“Fast & Furious 8” has just been confirmed by Vin Diesel, the lead actor of the franchise, at the recent Cinema Con that was held in Las Vegas. Thankfully for the fans, they now have a release date to look forward to: April 14, 2017.
Although reports have already surfaced about the next movie, “Furious 7” is still making it big in the box office, according to data from Rentrak. In fact, the film had just gone past “Frozen,” MTV reported. In just a matter of weeks, it managed to obtain more ticket sales than the animated hit from Walt Disney.
“Furious 7” has kept the top box office spot for the fourth consecutive week now, garnering $18.26 million over the weekend and reeling in $320.536 million at the domestic box office since the film premiered earlier this month. Abroad, however, the film made yet another $1 billion in foreign ticket sales – bringing a total of $1.32 billion worldwide, so far, according to Us Weekly.
The seventh installment of the “Fast & Furious” franchise is now the new fifth highest grossing movie of all time, edging “Frozen” to sixth place. It now only needs to earn $20 million to pass the film that is presently on the fourth spot, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.”
You can check out the current list of World Wide Grosses via Box Office Mojo here.
Third place belongs to 2012 “Avengers” with $1.518 billion. At second place is James Cameron’s “Titanic” with an epic total of $2.186 billion in 1997. Lastly, right at the peak of it all is yet another one of Cameron’s creations, “Avatar,” with $2.787 billion in 2009.
Fans of the franchise are expecting the ticket sales of “Furious 7” to continue to rise, especially since the film is still in theaters right now. A question that fans do have at present is whether or not the eighth film will be taking up where the seventh flick left off, especially with the void that Paul Walker’s character had left.
Rumor has it that someone had already been chosen to step in for the late Walker. According to The International Business Times, Vin Diesel may have hinted a bigger role for Kurt Russell. The “Guardians of the Galaxy” actor said when he appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” that Russell’s role was actually purposely revealed to make way for a larger story, one that will be taking place in New York, according to Comic Book.
The plot of “Furious 8” will reportedly be focused on the gang returning to New York, chasing cars on the streets once more. Russell told Kimmel. “I got an idea – a sense of what Vin, maybe, wants to do in the future, that this character could be a good part of.”
