Who would have thought that Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw would go from obsessed with hunting down Dominic Torretto and his family in the ever evolving Fast & Furious series to actually assisting them in three easy steps? Even stranger is the fact that if earlier plans panned out, we could have seen more of Deckard in the blockbusting series.
How much more? Try a whole movie’s worth, as Jason Statham himself revealed to CinemaBlend in the interview below that plans to draw him into the series were afoot as early as the end of Fast Five’s production cycle:
While Deckard Shaw was set up as a villain at the end of Fast & Furious 6, he would go on to becoming the main antagonist in Furious 7, avenging his brother Owen being put into a coma as a result of the final standoff at the end of the sixth film.
Of course, history eventually showed that Jason Statham’s heavy would eventually become pals with part of the team through some valiant baby-saving efforts in The Fate of the Furious. It’s a transition that’s been controversial with fans, and it’s also something that Statham definitely hadn’t foreseen in throughout his tenure in the series.
In fact, it seems that the Hobbs & Shaw actor even had his doubts that his post-credits tag would hold much meaning to the Fast & Furious series, or even if it would appear in the film. Thinking back to where the arc of the series was in Fast & Furious 6, it’s not that surprising to think that Jason Statham would be skeptical about how his actions would affect the series going forward. That particular film was the first with the Shaw family added into the mix, and as the formula for the series was freshly tinkered with the addition of Dwayne Johnson’s Hobbs in Fast Five, there were plenty of directions that the story could go.
Were Jason Statham to have been able to take his place in Fast & Furious 6, it seems like there would have been one of two things that had happened. One is that Statham would have starred as Owen Shaw, instead of Luke Evans, and been the brother in the coma at the beginning of Furious 7.
Another possibility is that Deckard Shaw might have made his first appearance that much sooner, and he would have been apprehended by the DSS, still setting up his big jailhouse fight with Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs. Either way, Hobbs & Shaw might not have happened, if fate hadn’t stepped in and delayed Jason Statham’s entrance into the series.
In the way history played out, Deckard Shaw came in, engines revved and revenge on his mind, in the scene below from Fast & Furious 6 that changed franchise history forever.
The Shaw family expands in Hobbs & Shaw with Vanessa Kirby’s Hattie Shaw being the latest addition, and with brother Owen and mother Queenie still in play, there’s no telling how many other relations are hiding in the shadows. If this latest spinoff does well enough, we’ll probably see more of Deckard, Luke and the rest of the gang in this highway of action and adventure that runs parallel to the Fast & Furious saga.