As ‘fate’ has it, a return to New York

keeps getting bigger and bigger.

“The secret ingredient is really the cast,” said Statham, who knows a thing or two about action ensembles from “The Expendables” series. “I think people have really latched on to all the characters over the years; they just want to continue following what happens in that world.”

That family image, though, took a blow last August when Johnson posted a cryptic Instagram message calling out a male co-star for being late to filming a scene. TMZ later reported that the target of The Rock’s ire was Diesel.

But there’s no debating that the cast has been a major part of the franchise’s success — particularly because it’s arguably the most diverse in the genre. It’s easy to forget that a year before “The Fast and the Furious” hit theaters, the similarly themed “Gone in 60 Seconds” exited the big screen as fast as its title predicted.

While that film boasted the bigger names on the marquee in Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie, “The Fast and the Furious” had an ethnically diverse cast that “reflected real life and the real street racing scene in Los Angeles where the film was set,” said comScore box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

“They were ahead of the curve long before diversity became such a high-profile issue in Hollywood.”

And then, of course, there’s the cars. The sheer obsessive use of classic and sports cars has remained a constant even as the franchise shifted gears from street racing flicks to heist films.

“We literally raced and destroyed hundreds of cars on every level in this film, from vintage Corvettes to Lamborghinis,” Gray said. “Some of that was painful because I’m a car guy.

“I’d ask the producers, ‘Can I drown a Lamborghini?’ — and they’d say, ‘Well, you know it’s going to take three Lamborghinis to do that shot.’ Well, I was like, ‘Is that possible?’ They would think about it, crunch the numbers, give you a look and say, ‘Yes.’ ”

With the franchise moving forward so quickly and the high cost of destroying hundreds of cars in the name of art, all doubts about whether or not they should’ve continued have to be left in the rearview mirror.

“The ending of ‘Furious 7’ was so emotionally powerful and so beautiful,” said Diesel, of the visual of Walker riding into the sunset in the closing credits, “it didn’t feel right to just stop the story right there.” EIGHT MOVIES IN, “The Fast and the Furious” franchise is finally speeding home — to New York City.

“I had the image of Dom driving that (Dodge) Charger over the bridge towards Manhattan for maybe five years,” said actor Vin Diesel, who pushed for a starring role for the Big Apple in “The Fate of the Furious.”

“A lot of people don’t know this, but the original article that the first movie came from — was inspired by — was about illegal streetcar racing in New York City,” Diesel said. “So there was a kind of poetic justice in finding a way to get Dom back to the East Coast.”

That original article optioned by Universal and producer Neal Moritz for the first “The Fast and the Furious” film was a 1998 Vibe magazine piece entitled. “Racer X,” written by then-Daily News business reporter Kenneth Li.

“Every time there’s a new one out, my quote, unquote good friends remind me how little I got paid for it,” jokes Li.

His “Racer X” chronicled the underground racing circuit of souped-up Honda Civics in New York, and drivers like Rafael Estevez, a charismatic leader of the scene who became the basis of Diesel’s character. Appropriately enough, before he broke into acting, Diesel said he used to speed his own car through the same stretch of the Henry Hudson Parkway where Estevez and company raced.

“The screenwriter asked, ‘What do you think the story should be?’ I suggested they stick close to my article. Instead they were thinking, ‘Point Break’ meets ‘West Side Story,’ which is more or less what they ended up with,” Li said. “Thank God they didn’t take my advice.”

So the story took a detour to Los Angeles, and the rest is history.

Even though much of the crashing for the New York scene in “The Fate of the Furious” was filmed in Atlanta, director F. Gary Gray said it was a career highlight to make it here, in the city Frank Sinatra sang about.

“To get five or six cars racing through Times Square at 50 miles an hour . . . is next to impossible,” Gray said. “To get an aerial shot of that in a post-9/11 Manhattan is almost impossible.

“You’ve never seen it before onscreen — and you probably won’t see it again.”