How “The Fast and the Furious” Tells the Story of Hollywood
When “The Fast and the Furious” premièred, on June 18, 2001, few expected it to be particularly successful. The formula was alluring but dumb: a young, hot cop goes undercover in the world of illegal street racing to infiltrate a gang of young, hot robbers. Nowadays, films with box-office appeal are audience-tested within an inch of their lives. But relatively little oversight went into “The Fast and the Furious,” which was just another mid-budget, medium-stakes bet, at a time when studios took more of a kitchen-sink approach. Starring Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, “The Fast and the Furious” ended up being a surprise hit, outearning known entities such as “Lara Croft” and “Dr. Doolittle 2” the week of its release. Made on a relatively modest budget of thirty-eight million dollars, it grossed more than five times that amount.
Twenty-five years and ten features later, “Fast” has become one of the most successful franchises in the history of Hollywood. Several of the films are among the most expensive ever made, and all of them combined have grossed more than seven billion dollars. Our impressively multicultural team of street racers now freelance in the shadowy and complex world of covert ops, jetting around the world to take down an increasingly unhinged array of nihilist supervillains. What holds the series together is a notional commitment to one’s chosen family, with Diesel’s principled-lunk paterfamilias, Dominic Toretto, ready with a cold beer and some big-picture wisdom at the end of a world-saving adventure. “Everyone’s looking for the thrill, but what’s real is family.”
Sometime around the 2011 release of “Fast Five”—the one where two cars drag a five-ton bank vault through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, occasionally using it to smash police cars—the series transcended its identity as a typical blockbuster and came to take on a deeper cultural significance. The film critic Wesley Morris won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, in part, for a much discussed review highlighting the “accidental genius” and progressive feel of “Fast.” As Morris and others pointed out, the franchise made an early and relatively organic commitment to diverse casting, growing from the core of Diesel, Walker, Jordana Brewster, and Michelle Rodriguez, to include Sung Kang, Tyrese Gibson, and Chris (Ludacris) Bridges, Nathalie Emmanuel, Dwayne Johnson, and Jason Momoa. “When we started,” Rodriguez, who plays Toretto’s wife, Letty, said, at a recent première, “there were no people of color, like, in movies. . . . People saw that the world wasn’t the United States of America and it wasn’t just Caucasian, you know? That the world was very yellow and very brown.” And then there’s the daffy spectacle of the films themselves, with plots beholden to almost avant-garde manipulations of time, space, and reality. We once gasped at cars launching over ravines; now we marvel in dumbfounded delight as cars parachute from cargo planes, or even rocket into outer space.
In a new book, “Fast and Furious Franchising,” the media scholar Dan Hassler-Forest argues that the series is central to understanding the evolution of Hollywood over the past twenty years. At first, it was easy to dismiss these movies, built on “predominantly male characters entering their phallic automobiles in an endless series of epic dick-measuring contests.” Yet Hassler-Forest found himself fascinated with the “surprisingly intricate mythology” of the franchise, “all the more compelling for the fact that it had so obviously been made up as it went along.”
While the Marvel Cinematic Universe is often held up as the exemplar of the I.P.-driven Hollywood mega-franchise, he argues that the “Fast” movies, which started seven years before the M.C.U., have been just as influential. They emerged at a time when the “ideal form” of a franchise was still the trilogy—think about the original “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones.” Even the most ambitious stories often felt exhausted by the third installment, with diminishing creative and financial returns. The almost accidental success of “The Fast and the Furious,” and its lack of preëxisting lore, suggested an alternative model for franchising: a cinematic universe that could be mined for as long as was profitable. While the films build on a common history, often going to great lengths to retroactively explain away inconsistencies or revive presumed-dead stars, the sequels aren’t bound to a single story.
To enforce some illusion of narrative coherence, “Fast” was early in its use of mid-credits scenes to tease sequels or introduce plot twists. And, during an era in which studios often relied on the long tail of home DVD sales, the series’ producers were inventive in their use of bonus features, commissioning short films, like “Los Bandoleros,” which currently stands as one of Vin Diesel’s last directorial efforts, to shade in backstories. The films became a kind of self-justifying expansion of brand identity, writing their own elaborate, globe-trotting canon as they went along.
The initial success of the “Fast” movies made sense within the aggro culture of early-two-thousands America, a kind of “Ocean’s 11” for dudes in muscle tees, but it wouldn’t have survived on this demographic alone. The franchise seemed to be losing steam by the third film, “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” from 2006, which is possibly the best stand-alone movie in the series, but failed as an attempt to continue the franchise without Walker and Diesel. While “Tokyo Drift” didn’t make as much money as Universal had hoped, it did earn more abroad than domestically. Perhaps it’s obvious in hindsight that “fast cars” and “hot chicks”—“Tokyo Drift” director Justin Lin’s summation of the films’ core associations—had international appeal. From the mid-two-thousands on, “Fast” gradually went global, anticipating a turn toward the “vulgar cosmopolitanism” that defines contemporary Hollywood, where any movie with blockbuster aspirations must concoct some reason for the characters to divert through South America or Asia.
One imagines that none of this would have happened if the producers of “The Fast and the Furious” had gone with one of their original titles: “Race Wars.” As Hassler-Forest suggests, the series’ wide appeal is owed partly to its capacity for hinting at the real world without ever approaching anything that feels like social commentary, with “all these inner-city guys and girls hanging out without racial tension, speaking the common language of the car, and more interested in racing than racism,” in the words of the first film’s director, Rob Cohen. The casting has always managed to feel diverse, but in a guileless, incidental way, giving the appearance of multicultural inclusion without espousing any explicitly progressive viewpoints. The series’ early commitment to an ethnic, blue-collar ethos made it seem visionary by the twenty-tens, when Hollywood confronted long-standing biases around casting in ways that felt like pandering. Instead of factions, there was family, and the characters’ primary bonds were, in Hassler-Forest’s words, “competence and loyalty.” It feels natural that the person sitting at the head of the table is Diesel, who has long traded on his ambiguous racial identity. (His production company, which is behind seven of the ten main “Fast” movies, is called One Race Films.)
I remember my excitement when “The Fast and the Furious” came out, in 2001, mostly because I thought it would be a movie about Dominican street racers in Washington Heights. The film had been inspired by “Racer X,” Kenneth Li’s 1998 feature in VIBE magazine about night racing in New York City, which described “an urban polyglot” of young racers trying to outsmart the police, in addition to the physical limitations of their souped-up Japanese cars. Other than the cars, little from Li’s story survived the adaptation process. But there was something delightful about how each new director built on the original formula. John Singleton set “2 Fast 2 Furious” in Miami and eased the series away from rap-rock rage toward a hip-hop nonchalance. Justin Lin—as close as there is to a “Fast” auteur—brought the character of Han (Sung Kang) over from his 2002 breakthrough indie film “Better Luck Tomorrow.” Known for his deadpan cool and penchant for snacking, Han became such a popular character that pressure from fans helped bring him back for “F9” after he was presumed dead at the end of “Fast & Furious 6.”
Though the “Fast” films came to seem like a harbinger of the future, I was initially a fan of their scrappiness, the way the early installments just about held together, much like the patched-up cars at their core. These were popcorn blockbusters with an appreciation for absurd spectacle and a vague grasp of physics—who knew they would accidentally chart a billion-dollar mythology? Reading the critic Barry Hertz’s “Welcome to the Family,” from last fall, an unauthorized account of the series’ inception and evolution, one is reminded of the luck and circumstance that elevated something with such simple ambitions into a cultural behemoth. Built on more than a hundred and seventy interviews, the book is a remarkably entertaining story of Hollywood in the two-thousands, when the talent pipelines included cable TV and music videos, when every movie didn’t need to be an event, and when the industry was not yet beholden to recognizable I.P.
Even if you’re not that interested in the casting what-ifs and trivia—I was amazed to learn that the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks had been hired to punch up dialogue for Rodriguez and Brewster’s characters in “Fast X”—Hertz’s interest in behind-the-scenes stories offers a fascinating bottom-up perspective on some of the film’s technical challenges, from Lin using Hot Wheels to map out chase scenes to the inventive D.I.Y. work of the stunt and special-effects coördinators Mic Rodgers and Matt Sweeney, who pioneered new ways of filming fast-paced driving scenes. Rodgers and Sweeney created something called the Mic Rig: imagine a pickup truck, only instead of a bed there is the stripped-down body of a sports car. A professional drives the truck, while the actors mime the movements for a camera mounted in front of their hood. For this innovation, Rodgers and Sweeney received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy, in 2002.
It can be hard to appreciate contributions such as these, now that “Fast” is just another bloated franchise, full of back-from-the-dead stars and long-lost family members. In “F9,” the character Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) quiets his trademark arrogance and begins questioning the nature of his existence: “Y’all ever thought about how many wild missions we’ve been on? And we somehow always survive?” His incredulity about their increasingly risky adventures—this is the one that involves a Pontiac Fiero in outer space—becomes one of the film’s running gags.
Both Hassler-Forest and Hertz are skeptical about the future of the franchise. In 2023, a former assistant of Diesel’s accused him of charges including sexual battery. (Diesel has categorically denied her claims. The case was dismissed last year on a technicality, with his accuser pursuing an appeal.) The last couple “Fast” films have also underperformed, and the delayed announcement of a follow-up to “Fast X”, from 2023, was seen as a bad omen. Universal finally announced a 2028 release date for “Fast Forever.” Perhaps the series has reached its farcical end, having already gone to the deep seas and outer space.
“Fast” is Universal’s longest-running franchise, and one of the highest-grossing film series of all time. Yet unlike a “Star Wars” or Marvel movie, “Fast” fandom doesn’t translate to toys, video games, and merchandising in quite the same way. There is something the series hasn’t yet tried, which would certainly get people talking. Perhaps the most preposterous aspect of this entire enterprise is that Brian O’Conner, portrayed by the late Paul Walker, has never actually left the “Fast” universe. Walker died, in 2013, during the filming of “Furious 7,” and the production relied on a combination of digital effects and stand-ins to complete the film. Within the reality of the series, he’s happily retired.
As one of Walker’s close friends tells Hertz, “It’s sad to see as a friend. But you know, we don’t own the franchise.” The use of technology to finish “Fast 7” made Rodriguez, his co-star, wonder about the future of filmmaking. “Who is going to take your likeness when you’re gone?” she said in an interview with Variety. For many fans, bringing Walker back from the dead in a new film would be a bridge too far, and yet it feels somewhat inevitable. There’s a chilling scene at the end of “F9” when the “family” has reunited at Toretto’s house for their customary post-mission barbecue. They leave an open seat at the table for him. “He’s on the way,” Brewster, who plays Brian’s partner, Mia, says, the camera cutting to O’Conner’s familiar Skyline GT-R pulling up to the driveway. It sounds ominous, as though she’s teasing—or threatening—a sequel. ♦