Fast and Furious Saga – 10 Fascinating Film Facts

Hate it or Love it, The Fast and Furious Saga is one of the most successful film franchises of all time

Hate it or Love it, The Fast and Furious Saga is one of the most successful film franchises of all time. Here are 10 fascinating facts about the Fast and Furious Saga

• The original film was titled ‘Redline’ before the studio settled on ‘The Fast and the Furious’. Other titles considered were ‘Race Wars’, ‘Street Wars’ and ‘Racer X’;

• Vin Diesel is synonymous with the franchise, but he wasn’t the studios first choice to play Dominic Toretto: Universal wanted actor Timothy Olyphant to play the role but he turned it down when offered resulting in Vin Diesel being cast.

• Jordanna Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez didn’t actually have driving licences before being in the first movie! They had to take and pass their tests before starting filming;

• Vin Diesel turned down $20m to appear in ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ instead deciding to work on ‘The Chronicles of Riddick’, the sequel to his movie ‘Pitch Black’;

• Speaking of ‘Riddick’ Vin Diesel wasn’t paid for his cameo at the end of ‘Fast and Furious – Tokyo Drift’ instead being given the rights to the ‘Riddick’ film franchise in return for his appearance.

• Although there are 10 films in the main series (11 including the Hobbs and Shaw spin-off) there are actually an additional 2 ‘short’ films: a 6-minute prelude bridging the end of the first film with the second which was included in the DVD release of ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ and a 20-minute short written and directed by Vin Diesel which serves as a precursor to the fourth film in the series;

• Rapper and Actor Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges has become a firm favourite in the series since his introduction in the second film, but his character was only introduced after another rapper Ja Rule was written out of the film when he chose not to reprise his role from the first film.

• Vin Diesel revealed in a Facebook post that The Rock’s character of ‘Luke Hobbs’ was originally written for actor Tommy Lee Jones with Diesel saying that a fan suggestion led him to reach out to The Rock to play the part although Director Justin Lin states that The Rock was always his first choice.

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• The last film in the series, ‘Fast X’, contains 4 Academy Award winners, all of whom are female: Rita Moreno, Dame Helen Mirren, Charlize Theron and Brie Larson;

• Although it has been announced that Fast X will be a two-part film Vin Diesel revealed in an interview ahead of the Rome premiere of the film that the studio, upon seeing the first part of Fast X, asked if the film could instead be made into a trilogy. Does this mean that we’ll be getting an extra film? We’ll have to wait and see

Watch the latest Trailer for the latest entry ‘Fast X’ here