Anyone who doesn’t like the Fast and the Furious franchise — and you should probably know where you fall at this point — isn’t likely to find much of this next post to be interesting. But if you’re a fan of this series, then you should be happy to hear the report from Twitch that Jason Statham might be joining the series. Him jumping on makes sense for a few reasons; in addition to being a big action star, the proceedings are also being taken over to Europe this time around. Just write the English bloke with a tough personality, cast him, and you’ve got your character.

That’s not the biggest news, though. Twitch has also learned that Universal might be planning the back-to-back sequel approach for Fast Six and Fast Seven. With shooting taking place over most of 2012, Six would get its already-scheduled release date of May 24th, 2013, and Seven could either be released around Christmas or the following summer. (I’m just guessing, but that doesn’t make it improbable.) Twitch speculates that this could explain director Justin Lin‘s recent exit from Terminator 5 — and this reasoning more or less makes sense, given that it would make his schedule a lot busier than initially expected.

Although it wouldn’t be truthful to call myself a fan of this series, there is a certain harmlessness that I admire; at least it isn’t mean-spirited or entirely reliant on CGI, so this isn’t something I consider to be bad. Excessive, yes, but we could do worse. Speaking of excess, you know that Universal must be considering this deal pretty strongly, with the box office intake of the final two Harry Potter movies (that were only split by eight months) being rather staggering. And if Breaking Dawn – Part 1 opens to big numbers, which everybody knows it will, they might be hard-pressed to not go in this direction. All I ask is that they bring Statham along.

Would you like to see Statham get Fast and Furious? Do you think that the sixth and seventh movies will shoot back-to-back?