Longtime Internet commenters have speculated that Jason Statham’s character in the action flick Collateral is the same Frank Martin from the Transporter movies. Collateral’s screenplay, Stuart Beattie, has verified the hypothesis put out by The Transporter’s director, Louis Letterier, that his film and that of his co-director, Paul Greengrass, take place in the same world. The idea that Statham’s Frank Martin from Collateral and The Transporter is the same person has been floating around the internet for over a decade. Statham had a two-line appearance in the opening of Michael Mann’s 2004 film Collateral, however, he was merely billed as “Airport Man,” as detailed in a report by Dark Horizons. At Los Angeles International Airport, Statham and Tom Cruise’s character, Vincent, cross paths during a baggage transfer.
Many viewers of The Transporter films think that Airport Man is actually Frank Martin. In the films, Statham portrays the title character, a former special operations officer now working as a highly competent driver and mercenary in the south of France (a position that Ed Skrein assumed for the rebooted version released in 2015). Despite Beattie’s earlier joke that the studio would not embrace the hypothesis, he has since acknowledged it as canon. During an appearance on the Collateral Confessions podcast, Beattie compared Statham’s Frank Martin to the character from the film Transporter. “That’s a question I posed to Jason. Of course. It is official canon. “Same universe… the studio would never say it, but in my brain, absolutely it’s him.”
Beattie, then 17 years old, conceived the film’s story in a cab on the way home from Sydney Airport. He went on to write the film’s script. He worried about what would happen if the driver casually spoke with his passenger without suspecting that the passenger was a psychopath. The film’s storyline was adapted from an earlier work, also named The Last Domino, although that process took place many years after the fact. In 2005, it was established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the two personas are in fact one and the same. Director of the first two Transporter films, Letterier confirmed in an interview with IGN that Frank Martin made an appearance in the fourth instalment.
Letterier has intimated that Frank Martin would continue to feature in films directed by other people in the future. “He’ll just be a cameo in other people’s movies; in Michael Mann’s movies,” Letterier stated, presumably referring to the character’s presence in Collateral. When this came out, neither Mann nor any of the other Collateral cast or crew members backed up his claim. Despite this, both The Transporter films and Collateral are still considered to exist in their own universes despite sharing an actor (Statham). Frank Martin, a mercenary driver for hire, will deliver anything, anyplace, for the appropriate price, in the three films that make up the Transporter franchise (directed by Leterrier and Corey Yuen and scripted by Luc Besson).
He has three rules he always breaks: never alter the agreement, never reveal anyone’s identity, and never open the box. In contrast, Cruise plays Vincent in Collateral, a passenger of Los Angeles cab driver Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx). When Max breaks the rules and takes a fare from Vincent, he is mixed up in the hitman’s illicit activities. Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Berg, Javier Bardem, and Bruce McGill all appear in the 2004 picture.
As of right now, you may watch The Transporter on Netflix.
You can now watch Collateral on Paramount+, HBO GO, and Netflix.