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. Most of today’s multi-racial blockbusters owe a massive debt to the pioneering practices of the Fast & Furious. 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.
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. 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.Įach 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. 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. 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. 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.
#THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS HOW TO#
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. Article contentĭoing so, however, required a gradual paring back of the car culture that permeated each of the first three movies. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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. 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. It’s here that the studio made two key realizations about the franchise it had been quietly nurturing.
#THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS MOVIE#
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. 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. Photo by Universal PicturesĪnother $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. Article content Underdog street racer Sean Boswell (Lucas Black in a ’67 Ford Mustang) and Boswell’s drifting rival D.K., the “Drift King” (Brian Tee in an ’02 Nissan Fairlady 350Z) jockey for position in The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift.
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