Here's how Fast & Furious 7 was able to finish Paul Walker's scenes following the actor's death. The seventh installment in the high-octane franchise was rocked with tragedy when Walker was killed in a vehicular crash in November 2013, at a time when production was only part way done. Having played the still-alive Brian O'Conner — a former lawman-turned-outlaw and Robin to Dominic Toretto's (Vin Diesel) Batman — since the original The Fast and the Furious in 2001, Walker's tragic passing left a massive hole in the popular film series. Understandably, the movie's creatives gave serious thought to canceling Fast & Furious 7 afterward, rather than trying to finish it without him.
Of course, that didn't happen, and the movie went on to become a massive box office success (grossing over $1.5 billion in theaters worldwide), in addition to earning widespread acclaim for the touching and tasteful way it «retires» Walker's Fast & Furious character. But in order to both finish the film and give O'Conner a fitting conclusion to his personal journey, the Fast & Furious 7 production team (including screenwriter Chris Morgan, director James Wan, and their many VFX artists) had to think decidedly outside the box.
Related: F9: Why Brian's Scene Was Perfect (& Didn’t Ruin His Furious 7 Ending)
After the Furious 7 ending and O'Conner's storyline in Fast & Furious 7 were rewritten, the film's crew set about the task of producing some 350 additional shots of Walker to flesh out his role in the movie, 90 of which used archived footage of the actor from previous outtakes or shots from earlier Fast & Furious films, which were then relit and repurposed. The other 260 shots were completed by having Walker's brothers, Caleb and Cody, perform his
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