When the first movie in the Fast and the Furious franchise came out, I was a young man, still in the military and ready to watch anything that involved explosions and the possibility of things crashing into other things.
As I am writing this, I am a week and a half past my 40th birthday and I have long since gotten past the notion of going to a movie theater. Why? Well, for starters the 70-inch television in my living room and the blackout curtains that my wife and I installed sure make it sort of a ridiculous notion to leave the house to pay seven dollars for popcorn I am only going to eat half of.
So, if we are going to have a movie night we eat something really satisfying for dinner and then watch whatever we have decided to watch. As a matter of fact, I have sat inside a movie theater exactly one time in fourteen years. It’s honestly, a hassle at any age that you have to pay for the honor of being allowed to go through. Sort of like if you were dying of thirst and the guy handing you the bottle of water as you lay inside the Red Cross medical tent asks you if you have two dollars for the water.
I tell you all of this to point out something: the one exception that I make to my “no theater” embargo is when a new Fast and the Furious movie comes out. They are movies that when they are seen for the first time that they need to be seen without the idea that you might have to stop the film for ten minutes to take a phone call from someone wondering how you restart the router at their house, or the “oh crap, I better take out the garbage” moment that we all have when we decide it might be getting a little too late to bother even trying to do it.
Whenever I sit down to watch one of these movies, I am not the now forty-year-old man who is wondering if the co-pay covered the trip to the eye doctor or if I am going to have to call about getting the gutters cleaned next week. I am back to being that twenty-year-old kid that was just in the mood to eat some overpriced sugar and watch cars go really, really fast. And we all need that once in a while…
F9 may be all about characters returning, but the previous film had one particularly noticeable absence. During the final cookout scene in The Fate of the Furious, Dom’s crew is around the table drinking Budweiser and Stella. It’s a weird scene.
Though Budweiser, Stella, and Corona are all owned by AB InBev, the lime-adjacent beverage has been a part of Fast and Furious movies since the beginning. Corona is so engrossed in the Fast franchise that Budweiser and Stella seem like imposters in the scene. Though, it turns out there may be a reason the beer is missing from the film.
A surprise return in F9 may indicate why the Coronas are back in the movie. As per usual, F9 closes out with Toretto hosting a family cookout. However, unlike Fate of the Furious’ rooftop cookout, this is taking place in LA at the site of his soon-to-be rebuilt house and Coronas are on the table.
Before everyone digs in, Dom notes that a chair is still open. Apparently, someone is still on the way. Soon after Dom brings up the vacancy, Brian O’Conner’s (Paul Walker) blue Nissan pulls up the driveway. The scene may add evidence to a Corona-inspired theory.
With Coronas being absent from The Fate of the Furious, a theory sprang up saying that the beer represents home and family in the Fast franchise.
There are numerous examples in the films to back it up. The sans Vin Diesel sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, doesn’t feature the beer. However, when Dom’s crew gathers around the table in Fast & Furious 6 to eat together and mourn the loss of Gisele (Gal Gadot), Coronas are all over the place.
With Brian O’Conner being absent from Fate of the Furious following Paul Walker’s tragic death, it makes sense that Corona is absent too. When O’Conner’s car makes a cameo at the end of F9, the Coronas seem to indicate the family is back together.