The next entry in the Fast and Furious franchise was supposed to arrive last summer, but now we're looking forward to the movie opening this summer. And fans are even more excited because we know what's in store. The first trailer for F9 was released before it was known the film would have to be delayed, and so we've known for a year that John Cena will play the villain of the new movie, and more specifically, that Cena is playing Jakob Toretto, the brother of Vin Diesel's brother Dom. Up until the trailer we had no idea Dom even had a brother, but Diesel promises it all makes sense.
The fact is, according to Vin Diesel, that the fact that we didn't know Dom had a brother is sort of the point. While the Fast and Furious franchise has been going for two decades, there's simply a lot we don't actually know about these characters. The movies have rarely bothered to tell us what anybody was up to before the first movie. That lends that period of time an air of mystery which F9 will now exploit. And because family is a major theme of the films, it makes sense to bring in actual family. As Vin Diesel tells EW...
Family is at the core of the Fast & Furious, and how you explore that and play with that is what makes for an interesting franchise. One of the compelling aspects of Fast is this backstory that we were introduced to literally 20 years ago, and that always has had its cloak of obscurity. We always wanted to know a bit more about the origins. And I think that a franchise has to earn the right to go back in-depth into a backstory, and I hope Fast & Furious has done just that. I feel like the instinct or desire to go into the backstory, almost the origin story, was something compelling for everybody.
The family of Fast and Furious is the one that you choose, not the one that you were born into, but considering just how important the concept of family is, it certainly makes sense to ask why we don't know more about the biological families of these characters. Are literally all of them estranged? In the case of the Toretto family, it certainly seems like that's the case, but in F9 we'll at least find out the reason for that. Why does a man like Dom, who holds the concept of family so dear, not even talk about his own brother?
Fans have had to speculate about what F9 will have in store for a year, and it will still be several more months before we have answers. And that's assuming that F9 actually still opens on its current schedule, which is far from a sure thing.
