Fast & Furious Turned Toretto’s Family Into The Avengers 13 Years Ago, And The Franchise Hasn’t Been The Same Ever Since

13 years ago, Fast & Furious 6 took Dominic Toretto’s family and turned them into The Avengers, changing the franchise completely. When watching the Fast & Furious movies in order, Fast & Furious 6 is the sixth in release order, but only the fifth chronologically. The reason for this is the placement of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift on the timeline, with the ending of this film actively setting up Fast & Furious 6‘s true sequel, Furious 7, which is widely regarded as one of the best Fast & Furious movies.

Concerning Fast & Furious 6‘s ending, however, the film concludes with Dominic Toretto having his family completely together for one of the final times. The upcoming story of Fast 11 gives Dom a very different-looking family, both in terms of personnel but also in how the group operates within the franchise. Interestingly, it was Fast & Furious 6 that altered how Dom’s family forever, taking them from what was once a relatively small-time street crew into a fully-fledged, car-based version of a superhero team like The Avengers.

Fast & Furious 6 Turned Toretto’s Family Into A Superhero Team

Gone Were The Days Of Heists & Swindles

Since Fast & Furious 6, no one can argue against Dom and his family being like a superhero team. Both in terms of the unbelievable stunts in the Fast & Furious franchise and how Dom’s family performs them to their overall values and motivations, the Toretto family is much different now than it was in the first five installments of the series. Fast & Furious 6 can be seen as the turning point of this, with the film taking a series about cars and having Toretto’s crew hired by a government agency to pull off a specific job.

In the film, Dominic is approached by The Rock’s Luke Hobbs and tasked with bringing down Owen Shaw. Shaw’s elite team of former SAS agents uses vehicles in their attempts to gain an EMP device known as the Nightshade, leading Hobbs to enlist Dom’s team to stop them. Although there are personal stakes involved for Dom via the reveal that his ex-girlfriend, Letty, is alive and working for Shaw, this setup is a lot like a superhero movie; Dom and his team are the specialists, tasked with tracking down an evil team of car-based villains.

Fast & Furious’ Characters Have Since Been Portrayed As An Elite Team

Their List Of Attributes & Skills Has Grown Considerably

Since this story in Fast & Furious 6, Dom and the other characters who are mainstays in the franchise have been depicted as an elite team. Furious 7 saw them work with an elite covert ops team led by Kurt Russell’s Mr. Nobody to find the key to a powerful spy-based weapon known as the God’s Eye. The Fate of the Furious then had Dom’s team committing regular jobs with Luke Hobbs for the American government before taking down an international cyberterrorist known as Cipher.

F9, Fast X, and the upcoming story of Fast 11 continued this trend, proving above all that Dom’s family is no longer a simple family of street criminals but an elite team of operatives. A character like Ludacris’ Tej, for example, went from a race host and mechanic to a world-renowned hacker and computer specialist, while Dom Toretto himself has been characterized as having exceptional durability and strength akin to other superhero movies. All of this stems from one point in the Fast & Furious timeline: Fast & Furious 6.

The Fast & Furious Family Worked Better When They Were Just Regular People

This massive change was one that also altered the franchise itself. Despite Fast Five often being dubbed the true turning point of the franchise due to the focus on intense, over-the-top action, the characters were at least regular people in this movie. Fast & Furious 6 changed that, turning the family into the elite operatives shown in the franchise as it is today. Admittedly, the series worked better when Dom and his loved ones were simply regular people trying to get by, especially in Fast Five.

Fast Five‘s stunts and action sequences were exaggerated, yes, but the crux of the story was Dom and his family pulling off a heist to retire now that Mia, Dom’s sister, was pregnant. These motivations were much more grounded in reality, as were the more personal stakes of the movies before Fast Five that focused on the Toretto family. After this, starting with Fast & Furious 6, the films began to lose that balance of grounded reality and insane stunts, primarily driven by the characters themselves becoming superheroes that would be no strangers in The Avengers.