While we wait to reunite with Dom, Letty, and all the rest, we're passing the time by
rounding up all the spoilers and rumors we can get our hands on.
Salud, mi familia.
After spinning its wheels for four commercially successful but critically uneven films, the
Fast and the Furious franchise really took off with 2011's Fast Five, a slick, exuberant
heist action flick that bore little resemblance to the smaller stakes street racing movies
that had come before it.
One of its biggest upgrades came in the form of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Luke Hobbs,
a Diplomatic Security Service agent who served as the film's intimidating antagonist.
Hobbs would go on to follow in the footsteps of former FBI agent Brian O'Conner, joining
up with the Fast Family rather than trying to apprehend them for their big-hearted crimes.
"Daddy's gotta go to work."
Jason Statham also joined the Fast and the Furious series as rogue assassin Deckard Shaw,
the family's deadliest antagonist.
At the end of Fast & Furious 6, he was revealed to be the one who killed Han back in 2006's
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
While many fans still haven't forgiven Shaw for that, he also wound up joining forces
with Dom's crew, and was responsible for saving Dom's infant son from Cipher in The Fate of
the Furious.
But while Hobbs and Shaw proved to be so popular that they got their own spinoff film, don't
expect to see them in the franchise's upcoming ninth film.
In an interview with MTV News, Johnson confirmed that he and Statham will not be appearing
there, although he left the door open for an appearance in the already confirmed 10th
installment.
The absence of Luke Hobbs leaves some mighty large shoes to fill, and who better to step
into them than that other wrestler-turned-actor, John Cena?
While no character description has yet been released, Universal has confirmed that Cena
is indeed joining the Fast and the Furious family, and his character is, to absolutely
no one's surprise, "a badass."
Beyond that, who Cena will be playing is anyone's guess, although it would be well within the
tradition of the franchise for him to make his entrance as a villain.
Johnson and Statham made the leap from antagonists to heroes, as did Luke Evans' Fast & Furious
6 villain Owen Shaw, who helps save Dom's son in Fate of the Furious.
But Charlize Theron's baddie Cipher may also be getting her own spin-off, hinting that
she too may wind up switching sides.
At this point, it would almost seem weird for a Fast and the Furious movie to bring
on new big name and have them not play a villain.
Chris Morgan has been writing the Fast and the Furious scripts since Tokyo Drift, but
with Morgan stepping away to pen Hobbs & Shaw, Fast 9 has tapped Daniel Casey to take over
writing duties for the ninth installment.
He's best known for 2018's Kin, but Casey grabbed the studio's attention with his script
for The Heavy, a subversive superhero movie that is currently in the works from producer
J.J. Abrams.
It's fitting that Universal would look to a superhero writer for the next Fast and the
Furious movie, considering the larger-than-life direction the franchise has drifted in during
its latest installments.
The stunts have been growing increasingly more out-of-this-world for years.
Fate of the Furious even includes jetpacks like the one the Falcon wears in the Avengers
movies.
Idris Elba's character and his cyborg-like abilities might not just be a one off thing
"Look at me.
I'm Black Superman."
Perhaps Casey's hiring hints that superpowers won't be limited to spinoffs, and that the
already-loose physics of the Fast and the Furious series will get shrugged off entirely.
While most of Dominic Toretto's crew joined the franchise somewhere between the second
and fifth films, Michelle Rodriguez has been there from the very beginning, playing Dom's
girlfriend and eventual wife, Letty Ortiz.
However, while Letty and Dom were closer than ever at the end of The Fate of the Furious,
Rodriguez herself was a different story.
In an Instagram post in 2017, Rodriguez wrote that she might consider walking if the Fast
franchise didn't give women a more prominent role.
Faced with a future without one of the family's longest-tenured members, or perhaps simply
because the studio agreed with Rodriguez and wanted to do right by its female fans, Universal
agreed to her stipulation that she would only return if they hired a female writer for the
ninth movie.
Although we still don't know who the woman is who will be helping Daniel Casey pen the
script for Fast 9, we hope that Rodriguez gets her wish and that the script does indeed
show the amazing women of the franchise some love.
During the filming of Furious 7, Paul Walker, who had been playing Dom's best friend and
brother-in-law Brian O'Conner since the first movie, was tragically killed in a car crash.
Instead of writing a similarly sad fate for Brian, the ending of the film was rewritten
to bring closure to Brian's story, with him riding off into the sunset.
However, Vin Diesel announced in 2017 that Jordana Brewster will be reprising her role
as Mia, Dom's sister and Brian's wife, for Fast 9.
Given how important it was to the entire cast and crew of Furious 7 that Brian receive a
happy ending, it'll be interesting to see how the series chooses to bring back Mia without
killing Brian off-screen or splitting them up.
Hopefully, Brian's absence will be explained by him staying home with the kids while Mia
goes off with her brother to help save the world.
It seems like every fan-base in every franchise wants the same actor to join up and “woah
- up” their perspective universe: Keanu Reeves.
Information has been murky about just how big Reeves' role will be in the film.
Could he be the villain?
And if he is the villain will he be the behind-the-scenes type or out there John Wick-ing it up and
jumping from moving vehicles like a seasoned vet?
Or will he even be in the movie at all?
Plenty of websites reported that Reeves would appear in Hobbs and Shaw and - spoiler - he
didn’t.
Just because people want Keanu in the movie, it doesn’t mean it’ll happen - just ask
MCU fans.
While the original The Fast and the Furious was filmed entirely in and around Los Angeles,
the series has since shot all over the world.
"You're a long way from home.
This is Brazil!"
In Fast 9, the series will be returning to the U.K., with production confirmed to be
underway in London.
Other shooting locations include Los Angeles and Hawaii.
It's important to keep in mind that a shooting location doesn't necessarily guarantee that
part of the film will be set in the same place.
For example, in Fast & Furious 6, London stood in for Moscow, and in The Fate of the Furious,
many of the "New York" scenes were actually filmed in Cleveland.
Still, most of the time when the Furious films travel abroad, it's because at least part
of the movie is set in the country they're filming in.
So it's a safe bet that Dom and his crew will be hopping across the pond for some of Fast
9, in addition to spending some time in at least one more tropical locale.
When it comes to gender representation, the Fast and Furious family has always been pretty
heavy on the dude side of things.
Fortunately, it seems as though Fast 9 may be taking some steps to correct that.
Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, and Nathalie Emmanuel are already set to reprise
their roles as Letty, Mia, and Ramsey, respectively, along with the as-yet unannounced female writer
joining the creative team.
In addition to these three established women of the Fast and the Furious world, Chris Bridges,
aka Ludacris, who has played Tej Parker in the series since 2 Fast 2 Furious in 2003,
took to his Instagram in early 2019 to tease an intriguing possible addition to the cast.
He posted a photo captioned "masterminding" of himself, his F&F cast-mate Vin Diesel,
and an actress moviegoers might recognize from John Wick: Chapter 2: Ruby Rose.
Of course, a single Instagram post doesn't necessarily mean that Rose is joining the
Furious family.
Even Luda's return for Fast 9 hasn't been confirmed yet, although it seems pretty likely
that he'll be back in action, even if the photo was taken just during a chill hangout
among pals.
It's worth noting, however, that Diesel is one of the masterminds of the franchise both
onscreen as Dom and behind the scenes as producer.
Considering that Rose previously appeared alongside Diesel in Triple X: The Return of
Xander Cage and that she's set to find new fame as the defender of Gotham City in the
CW's upcoming Batwoman series, Rose seems more than equipped to join this team of masterminds.
In the same Facebook Live video in which Vin Diesel announced Jordana Brewster's return
to the Fast and the Furious family, he also delightedly revealed that after a few years'
absence and a trip on board the starship Enterprise, director Justin Lin would be helming both
the ninth and tenth movies in the series.
Lin joined the Fast and the Furious series in 2006, taking the reins on The Fast and
the Furious: Tokyo Drift and staying with the films through 2013's Fast & Furious 6.
Other directors took over after that, with James Wan coming aboard for Furious 7 and
F. Gary Gray stepping in for The Fate of the Furious, but now Lin is back for what are
expected to be the final two installments in the saga.
Diesel said prior to the release of The Fate of the Furious that the reason he decided
to continue the franchise following Paul Walker's death while filming the seventh movie was
because Walker, quote, "promised eight."
He went on to explain that The Fate of the Furious would kick off a new trilogy that
would change the series.
Considering that the plot of Fate involved literal nuclear warheads, it's safe to say
they delivered.
Now that Lin, who was responsible for taking the series to new extremes, is returning to
shepherd the series through its final films, things only seem like they're going to get
bigger.
Nathalie Emmanuel first joined the Fast and the Furious crew as the mysterious master
hacker Ramsey in Furious 7, after she was kidnapped for inventing a hacking device called
the God's Eye.
Needless to say, she was subsequently rescued by Dominic Toretto and the Family, and the
next time we saw her in Fate of the Furious, she was an indispensable member of the team.
and now that we know she's returning for Fast 9, we can only hope that Ramsey will be a
member of the Fast family all the way until the end of the road.
We know Emmanuel is on her way back thanks to a tweet she made back in June, but that
wasn't the only part of it that got fans excited.
In addition to her announcement, she also included a row of emojis that look a whole
lot like the rest of the core cast, including Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris.
Their characters, Roman and Tej, have long been assumed to be returning for Fast 9, but
hadn't been officially confirmed.
Emojis may not be the most official means of confirmation, but it's looking increasingly
likely that the whole Fast family, minus their spin-off pals in Hobbs & Shaw, will be joining
forces yet again for Fast 9.
Maybe they can finally figure out what her full name is!
"Let me ask you one question."
"You can ask me anything."
"Anything?"
"What's my last name?"
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