The Fast And The Furious director to save cinema with heist/disaster movie hybrid

Rob Cohen is the visionary director that brought the world the original The Fast And The Furious and Jennifer Lopez’s The Boy Next Door, better known as “the movie with the first-edition copy of The Iliad.” Now, he has another project in the works that could be just as ground-breaking as those two films: According to Variety, Cohen has signed on to direct a “disaster action thriller” called Category 5 that tells the story of “a team of tech hackers” who try to rob a U.S. Mint building in a small town. However, it turns out that they’ve planned their operation for the same day that a huge hurricane is supposed to make landfall, meaning they have to pull of a thrilling heist and survive a dramatic storm at the same time.

Not since the golden age of Die Hard knockoffs has there been a movie premise that so brilliantly captures the fun of combining two different things. Maybe if Category 5 is a hit, Category 6 will be a heist movie set during a disaster that also features ghosts. Category 7 will add time travel. Category 8 will be a musical. Then Category 9 will be a total reboot, taking the series back to its heist/disaster movie roots.