The Ending Of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw Explained
This article contains spoilers for Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
For much of its runtime, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw might as well be called Hobbs vs. Shaw.
Even though they spend most of the movie working toward the same objective, Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) can't help but bicker, glower, and prank one another for the duration of their mission. As a result, they are a potent combo, but not much of a team, which hampers them when the pair faces down the movie's cyborg terrorist villain, Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), in hand-to-hand combat in its finale.
Brixton's augmentations allow him to more than hold his own against the pair. It is only via the power of teamwork that they are able to defeat him, as Hobbs and Shaw learn the lesson generations of video game cannon fodder have not: Fights are a lot easier if you gang up on the person you outnumber. Brixton is defeated. The super-virus that had infected Shaw's secret agent sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby) — and may or may not have migrated over from Mission: Impossible 2 — is neutralized. The world is saved.
All that's the easy part; how many movies have you seen where the world is saved at the end? After that comes the work of fashioning all that grand, finale-worthy destruction, all the collapsed buildings, the crashed helicopters, the recovered technology, into a bridge leading to the next sequel or spin-off, and Hobbs & Shaw was birthed from a franchise with plenty of experience in that.
What threads might a Hobbs & Shaw sequel pick up?
Black Superman or not, Brixton wasn't working alone in his attempts to wipe out a good portion of humanity with the Snowflake virus. He is an operative of the techno-terrorist organization Eteon, working, as the finale reveals, under the orders of its mysterious Director.
The Director of Eteon is heard but not seen at the end Hobbs & Shaw, ordering Brixton's termination via long-distance Control-Alt-Delete and then telling Hobbs the pair know each other, and will be seeing each other soon. Reducing the master villain to a disembodied voice wasn't always the plan: Dwayne Johnson told Screen Rant that the production had originally tried to cast Hobbs & Shaw director David Leitch's John Wick star Keanu Reeves, but that it was decided to leave his identity a mystery for the time being. His heavily-modulated voice was supplied by Ryan Reynolds, under his pseudonym "Champ Nightingale."
Reynolds also figures in the film's other big loose end, in a post-credit scene where his CIA agent Victor Locke makes a call to Hobbs laying out the discovery of a new super-virus before realizing he's explained all the horrid details to Hobbs' daughter, Sam (Eliana Su'a). The scene is mostly an extended Deadpool-style Reynolds riff, which means it's probably not binding for the sequel. The same is likely true with the fact that Reynolds plays both a good and a bad guy in the film's finale, though now at least the potential seed is planted for Locke to wind up being the big bad.
Whoever it is, it may take more than one sequel to find out. In theory, Eteon could have as many nesting super-agents as there are big-name actors willing to fight Johnson and Statham.
When can we expect to see a Hobbs & Shaw sequel?
The short answer: Whenever Dwayne Johnson wants to make it.
This is an oversimplification, but it's not necessarily incorrect. As befits one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Johnson's schedule is perpetually packed. He has two movies slated to come out in 2021, the long-delayed Jungle Cruise and Netflix's Red Notice. Production has also finally begun on his eagerly anticipated DC film, Black Adam. And, he may soon play King Kamehameha for Robert Zemeckis' The King. The man's busy, basically. He's not going to have a hole in his schedule just because he's not making Hobbs & Shaw 2, but he has expressed interest in returning for another go-around.
Johnson may be the biggest name, but he's not the only interested party whose schedule may need massaging. Jason Statham is starring in Guy Ritchie's latest, Wrath of Man, due in late 2021. Vanessa Kirby is filming two Mission: Impossible sequels simultaneously and was just nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for Pieces of a Woman. David Leitch is finishing work on the assassins-on-rails thriller Bullet Train and gearing up for the underworld vampire action-romance Undying Love.
No matter who the Director of Eteon ends up being or what grave threats Ryan Reynolds discovers next, Hobbs & Shaw 2 is not just over the horizon. In fact, producer Kelly McCormick told Collider in February 2021 that the sequel was in a holding pattern for now, letting everyone finish what they're working on for the time being and maybe clear some of the COVID backlog before circling back and trying to find a time (and a script) to make the sequel with. To make the follow-up, it's going to take everyone working as a team. Again.