Chris Morgan has been the writer of “The Fast and the Furious” franchise since it was about illegal street racing. He’s navigated it from those early days to twisty conspiracy thrillers to heist films to the nowadays of a mercenary-type situation or whatever. Over the course of eight films, planes, trains, and automobiles have flown through the sky, parachuted from above, travelled from the top floor of one skyscraper to the top floor of another skyscraper etc.
It’s culminated in this year’s upcoming “The Fate of the Furious,” in which a submarine launching torpedoes through a sheet of ice gets involved in an arctic car chase. It’s safe to say that if “Fast & Furious 9” goes ahead (and it’s safe to say that it will), there’s really only one place left to go if Morgan wants to one-up himself again, and that’s outer space.
Only if the idea was ‘so good,’ says Morgan
Morgan, being the insane, out-there, setpiece-craving screenwriter of “Fast & Furious” films that he is, didn’t shoot down the idea when it was proposed to him by Uproxx. Instead, he said he was open to it.
But he has one condition: the idea for the space-bound setpiece has to be “so good” that it feels worth doing.
Surprisingly, Morgan says he gets asked if he’s going to take the “Fast & Furious” franchise to space all the time. He said once and for all that “the only way” a future sequel would go to space is if he has an idea that was “something so good” he had to do it. He suggested bringing in Vin Diesel’s other character Riddick as “Dom’s long-lost brother,” but dear God, that is not “so good.” That is not “so good” at all.
Going to space might sound like a step too far, and bringing in a character from another franchise played by the same actor who is the lead of this franchise in question sounds like a step way, way too far, but is anything really a step too far in the world of “The Fast and the Furious” at this point?
Look at the trailers. Charlize Theron controls every single car in New York City and just crashes them all into each other. It’s not a franchise that’s on the side of logic, really.
‘Fast & Furious 8’ will be released on 12 April
The latest “Fast & Furious” Film, starring (as always) Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris et al, will be released in the UK on 12 April and the US a couple of days later on 14 April. It’s been directed by F. Gary Gray, who helmed the excellent NWA biopic “Straight Outta Compton,” and written by Morgan, whose upcoming projects include producing credits on Tom Cruise’s not-great-looking “Mummy” reboot and another “A-Team” reboot, like we needed one of them.