All The Fast & Furious 9 Rumors And Spoilers Leaked So Far

While Fast and the Furious fans returned to a corner of the Furious world in 2019's spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, the ninth installment of the main franchise won't race into theaters until April 2, 2021. The last time we saw Dominic Toretto and his found family of fast-driving thieves-turned-world-saving-heroes was in 2017's The Fate of the Furious, which saw the crew facing off against Charlize Theron's stone cold cyberterrorist Cipher in order to prevent a potentially devastating nuclear attack.

The series has come a long way from its origins, and the conflicts of the first film — street racing and stealing DVD players — now seem positively puny in comparison to the cataclysmic stakes of the more recent entries. After the nuclear threat of Fate and the introduction of literal superpowers in Hobbs & Shaw, the sky's the limit for what the next Fast and the Furious movie can throw at Dom's group of unconventional heroes. While we wait to reunite with Dom, Letty, and all the rest, we're passing the time by rounding up all the spoilers and rumors we can get our hands on. Salud, mi familia.

After spinning its wheels for four commercially successful but critically uneven films, the Fast and the Furious franchise really took off in 2011's Fast Five, a slick, exuberant heist action flick that bore little resemblance to the smaller stakes street racing movies that had come before it. One of its biggest upgrades came in the form of Luke Hobbs (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), a Diplomatic Security Service agent that served as the film's intimidating antagonist. Hobbs would go on to follow in the footsteps of Paul Walker's former FBI agent Brian O'Conner, turning away from his career in law enforcement to plunge into a life of big-hearted crime.

Jason Statham's rogue assassin Deckard Shaw also joined the Fast and the Furious series as an antagonist, revealed at the end of Fast & Furious 6 as the one who killed Han back in 2006's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. While many fans still haven't forgiven Shaw for killing Han, he too wound up joining forces with Dom's crew, and was responsible for saving Dom's infant son from Cipher in The Fate of the Furious.

But while Hobbs and Shaw proved to be popular enough characters to receive their own spinoff film, don't expect to see them in the yet-untitled Fast 9. In an interview with MTV News, Johnson confirmed that he and Statham will not be appearing in the ninth film, although he left the door open for an appearance in the already confirmed 10th installment.

Chris Morgan has been writing the Fast and the Furious scripts since Tokyo Drift, but once Morgan stepped away to pen Hobbs & Shaw, the door was open for a fresh new voice to enter the franchise. Fast 9 tapped Kin scribe Daniel Casey to take over writing duties for the newest installment. (It now seems that Morgan has also received a writing credit after all, though how directly he was involved with the screenplay is hard to say).

In addition to Kin, Casey grabbed the studio's attention with his script for The Heavy, a subversive superhero movie that is currently in the works from producer J.J. Abrams. It's fitting that Universal would tap a superhero writer for the next Fast and the Furious movie, considering the larger-than-life direction the franchise has drifted in during its latest installments. The stunts have been growing increasingly more out-of-this-world for years — in The Fate of the Furious, Hobbs hurls a torpedo at a car with his bare hands — and Hobbs & Shaw brought us Idris Elba's "Black Superman," Brixton. Perhaps Casey's hiring hints that superpowers won't be limited to spinoffs, and that the already-loose physics of the Fast and the Furious series will get shrugged off entirely.

During the filming of Furious 7, Paul Walker, who had been playing Dom's best friend and brother-in-law Brian O'Conner since the first movie, was tragically killed in a car crash. Instead of writing a similarly sad fate for Brian, the film worked some special effects magic, using Walker's brothers to help complete his scenes. The ending of the film was rewritten to bring closure to Brian's story, with him riding off into the sunset in a white car as Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again" played over the scene.

However, Vin Diesel announced during a Facebook Live video in 2017 that Jordana Brewster would be reprising her role as Mia, Dom's sister and Brian's wife, for Fast 9. Given how important it was to the entire cast and crew of Furious 7 that Brian receive a happy ending, it'll be interesting to see how the series chooses to bring back Mia without killing Brian off-screen or splitting them up. From the trailers, it looks as though Mia will be as major a presence as ever, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that Brian's absence will be explained by him staying home with the kids while Mia goes off with her brother to help save the world.

While the original The Fast and the Furious was filmed entirely in and around Los Angeles, the series has since shot all over the world, including locations in Japan, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Spain, the U.K., Cuba, and Iceland. In Fast 9, the series will be returning to the U.K., with production confirmed to be underway at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in London. Other shooting locations include Los Angeles and Hawaii.

It's important to keep in mind that a shooting location doesn't necessarily guarantee that part of the film will be set in the same place. For example, in Fast & Furious 6, London stood in for Moscow, and in The Fate of the Furious, many of the "New York" scenes were actually filmed in Cleveland. Still, most of the time when the Furious films travel abroad, it's because at least part of the movie is set in the country they're filming in. So it's a safe bet that Dom and his crew will be hopping across the pond for some of Fast 9, in addition to spending some time in the more tropical location of Hawaii.

Curiously, Hawaii and London were also shooting locations for Hobbs & Shaw, making us wonder if — even without Hobbs and Shaw themselves — the spinoff may tie into the plot of Fast 9 more than we think.

In the same Facebook Live video in which Vin Diesel announced Jordana Brewster's return to the Fast and the Furious family, he also delightedly revealed that director Justin Lin, whom Diesel referred to as the "forefather of Fast," would be helming both the ninth and tenth movies in the series. Lin joined the Fast and the Furious series in 2006, taking the reins on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and staying with the films through 2013's Fast & Furious 6. Other directors took over after that, with James Wan coming aboard for Furious 7 and F. Gary Gray stepping in for The Fate of the Furious, but now Lin is back for what are expected to be the final two installments in the saga.

Diesel said prior to the release of The Fate of the Furious that the reason he decided to continue the franchise following Paul Walker's death while filming the seventh movie was because Walker "promised eight." He went on to explain that The Fate of the Furious would kick off a new trilogy which would "redefine" the series and "defy expectations." And now that Furious veteran Lin is returning to shepherd the series through its "final chapters," Diesel promises that the end of the journey will be "magic."

While all signs pointed to Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris reprising their respective roles as Roman and Tej, for a long time no official announcement was made about their involvement in Fast 9, leading to some nervousness that they might not return. Gibson had previously threatened to leave the franchise back in 2017 if Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson reprised his role as Luke Hobbs in Fast 9, but later partially walked back his comments, saying that he should have kept his feelings about Johnson to himself. However, Gibson still got his wish, with Johnson's work on Hobbs & Shaw preventing him from returning for Fast 9. Still, the rest of the F9 cast had been in place for a pretty long time before fans finally got confirmation that Roman and Tej would indeed be coming back.

In July of 2019, the first cast photo released from the set confirmed that Gibson and Ludacris are definitely still part of the family for Fast 9. Taken to celebrate co-star Michelle Rodriguez's birthday, the photo shows several members of the cast, including Gibson and Ludacris, gathered around Rodriguez, who is holding a delicious-looking birthday cake.

Now that we've seen a full trailer, it's clear that Roman and Tej will be just as integral to the plot of F9 as ever, and will still be providing the same loyalty and comic relief we've come to expect from them. The duo receives a decent amount of screen time in the trailer, with Roman listing Jacob Toretto's impressive list of credentials and vowing to stick with Dom until the end, and Tej remaining decidedly unimpressed at a rocket-enhanced Pontiac Fiero.

Vin Diesel announced on Instagram in July of 2019 that Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren will be reprising their Fate of the Furious roles for Fast 9. Theron plays cyberterrorist Cipher, who forced Dom to turn on his team (including his new wife, Letty) and work for her in Fate by threatening to kill his infant son. Dom eventually managed to gain the upper hand, but not before Cipher ordered the execution of his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child, Elena (Elsa Pataky). While the Fast franchise has a history of turning villains into heroes, it's hard to see a scenario in which the woman responsible for Elena's murder is invited to join Dom's crew. The trailer certainly doesn't suggest any change of heart, with Cipher recruiting Dom's vicious brother Jacob to take down the crew. 

Mirren, meanwhile, was introduced in Fate as Magdalene Shaw, mother of previously villainous brothers Deckard (Jason Statham) and Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), and their sister, Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), who was introduced in Hobbs & Shaw. While as far as Dom's crew knows going into F9, the Shaw brothers were each responsible, either directly or indirectly, for multiple Fast family deaths — in addition to Deckard appearing to kill Han in Fast & Furious 6, Owen's actions in the same film led to the death of Gisele (Gal Gadot) — the Shaw family, led by Magdalene, was instrumental in helping Dom defeat Cipher in The Fate of the Furious. Mirren also reprised her role in Hobbs & Shaw, but whose side she'll be on in Fast 9 is anyone's guess. 

The first official trailer for the film (which is being marketed as F9: The Fast Saga in the U.S. and Fast & Furious 9: The Fast Saga in the U.K.) raced onto the internet on January 31, 2020, and brought with it some major hints about what to expect in the ninth film. The trailer opens with a musical callback to the end of Furious 7, which bid a sentimental farewell to longtime Fast protagonist Brian O'Conner following the death of actor Paul Walker. The opening notes of Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again" — which closed out the seventh film — play underneath a scene of Dom, Letty, and their toddler son Brian (introduced as a baby in Fate of the Furious). Letty gives little Brian the cross necklace that has symbolized her relationship with Dom throughout the series, saying it will protect him "from what's coming."

The trailer then goes on to expand on just what this ominous oncoming threat is, revealing that John Cena will indeed be playing a villain, and that he'll be teamed up with Cipher. What they want isn't clear yet, but based on Cena's description as a "master thief, assassin, [and] high performance driver," we expect this duo to be the Fast crew's biggest challenge yet.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Fast movie without plenty of mind-blowing car stunts, and the F9 trailer assures us that the newest installment will be no exception. In the first trailer alone, we see a car strapped to a rocket, a car driving up a falling bridge, a car driving off a cliff and being picked up by a magnetic plane, and a car swinging through the air like Tarzan.

As if the promise of a Toretto family showdown and flying cars weren't enough to build excitement for F9, the last few seconds of the trailer feature the shocking return of a character who has long been thought dead: Han (Sung Kang). First introduced in 2006's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Han was seemingly killed in a car accident by the end of that film. However, he then appeared in the next three Fast films, which served as prequels to Tokyo Drift, until 2013's Fast & Furious 6 ended by revisiting the third movie, revealing that the fateful "accident" was caused by Deckard Shaw.

Ever since the sixth movie, Han fans have demanded a better fate for their fave through the #JusticeForHan hashtag, and it appears that in F9, their pleas have finally been heard (the trailer even nods to the social media push with its closing tagline, "Justice is coming"). In the trailer, Han emerges from the shadows as the rest of the crew looks on in shock, seemingly brought back into the fold by Letty. He nonchalantly comments, "Nice clubhouse," before being welcomed by Dom with a big hug. We then get a brief glimpse of Han back in action driving an orange car, hinting that his return won't just be a brief cameo, but will once again find him as a valued member of the crew. Just how Han survived (and whose body Dom brought back from Tokyo to bury in Furious 7) is still a mystery, but we're ready to buy just about anything if it means Han gets to live again.