How to Watch ‘The Fast and the Furious’ Movies in Order
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Think all the way back to the year 2001. Snapple still came in glass bottles. Corona was not yet usurped by hard seltzer as the easygoing drink of the summer. Rapper Ja Rule was “Livin’ It Up ” on the Billboard charts — and on movie screens. And The Fast and the Furious, a little Point Break homage about street-racing thieves and the adrenaline-seeking FBI agent who goes undercover to catch them, beat the odds to be one of the highest-grossing movies of the summer.
Who could’ve known that movie would spawn a series that, more than 20 years later, would be the second-longest-running continuous, non-rebooted, not-recast franchise? (It’s second only to the Mission: Impossible movies, which has been around longer but has fewer entries.) And that those lowly street-racers would go on to race around the Vatican, drive through the skyscrapers of the Middle East and zoom through the favelas of Rio de Janiero, picking up mega-watt movie stars to join their family along the way?
If you want to trace how the movies went from fun diversions for car enthusiasts to super-special-effect-heavy blockbusters, here’s how and where to watch all the Fast and the Furious movies in order. The initial list is in order of release date, with streaming links where available. Then it’s followed by a list of the events in chronological order because, like some of the race tracks they’ve been on, the series takes some twists, turns and double-backs. As for where to stream them, there’s no one service that hosts them all, and most of them are not streaming for free, but it’s good to have Peacock and HBO Max if you don’t want to pay a rental fee for all of them.
Then, once you’ve seen Fast X, you can re-watch the Spider-Man movies in order, the Transformers movies in order, the Indiana Jones movies in order and the Marvel MCU movies in order, since those franchises all have new entries coming out this year too.
The Fast and the Furious (2001)
The Fast and the Furious franchise eventually transcends its humble origins as a turn-of-the-century Point Break re-do centered around the relationship between Dominic “Dom” Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker). But here, it starts small: Director Rob Cohen, in his first and only work with the franchise, leads a diverse cast through a fast-paced movie about cops and criminals on the hunt for thrills. And while the bleached hair and Ja Rule-heavy soundtrack may seem dated today, you can still see why it became a hit — the seeds for a successful franchise are in there
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
The Fast and the Furious franchise is so largely synonymous with its star, Vin Diesel, it’s hard to remember that he’s mostly absent from this one. Instead, Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton takes up the reins and adds Ludacris and Tyrese to the cast in a story that centers on the character of Brian and his life post-law enforcement.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
Remember the character of Sean, played by Lucas Black? What about Twinkie, played by Bow Wow? This movie — the first of a run of four directed by Better Luck Tomorrow‘s Justin Lin — moves the action to Asia and focuses mostly on characters that are only tangentially related to the rest of the franchise, so it’s the one that’s the least connected to the others. The true star is the drifting, a.k.a the way the cars skid around tight corners. The other best thing to come out of this one is Sung Kang’s character Han — sometimes referred to as Han Seoul-Oh, get it? — who does return in other movies.
Fast & Furious (2009)
After a few movies that headed in different directions, this one is back to basics: Both Dom and Brian are in it, Brian is back in with the FBI and Dom and his crew are back to doing crimes. And while it feels good just to have the old band together, the action sequences start to get more ambitious here, too — as you can see in the famous scene where they hijack an oil tanker together — which is a precursor for what’s to come.
