The Fast and Furious franchise is one of the most chaotic action movie series of all time, not least of all in the lack of continuity between each new title. But, the whole saga could have been very different if they had decided to stick with the original, rather boring working title way back at the inception of the franchise.
Fast and Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Fast Five, Furious 6, F9; when you actually look at the titles of the Fast and Furious movies, nothing makes sense. Except, that’s kind of the point really, isn’t it? The Fast Family are renowned for living their life a quarter mile at a time, so what they call their movie isn’t exactly at the top of the agenda for Dom Toretto and the rest of the Fast and Furious characters.
It’s pretty normal for movies to have what’s called a working title, before an official title is confirmed before its release. According to director Rob Cohen on the DVD commentary for the first movie, Fast and Furious was once referred to as something very different.
Before Fast and Furious came to fruition, the original movie from the 2000s was going to be called Redline. We don’t know about you, but “Do you want to go and see Redline?” doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping like “Do you want to go and see a movie called Fast and Furious?”
Even after the producers came up with the idea to call the movie The Fast and the Furious, they had some trouble acquiring the rights to the title. Turns out the rights to that name belonged to director Roger Corman from his 1955 movie of the same name.
Universal eventually managed to nab the title after the studio agreed to give Corman rights to some Universal stock footage as a swap deal. And the rest is history!
Can you imagine where the Fast and Furious cast would be now if it was the Redline franchise instead? We reckon the series would have stalled, certainly not living life a quarter mile at a time.