Charles Bramesco

We ranked the best movie franchises ever made — and we did it scientifically.

The emperor of planet Playboy made the world a safer place for sex, leaving behind a complicated legacy.

The studio hopes Martin Scorsese can lure the former Wolf of Wall Street into the superhero world.

Our children won’t believe us when we tell them that there used to be doubt over whether a female-fronted superhero movie would work at the box office. Even at present, the days of studio executive hand-wringing over whether audiences would deign to shell out their precious $11.75 to see a film in which a woman — who was not a man — did superhero things feel favorably remote. For director Patty Jenkins and her marble-carved star Gal Gadot have proven beyond all debate and rage-choked internet commenting that women are perfectly capable of making a whole mess of money during blockbuster season. And now it’s official.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that in the film A Bad Moms Christmas, there will be moms, they will be bad, and it will be Christmas. The sequel to 2016’s sleeper hit has now gotten its first trailer, and if nothing else, I can confirm for you beyond any shadow of a doubt that A Bad Moms Christmas will star a collection of moms, all of whom will indulge in varying levels of badness. This year, the reason for the season is mom-ing, and doing it badly.

Here’s how thoroughly Batman’s influence has permeated the mainstream: he’s claimed tacit ownership of the very notion of shining a light into the sky. The Bat-Signal, introduced in the comics as Gotham City’s method of summoning the Dark Knight, has been endlessly parodied in the annals of pop-culture — just earlier this month, the poster for Captain Underpants paid homage to the iconic (a word I mean here literally, and not in the ‘a photo of the Kardashians’ sense) design of the skyward spotlight. And all too appropriately, the Bat-Signal will now be used to give one former Batman, the dearly departed Adam West, a proper send-off.

Johnny Depp needs some public image rehabilitation, and badly. When it came out last year that he had physically abused former spouse Amber Heard, a dark and sickly pallor was cast over the heretofore beloved actor’s profile. It isn’t helping that he hasn’t been in a good movie since 2011 (Rango, though Verbinski’s follow-up The Lone Ranger has its supporters), and hasn’t been in a really profitable one since 2014’s Into the Woods. The guy has to save a little face if he wants to secure his future in this business, and what better way to do that than to play to the only demographic unaware of his unsavory personal life: the youth!

The sequel to 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy is fast approaching, only two short weeks out from today. But of course the media blitz has long since begun, wallpapering major cities with colorful posters depicting the main lineup of intergalactic crimefighters/occasional crime-doers. Sharp-eyed fans will notice some shifting personnel, too — blue-faced gun-for-hire Yondu (Michael Rooker) earned a lot of fans with his magical floating murder-arrow in the first film, and has been accordingly bumped up to main-cast status through sheer fan demand. As for new faces, Kurt Russell and Pom Klementieff bring some fresh blood to the franchise as Star-Lord’s long-lost father Ego and empath servant girl Mantis, respectively.

Did you know that they apparently made another Terminator movie in 2015? Despite having seen it in theaters back during its original run, this still strikes me as new, hard-to-believe information. If there was really a new installment of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s popular sci-fi/action franchise as recently as two years ago, wouldn’t someone remember that? Wikipedia claims that the film (subtitled Genisys, which sounds fake but okay) attempted to launch Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke’s big-screen phase of her career, included a clutch starring role from Ahnuld himself, and earned the second-most of any entry in the series. Call me crazy, but that seems like a pretty major occurrence to have entirely fled the public‘s collective pop-cultural memory. I’m skeptical — does this look like a real movie to you?

Transformers and the Super Bowl are a match made in heaven. Is the NFL’s biggest night not, in its own way, the Michael Bay of televised sporting events? Massive budget, fetish for pyrotechnics, close-up shots of muscle-bound men glistening with hard-earned sweat, oodles of American patriotism, very few women, an overall roiling undercurrent of homoerotic tension — when the new TV spot for Transformers: The Last Knight runs on Sunday night during the big game, it’ll be difficult to tell where the football ends and the gigantic alien robot battles begin.