Vin Diesel Only Did Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift To Get The Riddick Rights
With more Riddick movies on the way, we know that Vin Diesel values this character and franchise quite a bit. While Vin Diesel has the star power now to appear in any action movie franchise he wants, the character of Richard B. Riddick is dear to the actor. So why did it take nine years to release the sequel to The Chronicles of Riddick?
While there are many obstacles to movie-making, the biggest one for the Riddick series was obtaining the film rights. In 2000, Pitch Black was a box office hit, and its breakout star, Riddick (Vin Diesel), got a spinoff movie.
In 2004, Chronicles didn’t perform as well as Universal Studios would have liked. It only grossed $115.7 million worldwide against a production budget of $105 million. The studio wasn’t itching to make a third movie, so it placed the property on its dead franchise pile—until another one of Universal’s franchises was looking for a jump-start.
Universal Studios wanted the third entry in the series, 2006’s Tokyo Drift, to be a fresh start for the franchise. Director Justin Lin took the Fast & Furious movies in a new and exciting direction after the abysmal 2 Fast 2 Furious.
Universal wanted Vin Diesel to make a cameo appearance in the Tokyo-set film, with the promise to star in more Fast/Furious movies. Diesel agreed, but waived his acting fee in exchange for the film rights to Riddick.
With the rights now held by Vin Diesel’s production company, One Race Productions, they quickly started to plan a third Riddick movie. In 2009, Diesel and Riddick‘s co-writer/director David Twohy sat down in Diesel’s kitchen to hammer out the film’s story.
Production on the third film was also scaled back drastically to a smaller budget of $38 million with the hopes that the new sequel would perform better at the box office.
Also in 2009, Vin Diesel starred in Fast & Furious with Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster. The new direction of the Fast/Furious film series took Diesel away from Riddick, but at the same time relaunched his career as an action star. In 2011, Fast Five grossed $626.1 million worldwide, while Furious 6 took in $787.4 million worldwide in 2013.
Production began on Riddick in 2012, but Vin Diesel and Twohy ran into another speed bump when the completion bond fell through in Montreal. Vin Diesel personally advanced funds for the film until bank loans were secured, so the production could go back to Montreal to finish the film.
Diesel turned to Universal, who also agreed to take an equity position and ultimately distribute Riddick. Keep in mind, the movie studio was happy to get rid of the character in exchange for a simple cameo appearance.
In all, this was maybe how close things were to the Fast and Furious franchise being different forever. Vin Diesel getting the Riddick rights paved the way for one of the biggest movie franchises ever.
