Just when it seemed like the Fast & Furious franchise would keep going forever, Vin Diesel announced that the series will be ending with a two-part finale – tentatively titled Fast & Furious 10 and Fast & Furious 11 – to roll out after the COVID-delayed F9. The series has been rebranded The Fast Saga and the tenth and eleventh movies will bring an end to that saga.
This plan is reminiscent of a different two-part franchise finale that Vin Diesel was a part of: Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. Technically, these movies didn’t conclude the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or even “the Infinity Saga” within it, but they did mark the end of an era for the first generation of big-screen Avengers. And as the conclusion of the original six Avengers’ story, it was immensely satisfying. Diesel can learn a lot of lessons from these movies in giving The Fast Saga its own definitive conclusion.
First and foremost, the most effective way that Marvel used the two-part trick was ending the first part on a bombshell cliffhanger to get fans excited for the next one. With a bad guy who achieves his insane plan to wipe out half of all life in the universe, Infinity War has the most iconic downer ending since The Empire Strikes Back. The Avengers are at their lowest at the end of Infinity War to pave the way for their greatest victory in Endgame. Dom Toretto’s family needs to face the same adversity in the final Fast & Furious movies. The finale can really put these characters to the test and face them with more serious danger than they’re used to. With it being the end of the series, the stakes need to be higher than ever.
Just as Infinity War and Endgame raised the stakes with set pieces like the Battle of Earth, the action in the final Fast & Furious movies needs to top everything that’s come before. In a franchise marked by one-upmanship, with everything from a tank on a highway to a missile in Dwayne Johnson’s bare hands, this will be no easy feat. But since there will be no more movies in which to top themselves after these last two, the team needs to go all out with bigger, bolder, more exciting spectacle than fans have ever seen before. Michelle Rodriguez has leaked that F9 will bring the characters into outer space, so it’s unclear how they’ll manage to go bigger than that, but for Fast 10 and 11 to really feel like the culmination of the entire Fast Saga, they’ll need to figure it out.
Part of what made Infinity War and Endgame so effective as the Avengers’ last stand is that the villain they were standing against, Thanos, was their greatest foe to date. The villains of the Fast & Furious franchise have been a mixed bag. Characters like Deckard Shaw and Brixton “I’m Black Superman” Lore have been fun adversaries for Toretto and co., but for the most part, the series’ baddies have been forgettable and one-note, like Hernan Reyes and Owen Shaw. Cipher was memorable, but only because of her crazy dreadlocks. Thankfully, this means that the writers faced with the daunting task of giving the F&F team their greatest villain to date don’t have a very high bar to clear.
Some of the weaker F&F movies end with the good guys winning just because that’s what’s supposed to happen in a Hollywood action movie. For the final victory in the last movie in the series to be really effective, it needs to feel earned. Thanos had Earth’s mightiest heroes backed into a corner until the very last second. Iron Man and Captain America’s sacrifices paid off a decade’s worth of storytelling. The last two Fast & Furious movies might not be able to achieve this kind of finality, because the series hasn’t been building to a big payoff in the way the MCU always was, but they can still give the gang a satisfactory send-off if giving them a send-off is its primary focus.
Marvel turned half its cast to dust in Infinity War in order to keep Endgame focused on the six heroes who started it all. The final Fast movies can’t get hung up on perfunctory side characters like Mr. Nobody and Little Nobody. They need to focus on the family that’s been at the heart of these movies since the beginning: Dom, Letty, Mia, Roman, Tej, and possibly Brian, if the filmmakers can find a way to make it work. Paul Walker’s untimely passing has made dealing with Brian a particularly delicate subject, but the character is so crucial to the franchise that he needs to be a part of the end of the story, even if he only makes a brief appearance.
Arguably, Furious 7 was the most fitting conclusion to the Fast & Furious series. Whatever happens in Fast & Furious 11, it won’t be as emotionally charged as Dom and Brian’s final race set to “See You Again” at the end of Furious 7. But if Diesel learns the right lessons from his experiences working with Marvel on the last two Avengers movies, this two-part finale can still be great.
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