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.”
