Really? People Paid To See This Again??

Because I've come to accept that fact that people are generally stupid and utterly predictable in their behavior, it comes as no surprise that Fast & Furious, the third sequel in the Fast and Furious tetralogy, was the big winner at this weekend's box office, raking in a ridiculous $72 million.

It's not surprising that a movie that is basically the same movie as THE Fast and THE Furious (see what they did there, taking out the "the"s?), with the same stars and the same plot, is on pace to make over $100 million in a week. I mean, people paid a $1 billion to see the same Shrek movie three times. And even more to see the same Pirates of the Caribbean movie as many times. (The only Pirates movie I've seen a substantial part of is number 3, and it was as though the director had taken a class from Michael Bay on how to make an incoherent movie, and took that lesson and multiplied everything by 100.) They're not even attempting to be creative.

But filmmaking is not about artistic integrity; it's about making money. The first movie made money. Vin Diesel, who pretends to have some artistic sensibility, bailed out after that. Paul Walker made it through 2 Fast 2 Furious (see what they did there, replacing the "the"s with "2"s? Because it's the second one? Get it?) before he bailed, leaving the kid from Sling Blade all alone for the third one, which barely managed to make any money.

So, how do you revitalize a dying franchise? Bring back all the stars from the first one and make that again, of course. It just goes more towards proving my theory that if you made a movie of George Clooney and Brad Pitt taking a shit, people would pay to see it.

Oh, wait, they already did that; it was called Ocean's Thirteen.