

Around the turn of the century, Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s reign as the world’s biggest action hero appeared to be winding down. The hunt was on for the next action star and for a time, it looked like Vin Diesel might be that guy. Diesel’s star was on the rise and he had his pick of potential franchises. Unfortunately, the actor did not choose wisely. He bet on the wrong horse and ended up seeing his career cool off as a result. Just a few years after his big break, Diesel seemed to be forgotten.

And then a weird thing happened. The once arrogant actor returned to his discarded franchise. He seemed humbled by the experience. Strangely enough, both the franchise and Diesel’s career were reinvigorated by his return. Since then, Diesel has returned to the spotlight. He’s not A-list, but he is one of the stars of one of Hollywood’s biggest and most reliable action movie series. Diesel is back in a position where he is one hit away from having a career outside of the Fast and Furious movies which is not something anyone would have predicted just five years ago

Let’s go all the way back to the 1990’s. .Young Vin Diesel was making things happen. After getting some buzz for his short film, Multi-Facial, Diesel wrote, directed, starred in and produced the drama, Strays. This lead to a supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s World War II drama, Saving Private Ryan as well as voice work in Brad Bird’s animated feature, The Iron Giant. He wasn’t a star yet, but Hollywood was taking notice.



In 2000, Diesel kicked things up a notch. First, he starred in the low-budget sci-fi-action-horror hybrid, Pitch Black. Diesel played Riddick, a dangerous convict with enhanced vision. When the space transport Riddick is traveling on crash lands on an alien-infested planet that has been plunged into darkness, he becomes the only hope the passengers have for survival.

Pitch Black wasn’t a big movie. It topped out in third place at the box office and grossed under $40 million dollars in the US. Odds are, if you saw it you watched it on video. But Pitch Black was a hip movie. And Diesel’s anti-hero was captivating. This eccentric little sci-fi movie could have been Diesel’s Terminator – the low-budget movie most people didn’t see in theaters that helped make Schwarzenegger a star.



Wouldn’t you know it, the very next year Diesel starred in a hit. Sure, he shared top billing with co-star Paul Walker. But the original The Fast and the Furious was a big sleeper hit in 2001. Once again, Diesel impressed playing an antihero. Confession time: I have never actually watched any of the Fast and/or Furious movies. So I can’t tell you much about Diesel’s character, Dominic Toretto except that he is bald, speaks in a gravelly voice and likes fast cars. But odds are good you already knew that.

The first Fast and Furious film didn’t make Diesel or Walker into movie stars. But it opened doors for them. Diesel was in the enviable position of choosing among three potentially lucrative franchises. Rather than star in John Singeton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious, Diesel decided to take his chances with a Pitch Black sequel and a new property.



In 2002, Diesel reteamed with his Fast and Furious director, Rob Cohen, for the x-treme action movie, XXX. Actually, it was more extreme than that. The title was stylized so that the middle X was bigger than the two side X’s. It was xXx. How extreme is that? Pretty darn extreme I’d say.

Diesel played antihero Xander Cage, a chill bro who is into extreme sports and being extreme. He’s so gosh darn extreme that he makes extreme videos that stick it to the man. Which leads to him being recruited by a top secret government organization which trains him to be a spy. An extreme spy of course.

Early on in the movie, a dapper British spy gets killed probably due to lack of extremeness. It’s a winking acknowledgement that the filmmakers think that James Bond is old news. What the kids of the 21st century want is a secret agent who knows how to bodyboard and do the Dew. Only this turned out to be a slight miscalculation. It turns out that just like the generation before them, the kids thought 007 was pretty rad. Even if it was the Brosnan Bond.

xXx wasn’t a flop or anything. It opened in first place at the box office and grossed over $140 million dollars in the US. That’s about the same amount as The Fast and The Furious. But The Fast and the Furious had cost under $40 million dollars and xXx was around $70 million. So expectations were higher. Three years later, there was a xXx sequel, but Diesel did not reprise his role. Instead he was replaced by Ice Cube.

Fortunately, Diesel still had an ace up his sleeve. He still had Riddick to fall back on. In between, Diesel kept his indie cred solid with a couple of crime dramas. He starred opposite Barry Pepper and John Malovich in Knockaround Guys in 2002 and he headlined A Man Apart in 2003.



2004 was Diesel’s big moment. It had been four years since Pitch Black and he was finally able to revisit his first antihero in The Chronicles of Riddick. David Twohy who wrote and directed the original movie came back to write and direct the sequel. There were plans in place for a trilogy. Everything was falling into place to make Diesel a star.

There was just one small problem. Pitch Black was a tiny little movie that you showed your friends on video. And they would show their friends and so on until the movie had a cult following. But The Chronicles of Riddick was anything but small. It had a budget of over $100 million dollars. Even if everyone who saw Pitch Black in theaters came back and saw the sequel twice, there was virtually no chance the movie would break even.

The Chronicles of Riddick ended up grossing under $60 million dollars. That was more than the original film, but a lot less than the movie needed to make. Diesel’s sure fire life-line turned out to be a flop!

One movie very rarely sinks a movie star and Diesel continued to find work. In 2005 he starred in the comedy The Pacifier. If people were still comparing him to Schwarzenegger it was to point out how The Pacifier was a low rent Kindergarten Cop. Not that Diesel was alone. There was a trend of tough guys playing against type. Four years later, Diesel’s chief rival, The Rock, did essentially the same thing in Tooth Fairy.

It seemed the once cocky Diesel had been laid low. In 2006, he got good notices for starring in the courtroom comedy-drama Find Me Guilty. But other than critics, almost no one saw it. Seriously, check it out. It’s worth watching. There were more than a few giggles when later that year Diesel showed up in a cameo in the third Fast and Furious movie. The perception was that the actor had thrown in the towel and admitted defeat. Direct-to-video wouldn’t be far off.

In 2008, Diesel got another shot at stardom in the sci-fi action movie, Babylon A.D. But it turned out to be the biggest flop of his career to date. Diesel was out of gas. Come on. You knew I had to use that line eventually.



But this is where things get weird. By 2009, all three of the principle actors from the original Fast and Furious had fallen on hard times career-wise. So they all came back for the nothing-to-lose fourth installment of the series. Fourquels never work. There was no reason to think the series had life left in it. By reuniting the original cast, it seemed like a going away party.

Instead, Fast and Furious ended up outgrossing all of the previous movies in the series! That’s not something that is supposed to happen. Diesel didn’t run out and start making a bunch of other movies. Instead, he waited patiently for the next installment in the series. Two years later, The Rock joined the cast for Fast Five. And against all odds, that movie improved on the fourth one.

Since then, there has been a new Fast and Furious movie every other year. And each one has outperformed the one before it. The aging franchise didn’t just bring back Diesel and Walker, it also established Dwayne Johnson as a legitimate movie star.

His newfound success gave Diesel the clout to complete the Pitch Black trilogy. In 2013, Diesel produced the third movie in the series titled Riddick – sans Chronicles. David Twohy returned to write and direct and the budget was cut to just under $40 million. But the third time wasn’t a charm for Riddick. The movie bombed, but not nearly as bad as the bloated middle chapter.



In 2014, Diesel returned to voice work. He played the voice of Groot, the sentient tree in Marvel’s sci-fi smash, Guardians of the Galaxy. All Diesel said was “I am Groot” but the way he said it won over audiences. Not only will Diesel return to voice Groot in the sequels, there are rumors he could appear in other Marvel movies playing another role.

The seventh movie in the oddly titles Fast and Furious series opened in 2015. Furious 7 may not have been fast, but it was a massive box office hit. Sadly, it also marked Paul Walker’s final appearance in the series. The young actor died tragically in a car crash in 2013. Diesel grieved publicly and fans grieved with him. It seemed like Diesel, who was once viewed as stand-offish, had become someone his fans could relate to.

This weekend, Diesel tries again to reach beyond race car movies with the action-fantasy, The Last Witchhunter. Will it be a hit? I would bet against it. But Diesel’s got Furious 8 in the pipeline not to mention who knows how many Guardians of the Galaxy sequels. There is even talk of Diesel returning to the xXx series.

While he still isn’t A-list, Diesel has bounced back when most everyone had counted him out. After fifteen years in the spotlight, the actor seems to have settled into a groove that is neither fast not furious. But it seems to suit him just fine.

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