Fast and Furious 11 Will Have Smaller Budget
The Fast and Furious franchise is finally coming back down to Earth. In a post on his blog Insneider (which is behind a paywall, so this is via ComicBook.com), Jeff Sneider says that the next entry in the racing-turned-heist-turned-spy franchise will have a smaller budget and a lower-scale story more in line with the series’ humbler beginnings, which described with rote phrases like “lean and mean,” “back to basics,” and “one last ride.” The next installment also may have a new villain that fits the revised storyline. If so, that leaves them in a bit of a conundrum, as Fast X ended with a cliffhanger concerning the fate of Dominic Toretto and his “family” at the hands of Jason Momoa’s master villain, Dante Reyes. According to Sneider, that storyline may be wrapped up in the spin-off movie starring the Rock as Luke Hobbs, which was set up in a mid-credits scene at the end of Fast X. If you really want to laugh, the pared-down, modest, reasonable budget for the next Fast movie is… no more than $200 million. Wow, it’s hard to see where they went wrong with these films.
Arguing for storytelling fidelity in a franchise like The Fast and the Furious is like arguing for nutritional value in a Happy Meal – if that’s what you want, you’re in the wrong place. Still, it feels wrong to end a movie that’s part of a series with a loyal fanbase on a big cliffhanger only to decide the next entry will be going in a different direction and sending them on a sidequest to find out what happened to their favorite characters and their new arch-nemesis. When it was originally announced, the Hobbs spin-off would not feature Vin Diesel, but that’ll have to change if they go this route; the only other option is some “Don’t worry, Dom survived” voiceover, which can’t be satisfying for fans. Additionally, Dante was by far the best part of Fast X (for what that’s worth), a wildly entertaining villain who was over-the-top in the best ways. Everything that makes Jason Momoa annoying as Aquaman works for Dante, and one of the big draws of yet another Fast movie was seeing him again.
But, in a way, that’s fine for me. I like the Rock’s Hobbs much more than Dom or any of his crew, and I’d rather see a villain like Dante go up against a more likable character played by a more charismatic actor. And that leads to my other hope: Jason Statham. (If you’re new to my writing, I’m a fan; a big fan.) Among the many things Fast X set up and Fast 11 will probably ignore was a subplot for Statham’s Deckard Shaw, as his mother (Helen Mirren) was kidnapped by Dante, meaning the series’ new big bad just bought himself a Statham-sized amount of trouble. The only remedy to this I see is to effectively make this new film Hobbs & Shaw 2, with the duo teaming up to take down Dante, who appears to be a personal enemy for both of them now. I’m liking this idea the more I write about it; for all of Fast X’s faults, Dante was great, and I’d like to see him used to his full potential, bringing Hobbs and Shaw together again. Maybe they’ll tie him into that unresolved plotline with the evil organization from the last spin-off.
But that’s just me. I can imagine Fast and Furious fans being angry about this, and I wouldn’t blame them. They invested in this story and the characters that fuel it, and they’re now paying for Universal’s mismanagement of the series. And when I say mismanagement, I mean the ridiculous budgets. You know what Fast X cost to make before marketing, distribution, and the like? $340 million! That’s more than any of the Marvel films from Phases 4 and 5. And now, interest in these movies is winding down – probably in part because of how ridiculously ostentatious they’ve become – and they’re not making their money back, or at least not enough of a profit to justify the expense. So, the fans who stuck with the movies are the ones who miss out, but every bit of this is Universal’s fault, and Hollywood’s general atmosphere of drunken spending. When your “modest budget” is $200 million, you need an intervention.
