How to watch the Fast and Furious movies in order

❘ Published: 2023-05-26T15:58:14

Vin Diesel in Fast and Furious 10 (Fast X)

Universal Pictures

Here’s your guide to watching the Fast and Furious movies in order, including release and chronological order, with Fast X now in cinemas.

Race Wars, boosting DVD players, crummy tuna sandwiches in the side cafe of an LA garage: the Fast and Furious franchise has a humble foundation, originally envisioned as a shameless Point Break-lite racing actioner.

More than 20 years after we first hit the NOS, Vin Diesel and his eponymously speedy militia have the same modus operandi, it’s just the stakes that have changed: get rich, but save the world too, and always, always choose Corona.

Fast X, the highly anticipated penultimate chapter of the flagship Fast and Furious saga, is in cinemas now – so, here’s how to watch all of the movies in release and chronological order, and where to stream them.

Fast and Furious movies in release order

As always, watching every movie in a franchise in release order is the most straightforward – and for our money, it’s the best way to go, especially when there’s a pay-off down the line. Here’s the release order for the Fast and Furious movies:

The Fast and the Furious (2001)
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
Fast & Furious (2009)
Fast Five (2011)
Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
Furious 7 (2015)
The Fate of the Furious (2017)
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
F9 (2021)
Fast X (2023)

The first film, directed by Rob Cohen, was a modest blockbuster. From a $38 million budget, it grossed more than $207 million worldwide and became the unlikely launchpad for one of the most profitable franchises of the 21st century.

Despite his po-faced loyalty now, Diesel wasn’t so keen back then. He refused to return for 2 Fast 2 Furious, even with $25 million on the table, because he believed the script was inferior compared to its predecessor – he was right, but “forget about it, cuh.”

He returned at the end of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, a tremendous entry that welcomed mainstay director Justin Lin to the series – but, again, it wasn’t out of love for the franchise. He did it in exchange for the rights to the Riddick character, which was his payment for the cameo.

Three years later, encouraged by the audience reception to Dom’s brief appearance in Tokyo Drift, Universal managed to convince everyone to come back for a reboot. Everything remained canon, but the tone was different – and it was the big-screen equivalent of a car stalling. And then came Fast Five, a critical darling and financial success that changed the series forever.

Fast and Furious movies in chronological order

Now this is where things get a bit more interesting: watching the Fast and Furious movies in chronological order is similar to the release order, but there’s one big difference: Tokyo Drift.

We’ll list the order first before getting into more detail about the plot of each film, and we’ve also included a couple of fun extras for Fast purists.

The Fast and the Furious (2001)
Turbo Charged Prelude (2003)
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
Los Bandoleros (2009)
Fast & Furious (2009)
Fast Five (2011)
Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
Furious 7 (2015)
The Fate of the Furious (2017)
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
F9 (2021)
Fast X (2023)

The Fast and the Furious

Released in 2001, The Fast and the Furious has a simple story: Brian O’Conner is an undercover cop who tries to befriend Dom Toretto and his crew amid a spate of high-speed robberies. We’re introduced to Letty, Vince, Jesse, and Leon, and not only does he fall in love with Dom’s sister Mia, but he allows him to escape in a “10-second car” after the movie’s climactic drag race.

Turbo Charged Prelude

Less of a must-see and more of a fun way to spend six minutes, the Turbo Charged Prelude is a short film that sets up the events of 2 Fast 2 Furious. Brian is now on the run from law enforcement after letting Dom go, and as cops raid his house, he drives to Miami.

We see him taking part in a few street races, but as he starts to feel the heat from the fuzz, he meets a woman who helps him lay low. At the end of the film, Brian sees two cars that appear at the beginning of 2 Fast 2 Furious.

2 Fast 2 Furious

2 Fast 2 Furious catches up with Brian in Miami, enjoying a life of street racing with Tej and co. The cops find him and offer him a deal: help them take down Carter Verone, a local drug lord, and his criminal record will be wiped clean. In order to do so, he teams up with Roman, an estranged childhood friend, and Eva Mendes’ Agent Monica, who’s been undercover for a year.

The movie ends with Verone in custody and Brian and Roman free and clean – and they made sure to keep some cash from the bust, with plans to open a garage together. “Pockets ain’t empty, cuz.”

Los Bandoleros

Los Bandoleros is another short film, taking place between The Fast and the Furious and 2009’s Fast and Furious. It’s unclear exactly when it takes place in the timeline, but it doesn’t allude to the events of 2 Fast 2 Furious, nor does Tokyo Drift get a mention (more on that later).

Unlike the Turbo Charged Prelude, quite a bit happens: Dom enlists the help of Han and Rico to break out Tego from a prison in the Dominican Republic, marking the first time these characters appear chronologically. There’s also a corrupt politician called Elvis who wants Dom and his crew to hijack fuel tankers, and we’re reintroduced to Letty.

Fast & Furious

Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez in 2009's Fast and Furious

We’re five years on from the first movie. Brian is now an FBI agent, while Dom is hellbent on avenging Letty’s death at the hands of – you guessed it – a drug lord. The plot itself isn’t hugely relevant to the overall story, but the character beats are important: Brian reunites with Mia, as well as resigning from the FBI after Dom is imprisoned, with the film ending with Brian, Mia, Leo, and Santos gearing up to break him out. We also meet Gal Gadot’s Gisele for the first time, who returns in Fast Five.

Fast Five

Now we’re cooking with gas. Fast Five picks up immediately after the fourth movie, with Dom, Brian, and Mia – three of the most wanted criminals in America, apparently – fleeing to Rio de Janeiro. They get embroiled in a spot of bother: a train heist goes wrong and they’re framed for the murders of several DEA agents, putting the baby oil-smothered, hulking Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) on their trail.

Meanwhile, the trio plan their biggest job yet: robbing $100 million in cash from another drug lord. They recruit a team: Roman, Tej, Han, Gisele, Leo, and Santos. Not only is the drug lord killed (along with Vince, who comes back for redemption and dies in an ambush), but Hobbs ends up working with them… sort of. He gives them 24 hours to get ahead of him – but doesn’t realize they swapped the safes, allowing them to jet off to a country that doesn’t allow extradition.

Everyone goes their separate ways, but there’s one final twist in the mid-credits scene: Mendez’s Monica returns and hands Hobbs a photo of a “ghost”: Letty, seemingly still alive.

Fast & Furious 6

In Fast and Furious 6, Hobbs asks Dom for his help in exchange for pardons for everyone in his crew. He’s trying to take down an international mercenary group led by Luke Evans’ Owen Shaw, and they also happen to be pretty nifty behind the wheel.

Brian and Mia now have a son together, and Dom has moved on from Letty, now in a relationship with Elena. However, when Hobbs shows him Letty’s picture, he drops everything to find her – but she can’t remember a thing, as she’s suffering from amnesia from her near-death experience.

All ends well, though: they kill Owen Shaw on the longest runway in the universe, but Gisele also dies to save Han’s life. In a post-credits scene, vengeance arrives in the form of Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw, who kills Han in Tokyo before leaving a chilling message for Dom: “You don’t know me, but you’re about to.”

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Tokyo Drift was originally released as an awkward spinoff in 2006, starring a whole new cast led by Lucas Black as Sean Boswell, a teenage ex-pat who’s karted off to Japan after he’s caught street racing and wreaking havoc at home.

He meets Twinkie and Earl, who later return in F9, and Han, who’s killed in a chase through Tokyo’s streets. In the movie, we see his car being T-boned by a Mercedes, but it wasn’t until seven years later that we found out who was driving: Deckard Shaw.

After winning a race against Takashi, Sean decides to stay in Tokyo as the new Drift King. Before the credits roll, Dom shows up and says Han was family.

Furious 7

Deckard, Owen Shaw’s big, bad brother, begins his pursuit of revenge on Dom and his crew. First, he puts Hobbs in the hospital after a scrap in the DSS office, and then he kills Han. This is when the movie fully circles back to Tokyo Drift, with the closing moments syncing up with new scenes of Dom and Sean.

While Deckard hunts them all down, Dom and his crew help Mr Nobody (Kurt Russell), a super-secret government agent who needs their help to find God’s Eye, an omnipotent camera capable of hacking anything and everything with eyes and ears. This leads them to its creator Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), who becomes part of the team.

They eventually face off with Deckard in LA. Dom fights him on top of a multi-storey car park, which eventually buries – but doesn’t kill – Statham’s villain. At the end, he ends up behind bars, walls, and lots of doors in a maximum-security prison.

Furious 7 is significant as it marks the final appearance of Paul Walker’s Brian, after the actor died in November 2013, part-way through the filming of the movie. After rethinking and restructuring the film, it closes with one of cinema’s most emotional tributes of the 2010s, with Walker and Diesel driving off separately into the distance. “Whether it’s a quarter-mile away, or halfway across the world. You’ll always be with me, and you’ll always be my brother.”

The Fate of the Furious

The eighth Fast and Furious joint introduces the next big bad of the franchise: Cipher, played by Charlize Theron, who forces Dom to break bad to protect his son, whom he shares with Elena.

Meanwhile, Hobbs ends up in the same prison as Deckard after they’re betrayed by Dom on an off-the-books job, and they all end up converging in a military base in Russia. There’s a submarine, Hobbs pushes a torpedo away with his bare hands, and – of course – they all make it back to the US with barely a scratch.

Cipher is still at large by the end, but all of their records are cleared (again), and Dom and Letty agree to take care of Elena’s child after she’s killed – and they name him Brian.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

Jason Statham, Dwayne Johnson, and Vanessa Kirby in Hobbs and Shaw

Hobbs & Shaw is the first official spinoff in the franchise, seeing the unlikely team-up (after their hilarious scenes together in Fast 8) of Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw.

They’re tasked with going up against Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), a cybernetically-enhanced assassin who works for Eteon, a shady terrorist organization that controls all media and wants to kill billions of people with a supervirus known as Snowflake.

The plot has absolutely no bearing on anything in the main Fast Saga, but its chronological place is between The Fate of the Furious and F9. Oh, and we’ve yet to hear another mention of Eteon, so there’s that.

F9

The ninth movie in the franchise has it all: the whole cast, including our Tokyo Drift compadres, a new MacGuffin, space travel in a Pontiac, and a new villain.

The big arrival is Jakob Toretto (John Cena), Dom’s long-lost brother. Both sides are trying to find Project Aries, a device that can control any weapon on the planet. Coming off the back of a passionate fan campaign, Han also returns.

We learn a bit more about Dom’s past and his father’s traumatic death, which caused the brothers to become estranged, and Jakob soon comes to his senses and helps the familia. Alas, Cipher escapes again.

The movie closes with Brian’s car pulling up to Dom’s driveway, and we get a mid-credits scene of Deckard coming face-to-face with Han.

Fast X

We have arrived at Fast X, the penultimate chapter of the Fast & Furious franchise – or at least the central saga, with the possibility of other spinoffs still on the table.

The movie will follow Dom and his crew as they go up against a new threat: Dante (Jason Momoa), the son of Fast Five’s drug dealers whose birthright fortune was stolen from him, as well as his dad, and he’s not happy. Cipher is also hanging around somewhere, with the trailers teasing a brutal fight between her and Letty.

Whatever happens, we know Fast X will end with a whopper of a cliffhanger. Speaking to Collider, Michelle Rodriguez said: “I think people are gonna be really, really surprised and we’re gonna get a lot of open mouths at the end. Let’s just put it that way. It’s gonna be like, ‘Really? What?’ Like that! Like that’s how I was in theater. I was like, ‘Oh my god. What have we done?'”

Where to watch the Fast and Furious movies – how to stream

Whether you want to watch them in release order or chronological order, below you’ll find a complete list of the Fast and Furious movies and where they’re available to watch and stream.

The Fast and the Furious – Amazon Prime Video (buy or rent)
Turbo Charged Prelude – YouTube
2 Fast 2 Furious – Amazon Prime Video (buy or rent)
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift – Amazon Prime Video (buy or rent)
Los Bandoleros – Vimeo
Fast & Furious – Amazon Prime Video (buy or rent)
Fast Five – Amazon Prime Video (buy or rent)
Fast & Furious 6 – Amazon Prime Video (buy or rent)
Furious 7 – Peacock
The Fate of the Furious – Amazon Prime Video (buy or rent)
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw – Amazon Prime Video (buy or rent)
F9 – HBO Max
Fast X – In cinemas now

You can also purchase every entry on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra HD, with the exception of Turbo Charged Prelude and Los Bandoleros, which come packaged with their respective films.

Fast X is in cinemas now, and you can check out the rest of our Fast and Furious 10 coverage below:

You can also check out our guides for other franchises below:

Riddick movies in order | Saw movies in order | Harry Potter movies in order | Shrek movies in order

How to watch the Fast and Furious movies in order

Contents:

Fast and Furious movies in release order

Fast and Furious movies in chronological order

The Fast and the Furious

Turbo Charged Prelude

2 Fast 2 Furious

Los Bandoleros

Fast & Furious

Fast Five

Fast & Furious 6

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Furious 7

The Fate of the Furious

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

F9

Fast X

Where to watch the Fast and Furious movies – how to stream