'The Fate Of The Furious': Jason Statham's Plane Fight Almost Ended Differently

One of the best scenes in The Fate of the Furious (which made some serious cash this past weekend) involves Jason Statham's character, Deckard Shaw, fighting his way through a plane with a particularly special piece of cargo. I won't mention anything else u[ here in case you haven't seen it, but it's a super fun action scene that fully embraces the ridiculousness of the franchise.

I spoke with writer/producer Chris Morgan about the film last week, and got him to tell me about an alternate version of that scene that ended with a shout-out to Furious 7. Get the scoop about the alternate ending to the Jason Statham plane fight below.

Warning: spoilers for The Fate of the Furious ahead.

In the film, Deckard Shaw (Statham) and his brother Owen (Luke Evans) fly onto the airplane belonging to cyber-terrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron) to rescue the baby son of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel). Here's a TV spot that includes some footage from that scene:

In the movie, Shaw encounters Cipher on the plane, but she grabs a parachute and skydives out (look for her to appear in a future sequel). Since this whole franchise started as a riff on Point Break, I thought it might be fitting for Statham to jump out of the plane with no parachute to pay homage to one of that movie's coolest scenes. When I asked Morgan about it, he told me about an early version of the scene that he'd written:

The plane sequence – the Deckard Shaw fight with the baby – was incredible. Was there ever a draft that involved him going out the door of that plane with the baby in tow, because I was watching with my fingers crossed on the edge of my seat and really hoping it went there. It didn't, but I was wondering if you considered doing that when you were writing.

Morgan: Yes, so here was an early version we had, and ultimately we decided not to go with it, but to show you're on the right track. So Deckard Shaw arrives on the plane the exact same way, but he has a pack with him and we don't know what it is. And he gets the baby and fights his way out, and the end of that sequence is, he opens the duffel bag he's been carrying, and there's a baby seat in it. A car seat. And in the back of the plane is Dom's car that you see him load up into the plane earlier in the film. So he straps that kid in, gets in, and rolls it out the back, and they do the car going out like we did in Furious 7, but he's got the baby in it, and the baby is laughing the whole way. So that was something we considered. We had a version of that at one point.

Ultimately, I think they made the right move by not repeating imagery we'd already seen in Furious 7, but I still think it would have been awesome for Shaw and the baby to have jumped out and caught Cipher on the way down. What do you think? Would that have been too much, even for this film series?

The Fate of the Furious is in theaters right now.