"Fast & Furious 7" is one of the most anticipated films of next year.

The film brings back the majority of the cast that has made this franchise famous, and the hopes is that the distributor Universal Pictures can recoup its big investment and continuing bringing the franchise to greater financial heights.

Projecting the potential gross of films these days is rather difficult, especially for major sequels. The 2014 calendar year has witnessed a number of sequel duds including "The Amazing Spider-Man 2" and "Transformers: Age of Extinction" among others.

The "Fast & Furious" franchise has seen its struggles over the years. The first film was a huge hit that grossed $144 million in June 2001. The follow-up was released two years later and dipped a bit with only a gross of $127 million, and the third film in the franchise was a disaster that bottomed out at $62 million. It was the lowpoint financially for the franchise, and it took another three years before there was an attempt at a fourth film. That movie, which was released in 2009 under the rebranded title "Fast & Furious" (as opposed to "The Fast and the Furious") brought in about $155 million in the United States. Two years later "Fast Five" became the first installment in the franchise to hit the $200 million mark domestically when it brought in $209 million. And the most recent "Fast & Furious 6" brought in a whopping $238 million domestically. And that is only the U.S. gross. The films have been terrific overseas and the last two installments alone have accounted for $1.3 billion.

Reviews might have something to do with it. The first film was given a 53 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes while the second and third were a measly 36 percent. The fourth film, which brought about the turn around, was actually the worst reviewed film of the franchise, while the most recent two were the best reviewed of the bunch ("Fast Five" was approved by 77 percent of critics while its follow-up had an approval rating of 68 percent). A statistical analysis seeking out the correlation between reviews and box office domestically would indicate a strong correlation (0.74).

Which would indicate that the next sequel should do well if reviews are solid.

But even these stats cannot account for a major factor that will likely be the X-factor in everything -- Paul Walker's death. The actor, who was a major part of the franchise's cast, died while the film was in production and his absence left a lot of questions regarding his character's involvement. It is likely that fans of the franchise will turn up just to see how his death is dealt with.

But this might only account for opening weekend box office. There have been a ton of films that have been huge hits the opening weekend, but the biggest gross make their money based on return viewings. If fans are underwhelmed by this latest installment, then they might not come back a second time, likely depressing the film's eventual gross.

There have been a number of franchise films to open with tremendous first weekends, only to see their gross drop rapidly over the long run. "Spider-Man 3" opened to a record opening weekend back in 2007 ($151 million), but poor reviews (63 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) saw it become the lowest "Spider-Man" movie of its time, with only $336 million domestically by the end of the run.

"X-Men: The Last Stand" broke the Memorial Day Weekend record with $102 million gross back in 2006. But poor reviews eventually saw the film gross a total of $234 million. It was the highest grossing X-Men movie back then, but it was not a massive gross compared to other major franchise films back then.

"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" suffered a similar fate with a solid opening weekend, but wound up being the lowest grossing movie to date in the franchise.

Conversely, "The Dark Knight" and "The Dark Knight Rises" had tremendous reviews, great opening weekends and are among the top ranking films domestically of all time.

Do you think reviews will effect how well "Fast & Furious 7" does at the box office next year? Let us know in the comments section below.