Cannes adds Fast & The Furious

Cannes is doing something very Cannes and very not-Cannes at the same time. It has put The Fast and the Furious — the 2001 movie that launched Universal’s giant action franchise — into the 79th festival as a Midnight Screening on Wednesday, May 13. And right next to that, in Cannes Classics, it has programmed a restored print of Ken Russell’s The Devils. Basically, the festival is saying two things can be true at once: film history includes revered restorations, and film history also includes a movie about nitrous, pink slips, and Vin Diesel staring people down. ### What exactly did Cannes add? The key move is the Fast screening. Cannes announced it as a one-off anniversary event at the Grand Théâtre Lumière at 11:45 p.m. on May 13, tied to the franchise’s 25th anniversary. That gives a studio blockbuster origin story one of the festival’s splashiest late-night slots, not some tucked-away sidebar. (festival-cannes.com) ### Why this movie? Because the first Fast movie is now old enough to count as heritage — which feels weird until you do the math. Universal released it on June 22, 2001. What started as a Los Angeles street-racing thriller became an 11-film saga that Cannes itself describes as a global cultural phenomenon, with more than $7 billion in worldwide box office. That is exactly the kind of mass-audience footprint festivals increasingly want to acknowledge, even if the movie never belonged to prestige cinema in the old sense. (festival-cannes.com) ### Who’s showing up? Not just the film. The people attached to the franchise are part of the event. Cannes said Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, producer Neal H. Moritz, and Meadow Walker — Paul Walker’s daughter — would attend the screening. That turns the slot into a memorial gesture too, not just a nostalgia play. (festival-cannes.com) ### And where does The Devils fit? That one sits in Cannes Classics, the festival’s restoration and film-history section. The 2026 Cannes Classics lineup includes 21 feature films, 3 shorts, and 6 documentaries, and one of the restored titles is Ken Russell’s 1971 The Devils. So the festival is not treating Fast and The Devils as the same kind of object. One is a celebratory midnight event. The other is a canon-adjacent restoration. But putting them in the same year still creates the same message — Cannes is stretching the frame of what deserves ceremonial attention. (festival-cannes.com) ### Is this a big shift for Cannes? A shift, yes — but not a total break. Cannes has spent years mixing auteur competition titles with splashier out-of-competition premieres, revivals, beach screenings, and anniversary events. The 2026 festival runs from May 12 to May 23, and its official selection already spreads across competition, Midnight Screenings, Cannes Premiere, Special Screenings, Classics, and more. Fast fits that broader logic. It just makes the strategy unusually obvious. (festival-cannes.com) ### Why does the midnight slot matter? Because midnight at Cannes is where the festival lets itself be loud. It is the place for sensation, cult energy, and crowd response. Putting The Fast and the Furious there avoids pretending it is something else. Cannes is not rebranding the film as arthouse. It is honoring the exact thing it was — a high-voltage crowd movie that changed pop action cinema. (festival-cannes.com) ### So what’s the real takeaway? Cannes is broadening its definition of film legacy. The old model separated “serious cinema” from popular franchise filmmaking too neatly. This year’s program suggests that split is getting harder to defend. A restored scandal film like The Devils and the first Fast movie come from different traditions, but both shaped movie culture in ways Cannes now wants to stage, not ignore. (festival-cannes.com) ### Bottom line? This is not Cannes going full blockbuster. But it is Cannes admitting that a movie can be noisy, commercial, and deeply important to film history anyway. (festival-cannes.com)