Dwayne Johnson shared a new look at Fast and Furious franchise spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, featuring “baddest bad guy” Brixton (Idris Elba).
After clashing in The Fate of the Furious, “outlaw lawman” Luke Hobbs (Johnson) and “international spy” Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) team to battle mercenary forces with Deckard’s MI6 agent sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby) along for the ride.
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Johnson previously hailed Elba’s Brixton as “the baddest, most diabolical, most dominant and coolest bad guy the Fast & Furious franchise has ever seen.”
Past villains include Deckard and brother Owen (Luke Evans), and cyber-criminal leader Cypher (Charlize Theron), who terrorized Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and family in the series’ most recent blockbuster outing.
Officially titled Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, the David Leitch-directed spinoff is the first offshoot birthed out of the Universal Pictures franchise that has grabbed more than $5 billion in box office receipts across its eight films since launching in 2001.
“There are these buddy movies from the ’80s and ’90s like Lethal Weapon and 48 Hours that really speak to me as a filmmaker. They’re ones that made me want to be a filmmaker in the first place. So to see the chemistry [Johnson and Statham] had in the last Fast, and to see the potential that they could be… it was hard not to say yes, and say, ‘Let’s go do this,’” the Deadpool 2 director previously told IGN.
Leitch added the spinoff and hopeful franchise-within-a-franchise launcher will be “a little bit more grounded” than past entries in the explosive Fast series “because it’s the beginning.”
“It’s an origin story, in a sense. It’s not an origin story, but we’re starting a franchise, so we want it to be a little bit more grounded, a little bit more character-centric,” he told Collider. “We’re going to set up the stakes for these guys and their relationship, but we’re also going to have some great set pieces and some action that you’d expect.”
Baby Driver breakout Eiza Gonzalez boarded the project in November in a “key” but currently unrevealed role.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw opens August 2.
