The following contains SPOILERS for Fast X!
Fast X is set to be the beginning of a finale and it certainly set the stage for the next Fast & Furious film, but following some recent comments from Vin Diesel, we’re not quite sure if we should expect one more movie or two. It’s being hinted that Fast X could spawn into a trilogy, and that’s actually perfect because Fast & Furious 11 also needs to be Hobbs & Shaw 2.
The 2019 Fast & Furious spinoff didn’t have a box office run quite at the same level as the main franchise, but it did well enough that a Hobbs & Shaw sequel was announced, a sequel that we have never seen materialize. But that’s ok, because Fast X actually sets up a sequel to Hobbs & Shaw perfectly, which in turn would be an excellent setup for Fast & Furious 12.
How Fast X Sets Up The Future For Hobbes And Shaw
Hobbs and Shaw both appear in Fast X, but both are only bit players clearly there to set up larger roles in the next movie. Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw has a pretty epic battle with Han before the two join forces to fight off the agency trying to arrest them. When Shaw realizes that both he and his mother are potential targets for Dante, Shaw takes off to “go dig some graves.” We never see him again.
Dwayne Johnson’s Hobbs appears in the Fast X mid-credits scene. He’s leading a team in an incursion of the abandoned police station in Rio de Janeiro when he comes across another of Dante’s “vision boards.” He answers a ringing phone and we hear Dante telling Hobbs that he will be a target as well since he was actually the one who killed Dante’s father.
Clearly both scenes are designed to set up the next movie. We can expect both Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham to play much bigger roles in Fast & Furious 11 than they did in Fast X, but we can also connect these two scenes together into a single movie that brings Hobbs and Shaw back together again.
Fast & Furious 11 Should Take Place Concurrently With Fast X
One of the things that the Fast & Furious franchise has done quite successfully is play with franchise chronology. After introducing fan favorite Han as a member of Dominic Torreto’s crew in The Fast & the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the series famously jumped back in time, with the next three films showing us the years that Han and Dom spent together before his ill-fated trip to Japan. We even learned in Fast X that the post-credit scene in F9 wasn’t a separate event from the end of that 2021 film, but one that takes place in the middle of the new movie. The Fast & Furious timeline is a little confusing, but that's part of the fun.
The franchise can do something very similar here. Just because we saw the return of Hobbs in a scene at the end of Fast X doesn’t mean the scene actually takes place chronologically after everything we’ve already seen. Would it make sense for Dante to only go after Hobbs, the man who actually pulled the trigger on his father, after going after Dom? Not really, he wants them both equally dead. So instead, in this structure, Fast & Furious 11 reveals this scene takes place simultaneously with the early events of Fast X.
Then, once Shaw is made aware of the situation and goes driving off, he leaves the events of Fast X and drives into Fast & Furious 11. By the end of Hobbs & Shaw, the two frenemies trust each other. Shaw doesn’t trust Han or Roman, but he does trust Hobbs, so when he needs help tracking down Dante himself and killing some people, Hobbs is exactly who he would go to.
So Fast & Furious 11 would roughly take place in parallel with Fast X, just giving us the story of what Hobbs and Shaw were doing in their own fight with Dante while Dom and the family were doing the same. There are certain parts of the story in Fast X where we lose track of Dante, and we could learn that he’s running both attacks simultaneously. Or maybe Dante has a lieutenant we haven't met who is in charge of making them suffer. Considering everything that Dante does in the current film, it’s not like that would be a stretch.
We could even wrap up some storylines and include some additional characters from the first film. Hobbs & Shaw teased a faceless mastermind character behind the events of the movie, and so their identity could be revealed in Fast & Furious 11, along with this person being connected to Dante in some way. We could also see the likes of Vanessa Kirby’s Hattie, who will also want to protect their mom, return and become part of the story.
Fast & Furious 12 Can Bring Everybody Together For An Epic Finale
By the end of Fast & Furious 11, the timeline for Hobbs and Shaw has caught up with the events of Fast X. So now it’s time for the mysterious third movie, the end of a massive finale trilogy to the Fast & Furious franchise, where the entire family unites and works together to defeat Dante, or whomever the big bad is by that point.
Perhaps it's Hobbs and Shaw who actually save Dom and the rest of the team from the cliffhanger ending that Fast X left them in. If they swooped into the next movie without any explanation, it would feel unsatisfying, but if there's an entire movie leading us to that moment, it would be absolutely incredible.
If there are going to be two more Fast & Furious movies, that's fine, but if the whole family gets together in the next one, including all the characters who were teased in Fast X, it's not going to leave much for Fast & Furious 12 to do to blow us away. Let's wait and let that simmer. Considering how sure we were that Dwayne Johnson was never coming back, bringing Dom and Hobbs together again is going to be epic. That's a "final movie moment" we don't want to let happen too early.
