If Vin Diesel hadn’t been chosen to play Dom, when would Fast & Furious have ended?
If a different performer than Vin Diesel had portrayed Dominic Toretto, the Fast & Furious series may have concluded with Furious 7. Dominic Toretto, the main character in the Fast Saga, and his family have travelled the globe on adventures using their street racing and robbery abilities against terrorists and supervillains.
With the scheduled two-part conclusion of Fast X and Fast & Furious 11, the Fast & Furious franchise is coming to a close after a really amazing, if downright crazy, run of car heroics, yet it might be argued that the series missed its finest climax.
In addition to playing Dom on screen, Vin Diesel has contributed significantly as a producer to the Fast Saga since 2009’s Fast & Furious. Universal Pictures has a great interest in extending the series since the Fast & Furious movies had achieved their then-biggest success by a wide margin with the release of Fast Five in 2011.
But along with that came a blatant trend of the Fast & Furious movies becoming more and more like comic books and ridiculous in terms of their plots and action scenes, with a focus on Dom’s invincibility that makes the ending of Furious 7 seem like it was retroactively skipped over as a series finale.
As Furious 7 was being made when Paul Walker tragically passed away in 2013, Brian O’Conner, who played him, was dropped from the Fast & Furious franchise. In Brian’s heartbreaking send-off, which is considered one of the Fast Saga’s most well remembered scenes, Dom Toretto and Brian split ways as Brian begins a family with Mia, Dom’s sister (Jordana Brewster). While Vin Diesel has continued to appear in and produce the Fast & Furious films after Furious 7, the series might have—and maybe even should have—been the series’ finale.
After Furious 7, Fast & Furious should have come to an end.
Despite Brian’s retirement in Furious 7, Mia’s fight-heavy involvement in Furious 9 demonstrated that Brian and Mia themselves still had a presence. Brian’s absence was hesitantly justified as his taking care of his and Mia’s children. With just Brian’s automobile seen coming into Dom’s driveway in F9, the entrance of Brian’s car to the BBQ at the Toretto family at the conclusion similarly had to deal with not revealing Brian personally. If the Fast Saga had ended with Furious 7, such attempts to keep Brian relatively present without making an appearance on screen wouldn’t have been necessary.
In addition, Furious 7’s end sequence serves as a moving remembrance of Paul Walker and a sentimental wrap-up of the whole Fast Saga up to that moment. The conclusion of Furious 7 lovingly underlines Dom and Brian employing their driving abilities in one more street race in the improbable narrative of their relationship, set to Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s “See You Again.” Without Diesel’s desire to continue the Fast Saga beyond Furious 7, the film’s finale would have likely been the end of the series if a different actor were playing Dom, and this would have been the perfect choice from a narrative standpoint.
Although Furious 7 marks the conclusion of the Fast & Furious series, further adventures with some of the franchise’s characters are not necessarily ruled out. One example of such a scenario along those lines is the spin-off Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, which centred on Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham). Even in that case, the happy climax of Furious 7 saw the core chronology of the Fast & Furious films ride right past what was supposed to be its perfect finish.