Justin Lin has a blank check after the Fast X drama, and he’s using it to go back to indie movies
Sony has him directing One-Punch Man, but it's letting him go off and make a small movie first
Not even a year ago, Justin Lin suddenly and unexpectedly stepped down from directing Fast X—the penultimate entry in a series that he gets a lot of the credit for revitalizing—for reasons that we all assume had something to do with Vin Diesel’s need to control every single aspect of the franchise. Sony almost immediately snatched Lin up to take over an adaptation of hit anime/manga series One-Punch Man (which sounds like a bad idea, if only because main character Saitama seems far too silly to work in live-action and because doing it right is going to require outrageous special effects), but Lin might not be quite ready to go back to mega-budget tentpole feature-making just yet.
According to Deadline, it’s been an open secret to people in Lin’s “inner circle” that he always wanted to go back to his indie roots while he was making some of the biggest movies of all time, and Sony is so keen to get him behind the camera for One-Punch Man that they’re letting him go off an make a small indie movie first. The project is called The Last Days Of John Allen Chau, and it’s an adaptation of an Outside Magazine article of the same name (you can read it, but it’s obviously going to contain enormous spoilers) about a Christian missionary who visited a secluded tribe living on an island in the Indian Ocean. And it all worked out just fine for him!
The script comes from Ben Ripley, who previously wrote Source Code (which was pretty good) and that Flatliners remake (hey, Source Code was good). Deadline says Sony is “very high” on One-Punch Man, but it’s specifically giving Lin time to make John Allen Chau first in hopes that he’ll jump right into OPM when it’s done. Basically, Sony has given him a blank check for his time, and he’s using it to instead get a much smaller check for his next movie. After so many years of Lin assuring Vin Diesel that he’s not going to ruin the movies that he made good in the first place, it’s hard to blame him.