Fast X Credits Scene Explained: Guess Who's Back?
If you live your life a quarter mile of a time and haven't seen "Fast X" just yet, look away now! This article contains major spoilers for the Fast family.
Have you caught your breath yet? "Fast X" certainly lived up to the hype (you can read /Film's review by Ethan Anderton here) in terms of putting Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto and the rest of his racing crew through the wringer, overloading this latest sequel with constant action that somehow kept topping itself with each and every set piece. All of that culminated with a frankly mind-melting third act finale, which paid off on previous comments that the blockbuster would end on a daring cliffhanger.
By the time the smoke cleared, cinema's First Family was scattered to the winds — either dead or left with no assurances that they'd all make it out alive. After Jakob's (John Cena) heroic self-sacrifice to buy Dom and his son Brian (Leo Abelo Perry) a little more time, the pair currently await their fate at the bottom of the crumbling Hoover Dam, masterminded by the unhinged villain Dante (Jason Momoa). Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Ludacris), and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) were last seen trapped inside a crashing aircraft, shot out of the sky by the double-dealing Aimes (Alan Ritchson). And as for Michelle Rodriguez's Letty and Charlize Theron's Cipher, they've been staging a prison escape all the way at the bottom of the world in Antarctica ... with another surprise in tow revealed in the final seconds.
Have you managed to process all of that by now? Well, too bad because "Fast X" had even more fireworks to throw our way before the credits completely rolled. In a mid-credits scene, yet another familiar face makes his grand return out of nowhere: Dwayne Johnson's Luke Hobbs.
He's back, baby!
How's that for a surprise? There have been plenty of reasons why nobody expected to see Luke "I will beat you like a Cherokee drum" Hobbs ever appear in another movie in this franchise again, both in-universe and out. In terms of the official canon, 2017's "The Fate of the Furious" ended with the imposing Diplomatic Security Service agent hanging up his holster to spend time with his daughter for a change. Of course, he'd eventually come back in the rather divisively-received spin-off, "Hobbs and Shaw," where he reignited his feud with frenemy Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham). But while Shaw would go on to reprise his role in the main series again, it no longer seemed likely that the same would apply to Hobbs.
Until now, that is! "Fast X" director Louis Leterrier clearly left no stone unturned in delivering one of the most extravagant conclusions to any "Fast" movie to this point, but he saved perhaps the biggest surprise for the post-credits tease. We follow a masked soldier winding his way through a labyrinthine estate, clearly on the hunt to fulfill some dangerous objective. When he arrives at his destination, however, he's met with a similar setup that the villainous Dante had created for Dom. Faced with flashing images and incriminating footage from that infamous bridge in "Fast Five," the mysterious figure finds himself the subject of Dante's disembodied voice over the telephone. Though he holds Diesel responsible for the death of his drug lord father Hernan Reyes (Joaquim De Almeida), it was ultimately Hobbs who pulled the trigger.
And now with Dante swearing vengeance against him, to be continued in the next film, Hobbs has only one card left to play: milk his delivery of "You son of a b****" for all it's worth.
Mending fences?
For years, "Fast" fans have followed along with the real-life dramatics unfolding between stars Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson. To put it mildly, neither one of these egos seemed capable of tolerating the other during filming, leading to a massive personality clash and, in an infamous moment at the end of "Fast & Furious 6," possibly one of the most hilarious examples of staging in a major Hollywood blockbuster by two stars who may or may not have even been present on-set together at the same time. (See above.) Whether this was all an elaborate WWE-style storyline meant to drum up headlines or the product of genuinely irreconcilable differences, however, the effect was the same. Most never anticipated seeing Johnson's Luke Hobbs show up in a "Fast & Furious" movie again.
Have both actors finally internalized the franchise's main theme of never turning one's back on family and helped the cold war begin to thaw? Or could this be even more evidence of the fallout from the disastrous release of the Johnson-starring "Black Adam," which all but ended his decades-long dalliance with DC and left him wanting for a reliable franchise again? We'd propose that both hypotheticals can be true at the same time, though that doesn't make it any less of a surprise to discover that Hobbs may very well cross paths with Dom in the next movie — which could become extended into a trilogy of sorts.
Either way, Hobbs' return seems like another piece of evidence that the end of the road appears to be in sight. We wouldn't expect the "Fast & Furious" franchise to go out any other way.
"Fast X" is currently playing in theaters.