Universal has had quite a few high-profile failures, so Fast & Furious is probably the most important franchise it currently has running, so the news that the studio would like to make a seventh film in the series alongside the already planned sixth isn't that massive a surprise.
There have been rumours about it for a while, but now they've been confirmed by Vin Diesel, who told THR that, "With the success of this last one, and the inclusion of so many characters, and the broadening of scope, when we were sitting down to figure out what would fit into the real estate of number six, we didn't have enough space.
"We have to pay off this story, we have to service all of these character relationships, and when we started mapping all that out it just went beyond 110 pages. The studio said, 'You can't fit all that story in one damn movie!'"
Both screenplays will be written back-to-back, and there's a good chance they'll be filmed that way as well next summer. What isn't certain from Diesel's comments is whether Fast & Furious 6 and 7 will be a two-parter, or if they will be stand-alone movies.
And may I just say you have to have respect for Diesel, who always manages to talk as if Fast & Furious is some sort of Shakespearean saga of complex characters and epic intrigue. It's almost like he's never actually watched one.