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Dan Hassler-Forest, "Fast and Furious Franchising: How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
00:49:21
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello. And welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Dan Hassler Forrest about his book titled Fast and Furious, how the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2026. And really this book and our conversation answers exactly the question raised by the title, which is how has this series of films become such a successful franchise kind of in its own self, and what has that meant for Hollywood as a larger industry? I think anyone today, sort of anywhere in the world, and that's something we're going to talk about, is aware of this franchise. And that's unusual, right? That's not true of many film franchises. So how has that happened is obviously a simple question to ask, but a complicated and interesting one to answer. So, Dan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
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A
Oh, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.
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B
Well, I'm pleased to have you as well. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write a book about this franchise?
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A
Sure, sure. So my name is Dan Hassler Forest. I'm originally from the United States, but I live and work in the Netherlands. I'm employed by the Media Studies department at Utrecht University. So I teach and research media industries, like both sides of it, I guess, both related to power. So on the one hand, how the production of popular media continues to shift within global capitalism, and also how that power is translated into story forms. So. So what kinds of decisions regarding who stories are about, what kinds of power and agency they have within them, and how that relates to questions of social power in terms of gender, ethnicity, and global impact. And I came to this topic almost reluctantly. I wanted to write a book. I've been doing a lot of work over the past couple of years on American media companies and how the blockbuster industry, sort of the big media franchises, have come to dominate the entire horizons, it sometimes seems, of our media landscape and looking for one single franchise that would be a good illustration of that. And the obvious things at first seem things like Harry Potter or maybe Marvel or Star wars, but in every case, they seem to have specific elements that didn't quite tell the whole story. And then, I mean, I've been a kind of closeted Fast and Furious fan for several years, ambiguous Fast and Furious fan, I suppose. And so I realized all of a sudden it's the perfect example because it didn't start out, unlike Marvel or Harry Potter, it didn't start out as a serialized franchise. It began just like any movie, in the very early, like the late 1990s, early 2000s, like, let's make a movie and hope it's successful. And it was. And so the way it developed really both paved the way for how Hollywood and media industries ended up in 2026 or 2025, which is when I finished writing the book. And it was fun. It was a lot of fun, actually, to also look at the complicated ways in which this completely bonkers franchise has explored different ways of storytelling, but also different forms of representation.
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B
That's such a great introduction, I think, to the book and our conversation, because those are all topics we're probably going to talk about as our conversation develops. But before we get into what, to me, I think was the most sort of intriguing, like, how the hell did that happen? Aspect, which is, as you said, it didn't start off as a franchise. We will get to that. But of course, when it comes out, when the first film starts, even though it's not meant to be a franchise, franchises do exist, right? Blockbusters do exist. That kind of is in the ether when it's coming out. So what, you know, obviously they were aware of that, even if they weren't trying to be that at that point. So what sorts of things was the first film sort of trying to do? What was it, what tropes was it kind of trying to fit into? Like, how did it sort of see itself within what already existed?
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A
Well, I guess the best way to answer that is to contextualize that moment in film history a little bit. So the first movie, which was simply titled the Fast and the Furious, was released in the summer of 2001. That's another reason, by the way, why it just seemed like such a great illustration or case study. Because the film, like it just starts right at the beginning of the 21st century. So it had a kind of symmetry or elegance to it that it. That it runs through these past 25 years. But in, in 2001, Hollywood was. Was focused, or had been focused for almost 25 years on making the blockbuster the centerpiece of its business, business model. So from most film historians and scholars will point to jaws from 1975 as the solution to the. To Hollywood's crisis at the time, which was, you know, we were not sure how to. How to make money anymore with our movies. And so the solution became, well, every year we're going to make a couple of really, really Big, high concept movies that we're going to release simultaneously on hundreds of different screens. We're going to saturate the advertising with jingles and T shirts and caps and advertisements. And then if it's as successful as we hope it is, then we'll even make a couple of sequels. And that was the reigning model. In 2001, when this first movie appeared, it was. The idea was still for producers working in major Hollywood studios, like, let's try and find an idea, a pitch, sometimes even a script that was like that. We see a market for this. It's not, you know, it can be a big movie, but it doesn't have to be like a $200 million movie. I think the budget for the first Fast and Furious was somewhere around 70 or 80 million. And we'll throw it out there and see what happens. And the Fast and the Furious just became a huge, hugely popular movie. It was wildly successful. And so, and so that's, that's. So then what happened was, well, then, you know, if it's so successful, well, then we'll make a sequel. That's. And, and that's as far as it went. Right there. There wasn't, There wasn't the thing. Well, we'll get to that later. Probably. There wasn't this idea like, we're gonna, we're gonna make movies that are just ongoing, continuous franchises. You know, even the Star wars movies, which, you know, that had just been revived in 1999, which is two years before the Fast and the Furious emerged, that was not. They were like, okay, we're going to do a new trilogy. But it wasn't like, we're going to make Star wars movies in perpetuity. Right? It was like, we're going to keep doing that. There was just. There was a finite. There was a limit on how many movies you could make. Because the idea was, and the practice was the first movie would make a massive profit, and then the second one would be more expensive, but it wouldn't make as much money. And those two lines would converge after a little while. And then it's no longer profit profitable. And it's also no longer interesting for an audience to like, it was a joke to, to have more than two or three sequels to a successful film. So that's. So that's how the first movie appeared.
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B
That's really interesting to kind of take us back in time of what were the expectations at that point. And I love this comparison with Star wars, especially in this moment was when they sort of decided, okay, let's Keep going with this. With Fast and Furious franchise, were they just sort of going, well, we can see the model with Star wars and continuing it, or were they doing sort of something different even at this early point?
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A
No, the only thing they were interested in with the sequel was doing. And this was typical for the kind of sequelization logic that dominated the entertainment industry at this time. Certainly Hollywood at this time was like, okay. The producers were like, okay, well how can we do another version of the same movie? You know, how can we make it a little bit bigger? And they named it, I think it's still my favorite title in the whole franchise, two Fast, you know, numeral two Too Fast, Too Furious. The production got greenlit without a script, which was also typical of that time. They tried to get the breakout stars from the first movie, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, neither of whom were very famous before the first film. Vin Diesel passed. He didn't, he didn't like the idea and he didn't really believe in the franchise in that way. And Paul Walker, you know, was fine to come on board. So they were like, well, we'll just get another guy and we'll just do the same thing, but we'll shift it from Los Angeles to, to Florida. You know, we'll go, we'll go down, we'll go down to the east coast and we'll have, we'll have another action movie with cool cars and hot chicks. You know, I mean, they say this in giant scare quotes, but that was kind of the formula. Let's have beautiful people driving, driving really cool looking cars. Because that worked for the first time. And like narrative continuity from the first to the second movie was, was almost totally absent. You know, it's like, let's, we'll just take the same guy and we'll put him in a similar situation somewhere else. And the first movie hadn't been conceived, and no blockbusters were conceived as being the first chapter in an ongoing saga. And that's where it's different from, for instance, the Phantom Menace, you know, which was seen as, okay, we're gonna do a trilogy of films that could come out every three years. They're gonna be huge cultural and commercial events. This was just like a summer movie. You know, a summer movie is a movie. Movies around at the time were things like the Rock, you know, bad boys, these Michael Bay movies where you could do a movie and then if it was a big hit, maybe you would do a sequel. But the sequel was just an obviously mercenary derivative of the first and not the continuation of an Ongoing story.
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B
Yeah, that's funny to kind of think back to that one and you're like, yeah, there's really nothing in common between them.
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A
Not much. No, no, no. You have to really squint hard to see. To see it as something that moves forward.
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B
And yet obviously it works enough that they keep going. Right? We're not talking about a franchise that stops with two. So if we continue to sort of the first few of them, what sort of was and wasn't working, do they start thinking of it as more of a linked franchise at some point? Like, how does that develop?
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A
Well, you know, it's funny because since the movies weren't designed to provide the basis for an ongoing narrative, there was more of a sense of like, okay, um, like Hollywood producers generally would look at a movie. And this is like the logic at the time was the way Hollywood producers would look at a movie was to, to say, okay, it's been successful. What are the things that we think makes it successful? And for a movie like the Fast and the Furious, it wasn't the idea. Okay, we have this amazing story world with rich characters and an ongoing saga. There was nothing. It was based like, it was based on an article about, you know, like a journalistic article or investigative journalism into the subculture of illegal street racing in Los Angeles. And that was just the very. And then the movie is like a completely unrealistic take on that idea. Just taking that idea, making it into a genre movie that's largely derived from that movie. Was it Point Break to have a cop infiltrating a very cool gang of low stakes robbers who, who do illegal nighttime street racing? So it's a very flimsy kind of pretext for having an action film. And so the next movie was like, okay, we'll do that again. And then the third film which became Tokyo Drift was like, oh, well, you know, the stars from the first two movies, they're either not interested or they're pricing themselves out of our market. They're not really the reason that people come see these movies anyway. Universal, which is the studio that was marketing and producing these films, had a preference at the time for investing more in teen movies. So they wanted something that was more, more, had more of a high school vibe. And also they, they had noticed that the movies attracted a lot of non white audiences. So they said, well, let's, you know, let's, let's take it to a place outside of the United States and, and emphasize that multicultural aspect. So the third film is just like, has no continuity whatsoever. With the previous films, there are no returning characters. It's just, let's do a story about illegal street racing, but it's with a completely new set of characters. Teenagers who go. And one of them's a white kid from Los Angeles who is forced to move to Tokyo. And then he's introduced to a different kind of street racing over there. And then that becomes the story. So it was. And this is, this is in a way typical for how a lot of Hollywood, like second sequels would be. If it's, you know, well, we can't really do another, like a carbon copy of the first film with the same actors in the same story. We'll, you know, we'll innovate. We'll try to do something else that falls within the general brand. Like a good example is Halloween 3, where they like, Halloween was a huge hit. Halloween 2 was, okay, well, let's do that again with Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Myers hunting her. And then for the third movie, they were just like, well, you know, why not just do a completely different kind of story with none of the same characters? It'll just be a creepy movie that's set during Halloween and it has nothing in common. And people are always surprised when they watch the movies, like, where is, where's the shape? Know, where's Michael Myers? No, he's not in there. It's that, like, it's a way to experiment with the idea that a movie sequel can also be like an anthology series, you know, like you have a different, like black mirror or something. Like you have a different story every time. And that's what they did with Tokyo Drift. But that movie was, it turned out to be less successful financially than the previous two, especially in the United States. It was more successful overseas. And so it seemed like that was going to be, you know, the end. That would be the. In the 1990s, that would have been the end of the franchise. You might have gotten one or two, like direct video spin offs or maybe a kids TV show or something like that. But it would have ended its career as a blockbuster franchise except for the fact that Justin Lin, who had come in to direct the third film, had talked to Vin Diesel and he was like, you know, it would be, you know, because Vin Diesel, Vin Diesel comes in, he was the star of the first movie, and they bring him in for the very, very last shot of the third film as like a cameo. But the cameo points to this idea, like there may be a future with returning characters. And that got a huge response out of the audience. And Justin Lin and Vin Diesel were able to convince Universal that there was still a future for the franchise if they could retool it, like revise it into something that wasn't a renegade series of, you know, these racing films with no returning characters, but to make it into a Star wars like, saga, you know, like where we're going to follow these characters and they're going to be a crew and they're going to have rivalries and they're going to have, like, people coming back from the dead, you know, all this weird stuff. So then all of a sudden, things changed and they started making plans for the continuation of the franchise after what would have normally been a death sentence for the Brit.
- [16:50]
B
Yeah, this is such a key turning point, right? Because as you said, like, if this had happened kind of at any other point, like, this would be the end. And yet it's not even just not the end. It goes from being a franchise to sort of a mega franchise. And of course, there's a bunch of other ones at the same sort of time, right. When you're talking about sort of a group of characters you follow across multiple films on a saga like that sounds kind of like Harry Potter, right? Which is happening around the same sort of time. So what is going on then, to make Fast and Furious kind of a mega franchise? How do we get from this being not just, yeah, okay, we'll do one more to really being such a big deal?
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A
Well, the, like, the thing that had changed was there were two things going on right in the early 2000s. One of them was that the simultaneous release, almost simultaneous release of the Lord of the Rings, and the massive financial success of the first Harry Potter film, which was designed to be the first in an ongoing series of adaptations of those super popular children's books that they had all of a sudden opened up new possibilities for Hollywood. Like the new line, which is owned by Warner Brothers, really took a gamble on the Lord of the Rings movies in saying, okay, we're going to release them, but it's three films and they're going to be released in consecutive years. So every Christmas you'll go to, like, the next installment of this story, and the first two will have a cliffhanger ending where you're not quite sure, you know, what's going to happen if you haven't read the books anyway. And both of those things turned out to be so successful that Hollywood sort of shifted a little bit. They were like, that's not. We used to think that people wouldn't come to see a movie if they were required to have seen a previous film. But the other thing, that's the second factor that plays such a big role in what was changing was the impact of the DVD market. Because having like the, the DVDs came in and they weren't just a replacement of videotapes. They were much cheaper to produce, they were much easier to distribute. They were like loss leaders in most American supermarkets where they'd be stacked around, you know, where you, the checkout lane. So you could list for like five to ten bucks, you could pick up a big commercial movie and take it home with you. So it meant that the costs of distributing films that had previously only been available to see, you know, on somewhat costly videotapes or as rentals were now they were just everywhere and they were generating massive profits. So it meant on the one hand, like now people had access to films much more easily after they had already disappeared from movie theaters. And Lord of the Rings again was like a pioneer in successful promotion and distribution of home video versions of those films. So after the first film was a big hit, it was released twice in that year as a dvd. First as like a regular DVD for like the casual consumer, and then as this hugely stacked four disc deluxe edition for fans and collectors that really emphasize this idea like this is a special event and it's an ongoing saga and you know, and we're all excited and keyed up for the next movie that's going to come out shortly after the DVD release. So people were able to access and replay and rewatch these films over and over again as purchases that they could bring home. And Fast and Furious was also one of these movies that benefited tremendously from that DVD boom. So people in the first, like between 2001 and 2006 had become really familiar with these films through DVD sales and they were constantly re released on DVD because every time a new sequel came out, you would re release like a new special edition with an advanced preview of the upcoming sequel to help generate publicity for it. And so where Hollywood had previously been very reluctant to invest in things that were going to require an audience to return in the way that you would like for an ongoing television drama, they were now thinking, well, maybe having this serialized aspect is a way to generate ongoing profits because the Lord of the Rings movies were making more, move more money from one to two to three, right. The third one was the most successful of the three of them, which, which totally went against the previous logic that dominated Hollywood, which is you could make sequels, but after, you know, three episodes, the Game is pretty much over. And so the movie, again, all these titles are super confusing, but the fourth movie is just titled Fast and Furious. And it was promoted as the movie that was gonna bring back all of the, like, the most, like the faces that people remembered from all three of the first movies, even though they weren't really introduced, as if many of them knew each other or were even aware of each other's existence. But let's put them together in a movie and then now they're like a team, like on a TV show. And we're gonna set up the fourth movie to be the start of, of the franchise as a Harry Potter or Star wars or Lord of the Rings, like ongoing serialized saga. That's what it promised and that's kind of what the fourth movie delivered. And it was hugely successful. That promotional strategy of saying we're. I think the phrase that they used in the trailers was old parts, like new energy. Something like that is like, it's like it's. They're classic parts and we're putting them together to move forward in this, you know, like as if it's like a, a classic car that you've given a new engine to. Right. And so that's, that's what they're, that's what the fourth movie was. And the fourth movie was more successful than any of the three previous ones. So it was a huge, huge hit. Even though it's kind of one of the worst movies in the franchise, in.
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B
Hindsight, that's really interesting to think about. Kind of the incentives though, that create it and it's. And sort of what the result is as well. I wonder if we can now kind of bring in one of the threads we mentioned earlier into this sort of new massive success. Because some of the elements that you've described, discussed about kind of bringing together recognizable faces from previous ones, kind of see what this looks like. One of the earlier ones that we mentioned briefly is the idea that like, hey, this is popular sort of internationally, like, let's make that a bigger thing. So that's also part of kind of this new era of the mega franchise success, right?
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A
Yes, it is. Yeah, absolutely. And again, it has two, I'd say two key components. One of them is that the first movie, and this is a thread that's continued on through the whole franchise, but the first movie really stood out amongst the Hollywood films of its day as being like very emphatically and visibly multicultural. So it had a multi ethnic cast. It was really about how American cities were places that were full of different ethnicities where women weren't just, you know, they weren't just hot chicks, they weren't just like action babes to look at, but they could also like drive cars and they could do like, they could stand their own in a fistfight and stuff like that. So they were. I mean, it's a little bit cringe to look back at now, but at the time they felt kind of weirdly progressive for, for what a Hollywood blockbuster could be. And, and this multiculturalism translated much more easily than a lot of the kind of, you know, white, straight superhero type stuff, or not superhero yet so much. But the white straight action hero of Hollywood at the time translated much more easily into success, into financial success outside of the United States. And this is happening at a time when for the first time, Hollywood's financial dependence on foreign markets is starting to increase. So more of the revenue generated by blockbusters is now starting to come from outside the United States, which is no longer a growth market. And starting to figure out, like, how can we increase our share of the pie not just in Europe, but in Southeast Asia? How can we get into China? You know, how can we tap into the Middle Eastern markets and stuff? And one of the things that they found was that movies that were slick and exciting and action packed, like the Fast and the Furious, so that had a lot of the traditional Hollywood elements, but that were also much more diverse in terms of their cast and crew members that were like visibly diverse, that they played really well abroad. So that was part of a new growing strategy in Hollywood. Not just shifting from the blockbuster model where you make a big hit and then, you know, if it's big enough, you make a couple of sequels. But to saying we're going to try to make like an entertainment brand and keep the franchise going from one installment to the next. But also that these are no longer movies that are made primarily for American audiences. These are movies that are made for global audiences. So, you know, we're going to Tokyo, we're going to Rio, you know, we're going all over the world as primary settings, not as a place that James Bond just kind of goes to have a picturesque adventure, but those are the places where these characters reside and where they hang out with the locals. And it felt like, you know, like, oh my God, you know, it's like nice to have this kind of attention for a more global environment than Hollywood traditionally used to have.
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B
Yeah, that's really definitely a distinction from, as you said, James Bond and kind of how places are treated in that franchise. Now all of this sounds very successful. Right. And that it could kind of keep going for a while. Right. There's loads of global places to go, for instance, and a huge cast of characters kind of keep recombining. But it doesn't stop there. The franchise sort of goes into further aspects, I suppose, of popular culture and media. So can we talk about theme park logic and what that adds to this?
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A
Oh yeah, yeah. So theme park logic is the term that I use for how the transition that, like the transformation that Hollywood is going through at the time and now we're talking about the late 2000s is one where the main shift is from seeing film as a primary source of revenue to saying, okay, we want to, like we're film studios and, and we try to make big successful movies. And the financial success of those movies is what establishes our financial solidity. They're becoming parts of larger media conglomerates for which film is a relatively small part of their overall revenue. So corporations like Disney, which have always foregrounded their licensing, so saying, okay, we make only occasional movies and we survive by licensing those characters to toy companies, to onto T shirts and baseball caps, and to amusement parks, that kind of logic starts to dominate all other major Hollywood production companies as well. So it becomes more important to have ongoing franchises that are recognizable global brands that you can use to sell video games. You can use them to brand rides and attractions in your theme parks. You can even use them to sell cruises on your cruise ships to have a Fast and Furious experience. You know, I don't think that ever happened, but, but that, that could, theoretically you could have a Fast and Furious cruise. Why not? But that's where this sort of ongoing licensing of the brand becomes even more important than this, the individual success of any one film. So, and that's where the logic has taken us to this idea that we're not really like. And I think the best example of that is streaming companies like Amazon. Amazon now owns things like Tolkien and James Bond and they don't generate any revenue for them as films, hardly any. They generate revenue as an extension of their, of their brand identity. So that when we see a movie or we see a spin off James Bond show or anything that Amazon produces, it's just a reason for us to become Amazon prime members and to pay a monthly fee to be able to access that kind of content. And that's a complete transition from the idea that film companies would try to come up with ideas that would generate revenue as films or as blockbusters at any given moment and instead to shift to entertainment that exists as what people now call, and I'm saying this derogatorily, content, right? They're not shows, they're not movies. They're just content that has to be constantly generated because the value is in the brand, not in any one individual movie. And that's where it's, that's where it's taken us, right? And that's where the emergence of Fast and Furious as a global entertainment mega franchise or mega brand has become the dominant sport or the dominant way of producing entertainment globally.
- [30:18]
C
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A
This.
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D
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- [31:11]
A
There'S a.
- [31:12]
E
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- [31:41]
B
And of course, this content relies not just on the constant production kind of for its own sake, but because that drives direct, more direct engagement with fans. Right. So we're getting to a point where it's not just how many people buy tickets to go watch it in the cinema, it's also sort of how else are fans engaging with this? And so we can actually see as the franchise goes on kind of that it's not just about sort of what do the studios want or how much revenue is being generated, but also kind of more specifically, like, these fans want this and there's those fans who want that. So as we get towards the later films in the franchise, what are the sorts of, like, fan goals, I suppose, that these films are, like, meant to try and achieve?
- [32:23]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah. It's funny because the, like, the fandom became increasingly like, you know, A driving force across the entertainment industry. Again, it kind of starts with Lord of the Rings and how Peter Jackson really encouraged fan driven websites to be the advocates and the spokespersons rather than the like. Com. Like obviously commercial studio channels that Hollywood used to rely exclusively on. Like, fans were just irritants, you know, they, they did. They didn't want to have anything to do really with fans because fans were impossible to please and they always just wanted very specific things. And, and Peter Jackson was the first people to understand, like, no, if you can get the fans, like the hardcore fans who run websites and you can get their approval, then that means you have like, you have legitimacy towards people who will tirelessly advocate your brand. And that's what Vin Diesel also realized in the late 2000s as Internet, like online fandom and social media platforms began to take shape. He figured like, well, if I can, if I can like post content on Facebook and on Instagram, that will get fans involved and get their suggestions and then emphasize in publicity that, you know, I've cast people like, you know, Dwayne the Rock Johnson or Jason Statham because fans asked for it. It was their suggestion. I'm just doing what they want because we love our fans and we want to give them what they want. That became like a really dominant discourse in promoting the Fast and Furious movies. So the visibility and also the credibility and legitimacy of fandom really grew very quickly in the early 2010s as these movies were becoming these massive blockbusters where they were receiving the explicit endorsement and encouragement of people like Vin Diesel, who used it as this kind of populist, you know, promotional approach of saying, we're just, you know, I'm a, I, I just want to please our fans. We love our fans. They're acting like literally like rock stars. We just want to give the fans what they want. And so please keep giving us your ideas and your suggestions and we will listen to you, you know, and we'll take you seriously and we'll, and we'll interact with you a little bit on these platforms. And so that's how the fandom kind of ended up also co shaping, you know, like, I think that's an exaggeration, but there was definitely the, the promotional usefulness of fandom developed tremendously in the 2010s.
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B
And did the fans get what they wanted? Like from the fan point of view of like, hey, we're really advocating for the next film to have X, Y, Z. Like what was the reaction after?
- [35:03]
A
I would say no. Mostly I would say like there, but but again, there's, there's different kinds of fans, right? And I'd say there's one, I think the group that would, that is the most hardcore Fast and Furious fans. They're also the people who feel like it lost its mojo. It jumped the shark. Once it became this like Mission Impossible type super spy, you know, extravaganza. Once they were shooting cars out into space and Vin Diesel was doing these Superman rescue dives, you know, they were so far, like. Not to say that the first film was realistic, but compared to the later films, it's almost like a, it's like a Frederick Wiseman documentary almost. You know, it's like, it's very low stakes. It's very much a small urban drama. There weren't huge budgets involved. You know, the biggest stunts were having his charger like, you know, flip and crash, which you know, a stunt driver did. And it's an impressive stunt, but it's not like, you know, a person leaping off of a giant bridge in Spain or area or, you know, or, or, or drop, dropping these muscle cars out of, out of an airplane. You know, it's nothing like that. So for a lot of fans who were there from the beginning, it felt like a kind of betrayal of what the Fast and Furious originally stood for. But you know, by the same token, as the brand, as the movies developed into this global mega franchise, of course they attracted a whole new group of fans who were thrilled by this, by this status, by this huge, by the immensity of it, you know, and who love the fact that these, that these characters and the characters and like, the franchise has always been very, very true to that idea that they present themselves as being, they're, you know, as being underdogs. They're like street people. They're like a fantasy about what it's like for working class people who like to tinker with cars who also happen to become super spies. Right. So it's, it's a very pleasurable fantasy for people to go, to go see that and, and they cater to that idea that they are like Robin Hoods. You know, they're like, they're, they're true to their roots. They're not gonna, they may drive, you know, really fancy expensive cars, but they're always going to be. Dom is always going to be like a family guy who has barbecues, you know, on his street corner and, and, and, and is true to himself and his family. As ridiculous as that becomes, you know, over the course of the franchise.
- [37:35]
B
That's really interesting to kind of keep in mind, as you said, it's not just ever one thing. There's all these different perspectives that get pulled in together. So what does that mean then, now for the future of this particular mega franchise?
- [37:49]
A
Well, yeah, I think the last chapter in the book is about what I call the crisis era in Hollywood. And so the crisis era is defined by, on the one hand, you know, the impact of the COVID pandemic, which happened to hit just at a time when like, the. The full, like the full commitment of Hollywood to mega franchises had kind of reached its apex. And I like. And I think the moment it crested can just be. You can see it and point at it, and it's that it's the Avengers double whammy that the Marvel movies did, where they had like this serialized double movie climax, the what's it in? Infinity War, followed by Endgame, you know, having the biggest blockbuster of all time end on a cliffhanger, and then top that with the next biggest blockbuster of all time, have everybody come back to see who gets resurrected from the dead in the next movie. And right after that, that's when Covid hit and all the theaters had to close and all the blockbusters had to be shelved and all the plans had to be sort of procrastinated and put aside for a little while. And interestingly, like the ninth Fast and Furious movie was supposed to get the franchise back on its feet. It had struggled a little bit after it had reached its peak with the seventh film, which was the film that appeared in a retooled version after Paul Walker had tragically died in an automobile accident. And they had to postpone its release and sort of revise a lot of the film and the scenes, of course, that had to be made without him in it. And that because that. That's still the, like, the most successful film in the franchise. That's. It's still in the top 10 of most successful films ever released in just in pure hard revenue. But it never really recovered from that afterwards. And then. So the ninth movie was supposed to get. Get it back. And it was successful for a blockbuster released in the first year and after theaters had reopened. But it was not by a long shot, not as successful as what had come before. And I think we're seeing now in the past four or five years that on the one hand, we see this kind of franchise fatigue that is really set in that for a lot of people, this idea that you're seeing just another even more ridiculous version of a movie that you've seen many times over that there doesn't seem to be much at stake anymore, that these films, that they kind of exhaust this ability that they had for like, for many episodes to maintain an interest in these characters. But after seeing, and I think this holds especially for the Fast and Furious cycle, after seeing characters like tragically die and that having an impact and fans mourn them and the other characters mourn them and then like literally every one of them is then brought back in a later episode where it turns out their death was actually a ruse or, you know, fans were upset about the character leaving, or they just simply wanted to cater to this nostalgic fondness that people had for earlier films. So let's bring back a dead character. The Marvel movies are doing that now as well, of course, in the run up to Doomsday later this year, which is like, let's bring back all of the people who've been in Marvel movies ever and stuff them into a single film. I think these are really desperate attempts for a struggling industry that has, that has, you know, where the numbers have just been catastrophic. They've, I mean they've, they've never reached more than two thirds of what the revenue was from before COVID since COVID happened even in the Barbenheimer year, you know, so, so Hollywood is really struggling to get people back into theaters. A lot of theaters are closing. And what seemed for a time like, you know, a solution to the problem of how do we get people into movie theaters in the streaming era is no longer a safe solution. We've seen too many hugely expensive, seemingly sure fire blockbuster movies, like a new Indiana Jones movie or a new Transformers movie or a lot of Marvel movies, we've seen them struggle or even fail at the box office. And in part it's also because in the mega franchise era, the yardstick for success has moved up so high. Like a movie in that framework isn't really considered successful unless it makes more than a billion dollars. And the movies cost routinely upwards of 200 or $300 million to produce. The idea in Hollywood still being like, it's less risky to make one 200 million dollar movie than to make four, like medium budget 50 million dollar movies like the original Fast and Furious. And of course the ones that they make, they all have to be part of either an ongoing or a revived existing brand name or franchise. So you can have like a big movie, but it has to be. There are exceptions like Sinners, but they're rare. They're increasingly rare. If you look at the box office numbers for the past Several years, you'll see, like, every one in them in the global box office is either a sequel or a franchise film or some other kind of spin off of an existing thing, a remake. A movie like Wicked, where you take the wizard of Oz via the successful musical and you retool that into a big movie blockbuster with, of course, its ongoing sequels. That's the answer also to the question, like, why are we seeing so few original. Original films coming out of Hollywood and in megaplex screens? Well, that's. That's the reason. And Fast and Furious played a huge role in that.
- [43:36]
B
Yeah. Definitely illuminates not just this franchise, but kind of the whole. What's going on much, much more broadly than that. Right. To go back to the title of the book, Looking at the remaking of Hollywood. So thank you for helping us understand kind of this franchise and the wider phenomenon. Is this what you're continuing to work on then? As, of course, we see what happens with these mega franchises. Are you moving on to something else? Anything currently on your desk or looking to be that you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [44:04]
A
Oh, no, sure. Yeah. Since finishing the Fast and Furious book, I mean, it's, you know, so it's. It's. That's been almost a year now since. Since I submitted the final manuscript. And then, you know, there's proofing and indexing and stuff like that. But in the meantime, since. Since I finished that, I wrote a book. That's where I guess. I guess the Fast and Furious is like, in my mind, it's a big book, at least in the sense that it's about. It's like a big franchise. And it's also. It's mostly using that franchise to talk about how the industry has changed over that time. So it's very broad in its scope, and it's really about political economy with little bits of film analysis and film criticism mixed in. So after that, I felt like doing something completely different and writing something where you look very closely at one thing. I wrote a book for a series, a book series called Film Minutes. And it's going to sound crazy, but the format, I mean. But, you know, I'm the guy who wrote a Fast and Furious book, so I guess it's fair game. The idea behind the series is you take a film and then you write about it one minute at a time. For every minute of the film, you write something. And so I wrote a book on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in that way. And I love the idea of sort of releasing yourself from having one very particular kind of, kind of focus, one kind of framework that you look at this film at that it's kind of illustrating some aspect of feminist theory or psychoanalytical concepts or gender or, you know, any or race or anything like one specific thing where you pick and choose elements from the film to sort of strengthen that argument and instead to like, look really, really closely at what a film is doing, literally from one shot or one frame even to the next. And it's been a. It's been a really challenging but also really rewarding process. And that book should be out maybe by the end of this year, but certainly by, by the next. So that's a film minutes book on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
- [46:17]
B
Wow. That is a very different project indeed. I can only imagine what that was like to put together. But while that book is in process, of course listeners can read the book we've been talking about, which is titled Fast and Furious, how the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2026. Dan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [46:40]
A
Thanks so much for having me. This has been a wonderful opportunity to finally talk about the book that I wrote last year. So it's been wonderful. Thank you so. Much, Sam.