Film Theory: My Dumbest Theory Ever! (Fast and Furious)

Did you ever wonder why, across all the fights that happen in the Fast and Furious movies, there's never a clear winner? For all the pipes and wrenches and busted walls, it always comes down to some sort of a stalemate. Or the two get interrupted. Or a parking garage collapses on them. Well, there's a very good reason for this, and let me tell you, it ain't the narrative. According to the Wall Street Journal, many of the main characters have it written into their contracts that they cannot lose

a fight. Jason Statham negotiated the extent to which he can be beaten up on screen, Vin Diesel polices the number of punches he takes, and The Rock works alongside the fight coordinators to make sure that he, quote, "...gives as good as he gets." Turns out the only thing furious about these movies are the contract negotiations. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Film Theory, the show that doesn't have friends. It has family. One of the things that I've really appreciated about hosting Film Theory spec

ifically is that it's given me the excuse to watch a lot of stuff that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. Fifty Shades of Grey, Skin of a Rink, the KFC telenovela. But of all the things that I've watched for the sake of research, nothing has surprised me half as much as the Fast and Furious franchise. If you were to have made a diagram of things that I'm naturally attracted to in my media diet, these movies would be clear on the other side of the map. But, because I actively try to study everyt

hing without bias just to understand why so many people enjoy stuff, I finally sat down two years ago to binge through these things. I gotta say, I was blown away. Unironically, I liked them. Sure, there were some that were better than others, but I grew to love the cringe of three, the spectacle of five, the emotional send-offs of seven. I couldn't believe it. I became an unabashed fan of the Fast franchise. So much so that I was hyped when promos for Fast 10 came out, and then promptly disappo

inted when the movie was just kinda meh. But these movies, more than anything else that I've covered on this channel, reminded me to keep an open mind and to constantly be exposing myself to new things that might not initially be to my taste because, hey, who knows? You might just end up liking it. And that's why I'm doing a theory about it today. Because trust me, it ain't for the views, my friends. This one is not gonna perform. This and the Whose Line Is It Anyway episode, they're examples of

selfish content at their finest. So, how do you celebrate a dumb action franchise where people Tarzan swing with cars? Well, a dumb franchise deserves itself a dumb theory. And you see, that's the other reason this episode exists. I've been so busy doing such serious stuff in my final days on these channels. Exposing AI propaganda, giving up sugar and caffeine, reconnecting with family recipes, and analyzing Hello Neighbor frame by frame, that there hasn't been any room for a dumb episode. Just

a dumb, dumb, silly-willy, stupid episode that no one asked for and that literally no one cares about. I'm talking about something so dumb that it rivals my video essay on Deadpool being Ernest Hemingway. Oh, uh, by the way, Lee, with Deadpool and Wolverine coming up later this year, you might wanna revisit it. Uh, yeah, nah, Matt, I'm not doing that. Sure, your loss. Anyway, it was while I was watching Vin Diesel racing a bomb through the streets of Rome towards the Vatican that it finally str

uck me. We see a lot of cars in this franchise. And they are driving, literally all the time. So, just how much pollution are these guys pumping out into the atmosphere? I mean, these guys are constantly firing off NOS, jumping cars between buildings, drag racing in Japanese parking garages, and globetrotting to stop the baddies. And how do they do it? Through the love of family and a solid brand deal. I'm more of a Corona man myself. Ah. But while family may be enough to take down hacker terror

ists trying to hijack nuclear submarines, it's not enough to patch the holes in our atmosphere. It's not gonna be reducing the smog around LA. So, what exactly is the carbon footprint of the Fast and Furious franchise? Are our heroes actually doing more harm than good by racing through the streets to stop these international super criminals? Fasten your seatbelts and crack open a Corona, my friends. I sat down and ran the numbers. And the answer is gonna shock you. Well, actually, that's probabl

y not true. I don't think you care about this at all. But you know what? It may wind up being mildly interesting. So I figure we should probably be exactly on the same page as to what we're even talking about today, because this is a surprisingly complex topic for such a dumb theory. First and foremost, we need to address what exactly a carbon footprint is. I'm sure we've all heard the phrase tossed around before, but let's actually talk about precisely what it means. Practically all human activ

ity tends to release some sort of greenhouse gas into the air. Every time you ride in a car, a bus, an airplane, it's burning fuel. That combustion reaction releases a bunch of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Using lights and electronics, same thing. More often than not, that energy is coming from the burning of fossil fuels. Even stuff like growing food or making clothing, all of it uses energy. So your carbon footprint then, by its simplest definition, is adding up all the carbon you rel

ease into the environment just by living your day-to-day life. This is generally measured in carbon dioxide equivalent. And when you're talking about a 10-plus person crew globe-trotting to stop cyber hackers, those fuel emissions are gonna add up. But why does any of this matter? Well, in 1900, shortly after the Industrial Revolution, almost 2 billion metric tons of CO2 were released due to fossil fuel usage. By 1960, that number had more than quadrupled to 9 billion. More recent data from 2014

places it closer to 35 billion metric tons. In case you were wondering, the average annual carbon footprint for a US citizen? 16 tons. That accounts for everything from commuting to work to heating your house to playing way too much Lethal Company at night. From there, you can actually break it down even further into operational carbon versus embodied carbon. The first is the energy that's used when you're actually doing an activity. The fuel that's burning while you're using a vehicle, for ins

tance. Embodied carbon, meanwhile, includes all the invisible energy that's used to make something. All the emissions related to the vehicle throughout its entire lifespan, from the factory making them to the trucks and ships transporting them. As you might imagine, though, trying to hunt down how every single nut and bolt came to be inside of a 2000 Honda does prove to be a bit too time-consuming. So we're gonna be sticking with the broad operational carbon strokes today. We're theorists. We're

not insane. Okay, well, yeah, maybe a little bit of both. So, how did we even go about doing this for the Fastiverse? Well, firstly, we split the vehicles in each film into two categories. Motor vehicles like cars, trucks, tanks, etc. And flying vehicles like planes and jets. Then, I sat down and watched every movie, identifying every major vehicle used by a main character that I could. Just for an example, Brian drove both a 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse and a 1994 Toyota Supra MK4 in the Fast and t

he Furious. Then, he went on and drove a 2002 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 7 and a 1999 Nissan Skyline GTR R34 in Too Fast Too Furious. Both a 2002 Nissan Skyline GTR R34 and a 2009 Subaru Impreza WRX in Fast and Furious, that's the fourth one, both a 2001 Porsche GT3 RS and a 1971 Nissan Skyline GTR in Fast 5, a 1970 Ford Escort RS 1600, a 2010 Nissan GTR R35 and an Alfa Romeo Giulietta in Fast and Furious 6, as well as a 2012 Nissan GTR, Subaru Impreza WRX STI, Toyota Supra MK4, and the coolest

one of all, a 2013 Chrysler Town & Country minivan in Furious 7. Obviously, I'm not gonna list this out for every single character, but you get the point, we did our research. We did this for every single car that every main character drives. We then pulled the specs on each of them so we could find out their fuel capacity and gas tank size. That way I could calculate roughly how much CO2 they were emitting. For larger scenes that have a ton of cars in them, such as the first race in the Fast a

nd the Furious, as well as the car melee from Too Fast Too Furious, we assigned them either a 13-gallon tank if they were clearly a car, or a 16-gallon tank if they were clearly a truck, the average tank sizes for both those vehicles. Believe me, I would have tracked down the specs for each and every one of those cars if I could, but it's kind of difficult identifying exactly which cars are being used in some of these scenes when there's only like 8 pixels of them in frame, or we only see part o

f the hood of the car in like the corner of the screen. Then, once we were finished with all of that, we rinsed and repeated the entire process with the jets and the planes. Finally, we used online tools like Google Maps and airline services to figure out the distances driven or flown, as well as the number of hours each vehicle was in operation. So with all of that being said, let's start with the cars, shall we? To calculate how much CO2 our heroes blasted into the atmosphere with their races

and heists, it turned to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. According to the EPA, with every gallon of gasoline you burn to run your car, about 8,887 grams of carbon dioxide is created and released. So if your gas tank holds 13 gallons of gas, then it generates just over 115 kilograms of CO2, equaling out to roughly 0.115 metric tons of carbon dioxide released out into the atmosphere. Remember, that is for the entire tank gas. It would take you burning through almost 140 full tan

ks of gas to break into the US average of 16 tons for the entire year. So with all of those numbers in mind, just how big of a footprint did the cars of the Fast and Furious heroes leave in their wake? Well, believe it or not, but the franchise comes out of the gate swinging when it comes to CO2 pollution just from cars. The very first movie basically opens and closes with street races. It features multiple truck robberies, Vin Diesel fleeing the country via car, and a giant racing tournament ca

lled Race Wars. It was released in 2001 and it certainly shows. In total, by our calculations, 139.65 metric tons of CO2 were released during this film. To make that number a bit more tangible, a typical round-trip flight between New York and London releases two metric tons of CO2 per passenger. So you'd be looking at 70 flights worth of CO2 in this one movie alone. That is insane. Or you could consider this. Powering a mid-sized house for three years, it emits roughly two tons of CO2. So again,

those cars from the first movie are producing 70 times that amount in just one film. All these numbers, they're kind of ridiculous. And again, we are still just talking about the first movie. Interestingly, Too Fast, Too Furious features significantly less carbon pollution, despite Roman and Brian speeding all throughout South Florida trying to stop a drug kingpin. Though it does feature a whopping 61 aggressive gear shifts and pedal stomps, as well as Brian sending a 1969 Yanko Camaro SYC off

of a pier and onto a yacht, the total emissions for our heroes' cars is just 21.4 metric tons. See, this one surprised me because the movie actually has a short film prequel on the DVD extras. It shows Brian driving all the way from Los Angeles to Miami. I was kind of expecting that to inflate the total emissions by a good amount, but nope, the overall emissions from a trip didn't make that much of an impact. Speaking of numbers being smaller than you'd expect, despite the third movie, Tokyo Dri

ft, featuring the most time racing, 15 minutes and 10 seconds, the emissions from the heroes are actually the smallest of all the films by far, with a mere 3.59 metric tons of CO2 emitted. I credit this to a couple of things. First, despite spending the most time on the races, there are only five real ones throughout the entire film. The rest of the film is just spent on character drama. Why don't you nice boys let your cars do the talking? I only race for pink slips. How about me? Winner gets m

e. Yeah, it released in 2006, and it certainly shows. Also, I recognize that this is now the second time that I've used that excuse in this video, and spoiler alert, it probably won't be the last. Anyway, part three of the saga just featured fewer cars in the actual races. Most of them were just one-on-one because of the tighter venues in the streets, parking garages, and mountains of Tokyo. The spectacle of this film was all about the drifting, and not about the sheer volume of vehicles that we

re being driven around. But after two movies that were light on the carbon emissions, 2009's Fast and Furious seriously made up for some lost time. In the film's cold open heist, literally within the opening seconds of this thing, Dom and his crew steal two gas tankers and accidentally blow up a third. Fuel tankers this size typically hold somewhere around 6,000 gallons of gas. This means that Letty and the crew distributed 12,000 gallons of gas to fellow drivers throughout the Dominican Republi

c, and then an additional 6,000 gallons of gas just burned up right there in the mountains instantaneously. Those three tankers alone were responsible for unleashing around 160 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, ten times what the average American is gonna emit throughout an entire year. Add in an additional 21.4 metric tons from the general racing and driving from the rest of the movie, and part four creates a new high for the series at 184.1 metric tons of CO2, roughly the equivalent of 9

0 round trips between New York and London. And then from here, well, the emissions from the cars in the franchise actually plummet, as the Fast franchise shifts more into globetrotting spy thriller spectacle than its racing roots. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of ridiculous moments involving cars. Fast and Furious 6's runway chase is the scene that has the cars going the fastest for the longest, as Dom and the crew chase an airplane taken off for 13 minutes straight, going roughly 1

20 miles per hour the entire time. Fun fact about that, that means that this runway would have needed to have been about 26 miles long, 42 kilometers. For comparison, the longest runway in the world is Shigaze Peace Airport in China. Coming in at a mere 3 miles, just 5,000 meters. In short, Fast 6's runway here would have had to have been 10 times the length of the longest runway in the world. Like I said, these movies, they're probably dumber than this theory, which, you know, is saying a lot.

"- Hey Mia, you better hide your baby, or you better hide that big-ass forehead." Legit though, that is a great line. The only other way to liven up that barbecue would have been to use a different grill. Seriously, Roman, what are you doing, man? Never use a charcoal grill to make hot dogs. Over on Food Theory, I actually talked about all the best and worst ways to grill your meat, and the answers may surprise you. I know I wasn't expecting our conclusions. You can watch that video right now by

clicking the link at the top of the description. You're gonna be so prepared for that next barbecue that your family's gonna be talking about it on road trips and vacations for decades. Speaking of long drives, Fast 5 actually features the single longest driving distance across the entire franchise. Mia and Dom travel from Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro in a 2003 Acura NSX, and then the 1971 Nissan Skyline GT-R. We should also probably mention that they get Dom's Dodge Charger to South America a

s well. This single 6,000 plus mile trip consumed at least 531 gallons of gas, resulting in the release at 3.6 metric tons of CO2 just from these two characters getting to Rio. That one trip is more than the entirety of what we saw the heroes do in Tokyo Drift. And while Furious 7 certainly featured some memorable car stunts, especially Dom and Brian driving between buildings in Abu Dhabi, "- Dom, cars don't fly!" As you might imagine, the actual carbon emissions of that stunt were fairly low, s

ince, you know, there's not a whole lot of driving happening there, just a lot of falling. That one stunt actually generated less CO2 than the Paul Walker tribute AMV that appears later in the film. In total, between Fast 5, Fast and Furious 6, Furious 7, The Fate of the Furious, F9, Fast 10, and the spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, we see the heroes generate a measly 41.09 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Just as a reminder, the cold open of the fourth movie alone released seven times that amount. All in al

l, when you add up the car emissions from the good guys in these movies, it only comes out to about 388.33 metric tons across the 11 films. It's actually much lower than I expected, to be honest. New York City produces that many metric tons of CO2 in less than four minutes. Then again, remember that this is only taking into account the crews' travel via motor vehicles. Maybe things look a bit different when you factor in their airfare. Across the franchise, we count at about 75 flights taken by

the crew across all 11 films, and the distribution of them skews much heavier the later in the series that we get. Our heroes take just four flights during the first four movies, but after that, the crew really starts to jump all across the world. London, Brazil, Central America to the Caucasus Mountains, Abu Dhabi, New York, Samoa, Russia, Monaco, Berlin, Tokyo, the Caspian Sea. You get the idea. If Taylor Swift is getting cancelled for the greenhouse gases emitted by her private jet ride from

Japan to the Super Bowl, then the Fast and Furious familia should probably be getting DQ'd as well. But across all the air travel, one reigns supreme. The single craziest moment from all of these comes in Fast 9, where Roman and Tej fly a car into space to destroy a satellite. We're in outer space! Man, how much candy did you eat? Well, I eat candy when I get nervous. This little jaunt into orbit releases a whopping 269 metric tons of CO2 all on its own. In total, the planes flown by the crew ad

ded another 7,185.8 metric tons of CO2 to their footprint, bringing their total carbon footprint to a whopping, drumroll please... Mm-mm-mm. Terrible as always. Wouldn't have it any other way, Yosi. 7,573.98 metric tons of CO2. To translate that number into something that actually has meaning, it would take an average American over 473 years to match that amount of CO2 output. But the total did make me wonder, who's the real eco-villain here? The heroes or the bad guys? Well, I ran the numbers f

or the villains as well. And believe it or not, but the antagonists that they're fighting against in these movies, especially later in the franchise, they release way more carbon than our heroes ever do. For example, in Hobbs and Shaw, the big bad Eteon transports an entire army from the UK to Samoa. Dante from Fast X travels the world in his cargo airplanes, while F9 sees its villain sending a satellite into space via a rocket with two massive boosters on it. Based on researching SpaceX flights

, these two boosters here unleashed somewhere around 928 metric tons of CO2. Almost four times as much as Tej and Roman's space flights. And while all of these are certainly significant contributors to the carbon totals, they are nothing compared to the worst carbon offender of the entire series, Charlize Theron's Cipher from The Fate of the Furious. See, Cipher spends all of her time in a mobile workstation, riding in a modified Boeing 787, which only lands to refuel before immediately taken ba

ck off into the sky. There's no way of knowing exactly how much time passes in this film. Trust me, we tried. But considering all the travel and political extradition that our heroes face throughout its runtime, I estimate that it has to be at minimum 10 days. Since a 787 holds about 33.5 thousand gallons of aviation fuel, that means that Cipher is dumping over 3200 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere just in this one movie, and that's just during the time that we see her on screen. This isn'

t taking into account all of Cipher's travels before the events of Fate of the Furious. In total, the villains spew out 10,213.06 metric tons of CO2. And just to make sure that we're dotting our I's and crossing our T's here, that makes the total carbon footprint for the entire Fast franchise, both its heroes and its villains, to be a whopping 17,787.04 metric tons. And while that might seem like a massive amount, when you put it in perspective, it's really not. After doing all the math, the tot

al carbon footprint of the vehicles across this entire franchise is still less than what New York City generates in three hours. That 17,000 metric tons is just slightly more than what enters our atmosphere every minute of every day. It would take a single person over a thousand years to hit that mark, and that, I think, is the true lesson to take away from all this. Just the sheer volume of greenhouse gases produced by our society right now, and the real percentage that you as an individual is

actually contributing. Don't get me wrong, whether you're Joe Schmoe just going to work, or Dominic Toretto trying to stop cyber-terrorists from hurting your familia, watching your carbon footprint is a great thing. And collectively, we can make a difference. But it is a small, small difference when you look at the data. Rewind back to the statistics that I was citing before. Sure, a bunch of muscle cars might be pumping out CO2, but the same as 70, or even 90 round-trip transatlantic flights? T

hat statistic that I kept citing over and over again? That seemed like a weird and vastly overestimated comparison to me. And yet, that was the stat that the websites kept spitting back to me over and over again. But something about those numbers felt off, so I kept digging. And you know what I found? Discussions around carbon footprints are really vague and confusing. Look at the way this website frames it. A round-trip flight from New York to London is two metric tons of carbon dioxide per pas

senger. And this is common. Whenever you look up carbon footprint statistics, it's always targeted specifically at you, personally. It's your house, your travel, your problem. But the real problem here is the plane itself. That plane from New York to London? It is dumping 83 metric tons of CO2 out there, regardless of whether you're on it or not. On average, there are just under 10,000 planes in the sky at any given time. Your 16 metric tons of CO2 per year? It is a fraction of a fraction of a d

rop in that bucket. And yet, the companies out there? They're constantly passing the blame onto you. Do a search online for top CO2 emitting, and you see the top autocomplete results are for celebrities and countries. You know who you don't see in that autocomplete list? Companies. When they're really the ones with the actual power and responsibility of making impactful, lasting changes. In the end, Dom and the family? They're not just a bunch of car thieves fighting for justice. Seriously, go b

ack and watch. You'll see that Dom and the gang really just want to live peaceful, non-polluting lives, hanging out in their backyard barbecues. In Fast and Furious 6, the main characters have pretty much settled down on the Canary Islands, living low-key lives that don't involve spewing tons of carbon into the atmosphere. In Furious 7, they're back in Los Angeles again, trying to live normal lives. Brian even got himself a responsible minivan. What's that tell ya? In F8, Dom and Letty are relax

ing in Cuba. Furious 9, they've settled down on a ranch. And in Fast X, they've rebuilt their L.A. house and are just trying to be parents. Uncle John Cena even does his best to be environmentally friendly by busting out a personal aircraft that could be powered by just three shooters of vodka that he got on a plane. These guys are not just warriors, they are eco-warriors. Taking down bad guys, polluting our oceans, our skies, and our roads. Kinda like a modern-day, very mumbly-voiced Captain Pl

anet. I bet they even responsibly recycle their Corona bottles. But hey, that's just a theory. A film theory. Aaaaaand cut. If you want another Fast and Furious theory right now, we actually did one a couple years ago dissecting the franchise to figure out exactly which of the movies is the fastest and which one is the most furious. Or if you need some help translating Vin Diesel, go check out our theory on how to speak Groot. Probably the single best role he's ever played. Regardless, I'll see

you all next week with the return of one of my all-time favorite animated franchises.