With The Fate of the Furious now off the starting grid, (check out our review here), rumors have been rumbling about a potential spinoff starring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham. The pair have great on-screen chemistry, to be sure, but it’s apparently gotten to the point where it’s pissing off Vin Diesel.
The actor doesn’t just star in the franchise as hero/villain Dominic Toretto, but he’s also an executive producer on the latest entry alongside his sister, Samantha Vincent. According to insiders, the original cut of The Fate of the Furious contained several scenes where test audiences reacted so well to Johnson and Statham’s interactions that the studio began discussing a spinoff movie centred on their characters. The wrinkle comes in the fact that an additional scene to set such a thing up was apparently shot without Diesel’s knowledge, and when his sister reported this to him, the famously gregarious action star got a bit of a bee in his bonnet.
That led to him furiously calling NBC Universal to demand the scene be cut. He got his way, too, with the studio recalling the theatrical prints to get rid of the scene. Behaviour like this might be why an obviously annoyed Johnson posted the following on social media during production:
“Some conduct themselves as stand-up men and true professionals, while others don’t. The ones that don’t are too chicken shit to do anything about it anyway. Candy asses. When you watch this movie next April and it seems like I’m not acting in some of these scenes and my blood is legit boiling — you’re right.”
Representatives of the actors have refused to comment, but the official line on the controversial scene is that the director and studio ‘loved’ Johnson and Statham’s interactions in The Fate of the Furious, but decided not to include the scene in the theatrical release because it’d fit better ‘somewhere else’ (I’m guessing as a Blu-ray extra). The Fast and the Furious franchise has long appeared unstoppable, but could these resentments developing between the stars finally put the brakes on the venerable series?