When we think of the biggest movie franchises, generally it's stuff like Marvel, Harry Potter, Star Wars, DC, James Bond--mainstream pop culture around the world, spanning generations. One property that should be in that conversation of the Fast & Furious movies. Amazingly, the Fast & Furious franchise is the sixth biggest movie series of all time in terms of worldwide box office receipts--and there's at least one more movie to come.
It's astonishing, because no one could have guessed we'd end up here during the early days. The first four movies in the series combined to gross just under a billion dollars at the global box office. It's a great total considering all of them had sub-$100 million budgets, but not much of an indication of what would come next: The seven Fast & Furious movies we've gotten since, starting with Fast Five and including the Hobbs & Shaw spinoff, have earned a combined $6 billion worldwide. It's a completely unique track record for a franchise that isn't based on any existing beloved IP--that extremely rare blockbuster movie franchise that's popular on its merits.
We're now 11 movies deep, including a spin-off movie starring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham, video games, a Netflix animated series, and more. Still, what's being labeled the final movie in the main series is series due in 2026. So you've got plenty of time to rewatch this whole epic car saga before then--and you absolutely should, because this series is one of a kind. Scroll on to find out the best place to stream each Fast & Furious flick.
The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Where to stream: Tubi
It's funny to remember that when The Fast and the Furious first came out, it was mocked as just being a car-based ripoff of Point Break. Which is true, honestly--this is the story of LAPD cop Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker) infiltrating the truck hijacker #family of Dominic Torretto (Vin Diesel) and developing a lifelong LA bromance in the process. In a vacuum it's kinda a meh film, but it improves once you come back to it after watching the others--when you really care about what happens to Brian and Dom, The Fast and the Furious hits different.
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
Where to stream: Tubi
Vin Diesel opted out of this sequel, and instead we get the adventures of Brian and his childhood pal Roman (Tyrese Gibson) in Miami, where US Customs forces them to go undercover with a Cuban cartel run by Yellowstone star Cole Hauser. It's a pretty sloppily edited film, but this is the one where the series found its identity largely thanks to Tyrese's and Hauser's delightfully unhinged performances, not to mention the extra-long climactic chase sequence that involved a hundred-car scramble and concluded when Brian ramps his car from land onto a yacht that's moving down a river. It's not as pretty as the big stunts they do in later movies when they had budgets over $200 million, but it's still my favorite stunt in the series.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
Where to stream: Tubi
It's hard to figure out what Universal was trying to do with this film. Without any returning cast members from the first two, aside from a two-second cameo by Diesel, Tokyo Drift had the air of a DTV sequel that was released in theaters by accident. It's got a pretty solid saving grace, though: The first of these directed by franchise stalwart Justin Lin is a good freakin' movie, pretty much functioning as a car-based Karate Kid. Here we've got Sean Boswell, a redneck white boy from Alabama who's sent to live in Tokyo with his military dad after he totals his car in a high school street race. There he hooks up with Han, another American living in exile who's involved with some yakuza dealings, and things get really heavy really quickly. In a very real way, this was the movie that saved the franchise, even while it had the lowest box-office take of all the movies.
While this one was the third movie released in the series, it's actually seventh in chronological order--Han was so popular that they just kept bringing him back.
Fast & Furious (2009)
Where to stream: Tubi
After Tokyo Drift, Universal decided to move forward more earnestly, reuniting Walker and Diesel in what amounts to a direct sequel to the first movie, with Tokyo Drift director Justin Lin returning. So Dom is in Mexico still hiding from the law, but he comes back to LA when he hears that his longtime girlfriend, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), was murdered by drug runners while working undercover for Brian, who is once again a cop. So Brian and Dom cooperate uneasily to infiltrate the cartel responsible, and eventually they have to invade Mexico to get their revenge. I enjoy this one, but others find it grating because it's overly serious like the original movie was--but with Lin behind the camera, it's a much better movie, so I don't mind the tone.
Fast Five (2011)
Where to stream: Tubi
It's here that Fast & Furious turned into the franchise we know today. After Brian and Dom's sister Mia break Dom out of prison, they all go on the run until they end up in Brazil--where they naturally have to do some car-based crimes so they can eat. All the while they're caught between the local crime lord and Hobbs, a US government agent played by Dwayne Johnson in full heel mode. So what do they do? They call in a bunch of supporting characters from the previous movies, including Tyrese, Ludacris, Gal Gadot, Don Omar, Tego Calderon and, of course, Sung Kang's Han. The final sequence, in which Brian and Dom have to pull a huge vault safe in tandem through the streets of Rio--is an all timer.
Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
Where to stream: Tubi
I've always had an excess of affection for this one, in which our group of heroes basically become car-based superheroes who have to go up against up against essentially the dark versions of themselves: a crew of amazing drivers who don't care about each other and whose boss (Luke Evans) is happy to get rid of any of them he deems expendable--and Letty, who we thought was dead for the past two movies, is on that team. It's also the last one of these that Paul Walker was in all the way through, since he would die a year later during production on Furious 7, so there's a big element of nostalgia involved as well. It's not the best of these movies, but it feels like the end of something even so. The franchise still hasn't really recovered from Walker's death, and Lin's exit from the franchise after this film didn't help either.
Furious 7 (2015)
Where to stream: Max
Furious 7 is actually the biggest movie of the franchise, and the biggest movie of all of 2015 outside the US--its foreign-box-office total actually beat that of The Force Awakens, which is astonishing to think about. It made some sense--Walker's death was shocking, and this would be his last movie. Without those raw emotions, though, Furious 7 is pretty hard to watch, especially in the later action sequences when Brian is clearly being played by Walker's non-actor brother. Director James Wan does what he can, though, and Furious 7 is worth watching just for the incredible Azerbaijan car-skydiving sequence, which was filmed before Walker died.
The Fate of the Furious (2017)
Where to stream: Prime Video rent/buy
Straight Outta Compton director F Gary Gray took over for the first Fast/Furious without Paul Walker, and it turned the franchise on its head by having new villain Cipher (Charlize Theron) force Dom to do her bidding by kidnapping his ex-girlfriend and secret baby son that he didn't know about. This, in turn, forces all of Dom's #family to fight him.
This one caught tons of flack for giving Jason Statham's character a chance to redeem himself after he was revealed to have murdered Han in Tokyo Drift, but that never bothered me because his redemption task is suitably difficult and heroic--and also because the film lays it on thick with the "Dom turns enemies into #family" thing from the start. But Fate is also a good movie because it actually successfully changed up the franchise formula in a fun way. That's not easy to do this far into a series--as evidenced by all the movies that came after this one.
Fast & Furious Presents Hobbs & Shaw
Where to stream: Prime Video rent/buy
This spin-off from director David Leitch came about as a result of a feud between Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel, with Johnson and, for some reason, franchise screenwriter Chris Morgan, being exiled to this spin-off. The action is legitimately dope, and Idris Elba is always a great villain, but nothing about this movie makes any sense at all--Hobbs and Shaw became BFFs over the course of The Fate of the Furious, but they start this movie hating each other again with no explanation, and it never gets any more coherent after that. But if you're just here for action nonsense, Hobbs & Shaw will do it for you.
F9: The Fast Saga (2021)
Where to stream: Prime Video rent/buy
There's a really interesting idea here, going deep into Dom's past through flashbacks like it's Fast & Furious trying to pull a Godfather II. Unfortunately, the particulars of the story are pretty hinky, and it's a little bit too late in the franchise to introduce Dom and Mia's secret brother (John Cena) who no one has ever mentioned or hinted at--much less make him the villain. The action is still pretty good, especially the giant magnet stuff during the final big chase, but there are fewer brain cells than usual in this one.
Fast X (2023)
Where to stream: Prime Video
The son (Jason Momoa) of the baddie from Fast Five is here to be the most ridiculous person imaginable and cause a whole lot of carnage in the process. While Momoa himself is a delight, new director Louis Leterrier's aesthetic is overly cartoonish, and the story just flails around randomly--Cipher and Letty basically have their own separate movie going on and they never participate in the main plot or interact with the other main characters, the big twist is an out-of-left-field rehash of Fast & Furious 6, and it has what could be the most nonsensical cliffhanger anybody's seen in a cinema since they were running weekly serials a hundred years ago. It's the kind of thing you should probably see once just because it's so outrageous, but it's not a good movie.
How to Watch the Fast & Furious Movies in Order of Story Timeline
While, for the most part, the Fast & Furious films have been released in order of where they are set in the timeline, there's one massive exception. The third movie, Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift, was retroactively moved in continuity to actually happen after the events of Fast & Furious 6.
With that in mind, if you're dipping into the franchise for the first time and want to experience the series in storyline order, follow our guide below. That said, chances are we will still be watching them in release order. However you watch, there is no bad way to experience this series of movies.
The Fast and the Furious movie timeline
- The Fast and the Furious
- 2 Fast 2 Furious
- Fast & Furious
- Fast Five
- Fast & Furious 6
- The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
- Furious 7
- The Fate of the Furious
- Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
- F9: The Fast Saga
- Fast X
