‘Fast & Furious 7′ Gets an Official Summer 2014 Release Date

Fast and the Furious staple Vin Diesel broke the news that Universal wants Fast & Furious 7 in theaters by Summer 2014, and now the actor and studio have jointly confirmed their plan by announcing the movie’s official release date at the ongoing 2013 CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

Diesel and Paul Walker are, for certain, returning for the next Fast and the Furious installment, but otherwise it’s not clear who else is secure and onboard cast-wise. However, if the rumors about the Fast & Furious 6 post-credits scene are to be believed, then at least one major newcomer will join the vehicular racing series on its seventh lap (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Universal, according to Screen Rant contributor Perri Nemiroff (who is present at this year’s CinemaCon), has scheduled Fast & Furious 7 to reach theaters on July 11th, 2014. That means it will arrive a week before director Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past arrives on the scene, and two weeks before Hercules (featuring Fast & Furious 6 costar Dwayne Johnson) hits theaters.

There will probably be more competition during that month, by the time the other major studios finalize their Summer 2014 roster. Nonetheless, the seventh Fast and the Furious movie is going to be a heavyweight contender, following after the lucrative Fast Five and next month’s hotly anticipated sixth installment.

James Wan entered talks to direct Fast & Furious 7 this past week, after Fast and the Furious 3-6 director Justin Lin announced that Universal’s tight production schedule – which would have required him to begin pre-production on Fast & Furious 7 while simultaneously finishing editing on the sixth movie – has led him to pass on helming the seventh installment.

Wan is a talented horror filmmaker, but the director of such projects as Saw, Death Sentence and Insidious came as a left-field choice to replace Lin on the next Fast and the Furious movie. He is a capable storyteller, but Wan getting his feet wet for the first time on a spectacle-heavy tentpole and having little breathing room to do so, doesn’t sound like a recipe for success (creatively-speaking, that is, seeing how the Fast and the Furious brand name sells itself).

On a related note: Dwayne Johnson will be collaborating with director Brett Ratner on Hercules, around the same time that Fast & Furious 7 begins production; then again, Johnson’s character Luke Hobbs may get his own spinoff film, so perhaps that’ll make-up for him being (largely? Completely?) absent in F&F7.

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Fast & Furious 7 rides into theaters on July 11th, 2014.

Source: Perri Nemiroff