'Fast & Furious 11' update: Vin Diesel teases return of another major character. But how?

At the 2025 edition of FuelFest, an event for automobile enthusiasts held in LA, actor Vin Diesel, who was present alongside Tyrese Gibson and Cody Walker, dropped a major update on the 11th film in the Fast & Furious franchise.

Addressing an elated crowd, Diesel shared that the new film, which would pick up from the cliffhanger ending of Fast X, would get an April 2027 release window and teased that Brian O'Conner, played by the late Paul Walker in the series' earlier entries, would return.

Elaborating, Diesel told the crowd that he agreed to make the new one for Universal Pictures on three conditions. "The first is to bring the franchise back to LA. The second thing was to return to the car culture, to the street racing. The third thing was reuniting Dom and Brian O'Conner. That is what you're going to get in the finale."

However, Diesel did not reveal how they would bring Brian back. The most obvious guess is that advanced CGI and AI would be involved in some capacity. But it remains to be seen how loyal fans and film buffs in general will react to this idea. It's unclear whether Brian would appear in one scene or several — or throughout the film. If it's the latter, it would be quite baffling, to say the least. (But since the franchise is known for many strange decisions, it wouldn't be really that surprising, is it?)

In Furious 7, there was a genuine reason to incorporate a CGI component considering Paul Walker's untimely death in 2013 in a car crash, at age 40. Paul's brothers, Cody and Caleb, had opted to become stand-ins for their brother for the unfinished scenes, with the screenplay modified to make it appear as though Paul was retiring instead of the alternative. It's likely the makers would take the same route to bring the character back in the new film.

It has been 24 years since the release of the original film The Fast and the Furious, directed by Rob Cohen. The 11th film is expected to be the final entry of the long-running franchise. Jason Momoa, who played the principal antagonist Dante Reyes in Fast X, is expected to return along with director Louis Leterrier.

In an earlier interview with Empire magazine, Leterrier shared that he and Momoa will take the villain in a new direction. "Let’s do something else. It’s never twice the same with Jason. Dante will truly evolve. Let’s explore something we haven’t seen before. He was fuelled by vengeance. He could have played it dark, angry. But it was interesting to play with the duality and the push-pull within the character, where within the same sentence he’s laughing and feels the pain of losing everything. Only an actor like Jason could have done that."

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