- I'll have the tuna.
- No crust?
- No crust.
(driving synth music)
- Whoo!
- [Host] The "Fast and Furious" franchise
has grossed over five billion dollars
at the box office worldwide, putting it
in the same league as movies like "The Avengers",
"James Bond", and "Star Wars".
So how did a cheesy B-movie about stealing DVD players,
which critics called "a career killing skid mark"
and "the lame and laborious"
capture the world's heart,
and become one of the biggest franchises of all time?
Today on Wheelhouse, we're talking about
one of my favorite movies ever:
The Fast and the Furious.
(piano music)
- Before we dive in, I wanna thank Fixd
for sponsoring this episode.
Now, back to the movie.
Looking at the success of the Fast and Furious series,
it's wild that the first movie got
greenlit in the first place.
Director Rob Cowen got the idea
for the Fast and the Furious
after reading a magazine article.
Ken Lee wrote a piece about the budding
import tuner scene called Racer X.
It detailed real-life street racers in Upper Manhattan.
That article inspired Cowen to make the film.
And Universal bought the rights to the story.
If you've never watched the trailer
for "The Fast and the Furious",
I highly recommend you do.
There's no mention of a plot,
you've got Limp Bizkit, explosions,
dirt bikes, sweet cars, and they spoiled
the very end of the movie.
It's the most 2001 thing I've ever seen.
How do you not wanna watch this?
I've seen this movie maybe fifteen times,
and I'm stoked to watch it again right now.
- Let's go for a little ride.
- Go!
(heavy rock music)
- [Host] "The Fast and the Furious" opened on June 21, 2001.
To say its critical reception was lukewarm
would be a compliment.
Some reviews appreciated what is was,
a guilty pleasure with high stakes action.
But other critics pointed out the wooden acting,
and called it "fast food for the eyes."
- Nice car.
What's the retail on one of those?
- More than you can afford, pal.
Ferrari.
- Look, I'll admit, no one was gonna win an Oscar
for this movie, but that didn't stop people
from checking it out.
One reason "The Fast and the Furious"
was successful was timing.
The only competition at the box office opening weekend
was "Doctor Doolittle 2", the one where
the bear goes doo-doo in a potty.
(fart noise)
- Oh! Oh!
- [Host] When given the choice between that
and cars flying through the air,
summer audiences came in droves to check out this car movie.
The trailer didn't lie.
People wanted fast cars doing sweet stunts
and they got it in spades.
Letty's Civic really did drive under that semi.
They really wrecked Dom's Charger.
They strapped the actor who played Vince
to the side of a semi.
Even though it was ridiculous,
it somehow felt real, and it definitely felt intense.
"The Fast and the Furious" netted over
a hundred and forty million at the box office.
Universal got the hint.
People wanted more.
The world that "Fast and the Furious" was released into
was different than the one we live in now.
It was three months before the September 11th attacks,
and nearly a decade before social media took over
as the world's biggest news source.
World events aside, the world of cars
was way different back then as well.
And "The Fast and the Furious" was about the changing.
It was a movie for car people,
by people who knew almost nothing about cars.
How could that work?
Anyone watching would know that a computer
blinking the words, "Danger to manifold"
doesn't make sense.
And neither does blowing the floor pan off a car.
(intense beeping)
- Shut up!
- [Host] But car people didn't have anywhere else to go.
Those mistakes have become what people love
about this movie.
- And Hector is gonna be running
three Honda Civics with spoon engines.
- (singing) Make it natural.
Integration.
He could have used the Fixd mechanic hotline service
that provides unlimited access
to an ASC certified mechanic,
on their team for anything you need.
Fixd mechanics are on your side
to help you with all your car questions.
Ding!
Advertising.
Now back to the movie.
So how did a movie riddled with errors
and plot holes become the phenomenon it is today?
It grew its own audience.
(chiming beats)
- Tuner culture, which revolved around
modifying Japanese compacts
was in its infancy in 2001.
The only people involved in the tuner scene
were the true believers, the people modding their own cars
and usually racing them on the weekend,
either on the track, or on the street.
So what does this have to do
with "The Fast and the Furious"?
One word.
SEMA.
And every year, they'd have a huge convention in Las Vegas
called the SEMA Show.
You might have heard of it.
At the show, tons of aftermarket brands
show off their new stuff and some
of the best builds in the country.
Not only is the aftermarket in attendance,
but bigwigs from Detroit are there
to scope out the trends and incorporate them
into their own mainstream products.
Once the movie came out and was a huge hit,
popularity of Brian O'Conner style Eclipse
and super builds exploded.
And people started bringing them to SEMA en masse.
Those same industry bigwigs saw these cars
at the show and thought, hmm, there might be something
to letting people customize their car their way.
This paved the way for brands like Scion,
whose entire pitch to consumers
was that they could build one how they wanted to.
While white, black, and silver are
the most popular paint options,
more and more OEMs are offering bolder colors,
in no small part thanks to "The Fast and Furious" series.
Since the first "Fast and Furious" made so much money,
Universal knew they couldn't not release a sequel.
"2 Fast 2 Furious" came out two years later
to even worse critical reception.
But it still made over 236 million in ticket sales.
Impressive, but nowhere near the one point five billion
the current ones are raking in.
Before the franchise could reach its full potential,
it had to hit rock bottom.
Like when I got kicked out of northern Arizona,
and had to go to community college.
It's not really rock bottom.
It was actually the best thing that ever happened to me,
but, this isn't in the script.
This is real.
"Tokyo Drift" had a budget of eighty-five million,
and none of the original cast.
It bombed.
In its opening weekend, "Tokyo Drift"
didn't even cover its production budget,
and its entire run grossed just over half
of what "2 Fast 2 Furious" raked in.
Moviegoers were telling Universal,
"No Walker and Diesel? No way these seats sell."
Yeah, there's crazy cars in every movie.
But as objectively bad as it was,
there was something about the characters in the first one
that people really connected with.
Let's look at this scene from the first movie.
Dom takes Brian back to his house
to look at his 1970 Dodge Charger.
The car belonged to Dom's dad, who passed away
in a racing accident.
Dom claims the car can run nines at the drag strip,
but when Brian asks Dom what he's run,
Dom says,
- I've never driven her.
- Why not?
- Scares the shit outta me.
- Again, I know it's stupid.
But I love it.
- I live my life a quarter mile at a time.
For those ten seconds or less,
I'm free.
- [Host] Among all that mindless formula,
there were actually really relatable,
dare I say archetypal scenes throughout.
- I dunno, it's something about engines that calms me down.
You know?
- [Host] After the Eclipse blows up,
Brian's next car arrives on the bed of a truck,
the shell of a Toyota Supra.
It's not running, and it's difficult to see
what it will become.
The shell of a car, Brian's shell of a cop,
he's becoming more vested in his new crew,
and will be built up by them,
as he and Vin Diesel build up the Supra.
Take this scene, with the two in the empty engine bay.
The two have room to create something real,
for the car, it's an engine,
for Walker, it's a friendship.
Dare I say,
- Family.
- [Host] He's moving further from his identity as a cop,
and each element that is added to the Supra,
he becomes more a part of Diesel's band.
This is real stuff, people.
Whether we want to admit it or not,
people like the way Brian and Dom,
or Letty and Dom,
or Dom and this guy,
interacted, it's chemistry.
- Street's closed, pizza boy!
Find another way home.
- [Host] So, it's 2009.
Three years since "Tokyo Drift"
laid an egg at the box office.
And we found out they were making another one.
I was sixteen, so I was pretty stoked.
But other people were like, "What?"
Even more surprisingly was that
director Justin Lin was back, the guy
who directed "Tokyo Drift".
But this time he knew what people wanted,
and it wasn't just cars.
"Tokyo" had cars, what it didn't have was Brian and Dom.
Well, it had Dom, but not 'til the very end.
You know what I mean.
Lin would get the original gang back together,
and hey, people might not have liked "Tokyo Drift",
but they really liked Han, so let's get him in there.
And of course don't forget about Letty and Mia.
It was the franchise and the director's last shot.
All or nothing.
That sounds a lot like the races in the first one.
(yelling)
- Lin blew it out of the park.
"Fast and Furious" made 363 million dollars
worldwide at the box office.
The gang was back on.
And they didn't stop adding to the formula.
They made another one, "Fast Five",
where Ludacris and Tyrese were back.
I don't even remember what they did in the second movie,
but fans loved them.
- Eject-o seat-o, cuz!
- And yeah, what if we add the biggest action star
in the world to the mix?
The Rock came on as a bad guy.
And we loved it.
Oh, guess what, for the next movie,
how about we get, oh, I dunno,
Jason Statham at the end.
From the fourth movie on, the series made
more and more money with each installment.
"Fast Five" doubled the box office with over
six hundred million.
Then "Furious Seven" made a billion and a half.
Then "The Fate of the Furious" broke a billion again.
By the time the latest installment came out,
the cast had two Oscar-winning actresses,
and Helen Mirren asked to be in the movie.
And who can forget all the cars along the way?
The Eclipse, The Supra.
All of Dom's Chargers.
Brian's silver R34.
The Veilside RX7.
The RB26 powered Mustang.
The Buick GNX, the Rock's Gurkha f5,
the Ford Escort, the skydiving WRX,
Dom's Ice Charger,
the list goes on.
And the stunts!
Going under the semi.
Jumping over the train tracks.
Jumping a Yenko Camaro onto the yacht.
All of the real drifting in "Tokyo Drift".
The tanker heist, the vault heist,
driving out of an airplane.
Every movie raising the stakes higher than the last.
(gentle piano music)
- [Host] So how did "The Fast and the Furious"
go from some weird cult classic
about Misubishis and Toyotas,
to worldwide appeal and box-office records?
It grew its own audience, and continued to feed them
more and more of what they wanted.
It's not only its own franchise,
but it's effectively its own genre.
These movies give the fans what they want
over and over and over and over again.
And I am truly not ashamed to say
that I love them.
(music fades)
- Again, I wanna thank Fixd for sponsoring this episode.
Fixd is the bluetooth OBD2 reader
that connects wirelessly to your smartphone,
letting you watch critical engine functions in real time
and helps you diagnose check engine lights
with the touch of an app.
I actually use Fixd in my car, and I really like it.
So, click the link in the description below,
and use code "Donut" for ten percent off your order.
Hit that yellow subscribe button right there,
if you wanna see more videos about
how the car world affects you.
We talked about The Eclipse on Up to Speed,
so check that out right here.
There's a lot of cops in "Fast and Furious",
and if you wanna know more about cop cars,
check out this little episode of Wheelhouse.
There's like five thousand cars
in the "Fast and Furious" movies,
but I wanna know what your favorite is.
In the comments, let me know,
I'll be down there with ya.
Be nice! I'll see ya next week.