AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Fast cars, attractive people, a stone face, monotone Vin Diesel - must be the new "Fast And Furious" movie.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS")
VIN DIESEL: (As Dom) I think I found my team.
CORNISH: This week, the eighth installment hit theaters, "The Fate Of The Furious." And for a franchise that all started with a fight over a tuna sandwich, the stakes have gotten pretty high.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Shea Serrano is a writer for the website The Ringer.
SHEA SERRANO: The first one was mainly focused on actual street racing. They were racing for like $2,000 a race. And then by, like, the time we got to the fifth one, they were robbing a warlord of a hundred million dollars.
CORNISH: As the stakes scaled up, so did the damages. A British insurance company calculated the cost of all those car crashes and street fights.
SHAPIRO: There's less than a million dollars of damage in the first movie.
SERRANO: The biggest thing that happens in the first one is a car flips. There are two times where a car crashes and it rolls over. And that was, like, the biggest, most damaging thing that happens.
SHAPIRO: Puny compared to "Furious 7" where almost $300 million of stuff gets wrecked, much of it in one insane scene involving one of the most expensive cars in the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FURIOUS 7")
PAUL WALKER: (As Brian O'Conner) Do you realize what this is? Lykan HyperSport - $3.4 million, 0 to 60 in less than three seconds. There's seven of these things in the world, and this guy keeps it locked up in a vault.
DIESEL: (As Dom) Nothing sadder than locking a beast in a cage.
CORNISH: The beast goes out of the cage and out of the skyscraper penthouse all together into another skyscraper then out a window and into another skyscraper. Our heroes escape without a scratch. The car does not.
SHAPIRO: As for the newest film, Shea Serrano of The Ringer says, of course, this one ups the ante again.
SERRANO: There's like a scene where some hackers control like a thousand cars.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FATE OF THE FURIOUS")
CHARLIZE THERON: (As Cipher) I want every car in a two-mile radius now.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) There's over a thousand of them.
THERON: (As Cipher) Hack them all.
SERRANO: They just hack into them and start zombie driving them. And they're just smashing them into everything. They're driving them like out of parking garages. They're hacking all the cars in there, and then they just drive them all out of the back of the garage onto the ground. It's like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cars crashing into each other.
SHAPIRO: Craziest thing of all - this isn't even the last movie in the franchise. "Fast and Furious 9" and 10 are already on the books for April 2019 and '21 respectively.
CORNISH: Shea Serrano says the challenge now is, where do they go from here?
SERRANO: They fought a tank. They fought a plane. This time they fight a submarine. I assume soon they're going to have to fight a space shuttle. I can't - I'm excited for "Fast And The Furious 10" in outer space.
CORNISH: Shae Serano of the website The Ringer. "Fate Of The Furious," the eighth one, is out today.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAKE ONE AND MF DOOM'S "TRAP DOOR") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.