Fast and Furious cast reunites at Cannes for 25th anniversary screening

Cannes got a late-night burst of blockbuster electricity when Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster returned together for a 25th-anniversary screening of The Fast and the Furious, turning the Croisette into a reminder of how far the franchise has traveled since 2001. The festival scheduled the special presentation for 11:45 p.m. Wednesday at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, and the crowd around the venue was packed despite the hour.

The screening was more than a nostalgia stop. Festival de Cannes framed The Fast and the Furious as the 2001 film that launched a worldwide cultural phenomenon, and Universal Pictures has built that phenomenon into an 11-film saga that has earned more than $7 billion at the global box office. The franchise’s scale is visible in the numbers alone: Furious 7 brought in about $1.51 billion worldwide, The Fate of the Furious about $1.19 billion, F9 about $719 million and Fast X about $714 million.

Diesel arrived in a black jacket with a racecar design on the back, fitting for a franchise rooted in street racing and speed. Universal asked guests to dress in casual chic, but the real visual statement was the reaction at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, where fans had waited for hours to catch a glimpse of the cast. The screening sat within Cannes’ special screenings and Cannes Classics programming, a placement that gave a once-maligned action movie the institutional polish usually reserved for canonical cinema.

The emotional center of the night was Paul Walker, whose death in a 2013 car crash still shadows the series. Meadow Walker, his daughter, appeared at Cannes, extending the franchise’s family thread into a new generation. Diesel became tearful as he paid tribute to Walker, a moment that gave the celebration a more elegiac weight than a standard studio anniversary event. It also recalled how the series has endured through tragedy, cast changes and shifting critical opinion without losing its core audience.

The timing mattered too. Universal has already set the next sequel, Fast Forever, for theatrical release on March 17, 2028, signaling that the franchise is still being planned as a long-running global property rather than a finished memory. For Cannes, the screening filled a blockbuster gap and showed how the festival now uses major studio nostalgia not just to honor a hit film, but to keep the red carpet relevant to audiences who still show up for stars, spectacle and a brand that has outlived the decade that created it.