Dwayne The Rock' Johnson

It looks like Vin Diesel has bested Dwayne Johnson in at least one arena, clocking in at number one on Forbes’ list of the highest-grossing actors of 2017 — and throwing a little more fuel on that Fast & Furious feud (say that five times fast). Thanks to The Fate of the Furious and xXx: Return of Xander Cage, Diesel edged out his Fast co-star / arch-nemesis, and with fewer 2017 releases under his belt.

Someone almost got stuck, Alan Parrish style.

Each new development in the Fast and Furious feud is somehow more delightful and absurd than the last. First there was the highly-publicized beef between Dwayne Johnson and Vin “Candyass” Diesel. Then Tyrese Gibson got involved when it was announced that Johnson is headlining a spinoff. That quickly escalated when Universal pushed back the release of Furious 9 to make room for the spinoff, and now, a few irate Instagram posts later, here we are: Tyrese Gibson is threatening to quit the Fast fam if Dwayne Johnson returns for the ninth movie.

First he was the Rock. Now Dwayne Johnson is the Eagle.

As promised, Disney has debuted the first official trailer for Moana, the studio’s new musical adventure featuring the voices of Dwayne Johnson as a demi-god — as if you could cast him any other way. The Rock already played Hercules, now he plays a guy who kind of looks and sounds like Hercules’ South Pacific cousin Maui, who boasts of his great deeds, his magical fish hook, and his apparently magical dancing tattoos.

Following in the footsteps of 21 Jump Street, Dwayne Johnson’s R-rated Baywatch movie has the potential to be another great comedic riff to its classic ’90s predecessor. And while we await the inevitable news of a David Hasselhoff / Pamela Anderson cameo, Johnson has our first look at the upcoming film, featuring Zac Efron, new uniforms and a concept called “alpha balls.”

So far, we only know some basic info about Disney’s next animated musical, Moana — Dwayne Johnson joined the voice cast months ago, and the studio offered a few details during D23, but nothing very substantial, like who exactly is playing the title role of the next Disney princess? A new feature introduces you to Auli’i Cravalho, a young Hawaiian girl who beat out hundreds of hopefuls in Disney’s search for the voice of Moana.

The classics of this genre featured danger and destruction on a scale a guy could wrap his head around; a hijacked airplane, a skyscraper on fire, a capsized ocean liner filling with water. But when you live by spectacle, you die by it too. And so the disasters got bigger and bigger, one movie trying to top the next, until it became an arms race of planetary devastation. One movie blows up the White House, the next one washes it away in a tidal wave. Where do you go from there? An exploding tidal wave? At this point, if your disaster movie isn’t eradicating a large portion of the globe, don’t even waste your time.

Furious 7 almost certainly won’t be the last Fast & Furious movie. But at times it feels like a series finale. There are numerous callbacks and homages to the franchise’s entire 15-year history. The setpieces are bigger and crazier than ever; it’s hard to imagine anyone topping them. And before the chases really get rolling, the mood is often downright mournful. Two different scenes are set in graveyards, and characters talk about taking “one last ride” together.

There are few impersonations on SNL we enjoy as much as Jay Pharoah’s President Barack Obama, the chief subject of the latest episode’s cold open. But in a nice twist, the leader of the free world soon finds himself transforming into a monster of a man. Did you really think SNL would get Dwayne Johnson to guest host and not bring back The Rock Obama?