Full-Throttle Franchise: The Culture, Business and Politics of Fast & Furious

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Description

When the first Fast & Furious film was released in June 2001, few predicted that it would be a box office hit, let alone the launchpad for a multi-billion-dollar franchise. A mid-budget crime movie set around L.A.s underground car-racing scene, featuring a cast of relative unknowns, the film became one of the surprise hits of that summer, earning more than 5 times its budget in worldwide ticket sales. 2 decades and 9 films later, Fast & Furious today ranks among the 10 highest-grossing movie franchises of all time, with a box office total of $6.6 billion and has also given rise to an animated TV show and theme park ride. Full-Throttle Franchise is the first book to offer an in-depth analysis of the Fast & Furious, bringing together a range of scholars to explore not only the style and themes of the franchise, but also its broader cultural impact and legacy. The collected essays establish the franchises importance in cinematic and ideological terms, linking their discussions to wider issues of genre, representation, adaptation, and industry. Topics range from stardom and performance, focusing on key actors Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, to the way in which Fast & Furious intersects with dominant ideas of racial, gender, and sexual identity. Aimed at both scholars and fans, Full-Throttle Franchise seeks to uncover just what has made Fast & Furious so enduringly popular, mapping its outrageous set pieces, ever-expanding universe, and growing cast of global megastars in terms of wider cultural and industrial forces.

Reviews

The Fast & Furious saga is a gift that keeps on giving. The social media presence of some of its stars (notably Vin Diesel on Facebook and Dwayne Johnson on Instagram) is almost unprecedented for actors, the farewell song (See you again) for another of its stars (the late Paul Walker) is among the top five most viewed videos on YouTube. And, yes, there are the films, a somewhat impromptu and ever shape-shifting series of action spectacles that has grown from innocuous beginnings into a world-conquering franchise that is, however, curiously marginal at the US box office. Full-Throttle Franchise is exactly the kind of full-scale study that this unique franchise has long needed: highly critical where appropriate but also quite celebratory where it is deserved, with an eye for filmic and other details but also with a view of the big picture, to do with the film industry and popular culture in the 21st century. The book offers a broad range of perspectives on the franchise, bringing together quantitative and qualitative, textual and contextual analysis, dealing with authorship, genre and stardom; race, gender, familialism and bromance; sequelisation, adaptation, transmedia storytelling and globalisation. Rather surprising twists in the story of the franchise are highlighted in chapters on the growing importance of the Chinese market, on childrens animation and on pro-wrestling. While always properly academic, individual chapters are often fun to read as well, and they should indeed inspire much future work on this fascinating global phenomenon. * Peter Krmer, Senior Research Fellow in Cinema and TV, De Montfort University, UK, and author of the BFI Film Classic on 2001: A Space Odyssey (2nd edition, 2020) and co-editor of Grease is the Word: Exploring a Cultural Phenomenon (2020) *
Full-Throttle Franchise interrogates an exciting and timely range of questions raised by the Fast & Furious franchise, which as editors Joshua Gulam, Fraser Elliott and Sarah Feinstein note, has reflected many cultural and film industry shifts of the last decades and stands distinctly apart from them as well. Read and learn! * Mary Beltrn, Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin, USA *
This expansive collection, meticulously conceived and rigorously edited, examines a franchise that is both an exemplar of current trends in the franchise era and a unique transmedia property that has triumphed against the odds. Beginning with a comprehensive and enlightening introduction, the various chapters go on to cover a range of perspectives that are all central to the success and longevity of the saga, including the action genre and sequences, racial politics and ideology, stardom and authorship, masculinity, and extratextual properties. The scope and precision of the collection is breathtaking, positioning itself as the essential study into the Fast Saga and a robust addition to the family of contemporary Hollywood scholarship. * Julie Lobalzo Wright, Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick, UK *

Author Bio

Joshua Gulam is a Lecturer in Film in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Fraser Elliott is a Lecturer in Film, Exhibition and Curation in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Sarah Feinstein is a Teaching Fellow in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, UK.