reunion.”
While our sources also reported some time ago that an early draft of the screenplay for Fast & Furious 9 included a cameo by Hobbs, there was no sign of the former WWE superstar in the film’s first trailer, which may explain why he and the Shaws will have their stories wrapped up in two more films about their own side-quest for the literal fate of mankind.
Of course, plans can always change depending on how things unfold, but for now, we’re told that Universal definitely wants to spin out Hobbs & Shaw into a trilogy and given how successful the first entry was, that’s not too hard to believe.
