"Wonder Woman" opens, crushes the competition in an Amazonian embrace and adds another brick in the small wall of the DC Comics universe.
"The Mummy" opens, gets pretty much reburied upon awakening, but is still the foundation of what Universal hopes is a major moneymaking venture - rebooting its classic monsters Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, Creature From the Black Lagoon, etc. They're calling it the Dark Universe.
And the Marvel Comics Universe (MCU for those in the Cool Kids Club) just keeps steamrolling over everything with "Guardians of the Galaxy 2," "Logan" and new films from Black Panther, Thor and Spider-Man. At $11.7 billion and counting, is there any doubt the universe will keep going until it implodes into a black hole?
These days, if you're a movie company and you don't have an ongoing series of interconnected films, you're that pitiful wretch nobody wants to sit with in the school cafeteria.
"Transformers," "Alien," "Pirates of the Caribbean," "The Fast and the Furious" - you could go for days listing all the film series released over the last two decades. And we're not counting "Harry Potter," "The Lord of the Rings" or "The Twilight Saga," which at least were based on books and had a preplanned endpoint.
Movie series aren't new, of course. Six movies in the "Thin Man" series were released between 1934 and 1947; the first was even nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
James Bond exploded the moment "Dr. No" was released in 1962, and it's still going after 24 films, although it has had its ups and downs in terms of both quality and ticket sales.
"The Planet of the Apes" came out in 1968, was followed by five others in the 1970s then was reborn with a trilogy that began in 2011. "Star Trek" boldly went from TV to movies in 1979 and lasted until 1991; "Star Trek: The "Next Generation" followed from TV to film in 1994 and - again - the classic series rebooted in 2009.
In all fairness, the movie industry is a risky business. Spend about $160 million on "The 13th Warrior" in 1999 and bring in $62 million at the box office? Somebody gets canned.
While series can be cash cows, they also can be simple fun. No one says the Marvel Universe is high literature, but most of the movies are entertaining eye candy. Can anyone recount exactly what has happened in each movie and how they connect to each other? Maybe if you watched them back to back to back, but maybe not even then.
The best plan may be to latch onto a series from the first film and follow it from there on out. Almost certainly you'll wade through some tripe, but you may have some fun, too. Sometimes that's enough.
Contact Shawn Ryan at mshawnryan@gmail.com.