Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss motion pictures with your fellow movie lovers. Have you ventured into theaters yet after long months in quarantine? For many, this is the week they’ll be going to the movies for the first time in a while… partially because what may be the year’s first blockbuster hits screens in America.

This week finally sees the release of F9, the ninth film in the Fast & Furious franchise. Worldwide, it has already made $300 million. It marks the return of Justin Lin, the director from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift to Fast and Furious 6. It also comes at a tail end of an internal drama where Vin Diesel and the Rock had a sort of professional divorce and took custody of different parts of the franchise.

Twenty years ago, it started as a Point Break remake with the twist of illegal street racing. Young teenagers everywhere were forever changed, peeling out of the parking lots of movie theaters all over the world and imagining that their cars had a few canisters of NOx in the trunk.

The series then went on to evolve into some sort of spy thriller where cars drove off of towers, a God’s Eye computer could track anyone around the world, and Idris Elba played some sort of cyborg. The stakes would escalate along with the unlikeliness of the titles. Was the 7th movie Fast & Furious 7, The Fast and Furious 7, Fast 7, or Furious 7? I doubt anyone really knows.

But for a lot of us, the real Fast & Furious were those first three films, where street racing was king. They were also strange anomalies in film at the time. When people of color were basically the sidekicks in films, here they were the main characters. The cool ones. And they weren’t afraid of who they were, putting their culture right out there were you can see it.

As a non-white young man, this meant a lot.

So in celebration of the franchise, here’s today’s prompt: what is your favorite Fast & Furious film?

Tokyo Drift is considered by some to be the worst of the franchise. What this thread presupposes is… what if it’s not?

Next week: character introductions