From Most Furious To Least Fast: A JustWatch List
“I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters. Not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit. For those ten seconds or less, I’m free.”
-Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), The Fast And The Furious (2001)
With the arrival of Fast X to theaters earlier this month, the 11th entry in Universal Pictures’ surprisingly durable franchise, our friends at JustWatch have taken stock of the series’ longevity with a new list breaking down which titles in the saga have been the most globally popular on their platform.
As a refresher, JustWatch is the go-to resource for film fans striving to stream anything and everything. The site keeps tabs on just what is being broadcast where, in terms of both streamer and region, and (where applicable) for how much.
Fast X, for now, occupies an exclusively theatrical window, so it doesn’t qualify. Instead, JustWatch assesses how its 10 predecessors have faired over the lifetime of its site, from a cumulative, international perspective. Despite Fast X being called Fast X, the latest flick, helmed by The Transporter‘s Louis Letterier, is actually the 11th overall movie in the series because a spin-off, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes And Shaw (2019), has also hit theaters.
The street racing franchise has morphed into something of a jet-setting spy adventure in its iterations, starting with Fast & Furious 6 (2013), and its chameleonic ability to adjust its narratives could in part explain its continued appeal, 22 years (and counting!) after the original blockbuster’s summer release.
What began as a pretty blatant Point Break rip-off that licensed the name of a relative minor entry in the TFH Guru Roger Corman film canon, but with cars in the place of surfboards, has become one of the most lovable action movie franchises of the 21st century. I’m not saying any of this is Shakespeare, but there’s a baseline likability to a lot of our leads, abetted in no small part by the diversity of this show’s casting, which is a wonderful element that sets these shows apart from far too much (ahem) white bread Hollywood fodder.
It’s fascinating to examine which entries in the ongoing Fast yarn have gotten the most JustWatch hits over the years.
Yours truly is wholly unsurprised that the relatively scaled-down original film, probably my favorite in the whole run thus far, is the most sought-after picture. F9: The Fast Saga (2021), a fairly mid-tier entry, directly follows The Fast And The Furious, probably because of (1) the sheer dominance of streaming platforms in the home video space these days and (2) fans’ interest in getting a refresher on where the series stands now heading into Fast X. At present, the film is keeping pace with the way its predecessor performed at this same point in their theatrical runs ($113.5 for Fast X, compared with $116.1 million for F9, at the 10-day mark, seemingly on track for a finish in the terrain of $160-$180 million), while it appears to be lapping F9 abroad, thanks in part to more theaters opening up following the prevalence of COVID-19 vaccinations and boosters.
My personal least-favorite Fast film, Furious 7, suffers mightily from the fact that co-star Paul Walker passed away in the midst of production (in a fiery car wreck, tragically), and had to be replaced by a combination of outtakes and creepy digital uncanny valley grafts onto his brothers’ faces. Horror helmer James Wan’s lone franchise entry is the series’ most successful box office success to date, and is thus frustratingly high on this list, speeding into an undeserved sixth place finish, ahead of my second-favorite Fast film, Fast Five (2011), an All-Star heist adventure that Screen Rant’s Ryan George likes to call “Creatine Ocean’s Eleven” — a very apt nickname.
The bottom of the list is also a bit curious, as it’s occupied by two of the stronger Fast episodes. The first car thieves-as-spies epic Fast & Furious 6, capped by a face-off between our heroes and their British baddie doppelgangers on a seemingly miles-long airport runway lands in ninth place here, beyond several inferior flicks. The Miami adventure 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), which introduced Tyrese Gibson’s Roman Pearce to the series, rounds out the list all the way in 10th place, far lower than this flashy John Singleton-helmed neon extravaganza deserves.