This one goes to 11

In my review of Fast & Furious 9 (as it's called in Australia)/F9 (as it's called in the U.S.), I joked about how the inevitable Fast & Furious 10 should be called Furious X.

In reality, I didn't think that only the tenth movie was inevitable, but probably the 11th through 20th as well. If you're still making money on this franchise in today's Hollywood, where a successful franchise never dies, might as well keep making them forever. I mean, Dominic Toretto's much prized "family" already has the notion of younger generations built into it.

Strangely, I am now learning that there will be "only" two more movies in the series.

Movieweb -- which sometimes gives me extremely useless pieces of information, and sometimes actual news -- alerted me to the fact that the 10th and 11th movies are filming back to back (Lord of the Rings style), and that they will be the final two movies in the series.

"Sure," you say. "Every series says it's ending, which usually only means there will be more movies to come after the 'last' one than came before."

Ordinarily I would agree with you, but when a series has been going on this long, they end it because key participants are jack of it, to use the Australian expression. So I suppose maybe we should take an announcement that it's wrapping up more seriously than we otherwise would.

I actually didn't get beyond the headline on Movieweb, but I did some googling and found that there wasn't a reason given by Diesel, the unofficial spokesperson for the franchise, other than that "every good story deserves an ending." Probably unspoken: He doesn't want to be playing Dominic Toretto when he's 60 years old (which is only seven years off). Given that Movieweb also had Diesel talking about the filming of the next Riddick movie, maybe more to the point is that he would play Dom at 60, but even he can acknowledge that this is too ridiculous -- even more ridiculous than cars in outer space.

Eleven seems like a strange number, except that in their minds, it's the tenth movie in two parts. That's just silly. You could call this series one movie in 11 parts, if you wanted to, given how much the movies relate to each other in terms of calling back old characters and things that happened very early in the series -- even if some of that was retrofitted after the fact to give it greater continuity. Though I suppose what they'll do is end #10 on a cliffhanger, which is something this series doesn't typically do, but which will make it easier to characterize as a single film in two parts. 

Either way, it looks like they're planning to take this series to the junkyard in the sky after these final two. 

Or are they?

"It won't be the end of the Fast universe," said Diesel. "But in terms of this mythology and this saga, Fast 10 will be the finale."

So that's the way this most resembles a modern franchise. It's a brand more than a consistent set of characters. No one character has appeared in every single film, so you could also argue that no one character is the key to the success of the franchise. Dom is as close as they get, but even he didn't appear in the first sequel and was only in the end credits teaser in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

They've already spun off two characters, Hobbes and Shaw, in their own movie, and I believe that movie is also getting a sequel. The next likely characters to spin off would be Roman and Tej, the characters played by Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris, whose back-and-forth has been some of the series' best (and most needed) comedy. 

And really, why not use the same characters, just with different actors? The reboot is the ultimate endgame of any long-running franchise, and over the course of 50 years into the future, there could be multiple reboots. If they want to do it relatively soon they've already cast someone as a young Dom Toretto, a Kiwi actor named Vinnie Bennett, who appears as the young Dom in F9. Whether he becomes a bankable actor or not may dictate the viability of such a move, but he's only 28, so he could do 25 years of Fast & Furious movies before he's as old as Diesel is now.

It won't be a sad sendoff for me. Although I've really enjoyed about three of these movies, that's only a third of the number that are currently in existence, or even less than that if you include Hobbes & Shaw. 

But I have seen them all, which indicates just how much this series has forced critics to reckon with it, whether they wanted to or not.

That reckoning won't come to an end in F11 -- or F10 Part II if they insist -- but at least it will hit pause.

For maybe two or three years, until they launch Fast & Furious: The New Generation, with a special cameo by Vin Diesel as Grandpa Dom.