The Fast and Furious franchise has had more than its share of ups and downs. The relatively low budget ($38 million) action thriller The Fast and The Furious wasn’t the kind of film you would expect to blossom into a seven film franchise worth roughly a billion dollars. Last year’s Fast and Furious 6 was the franchise’s most successful chapter to date, ranking in more than $788 million and fast-tracking production of Fast 7. That production came to a startling halt when Paul Walker died in a car accident in December. After being on hold for a number of months, production is set to start back up in April.
Walker’s death occurred in the middle of production, forcing producers and director James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring) to make the difficult decision of whether to scrap production and start over, or salvage the film that had already been shot. Late in 2013, Universal announced that Walker would be seen in Fast and Furious 7, and that the installment would retire him from the series. For the past two months, screenwriter Chris Morgan (Fast 5 and 6) has been hard at work rewriting a script that will include most of Walker’s scenes.
Filming will resume in early April and is schedule to last six to eight weeks. Shooting begins in Atlanta, where the film had been in production last November. This new schedule will give James Wan roughly eleven months between wrapping principle photography and the film’s premiere on April 10, 2015.
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