Fast & Furious 7 Will Still Be Shooting In January 2014

Just how big is Fast & Furious 7 (2014)?  The answer appears to be – very big indeed.  Aside from a mammoth ensemble featuring The Rock, Paul Walker, Tony Jaa, Vin Diesel, Kurt Russell and Jason Statham, among a string of other B/C-Listers, production is now going after stars from emerging markets.  An example is Indian actor Ali Fazal who will appear in the movie as a street racer.  Most won’t know him, actually, given the number of Indians on this planet, perhaps most will know him, and that’s probably the point of his casting.  As if this movie won’t generate gargantuan profits already, 1.2 billion people will be given another incentive for going to see it.  Fast 7 will likely be a very big deal in India.  And that’s before we get to their marketing strategy for China.

But there’s another point in mentioning Fazal.  He has also confirmed that he’ll return to shoot more scenes in January, 2014.  Obviously, unless there is a break in shooting, this means the movie will be shooting for at least four months.  This is around the same length of time taken by The Raid 2, which took around 110+ days.  Although make no mistake, Fast 7 will not be able to touch that movie.  Probably most interesting of all though, even before Fast 7 began shooting last month, in early August James Wan claimed he had been working on the action scenes for this movie since May.  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have paid that much attention.  But consider that this is the director of Death Sentence (2007) (review here), a movie with brutally and skilfully enjoyable action sequences – far beyond anything Justin Lin has ever filmed with his juvenile fridge nuking.  This is down to Wan being able to appreciate that you must not insult the viewers intelligence.  May-Jan, that’s a lot of resources being married with a lot of skill.

So, ManlyMovie cautiously postulates that Fast & Furious 7 could quite possibly live up to the hype…

Updated: A picture of Djimon Hounsou comes via Tony Jaa’s Facebook (thanks to ASFan).  Villains photo?