Chris Morgan reveals the original ending to Furious 7

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Close to halfway through the shooting of FURIOUS 7, Paul Walker tragically died in car accident, leaving his friends and family to grieve and the future of FURIOUS 7 up in the air. As we now know, the sequel went through some fairly serious restructuring and, thanks to Paul Walker's brothers stepping in along with a healthy application of CGI, Walker's character of Bryan O'Conner was given the chance to ride off into the sunset.

Chris Morgan, who has written every installment of the franchise since TOKYO DRIFT, recently spoke with Collider about the long-running franchise and revealed how FURIOUS 7 was originally supposed to end.

Well, the original ending, if I remember correctly, was our guys end up solving the problem and then kind of becoming—again, going more outlaw, it was sort of a happier ending that kind of ends with the insinuation that they were gonna go off onto this heist or this job. But the core issue for Brian, Paul’s character, was this kind of ‘Who am I?’ sort of question. He’s a guy who used to be a cop and in the thick of the action and a racer, and all this stuff, and now he has an amazing wife, a kid and another one on the way. Then he starts to look at his life and it’s not a midlife crisis but to say—we said it in the movie, ‘I miss the bullets, I miss the action’ and the point of the adventure was to show by the end of it that the thing that’s truly important to him is his family and being there. It wouldn’t mean that he has to stop those adventures or those things, but the context is just a little bit different, he has a different understanding of who he is at his core and what’s most important in life.

The original ending isn't really that much of a departure from the one which we got, although O'Conner's decision to focus on his family is obviously a little more permanent. I was quite impressed with how Universal and director James Wan were able to complete Paul Walker's work and give his character a touching send off, but it was a tough decision to make as at one point they were considering scrapping the entire film.

We had him in a lot of the action stuff and not a lot of the dramatic sequences, and so those were gonna be impossible to get. Then we had the question of like—there was a real moment where not only were we all just emotionally devastated, but there was a real question of is it even possible to finish. There was a beat where we were actually all just thinking about just shutting it down and not going on with it, but we took a little time and everyone had a chance to grieve. Then we all started thinking about it and I started specifically thinking about, ‘How do we build that story? What do we have with Paul?’ and really for me it was about, ‘Can we give the audience a cathartic experience to say goodbye? Can we do something that is worthy of Paul that he would appreciate?’ So it really kind of came down to that last sequence, so I just ended up writing it out and I took it into the studio and I was like, ‘This is what I think the end of the movie is’ and they loved it and the studio loved it. That was the moment when we all agreed, ‘We need to do this.’

As well as considering scrapping FURIOUS 7 altogether, there was also talk of ending the franchise once FURIOUS 7 was received as well as it was. Chris Morgan said that they were thinking that it might have been appropriate to "go out on a good note and leave it alone," but that the FAST & FURIOUS team "made an agreement to say that we wouldn’t revisit this unless we had a story that did something dramatically different, that was worthy of being done." Is THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS that film? I suppose we'll soon find out once it hits theaters on April 14th.