When you think of the names most closely associated with the Fast & Furious franchise, Gary Scott Thompson isn’t one that comes up all that often.
Fans would name stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, director Justin Lin, writer Chris Morgan and producer Neal H. Mortiz before they got to Thompson, but he was integral to the creation of the multi-billion dollar behemoth after co-writing the screenplay for Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious alongside Erik Bergquist and David Ayer.
In a new interview with MovieWeb, the Las Vegas creator reflected on where Fast & Furious finds itself now, and whether or not he could have imagined he’d have a hand in laying the groundwork for one of the most popular and commercially successful properties the industry has ever seen.
“Well I’m a writer so I can imagine a lot of things. I did imagine it but I also imagine the flip side that it was never gonna see the light of day. I have to think every time going in and I have to believe it will be huge. You kinda think about baseball. If someone is a .300 hitter that’s great. We don’t have a lot of .300 hitters in this business. Going in I have to believe that it’s going to be the one, I did imagine it, but I also imagine the disaster that could have happened.
I don’t think they see the ending that I saw, but I don’t think they see an ending either. It’s making too much money. Universal Execs have said, ‘Thank you for creating our Marvel Universe’. They are competing with Marvel. It’s like the only movies getting made out of our studios lately are Marvel, Disney, Fast & Furious, or DC Comics. These films cost a lot of money so they want to make a lot of money. They will write it until it dies.”
Thompson received a story credit on 2 Fast 2 Furious, but that was his last involvement in the brand, which wouldn’t reinvent itself as a globetrotting action-packed extravaganza for almost another decade. Fast & Furious is a lucrative business, with two more chapters and a slew of spinoffs in the works, which must be conflicting for the writer who helped sow the seeds for what it would become before being left out of the equation.
