If you are a resident of Planet Earth – and particularly if you are a resident of Abu Dhabi – it’s a good bet that you’re aware that the seventh instalment of Universal Pictures’ Fast & Furious movie series was released last weekend. Its global box office take is somewhere around $400m. I have only rudimentary understanding of statistics, but I think that means that if you’re right now in a room with ten other people, three of them have seen the film.
I may have the numbers wrong, but the point remains: the movie is a gigantic international hit.
What makes the performance of Furious 7 even more impressive, to me anyway, is that in tone, plot, cast, pace, and in every other conceivable way it is identical to all of the Fast & Furiouses that came before it. Watching the movie – which I did, happily, last weekend with a thrilled and rapt crowd – is an exercise in perfectly managed expectations. It's everything fans expect from a race car picture – noise and explosions and in-your-face human interaction – and it hits all of the notes of the previous pictures, but somehow louder, more explosively, and even more in-your-face.
That’s what millions of its fans, me included, wanted when we bought our tickets and took our seats in the cinema. And that’s what they delivered.
The picture is what savvy Hollywood types call “a crowd pleaser”, what movie fans call “an awesome ride”, and what clever intellectual types call “clichéd nonsense without an ounce of redeeming merit”.
But that, of course, just makes those of us who like that sort of thing like the movie even more. It’s not a movie for critics – those benighted people who can suck the fun out of anything. It’s a movie for movie fans.
Still, whenever anything in Hollywood is as successful as the Fast & Furious franchise, everyone wants to chip in their own ideas. Despite its huge success, the temptation to improve it, to change the essential dynamic, to overthink the basic idea of the movie must have been immense.
People in Hollywood – and in every other business, too – have a hard time leaving successful things alone. The minute you find a favourite snack food or soft drink, you can be certain that the marketing brain trust behind the brand will set about to tinker with the basic ingredients.
In the late 1980s, when Coca-Cola, perhaps the most successful consumer brand in world history, decided that the only way to solidify their position as the manufacturers of the most popular drink on Earth was by changing the recipe for the most popular drink on Earth, the result was a PR and sales disaster. People who loved the taste of Coca-Cola, the executives discovered to their shock, did not want that taste to change. What Coca-Cola was selling as “new Coke” was something no one wanted to buy.
The executives and marketers who made that disastrous decision weren’t stupid. On the contrary, they were smart – the smartest people, I’m sure they would have insisted at the time, in the room. Armed with charts and surveys and market testing results, they thought and thought and over-thought themselves into nearly destroying one of the most iconic brands in the world.
“People want new!” you can hear them say. “People want something different!”
The truth is, at no point in history has anyone, really, wanted anything “new” or “different”. What we want – when we’re really being honest with ourselves and each other – is exactly what we’ve always liked, just maybe a little bit turbocharged. That, often, leaves the creators of the product unfulfilled and dissatisfied. It was entirely possible that the creative forces behind Furious 7 would have said to themselves: “Aren’t we tired of doing the same movie over and over again? Aren’t we bored with the same basic set-up?” They could easily have convinced each other that the seventh instalment of the series should be the “dramatic” one, the artistic one, the one without loud explosions. They might even have put in a sensitive modern dance number.
Don’t laugh. There’s no limit to the damage people can do when they’re trying to be fresh and clever.
The $400 million weekend enjoyed by the producers of Furious 7 is richly deserved – not just because they made a fun and thrilling picture, but because they didn’t overthink it, despite what must have been countless opportunities to do so. Smart people in the entertainment business (yes, there are some) end up making the same mistake that the Coca-Cola executives did 30 years ago. They make complicated, psychologically-nuanced dramas instead of good old-fashioned cop movies. They turn simple romantic comedies into meditations on gender roles. They’ve soured on the hugely profitable television staple, the sitcom, and replaced it with an overthought and overwrought new genre, the “dramedy”, which manages to fail at both drama and comedy.
The audience shrugs at these improvements the way Coke fans shrugged at New Coke. Just give me what I want, the audience says. And what I want is basically what I enjoyed last time. Only louder.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
