Dwayne Johnson Has Left A Billion-Dollar Franchise
Dwayne Johnson is looking ahead, and that future doesn't include one of his biggest franchises.
This article is more than 2 years old
For a while now, there have been reports of a feud between Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel, who famously leads Fast & Furious as Dominic Toretto. At first, these were rumors. Then it got more serious. In the June issue of Men’s Health, Vin Diesel said it all came around to Vin Diesel giving The Rock “tough love”. He said, “I would do anything I’d have to do in order to get performances in anything I’m producing.” Now, The Hollywood Reporter has asked Dwayne Johnson about Vin Diesel’s comments.
Here’s what Dwayne Johnson had to say about reading Vin Diesel’s statements:
I laughed and I laughed hard. I think everyone had a laugh at that. And I’ll leave it at that. And that I’ve wished them well. I wish them well on Fast 9. And I wish them the best of luck on Fast 10 and Fast 11 and the rest of the Fast & Furious movies they do that will be without me.
That was a big statement there at the end. The Fast & Furious franchise just released its ninth movie, F9, without Dwayne Johnson. There will be two more movies in the main series, numbers 10 and 11, before the main series is done. While is it expected that we will see more spinoffs and the franchise isn’t over, for The Rock, apparently, his time with Fast & Furious films is over. That makes sense, considering that Vin Diesel is so publicly making statements that don’t exactly send out a good vibe for a positive work environment and The Rock has a lot of other things going on.
On the other hand, who turns down a billion-dollar franchise like Fast & Furious? There are only so many of those. Opportunities like Marvel movies don’t come along every day. And this is what Dwayne Johnson does, right? Builds franchises?
Dwayne Johnson doesn’t leave franchises. He makes them. This is the man who went on Saturday Night Live and called himself “franchise Viagra”, and since that time, he’s really proved it. He does sequels. He hits huge numbers at the box office. He’s a guy that studios want to see participating in their franchises and building them up. Right now, he’s doing that for DC with Black Adam and for Disney with his upcoming movie, Jungle Cruise. In the past, he’s done that with Fast & Furious, appearing in several of the movies in the main franchise and in a Hobbs & Shaw spinoff series. But are those days over? Apparently, they are.
For Dwayne Johnson, that’s probably not such a big deal. He has a lot of other top-performing movies out there. He’s got the Jumanji films, that are just waiting for all the actor’s schedules to line up so a third one can be made. The first film in that series earned $962 million at the worldwide box office. At the end of July, he’s releasing Jungle Cruise with Emily Blunt, a movie that’s sure to be a hit for Disney. He’s just finished filming Black Adam for DC, a movie he’s waited a long time to see happen. There’s an animated film coming up from DC starring The Rock as well called DC League of Super-Pets. And this is just skimming the surface. It doesn’t seem likely that Dwayne Johnson will lose sleep about skipping the future Fast & Furious films. It’s a shame, though, for fans who liked seeing him in them.
