The first image has arrived from The Fast and the Furious spin-off Hobbs and Shaw, and it certainly sets an ominous tone for the type of the relationship that stars Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Jason Statham will have in the highly anticipated film. While the two mega-stars have been at odds in past Furious films, this time they are forming an uneasy partnership to thwart a new threat posed by Idris Elba, who plays the villain in the film.

Hobbs and Shaw is a spin-off from The Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment of The Fast and the Furious series. The plot focuses on Johnson’s US Diplomatic Security Agent Luke Hobbs as he forms an unlikely alliance with Statham’s Deckard Shaw, who spent his time in a previous movie (Furious 7) being chased around the world in various scenic destinations by Vin Diesel‘s crew while simultaneously chasing them. It was all very confusing, until a climactic lightsaber battle cleared everything up.

The spin-off, directed by Deadpool 2‘s David Leitch and written by frequent Furious scribe Chris Morgan, primarily exists because movie studio executives like to swim around in giant vaults filled with money, but the motivation behind its creation stems from Johnson and Diesel having a difference of opinion (to put it nicely) about how they approach movie-making and collaborating. Though the beef between the two stars seemed to begin as a publicity stunt, it morphed into a real feud that resulted in them refusing to film scenes together in the last movie. This bad blood, coupled with the need to find a way to milk more money from a franchise that is about to wrap up with it’s ninth installment, led to the birth of Hobbs and Shaw.

Johnson shared the first look at Hobbs and Shaw on Instagram in the form of the intense stare-off you can see below. This precarious partnership (which hopefully leads to less-precarious hand-to-hand combat) takes form in theaters on August 2, 2019, and hopefully they can wrap up filming in time to keep 2020’s Fast & Furious 9 on schedule.

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