Fast & Furious in release order

About this order

Eleven films, two shorts that shipped on discs rather than in cinemas, all 52 episodes of Spy Racers, and a 2002 crime drama that is not a Fast film at all. That last one needs explaining, and it is the most interesting thing on this page.

Better Luck Tomorrow is here because Han is

Justin Lin's 2002 film sits in a series of its own rather than in Movies, because putting it in Movies would have said it was the second Fast film. It is on the page because Han Lue is in it: Lin wrote the character here and took him into Tokyo Drift when he was hired to direct it, and both Lin and Sung Kang have said in interviews that it is the same man.

What does not exist is any studio or on-screen acknowledgement. The nods are Han's constant eating, the "Han Seoul-Oh" alias both men call a fake ID, and Jason Tobin turning up as a different Hu in three of the later films. It is the first film row on this site to carry a note, because it is the only one where a reader cannot work out from the table why it is on the page.

The Prelude goes where it went

The Turbo-Charged Prelude shipped on a DVD on 3 June 2003, and 2 Fast 2 Furious opened on the 6th. Most lists file it as a disc extra. On a release-order site it sits one row ahead of the film it sets up. Los Bandoleros is treated the same way, dated to the Blu-ray and iTunes release of 28 July 2009.

Hobbs & Shaw is a film of the franchise

Billing notwithstanding. It sits in Movies in its release position rather than in a spin-off series of its own.

Spy Racers is six seasons, not six series

Every season carries a place-name subtitle on screen - Los Angeles, Rio, Sahara, Mexico, South Pacific, Homecoming - but Netflix, Wikipedia and IMDb all number them 1 to 6, so that is how they are carried. Each season dropped whole on one day, so the order within each of those days is simply the episode order.

Four cross-overs, and two that were argued about

Four episodes carry a flag, all of them Dom Toretto appearing in person: the first episode, the last of season 1, and both halves of the finale.

Two more were researched and deliberately left off. Escape from L.A. drops the crew's cars out of a jet onto a highway - the Furious 7 stunt - and the fan wiki's plot summary adds "which Dominic Toretto had done before", but that sentence cannot be told apart from an editor's aside and no transcript or quoted line exists. The Toretto Virus is weaker still: one Trivia bullet on a page with no plot summary at all. A visual restaging is not a story or dialogue reference.