New Alleged Details About Justin Lin’s Fast X Exit Reveal Some Wild Scrapped Plot Twists Involving Jason Momoa’s Character

One of the biggest twists from 2023’s Fast X wasn’t something from the movie itself, but rather its production in real life. Just one week into filming, Justin Lin, who’d directed five of the previous Fast & Furious movies, departed the blockbuster, resulting in Louis Leterrier taking over helming duties. At the time, it was reported that this move stemmed from “creative differences” with franchise lead Vin Diesel. Now new details have come out about why Lin left Fast X, and they come with some wild reveals about scrapped plot points involving Jason Momoa’s Dante.

In an excerpt from Indiewire for the unauthorized book Welcome to the Family, which releases this week and covers the history of the Fast & Furious franchise, it’s mentioned that a “key source of discord” between Justin Lin and Vin Diesel, as well as actor’s sister/fellow producer Samantha Vincent, “centered around the script and its ending.” Specifically, there were drafts of the Fast X script where it was revealed that Dominic Toretto’s son, affectionately referred to as “Little Brian,” was actually the biological son of Dante, the movie’s main antagonist. While some thought this was “the perfect, if deeply dark, way,” for Dom to grapple with the concept of family, in that he’d be protecting a boy who wasn’t biologically his own, others, including Diesel, didn’t approve of the twist.

So had this made it into the final version of Fast X, that means that Little Brian’s biological mother, the late Elena Reves, would have had a thing going with Dante Reyes. I’m not sure how this would have worked on the Fast & Furious timeline considering that Elena got pregnant with Brian sometime prior to Fast & Furious 6, when she and Dom were still an item, and after Dante had already been injured during the bank vault heist sequence depicted in Fast Five. Also, I find it hard to believe that Elena would have gotten romantically involved with Dante since he was the son of crime lord Hernán Reyes and she was one of Rio’s few incorruptible police officers.

On top of all this, Welcome to the Family also shares that Justin Lin and Universal disagreed over the former’s idea for Fast X’s final action set piece, which would have “involved Dante using a giant excavator-like machine to wreak havoc.” Going this route would have propelled the movie’s production budget even higher, and Alexander Witt, a second-unit director who worked on Fast X, had this to say about the kibosh being put on this sequence:

I agree with the sentiment of this sounding too Transformers-y, although like Witt noted, the final action sequence still ended up being a CGI fest, so one could argue it was a lateral move. In any case, eventually a “heated closed-door meeting” with Universal convinced Justin Lin he needed bow out of directing Fast X. As noted in the book, this stands out from previous instances of directors leaving major movies, like Phil Lord and Chris Miller on Solo: A Star Wars Story and Bryan Singer on Bohemian Rhapsody, because Lin left on his own accord instead of being fired by the studio.

Justin Lin was still credited as a producer on Fast X, but his time with the franchise is now over. He returned to the filmmaking space with Last Days, which premiered on the 2025 movies calendar last month, and he’s set to direct the film adaptation of Keanu Reeves’ BRZRKR for Netflix. Fast & Furious 11, which Louis Leterrier is returning to direct, still doesn’t have a release date, but Vin Diesel posted an optimistic update about its progress several weeks ago.