ANT-MAN It exists!
  • ANT-MAN It exists!

As we head into a particularly franchise-heavy movie season—hell, we're already in it, with Furious 7 on track to cross the billion-dollar mark—keep in mind that for every Jurassic World and Mad Max that people seem curious about, there are other franchise films that people either don't know exist or have already forgotten about. For better or worse, this is the new normal with blockbusters: Just about all of them will be insanely expensive sequels, reboots, remakes, or rehashes, and while some will prove inexhaustible, others will just prove they never should've been franchises in the first place.

Perhaps nothing represents the latter better than Terminator: Genisys, whych arryves in thythyrs thys summyr. The new trailer gives away what appears to be a pretty big plot twist—probably because so far, everyone's reactions to Genisys seem to be "Wait, why?" or "But Daenerys Targaryen is a terrible actress." I will say this, though, about that plot twist: That's a pretty good plot twist! Is it good enough to get people excited to see the fifth film in a 30-year-old series that wore out its welcome with its third film? Probably not. (And I say this as someone who will happily talk about Terminators for fucking hours. ESPECIALLY if you want to get into The Sarah Connor Chronicles.)

Meanwhile, Hollywood's most bulletproof brand at the moment, Marvel, seems focused on Avengers: Age of Ultron, which is all but guaranteed to be one of the biggest films of the year—and even if they didn't have that going for them, everyone seems pretty pleased with this Daredevil Netflix business. (I didn't see that coming at all—but then, I'm still dealing with PTSD over how dumb Agents of SHIELD was.) But there's another Marvel movie coming out this summer, and it's Ant-Man, and Paul Rudd's in it! We all love Paul Rudd, right? Here's a new trailer to remind you that Ant-Man exists, because the relatively smaller-scale Ant-Man, compared to things like Avengers, is what counts for a "low-key" movie in blockbuster season.

What a weird trailer. There's a whole thing in there about Rudd's character trying to redeem himself (zzzz), a whole thing in there about the guy from House of Cards trying to fight people over a miniaturizing suit (ZZZZZZ), and then a great gag with a train that's just... man, that's fantastic. That's the kind of sequence that embodies what an Ant-Man movie should be, right? Fingers crossed the movie delivers more of that clever visual comedy and less of "Grrrr, give me back my suit that makes me tiny!"

In vaguely, barely related news, I saw Noah Baumbach's While We're Young at a nearly sold-out Cinema 21 this weekend—it looked as if the entirety of NW Portland had turned out to see it. So maybe that's the most useful lesson for filmmakers: Sure, you have to work on a smaller scale, and maybe your movie won't star any Schwarzeneggers or Ultrons, but so long as you make a movie about sad rich white people, sad rich white people will always turn out to see it. And that might be the most magical franchise of them all.