Justin Lin has a blank check after the Fast X drama, and he’s using it to go back to indie movies

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.