Fast & Furious 7 speeding to box office triumph

When it was first released in 2001, The Fast and the Furious didn't seem the kind of stuff franchises are built on.

Set in the gritty world of Los Angeles street racing, the movie boasted flashy action sequences but had no muscle-bound superheroes, suave spies or supernatural teens. The actors - Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez - weren't stars who most people would recognise on the street.

But producer Neal Moritz was confident the film would resonate with audiences: he'd seen how it played at the first test screening in Chatsworth, where the moviegoers "went crazy" for the film. "They were out in the parking lot afterwards doing doughnuts and revving their engines," says Moritz, who has been with the franchise since the beginning, including its latest incarnation, Furious 7 (billed as Fast & Furious 7 in Hong Kong). "I knew we had something special."

And then some. The first film grossed more than US$200 million worldwide, spawning a franchise that supplies Universal Pictures with the kind of adrenaline (not to mention cash) that studios live by these days. By building on the film's multicultural base to help market it globally and amping up the spectacle and stunts, the franchise just keeps getting bigger.

Last weekend, Furious 7 raced to No1 in the US with a massive US$143.6 million domestic opening. If early estimates hold, the film will mark the biggest debut for the franchise, which has so far racked up more than US$2 billion worldwide. It would also become the ninth-biggest debut in box-office history.

"The first film was made as sort of a counterculture, midrange-budgeted action film with a definitive concept at the centre of it," says Donna Langley, Universal's chairwoman. "Over the years, we've been able to grow the franchise creatively to make it global. A little bit of timing and a lot of strategy has worked in our favour."