With the success of the latest installment of The Fast & The Furious franchise (Fast Five) confirming that the series is far from finished, Universal chairman and co-chairman Adam Fogelson and Donna Langley are planning what he calls “the biggest bet I’ve ever made”, by moving the series away from street-racing, and into the action-packed world of heist movies.
Screenwriter Chris Morgan (who penned the last three Fast & Furious movies for Universal) has been confirmed to be writing a sixth installment in the franchise, as part of his new production deal with the studio, and will be basing it around a major robbery; in a move that Fogelson believes will help the franchise break through its ceiling of ticket sales, by “taking it out of being a pure care culture movie, and into being a true action franchise in the spirit of those great heist films made 10 or 15 years ago”, films where the “driving ability is just a part of the movie, like those great chases in The French Connection, The Bourne Identity, and The Italian Job.”
Fast Five was seen as the transition film to bring the franchise into a new genre; as it’s the first film in the series to focus more on a robbery than the driving, and finishes with “a lot of surprises, which will set up the franchise as a series of heist action films”; to which Dwayne Johnson (Faster) hopes to appear, and should prove integral to the action in Fast Six.
As of yet there’s no release date set for Fast Six, but as Fogelson believes “creating a movie with real action and real cars will be amazing to people excited by something real” other than the overused CGI effects we have come to expect from the majority of studio releases, it could be an interesting, and potentially brilliant, genre-changing, experiment.
Matt Wheeldon.
Source: Deadline.
