Fast X, the latest chapter in the 22-year-old Fast and Furious franchise, is looking at a pretty sorry $65-$70 million opening weekend.

According to Box Office Pro:

Diminished returns have set in for the long-running brand in the eight years since Furious 7 saw the franchise peak with a $147.2 million domestic opening and $353 million total (part of $1.5 billion globally).

…

Since Furious 7, the series has seen domestic openings decline by 52 percent to $70 million with F9‘s 2021 release (after The Fate of the Furious pulled $98.8 million on Easter weekend in 2017). Notably, F9 may not be a perfect comparison in terms of opening and/or staying power due to the recovering nature of the mid-pandemic marketplace at the time.

I can tell you the exact moment this series lost me…As silly and petty as this sounds, it was early in F9. With their young son, Dom (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) have retired from super-spying and saving the world to an idyllic farm. Then we cut to Dom working on a tractor in a perfectly white t-shirt with perfectly clean hands and perfectly clean tools.

Even after the utter absurdity of the previous chapter, 2017’s Fate of the Furious, which had race cars chasing a nuclear submarine, I still wanted to give the franchise every benefit of the doubt. I understand the pressures that come with being a global blockbuster franchise. Everything has to be bigger, but…

Does it have to get stupider?

Yes, yes, it does, and as small as that tractor moment was, I immediately knew that if F9 did not care about reality when it came to little things (like a t-shirt), it certainly would not care about the big things. So, that was when I checked out forever. And my instincts proved correct. F9 turned out to be a five-alarm joke: Cars in space. Trapping a cable in a wheel well to fly across a chasm. Han returns from the dead. A plane captures a car in mid-air. The ever-expanding cast of villains, arch-villains, supervillains, and arch-supervillains. Why is Helen Mirren in this thing? When did 60-pound Mia (Jordana Brewster) win her blackbelt in punching out 200-pound guys? Is that Cardi B? It must be; I can not understand a word she is saying.

Now the already over-stuffed franchise is adding Brie Larson, Rita Moreno, and Jason Momoa to Fast X. What, was Adam Driver too busy?

From the original The Fast and the Furious (2001) to Furious 7 (2015), no one was a bigger fan. Now the series is a CGI’d joke, a green screen’d punchline… Most of all, it is insulting. You love this franchise so much, we can do anything we want, and you’ll keep coming.

Even more frustrating is that the Fast & Furious franchise is one of the few franchises refusing to bend the knee to the false god of woke.

Fast & Furious was always kind of silly. I get that. But like the Mission: Impossible series, even as everything got bigger and louder, until part eight, you could suspend disbelief. A car jumps from one building to another? Could happen. A runway that is 25 miles long? Could happen. Anyone who walks into a movie looking for literal needs to find another pastime.

Sadly, Fast & Furious has reached the “invisible car” phase of the franchise. Remember that James Bond movie with the invisible car? That is where we are at now. In other words, due to a creative gas tank on E, we are being taken for granted.

Real shame.

Rumor has it they spent $340 million on this sucker. If that is anywhere near accurate, between that and the promotion budget, Fast X will have to close in on $1 billion worldwide just to break even.

Well, we will know the fate of Fast X when it hits screens on May 19. We are told this is the first part of a two-part franchise finale.

Then it is no more Fast & Furious movies.

“Death, where is thy sting?”

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.