Earlier this week, Justin Lin stood up from the director’s chair on the set of Fast X for the final time. He’s sticking around as a producer, but Universal is reportedly spending incredible amounts of money to source his replacement on set — up to a million dollars per day. Conveniently for the studio, you all have put together an exquisite list of candidates. All the suits in Hollywood need to do is pick one.
Michael Bay, obviously.
Because suddenly all the cars are Transformers, and everyone ends up in SPACE fighting Decepticons.
And then towards the end, Toretto performs a Hero Sacrifice, saves the universe, but also somehow infused with some weird alien technology, so while we all think he’s dead, he’s not, and ends up going through the wormhole created to send Megatron back across the universe.
500 years later, the broken ship he was on crash lands on a mysterious planet, and the human-like aliens that live there find Toretto in the wreckage behind the wheel of a ‘69 Charger.
And when one of the aliens asks who this man is, they wipe the dirt from his fancy space suit. His name badge, which once said “TORETTO, DOMINIC”, now badly faded, reads only “R...D..IC”. The universal translatorused to scan the badge beeps, and the alien reads it aloud.
“Ri...Riddick.”
Roll credits.
Aside from dbeach84's incredible crossover plot, there’s a harsh truth here: You don’t want Michael Bay to make a Fast and Furious movie. You might think it works, but it doesn’t. Here’s why, in long form.
Bay is, undeniably, the best at what he does. No other filmmaker currently working could recreate Bay’s style, with any amount of studio money behind them — they don’t have his eye, his sense of chaos, motion and kinetic filmmaking that makes his work stand out.
But Bay is also cruel towards his characters. There’s a sense of something between juvenile humor and outright nihilism that runs through his movies, and that stands in stark contrast to the Fast Saga’s hokey-but-earnest message of family. That sort of strong, core emotion, memeworthy though it may be, would be a wild tone shift for Bay. Trust me, you don’t want him running Fast X.
George Miller would be great, he clearly still has it, and can obviously shoot car action, but he only makes movies he writes, and his writing would never stoop to this level.
David Leitch didn’t do much with Deadpool 2, but he knows stunts, he knows how to work in lighter material that feels like it’s trying to be “big”, he co-directed John Wick, and Hobbs & Shaw worked really well (so well that he forgot to end it and tacked on a whole extra act).
Brad Bird made a fantastic action film that balanced the light and heavy elements to make Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol a fantastic watch, a perfect fit for the F&F series, and he could use a win after Tomorrowland went down in flames.
Speaking of Tom Cruise directors, Doug Liman made Edge of Tomorrow a winner, even if it found its legs on video instead of in theaters, and American Made looked interesting. Granted, his last film was Chaos Walking, but Liman’s shown he can really take a project to that next level with practical action setpieces.
Miller, by contrast, has a much stronger sense of genuine emotion. In Fury Road, when Furiosa finally reunites with the Vuvalini, the sense of hard-won peace followed by immediate, shattering loss is so real. Turn the Emotions Dial to something just as heartfelt but a little more optimistic, and you could find yourself in Fast territory.
I offered up my choice yesterday as a comment and I repeat it here: Kathryn Bigelow. She’s an action director who can kick ass and take names: The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty—that’s a no-shit resume. Any action sequence she and her team could dream up, I’m sure she’d take the franchise into a harder edge, streets-of-LA direction—you know, be a refreshing change from being shot into a space in a Fiero or super-duper magnets destroying everything around the car, yet the car ain’t affected. Movie physics is boring the daylights out of me, so dial it way, way back.
And if Toretto’s Charger got back to looking like an actual 2nd gen Charger, big BIG plus.
The Fast And The Furious was essentially a Point Break ripoff to begin with, so why not round out the series by bringing the actual director of Point Break in to bring the series back to its roots?
M night shymalan.
Gimme the beat boys, and free my soul
I’m going to the beach that makes you old
And drift away
What would the twist ending be for a Shyamalan-directed Fast movie? We’ve already covered the “secret evil brother” plotline, where do you go from there?
I nominate David Cronenberg. And I want him to turn the next F&F into a horror movie where by the end, everyone has died in some weird sci-fi way and Vin Diesel is left sitting on a rock contemplating his own mortality.
Finally, a director willing to go full Cars Homunculus Theory on the Fast Saga. I would watch a thousand Cronenberg-directed Fast movies, and I would adore every one.
Jane Campion? {ducks and covers}
Seriously, think about it. She probably could direct action, though it would come along but seldom and doesn’t last very long, and the scenery would be terrific, with plenty of time to admire it. Comments about toxic masculinity would be made. Occasional dialogue.
Too many series in Hollywood now are rote, predictable, and safe. Shaking things up is good, and hiring Jane Campion to send off the Fast Saga is a certifiable shakeup.
Rob Zombie. At then we would get one badass soundtrack out of it. Can never have too many Zombie car songs!
Or George Miller. Image the vehicular mashups we could get from a non-post-apocalyptic world!
Technically, The Munsters was a Universal production, meaning the rights to the Drag-U-La design may be on the table for the Fast Saga to use. I’m just saying, Rob, there are options here. Have your people talk to Vin Diesel’s people.
Vin Diesel should act in it, produce it, direct it, write it and put this series out of its misery with its utter failure
Speaking of Vin, there’s actually a bit of precedent here. He wrote, directed, and starred in the 1997 film Strays, which has a higher critical score on Rotten Tomatoes than some Fast films. I’m not saying it would definitely work, but it certainly could.
Kenneth Branagh.
And a screenwriter who can give us a car chase version of The Canterbury Tales.
Kenneth Branagh may have stumbled with direction in the past, but an Oscar nomination for Best Director on Belfast may show that he’s ready to take on cinema’s greatest franchise. His background is in Shakespearean plays, which are often described as the Fast Saga of their day. By who, you ask? People. They go to a different school, you wouldn’t know them.
Steven Soderbergh - he’s done action, worked with ensemble casts, and if he’s not franchise-averse, would probably take the job pretty seriously. Plus, at this point, the F&F movies are bordering on Ocean’s Eleven, but guzzling energy drink martinis.
Many people call Fast Five the height of the Fast Saga, and it’s the movie that veers closest to a traditional heist film structure. Patrick H Willems even called it “Axe Body Spray Ocean’s Eleven,” making Soderbergh the perfect choice to bring that style back to the series.
Nick Park. Think of all the money you’ll save on crashing cars and CGI if you just made it all out of modelling clay. There are already great chase sequences in the Wallace and Gromit films, so it’s not completely out of his league.
For this to work alongside Vin Diesel, I’m picturing a hybrid approach: The people, the family, are live action, while the cars are all claymation. This novel filmmaking approach will revolutionize blockbusters as we know them, and the cinema landscape will never look the same again. Probably. Maybe it’ll just be bad.
This is a no-brainier: Edger Wright.
Wright cut his automotive action teeth with Baby Driver, but I’m more interested in the foreshadow/callback writing style of the Cornetto Trilogy here. Imagine that sort of Zemeckis-style intricate clockwork storytelling, but in a Fast Five-style automotive heist story. I don’t even care if it’s a Fast movie, I just want that film.
Huge reset. Olivia Wilde.
And make it a musical.
Booksmart had genuine filmmaking craft behind it, and a perfect 1977 Firebird. What more could you want from a Fast movie?
There needs some time influence in the series, like to get some of mine back - I’m going with Christopher Nolan.
Nolan’s down-to-earth, realistic style would be a hilarious mismatch for the Fast Saga. Imagine Dom and the crew racing stock, police surplus Chargers around a cloudy Chicago. Is that really what you want?
Wes Anderson. We need Vin Diesel and The Rock sipping tea outside a French bistro. Also all the car chases will be stop motion.
Unfortunately, Wes Anderson’s cinematic style would require Vin Diesel and The Rock to be in the same shot. Sure, his classic 180-degree shot/reverse shot technique would work with the actor’s ongoing feud, but how could he get his perfectly symmetrical wide-angle shots? Sorry, can’t be done.
Nobody. Please, no more fast and furious.
I understand, on some level, that people are tired of this series. But, think about it from another angle: The Fast Saga is the only major Hollywood franchise right now that isn’t based on existing intellectual property (Point Break and Stephan Papadakis’s life story notwithstanding), and we need to keep it going as long as we can. A world where the only major tentpole releases are DC or Marvel? No thank you.
Werner Herzog
“And what haunts me, in all of the shots of Vin Diesel, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of Vin Diesel. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”
I’m not sure if I’d rather have Werner Herzog direct a Fast movie, or have him cast in a Fast movie. After reading this monologue, though, I’m leaning towards the latter. I need his voice speaking to Dom.