Watch Now, It’ll Be Late in a Week: The Movie That Proves Vin Diesel Isn’t Just Fast and Furious

Hollywood was his in the early 2000s.

While he recently landed a role opposite the late Paul Walker in Fast & Furious , a film with a winning concept that would be the starting point for a monumental franchise, Vin Diesel has also signed another juicy deal.

He becomes Xander “XXX” Cage, an extreme sports specialist covered in tattoos, who is recruited by an agent of the National Security Agency (NSA) to infiltrate a criminal organization and put an end to its activities.

The new king of action…

Hitting theaters a year after Fast and Furious, xXx features Diesel’s growing popularity and his share of action: car jumping off a cliff, motorcycle stunts, skydiving through snowy mountains… There’s no doubt the actor wants to follow in his footsteps. Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. Samuel L. Jackson’s presence in the casting adds a bit of hype around this release.

And it is a complete success. xXx started better than Fast and Furious in the US and made a lot of dollars worldwide. In France, it attracts 1.3 million curious young people to theaters. In any case, a sequel, called xXx2: The Next Level, is due in 2005… but without the diesel.

…who has a big head?

While he said he was going to continue, Vin Diesel backed out after reading the script and realizing he would no longer be working with director Rob Coen. Faced with this, the studios made a radical choice: kill his character off camera. They then introduce a new hero in the form of Darius Stone, an agent played by Ice Cube.

Despite the teams’ goodwill, this second opus failed at the global box office, collecting only $70 million, a far cry from its $118 million investment. Fewer than 500,000 people in France will see the sequel in cinemas… proof that Vin Diesel’s popularity has benefited the franchise greatly.

The latter insists on making a third film. We had to wait until 2017 for xXx: Reactivated to celebrate the return of Xander Cage to our screens… back from the dead.

xXx leaves the Netflix catalog on April 13.