Top Gear: Back in the Fast Lane

Fast & Furious (formerly known as The Fast and the Furious) is an American action media franchise centered on a series of films revolving around street racing, heists, and spies. The franchise also includes short films, a television series, toys, video games, live shows, theme park and museum attractions. The films are distributed by Universal Pictures. The first film, based on the 1998 Vibe magazine article "Racer X" by Ken Li and written by Gary Scott Thompson, Erik Bergquist, and David Ayer, was released in 2001. The first four films focused on illegal street racing, culminating in Fast & Furious (2009). The series moved towards heists and espionage with Fast Five (2011), which was followed by five further films in that genre. An eleventh and final film, Fast Forever, is set to be released in 2028. Universal expanded the franchise with the short films The Turbo Charged Prelude for 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) and Los Bandoleros (2009) and the spin-off film Hobbs & Shaw (2019), while its subsidiary DreamWorks Animation followed this with the six-season animated streaming television series Fast & Furious Spy Racers (2019–2021). Soundtrack albums have been released for all the films, as well as compilation albums containing existing music heard in the films. The series has been commercially successful. It is Universal's biggest franchise and the eighth highest-grossing film series, with a combined gross of over $7 billion. Critical reception of the franchise has been mixed, though the fifth through seventh entries have been more positively received.