Tokyo Drift Straight Up Saved The Fast And The Furious Franchise.
You’re welcome Vin Diesel.
The Fast and the Furious film franchise is one of the weirdest film franchises out there. In recent years it’s gone on to become a behemoth at the box office, and the films have inexplicably gotten better in recent years based off of their aggregated ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ scores.
But it wasn’t always this way. When The Fast and the Furious first hit the scene back in 2001, it was met with middle of the road reviews, however, it did prove to be a box office smash with a budget cost of only $38 million and a worldwide gross of over $207 million. But it was obvious that the first film was intended to be a one-off solo film, much like Point Break that originally helped inspire its tone and overarching themes.
But with the box office success The Fast and the Furious accrued, a sequel was soon greenlit in the form of 2 Fast 2 Furious. Though Paul Walker decided to come back for a second outing, Vin Diesel chose not to return because he and the first film’s director, Rob Cohen, split off to make xXx instead.
It was obvious that that neither Diesel nor Cohen had much faith in the Fast and the Furious as a franchise, and neither were too interested in returning to the world of underground street racing.
Paul Walker did his best to keep the spirit alive, but with an even worse critical reception and so-so box office performance, no one seemed all that interested in coming back for a third go around. To be fair, 2 Fast 2 Furious technically had a better worldwide box office performance than the original, but it also had double the budget working against it, so it didn’t seem to really go anywhere from a financial position.
The Fast and the Furious franchise was losing steam and it didn’t appear to be driving in a clear direction.
As such, anyone involved in the original film slipped off the bandwagon and The Fast and the Furious seemed like it was going to fade into B-movie obscurity.
It was obvious that there was something there in the series that audiences wanted, but the producers just couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
But then a couple years later in 2006, the producer of the first two films, Neal H. Moritz, decided to try again, this time with a brand new cast and a fresh location in an effort to reinvigorate the fumbling franchise.
This film would be The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
The idea of Tokyo Drift was to shake up the franchise and create something new and unique that could potentially spin-off into its own series within the franchise.
But with an even worse critical reception and the lowest box office returns of any film in the franchise, the future of the series was dubious at best.
It didn’t help that the director of the first film was super critical of the third entry, stating, “If you were to just watch Tokyo Drift, you’d say ‘I never want to see anything related to Fast & Furious again.’”
All in all, not great news for the franchise. Except for one small thing…
Vin Diesel.
Diesel made a last minute cameo appearance at the end of Tokyo Drift which many highlighted as the best and worst thing about the film.
It was the best thing because, well… it’s Vin Diesel. It was the worst thing because everyone wanted more Vin Diesel than what they got.
It seemed that the filmmakers had found the missing ingredient. There appeared to be something significant to the original cast that was painfully absent from Tokyo Drift. People wanted to see more of that, not more of this.
But was the pairing of Vin Diesel and Paul Walker really all that iconic back in the original film? Did everyone want to see more of these two together after the first movie? I would argue, no. At least not at the time.
Folks seemed to enjoy The Fast and the Furious, but no one was desperately clambering for more adventures from this particular duo.
It wasn’t until they were both gone that everyone realized that given the option, they would rather watch Diesel and Walker together than Lucas Black’s dull new character with the strange accent from Arizona.
And that was the essential ingredient: absence. Without a film showing what the franchise was like without them, the franchise wouldn’t be at the highpoint it is today.
You can tell how connected audiences became to Diesel and Walker’s duo after the unfortunate passing of Paul Walker in an automobile accident in 2013. For an actor who didn’t really appear in many movies outside of The Fast and the Furious franchise, it was one of the hardest hitting tragedies to strike Hollywood in a very long time. On a personal note, I don’t get too choked up after celebrity deaths, but surprisingly Walker’s death hit pretty close to home for me. I can’t remember feeling worse over any other celebrity’s death in my lifetime.
Which just goes to show that in some indescribably significant way, Walker had somehow connected with people. It’s no coincidence that Furious 7 went on to have one of the highest grossing opening weekends of all time.
For some reason, Paul Walker meant something to us.
After the first entry into the series, no one was truly excited about more Fast and the Furious movies, but because they unintentionally made an artificial sense of longing — a vacuum of the main cast — people got a weird thrill at seeing the “old” gang back together again when the fourth movie in the franchise, 2009’s Fast & Furious, reunited Vin Diesel and Paul Walker back together again.
No one seemed to be paying any attention until they got rid of them and then brought them back. Without a triumphant return, no one would have cared. But since they did have a triumphant return, they became staples of cinema.
The rest is history.
So in reality, the “old” gang should be thanking Tokyo Drift for its brief tenure in the series, because without it, the Fast and the Furious franchise would more than likely be in the scrapyard.
