The ‘Fast and Furious’ Movies Ranked: From Street Racing to ‘Mission-In-Freaking-Sanity’

When The Fast and the Furious hit cinemas in 2001, it was a fairly straightforward movie about street racing in Los Angeles and living life a quarter mile at a time. The biggest stunt involved racing a train. The biggest crime involved stealing DVD players from trucks.

Twenty-five years later, the same franchise has launched a car into space, fought cyber-terrorists and turned Dominic Toretto into something dangerously close to a vehicular superhero.

With the Fast & Furious 25th Anniversary Exhibition bringing some of the series’ most famous cars together, we decided to look back at the films themselves, ranking them from the ones that still cared about street racing to the ones that clearly decided physics was optional.

If you’re planning a full rewatch, we’ve also mapped out the full Fast & Furious timeline in chronological order further down.

The 25th Anniversary of Fast & Furious

Looking back now, it’s almost hard to believe these movies started as small street racing dramas.

The early films were about modified imports, underground garages and late-night races through Los Angeles. Now the crew are globe-trotting operatives launching rocket cars into orbit and saving the world between family barbecues.

Somewhere along the way, Fast & Furious stopped pretending to be realistic and just leaned into the chaos. And honestly, that’s probably the best decision it has ever made. So without further ado, let’s get ranking…

The ‘Fast and Furious’ Films, Ranked

11. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

The first official spin-off of the series pairs Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham as reluctant partners, sending Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw on a globe-trotting mission that leans even further into the franchise’s action-movie absurdity.

The villain this time is Brixton Lore, played by Idris Elba, a cybernetically enhanced super-soldier who calls himself “Black Superman.” It’s the kind of line that tells you exactly what sort of movie this is going to be.

We also end up in Samoa for a huge family showdown involving Hobbs’ extended relatives, including one of The Rock’s real-life cousins, WWE’s Roman Reigns. The climax is… a lot. Sorry, my Tribal Chief.

The scene you remember: Hobbs and Shaw chaining together a convoy of trucks to stop Brixton’s helicopter in mid-air. Yeah, the franchise clearly forgot what subtlety means. 

Available to stream on: Stan, Netflix, Binge, Foxtel, Prime Video

10. Fast X (2023)

By the time Fast X rolls around, the franchise is essentially running on pure spectacle. The tenth instalment in the story splinters across multiple locations and characters as the series starts building toward its long-promised finale.

The real highlight is Jason Momoa, who arrives as Dante Reyes, the vengeful son of the Rio drug lord from Fast Five (the series loves introducing surprise family members). Thankfully, Momoa plays the role like he’s having the time of his life, turning Dante into a flamboyant, scene-stealing villain who already knows: “You love a good villian.”

Beyond that, it’s hard not to ignore the film’s blemishes that come courtesy of the more depth-defying stunts. You can only hold your belief for so long before you start dismissing the stunts altogether.

The scene you remember: A giant rolling bomb tearing through the streets of Rome while Dom races to stop it, turning the city into a high-speed demolition course.

Available to rent on: Amazon Prime, Apple TV and YouTube

9. F9: The Fast Saga (2021)

If the earlier films slowly pushed the boundaries of what these movies could get away with, F9 simply stops asking the question. In the ninth film, Dom is suddenly revealed to have a long-lost brother, Jakob, played by John Cena, a master driver who somehow grew up in the same house but never came up in conversation before now (probably because we couldn’t see him).

Honestly, things get so ridiculous, it’s as if the filmmakers are daring someone to stop them.

The scene you remember: Roman and Tej strapping a rocket to a Pontiac Fiero and launching themselves into orbit, proving that the series had officially run out of road and decided “We’re going to space.“

Available to stream on: Foxtel Now, Stan, and Binge

8. The Fate of the Furious (2017)

The franchise has officially embraced its spy-movie phase. Dom’s crew are no longer just pulling heists or chasing criminals; they’re dealing with cyber-terrorists, nuclear weapons and Charlize Theron, who arrives as hacker mastermind Cipher with a plan to turn Dom against his own team.

It’s also the film that gave us one of the franchise’s more memorable behind-the-scenes dramas. During production, Dwayne Johnson famously took to Instagram to complain about certain male co-stars behaving like “candy asses”, a comment widely believed to be aimed at Vin Diesel. The tension reportedly got so bad the two actors filmed many of their scenes separately.

The scene you remember: A swarm of hacked cars raining down the streets of New York as Cipher turns the city into a remote-controlled demolition derby.

Available to stream on: Foxtel Now, Stan, and Binge

7. Furious 7 (2015)

If Fast & Furious 6 nudged the series toward full blockbuster territory, Furious 7 floors the accelerator. Jason Statham arrives as Deckard Shaw, the older brother of Owen Shaw and a one-man wrecking crew determined to settle the score with Dom’s team.

The scale jumps again, sending the crew across the globe on a mix of special-forces missions, high-end supercars, and increasingly improbable stunts. It’s also the film that doubles down on the franchise’s core idea that Dom doesn’t have friends, he has family, culminating in the final appearance of Paul Walker as Brian O’Conner and an ending that lands far better than anyone probably expected.

The scene you remember: The Lykan HyperSport blasting through not one, not two, but three skyscrapers in Abu Dhabi. It’s completely absurd, but by this point, the series is just trying to outdo itself.

Available to stream on: Stan, Netflix, Binge and Foxtel

6. Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

At this stage, the franchise has stopped pretending these are just street racers. If you ignore the opening montage of scenes from previous films, Fast & Furious 6 leans fully into the action blockbuster formula introduced in Fast Five, with Dom’s crew now working alongside Luke Hobbs to track down a mercenary driver played by Luke Evans.

Somehow still alive, Letty, played by Michelle Rodriguez, returns with amnesia (because of course she does), and she’s coming for Dom. It’s a soap opera twist, but the series commits to it with impressive confidence.

“Ride or die. Remember?”

The scene you remember: Dom catching Letty mid-air after she’s launched from a tank explosion during a highway chase (I remember the entire cinema bursting out laughing at this one). Physics be damned. Oh, and the runway that follows appears to be roughly the length of Western Europe.

Available to stream on: Foxtel Now, Stan, and Binge

5. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

Tokyo Drift takes the franchise outside of the United States for the Far East, swapping LA’s drag strips for Tokyo’s underground drifting scene. Instead of straight-line street races, the film leans into mountain roads, neon-lit car parks and a racing style built around sliding sideways through corners at speed.

It also introduces one of the franchise’s most beloved characters: Han, played by Sung Kang, whose calm, snack-fuelled approach to life makes him instantly cooler than everyone else on screen. Oh, and Lil Bow Wow is here, too, to explain that DK doesn’t mean Donkey Kong.

The scene you remember: The mountain drift race through Tokyo’s winding roads, where the film finally shows what drifting looks like when it’s done properly. And of course, American muscle always wins.

Available to stream on: Foxtel Now, Stan, and Binge

4. Fast & Furious (2009)

“You don’t turn your back on family.”

After sitting out 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift, Vin Diesel returns to the franchise in Fast & Furious, reuniting the original cast and pushing the story further into crime thriller territory (and officially abandoning any logical naming system).

Street racing is still there, but the focus shifts to high-speed smuggling runs through desert tunnels and a darker storyline involving Letty.

This is also where Dom suddenly seems to possess superhuman abilities related to cars. Out of nowhere, he’s able to reconstruct Letty’s crash in his mind just by studying tyre marks and debris like some sort of street-racing clairvoyant. 

The scene you remember: The opening oil tanker heist, where Dom’s crew hijack a convoy along a mountain road using modified cars and a lot of very questionable physics. The CGI explosion hasn’t aged perfectly, but the stunt still sets the tone for where the series is heading.

Available to stream on: Foxtel Now, Stan, and Binge

3. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

With Dom on the run, 2 Fast 2 Furious shifts the action to Miami and follows Brian O’Conner trying to rebuild his life through street racing. The film leans heavily into the early-2000s tuner scene, where every car is brighter, louder and fitted with more neon than strictly necessary.

It also introduces two characters who stick around for most of the franchise. Tyrese Gibson arrives as Roman Pearce, Brian’s fast-talking childhood friend, while Chris “Ludacris” Bridges plays Tej, the mechanic and race organiser who quickly becomes the crew’s technical brain (and Ja Rule’s replacement).

Together, they get pulled into a high-stakes job that, unsurprisingly, relies on very fast cars and even faster driving. They even pull a stunt straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard / Starsky & Hutch by landing a car on a yacht.

The scene you remember: The garage doors flying open as dozens of brightly coloured cars swarm the streets of Miami, overwhelming the police in one of the franchise’s most chaotic street racing moments.

And who doesn’t love “Ejecto seato, cuz!”

Available to stream on: Foxtel Now, Stan, and Binge

2. The Fast and the Furious (2001)

Before the submarines, secret agents and rocket cars, The Fast and the Furious was a surprisingly simple story about street racing in Los Angeles and living your life a “quarter mile at a time.” Yes, it’s been called Point Break with turbochargers, but the underground racing scene, modified imports and late-night garage culture give the film an authenticity the later movies never really try to recreate.

Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner starts the film as an undercover LAPD officer investigating a string of high-speed truck hijackings, but the closer he gets to Dom Toretto’s crew, the harder it becomes to tell which side he’s actually on. Vin Diesel plays Dom with quiet intensity, surrounded by the core characters who would keep returning to the franchise for years to come, including Michelle Rodriguez as Letty and Jordana Brewster as Dom’s sister Mia.

The scene you remember: Dom and Brian racing the train in Dom’s black Dodge Charger and Brian’s green Mitsubishi Eclipse. It’s the moment that defines the film: pure early-2000s street racing adrenaline, with Dom pushing his car past the limit just to prove the point.

Available to stream on: Foxtel Now, Stan, and Binge

1. Fast Five (2011)

“This shit just went from mission: impossible to mission: in freaking sanity!“

This is the moment the series finally figured out what it wanted to be (and that saved the franchise from going into ‘straight to DVD’ territory).

Instead of trying to keep the street-racing formula alive, Fast Five pivots into a full-blown heist movie. The crew assembles for the first time, Rio becomes the playground, and Dwayne Johnson arrives as federal agent Luke Hobbs. 

The inevitable showdown between Dom and Hobbs in a safehouse fight is less choreography and more two human bulldozers smashing each other through furniture while the rest of the crew wisely keeps their distance. Just don’t say who won.

The scene you remember: Dom and Brian dragging a giant bank vault through the streets of Rio using two Dodge Charger police cars, smashing half the city in the process. It’s ridiculous, inventive and somehow still grounded enough that you believe the crew might actually pull it off.

Available to stream on: Foxtel Now, Stan, and Binge

Fast & Furious Films By The Numbers

The Fast & Furious franchise (aka The Fast Saga) has undergone one of the most drastic evolutions in cinema history—starting as a niche street-racing series and transforming into a billion-dollar global espionage juggernaut.

Fast & Furious Movies Ranked by Box Office Rankings

Rank	Film	Year	Worldwide Gross
1	Furious 7	2015	$1.515 Billion
2	The Fate of the Furious	2017	$1.236 Billion
3	Fast & Furious 6	2013	$788.7 Million
4	Hobbs & Shaw	2019	$760.7 Million
5	F9: The Fast Saga	2021	$726.2 Million
6	Fast X	2023	$704.8 Million
7	Fast Five	2011	$626.1 Million
8	Fast & Furious	2009	$360.4 Million
9	2 Fast 2 Furious	2003	$236.4 Million
10	The Fast and the Furious	2001	$207.3 Million
11	The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift	2006	$158.9 Million

Scroll horizontally to view full table

And here’s what the experts (you) say, according to the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer:

Fast & Furious Movies Ranked by Tomatometer score

Rank	Film	Year	Tomatometer	Critic Consensus Summary
1	Furious 7	2015	81%	Praised for its emotional tribute to Paul Walker and peak action scale.
2	Fast Five	2011	78%	The “Fresh” turning point; hailed for reinventing the series as a heist film.
3	Fast & Furious 6	2013	71%	Viewed as a successful continuation of the Fast Five blockbuster formula.
4	The Fate of the Furious	2017	67%	Mixed but “Fresh”; praised for cast chemistry despite the “superhero” turn.
5	Hobbs & Shaw	2019	67%	Critics enjoyed the chemistry between Johnson and Statham as a buddy-cop riff.
6	F9: The Fast Saga	2021	59%	Rotten. Critics felt the “space” jump and physics-defying stunts finally went too far.
7	Fast X	2023	56%	Rotten. Jason Momoa’s performance was a highlight, but the story felt bloated.
8	The Fast and the Furious	2001	55%	Rotten. Originally dismissed as a “point break” clone with cars; seen better in hindsight.
9	Tokyo Drift	2006	38%	Rotten. Panned at release for lack of original cast, though now a cult favorite.
10	2 Fast 2 Furious	2003	37%	Rotten. Criticized for being “too silly” and lacking the grit of the original.
11	Fast & Furious	2009	28%	Rotten. The lowest-rated; critics felt the reunion was wasted on a dull plot.

Scroll horizontally to view full table

Fast and Furious Franchise in Chronological Order

If you’re planning a full rewatch, the Fast & Furious timeline isn’t quite as straightforward as its release order suggests. Between short films, spin-offs and one very important detour to Tokyo, here’s how the story actually fits together.

1. Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) (optional prequel/spin-off)
2. The Fast and the Furious (2001)
3. Turbo-Charged Prelude (2003) (short film)
4. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
5. Los Bandoleros (2009) (short film)
6. Fast & Furious (2009)
7. Fast Five (2011)
8. Fast & Furious 6 (2013) (skip the post-credits scene if it’s your first time)
9. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
10. Furious 7 (2015)
11. The Fate of the Furious (2017)
12. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) (spin-off)
13. F9: The Fast Saga (2021)
14. Fast X (2023)

Tokyo Drift might be the third film released, but it actually takes place later in the timeline. Watching it after Fast & Furious 6 makes the story flow properly (even if it does retcon F&F history), especially if you’re going in fresh.

There are a few additional pieces that sit around the edges of the main Fast & Furious story:

• Los Bandoleros – fills in what Dom was doing before Fast & Furious (2009)
• Turbo-Charged Prelude – bridges Brian’s story between the first two films
• Fast & Furious: Spy Racers (2019–2021) – animated series set loosely within the same world
• Fast & Furious: Showdown (2013) and Crossroads (2020) – game tie-ins, not essential

Upcoming projects like Hobbs (TBA) and future Fast & Furious sequels will continue the story beyond Fast X.

Common questions about the Fast & Furious franchise