Has It Become Impossible To Kill Off Any Fast & Furious Characters?

The Fast & Furious franchise may have made it impossible to kill off any major characters. The transformation of the Fast Saga is well-known as one of the wildest stylistic shifts any big franchise has ever undergone. That, of course, has done little to harm the Fast & Furious movies, with audiences fully expecting each new entry to be more ridiculous than the last.

As the Fast & Furious franchise’s comic book-like evolution removed it from the relatively realistic tone of 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, mortality has become less and less of a factor in the franchise. Of course, holding contemporary Fast & Furious movies to any standards of logic or realism is an exercise in futility, as well as missing the point of its popularity. Nonetheless, a big question remains: can the Fast Saga ever actually kill off any of its core characters? The answer is maybe, but there’s no incentive to do so.

Dead Characters Keep Returning In The Fast Saga

As the Fast & Furious franchise hit its stride with 2011’s Fast Five, the movie included the twist that Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez), the supposedly deceased girlfriend of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), was still alive. Character deaths being retconned is hardly unusual in action movies, and Letty’s Fast & Furious return fell into that classification. Then, F9: The Fast Saga turned things around even more with the return of Han (Sung Kang) after his apparent death in Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift.

The fact that the Fast Saga keeps going to such lengths to revive dead characters is especially interesting given how over-the-top the stunts and action of the series have become. Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) even comments on this directly in F9: The Fast Saga, positing that he and Dom’s crew might be invincible considering the kinds of adventures they’ve survived together. With the return of the seemingly dead Gisele Yashar (Gal Gadot) also fully possible, “death” in the Fast & Furious franchise seems to be defined more as a temporary retirement, to be followed by a big comeback.

Does Characters Not Dying Work For The Fast Saga?

One could argue that with the franchise’s embrace of space travel and further absurdity, Fast & Furious has sacrificed any sense of stakes or drama in favor of wilder and wilder spectacle. With characters like Letty, Han, and potentially Gisele returning, the audience has every assurance that Dom’s family will always prevail in the end. While a major, and permanent, character death would add a sense of gravity back into the Fast & Furious movies, there does not seem to be much incentive to do so, at least from a commercial standpoint.

The franchise has long since crossed the billion-dollar threshold, with F9: The Fast Saga still managing a strong $726 million as theaters were recovering from the pandemic. That does not mean that the Fast & Furious series is completely unwilling to commit to a character’s death, with the Fast & Furious franchise’s mega-budget two-part finale being potentially the best place for that to happen. Even still, the Fast & Furious franchise plays by its own rules, and its predilection for characters returning from supposed deaths continues to fuel its commercial viability.