The Fast & Furious franchise has evolved from a semi-serious 2001 B-movie about underground auto-racing to something like a multicultural superhero franchise - where a strategically diverse surrogate family of car fanciers engage in ever more unlikely action-adventure scenarios (most recently, becoming friendly allies of a covert government agency who conscripts them to tackle a surprisingly large number of car-based super criminals). Not bad for a series many critics did not expect to endure after the mixed reception that greeted the first sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious.
Now, the 8th installment of the series (the first produced since the tragic death of former series co-lead Paul Walker) is heading to theaters as The Fate of The Furious; with fans primed to discover the shocking secret of what could possibly have turned onetime main hero Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) into the henchman of Charlize Theron's Cipher - a high-tech terrorist mastermind, who attacks Team Furious with a device capable of weaponizing and remote-controlling entire cities' worth of cars.
We're not far from release now, so co-star Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has now shared a new poster for the highly-anticipated film to social media. Check it out below.
Amusingly, the new poster (along with finally pulling the trigger on the "Fate"/"F8" visual pun inherent in the title) forgoes depicting any of the human cast, instead displaying a lineup of the tricked-out cars (and one tank) that will feature in the main story; which early trailers have indicated will find Kurt Russell's "Mr. Nobody" giving the heroes access to a bunker housing myriad rare and specially-modified vehicles - presumably in anticipation of their traditional rides not being capable of thwarting Cipher's sinister ambitions. The most recent trailer had featured these and other vehicles in conflict against Cipher's submarine in an arctic location.
Left unsaid, still, is the "Fate" eluded to in the title. It has been widely implied that F8 is meant to begin a three-film story arc which will provide closure for the main characters and end the series on an even 10 installments, but where that arc is headed or what it had to do with Toretto becoming evil is yet unclear. More recent trailers have depicted Cipher speechifying to Dom about his seeming betrayal in the presence of a crucifix necklace seemingly identical to his own; implying that the two may share a connection that relates either to his past or the franchise's thematic fixation on families (both surrogate and otherwise). How this relates to Helen Mirren, who's coming onboard as Owen/Deckard Shaw's mother, remains unclear.
Next: Why Has Dominic Toretto Betrayed The Fast & Furious Family?
Source: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson
