Vrooom.... Fast & Furious!

Last weekend Rio very well set the tone for a smashing summer season to come! The macaw birds remained at the top and would be surely grossing $100 million at the US box office in their third weekend, making it probably another wonderful year for animated movies (remember Rango is currently at the revenue charts for this year). Hop meanwhile already reached that mark during the last weekend, a surprise hit indeed it has been! But we no longer hope to be talking about whether movies would be able to crawl across the $100 million barrier or not from this weekend onwards. For it is the beginning of the most anticipated time of the year - the summer season! High-budget movies are going to be rolled week after week... some with the potential to make it so big that a franchise would soon evolve... some might end up in ruins and despair... all waiting for our final judgement, us, the movie-watchers... the stakes are always high, and amongst the movies releasing in the next three month period, there would be some that would be aiming for a potential $1 billion earnings in worldwide revenues. So which one would it be is the big question mark.

This weekend kicks off in some style... fast cars, muscled men, gorgeous women, and multiple car chases! The fifth movie in the Fast & Furious instalment, Fast Five. Normally you do not associate the fifth movie of a series to have the potential to be the biggest of the series, do you? But with this franchise, the story is different. While the first movie, The Fast and the Furious released in 2001 had created a name for itself and a name for its leading star, Vin Diesel, and raked in about $145 million at the US box office (on a budget of $38 million, mind you!), the next two instalments declined in comparison notably due to the absence of the no-nonsense style of Vin Diesel. So how to sort this problem? Simple, bring back the entire cast of the original movie and wola, Fast & Furious, the fourth movie of the series, turned out to be the biggest hit of the franchise with $360 million in worldwide revenues. So the next question is how do you top it? Simple again. If Vin Diesel is not enough to fill up the screen, add another macho 'no small talk' guy to the squad. Enter Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, as the tough-cop brought in to disrupt Vin Diesel and his team's plans. With the biggest budget yet amongst all the movies in this series, expectations are bound to be high. And with Justin Lin as the director (who worked on the last two movies too), the car chase scenes are bound to be great! So vrooom vrooom, here we go, the summer season is on!