Why Do We Still Love the Fast and the Furious Franchise?

Today, in 2009, Fast & Furious, the fourth film in the successful action franchise, debuted in America, before going on to take the record of the highest grossing opening weekend for any car movie in history. It raked in $72.5 million, besting the 2006 release of Cars, which had come in at an impressive $60 million opening weekend. All told, Fast & Furious would go on to earn more than $244 million at the box office.

And it’s still earning. Nearly a decade later, my partner and I settled into a weekend of fast food and fast cars, binge watching the best of the franchise late into the night. And, despite the baggy jeans and spiked hair, the movies withstand the test of time. That’s because they’re every car fan’s ultimate fantasy.

I’ve come to understand that it’s a fruitless effort to analyze the Fast and Furious movies. Classic American muscle cars don’t drift. It’s a fact of life. If you jump off an opening drawbridge and land on the street on the other side, your suspension will not be able to absorb the impact. If we delve into the details of the movies, we see the seams. But honestly, when we’re watching Paul Walker and Vin Diesel tearing ass through the Dominican Republic, Los Angeles and Rio, we don’t really care.

These movies humanize the street racer, casually brush off the insane amount of wreckage our heroes cause, and give us a chance to feel the insane power of GTRs and modern muscle cars – with modifications, of course – as they hit the no rules part of the road and just go. This series is not about reality. InsureTheGap.com, an auto insurance and protection company, estimated that the damage done across the first seven movies of the franchise would total more than $514 million – not to speak of the injuries and deaths caused by this kind of reckless racing. 

But, from the comfort of our beds and pizza boxes, that’s exactly what we want. The franchise gives us what we’ll never have in real life. No rules and lots of speed. The admittedly shallow story lines keep us engaged, but we’re not here for the drama. We’re here for the sex, the cars and the speed.

And The Fast and the Furious delivers in spades. We get car chases in exotic locations, half-dressed models on the hoods of sexy imports, we get payouts in the millions, we get heists. For these reasons alone, the Fast and Furious franchise is already joining the car and racing classics like American Graffiti, Grease, and Cannonball. With a new movie, The Fate of the Furious, coming out next week, our appetite for hot cars going fast continues to be fed.

None of that discounts the emotional element of the films as well. Despite the franchise’s penchant for short skirts and tight shirts – I’m look at you, Dwayne – the audience comes to care deeply about these characters. At the end of Fast and Furious 6, when Gisele, played by Gal Gadot sacrifices herself for Han, played by Sung Kang, after having only just found each other, the audience feels that hurt down to the bone. The reuniting of Dom, (Vin Diesel) and Letty, (Michelle Rodriguez), the girlfriend he thought was dead, makes us truly care for the characters we grow to know so well over the course of the films.

And we care for the actors too. When Paul Walker was killed in a crash at the end of 2013, Fast and Furious fans were rocked by the loss of a man who had done so much for the genre and the car world. The franchise and its fans, continue to honor him today.

So, how does a movie series that first came out in 2001 – sixteen years ago – continue to hold such sway with audiences around the world? Well, if you have to ask, maybe it’s time for a rewatch.

Images selected from FastandFurious.com