The 10th movie in the The long-running Fast & Furious movies are in a class of their own in how they've progressed from their beginnings in 2001's The Fast and the Furious. While the Fast & Furious series' run over two decades is unheard of for most action movie franchises, their transformation is even more of an anomaly.
In the first three movies, the Fast & Furious films were focused on street racing, and began to shift to the underlying elements of criminal life in 2009's Fast & Furious. Fast Five re-invented the series with a new focus on both heists and globe-spanning adventure, with continued through Furious 7. The Fate of the Furious and the spin-off Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw began to move the series in a spies meets superheroes hybrid tone. With the complete detachment from reality seen in F9, another transition would occur.
The lead-up to the release of F9 was where the franchise adopted the new term of the Fast Saga. F9 itself even carried the subtitle of "The Fast Saga", and both it and Fast X dropping the Furious portion of the title and sticking with Fast actually means more than it seems to. With the Fast Saga as the franchise's official classification, sticking with just the term Fast as each movie's primary designation is emblematic of how much the franchise has changed over time - and fully embraced that change.
The unveiling of the title Fast X itself shows the tone shift of the franchise without a second of footage even being shot. More resembling the logo of the X-Men movies than the Point Break retooling, Fast X promises plenty of more ridiculous action. The evidence of that lies not just in the preceding movies, most especially F9, but in the shorthand term of the Fast Saga being the film's moniker.
While Furious 7 and The Fate of the Furious kept the Furious term of the original title, it's arguably due to the two being the last to hold onto any thematic tissue from the original movies. By the same token, the only other movie in the franchise to strictly use the Fast term, Fast Five, is the definitive turning point for the series becoming its new self. F9, best the first of the newly dubbed Fast Saga, was another metamorphosis of sorts, literally taking the franchise into space and dialing its all-around ridiculousness up to its highest levels yet.
There's no telling exactly where Fast X is going to take the Fast Saga as part one of its planned two-part finale. With even aliens on the table for Fast X, its title by itself captures how much the series has changed. What began as the Fast & Furious series has morphed into the Fast Saga, and with it, the franchise bid farewell to realism once and for all.
