We didn’t know how good we had it in 2011. A full year before Marvel would debut its first crossover with The Avengers, and bring the film industry as we knew it in line with its cinematic universe, Universal created a shared world of its own. The studio was also building a superhero team, in a way, one that’d go on to be the center of increasingly bloated vanity projects. But 15 years ago, the Fast & Furious saga was still about cars going vroom and little else, and its fifth entry would change that for better and worse.
The crossover we get in Fast Five is relatively modest in hindsight, corralling the heroes of four disparate Fast & Furious movies for their biggest score yet. Back then, the Fast saga was what we’ve now come to know as “unc slop,” a relic of the noughties that was mostly just cool to father figures and gearheads. The franchise always did well at the box office, but there was a sense it was running out of road. Fast Five effectively unlocked another lane: it was a turning point that paved the way for the bigger, grander (and arguably stupider) saga we have now.
