With “Jungle Cruise” now in cinemas and on the Disney+ service, the film’s star Dwayne Johnson and his producing partner Hiram Garcia have been doing press rounds and answering questions.
The pair work together at the Seven Bucks Productions banner with Garcia serving as president of production and producer on Johnson’s assorted films.
Collider recently spoke with Garcia at length about all the projects currently in active development at Seven Bucks and he offered updates on many of them:
First up he confirmed Johnson will not reprise his Luke Hobbs role in the next two “Fast and Furious” films, the actor having “made the clear decision to close the Fast & Furious chapter for all the evident reasons” following the eighth entry.
That won’t interfere with the plan to continue with the “Hobbs & Shaw” spin-off series:
“We just have specific plans for what we want to do with the Hobbs character and I think the fans are going to love it! We’re working to deliver something very unique and fresh and we know the studio is eager for us to get into it… At the moment we’re trying to figure out what that sequel is going to be, but we have some very big ideas.”
With Johnson starring in the upcoming DC Comics adaptation “Black Adam,” the question has been raised as to whether Johson would go over and do films with Marvel. He says:
“DJ and Kevin [Feige] have a great relationship and we’ve flirted around a few ideas before, but nothing serious. There’s a mutual admiration for what we each have been doing and what Kevin has built over there is truly incredible. Ultimately though for us, we’ve always been very committed to what we wanted to build with Black Adam.”
A first draft is in for “The Scorpion King” reboot with a polish now being done on it. A planned team-up with Robert Zemeckis for “The King” has a “great script” but they haven’t got a schedule they’re happy with at present.
A third film in the “Jumanji” reboot franchise is still stuck in development with director Jake Kasdan and producer Matt Tolmach not proceeding unless they are “delivering the best version of that story”.
Johnson’s planned sequel to John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China” has stalled somewhat due to complications surrounding the property:
“It’s still an ambition of ours but unfortunately there are complications that come with a legacy property like that which has so much attached to it from over the years.
We have a really fun idea on what we’d want to do with it, especially since our goal was never to remake Big Trouble but simply continue it. Similar to what we did with Jumanji we would continue the story and make sure the original stands on it’s own since it means so much to us and fans all around the world.
So needless to say we are still working on making that happen but as with any great project the road is not easy but we are sticking to it! We’re going to figure out a way to continue the story of Big Trouble in Little China.”
Johnson also has the mega-budget action caper feature “Red Notice” coming to Netflix later this year.
