Fast and Furious Franchising: How the Serialized Blockbuster Remade Hollywood (Mass Markets: Storyworlds Across Media)

What the popularity of the Fast and Furious film franchise says about Hollywood blockbusters and media production

Fast and Furious Franchising charts the transformation of Hollywood through the story of one of its most successful cinematic universes. Released in 2001, The Fast and the Furious became an unexpected hit, developing into a seven-billion-dollar media franchise with nine direct sequels (so far), one “sidequel,” copious spin-offs, and licensing deals from board games to theme park rides.

Dan Hassler-Forest shows how Fast and Furious paved the way for a new form of serialized storytelling that balanced new distribution practices and expansion into international markets with a savvy awareness of representational politics. By following the series’s development over the past twenty-five years, Fast and Furious Franchising reveals distinct phases that reflect larger media-industrial trends: the postclassical blockbuster era of the early 2000s; the emergence of the megafranchise between 2008 and 2014; the franchise’s “imperial” era, from 2015 through 2019; and the postpandemic crisis era of media saturation and franchise fatigue.

While examining this rapidly changing media landscape, Hassler-Forest offers lively, insightful analyses of the films as they have embraced ever-more-ludicrous plots and unlikely character turns while always maintaining their signature faith in the power of family. As he illuminates the role of the Fast and Furious movies in the global entertainment industry, Hassler-Forest shows how the films’ improbable success proves Dominic Toretto’s adage that, whether “you win by an inch or a mile . . . winning’s winning.”

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Dan Hassler-Forest is assistant professor of media and culture studies at Utrecht University. He is author of several books, including Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism: Defying Every Label; Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism; and Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age.