Chris Morgan

Like, all of that is all...

And credit to Chris Morgan, the writer of all of them, too.

You know, the two of them together really define it.

So, yeah, Wan coming in is really... you know, he is, this is a work for hire project for him.

And by the third installment, neither Diesel nor Walker was coming back in a starring role, and Universal essentially decided to start over with new characters, a new location, and a completely different corner of car culture.

Writer Chris Morgan actually originally pitched a story about Dom going to Tokyo, learning to drift, and solving a murder, which is hilarious to imagine, but Universal wanted a high school story instead.

Morgan would go on to write a huge chunk of this franchise, and the movie was directed by Justin Lin, who producer Neal Moritz pursued after seeing his indie breakthrough, Better Luck Tomorrow, and I will have more to say about that later in the podcast.

Uh, Lin apparently wasn't thrilled with the script he was initially given and thought some of its depiction of Asian characters was dated and offensive, but Universal gave him enough freedom to reshape it.

He sees another kid being bullied and almost intervenes, but ultimately stays out of it.

As we can see, there's this passivity to him early on, even though he does feel the sense of right and wrong.

Uh, and of course, this is written by Chris Morgan in the first of many Fast movies he'll write, and directed by Justin Lin.

So I wanna take this as an early opportunity to talk about how important the soundtrack is to the movie's identity.

I stopped studying Japanese in year nine to pursue my real passion of spotting ADR in major Hollywood releases, and I have never studied Portuguese.

The story of this particular 47 Ronin starts with Walter Hamada, Chris Morgan, and a strange fallow period for Hollywood.

In the pre-MCU mid-2000s, Harry Potter was still going strong and Lord of the Rings was still the franchise that every studio wanted to recreate, with a box office haul in the billions and real cultural cut-through.

Pirates of the Caribbean came closest to recapturing that magic, but the stragglers of this trend left a long tail of expensive epic fantasy films that failed to connect with audiences.

In 2008, the studio that made Lord of the Rings, New Line Cinema, were about to be bankrupted by another Rings-chasing project, The Golden Compass.

And New Line had also just hired Walter Hamada as a production executive.

Chris Morgan, meanwhile, had just written the script for Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift when he teamed up with Hamada for 47 Ronin.

Hamada and Morgan would end up sharing a story credit on the film, although throughout production, Hamada was always described as an executive producer, not a writer, and Morgan's name is the only one on the cover page of the early draft of the script.