It seems nothing can kill The Fast and The Furious film franchise.
Actor and producer Vin Diesel has confirmed April 14, 2017 as lift off for the next sequel, The Fast and The Furious 8.
This will be followed by the release of Furious 9 on April 19, 2019 and end with The Fast and The Furious 10 in April 2021. Few films have the cache to lay out their schedule years in advance but the action-packed race franchise for petrol heads is playing by its own rules.
Once completed, the remaining three films will bring the franchise to ten feature films, making it Universal Studio's biggest franchise of all time but still short of the 24 official Bond films - spanning Dr No in 1962 to Spectre in 2015 - and Star Trek's 12 cinematic explorations of deep space.
But, hey wait, there's more. Diesel, who plays who plays ex con and elite street racer Dominic Toretto, has already confirmed spin-off films are currently in the works.
"We've written out story lines for various characters," Diesel said. "We've been playing with it for a long time. It's a very rich property and we're committed to treating it with a lot of class."
The franchise survived the death of actor Paul Walker in a fiery single car accident in 2013. The latest instalment, Furious 7 in which Walker posthumously appeared, was box office gold, taking $1.5 billion internationally in 2015 behind Avatar, Titanic and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
