Vin Diesel Skips a Number, Confirms Fast & Furious 7

I've never understood The Fast & the Furious franchise. The first film was a serviceable, if extremely derivative, Point Break knock-off. It was a surprise sleeper in the summer of 2001, aka the summer where nothing really came out (Sure, we got A.I., but you assholes didn't appreciate it), so it getting a sequel wasn't surprising. Then the outrageously homoerotic 2Fast2Furious happened--really, it just happened--and Tokyo Drift attempted to make the franchise name bigger than anything else, but after that the franchise seemed due for DTV-ville.

But what people missed, I guess, was Vin Diesel and Paul Walker making "I've always loved you vibes" during a block-of-wood-acting-off. The grammatically challenged Fast/Furious scored a new franchise best, and earlier this year, Fast Five topped even that one with the addition of Dwayne "Can I Please Star in Something That Makes Money That ISN'T a Kids Movie" Johnson. I still haven't seen it, but I hear the fight between him and Vin is particularly...greasy, in a baby oil kind of way.

So of course there's going to be a sixth one. That was to be expected. But the real shocker of the day is Vin Diesel revealing that not only is there a sixth one being prepped, there's already a SEVENTH flick in the scripting stages. During a talk with THR, Diesel proclaimed that the story they've concocted for number six is so big, they're splitting it in two. Of course they are. The franchise has become a self-sustaining cash cow for the forseeable future, and working on these projects means Walker, Diesel, and the ever-growing cast of interchangeable actors can keep cashing checks.

The most fun I can wring from the franchise anymore is trying to figure out how screwy the titles are going to get. Since #4 dropped the "The"'s and the "And," and #5 dropped the second half of the franchise title altogether, I'm guess the next one will be Furious Six, with the seventh one finally merging the whole thing into one word, Fasturious, with a 7 replacing one of the letters to solidify its moldy edginess.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter