SCOTT Eastwood is returning to The Fast Saga, reprising his role as Eric Reisner a.k.a. Little Nobody in Fast & Furious 10.

Also known as Fast X, the tenth film in the main franchise is currently in production after a brief but significant snafu regarding its filmmaker. Director Justin Lin, who returned to the franchise in Fast & Furious 9, was meant to wrap up The Fast Saga but exited Fast 10 and has since been remonplaced by Louis Leterrier.

The car-centric franchise has come a long way since its street-racing days in the 2000s. Now, it’s a full-blown action-adventure saga known for its crazy stunts and over-the-top storylines. The Fast Saga is one of the most popular franchises right now, so it’s no wonder that there’s immense pressure to deliver a satisfying ending.

Aside from its core cast, Fast 10 has also brought in A-listers Jason Momoa and Brie Larson to board the project. Its latest ensemble addition, however, is a familiar face.

According to a new report from THR, Eastwood is set to reprise his role as Little Nobody in Fast 10. No additional context has been given regarding how involved he will be in the movie’s story. Reisner’s boss, Mr. Nobody, however, has yet to be confirmed for the upcoming blockbuster as there’s still no word if Kurt Russell will be joining the upcoming Universal blockbuster.

Following his introduction in Fate of the Furious, Little Nobody didn’t appear in Fast & Furious 9 despite Mr. Nobody’s cameo. In the 2021 Lin-directed film, Russell’s shady manipulator was revealed to be the person who saved Han (Sung Kang) from Deckard Shaw’s (Jason Statham) attempted murder in Tokyo. Mr. Nobody was also the one who advised him to stay hidden until he re-emerged several years later. Given the nature of Mr. Nobody’s cameo in Fast & Furious 9, it made sense that Little Nobody didn’t appear with him despite being the older gentleman’s right-hand man. Whether or not Mr. Nobody appears in Fast 10, the fact that Little Nobody will be in it is an indication that he will be involved in the narrative.

With Little Nobody’s impending return to The Fast Saga, it’s curious if there are any other familiar characters that fans haven’t seen in a while who will be appearing in Fast & Furious 10. Ever since Han’s surprise resurrection, there have been theories that other supposedly dead players in the franchise can come back, particularly Gal Gadot’s Giselle. There has been no concrete word about this thus far, but as fun as seeing all these characters in the new blockbuster will be, it also risks making the film overstuffed and convoluted. (source: screenrant.com)

(ROHN ROMULO)

THIRTY-SIX years after portraying Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun, Tom Cruise returns to the iconic role that catapulted him to global superstardom, with the long-awaited sequel, Paramount Pictures’ Top Gun: Maverick (in Philippine cinemas May 25).

[Watch the film’s final trailer at https://youtu.be/MX3gBYuV5Jg]

“I’d thought about a sequel to Top Gun for all these years,” says Cruise. “People had asked for a sequel for decades. Decades. And the thing I said to the studio from the beginning was: ‘If I’m ever going to entertain this, we’re shooting everything practically. I’m in that F/A-18, period. So, we’re going to have to develop camera rigs. There’s going to be wind tunnels and engineering. It’s going to take a long, long time for me to figure it out.’  For years, people had said, ‘Can’t you shoot [the movie] with CGI?’ And I always said, ‘No. That’s not the experience.’ I said, ‘I need to find the right story. And we’re going to need the right team. This movie is like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. I’m not playing.’”

On the original movie, although Cruise was filmed in the cockpit of an F-14 Tomcat, his castmates weren’t so successful in their endeavors. “We had other actors up there, flying,” says legendary producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “Tom was the only one we had usable flight footage for. We had tons of footage of the other actors in the air with their eyes rolling back in their heads. This time, thanks to Tom, all the actors on Top Gun: Maverick became accustomed to the fundamentals and mechanics of flight and G-forces, because of all the training they did months in advance. Unlike the first film, our actors are actually in the cockpits of the F/A-18s in flight, acting and speaking their lines of dialogue.”

Cruise says there is a “majesty and beauty” in flying an airplane. “It’s both using and defying nature,” he says. “And playing Maverick again, at a different stage of his life, has been an incredible experience for me. Maverick is still Maverick. He still wants to fly Mach 2 with his hair on fire. But you see the transition that Maverick undergoes. The pressure of him losing his best friend, the responsibility he feels about that and how he has carried that with him. This film is about family and it’s about friendship and it’s about sacrifice. It’s about redemption and the cost of mistakes.”

And that emotion hasn’t just been up on screen, but behind the scenes, on a journey that has taken the makers of Top Gun: Maverick both back in time and forward, into new frontiers in filmmaking. “What we have achieved with the aerial sequences is genuinely something that people will never have seen before,” says Cruise. “We’ve trained actors to be able to fly and perform in real F/A-18s. And, to do that, we took the greatest fighter pilots in the world [from the U.S. Navy] and we taught them about movies – the pilot and the actor had to work as a team. This is the sophistication of the aerial sequences. No one’s ever done this, ever.”

It’s not just pride that Cruise feels, though. Top Gun: Maverick isn’t just a movie – it’s a destination. A culmination of everything he has learned in his 40 years in this business (Cruise’s debut, Endless Love, was released on July 17, 1981), this is a story he’s been building towards. A love letter to aviation, for sure. But a love letter to movies too.

About Top Gun: Maverick

After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose”.

Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski, Top Gun: Maverick stars Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis with Ed Harris.

The film is written by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, based the characters created by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.  Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie and David Ellison.

Top Gun: Maverick is distributed in the Philippines by Paramount Pictures through Columbia Pictures.  Follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/paramountpicsph/; Instagram at www.instagram.com/paramountpicsph/  and YouTube at  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsZ7igjHZB-5k8DDM7ilVJw. Connect with #TopGun and tag paramountpicsph

(ROHN ROMULO)