The Fast & Furious 9 trailer has set an official January release date and will drop as part of a live concert in Miami. Since its humbling beginnings as a Point Break-esque film about street car racing in the early 2000s, the Fast & Furious brand has evolved into an extremely popular action series about globe-trotting superheroes like Dominic "Dom" Toretto (Vin Diesel). It's only continued to expand throughout this year thanks to the release of its first movie spinoff (Hobbs & Shaw) and cartoon series (Fast & Furious: Spy Racers), and will unleash its ninth mainline entry in 2020.
Directed by Justin Lin (his first time helming a Fast & Furious movie since 2013's Fast & Furious 6), Fast & Furious 9 will pit Dom and his family against some as-yet unknown threat presumably connected to their old enemy, the brilliant cyberterrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron, reprising her role from The Fate of the Furious). Diesel recently confirmed the Fast & Furious 9 trailer would be arriving in January, and teased a related special announcement for today. As it turns out, he wasn't kidding around.
Today, the official Fast & Furious Twitter account confirmed the Fast & Furious 9 trailer will arrive on January 31, 2020, as part of a live concert event in Miami featuring Fast & Furious veteran Ludacris, Wiz Khalifa, Charlie Puth, Ozuna, and Cardi B (who also costars in the film). You can click on their post below to see how you can attend.
Trailer premiere events like this are not unheard of. Paramount flew journalists out to Japan for the Ghost in the Shell trailer debut in late 2016, and there have been similar press-related trailer launches for movies like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets over the last few years. Hosting an entire concert is something else, though, even for a brand as world-famous as Fast & Furious. Then again, Fast & Furious 9 is getting a later start on its marketing than other tentpoles due to arrive in the first half of 2020 (many of which have dropped or will soon drop trailers this month), so the idea behind the live concert could be to generate more noise when it arrives in order to make up for lost time.
Nine movies in and pushing twenty years old, however, one wonders if the Fast & Furious franchise will begin showing its age with Fast & Furious 9. This year's Hobbs & Shaw earned a respectable critical reception, but it didn't scale the same heights as the previous two Fast & Furious sequels at the box office, and raised doubts about Universal's plans for additional film spinoffs down the line. The current plan is to end the mainline series after Fast & Furious 10, so all the ninth installment really needs to do is perform well enough to ensure Dom's story gets its planned conclusion. Whether a trailer drop/live concert helps the cause, that remains to be seen.
Source: Fast & Furious/Twitter
