Few movie franchises have the staying power of the Fast & Furious movies. With a whopping ten films in just twenty-two years, the series has been through it all, from box office highs, to the ultimate low of Paul Walker’s untimely death in 2013. Perhaps surprisingly, even after Walker died, the franchise continued on successfully, though it lost its family identity in the name of bigger and more over-the-top stunts. Each film tried to outdo itself, but audiences kept forking over their money for it. That all ended with Fast X in 2023, which was a box office dud. Now, for the final movie, Vin Diesel wants to switch things up and go back to what the first movie was like. That’s a good idea, but sorry Vin, it’s much too late.
‘Fast X’ Was a Surpising Box Office Misfire

Usually, movie franchises begin to falter commercially as more entries come in, with quality suffering and fans beginning to fall away and turn to something new. Somehow, the Fast & Furious franchise didn’t suffer from this. Even when Paul Walker died in a car accident in late 2013, the movies were still able to go on without one of its two leading men. This was not only because the Fast & Furious movies had an ensemble cast, but also because of the type of movies they were. Later sequels increasingly became about over-the-top fun. Some of the baffling stunts we saw (they even went to space!) weren’t realistic, but the movies were the perfect high-octane popcorn fun that we all need from time to time.
The franchise’s box office drawing power peaked in 2015 with Furious 7, which made $353 million. F9 in 2021 might have only made $173 million domestically, but we were just returning to theaters after the pandemic, so that lower figure makes sense. What didn’t make sense was that Fast X, which came out in 2023, the year of Barbie and Oppenheimer, made only $146 million. It was now clear: the franchise had finally gotten too out of hand to keep supporting.
Vin Diesel Wants To Return to the Original Fast & Furious Formula

Image via Universal Pictures

Fast X failed for many reasons, the main one being that it was retreading the same old ground of wacky villains (this time portrayed by Jason Momoa), the crew coming together to save the world, Vin Diesel going on and on about family, and the stunts becoming so far out there that we were now shaking our heads instead of dropping our jaws. Fast X had more CGI, and even a scene where a car is racing up an exploding Hoover Dam. Fast X didn’t exist in reality and was essentially a cartoon where anything was possible. It was all too much.

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“EJECTO SEATO, CUZ!”

It seems like even Vin Diesel has realized that Fast & Furious jumped the shark and needs to dial it back. In a Thanksgiving Instagram post this year, he wrote:

It’s Too Late To Take the Fast & Furious Franchise Back to Its Simpler Past

Image via Universal Pictures

It looks like no one really has a concrete idea of how to finish the franchise and is just making it up as they go along, which is a surefire recipe for disaster. Vin Diesel does have a point. We already didn’t need the last movie in the franchise to be a two-parter, and we certainly don’t need a trilogy. If fans are walking away, the solution is not to dump more at their fleeing feet. The answer isn’t to bring back Dwayne Johnson as Hobbs yet again, either. He and Dominic Torrento have had their rivalry (as have Diesel and Johnson in real life), but we’re over it.

So can a final Fast & Furious movie go back to those first films, when they were just about street racing and hadn’t become a CGI-fest parody of itself? In a perfect world, that would be great (and with budget concerns, that might be the only option) but it’s much too late. Once you jump the shark, you can’t step back over it and pretend the moment never happened, especially when Fast & Furious not only jumped the shark but strapped a rocket on and flew over it into space.
Even if the franchise could find a way to restrain itself and write a more coherent, stripped-down story, it still wouldn’t matter. Fast & Furious was always about more than the cars — it was about the characters too. Recent sequels were so chaotic, it was as if they were trying to distract us from Paul Walker’s absence. A leaner ending would just be a brutal reminder of a past we can’t return to.
Fast X is available to watch on Peacock in the U.S.
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Fast X

Release Date

May 19, 2023

Runtime

141 Minutes

Writers

Justin Lin
, Dan Mazeau
, Gary Scott Thompson

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