It’s a long way from hijacking trucks to low-Earth orbit, but judging from the most recent trailers for the upcoming ninth instalment in the Fast & Furious franchise (F9), that would appear to be the trajectory for the world’s favourite gang of former street racers turned genre-smashing super heroes.
It’s been a long, strange trip for a creative group that managed to parlay a low-budget remake of Point Break (based on a magazine article about New York City gearheads and scofflaws) into a never-ending series of billion-dollar blockbusters only tangentially related to their automotive roots.
And yet, it’s hard not to see how the decision to distance the Fast & Furious films from the car culture that birthed them has been key to the success of the entire enterprise.
While it’s true that vehicular mayhem remains a component of each entry, Dom Toretto and his crew now employ stunt driving as mere window dressing to the physics-defying, globe-trotting invulnerability that serves as their primary weapon in pulling off whatever elaborate, world-changing caper they’ve been pulled into. It’s a transition that has borne major financial fruit for Universal Studios — and obliterated the concept that a diverse cast is anathema to a strong box office — but it’s also forced the Fast & Furious philosophy to turn its back on the very movement that birthed it.
Three car culture time capsules
To understand the distance between the upcoming F9 and the franchise’s point of origin means going all the way back to 2001, when no one had ever made a successful movie about street racing, and Vin Diesel was still best known for supporting roles in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and a small sci-fi flick called Pitch Black.
His on-screen partner-in-crime, Paul Walker, was also only just emerging from a long string of teen flicks, and with the rest of the cast of that year’s The Fast and the Furious filled out by relative unknowns (Michelle Rodriguez, Rick Yune, Matt Schulze), TV actors (Jordana Brewster), and hip-hop cameos (Ja Rule), not much was expected of the movie other than filling enough theatre seats to make back its $38-million budget.
Some $207 million later, it was clear that journeyman director Rob Cohen and writer Gary Scott Thompson had hit on something significantly bigger than a summer popcorn-seller. Trouble is, the executives at Universal who had green-lit the picture weren’t sure how, exactly, to capitalize on a movie that was essentially a love letter to California’s import tuning scene.
This explains 2 Fast 2 Furious, the 2003 sequel that exported the fun-in-the-sun street action to the opposite coast. With Miami as its backdrop and Diesel missing in action, the movie would use a similar casting template (with Ludacris replacing Ja Rule as the requisite nod to pop culture) to highlight the vibrant muscle car and J-tin populating Florida’s panhandle.
Another $237 million worldwide was strong enough (against nearly double the first movie’s budget) to tack on a third sequel, 2006’s The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift. The movie on one hand played it safe (with Lil’ Bow Wow present to capture the hip hop crowd) while at the same time allowing new director Justin Lin to cancel out both Walker and Diesel (save for the latter’s two-minute epilogue) in favour of placing a largely Asian cast front and centre. Tokyo Drift was the first entry to not make back its budget domestically, but it was also the only movie in the trio whose international box office was appreciably higher than at home, allowing it to turn an overall profit.
It’s here that the studio made two key realizations about the franchise it had been quietly nurturing. At the time, Hollywood was still staunchly white-washing big money tent-pole pictures, but both 2 Fast and Tokyo Drift had featured just a single Caucasian protagonist in an ensemble cast that more accurately reflected the moviegoers outside of the U.S., who were increasingly important in greasing the financial wheels of American-made pictures. Sensing a unique opportunity to appeal to audiences that had to that point been denied a truly representative blockbuster, savvy marketing minds began to craft the battle plan that would shape the future of Fast & Furious and serve as a notice to other studios that the era of ignoring international returns was over.
Doing so, however, required a gradual paring back of the car culture that permeated each of the first three movies. Universal knew how to sell explosions and one-liners to a global crowd, but twin-turbo Supras and Mopar drag cars? Not so much — or at least, not to the same degree. Whereas Tokyo Drift tapped into the touge movement that was spreading across the world in the form of both Formula and Initial D, and 2 Fast 2 Furious had focused its universe as much on the candy-paint southern cars as it did on drag race metal, future titles would reposition the Fast & Furious automotive passion as a backdrop, rather than a well from which to draw plot and character.
Instant success
The effect was almost immediate. 2009’s Fast & Furious introduced cross-border tunnels and international drug rings into the equation, and although Walker was back in the fold, it would be Diesel and a cast of decidedly mixed ethnicities and cultures that steered the film. While driving acumen played a key role, it was in service of the action set pieces that truly served as its central hook, with only a single, over-the-top street scene to be found. Three years later, Fast Five would head down to Rio and further side-show street racing, which took place almost entirely off-screen, and by the time Fast and Furious 6 arrived, the idea of lining up for pinks was as quaint as the concept that a ragtag crew of street punks and FBI washouts weren’t capable of thwarting international terrorists.
Each of the above films made orders of magnitude more money than the trio that had preceded them, thus setting in stone the playbook for the franchise’s future: bigger stunts, more absurd scenarios, and as many exotic locales as could be squeezed into a shooting schedule. Chases broadened to include cargo planes hurtling down 23-mile-long runways and nuclear submarines churning through arctic ice, and cars regularly parachuted from the sky to do battle with tanks. Essentially, if an 11-year-old could imagine their action figures doing it, the Fast & Furious producers weren’t afraid to put it on the screen.
Changing movies forever
Most of today’s multi-racial blockbusters owe a massive debt to the pioneering practices of the Fast & Furious. Although the process has been a slow one, those who would fight against representation in big budget Hollywood movies can no longer make a financial argument to back up their bigotry, thanks to the franchise’s massive, and enduring success.
At the same time, it’s become almost impossible to relate on a real level to any of the characters who now inhabit the series’ vastly expanded universe. What does the average person have in common with a man who can deflect a speeding missile with a well-placed kick, or leap from a disintegrating, exploding airplane into the relative safety of a speeding vehicle? Far less than they did when many of those same faces — a little fresher, a little younger — were staying up late in the garage wrenching on cars they planned to decimate, once those overnight parts from Japan had arrived.
In a world where superheroes have replaced fallible, fragile humans in almost every form of entertainment, and where mid-budget movies no longer have a place in a release schedule that swings its hundred million dollars for a grand slam each and every time, there’s little hope for a return to the subculture that started it all. That likely won’t keep the diehards from hitting the cinema for F9, hoping for just a little reflected gearhead glory amid all the big booms.
How the 'Fast & Furious' franchise evolved — and changed Hollywood in the process - Driving
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