Back in the days before Dwayne Johnson's Luke Hobbs, the Fast & Furious franchise existed in a state of flux when it came to its lead cast members. For example, when it came time to make The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Universal Pictures couldn't get Vin Diesel or Paul Walker to sign on, so they instead turned to Lucas Black. That ended up being the only movie in the franchise for the Alabama-born actor, as Diesel, Walker, and other original castmembers ended up returning to the series in 2009's Fast & Furious, but today's it's been announced that Black is ready to make his triumphant return - and in a big way.
Deadline reports that the Tokyo Drift star, who played a character named Sean Boswell, is going to make is comeback in James Wan's Fast & Furious 7, but that's not all. According to the site's sources, the actor will become a "regular in the series" and that he has signed on for at least the next three movies, meaning that we will also get to see him in Fast & Furious 8 and 9. As we don't really know anything about Chris Morgan's script for the next sequel - outside of the fact that it's set in Los Angeles - at this stage we don't know how Black will be introduced into the plot and united with the rest of the franchise's cast.
In Tokyo Drift, which is actually set after the events of the three most recent films, Sean Boswell was portrayed as a 17-year-old loner and street racer who is forced to move from the United States to Japan to live with his father when he gets too many strikes on his record. After the move he becomes a good friend of Han (the character played by Sung Kang who says he used to be a member of Dominic Toretto's gang) and is introduced to the world of drift racing. At the end of the movie Vin Diesel had a cameo as Dominc, reintroducing his character to the franchise, but outside of him Boswell has no other connections within the movie universe.
As revealed with the film's first set photo - which was just published on Diesel's Facebook page - production on Fast & Furious 7 is already underway, with Diesel, Walker, Johnson, Tyrese Gibson, Jason Statham, Djimon Honsou, Tony Jaa and Ronda Rousey all signed on. Universal Pictures has announced that the movie will be in theaters on July 11, 2014, which is just a little more than a year after Fast & Furious 6.
