Full-Throttle Franchise

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) *
Full-ThrottleFranchise interrogates an exciting and timely range of questions raised by the Fast & Furious franchise, which as editors Joshua Gulam, Fraser Elliott and Sarah Feinstein note, has reflected many cultural and film industry shifts of the last decades and stands distinctly apart from them as well. Read and learn! * Mary Beltrán, Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin, USA *
This expansive collection, meticulously conceived and rigorously edited, examines a franchise that is both an exemplar of current trends in the franchise era and a unique transmedia property that has triumphed against the odds. Beginning with a comprehensive and enlightening introduction, the various chapters go on to cover a range of perspectives that are all central to the success and longevity of the saga, including the action genre and sequences, racial politics and ideology, stardom and authorship, masculinity, and extratextual properties. The scope and precision of the collection is breathtaking, positioning itself as the essential study into the Fast Saga and a robust addition to the ‘family’ of contemporary Hollywood scholarship. * Julie Lobalzo Wright, Assistant Professor in Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick, UK *