In the summer of 2001, one of the new releases on a late June weekend was a car racing movie called The Fast and the Furious.

Let's go for a little ride.

It just sounds like summer in the early 2000s, doesn't it?

When the sun goes down, another world comes to life,

said the trailer, which promised to reveal a world of car racing and sex.

In hindsight, the movie's easy to make fun of.

But at the time, some critics got a kick out of it.

Roger Ebert said it had great chase scenes and kind of a pirate spirit,

and that it reminded him of a movie you would see it drive in, if it still existed.

Audience is like to too, so naturally, two years later...

The sequel, Too Fast, Too Furious, starred Ludacris, who also had a song on the soundtrack.

What the sequel didn't have was the original film's star, Vin Diesel.

Still, it was a hit, so three years after that.

With the third installment, Tokyo Drift, the franchise scrapped the original cast entirely.

It scrapped locations, it scrapped the stories, it scrapped everything, and started from scratch.

The bigger the risk, the greater the rush.

Well, that film didn't play quite as well at the box office.

Universal, the studio behind the franchise, could have called it a day, but they didn't.

It's just like old times.

They made a fourth movie, and it made $360 million in 2009.

And two years later...

We'll do one last drop, and then we disappear forever.

...