Vin Diesel Announces Return of xXx
He’s been Dominic Torretto five times, and Riddick thrice - now, Vin Diesel has revealed he’s set to reprise another of his breakthrough action hero roles.
The blockbuster star took to Instagram to reveal that a third installment in the ‘xXx’ series is set to commence production before the year is out.
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Accompanying a photograph of himself from the era when the original ‘xXx’ was made, Diesel told followers, “ While I was filming XXX, guys on set called me Air Diesel… The time to return has come. Filming starts December in the Philippines. #ILiveForThisShit”
2002′s ‘xXx’ saw Diesel reunite with ‘The Fast and the Furious’ director Rob Cohen - both men declining to return for ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ in so doing. It also earned Diesel his first $20 million pay day - a good chunk of the $70 million budget.
Pitched as a contemporary spin on James Bond, Diesel took the lead as Xander Cage, a tattooed, freedom-loving, law-breaking extreme sports fanatic coerced into becoming an NSA spy by Samuel L Jackson’s pre-Nick Fury big boss man Augustus Gibbons. Sent to Prague, he teams up with Asia Argento’s undercover Interpol agent to take down a fanatical anarchist group with apocalyptic plans.
While it was perhaps a bit too anxious to be hip, ‘xXx’ proved a refreshing antidote to the 007 of the day (coming out the same year as the lacklustre ‘Die Another Day’), and was a reasonable box office success, earning over $277 million worldwide.
However, once again Diesel proved unwilling to return for the follow-up film allegedly over script concerns, meaning that ‘xXx: State of the Union’ - released as ‘xXx 2: the Next Level’ in the UK - saw the codename xXx inherited by Ice Cube, Xander Cage having apparently met an off-camera demise.
While a third film, said to be entitled ‘xXx: the Return of Xander Cage’ has been touted by Diesel for some time, there had been little word on the matter for a while - and with the ‘Fast & Furious’ series having more or less morphed into the streetwise equivalent of Bond that ‘xXx’ aimed to become, a Xander Cage revival didn’t necessarily seem too important.
There are no plot details, director, other cast members or release dates announced at this time, but Diesel will co-produce along with original producer Neal H Moritz, and the script is from John D Brancato and Michael Ferris.
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Picture Credit: Sony, Instagram/Vin Diesel
