The Fate of the Furious, on the other hand, joins Furious 7 as the only two chapters of the muscle-car soap-opera saga to cross the $1 billion mark, so I shouldn’t be too surprised to see Fate doing so well.
Even the third Hobbit film (which is fully titled The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies… a fact I’m sure I once knew but completely forgot) stalled out at $956 million internationally.
I doubt there’s any other long-running franchise that pushed later chapters above that critical box office mark.
That being said, any franchise that manages to post north of $1 billion globally with its seventh and eighth films, respectively, is an eye-popping accomplishment.