If you saw James Wan's Furious 7 in theaters this weekend and wound up thinking to yourself, "Wow, that was the most action-packed, violent spectacle the franchise has produced yet" it turns out your instinct was 100 percent dead on. This is because all of the movies have now been broken down for their content, and the results show that Furious 7 is both the fastest and the most furious film we've seen from the series thus far.
It was the folks at Bloomberg that recently took the time to watch all seven installments of the Fast & Furious franchise, and their results are rather conclusive: Furious 7 is the biggest spectacle that we've seen from the long-running continuity. The breakdown is rather simple: corresponding to the "Fast" category, the writers calculated the percentage of time main characters in the movies are seen "driving or riding in vehicles, including cars, trains, and planes. The "Furious" portion includes the percentage of screen time dedicated to "hand-to-hand combat, discharging weapons, and slamming one vehicle into another." As you might imagine, there is some crossover between these two areas, but when all was said and done, Furious 7 topped all other titles in both of them.
According to the breakdown, 49 minutes of Furious 7 is spent watching the characters go fast, while 33 minutes are spent watching them beat the hell out of one another. That means that 35 percent of the total two hour and 17 minute runtime is dedicated to the former category, while the number is 24 percent for the latter. These numbers beat out 2 Fast 2 Furious on the vehicular side of things, and Fast & Furious 6 where violence is concerned. This is all while being the longest movie that the franchise has produced thus far.
Looking at the chart that Bloomberg has drawn up (which I recommend checking out), it's interesting to note the level of escalation that the movies have undergone since the release of Fast Five. Both 6 and Furious 7 represented incremental increases over their most recent predecessor. It's also interesting to note that violence didn't really become a big part of the series until the fourth movie, . The three movies released before that all have "Furious" scores that don't make it above 10 percent of total screen time.
Both fans and critics alike are definitely responding to Furious 7's rather over-the-top nature, as reviews have been largely positive, while box office numbers have soared. Should Universal Pictures decide to move forward with a Fast & Furious 8 - and one can definitely see them doing so - it's not too hard to imagine them looking to make a film that is once again an even bigger blockbuster event. We'll have to wait and see how things turn out.
