Poor old Vin Diesel, he got a bit big for his boots, dropped the franchises that made him a star, went off and made a load of awful movies that bombed and is now humbly coming back to the roles that he knows people have wanted to watch him play in the past.
We’ve already had him back behind the wheel in Fast & Furious, and while it was announced last year that a script had been commissioned for xXx3: The Return Of Xander Cage, which would bring Diesel and xXx director Rob Cohen back to the franchise fold, when Cohen left the movie earlier this year (to go and make Medieval instead), it was assumed that the sequel had fallen into development hell, never to return.
That’s not true however, as Ericson Core has now signed on to direct the film. Core was the cinematographer on The Fast & The Furious, and so already has a relationship with Diesel, although since then he’s directed the Mark Wahlberg movie Invincible and is attached to the thrillers Conrail and Liberty.
It still leaves the question of whether anybody wants to watch another xXx movie, whether Vin Diesel’s in it or not. The first one was dreadful, the second, which Vin side-stepped (allegedly because they wouldn’t pay him enough) and got replaced in the lead by Ice Cube, was even worse, and in 2009 most people have forgotten they even existed. If they do make xXx3, we’re assuming they’ll ignore the short film that appeared on the xXx2 DVD, which saw Xander Cage getting bumped off.