Dwayne Johnson may have dropped out of the main series, due to what certainly seems to be irreconcilable differences with Vin Diesel, but the Fast & Furious family only continues to grow.
You don't have to play the full Six Degrees of Separation to connect the majority of Hollywood's biggest names, and that's arguably even more true in the comedy genre, or at least the last decade of it. Almost anybody to have appeared in a movie designed to generate laughs will have encountered either Adam McKay or Judd Apatow at one stage, which obviously includes Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill.
Every classic horror or fantasy property finds itself being rebooted, remade and reinvented in perpetuity. Just look at Universal's stable of classic monsters; it's been less than four years since the Dark Universe imploded at the first hurdle, but there are upwards of a dozen projects in various stage of development, at least four of which involve Dracula in some fashion.
Landing Angelina Jolie for Eternals was a huge coup for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially when the Academy Award winner has significantly scaled back her output over the last decade. While Chloé Zhao's cosmic blockbuster marks her second release in the space of seven months following Warner Bros.' thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead, before that she'd only appeared in four live-action movies across the previous eleven years.
Let's get the good news out of the way first; Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is set to spend a second weekend at the top of the domestic box office with an estimated $31 million rolling in before the end of play on Sunday, which is a solid hold for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, typically a very front-loaded franchise.
In shocking news that you'd never have seen coming in a million years, Netflix's hot new action movie has managed to grab the number one spot on the most-watched list just 24 hours of premiering. We are of course lying with that opening statement, and it's become par for the course to see the streaming service's latest splashy offering draw in a huge audience on day one; the real question is how long Kate can stay there.
Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor remains one of the most polarizing figures in DCEU history, and one who never got a second bite at the cherry to see if they could win over the doubters. Reinventing Superman's arch nemesis as an eccentric trust fund billionaire didn't sit right with a lot of people, even if many aspects of the actor's approach were ripped straight from the comic books.
Jamie Foxx was the first returning face to be confirmed for Spider-Man: No Way Home last October, and it was the announcement of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 villain's impending comeback that revealed to the world Tom Holland's third solo outing sequel was going to be predicated on the multiverse.
Looking at how the Marvel Cinematic Universe has only continued to go from strength to strength, it's easy to forget just how big a deal it was when Netflix first announced they'd partnered up with the comic book giant to develop a quartet of shows that would exist in the same mythology and culminate in The Defenders.
Oscar Isaac may have made his screen debut in the late 1990s, but it took a long time for the actor to break through into the mainstream. He's definitely managed it, though, and earned a reputation as one of the best talents of his generation via a string of phenomenal performances in a variety of different genres.