Vin Diesel says Paul Walker’s 'Fast and Furious' character will return for series finale
'I've been listening to my fan base'
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Fast & Furious franchise star Vin Diesel has announced his long-running movie series will cross the finish line in April 2027 with the help of the late Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner character.
Diesel (who plays Dominic Toretto in the films) broke the news alongside co-star Tyrese Gibson and Walker’s brother Cody at Fuel Fest in Pomona, Calif., over the weekend.
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“The studio said to me, ‘Vin, can we please have the finale of Fast and Furious (in) April 2027?'” Diesel said during a surprise appearance. “I said, ‘Under three conditions’ … because I’ve been listening to my fan base. I’ve been listening to all of you, who have been asking for three things. The first, is to bring the franchise back to L.A.! The second thing was to return to the car culture, to the street racing! You wanna know what the third thing was? … The third thing was reuniting Dom and Brian O’Conner.'”
As the audience broke out into cheers, Diesel ended his message, saying, “That is what you’re gonna get in the finale!”
Walker’s cop-turned-street racer character was written out of the series after the actor died while in the midst of shooting Furious 7 back in 2013. His brothers completed work on the film with the help of digital technology and stunt doubles. At the end of that film, Brian and Dom take one last drive with the characters coming to a fork in the road and going their separate ways.
While the rest of the Fast gang has continued to participate in worldwide heists in a bid to stop global terrorists, Brian remains in hiding, raising his and Mia’s (Jordana Brewster) children.
Previously, Chris Morgan, one of the key architects of the Fast & Furious franchise since the third instalment, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, told Postmedia that Walker’s character could return in future movies.
“There are no rules. Brian exists in our world and he’ll always live in our world.” Morgan said back in 2017. “There was a moment when we were doing Furious 7 after Paul had died and a lot of people were theorizing that maybe we should kill off that character. I took a really hard line with that. For me, there was no way I would ever write Brian O’Conner out of our universe. Our franchise is a very hopeful one. It’s a very loving one. It’s a very family one. I love, as a fan, knowing that Brian and Mia and their kids are out there and they are happy. I would never want to mess with that. As for what happens with that down the road, we’ve been thinking a lot about where the stories go and how we deal with them.”
The series’ 10th entry, 2023’s Fast X, introduced Jason Momoa’s Dante Reyes, who was looking to exact revenge on Dom and his crew for his father’s death in Fast Five.
With Fast X billed as the first of a two-part finale, Momoa teased that “lots of chaos” is in store for fans of the franchise.
“Some evil s*** is going to happen,” he told Postmedia in a 2024 interview. “There’s more coming.”
Meanwhile, Fast X director Louis Leterrier promised Entertainment Weekly back in 2023 that the finale will be “a sad one.”
“You’re going to cry. There are some tears in your future, let me tell you,” he said.
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