The first movie is NOT The Fast and the Furious
Considering how long the Fast & Furious movies series has been going, it can be a bit daunting to try to get into it now, especially since there's some timeline funkiness thanks toPaul Walker's tragic and untimely death, plus the spinoff movie and another flick that you probably didn't even realize was Fast & Furious canon. But we'll help you get started on watching all of the Fast & Furious movies in order.
The Fast & Furious movie series began, withThe Fast and the Furiousin 2001, as a mid-budget car-racing franchise for its first four movies before emerging as a cultural powerhouse with 2011'sFast Five. These days, the action movies starring Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jason Statham, and more are as firmly embedded in our cultural consciousness as the Marvel and Star Wars franchises after churning out one massive box office hit after another.
There's no secret to this series' success — it blew up thanks to its dope action sequences and its authentic and appealing sentimentality, and the fact that it's easily the most diverse blockbuster franchise of all time certainly helped. Read on to discover the definitive timeline order for this venerable franchise.
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1.Better Luck Tomorrow(2002)
Whoa, whoa, whoa. The first movie on this list isn't the one that supposedly started it all,The Fast and the Furious? Yep, but let us explain. It's not an official Fast & Furious movie, but this 2002 indie drama focuses on a group of Asian-American teens in Orange County who use their cover as straight-A students to get into a life of crime, and it serves as the origin story for Sung Kang's Han, one of the most popular characters in the Fast & Furious franchise who made his official F&F debut in 2006's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Retroactively incorporating it into F&F canon was inevitable as it was directed by Justin Lin, who also served in that role for five Fast & Furious movies, and it even name dropped The Fast and the Furious in the trailer around the one-minute mark. Since Han is in high school during this movie, it has to take place before any of the Fast & Furious flicks.
Since it's not really a car movie, you may be tempted to skip it. But you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you did that, because Better Luck Tomorrow, with its groundbreaking depiction of an underrepresented group and character-driven storytelling, is the best film on this list.
Metacritic score: 67
2.The Fast and the Furious(2001)
Paul Walker is Brian O'Connor, an undercover cop investigating highway big rig robberies. Vin Diesel is Dominic Toretto, the guy masterminding the robberies. And, obviously, they become best friends and things get pretty complicated. Folks used to make fun of this one for being a Point Break ripoff, but now it's the nicely grounded starting point for what would end up becoming Hollywood's most unhinged long-term movie franchise. Today, everything about this flick feels like the low-rent version of what comes later — this one had a budget of only $40 million, a tiny fraction of the $300-plus million that Universal would spend on Fast X decades later. But that sort of gritty cheapness is part of the appeal these days, a bit of counterprogramming against the excess of the later movies in this franchise.
Metacritic score: 58
3. 2 Fast 2 Furious(2003)
John Singleton directed the franchise's first sequel, which swapped Diesel and sunny Los Angeles for Tyrese Gibson and sunny Miami, and it's the most sloppily made movie in this series. But that doesn't mean it's bad or not fun — quite the contrary. 2 Fast 2 Furious is actually the movie that defined what kind of series this would be in the long run by significantly lightening the tone and giving us one of the franchise's most entertaining villains, played by Yellowstone's Cole Hauser. And the climactic stunt, in which Walker has to ramp a muscle car from land onto a yacht that's floating down a river, set the standard for the sort of ridiculous stunts that the franchise is known for.
Metacritic score: 38
4. (2009)
Here's when things get a little tricky. Despite being the fourth movie in the F&F franchise (if you don't count Better Luck Tomorrow), it's actually the third movie to watch if you're looking to view the movies in chronological order within the Fast & Furious cinematic universe, as it's set before the events of 2006'sTokyo Drift. This flick re-centered Fast & Furious as a franchise by bringing back Diesel and directly following up on the events of the first movie after the side stories we got with 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift. It's also the last movie in the series to have a budget under $100 million, which resulted in some dodgy CGI during the final chase through tunnels beneath the US-Mexico border. But if you can look past that relatively minor issue, Fast & Furious is a great bridge from the franchise's humble beginnings to the juggernaut it would become with Fast Five.
Metacritic score: 46
5. Fast Five(2011)
The fifth movie in the series is also its biggest escalation, incorporating Ludacris and Tyrese from 2 Fast 2 Furious, Sung Kang from Tokyo Drift, and Gal Gadot, Don Omar, and Tego Calderón from Fast & Furious into the core ensemble — not to mention the addition of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the U.S. government agent hunting them in Brazil — in order to pull off a heist that ended with Walker's Brian O'Conner and Diesel's Dom Toretto tandem-towing a massive vault full of money through the streets of Rio de Janeiro. For most folks, Fast Five is where this franchise became A Thing — director Justin Lin used the massively increased budget on this one verywisely, and you can see every dollar on the screen. Universal Pictures saw lots of dollars, too; the film made more than $600 million worldwide.
Metacritic score: 66
6. (2013)
As a long-time fan of this series — I ran a Fast/Furious fan blog in college well before Fast Five made these movies cool in a mainstream way — Fast & Furious 6 is my personal fave of all of these flicks, balancing the now-massive ensemble perfectly by giving every single character crucial roles to play throughout, something that wasn't really true with Fast Five. It's also got the nice gimmick of having our heroes face off against what's essentially an evil version of their group, which is funny, and it has the decency to bring a previously dead character (Michelle Rodriguez's Letty) back to life, giving her amnesia, and putting her in that evil squad. Now that'sa personal conflict we can care about.
You could also argue that this one features the silliest chase sequence of the franchise during the climax, when our heroes are chasing an airplane down a runway that has to be a couple dozen miles in length considering how long the sequence goes on for.
It's hard not to dream about how things would have gone for this series if Paul Walker hadn't died during production on Furious 7, and for me that dream involves a bunch more sequels that are just as good as this one. Alas.
Metacritic score: 61
7. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift(2006)
The third movie in the series to be released didn't include any characters from the previous movies aside from a brief Vin Diesel cameo at the very end. But this mid-budget, car-themed Karate Kid-type story about a redneck teenager from Alabama getting into the Tokyo street racing scene is an outstanding little fish-out-of-water movie in its own right, full of great characters whose motivations are easy to relate to.
While it functioned like a spinoff when it first hit theaters in 2006, Tokyo Drift would become a key franchise piece over time thanks to the popularity of Sung Kang's Han. But because Han "dies" in this movie — it's later revealed that he faked his death — the powers-that-be created a trilogy (Fast & Furious through Fast & Furious 6) set before Tokyo Drift that kept bumping it back in the timeline in order to keep using Han until it ended up here, between the sixth and seventh movies — even though everyone in this one is, hilariously, still using a flip phone.
Metacritic score: 45
8. Furious 7(2015)
Furious 7 is a tough movie to talk about, because Paul Walker died in an automobile accident midway through production, sparking massive rewrites and reshoots involving Walker's brother that aren't that convincing. When it first came out, it was very tough to evaluate because of that immense emotional baggage — a lot of us couldn't help but get caught up in our feels about it. Now that the shock of Walker's death has faded and we can see this movie more clearly, it's a little bit hard to watch. Having to shoot half your movie after one of your franchise co-leads died was an impossible task.
But director James Wan is such a master of his craft that Furious 7does still manage to have some of the series' best action sequences — in particular the one where the team has to skydive in their cars onto a winding mountain road and then engage in a lengthy vehicular battle against famed martial artist Tony Jaa. Oh yeah, there's also the one where Dom jumps a supercar between skyscrapers in Dubai. Furious 7 is messy, but there's still plenty to like — and the tribute to Walker at the end still draws a tear from my eye every time.
Metacritic score: 67
9. The Fate of the Furious(2017)
Charlize Theron's Cipher shows up in Cuba to force Dom to betray his friends by holding his ex-girlfriend and secret son hostage, and large parts of this flick involve the core ensemble fighting againstthe franchise's now-lone main character. While all of the Fast & Furious movies since Paul Walker's death have been extra messy and lacking something, Straight Outta Compton director F Gary Gray delivered a remarkably energetic movie that actually hits just about every franchise note correctly.
Not everybody liked that Jason Statham's character was able to earn redemption after killing Han, but this OG fan disagrees:his airplane baby rescue sequence is one of the series' most memorable scenes, and I've always felt like it was a suitably heroic and difficult deed. And after Han was resurrected in the next movie, the whole discussion was rendered moot anyway, so it's even easier to enjoy everything that F8 has to offer now.
Metacritic score: 56
10. (2019)
A well-publicized feud between Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson led to the pair sharing almost no screen time in The Fate of the Furious, and then Johnson being sent to his own spinoff movie with Statham and Idris Elba as the villain. Hobbs & Shaw comes from John Wick and Atomic Blonde director David Leitch, so you know it's kinetic as hell and the action is very well put together.
The problem, though, is that The Rock just isn't that good as a leading man these days — Hobbs is much better as a supporting character — and his kiss with Vanessa Kirby near the end of the film is so obscenely unconvincing that it's actually hilarious. Hobbs & Shaw isn't a badmovie, but it also doesn't do much to justify its own existence. If you're just here for the action, though, it's a solid pick.
Metacritic score: 60
11. F9: The Fast Saga(2021)
After Furious 7 and The Fate of the Furious were handled by other directors, Justin Lin returned to the helm of the franchise he helped elevate a decade earlier. But, frankly, this movie just has too much going on. We've got John Cena playing Dom's villainous secret brother Jakob, who gets a bunch of lengthy black-and-white flashback scenes to explain why he's out to get Dom and why we've never heard of him before, and on top of that we've got the return of Han, who had actually just faked his own death in Tokyo Drift for reasons that require far too much explanation and don't really make sense. The action is still good, at least — in particular, the use of a high-powered magnet truck causes all sorts of delightful mayhem, and Tyrese and Ludacris get to go to outer space (!!!) during the climax — but, honestly, F9 was the first time I'd ever watched a new Fast & Furious movie and wondered why we're still doing this.
Metacritic score: 58
12. Fast X(2023)
Jason Momoa, playing the son of Fast Five's villain, is a delightfully unhinged new baddie, like if Cole Hauser's character from 2 Fast did too much co*ke and headbutted a brick wall. But despite Momoa's efforts, Fast X is a pretty bad movie. Director Louis Leterrier relies far too much on sketchy CGI — it frequently looks like a Marvel TV show that was shot cheaply on a CGI soundstage — and it ends on quite possibly the most ridiculous cliffhanger in the history of cinema. In another life I might find that funny. But after caring about this franchise far more than I should have, for decades, I'm just exhausted.
Metacritic score: 56
