Vin Diesel Starring In Prequel To A Billion-Dollar Franchise?
A prequel story may be an upcoming Vin Diesel project.
This article is more than 2 years old
When it comes to Fast & Furious movies, anything goes. Whenever Vin Diesel is asked about the possibility of something happening in an upcoming movie, or whether another project may be planned, his go-to answer is something along the lines of, “nothing is off the table.” Which, honestly, is a fair enough answer for anything involving this franchise. They’ve sent a car into space. They refuse to rule out the idea of a Jurassic Park crossover movie, where Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto and Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady hang out with fast cars and dinosaurs. So, the idea of a prequel movie centered on Dominic Toretto is far from anything in the left-field for this franchise. Now, according to sources for We Got This Covered, a prequel movie could potentially happen.
The outlet claimed that their sources have heard a prequel movie centered on a younger version of Dominic Toretto is “in the cards”, which likely means that Universal Pictures is discussing the idea. For now, take this with a grain of salt. Vin Diesel has been asked about this during press tours for F9 and given his usual go-to answer of “nothing is off the table”, but at this time, there’s no telling what might happen with this idea.
If they do make a Dominic Toretto prequel, it could star Vinnie Bennett, the actor who played a young Dom in F9. He looked a fair amount like he could be a young Vin Diesel. The ninth Fast & Furious movie took place in the current timeline, but featured a lot of flashbacks throughout the movie, even starting off in the past with its opening scene. Those flashbacks told a lot of the story of young Dominic Toretto’s life, making it seem to many like a prequel movie may not be necessary. However, this is Fast & Furious, where anything goes. In a prequel movie, we’d likely see a lot of Dom learning to be the guy who drives the fast cars (and other vehicles) we see in later films. There’s a lot of room for daring stunts there. This does draw attention to the biggest problem with a prequel project, though.
So far, we have nine Fast & Furious movies. We know that the main series will have eleven total, which means that we have two more Vin Diesel films to go for this franchise. We also know that spinoffs are happening and more Hobbs & Shaw is on the way. In the main storyline, the challenge for the filmmakers has been to continually surprise the audience with bigger, better stunts. It’s why they fly a car into space in F9–it’s bigger, it’s better, it’s awesome. Continually topping themselves like that is not easy. As the story continues and the characters level up, audiences get to see wilder stunts on screen, stunts that make even less sense to a physicist. This is the job of a lot of action movie franchises, and it’s apparently not as easy to do as it may seem to some, because not everyone pulls it off. Fast & Furious pushes the limits of reality further with each movie and it’s why audiences keep coming back.
This is a problem for a prequel movie. By going back in time, Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto has to level down his skills some. This isn’t an insurmountable problem. They could introduce a mentor in young Dom’s life, someone with a lot of badass skills ready for stuntwork to show Dominic Toretto learning to be who he will eventually become. They’ll have to balance that out though to make it still believable that the struggles he sees in the first movie would still be obstacles at that point in the timeline–that is, if they decide to care about the believability part.
Believability means something a little different in Fast & Furious movies. If they decided to make the Dominic Toretto prequel movie the Jurassic Park crossover, and have a young Dom hit his head in the end and forget everything that just happened, it’d probably still be a pretty awesome movie experience. Let’s not ever allow something like believability get in the way of an awesome Fast & Furious stunt.
