All The Fast & Furious 9 Rumors And Spoilers Leaked So Far

While Fast and the Furious fans returned to a corner of the Furious world in 2019's spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, the ninth installment of the main franchise won't race into theaters until April 2, 2021. The last time we saw Dominic Toretto and his found family of fast-driving thieves-turned-world-saving-heroes was in 2017's The Fate of the Furious, which saw the crew facing off against Charlize Theron's stone cold cyberterrorist Cipher in order to prevent a potentially devastating nuclear attack.

The series has come a long way from its origins, and the conflicts of the first film — street racing and stealing DVD players — now seem positively puny in comparison to the cataclysmic stakes of the more recent entries. After the nuclear threat of Fate and the introduction of literal superpowers in Hobbs & Shaw, the sky's the limit for what the next Fast and the Furious movie can throw at Dom's group of unconventional heroes. While we wait to reunite with Dom, Letty, and all the rest, we're passing the time by rounding up all the spoilers and rumors we can get our hands on. Salud, mi familia.

F9 marketing began ramping up in earnest at the beginning of 2020, with Universal Studios leaning on that promotional NOS button with a new trailer that had fans excitedly revving their engines in anticipation of a May 22, 2020 release date. However, no one could have anticipated the worldwide coronavirus outbreak that would begin just a few weeks after that trailer dropped. As the virus quickly spread and countries around the world hastened to take the precautions that would keep their citizens safe, these precautions began to bleed into nearly every industry, and Hollywood was no exception.

Hot on the heels of the announcement of other major blockbuster delays like No Time to Die and A Quiet Place 2, Universal Studios also made the tough call to push back F9's release nearly a full year, from May 22, 2020 to April 2, 2021. "While we know there is disappointment in having to wait a little while longer," the official statement read, "this move is made with the safety of everyone as our foremost consideration. Moving will allow our global family to experience our new chapter together. We'll see you next spring."

While this news undoubtedly comes as a disappointment to Fast fans, as coronavirus cases continue to accelerate faster than a Dodge Charger in a street race, it was definitely the right call. Not long after the announcement was made, major movie theaters across the U.S. made the decision to close their locations in the best interest of public health. Plus, as the official statement said, bumping the release date is the best way for the global Fast family to all watch at the same time, and as any Fast and Furious fan knows, nothing is more important than family.

After spinning its wheels for four commercially successful but critically uneven films, the Fast and the Furious franchise really took off in 2011's Fast Five, a slick, exuberant heist action flick that bore little resemblance to the smaller stakes street racing movies that had come before it. One of its biggest upgrades came in the form of Luke Hobbs (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), a Diplomatic Security Service agent that served as the film's intimidating antagonist. Hobbs would go on to follow in the footsteps of Paul Walker's former FBI agent Brian O'Conner, turning away from his career in law enforcement to plunge into a life of big-hearted crime.

Jason Statham's rogue assassin Deckard Shaw also joined the Fast and the Furious series as an antagonist, revealed at the end of Fast & Furious 6 as the one who killed Han back in 2006's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. While many fans still haven't forgiven Shaw for killing Han, he too wound up joining forces with Dom's crew, and was responsible for saving Dom's infant son from Cipher in The Fate of the Furious.

But while Hobbs and Shaw proved to be popular enough characters to receive their own spinoff film, don't expect to see them in the yet-untitled Fast 9. In an interview with MTV News, Johnson confirmed that he and Statham will not be appearing in the ninth film, although he left the door open for an appearance in the already confirmed 10th installment.

The absence of Luke Hobbs leaves some mighty large shoes to fill, and who better to step into them than that other wrestler-turned-actor, John Cena? Universal confirmed early on that Cena was joining the Fast and the Furious family, and his character would be — to absolutely no one's surprise — "a badass." The first trailer eventually revealed that he's playing the ninth movie's antagonist, Dom's brother, Jacob Toretto. 

Whatever the franchise has in store for Cena's character, it's well within the tradition of the franchise for him to make his entrance as a villain and redeem him later on. Not only did Johnson and Statham make the leap from antagonists to heroes (as did Luke Evans' Fast & Furious 6 villain Owen Shaw, albeit to a lesser extent), but Charlize Theron's baddie Cipher may also be getting her own spin-off, hinting that she too may wind up switching sides. At this point, it would almost seem weird for a Fast and the Furious movie to bring on new big name and have them not play a villain.

Chris Morgan has been writing the Fast and the Furious scripts since Tokyo Drift, but once Morgan stepped away to pen Hobbs & Shaw, the door was open for a fresh new voice to enter the franchise. Fast 9 tapped Kin scribe Daniel Casey to take over writing duties for the newest installment. (It now seems that Morgan has also received a writing credit after all, though how directly he was involved with the screenplay is hard to say).

In addition to Kin, Casey grabbed the studio's attention with his script for The Heavy, a subversive superhero movie that is currently in the works from producer J.J. Abrams. It's fitting that Universal would tap a superhero writer for the next Fast and the Furious movie, considering the larger-than-life direction the franchise has drifted in during its latest installments. The stunts have been growing increasingly more out-of-this-world for years — in The Fate of the Furious, Hobbs hurls a torpedo at a car with his bare hands — and Hobbs & Shaw brought us Idris Elba's "Black Superman," Brixton. Perhaps Casey's hiring hints that superpowers won't be limited to spinoffs, and that the already-loose physics of the Fast and the Furious series will get shrugged off entirely.

While most of Dominic Toretto's crew joined the franchise somewhere between the second and fifth films, Michelle Rodriguez has been there from the very beginning, playing Dom's girlfriend (and eventual wife), Letty Ortiz. However, while Letty and Dom were closer than ever at the end of The Fate of the Furious, Rodriguez herself was a different story. In an Instagram post in 2017, Rodriguez wrote, "I hope they decide to show some love to the women of the franchise on the next one. Or I just might have to say goodbye to a loved franchise."

Faced with a Letty-less future — or perhaps simply because the studio agreed with Rodriguez and wanted to do right by its female fans — Universal agreed to her stipulation that she would only return if they hired a female writer for the ninth movie. However, with the film now complete and no word of a female writer onboard, it doesn't look like the studio followed through on that promise. We can only hope that Rodriguez still got her wish, at least in some capacity, and that the movie shows the amazing women of the franchise some love.

During the filming of Furious 7, Paul Walker, who had been playing Dom's best friend and brother-in-law Brian O'Conner since the first movie, was tragically killed in a car crash. Instead of writing a similarly sad fate for Brian, the film worked some special effects magic, using Walker's brothers to help complete his scenes. The ending of the film was rewritten to bring closure to Brian's story, with him riding off into the sunset in a white car as Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again" played over the scene.

However, Vin Diesel announced during a Facebook Live video in 2017 that Jordana Brewster would be reprising her role as Mia, Dom's sister and Brian's wife, for Fast 9. Given how important it was to the entire cast and crew of Furious 7 that Brian receive a happy ending, it'll be interesting to see how the series chooses to bring back Mia without killing Brian off-screen or splitting them up. From the trailers, it looks as though Mia will be as major a presence as ever, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that Brian's absence will be explained by him staying home with the kids while Mia goes off with her brother to help save the world.

There are very few places Dom Toretto and his crew haven't driven yet. Over the course of the eight Fast and the Furious movies, we've seen cars driven out of planes, onto boats, from one skyscraper to the next, and across thick sheets of ice. However, according to The Fate of the Furious director F. Gary Gray, there might be one location left that could top them all: outer space.

"Outer space?" Gray said during an interview with Screen Rant, "Listen, I wouldn't rule [out] anything with this franchise."

While that's hardly confirmation that Dom should start getting fitted for a space suit, if there's any film franchise that could figure out a way to make space cars seem plausible, it's this one. Each film has been bigger than the last, featuring increasingly more jaw-dropping car stunts. Space isn't entirely out of the question. Dom may just need a little bit of an assist from Elon Musk.

While the original The Fast and the Furious was filmed entirely in and around Los Angeles, the series has since shot all over the world, including locations in Japan, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Spain, the U.K., Cuba, and Iceland. In Fast 9, the series will be returning to the U.K., with production confirmed to be underway at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in London. Other shooting locations include Los Angeles and Hawaii.

It's important to keep in mind that a shooting location doesn't necessarily guarantee that part of the film will be set in the same place. For example, in Fast & Furious 6, London stood in for Moscow, and in The Fate of the Furious, many of the "New York" scenes were actually filmed in Cleveland. Still, most of the time when the Furious films travel abroad, it's because at least part of the movie is set in the country they're filming in. So it's a safe bet that Dom and his crew will be hopping across the pond for some of Fast 9, in addition to spending some time in the more tropical location of Hawaii.

Curiously, Hawaii and London were also shooting locations for Hobbs & Shaw, making us wonder if — even without Hobbs and Shaw themselves — the spinoff may tie into the plot of Fast 9 more than we think.

In addition to the confirmed shooting locations for Fast 9, Vin Diesel has been vocal about yet another place he'd like to visit as Dominic Toretto. "We haven't been to Africa," he told TODAY in 2018, "and we are long overdue."

Africa, of course, is a big continent, with a wide variety of terrain for Dom's crew to cover in their signature fleet of customized cars. Maybe we'll see them racing through the streets of Cairo, or bumping down a dirt road in Namibia, or kicking up sand along a beach in South Africa.

Granted, production for the ninth Fast and the Furious film hasn't yet confirmed any African filming locations, but it's always possible that another location could stand in for whichever country the crew goes to, or that more locations could get added to the shooting schedule. In any case, Diesel is right that the Furious gang is long overdue to bless the rains down in Africa, and it's time they remedied that.

In the same Facebook Live video in which Vin Diesel announced Jordana Brewster's return to the Fast and the Furious family, he also delightedly revealed that director Justin Lin, whom Diesel referred to as the "forefather of Fast," would be helming both the ninth and tenth movies in the series. Lin joined the Fast and the Furious series in 2006, taking the reins on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and staying with the films through 2013's Fast & Furious 6. Other directors took over after that, with James Wan coming aboard for Furious 7 and F. Gary Gray stepping in for The Fate of the Furious, but now Lin is back for what are expected to be the final two installments in the saga.

Diesel said prior to the release of The Fate of the Furious that the reason he decided to continue the franchise following Paul Walker's death while filming the seventh movie was because Walker "promised eight." He went on to explain that The Fate of the Furious would kick off a new trilogy which would "redefine" the series and "defy expectations." And now that Furious veteran Lin is returning to shepherd the series through its "final chapters," Diesel promises that the end of the journey will be "magic."

Nathalie Emmanuel put an end to the speculation that her character, master hacker Ramsey, might not be returning for Fast 9, putting fans fears to rest with a June 24, 2019 tweet that read, "Day one of shooting Fast and Furious 9 today... The team is back together."

Ramsey first joined the crew in Furious 7, after she was kidnapped for her invention of a hacking device called the God's Eye and was subsequently rescued by Dominic Toretto and company. The next time we saw her in Fate of the Furious, she was an indispensable member of the team, and now that we know she's returning for Fast 9, we can only hope that Ramsey will be a member of the Fast family all the way until the end of the road.

Although Ramsey doesn't get much of a chance to shine in the F9 trailer — those opportunities are saved for the Toretto brothers, Letty, and refreshingly, Mia — she is present in a number of scenes. For the most part, Ramsey is seen in planning mode, meeting with the Fast gang in various spaces as they plot their next move. She also pops up in a few high-speed driving scenes, but always as a passenger, since Ramsey is much more of a thinker than a wheel woman. We can only hope her genius-level intellect is enough to help the Fast family maneuver their way out of whatever predicament they find themselves in this time.

While all signs pointed to Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris reprising their respective roles as Roman and Tej, for a long time no official announcement was made about their involvement in Fast 9, leading to some nervousness that they might not return. Gibson had previously threatened to leave the franchise back in 2017 if Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson reprised his role as Luke Hobbs in Fast 9, but later partially walked back his comments, saying that he should have kept his feelings about Johnson to himself. However, Gibson still got his wish, with Johnson's work on Hobbs & Shaw preventing him from returning for Fast 9. Still, the rest of the F9 cast had been in place for a pretty long time before fans finally got confirmation that Roman and Tej would indeed be coming back.

In July of 2019, the first cast photo released from the set confirmed that Gibson and Ludacris are definitely still part of the family for Fast 9. Taken to celebrate co-star Michelle Rodriguez's birthday, the photo shows several members of the cast, including Gibson and Ludacris, gathered around Rodriguez, who is holding a delicious-looking birthday cake.

Now that we've seen a full trailer, it's clear that Roman and Tej will be just as integral to the plot of F9 as ever, and will still be providing the same loyalty and comic relief we've come to expect from them. The duo receives a decent amount of screen time in the trailer, with Roman listing Jacob Toretto's impressive list of credentials and vowing to stick with Dom until the end, and Tej remaining decidedly unimpressed at a rocket-enhanced Pontiac Fiero.

Unsurprisingly, the Fast family continues to grow. It was announced in July of 2019 that three new characters will be joining the cast, with the additions of Finn Cole, Anna Sawai, and Vinnie Bennett. Cole will be recognizable to fans of TNT's Animal Kingdom or Netflix's Peaky Blinders, while Sawai was featured in the 2009 film Ninja Assassin, and more recently had a recurring role in the British TV series Giri/Haji. Bennett has had roles in Ghost in the Shell and Human Traces, as well as a role on the New Zealand crime series The Bad Seed. 

No details have yet been released about any of their characters, so feel free to speculate about whether they'll be playing good guys, bad guys, or something in between. However, with Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham sitting this one out, and with Michelle Rodriguez voicing her desire for that this installment to "show some love to the women of the franchise," we're crossing our fingers that Sawai, at least, may be joining Dom's crew. If she does, that could potentially result in the first crew in Fast history in which the women have outnumbered the men.

Vin Diesel announced on Instagram in July of 2019 that Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren will be reprising their Fate of the Furious roles for Fast 9. Theron plays cyberterrorist Cipher, who forced Dom to turn on his team (including his new wife, Letty) and work for her in Fate by threatening to kill his infant son. Dom eventually managed to gain the upper hand, but not before Cipher ordered the execution of his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child, Elena (Elsa Pataky). While the Fast franchise has a history of turning villains into heroes, it's hard to see a scenario in which the woman responsible for Elena's murder is invited to join Dom's crew. The trailer certainly doesn't suggest any change of heart, with Cipher recruiting Dom's vicious brother Jacob to take down the crew. 

Mirren, meanwhile, was introduced in Fate as Magdalene Shaw, mother of previously villainous brothers Deckard (Jason Statham) and Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), and their sister, Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), who was introduced in Hobbs & Shaw. While as far as Dom's crew knows going into F9, the Shaw brothers were each responsible, either directly or indirectly, for multiple Fast family deaths — in addition to Deckard appearing to kill Han in Fast & Furious 6, Owen's actions in the same film led to the death of Gisele (Gal Gadot) — the Shaw family, led by Magdalene, was instrumental in helping Dom defeat Cipher in The Fate of the Furious. Mirren also reprised her role in Hobbs & Shaw, but whose side she'll be on in Fast 9 is anyone's guess. 

In an Instagram video posted by Vin Diesel from the Fast 9 set in November 2019, Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez revealed that they were filming at a racetrack which may or may not have been Irwindale Speedway. But the exact real-life location may not matter as much as how a racetrack factors into the lore of the Fast and Furious franchise. Diesel said in the video, "You diehards will know where we are. You day ones will know where we are." 

This makes it sound like Fast 9 will be calling back to the first Furious film, in which Dom relayed the story of how his father died to his then-new friend Brian O'Conner. It was the last race of the season, and the elder Toretto, a professional stock car driver, got into a fatal wreck when another driver named Kenny Linder clipped his bumper on the final turn. Considering that Diesel also included the hashtag #Fatherhood on his video, could the racetrack setting indicate that we might be getting a flashback to a young Dom and his dad, possibly around the time of that fateful final race? 

But the nods to the past may not end with Dom's dad. SlashFilm reports that the Fast 9 production was also looking for a Paul Walker double, and his brother Cody Walker was spotted on set. Perhaps Fast 9 will be taking a page out of Furious 7's book and will include a reunion between Dom and his best friend/brother-in-law, using look-alikes, movie magic, and the secret ingredient of the entire Fast and Furious franchise: family. 

The first official trailer for the film (which is being marketed as F9: The Fast Saga in the U.S. and Fast & Furious 9: The Fast Saga in the U.K.) raced onto the internet on January 31, 2020, and brought with it some major hints about what to expect in the ninth film. The trailer opens with a musical callback to the end of Furious 7, which bid a sentimental farewell to longtime Fast protagonist Brian O'Conner following the death of actor Paul Walker. The opening notes of Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again" — which closed out the seventh film — play underneath a scene of Dom, Letty, and their toddler son Brian (introduced as a baby in Fate of the Furious). Letty gives little Brian the cross necklace that has symbolized her relationship with Dom throughout the series, saying it will protect him "from what's coming."

The trailer then goes on to expand on just what this ominous oncoming threat is, revealing that John Cena will indeed be playing a villain, and that he'll be teamed up with Cipher. What they want isn't clear yet, but based on Cena's description as a "master thief, assassin, [and] high performance driver," we expect this duo to be the Fast crew's biggest challenge yet.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Fast movie without plenty of mind-blowing car stunts, and the F9 trailer assures us that the newest installment will be no exception. In the first trailer alone, we see a car strapped to a rocket, a car driving up a falling bridge, a car driving off a cliff and being picked up by a magnetic plane, and a car swinging through the air like Tarzan.

Halfway through the F9 trailer, Letty reveals that John Cena's character isn't just any criminal mastermind — he's Dom's younger brother, Jacob Toretto. We don't know what happened between the Toretto brothers to pit them against one another, but given Dom's established feelings about family, it has to have been something pretty major. The trailer leans hard into the family theme that has defined the franchise from the beginning, but rather than an undercurrent running beneath the main plot, it seems that this time, family is the main plot.

At one point, Magdalene Shaw (who seems to still be working alongside Dom's crew, even if her children are conspicuously absent) says, "There's nothing more powerful than the love of family. But you turn that into anger, and there's nothing more dangerous." The trailer then goes on to explicitly state, "Not all blood is family," indicating that F9 will revolve around the idea that Dom's real family is the ride-or-die crew who has been with him throughout the previous Fast films, and not necessarily the brother who shares his DNA.

Having one of the main villains of F9 be a Toretto sibling also explains why Mia is back — she's obviously sided with Dom in whatever rift has placed the Toretto brothers on opposing sides. The trailer features a quick clip of Mia and her sister-in-law Letty fighting side by side, showing that Mia is prepared to stand with her brother and his family, against their other brother, perhaps once and for all.

As if the promise of a Toretto family showdown and flying cars weren't enough to build excitement for F9, the last few seconds of the trailer feature the shocking return of a character who has long been thought dead: Han (Sung Kang). First introduced in 2006's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Han was seemingly killed in a car accident by the end of that film. However, he then appeared in the next three Fast films, which served as prequels to Tokyo Drift, until 2013's Fast & Furious 6 ended by revisiting the third movie, revealing that the fateful "accident" was caused by Deckard Shaw.

Ever since the sixth movie, Han fans have demanded a better fate for their fave through the #JusticeForHan hashtag, and it appears that in F9, their pleas have finally been heard (the trailer even nods to the social media push with its closing tagline, "Justice is coming"). In the trailer, Han emerges from the shadows as the rest of the crew looks on in shock, seemingly brought back into the fold by Letty. He nonchalantly comments, "Nice clubhouse," before being welcomed by Dom with a big hug. We then get a brief glimpse of Han back in action driving an orange car, hinting that his return won't just be a brief cameo, but will once again find him as a valued member of the crew. Just how Han survived (and whose body Dom brought back from Tokyo to bury in Furious 7) is still a mystery, but we're ready to buy just about anything if it means Han gets to live again.