Fast and Furious 8 Struggles to Find Director
Action sequel currently driverless.
One of this summer's big movie success stories was Furious 7. The seventh film in the already popular Fast And Furious franchise took the series to a new level when it passed the $1.5 billion mark in terms of global box office, making it the fifth most successful film of all time.
Despite this success, producers Universal are having trouble finding a director for the next film. The Hollywood Reporter have reported that James Wan, director of Furious 7, has declined "life-altering money" to return for another instalment of the action series, opting instead to make the sequel to his 2013 horror hit The Conjuring.
Justin Lin, who directed four of the previous parts, has declined too, moving onto the latest Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond. Non-Stop director Jaume Collet-Serra was also approached, but was not available.
Furious 7 had a notoriously troubled production, with star Paul Walker dying in a car crash halfway through shooting. The film was completed using a rewritten script, body doubles, and elaborate effects, but The Hollywood Reporter notes that the difficulty of the two-year production period may have had a detrimental effect on Wan's health. In addition, sources for the site state that star and producer Vin Diesel was "extraordinarily difficult," questioning many of the complex action sequences in tiny detail. Representatives for both Diesel and Wan have denied that there were on-set problems.
The eighth Fast & Furious film is currently scheduled for an April 2017 release. In December last year, Deadline reported that Universal were looking for a director to helm a "multi-part production," with several movies shooting simultaneously, but it is unknown if this is still their intention.
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