Consider This from NPR - What Hollywood Could Learn From The 20-Year Success Of 'Fast & Furious'

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

What's behind the 20-year success of the Fast & Furious franchise? Casting, storytelling and reinvention. NPR's Linda Holmes — who wrote an owner's manual to the franchise — explains. Linda is one of the hosts of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Find their episode about F9 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Pocket Casts. F9 premiered overseas last month while waiting for pandemic-shuttered cinemas to open in the U.S., where it's supposed to restart the Hollywood blockbuster. NPR's Bob Mondello has more in his review of the film. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In the summer of 2001, one of the new releases on a late June weekend was a car racing movie called The Fast and the Furious. Let's go for a little ride. That just sounds like summer in the early 2000s, doesn't it? When the sun goes down, another world comes to life, said the trailer, which promised to reveal a world of car racing and sex. In hindsight, the movie's easy to make fun of. But at the time, some critics got a kick out of it. Roger Ebert said it had great chase scenes and kind of a pirate spirit, and that it reminded him of a movie you would see at a drive-in, if they still existed.

Audiences liked it too,, naturally, two years later... The sequel, Too Fast, Too Furious, starred Ludacris, who also had a song on the soundtrack. What the sequel didn't have was the original film's star, Vin Diesel. Still, it was a hit. So, three years after that... When you drift, if you ain't out of control, you ain't in control. With the third installment, Tokyo Drift, the franchise scrapped the original cast entirely.

It scrapped locations, it scrapped the stories, it scrapped everything and started from scratch. The bigger the risk, the greater the rush. Well, that film didn't play quite as well at the box office. Universal, the studio behind the franchise, could have called it a day. But they didn't. Just like old times. They made a fourth movie, and it made $360 million in 2009. And two years later...

We'll do one last drop, and then we disappear forever. They didn't disappear. The fifth movie made $626 million. And two years after that... Ride or die. $789 million. Fast forward to now, there have been eight movies in the franchise. The last two each made more than a billion dollars, and the ninth film is now hitting theaters in the U.S. It's called F9 The Fast Saga. Maybe this is the end, but we won't go out together. You know I'd ride to the death with you. Consider this. It's probably not the end. And there are some very specific reasons that two

decades in, the Fast and the Furious franchise still has a lot of gas in the tank. It has to do with casting, storytelling, and reinvention. Our pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes explains what the rest of Hollywood could learn. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Friday, June 25th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Capitalism touches every part of our lives.

Capitalism is a giant force that I don't understand. I feel that it's a very safe system. I'm constantly in fear of losing my job. It is our biggest success and our biggest failure. On this special series from ThruLine, Capitalism. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. This is not the first time pop culture critics have marveled at what makes The Fast and Furious so successful. Here's a clip from NPR 10 years ago. Fast cars, fast women, sun-kissed backdrops,

Fast Five is the fourth sequel in the hugely successful Fast and Furious franchise. Back then, NPR ran an interview with Wesley Morris, then a film critic for the Boston Globe, who called the franchise the most progressive force in Hollywood. Well, basically the thing that I'm most interested in with this series is that it promotes race as this very normal thing. Morris' argument was that the franchise took an approach to its characters, casting, and marketing that created a diversity you just didn't see much in Hollywood at the time. Black, white, Asian, Hispanic characters all playing equal roles in stories that, importantly, had nothing to do with race.

It's not the subject of the movie the way it is in most Hollywood movies. Race is just a matter of fact. It is not the way people conduct their business. It is not a cause of friction. And I think that part of the popularity of this series is that it looks like the world that a lot of the people who pay money to see these movies, it looks like the world they live in. And that isn't ever really the case in most Hollywood movies, even in 2011. Even in 2011. Since then, the films have maintained that diversity, even as many of the characters and cast have changed. The franchise also weathered the tragic death of one of its stars, Paul Walker, in 2013.

Other stars, writers, and directors have come and gone. The latest film isn't even really about car racing. And pure pop culture critic Linda Holmes says you can kind of think about the franchise like the ship of Theseus. That's the philosophical conundrum where you have a ship and you replace all the boards one by one. And you wonder if it's even the same ship you started with. In a few minutes, Linda and I will talk about the franchise's approach to reinvention and its enduring success. But first, NPR film critic Bob Mondello has a look under the hood of the latest film. Here's his review. If you've seen the F9 trailers, you've seen the film's first big set piece. Our motley heroes

have driven across a minefield somewhere in Central America, escaping unscathed because they're just so darn fast. And now Dom and his wife Letty are in a black sedan, pursued, as is their habit, by missile-shooting helicopters, headed for what their map said was a bridge. One of those cable-and-plank things... Where's the bridge? ...that we've already seen disintegrate,

so as they approach the edge of a very high cliff over a very deep chasm, there's just a single pylon left sticking up. Naturally Dom aims for it and hits the gas, and wouldn't you know, the car catches on a metal cable as it goes sailing into space, swinging them around like Tarzan on a vine, or maybe like a yo-yo on a string, landing them with a crash on a different cliff. The helicopter pilot assumes, not unreasonably, that they couldn't have survived, and flies away. Well, that was new.

That is the idea, though after eight of these shindigs, new is getting noticeably harder to pull off. Not that director Justin Lin, who's made four previous installments, is out of ideas. He just has to inflate them these days. So besides that swan dive off a cliff, we get an armored truck the size of a locomotive doing a somersault. And a car launched into orbit. Please tell me that's not a Pontiac Fiero. Strapped to a rocket engine? Impressive. I know. No. And Vin Diesel's Dom and his team globetrotting from Tbilisi to Montequinto.

Yes, I had to look that up. To save the world while dodging whole platoons of assassins. All of them breathtakingly bad shots. Everything definitely grander in F9, if less tied to any sort of real suspense. Vast and spurious, maybe. The grandness is also unrelated to plot, of which there's quite a bit, mostly centered on family. Estranged by a tragedy in their youth, Dom and his supervillain-ish sibling, played by a tight-lipped John Cena, spend much of this reunion's two and a half hours glowering at and pummeling each other. That probably sounds like more fun than it is.

Actually, most of this does, I'm guessing. Crank it all the way up! Cars and camaraderie notwithstanding, though, there's bound to come a point when elaborately staged mayhem and even deliberately preposterous world domination fantasies just feel overdone. Give F9 points for a real world domination fantasy that involves getting people back into theaters, but here's hoping that once it's lured the crowds back, it'll clear the way for F10 to be less labored and more a labor of love. I'm Bob Mandela.

There's a lot more to say about why these films have resonated with audiences for so long and what Hollywood could learn from their success. I talked about that with Linda Holmes, one of the hosts of the NPR podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour. She recently wrote a big essay about The Fast and Furious, an owner's manual to the franchise. We'll link to it in our episode notes. Did you really rewatch all nine of these movies in order to write this essay? It's very comprehensive. I watched at least some of all of them. Wow.

And some of them I had seen before, so I revisited my greatest hits. So when the first movie in the franchise came out in 2001, do you think anyone would have predicted that we would be talking about the ninth installment in the franchise with likely more to come these 20 years later? I don't think so. You know, these were received, the first movie was received as a kind of almost like an exploitation picture. The trailer made it look like it was about, you know, nightlife and hot women in fast cars. And, you know, critics at the time talked about it as kind of the kind of thing you would see at a drive-in. And so I think they sort of thought of it as almost like a cheap little movie, which is funny now, of course.

You point out that in the first one, they were stealing DVD players. Yeah. It's not about world domination. Right. First of all, that's how low the states were. And second of all, that's how long ago it was. They were stealing DVD players. And when they had rivals and enemies, it was, you know, other street racers because street racing was kind of the culture that these guys were all part of. And so there was some, you know, kind of low level thievery and car racing.

And that was what the stakes were. But there was something special about this franchise. So way back then in 2001, what made it distinctive? Well, I think, you know, people responded to the cop story. It was very similar, actually, to the previous Keanu Reeves movie, Point Break, in that it was a cop played by Paul Walker who kind of went undercover and infiltrated this gang led by Vin Diesel and kind of fell in with them, became loyal to them, grew to like them. I think people responded to that story. I think they also responded to car racing. Car racing

is fun. And this is not the first time Hollywood had learned it, but I think they responded to the fast cars in the good time. Of course, during the filming of the seventh movie in the franchise, Paul Walker, who had become kind of the centerpiece, died before the movie was finished. That was a real challenge for them because, you know, obviously, yes, he had been in the first film, he had been in all of them except the third one, the third one had kind of been a whole different group of people. But because they had kind of switched out the settings and the characters, I think it made it a little bit easier for them to write a graceful retirement for the character. But it was definitely one of the most challenging and difficult things that could happen to a franchise of this size. And it's kind of amazing that it went on the way that it

did. You talk about how the franchise sort of shifted and expanded. And as you write in your essay, from the very beginning, Fast and Furious embodied inclusion and really progressive representation. They really did. And you know, at a time when a lot of franchises like this did not have diverse casts and characters, they didn't in this one, you know, they began to maybe not in the very first one. But once they were adding actors like Tyrese Gibson, and Ludacris, and obviously starting with Michelle Rodriguez, who was in the first one. And I think that's exactly right. It's something that has meant a lot to the fans of this franchise who have valued that inclusion quite a lot. Does it even matter if critics like them?

You know, it doesn't necessarily matter. But critics have actually liked some of these movies quite a bit. I think particularly the fifth one, the seventh one, have really gotten good reviews. Critics like these when they're good. So what's the secret of its success during a tough time for Hollywood? Well, you know, I think flexibility. They have adjusted a bunch of different times. They actually moved one of the movies around in the timeline in order to have somebody who had died kind of undie. You know, they've not only shifted the themes because really, you know, remember these guys were opposed to police at the beginning of undie. You know, they've not only shifted the themes, because really, you know, remember, these guys were opposed to police at the beginning of this series. Now they kind of work with the

national security apparatus to try to stop nuclear war. So they've shifted kind of the thematic orientation of these characters. They have added a bunch of people. They added The Rock. They added Jason Statham. They have had people who have been gone for some movies and then come back. It is a series that has never stopped moving and changing. And I think weirdly, for something where a lot of people think all the movies are the same, I think that's actually the secret sauce. Linda Holmes covers pop culture for NPR, and she's one of the hosts of Pop Culture Happy Hour. We've got a link in our episode notes where you can find the latest episode of that podcast.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.