

With all of that in mind, here are three major themes that have made the Fast & Furious franchise so memorable and so lucrative. We don’t know what 2021 will bring - but we at least know that any problem faced in the Fast & Furious universe can be solved by throwing more cars at it.
#Fast and the furious movie#
Now, with F9 entering theaters as one of the presumed titans of the summer box office, at a time when many of us are finally comfortable returning to movie theaters, it seems clearer than ever that this goofy, over-the-top film franchise with a heart of gold is the film franchise of the moment.

This is, give or take a Marvel Cinematic Universe, the most significant movie franchise going right now. The eighth film, 2017’s The Fate of the Furious, made $1.2 billion at the global box office, less than 2015’s Furious 7 ($1.5 billion) but well above 2001’s The Fast and the Furious ($206 million).

With each successive film, Fast & Furious becomes a little more ludicrous and a little more irresistible - and the world has embraced that idea. The story is as much about the ways they become an ad hoc family as it is the bigger, badder monsters they face off against.Īm I saying the Fast & Furious franchise is a really good D&D campaign where the stakes keep rising higher and higher because they have nowhere else to go? I’m not not saying that.ġ1 questions you were too embarrassed to ask about the Fast & Furious movies Their bonds become solid and even unshakable, no matter what strife they face. In any good D&D campaign, the core characters grow and change together. In a traditional campaign (a story that unfolds over many sessions and often many years), the heroes start off facing low-level monsters and criminals threatening their tiny village, but as their powers grow, they tackle more existential threats, like enormous dragons or sorcerers who threaten to end the world. In the classic role-playing game, characters are supposed to continually level up.

Why does it work at all? Well, look at D&D. (A 10th film, 2019’s Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, exists, but this spinoff really isn’t a key part of the core storyline.) The expansion of the characters’ powers and the inflation of the films’ dramatic stakes seem ludicrous from the outside but completely believable if you watch all nine films in a row. Nobody sends a desperate cry for help to international super-spy Dominic Toretto (Diesel) when his plane crashes in a Mexican jungle, as happens at the beginning of F9. More than anything else, it’s a window into just how this franchise went from being about illegal street racers tearing up the streets of Los Angeles to one where a secretive CIA operative named Mr. It’s also a window into Diesel’s canny knack for knowing exactly what people want to see from him (and his movies), and why.
#Fast and the furious full#
When promoting Furious 7 in 2015, the actor actually played a full game with folks from the site Nerdist, both to show off his role-playing chops and to symbolically bridge the gap between high school cliques, telling the nerds that it was okay to love his movie franchise seemingly geared at motorheads.ĭiesel’s D&D love is a window into why the Fast & Furious franchise (or the Fast Saga, as the poster for F9, the latest installment in the series, would have it) has become so beloved by so many different people. Actor and producer Vin Diesel, the star and arguably the creative mastermind of the Fast & Furious franchise, is a big Dungeons & Dragons fan.
