Fast and Furious Franchising How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood by Dan Hassler-Forest
After due consideration and a binge-watching weekend, Dan Hassler-Forest decided he was “fully on board” with the Fast & Furious franchise. The media studies professor (Utrecht University) conceded that F&F is “goofy,” even “nonsensical and repetitive,” and yet … it provided him with sufficient grist for a book.
Hassler-Forest’s Fast and Furious Franchising didn’t convince me to follow Fast and Furious (2002), 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) or any others in the series. For me, F&F is nothing better than a terrible waste of Vin Diesel. At worst, the muscle-car crime fantasy was a seismic indicator of American attitudes: Speed and might make right and to hell with the skid marks.
However, Hassler-Forest does good work deconstructing the assumptions behind the plotting and casting. The formula at work in the first Furious was already well established in Hollywood: the naïve innocent guided into a dangerous world by a good-hearted outlaw. That outlaw, Dominic Toretto (Diesel), is an ethnically ambiguous patriarch, the feudal lord of his underworld fiefdom, a multi-racial street racing-crime gang where women (if still subservient) can take the wheel. Dominic brings Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) under his wing, unaware that he’s an undercover cop. Despite his mission of infiltration, Brian falls in love with Dominic’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster), insuring the romance angle. The trailer checks off the superficial attractions: explosions, guns, sex and most of all, a Futurist’s love of mechanized speed. The setting is a fictional urban youth subculture, the Dead End kids with cars, but contemporary in its ethnically diverse cast.
OK, cool enough. Where Hassler-Forest’s study becomes more interesting is in his exploration of how Fast and Furious, intended as a one-off, mid-budget exploitation flick, gained a sequel and grew (morphed) into an industry-shaping sequence. As the author sees it, F&F marked a “monumental transformation … from high-content blockbuster to branded IP, from film sequels to transmedia content; from a primary focus on the American box office to transnational coproductions.” Like a scale-model earthbound answer to Star Wars, F&F became a “storyworld,” interesting “for the fact that it was so obviously made up as it went along.”
F&F fed Hollywood’s addiction to “serialized megafranchises,” mainlined by “international box office revenue.” Speed sells everywhere, it seems, and the plan is to extend the run indefinitely (unless the box office gas runs out). Hassler-Forest imagines F&F could continue after Diesel’s death or retirement with a young successor in the driver’s seat. As long as the concept sells, Hollywood’s hedge-fund, private equity masters will continue to extract wealth as if F&F was a petroleum reserve beneath a desert of ideas.
