It’s been a long haul, but you can’t keep a Furyan down. Today, we found out that the long-gestating fourth film in the Riddick franchise is finally going into production, with Vin Diesel once again taking on the role of Richard B. Riddick, a laconic Furyan who kicks ass across the galaxy even when he can’t see very well in a brightly lit environment.
The script for Riddick: Furya, as the fourth film is titled, has reportedly been completed as far back as 2021. The movie has been in development limbo since then, but according to Variety, it will start production on August 26, 2024 and will shoot in both Germany and Spain.
Here’s the synopsis for the upcoming feature, per Variety:
In Riddick: Furya, Riddick finally returns to his homeworld, a place he barely remembers and one he fears might be left in ruins. But there, he finds other Furyans fighting for their existence against a new monster—and some of these Furyans are more like Riddick than he could have ever imagined.
Writer-director David Twohy, who helmed the first three films in the franchise—Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and Riddick—is back once more for Furya. We don’t know yet who will be joining Diesel on the call sheet, and we also don’t know the scale or budget for the sci-fi feature, something that is up in the air given Universal Pictures only greenlit a scaled back budget for the third film after the financial flop that was The Chronicles of Riddick, which cost $120 million to make but only garnered a little over $107 million worldwide when it was released in 2004.
The third film, 2013’s Riddick, had a much more modest budget of $38 million and, with DVD sales and its almost $95 million global box office haul, likely made money for the studio. Despite this, it’s been over a decade since the Fast & Furious star has returned to the sci-fi franchise. Riddick fans won’t have to wait much longer, however—while we don’t have an official release date yet, we’ll likely see the movie in late 2025 or early 2026 given its August production start time.
