NBC Universal Chief Content Officer Donna Langley has apologised for a notorious scene in F9.
In the film, better known as Fast and Furious 9, two of the action franchise's characters are blasted into space in a rocket car, resulting in one of the more baffling moments in the often exaggerated action series.
The infamous scene from the 2021 film involves Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris’s characters, Roman and Tej, getting into scuba suits and flying their superpowered car to the International Space Station.
“I’m sorry that we sent them to space,” Langley said during a talk at the Toronto International Film Festival. “We can never get that genie back.”
Speaking with the festival’s director, Cameron Bailey, Langley admitted that most of the ideas featured in the lucrative franchise come from conversations with fans.
“Vin [Diesel] was an early adopter of talking to his fans directly,” Langley said, according to Variety. “As we saw that growing, and we saw where the conversation was going. We’ve always been very fan first on the ‘Fast’ franchise.”
This apparently included rethinking the deaths of major characters such as Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty Ortiz.
“[People would] sort of throw out little things about, ‘Oh God, don’t kill Letty,'” Langley explained. “OK, we’ll bring her back. ‘She never died. Don’t worry. Nothing to see here.’ But that’s all led by fan engagement.”
Langley also noted that much of the series’ success has hinged on its switch from films about racing culture to an action-heist franchise.
“We knew that we had to figure out how to grow it,” Langley said. “We made a conscious decision to pivot to a sort of a globe-trotting heist scenario.”
Fast and Furious is one of the most successful movie series ever, which now has 11 movies to its name. 2023’s Fast X grossed more than $700m at the global box office.
A follow-up is reportedly in the works, with Vin Diesel stating in June that it could see the potential return of Paul Walker’s character, 12 years after the actor’s death.
The 58-year-old said: “The studio said to me, ‘Vin, can we please have the finale of ‘Fast and Furious’ [in] April 2027?' I said, ‘Under three conditions.’ First, is to bring the franchise back to L.A.! The second thing was to return to the car culture, to the street racing! The third thing was reuniting Dom and Brian O’Conner.”
