Spinoff sees Rock change track

Hollywood A-lister teams up with fellow Fast and Furious star for new franchise, Xu Haoyu reports.

After the eighth installment of the Fast and the Furious franchise raked in 1.3 billion yuan ($184 million) at the Chinese box office in just three days last year, Universal Pictures decided to launch a spinoff to tap into the original series' runaway success.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs &Shaw centers around the duo of Luke Hobbs, an agent of the US Diplomatic Security Service (Dwayne Johnson), and Deckard Shaw, a former elite British military operative (Jason Statham), and the one thing they have in common: family.

In the film, the quarreling two are forced to team up to stop terrorist Brixton (Idris Elba) from gaining control of a biological weapon that could change the fate of humanity and rescue Shaw's sister (Vanessa Kirby), an MI6 agent who had to inject herself with the virus during a special mission.

Hobbs and Shaw have been trying to take each other down with verbal insults and body blows ever since they first met in the seventh Fast and Furious outing.

"You know we hated each other," Johnson jokes at a news conference in Beijing.

"Still do," retorts Statham.