The Magnet Plane In Fast & Furious 9 Was A Nine-Year-Old Kid's Idea

People have joked for years that the more recent Fast & Furious films seem like they’ve been written by excitable children. You know what we’re talking about - things like a nuclear submarine chasing down a bunch of supercars, a hoard of ‘hacked’ cars raining down from a multi-storey car park, and a Pontiac Fiero blasting into space.

It turns out though that the latest instalment, F9, genuinely does have a scene thought up by a nine-year-old. In an interview with Empire Magazine, director Justin Lin - who also helmed Tokyo Drift and the franchise’s three subsequent films - revealed that one stunt was the idea of his son Oqwe.

Said sequence involves John Cena’s character Jakob Toretto driving off a cliff in a Ford Mustang GT350R while being chased by his brother Dom and Letty Ortiz. Moments later, Fate of the Furious baddie Cipher (Charlize Theron) swoops down in a futuristic aircraft and picks up up the car with a giant magnet.

Oqwer, who was around eight or nine years old at the time, came up with the setup while Lin (pictured below) was in a production meeting in London. “The only way we could hang out was that he would come the meetings with me,” he said, adding, “when an action beat proved tricky, Oqwe came up with a two-word solution: magnet plane.”

“We were talking about the ravine and I said, ‘Alright, so here’s Roman and Tej. Jakob needs to get to the other side – how does he get there?’ And Oqwe just picked it up and pitched the idea of the plane and everything,” Lin added.

At that point, the team were already playing around with the idea of magnets, which will play a prominent part in some of the film’s smashiest scenes. We’ve already seen a Toyota GT86 getting shoved through a shop front, a stunt which was filmed for real and enhanced with CGI. A more recent video showed numerous cars being chucked around during F9 filming as part of the story’s magnet-related carnage.

It’ll definitely be a film that requires viewers to leave their brains at the door before taking a seat in the theatre, but hey, after the last year or so, a bit of vehicular silliness might not be such a bad thing. F9 will be out on 25 June in the USA and 8 July here in the UK.