I heard rumours about this last week from someone who works in the film industry, and now media outlets from CTV to the Leader-Post are reporting that Vin Diesel will be filming the third installment in the Chronicles of Riddick Sci-Fi series in Regina this fall.

In the series, Diesel plays the last surviving member of the Furyan race. When he was a baby, he apparently survived an attack by a Necromonger officer who was intent on killing all male Furyan infants to thwart a prophecy that one day he would die at the hands of a Furyan male. I haven’t seen either of the first two movies [Pitch Black (2000) or The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)] so I don’t know if the Christ parallel (via the Biblical story of King Herod ordering the death of infant boys in Bethlehem and surrounding area following Jesus’s birth) extends to the rest of the series or not, but the character Diesel plays is a definite bad-ass.

He’s got military training, is an ex-con, and possesses surgically enhanced eyes that permit him to see in the dark. He gets stranded on isolated/desolate planets, battles bounty hunters, wages war against the evil Necromongers and a whole bunch of other fun stuff including, I believe, romancing a character named Kyra (played by Alexa Davalos, pictured below).

To give you a taste of what Regina’s in store for, here’s the trailer for The Chronicles of Riddick.