'Fast And Furious' By The Numbers: The Number Of Coronas Consumed, Cars Crashed, And "Family" Mentioned

Over the years, the Fast and Furious movies have carved out an identity – fans know what to expect from them and they deliver. As with any long-running movie series, certain trends, motifs, habits, and patterns start to emerge, stuff that makes you chuckle with recognition.

But what happens when you go through the first seven movies (part eight, The Fate of the Furious, is in theaters today) and try to count the various repeating elements? Just how many Coronas does Dominic Toretto drink throughout the course of the series? How many times does everyone say "family"? How often do Dom and Brian share a smoldering look? And just how many cars crash in each movie?

Those questions have now been answered. Buckle up. It's time to start counting.

Dominic Toretto's favorite brew begins as just background color (you can't even clearly see the label in the first movie), but it eventually emerges as an actual component of the Fast and Furious mythos, becoming the punchline of a silly joke in Furious 7. Naturally, the films that don't feature Vin Diesel don't feature any Coronas and the Brazil-set Fast Five finds the crew drinking another, unspecified beer instead.

This was a tricky one to count, but here are the rules I settled on. If a "hero car" hits another vehicle and keeps moving, it doesn't count as a wreck. However, the vehicle it hit (provided that it's no longer involved in the sequence) will get counted. Once a "hero car" was wrecked, it was added to the tally. As you can see from the numbers, the final three movies dominate this category, but it's Fast and Furious 6's "tank on the highway" scene that gives it the final edge. However, special props need to be given to Fast Five's final scene, during which Dom wrecks 12 enemy vehicles in one brisk scene using "safe-fu" on a Rio highway.

The budding bromance between Dominic Toretto and Brian O'Connor forms the initial heart of the series and these two exchange their fair share of knowing, loving, brotherly, profound glances. The tally here doesn't represent every single time they look at one another, but rather every single time they look at one another and you can feel it. The more stripped-down, personal first movie has the easy edge here and these moments become fewer and farther between later in the series. The tragic death of Paul Walker surely had something to do with the small number of moments in the seventh movie. Interestingly, the fourth movie, Fast and Furious, takes the longest time for one of these moments to occur, mainly because the estranged duo spends the first half of the movie deliberately avoiding eye contact with one another, even as they share major scenes.

Despite initially being introduced as a tough guy replacement for Dom in 2 Fast 2 Furious, Roman Pearce quickly becomes the punching bag of the series and for good reason: Tyrese Gibson is a natural  comedic talent and he's far more effective as a big goofball than as another glowering hero. Naturally, he sometimes gets pushed to the edge by other characters or a particularly awful situation, resulting in him ranting and raving and overreacting. As you can see, the truly insane events of Furious 7 got the most freak-outs – he gets to say what everyone in the audience is thinking.

These may be silly action movies, but the creators of the Fast and Furious series eventually realized that audiences enjoyed the camaraderie between the members of the crew as much as the big action scenes. So they doubled down on the "family" aspect of the movies, playing up the personal relationships and transforming the subtext of the first movie into something very literal. In the first few movies, the use of the word "family" is incidental, something that just comes up in dialogue every so often. But starting with Fast Five, it becomes the keyword for the entire series, peaking (so far) with Fast and Furious 6's 10 uses of the word.

It wouldn't be a Fast and Furious movie without a scene set at a party or race rally where the camera lingers on gratuitous close-ups of scantily clad women. Since counting every single underdressed woman in each shot would be impossible, these numbers come from counting each woman who is the focus of a shot and whose presence in frame doesn't add anything to the film beyond something for the audience to leer at. While the movies are pretty consistent in their numbers, Furious 7, seemingly in an act of self-parody, goes all-in on this. The early "Race Wars" montage features 30 rapid-fire shots of women in booty shorts and bikinis posing for the camera.

When the characters in the Fast and Furious movies aren't driving, they tend to huddle around tables, drinking beers and swapping stories coated in grease and life experience. Often, these stories feature their fair share of jock philosophizing, featuring lines like "I live my life a quarter mile at a time." Naturally, most of these come from Dom, but the Dom-less Tokyo Drift gives the other movies a run for their money. It should be noted that 2 Fast 2 Furious and Fast and Furious 6, the most plot-driven movies of the bunch, were the only movies that didn't cause me to ever wrinkle my forehead and mumble "What the hell is he talking about?" before marking another tally on the list.

This category is an interesting case where the results weren't nearly as exciting as I was expecting. Originally introduced as a mechanic and race organizer in 2 Fast 2 Furious, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges' Tej Parker eventually evolves in the crew's "Q," the weapons and technology guy who hooks them up with all kinds of nifty gadgets and tools. While there are many shots of Tej sitting behind a computer, typing away, there are only a small handful of moments where he explains something via hilariously obtuse techno-babble. Most of the time, he just has to look like he knows what he's doing.

A mainstay of the series, NOS is a dominating force in the early movies, with nearly every major character using nitrous oxide boosts to gain the edge in races and chases. However, Tokyo Drift, with its focus on stylish racing instead of fast racing, broke the series of its reliance on the stuff and the rest of the series followed suit, saving these massive speed boosts for vital moments (like ramping off a parking garage at a hovering helicopter). Interestingly, NOS was used less as the characters grew increasingly superhuman, as if relying on it would cheapen their impossible onscreen abilities. It's telling that, in the later movies, NOS is used more often to power gadgets than it is to gives cars a boost.

In order to qualify for this count, a single moment had to result in my yelling "Oh, come on! There's no way he would have survived that!" at the television. Naturally, the earlier movies have a few of these moments, but they're saved for the most dramatic scenes. By the later entries, characters are surviving accidents and situations that would have killed them ten times over. The fifth, sixth, and seventh films make a strong case for the entire Toretto crew being nothing short of invincible, walking away from wrecks that otherwise transformed their vehicles into scrap metal.

As explained in Fast Five, Han used to be a smoker, so he keeps his hands busy by constantly snacking (chips seem to be his snack of choice). To determine Han's snack count, I followed one simple rule: every time the movie cuts to the new location, I note if he's eating something; if he is, I counted it. The results were pretty steady, but Tokyo Drift (the movie where he has the most screen time) was the easy victor here.

As Brian screams to Dom in Furious 7: "Cars don't fly!" But they do in the Fast and Furious movies. To qualify here, a four-wheeled vehicle had to go airborne, with all four tires off the ground. This could be the result of an incidental bump on a mountain road, an intentional and dramatic ramp, or...a bunch of cars literally parachuting out of an airplane. As is often the case with this series, the numbers got bigger as the series went on, with part seven dominating the count.