©The Fast and the Furious, Courtesy of Universal Pictures 

After 25 years, The Fast and the Furious franchise is headed for oblivion, with the eleventh and final movie in the series scheduled to debut in 2026, says director Louis Leterrier. It was originally supposed to appear on April 4, 2025, but the recent SAG-AFTRA strike played havoc with scheduling.

In a panel this weekend at CCXP MX, Leterrier said that the new installment is “happening very, very soon.” He was quoted as telling Collider, “I’m able to shoot a little horror movie this summer. I’m finishing my horror movie on September 15th, and I start [pre-production] of Fast on September 16th.”

Leterrier added that “It’s filming early next year, and it’s coming out in 2026, which will be exactly to the day, 25 years since the first one came out [on June 22, 2001].” The release date, however, has not yet been confirmed by Universal. Leterrier noted that the upcoming film will be set in Los Angeles, as was the original movie in the series: “That’s what we wanna do. We wanna bring it back home, and still have a great big journey to tell.”

The first film in the series was penned by screenwriters Gary Scott Thompson, Erik Bergquist, and David Ayer. It was based on “Racer X,” an article in Vibe magazine by Ken Li. The early episodes focused on illegal street racing. Beginning with Fast Five in 2011, the theme shifted toward heists and spying. In 2018, Universal created a spinoff with the film Hobbs & Shaw. At the same time, DreamWorks Animation, a Universal subsidiary, released an animated streaming TV series titled Fast & Furious Sky Racers
.
Fast X, the latest installment in the popular series, was written by Oren Urizel and Christina Hodson and starred Charlize Theron and Vin Diesel. It earned more than $700 million at the box office globally on a production budget of $340 million.

Check out more of Edward’s articles.