As an acclaimed action movie director, there was no one better than Rob Cohen to kick-start the Fast and Furious franchise with The Fast and the Furious in 2001. However, while he stepped down from directing any sequels, the speed-racing franchise continued, with Fast X currently in the process of being filmed.
That being said, the legacy Cohen created with the explosively successful first movie, which introduced us to the likes of Dom Toretto and Brian O’Conner, is one that continues to have an impact to this day — but Cohen has been honest in the past about not necessarily agreeing with the direction the franchise was going. One such example of this was Tokyo Drift, the third instalment of the thriller movie franchise.
In a 2012 interview with We Got This Covered, Cohen, who also worked with Dom Toretto star Vin Diesel on the movie XXX, said, “The first couple sequels though, what I hated about them was that it was just for money, the studio was just milking the cash cow.”
He continued, “It’s a miracle they didn’t kill it. If you were to just watch Tokyo Drift, you’d say “I never want to see anything related to Fast and Furious again.”
However, despite his mixed feelings about some of the sequels, in that same interview, he made it clear that the franchise has a special place in his heart. “ I mean, it is my baby,” he said. “No matter what way they twist it, I am still the guy who did the first one and made it what it was.”
He added, “I think that for a series to last ten or twelve years, you have to keep growing. I don’t know that I would have gone to the heist world, but the fact that it did $550 million, twelve years after the first, is a compliment to what we started out to do.”