There was a time when the Fast & Furious movies were exclusively about street racing rather than about engaging in big-budget action scenes across iconic foreign locales. The very first movie in the series, The Fast and the Furious, introduced franchise lead characters Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) in the context of an underground drag racing scene. The backdrop of street racing would be carried over into the next three installments, 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and Fast & Furious.
Though at first the sequels would focus on different lead characters, eventually a more concrete lead cast of characters was established. Toretto and O'Conner became the leads of the franchise alongside Letty Oritz (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson), and Tej Parker (Ludacris). Also coming into focus as the Fast & Furious films went on was a heavy emphasis on familial bonds between all sorts of different people. Even antagonistic characters like Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) eventually became essential allies. These tight-knit connections emerged in later installments that placed a heavy emphasis on large-scale action sequences rather than street racing, a sharp contrast to the more grounded initial Fast & Furious adventures.
Whereas the biggest score in the original film was stealing a truckload of VCR tapes, the trailer for Fast & Furious 9 sees Dom and his crew dealing with a magnet plane and cars with rockets tied to their roof. That's been par for the course for this franchise for nearly a decade now, ever since Fast Five took the series in a direction more reminiscent of heist movies rather than a standard street racing feature. This was done to elevate the franchise from being about car culture and more action-oriented. In 2011, then-Universal Pictures head Adam Fogelson told Deadline as much, saying, "The question putting together Fast Five was...can we take it out of being a pure car culture movie and into being a true action franchise...if these movies were still about street racing, there was probably a ceiling on how many people would buy tickets."
Considering the fact that the box office for Fast Five nearly doubled what Fast & Furious received two years earlier, Universal knew they made the right decision. From then on, the box office increased until it peaked with over $1.5 billion with Furious 7 in 2015. Even The Fate of the Furious made over $1.2 billion and the latest spinoff, Hobbs & Shaw, managed to rake in almost $760 million, which is still higher than Fast Five's worldwide gross.
Focusing solely on street racing may have kicked off this saga, but for it to be taken to the next level, the Fast & Furious movies had to expand their appeal to general action movie fans. As evidenced by the opening scene of The Fate of the Furious depicting Dom engaging in a street race in Havana, the films haven't entirely abandoned the fundamentals of what put the series on the map in the first place. Such scenes indicate that fast cars trying to outrace one another will always have some kind of presence in this franchise. However, in an effort to appeal to a wider audience, they're no longer the sole focus of the Fast & Furious saga, with staples of heist & spy movies now having a far greater presence in the lives of Dominic Toretto and company.