The Fast and Furious franchise has never exactly been high-brow entertainment, but this is the first we’ve ever heard of a movie plot point coming from an actual kid.
To explain, let’s all head back to the care-free days of January 2020. The first trailer had just come out promising the usual rollercoaster ride of car chases and explosions that we’ve all come to expect from the Fast and Furious series. Then at the end of the three-minute trailer, John Cena and Vin Diesel are both seen engaged in a game of chicken, driving headlong towards the edge of a cliff.
Unexpectedly, Cena is saved by the arrival of Charlize Theron and her magnet plane, which catches Cena’s car while in midair. This led Roman to hilariously quip, “Damn, they got a magnet plane?”
If the idea of a magnet plane sounds childish, well, there’s a good reason for that. Director Justin Lin admitted in a recent interview with Empire that it was actually his son that came up with the whole thing.
Lin explained that he and his son Oqwe were in London for a series of F9 meetings. At some point they began to discuss the problem of a set piece involving a car flying over a giant chasm. They needed something exciting but different to get car A to point B, and that’s when Oqwe chimed in with his blockbuster idea: “magnet plane.”
“We were talking about the ravine [set-piece] and I said, ‘Alright, so here’s Roman and Tej," Lin explained. “Jakob needs to get to the other side – how does he get there?’ And Oqwe just picked it up and pitched the idea of the plane and everything. After us spending hundreds of hours on planning, I guess he was paying attention, and he understood the characters.”
Not to be outdone, Diesel’s character follows after Cena by launching off the same cliff after getting his car entangled with the remains of a rope bridge. Everyone seems pretty surprised when it actually works, which basically is the entire Fast and Furious franchise for you.
There’s still time to see some free Fast and Furious movies leading up to F9’s release in theatres on June 25. And if you’re still on the fence about it because of a deadly disease and all, Vin Diesel has a special message just for you.
