Fast & Furious is one of the biggest movie franchises, but its box office performance has been on a downward spiral, and Fast X needs to fix it. The early movies in the street racing series were hugely successful for the time, with the first two making between $200-250 million. However, when the series went in a brand new direction by shedding its street racing skin and becoming a high-octane action franchise, each movie was a blockbuster hit. Between the new globetrotting approach, the explosive action, and Dwayne Johnson's introduction into the series, Fast Five made $620 million, almost double its predecessor, and the franchise hasn't looked back since.
Following the game-changing fifth movie in the series, the Fast & Furious franchise has been in competition with itself, with each consecutive movie outdoing the last in terms of jet-setting, action sequences, and sheer scope of the world. Up to a point, the box office gross accurately reflected the series' ambitiousness. Fast & Furious 6 outgrossed its predecessor with $788 million, and Furious 7 quickly made $1.5 billion, massively overperforming. However, since then, while the box office performances of the latest films aren't terrible, the series is clearly struggling compared to its mid-2010s success, and Fast X seriously needs to change that.
Every Fast & Furious Movie Box Office Performance Has Gotten Worse Since Furious 7
Following the phenomenal success of Furious 7, every movie in the franchise has made less than its predecessor. Two years after Furious 7, The Fate of the Furious was theatrically released and grossed $1.23 billion. That's still an incredible feat for a franchise that started as a crime drama about thugs stealing DVD players, but an almost $200 million drop is still steep. Two years after that, the spin-off, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, only made $760 million, a whole $470 million less than The Fate of the Furious. Though it wasn't a proper Fast & Furious movie, it still had some serious star power.
2021 saw the most shocking box office performance of the series yet with F9. The ninth installment of the franchise should have been a huge success, as it had been a whole four years since the last proper movie in the series. As bi-annual releases could have fatigued audiences, a four-year gap was exactly what fans needed, but it had the worst performance in the series since Fast Five. Despite having almost the whole cast back, fan-favorite character Han returning for the first time in six years, and the crew literally going into space, the film made even less than the spin-off with just $720 million.
Why Has The Fast & Furious Box Office Performances Been Getting Worse?
There is a clear spike in the franchise's box office gross with Furious 7, as every previous and following movie's gross is significantly lower. And the most obvious reason for that spike is Paul Walker. The actor played Brian O'Conner, the series' real hero. Audiences took an immediate shine to the street-racing undercover cop, as not much is cooler than that, and the love for him only grew stronger when he became a family man in Fast Five and Fast and Furious 6. As Walker died in the middle of Furious 7's production, there was a strong curiosity about how the movie would work around his death and how it'd honor him.
Following Furious 7, the franchise no longer had its relatable leading man, and it didn't help that Johnson, the biggest movie star in the world, was distancing himself from the series. Now, Johnson is not involved with Fast & Furious due to creative differences with Vin Diesel. But the biggest issue for the franchise is simply the quality, which has been getting worse with each consecutive release. Furious 7 got the best audience and critical reception of the entire series, but the movies steadily dropped from a 7.1 on IMDb to a 6.6 for Fate of the Furious, then to 6.5 for Hobbs & Shaw, then to a shocking 5.2 for F9 (via IMDBb).
Fast X Could Break The Box Office Trend
Though the franchise looks like it's stuck in this downward trajectory, Fast X could still bring the series back to its billion-dollar days, or at least close to it. There's a lot of positivity surrounding the 10th movie in the series, especially following two great-looking trailers. Fast X is resonating with fans more than any movie in the franchise since Furious 7, as it's returning to its roots in a big way. Fast X's trailers tease two different street races, and not just between muscle cars but between souped-up Japanese imports, and there has been a huge demand for the Fast series to bring back street racing.
Universal Needs Fast X To Be The Highest-Grossing Movie In The Franchise Yet
As badly received as F9 was, the film's quality wasn't entirely to blame for its box office failure. The movie was released quickly after COVID-19, a time when restrictions were still in place and people weren't confident about being in public spaces. In that respect, there's no knowing how much F9 could have made under normal circumstances. But either way, its $720 million gross is still a bad sign for the franchise's future. While $720 million isn't a bomb by any means, given that a movie generally needs to make 2.5 times its budget to break even, it's a huge underperformance, and Universal absolutely cannot afford another disaster like this.
Universal is unlucky when it comes to the Fast & Furious franchise. The pandemic meant the studio had to spend more money on marketing F9 while knowingly suffering at the box office. And Fast X is the subject of behind-the-scenes drama that caused the budget to drastically inflate. Director Justin Lin quit Fast X midway through shooting, leaving the production at a standstill. If the "2.5" rule is applied to the $340 million Fast X budget, it needs to make $850 million to break even. It has become one of the most expensive productions of all time, and it’ll be a disappointment if it makes anything less than $1 billion.
0 Comments