Though the pandemic forced the Fast & Furious team to change its route plans, delaying the ninth instalment to this year and moving back the release of the 10th and 11th movies, which are talked up as the end of the franchise's current iteration. With Fast & Furious 9 managing a win at a troubled time for the box office, a Universal has now planted a flag for the next film, reserving an April 2023 spot on its calendar.
And though this sort of detail is usually announced by Vin Diesel in a gravel-voiced social media post, the news dropped because the studio put the date on media analytic site Comscore. But we can expect something from the man behind Dom Toretto soon enough.
The aim has been to shoot these next two films back to back, with Justin Lin overseeing the end of the franchise he helped to reenergize.
Whether that's still the case remains to be seen, but thanks to the ninth film making $681.5 million and becoming the highest-grossing film of the pandemic era, the future for "da movies" (as Diesel might say) is still bright, at least from the Fast point of view.