Fast And Furious 7 (2015)

Furious 7 (also known as Fast & Furious 7) is a 2015 American action film directed by James Wan and written by Chris Morgan. It is the sequel to Fast & Furious 6 (2013), and serves as the seventh installment in the Fast & Furious franchise. The film stars Vin Diesel, Paul Walker (in his final film role), Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Jordana Brewster, Djimon Hounsou, Kurt Russell, and Jason Statham. In the film, Dominic Toretto, Brian O’Conner, and the rest of their team have returned to the United States to live normal lives after securing amnesty for their past crimes, until Deckard Shaw, a rogue special forces assassin seeking to avenge his comatose younger brother, puts the team in danger once again.

Plans for a seventh installment were first announced in February 2012 when Johnson stated that production on the film would begin after the completion of Fast & Furious 6. In April 2013, Wan, predominantly known for horror films, was announced to direct the film. Casting showed the returns of Diesel and Walker that same month. Principal photography began that September in Atlanta, but was indefinitely suspended in November after Walker’s death; filming resumed in April 2014 and ended in July, with Walkers’s brothers Caleb and Cody standing-in to complete his remaining scenes, causing delay to its 2015 release date; with other filming locations including Los Angeles, Colorado, Abu Dhabi, and Tokyo. With an estimated production budget of up to $250 million, it is one of the most expensive films ever made.

Furious 7 premiered in Los Angeles on April 1, 2015, and was theatrically released in the United States on April 3, exactly six years after the fourth film was released. Upon release, the film became a critical and box office success, with praise being aimed at the film’s action sequences and its emotional tribute to Walker. It grossed $397.6 million worldwide during its opening weekend, which was the highest of all-time at the time. The film grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide, making it the third highest-grossing film of 2015 and the fourth highest-grossing film of all time at the time of release. It was the highest grossing film of 2015 out of the domestic box office. Additionally, Furious 7 became the highest-grossing film of the franchise in the first twelve days of its theatrical release and ranks as the highest-grossing film in the franchise to date. A sequel, The Fate of the Furious, was released in April 2017.

Plot.

After defeating Owen Shaw and securing amnesty for their past crimes, Dominic Toretto, Brian O’Conner and the team have returned to the United States to live normal lives. Brian accustoms himself to life as a father, while Dom tries to help Letty Ortiz regain her memory. Meanwhile, Owen Shaw’s older brother, Deckard Shaw, breaks into the hospital where the comatose Owen is held in London, before breaking into the DSS office in Los Angeles to extract profiles of Dom’s crew. After revealing his identity, Deckard fights Luke Hobbs and escapes, detonating a bomb that severely injures Hobbs. Dom later learns from his little sister, Mia, that she is pregnant again and convinces her to tell Brian. However, a letter bomb, sent from Tokyo, explodes and destroys the Toretto house shortly after Han Lue, a member of Dom’s team, is apparently killed by Deckard in Tokyo.

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Dom travels to Tokyo to retrieve Han’s body and acquires the objects found at the crash site from Han’s friend, Sean Boswell. As Dom, Brian, Tej Parker, and Roman Pearce mourn Han and Gisele Yashar at Han’s funeral in Los Angeles, Dom confronts Deckard in an underground tunnel. Deckard flees when a covert ops team arrives and opens fire, led by a man only known as Mr. Nobody. At his air base of operations in El Segundo, California, Mr. Nobody says that he will help Dom in stopping Deckard if he helps him get God’s Eye, a computer program that uses digital devices to track down a person, and save its creator, a hacker named Ramsey, from a Nigerian terrorist named Mose Jakande. The team soon airdrops their off-road modified cars over the Caucasus Mountains in Azerbaijan, ambush Jakande’s convoy and rescue Ramsey.

They go to the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi and steal the flash drive containing the God’s Eye chip from a billionaire hidden in a Lykan HyperSport. With God’s Eye near telecommunications repeaters, Dom, Brian, Nobody, and his team track down and capture Deckard, but are ambushed by Jakande and his henchmen and forced to flee while Jakande obtains God’s Eye. As Mr. Nobody is med-evaced, the team returns to Los Angeles where Dom plans to singlehandedly fight Deckard alone, while Letty, Brian, Tej, and Roman resolve to protect Ramsey from Jakande. Later on, Brian promises Mia that he will fully dedicate himself to their family after he defeats Deckard and Jakande.

Development.

On October 21, 2011, the Los Angeles Times reported that Universal Studios was considering filming two sequels—Fast Six and Fast Seven—back-to-back with a single storyline running through both films. Both would be written by Chris Morgan and directed by Justin Lin, who had been the franchise’s writer and director, respectively, since The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006). On December 20, 2011, following the release of Fast Five (2011), Vin Diesel stated that Fast Six would be split into two parts, with writing for the two films occurring simultaneously. On the decision, Diesel said: We have to pay off this story, we have to service all of these character relationships, and when we started mapping all that out it just went beyond 110 pages … The studio said, ‘You can’t fit all that story in one damn movie!’ However, in an interview on February 15, 2012, Dwayne Johnson stated that the two intended sequels would no longer be filmed

simultaneously because of weather issues in filming locations, and that production on Fast Seven would only begin after the completion of Fast Six. In April 2013, during the post-production of the retitled Fast & Furious 6, Lin announced that he would not return to direct the seventh film, as the studio wanted to produce the film on an accelerated scheduled for release in summer 2014. This would have required Lin to begin pre-production on the sequel while performing post-production on Fast & Furious 6, which he considered would affect the quality of the final product. Despite the usual two-year gap between the previous installments, Universal chose to pursue a sequel quicker due to having fewer reliable franchises than its competitor studios. However, subsequent interviews with Lin have suggested that the sixth film was always intended to be the final installment under his direction.

Filming.

Principal photography began in early September 2013 in Atlanta, with a casting call issued. Abu Dhabi was also a filming location; the production crew chose it over Dubai, as they would benefit from the Emirate’s 30% rebate scheme. Pikes Peak Highway in Colorado was closed in September to film some driving sequences. On September 16, the production filmed with Paul Walker and the Kimsey twins, playing his son, Jack, in front of an Atlanta elementary school. Han’s funeral scene was filmed at Oakland Cemetery, with extras needed for the scene being “hot, hip and trendy cool types of all ethnicities between the ages of 18 and 45”. On the evening of September 19, Lucas Black joined the production for his sole scene with Diesel, in an Atlanta parking garage. Separate scenes with Walker also shot in the same location on the same night, including one half of a phone conversation between his character and Jordana Brewster’s.

On October 24, over a month into the film’s production, Johnson tweeted he had started shooting for the film after wrapping up on Hercules. Five days later, Diesel posted the first photo of Johnson on the set, in the hospital scene. On November 30, Walker, who portrayed Brian O’Conner, died in a single-vehicle accident. The next day, Universal announced that production would continue after a delay that would allow the filmmakers to rework the film. On December 4, Universal put production on hold indefinitely. Wan later confirmed that the film had not been cancelled. On December 22, Diesel announced that the film would be released on April 10, 2015. On February 27, 2014, The Hollywood Reporter reported that filming would resume on April 1, and that the cast and crew had headed to Atlanta to prepare for about eight more weeks of shooting. Principal photography ended on July 10.

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Stunts.

The “airdrop” sequence was conceived by stunt coordinator, Spiro Razatos, who also supervised on the franchise’s two previous installments; Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6. Razatos told Business Insider that he wanted to rely more on real stunts rather than CGI because he wanted the whole sequence to “feel real” and fulfill audience’s expectations. The stunt took months of prep-solving problems. Cameras needed to be mounted onto cars in a way that they would not be destroyed when the cars landed, and the crew had to figure out a safe way to get the cars out of the plane. They performed a dry run with a single car falling out of a plane and did this six times. Cars were dropped from a Lockheed C-130 Hercules high above the Arizona desert, but close up shots that show the cars landing on a mountain road were filmed in Colorado.

There were two airplanes, flying at a height of 12,000 feet, each dropping two cars apiece. BRS parachutes enabled with GPS were secured to each of the cars before dropping off the C-130 plane. At about 5,000 feet, the parachutes deployed. Over 10 cameras were used for the sequence. In addition to cameras on the ground, there were cameras remotely operated inside the plane and another three mounted outside each car. Additional cameras were on a helicopter, where Razatos was stationed watching monitors. Three skydivers used in the shoot wore helmet cameras to help shoot the sequence from multiple angles. Sky divers would either jump out before cars or after them. While all the cars landed on their drop zones, 70% landed perfectly and 30% did not. For the close-up scenes which show the actors inside their cars,

a giant gimbal with a 360-degree range of movement were attached to each of the cars and was filmed against a green screen to reproduce their tumble through the sky. The last part of the scene, which shows the cars hitting the road was shot separately. To get that right, the team set up a pulley system that had cars six to ten feet above the ground. When they were dropped from the cranes, the stuntmen who were sitting in the driver’s seats raced their engines at about 35 to 40 miles per hour and slid to the ground at full speed. Those cranes were then later removed from the film with computers. Razatos claims, therefore, that the air drop sequence was “all real” and that it would be “hard to top”.

Redevelopment of Walker’s character.

In January 2014, Time reported that Walker’s character, Brian O’Conner, would be retired instead of killed, and that new scenes would be developed in order to allow the franchise to continue without him. To recreate Walker’s likeness, the filmmakers hired Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital visual effects house (which had previously produced the imagery of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings franchise and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes franchise). Initially, what Weta could do was severely constrained by the quality of the reference materials available for Walker’s physical appearance. In April 2014, it was reported that Walker’s brothers Caleb and Cody had been hired as stand-ins. Their strong resemblance to their late brother meant the filmmakers could use scans of their bodies instead of recreating Walker’s entire body from scratch. The final film showed Walker’s face superimposed over the bodies of his brothers or actor John Brotherton in 350 visual effects shots. 260 used a computer-generated face, while 90 repurposed actual footage of Walker’s face borrowed from outtakes or older footage.

Home media.

Furious 7 was released on July 6, 2015 in the UK and was released via DVD and Blu-ray on July 28 in other countries. The Blu-ray edition features an all new extended edition of 140 minutes long,[80] deleted scenes, stunts, behind-the-scenes, and the music video for Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s “See You Again”. The Blu-ray and DVD version include behind-the-scene footage of the “Race Wars” scene including rapper Iggy Azalea and making of the cars featured in the film. In the U.S. and Canada, it sold roughly 2.5 million units on Blu-ray and DVD in its first week of release, making it the highest-selling home entertainment live-action film of 2015. This record was later surpassed by Jurassic World (2015) the following month.

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Box office.

Furious 7 grossed $353 million in the United States and Canada and $1.163 billion in other countries, for a worldwide total of $1.516 billion, against a production budget of $190–250 million. It was also the fastest film to reach the $1 billion mark at the time, doing so in 17 days. It also became the first film to pass $1 million in 4DX admissions worldwide. Deadline Hollywood calculated the film’s net profit as $354 million, accounting for production budgets, marketing, talent participations, and other costs; box office grosses and home media revenues placed it fifth on their list of 2015’s “Most Valuable Blockbusters”. Worldwide, Furious 7 was released across 810 IMAX theaters, which was the largest worldwide rollout in IMAX’s history, Its worldwide opening of $397.6 million was the fifth-highest opening of all time. The film had an IMAX opening weekend total of $20.8 million.

Cast:

Vin DieselasDominic Toretto:
Paul WalkerasBrian O’Conner:
Dwayne JohnsonasLuke Hobbs:
Michelle RodriguezasLetty Ortiz-Toretto:
Tyrese GibsonasRoman Pearce:
Chris “Ludacris” BridgesasTej Parker:
Jordana BrewsterasMia Toretto:
Djimon Hounsou as Mose Jakande:
Tony Jaa as Kiet:
Ronda Rousey as Kara:
Nathalie EmmanuelasRamsey:
Kurt RussellasMr. Nobody:
Jason Stathamas Deckard Shaw: