With the wildly popular Fast & the Furious franchise slated to wind down after its ninth and tenth installments, Vin Diesel is wasting no time finding the next action franchise to add to his résumé. This time, he’s teaming up with STXfilms to star in and produce an action-comedy film franchise called Muscle, according to reports in Deadlineand The Hollywood Reporter.
Details about the franchise are spare—nonexistent, really. The plot, writer, director, and start date for production are still under wraps. That’s not entirely surprising: STXfilms was ostensiblylaunched with the goal of reinventing the current Hollywood system. Rather than banking on massive blockbusters with gargantuan budgets to match, STX wants to go back to an older Hollywood model of mid-budget films driven by a celebrity name.
With Diesel’s past success as the face of the Furious and xXx franchises, he’s a natural choice to propel another action franchise to success. Chairman of STXfilms, Adam Fogelson, agrees. In a statement, he said:
“I’ve known Vin for more than a decade after working closely with him on the Fast and Furious franchise and I’m excited for him to return to this genre. Muscle is the perfect blend of action and comedy that his millions of devoted fans around the world have come to love him for, and we believe has the potential to become his next big, signature franchise.”
Diesel is plenty busy these days. He voices Groot in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies and the box-office-demolishing Avengers: Infinity War, which is set for a (probably equally blockbuster) sequel in 2019. He’s also slated to appear in Sony’s upcoming Bloodshot and reprise his role as Xander Cage in xXx4.
