Is The Fast and the Furious the best film series of all time?

After watching these movies for the first time through Films and 40's I have come to this conclusion. F&F is the best film series of all time. It has to be for at least series over three movies long. I might say that The Lord of the Rings is better but that is really one whole thing.

Star Wars is good but has those prequels really dragging it down. You might say 2F2F is bad, it is terrible, but I would say it is way more watchable than the prequel Star Wars movies. Hell, I would rather watch 2F2F than any Star Wars movie.

The Marvel movies have not learned to not take themselves too seriously and I find them really boring for it. They are so formulaic.

Mad Max is great and Fury Road is one of my favorite films of all time but I find 1 and 3 to be lacking.

Harry Potter is lame.

All of the horror moves series were really terrible after the first

Mission Impossible is fantastic but I only want to see those once.

I really can't say there there is a movie series better than F&F. Am I forgetting something?

It's tough but I think James Bond beats it out. It's got better cars, and quite frankly it's got better chases too. It's also got this:

Harry Potter is not lame.

(But yeah you're probably right.)

Fast and the Furious only started becoming quality movies when Fast Five came out and it looks like even that is starting to fade with the recent movie that came out. Fast Five is probably still the best one of those anyways

@jordanarama: The movies are lame, and that's coming from someone who loves the books

I'd say no because so many of them are bad. 4 is just really, really boring. I know a lot of people dislike 2 but it's also kind of dumb and fun but still really bad but it's dumb, badness is at least some what more enjoyable than 4. I still need to catch up on the rest of the series though.

I'd actually say that Rocky is probably the best film series going by your metric of over 3 movies. It only has 1 really bad film with 5 out of the entire franchise and the newer films are also excellent.

Fuck no, great series but come on.

I personally would put Matrix as the best series, love all 3 movies, with the first one better than any of the FF films (5 is the only one I would hear an argument for)

The Godfather. Nolan's Batman. Over three though, maybe...

@nightriff: I think you'd be hard pressed by a lot of other people to support you that the Matrix franchise as the best. Besides, OP stated over three movies. If we're speaking 3, I'd go with Toy Story.

Not as good as Lethal Weapon or Die Hard but close....

@mrcraggle: Hello....the Animatrix....kidding. I would have to think about my favorite film series, I was just throwing out the Matrix as a series that I consider better than FF, 2 has amazing action sequences (don't look at the plot), I enjoy 3 a whole lot, is a great? No but its on par with the middling FF films and 1 is one of the best actions movies ever released.

Best series with more than 4 movies? Batman franchise then, Batman (1989), Batman Begins and Dark Knight alone make it an incredible series and I'll give Batman Returns and DK Rises some props too.

I was confused and very worried to open the thread and find out it wasn't a joke.

Lord of the Rings

I don't care for Star Wars at all, but if you're gonna discount it because of the prequels being bad, you have to discount F&F for the same reason

Someone said the Toy Story series and holy shit why hasn't everyone who's already replied to this thread changed their answer already even before I posted this? Each one was better than the last, and they're all amazing. I demand edits to all posts in this thread past haste!

I don't hate the Fast and the Furious movies but I'm not really their biggest fan, so no?

On the other hand, after thinking it over for the requisite internet five seconds, I'm not particularly keen on carrying a flag for any of the other film franchises longer than three movies either. I'm not particularly for or against any of them. I'm certainly for some of their individual films. Guardians of the Galaxy and the latter two Captain America movies are some of my favorite movies in a long time, but overall I'm not going to go to bat for the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. I like all of the Lethal Weapon movies. I like three out of four Mad Max movies (the first more than the others, which should tell you which one I didn't like much). The Harry Potter movies are fine and admirably ambitious and, much like the books, got better and more stylish with each entry, but if I ever want to experience that story again I'll read the books. But none of those entire franchises are particularly special to me.

Look, I love myself some Fast & Furious but I wouldn't put it above stuff like Battles Without Honor and Humanity or, on more familiar ground with F&F, Aces Go Places. I mean that series basically starts with where it took F&F six movies to get:

No.

You are probably right

It is the only blu-ray box set I have ever bought. I just love these stupid characters.

More than 3 movies is kind of an arbitrary metric but sure let's go with that.

The first 4 die hard movies are very good. 1 and 3 being all time action movie classics while 2 but mostly 4 are fun dumb on the level of the good FF movies. Mission impossible is up there too. James Bond too I guess but those are as uneven as FF movies.

The fact of the matter is, FF maybe has a 50-60% batting average with its movies so it's not like they're some huge contender for the ''best movie franchise''

Wait a minute. There are people out there that don't realize that the Fast and Furious movies are pretty much all terrible. Even diehard fans of the series will admit to at least half of them being straight up bad. They're a fun sort of terrible and extremely enjoyable, but most definitely terrible movies that shouldn't be involved in any sort of serious discussion about good movies. It's almost as bad as trying to call the Transformers series great.

It's apropos that you mentioned horror movies because the series has been created very much with the same mentality. I'd put the Fast and Furious franchise right there with Friday the 13th.

Are you trolling right now? I'm not sure. These movies are dumb fun, but they're not good.

Fucking-- no.

I was assuming you were being hyperbolic, but...maybe not?
I mean, for one, Harry Potter is not lame at all and on average, better than F&F as a whole series.
Fast Five is where the series finally started getting really good. 5,6 and 7 are all incredible, with 8 being just "pretty good"

The Evil Dead films make up the best series of all time. No. Fucking. Question.

On average for a long-running series, though, the James Bond movies probably take it. There are a lot of good ones, and even the bad ones are rife with hilarity.

I'm a recent convert to the series too, F8 was the first one I've seen in theatres and I really dug it. That said...

there's no way I'm budging on Star Wars!

i thought people liked this movies ironically i've seen a couple and i still can't belive they keep making them they are on the same level of quality as michael bay movies and i guess that's why they keep making money but damn tell me this is a joke

Lots of people in this thread that don't live their lives a quarter-mile at a time, pretty disappointing.

1-4 aren't very good, so no? I'd say it's definitely one of the most interesting.

Oh, you're not kidding. I'm going to go with Alien, with the first and second being the obvious high water marks for the series and sci-horror in general.

Okay I know people love these films because they're the "good kind" of stupid but let's not be silly.

Not quite, since there's only a couple of movies that are truly great, but it's definitely an awesome and crazy thing overall.

i liked the first few movies more, im not really into the newer ones.

The Lord of the Rings: Critically and Commercially successful

Even the third movie of the Godfather Trilogy is crappy.

ALL of them? Romero's Zombie-trilogy is phenomenal and so is Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy (plus that remake is incredibly underrated). Fulci's Apocalypse trilogy is a ton of fun as well. And I would say Friday the 13th have at least as many good films in it as FF (1, 2, 4, 6)

FF is at best a happy accident, although after 6 they havn't really seemed to have any sort of direction. Really only 3, 5 and 6 are any good.

I'd say so, without a doubt. The first movie came out when I was 10 years old and I'm 26 now: I've been watching these characters for most of my life. I was already evangelizing the series once 5 blew up into a phenomenon, but I know I've said on here before that the whole zeitgeist really crystallized for me when I sat through the ending of 7 in the theater on opening night.

I fairly strongly disliked 8 because it seemed to rewrite the crew as a mercenary band of killers, rather than the lovable misfits they've always been. It actually had me pretty bummed out for a while even after leaving the theater, and no other series can have that lingering impact on me because no other has created such an attachment to its cast.

With one good movie i would say no to that.

Fuck no.

What.

No, they are fun (after Fast Five) but still bad movies. The Godfather, Back to the Future, Alien and Toy Story are better even with some bad ones in the franchises.

Edit: Forgot about Hammer's Dracula series, campy fun movies with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

Look duder, I am in love with the F&F series, I really am. But there's no way you'd ever get me to argue that any of these are good movies. They're gloriously dumb action movies that know exactly what they are and embrace it all the way and I love them for that but really they're not good movies and that's not even getting into the trainwreck that was 4.

That being said, there really aren't that many fantastic series if we're going by your 'longer than a trilogy' metric either I guess but I'd probably go to bat for Star Wars or Mission Impossible?

If you include trilogies then there's no way F&F is even in the conversation.

Fast & Furious movies are like the TV show M*A*S*H. MASH was a good show, better than it should have been for a half-hour comedy about Korean doctors and nurses. However, it no Seinfeld, All in the Family, The Office, or Cheers.

Being better than people think or doing something decent with something stupid is laudable, but it's not important.

@nightriff: I actually really like The Animatrix (it's my favourite thing about The Matrix after the first film) and with the news of WB rebooting the franchise, that's the stuff I want to see more of. I want to see more of this world and characters rather than a reboot and more Christ allegories.

Nope. The best film series is Sherlock Holmes.

It'd be there just on the strength of the 1940s movies with Basil Rathbone (14 movies) and the various movies in the 50s/60s/70s that either had Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee (or both) as either Sherlock, Mycroft, or a villain. But there's been so many more than just those, and they're usually at least decent movies.

I'd also be willing to accept The Muppets.

I've never seen any F&F films but I might one day if I get bored. If I had to say what the greatest film series is, I would say the Dollars trilogy. I think that's the only trilogy where the third film is by far the greatest.

It is hard to come by a film series that goes past three and stays good. Most people here are mentioning trilogies which isn't what OP asked for. There are lots of great examples of fantastic movies trilogies, but they usually stop there and for a reason. Unless it's a fun action movie series that's light on plot it can be very hard to find a good reason to come back for that forth go-around without feeling extremely forced. Even some of the best movies and movie sequels pop a flat on the third (Alien and The Godfather).

The Fast and the Furious is a bit different because it was a late bloomer and only really hit it out of the park with Fast Five when it became a different thing. Even since that movie shook things up the series has been on a downward slope. James Bond, Star Wars, and the X-Men all have long runs that have mostly been decent. They still have bad movies in there, but so does F&F. Lethal Weapon and Die Hard both made it to 4 without getting too bad (though Die Hard 5 is terrible).

My top pick would probably be Mission Impossible though. They're up to five and only really had one stinker so far with the second movie, and even that is pretty enjoyable if you shut your brain off to enjoy how stupid it is.

EDIT: Can't believe I forgot Mad Max. That's probably ahead of Mission Impossible for me. Even though I didn't like the third one too much, the other three movies are amazing.

Honestly, I re-watched the LotR trilogy last summer and I feel the movies aren't aging that well. I probably have more fun watching the F&F series. And I say this as someone that's a HUGE Tolkien fan (though that might be part of the problem -- I don't like some of the liberties Jackson takes with the source material).

That being said, while the Roger Moore films really bring down the series, the Bond franchise still probably has more good/great films than F&F. I agree with people saying that MCU franchise is formulaic (at least from what I've seen), and the Harry Potter films are generally okay at best (again, I'm a fan of the books).

A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back are probably the only Star Wars movies I enjoy more or as much as F&F 5/6/7.

So to conclude this rambling post...I wouldn't say that F&F is the best long-running film series, but I wouldn't call you crazy if you said it was.

they're the 8 best movies of all time. how could it not be.

While I love me some fast and furious (can't wait for that rumoured spin-off) I really don't think the films have been that consistent over the years. And I wouldn't call any of the individual films "great" either. They're real fun but man, there's a lot of bad bits in there as well.
Personally I'd say some strong contenders are Linklater's Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight trilogy, the Toy Story films and Kieslowskis Three Colours.