Hollywood's new blockbuster model, as explained by quick & Furious action scenes

Hollywood's new blockbuster model, as explained by quick & Furious action scenes

·        History

When The quick and also the Furious opened within the summer of 2001, few would have foretold that it might launch one among Hollywood’s biggest franchises. A modestly budgeted action picture built around an urban street racing culture that borrowed heavily from Point Break, the film turned into a surprise hit, earning a total of $207 million at the box office, with about $144 million coming from domestic ticket sales, on a $38 million production budget.

Sixteen years later, the series has become more of a behemoth than even that initial success would have suggested. The latest two entries, Fast & Furious 6 and Furious 7, boasted production budgets bigger than the first film’s total domestic earnings, clocking in at $160 million and $190 million, respectively. The series is now one of Hollywood’s most reliable moneymakers: The most recent, Furious 7, made $1.5 billion at the global box office by itself — the vast majority from foreign sources — and expectations for this week’s installment, The Fate of the Furious, are similar.

·        Fast and Furious 8: five things to understand regarding The Fate of the Furious

As the series has grown in scope, so have its signature car-themed action sequences, the small-scale street racing of the original giving way to increasingly epic and implausible vehicular spectacles that have defined the franchise and helped cement its international appeal.

At this point, you can trace the evolution of both the franchise and Hollywood’s business model through the progression of the series’ action sequences — and see the trade-offs that moviemakers have made as their audience goes global.

·        The modest origins of The quick and also the Furious

When the series began, it was working with a relatively modest budget, and it was targeted at a mostly American audience: young men steeped in, or at least aware of, contemporary car madding and street racing culture. And the action scenes reflected that.

The first quick & Furious picture opens with an evening athletics sequence that sets the tone for the whole motion picture. It’s set on the streets of Los Angeles, where modern-day hot-rudders have gathered for an illegal street race. The opening moments, before the cars take off, emphasize the community aspect of the race and offer a glamorized depiction of the culture and the participants — which is to say, a flattering view of the target audience.

It conjointly offers an equally adulatory read of the objects of their obsession, their souped-up, home-mudded cars. In this scene and throughout the movie, the cars are polished and brightly colored so that they stand out in the frame. While they idle at the starting line, director Rob Cohen cuts in for a close-up of the tailpipes spitting fire as the vehicles prepare to cross the starting line. Once the race begins, he cuts into shots of gears being shifted and pedals being pressed, glancing at the ever-so-serious faces of the drivers as they make their moves.

From there, Cohen takes us inside the cars themselves, tracking their inner workings as they burst off the line. These shots consider computer-generated effects to require viewers within the vehicle so as to emphasize the vehicle’s power and performance. This sequence, and in some sense the entire movie, is about fetishizing hardware.

As the race continues, the scene takes some impressionistic turns, showing, for example, the warped view of a city street from the perspective of a driver going 140 miles per hour. But the cars themselves operate in a way that is essentially carlike, doing the sorts of things that viewers understand cars can actually do. It’s not documentary-real, but it’s more or less grounded in a sense of traditional physical reality, and the scene itself is set in a place designed evoke a real culture and a real place.

The same goes for a climactic chase sequence that pits the film’s two street racing leads, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), against a pair of bikers who have simply taken out a member of Toretto’s crew.

Once again, the scene is not strictly realistic — you don’t often encounter hot rods chasing automatic-weapon-toting bikers through a major urban area — but it seems more or less aware of the laws of physics, and generally willing to abide by them. The impetus for the scene, meanwhile, is a drive-by shooting that bears at least some small likeness to real-life urban gang warfare, albeit with more than a touch of Hollywood melodrama.

The film and its action scenes, in alternative words, were set in an exceedingly explicit place, among a selected cluster of individuals, in an exceeding world that resembled, a minimum of in some basic fashion, our own.