Full-Throttle Franchise

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 franchise’s 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.

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.

List of FiguresList of TablesList of ContributorsAcknowledgements 1. Researching Fast & Furious in the franchise era of Hollywood
Joshua Gulam (Liverpool Hope University, UK), Sarah Feinstein (University of Leeds, UK), and Fraser Elliott (University of Edinburgh, UK)
2. From Mission Impossible to Mission Insanity: A longitudinal analysis of action sequences in the Fast & Furious franchise
Lennart Soberon (Ghent University, Belgium)
3. ‘For those ten seconds, I’m free’: Temporality, affect and spectacle in the Fast & Furious franchise
Naja Later (Swinburne University, Australia)
4. A critical quantitative analysis of race and representation in the Fast Saga films
Pete Jones (University of Melbourne, Australia) and Joshua Gulam (Liverpool Hope University, UK)
5. Vin Diesel as franchise auteur: Intersectional authorship and the cuddly hardbody in Los BandelerosCarrieLynn D. Reinhard (Dominican University, USA) and Christopher J. Olson (University of Wisconsin, USA)6. Fast, Furious, and Free of Sex: Dom, Brian, and hetero male affection
Aaron Hunter (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)7. ‘What’s real is family’: Maternal bodies, paternal labour and parenting roles in Fast & Furious Bianca Batti (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)

8. ‘I never want to lose a fight’: Masculinity, machismo and high-octane action in the Fast & Furious franchise
Rebecca Feasey (Bath Spa University, UK)9. The on- and off-screen bromances of Fast & FuriousJackie Raphael (Curtin University, Australia) and Celia Lam (University of Nottingham in China)10. ‘It’s so so so so so so important’: China’s role in shaping the Fast & Furious franchise
Fraser Elliott (University of Edinburgh, UK)11. Fun for all the family: Adapting the Fast & Furious as animated children’s television
Sam Summers (Middlesex University, UK)12. ‘Zero tolerance for candy asses’: World Wrestling Entertainment and Fast & Furious as transmedia storytelling
Robert Watts (University of Manchester, UK)FilmographyIndex

“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 children’s 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 Krämer, 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)

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