Although the franchise has been so consistently lucrative that there was no chance it was ever going to happen, there remains a band of Fast & Furious fans adamant in the belief the series should have been ended after the heart-wrenching seventh installment.
The death of Paul Walker sent shockwaves through both the industry and the cast and crew members who he’d been regularly collaborating with for a decade and half, with Furious 7 making a bittersweet impact at the box office by becoming one of the highest-grossing movies ever made after earning in excess of $1.5 billion.
Very rarely has an action-heavy epic with a budget of $250 million been capable of reducing audiences to floods of tears in the multiplex, but that’s exactly what happened when Walker’s Brian O’Conner was given a swansong that reduced old and new fans alike to emotional rubble.
Furious 7 still ranks as one of The Fast Saga‘s finest entries despite its tragic production, but the subsequent adventures have failed to recapture the critical and commercial heights James Wan’s sole stab at the property enjoyed . The law of diminishing returns was always going to set in eventually, but neither The Fate of the Furious, F9, or Fast X were anywhere near as good from a purely entertainment perspective.
Nonetheless, the 10th film roaring into theaters has led to an uptick in popularity for the seventh go-round, with FlixPatrol revealing Furious 7 as one of the top-viewed titles on both iTunes and Google Play Movies this week, even if some find it hard to subject themselves to that finale all over again.
