Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, The Fast & The Furious franchise has made over $7bn to date – and it all began with the theft of consumer goods. NB: The following contains a few spoilers for 2001’s The Fast & The Furious. The Cannes Film Festival had a particularly high octane engagement in May ... The Fast & The Furious at 25 | A franchise built on a foundation of stolen DVD players
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, The Fast & The Furious franchise has made over $7bn to date – and it all began with the theft of consumer goods.
NB: The following contains a few spoilers for 2001’s The Fast & The Furious.
The Cannes Film Festival had a particularly high octane engagement in May 2026: a screening of 2001’s The Fast & The Furious. Stars including Vin Diesel, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez attended the glitzy event at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, marking the automotive action film’s 25th anniversary.
For those stars in attendance, it must have been a faintly surreal moment. Released in 2001, the film was a moderately-budgeted B-movie designed to capitalise on the era’s craze for Japanese high-performance cars. It had a plot that was suspiciously close to Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break. Its title was borrowed from an old Roger Corman film.
And yet far from making a bit of money and vanishing into history, The Fast & The Furious kept rolling – and rolling. We’re now up to nine sequels and one spin-off into a multimedia juggernaut of a franchise, with more adventures planned; to date, the series as a whole has made over $7bn to date in cinemas alone.
It’s even more impressive when you consider that the whole saga began with the theft of some DVD players.
Although Vin Diesel now has his fingerprints (and ego) all over the Fast & Furious franchise, it was originally built around the late Paul Walker, who at the turn of the millennium had yet to break out as a star; he’d appeared in commercials and TV shows since he was a kid before finding supporting film roles towards the end of the 90s.
It was after Walker worked with director Rob Cohen on a thriller called The Skulls (2000) that the idea for The Fast & Furious first took root. According to The LA Times, Cohen and producer Neal H Moritz began talking to Walker about another project they could create together. It was Walker who came up with an initial concept of undercover cops and racing cars – his templates being Days Of Thunder and the gangster thriller Donnie Brasco.
With that in mind, Cohen found an article in Vibe magazine called Racer X. Written by Kenneth Li, it explored the late 90s craze for taking Japanese cars, tuning them to the point just before their engines blew from the stress, and racing them up and down city streets. Li captured the scene’s multicultural energy and how it differed from a previous generation’s love of modifying big, American cars with V8 engines.
“People say I cheat all the time,” a chap named Estevez told Li. “They say I jump the line, I do this, I do that. Drag racing is war. If you bring a knife, and I bring a machine gun, you’re dead. That’s it.”
Although multiple writers developed the script – including Training Day screenwriter David Ayer – the tone of that article remained intact in the finished film. Walker would play an undercover cop who infiltrates the LA street racing scene to track down a gang of thieves. Vin Diesel, then hot off the sci-fi horror film Pitch Black, was brought in as Dominic Toretto, the macho leader of that gang.
The finished film’s first scene establishes its particular type of action: Toretto’s gang, driving identical black Honda Civics, stage a heist on a busy nighttime freeway: they hijack a truck filled with Panasonic TVs and DVD players while the vehicle’s still in motion – using grappling hooks and daredevil jumps to clamber aboard the cab, they disable the driver with a tranquiliser dart, then make off with the goods.
In a commentary track on The Fast & The Furious’s DVD, Cohen said that the scene is essentially lifted from John Ford’s western, Stagecoach, with the 18-wheeler standing in for the titular wagon and the Civics replacing black-clad thieves on horseback.
More broadly, The Fast & The Furious’s core plot, of an undercover cop infiltrating a group of harebrained thieves, only to be seduced by their outlaw lifestyle (and the charisma of their leader) is an awful lot like the above-mentioned Point Break – something Cohen also admitted in his commentary track.
(In 2019, Rob Cohen faced accusations of sexual assault from both his daughter and actor Asia Argento. Cohen has denied the allegations.)
It’s easy, of course, to pick all sorts of holes in the story. Why do the thieves insist on stealing the goods while they’re in transit, when they could be damaged or, worse, someone could get killed? Wouldn’t it be better to hijack the truck while the driver’s parked up for a toilet break?
Then again, the goofiness of the plot is part of the charm – that undercover cop Brian only changes his surname (from Spilner to O’Connor) is another quietly amusing touch. The low-stakes nature of the plot might also surprise those whose familiarity with the franchise began with Fast Five and its increasingly hatstand sequels; there’s no saving the world here, just a series of heists worth a now quite modest-sounding $6m in electrical goods.
Nor does The Fast & The Furious have much in the way of a villain. The main antagonist, really, is the lump-headed vest-wearer, Vince (Matt Shulze), who has a crush on Toretto’s sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster), resents that she fancies Brian rather than him, and correctly guesses that this blonde-haired, blue-eyed interloper is a narc. Vin Diesel’s incarnation of Dom is meaner and moodier here than in later films, mainly in an effort to keep audiences guessing as to whether he’s really the ringleader or not; it’s doubtful that many were fooled.
In retrospect, The Fast & The Furious anticipates a problem that has often followed the franchise around for the past 25 years: a lack of formidable villains. Nine episodes in, and it’s doubtful that even its more ardent fans could call any of them particularly memorable; of the ones that are, like Jason Statham’s road-going assassin, Deckard Shaw, they often end up switching allegiance and becoming one of the good guys anyway.
In place of ratcheting tension or stakes, there are the car sequences, and for the most part, time has been kind to the ones in The Fast & The Furious. The first street race along a Los Angeles urban road feels only glancingly connected to reality – blasts of niitrous oxide are to these cars what hyperspace is to the Millennium Falcon.
Another race, on the other hand – between Brian in his Toyota Supra and a rich guy conveniently cruising around in his Ferrarii – captures the aspirational quality of the original Racer X article; most of us will never own an Italian supercar, but modifying a Japanese GT car into a 800 horsepower monster at least sounds attainable. Power may increasingly be the preserve of the wealthy; speed isn’t.
Meanwhile, the heists and later action set-pieces all use real cars on real roads with real stunt drivers – an oily, dirty reality that the later films increasingly divorced themselves from.
There are car crashes here that actually feel painfully convincing – and Vin Diesel isn’t yet an invincible superman. One collision with a truck leaves Dom crawling out of his trashed muscle car clutching what appears to be a broken arm. Vince, in the middle of a heist gone awry, ends up riddled with buckshot and his arm tangled up in a length of cable. It’s a far cry from the recent sequels, where characters can cheat death and defy the laws of physics to such an extent that even gang member Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson, who joined the franchise in 2 Fast 2 Furious) has wondered aloud whether they’re all invincible.
Universal never expected all that much from The Fast & The Furious, and was probably stunned when it not only made more than five times its $38m budget in cinemas, but also became a sales phenomenon on DVD (customers were probably watching it on a Panasonic player they acquired on the hush-hush from some guy named Jessie).
Sequels followed, though the earliest of these appeared to be made with the laws of diminishing returns in mind. Diesel declined to appear in 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious, with Walker partnering with Tyrese Gibson instead. Walker and Diesel had a cameo in 2006’s The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift, but it was largely an unrelated story with a new protagonist (Lucas Black, who looks far too old to be a teenage military brat). Tokyo Drift was initially imagined as a straight-to-video release, which says a great deal about how the franchise was regarded in the 2000s.
It was in 2009’s Fast & Furious, which brought the original cast back for what amounts to a reboot, that the franchise began to switch direction. The illegal street racing and Japanese cars are still there, but you can sense them slowly being de-emphasised, like someone turning down a volume slider; by 2011’s Fast Five, standing quarter miles and Honda Civics were out and huge fights, shoot-outs and increasingly wild chases were in. Bolstered by the presence of Dwayne Johnson and a renewed sense of confidence in its own ridiculousness, the film made $630m worldwide.
In a move few could have predicted, a series of films about car-obsessed outlaws became a success to rival the likes of Mission: Impossible and James Bond. (The seeming habit of writing a plot around pre-selected global locations and set-piece ideas also feels lifted from those franchises.)
Even the tragic death of Paul Walker, whose smiling, boyish persona served as the original film’s launchpad, didn’t stop the Fast juggernaut. When he passed away in 2013 following a horrifying car accident, Fast 7 used filmmaking trickery to give Brian an emotional send-off.
But as Fast 9 went into space and Fast X saw an Acme Corp-style giant bomb roll through the streets of Rome, there’s now a sense that the franchise needs to reinvent itself again. The latter cost over $300m to make, a sum brought about in part because regular director Justin Lin’s sudden departure saw the production clamouring for a replacement; Louis Leterrier stepped in shortly before filming began.
After original plans to make a direct sequel to Fast X were dropped (leaving plot lines involving Jason Momoa’s camp villain, Dante, hanging in mid-air), it’s now reported that the eleventh film in the mainline franchise will return to its roots. Back to Los Angeles, and back to the urban street racing that formed the original film’s backdrop.
This is probably not a bad idea. Not due to nostalgia, though the sequel will probably come loaded with plenty of that as standard. Not even because of the cars, several of which are now worth a fortune in the real world (seriously, check out the cost of a decent Toyota Supra these days).
No, The Fast & The Furious still works, in its own way, because it’s so battily good-natured. That the Fast franchise is ‘about family’ is a shop-worn cliche these days, but the first film successfully establishes a bassline that has been there ever since: that these movies are about outsiders forming their own community. They’re from different backgrounds, they get on each other’s nerves, but they’re essentially decent, well-intentioned people who look out for one another.
The sequels have constantly tried to up the stakes and increase the spectacle, but it’s the friendship and easy-going chemistry that makes these movies stand out from the action crowd. So much so that a Fast sequel could pare the budget right back and make the stunts smaller-scale if it can get that human element right. It’s the fuel that has kept the Fast movies going, long after all those stolen DVD players have been consigned to a landfill.
The Fast & The Furious (and just about every film in the Fast saga) is streaming now on Netflix.
