Vin Diesel asks "little brother" Dwayne Johnson to come back to Fast And Furious

Peace in our time. Is it really possible? If we’re talking about Vin Diesel vs. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a.k.a. the feud known as “CandyAssGate,” the answer is… probably not. The years-long back-and-forth has been too protracted, too passive aggressive to ever come back from, especially when Johnson has recently said that he’s not going back to the Fast & Furious family and that the next Hobbs & Shaw movie will be the “antithesis” of a Fast movie. And yet, Vin Diesel extended an olive branch to “little brother” Dwayne Johnson today, proving that there may still be some hope for reconciliation.

Diesel’s message to Johnson came in the form of a public Instagram post that Johnson is not tagged in, and in it he refers to Johnson as his “little brother” and says that his family thinks of him as “Uncle Dwayne.” With Fast 10 coming up, Diesel says it’s time to make good on a promise he made to Pablo (Diesel’s nickname for Paul Walker) and do everything he can to make Fast 10 the best finale for the series—which means burying the hatchet and bringing Johnson’s Hobbs back to the mainline Fast movies.

Diesel says Johnson still has a “very important role to play” and that Hobbs can’t be played by anyone other than him. (Counterpoint: Recasting Hobbs this late in the series, after everything that happened behind the scenes between these two guys, would be absolutely hilarious.)

Of course, this wouldn’t be another installment in the CandyAssGate saga without some candyassing, which comes in the form of Diesel talking down to Johnson a bit and preemptively questioning his commitment to a thing he already said he doesn’t want to do. Diesel says that, if Hobbs coming back is going to work, then Johnson “must show up” and can’t “leave the franchise idle.” He also says he hopes Johnson will “rise to the occasion,” and… there’s no way in hell that’s going to work, right?