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Curated playlist

20th Century Studios franchises

  • Rocky (franchise)The Rocky franchise has renamed part of a real building. The entrance to the Philadelphia Museum of Art is now widely known as the Rocky Steps. Sylvester Stallone created the series around Rocky Balboa, a fictional boxer from that city,…
  • Madagascar (franchise)Madagascar is a DreamWorks Animation franchise that has grossed more than 2.2 billion dollars. That makes it the ninth highest-grossing animated franchise ever, and the third biggest at DreamWorks, behind only Shrek and Kung Fu Panda. Its…
  • Terminator (franchise)The Terminator franchise began with a sale that cost the buyer a single dollar. Before the first film existed, James Cameron sold the rights to Gale Anne Hurd, who would later become his wife. He attached one strict condition: he had to be…
  • Kung Fu PandaKung Fu Panda began on the 6th of June 2008, when DreamWorks Animation released a film about a giant panda who was never supposed to be a hero. His name is Po Ping. He is bumbling and gluttonous, and he is improbably named the prophesied…
  • Hitman (franchise)Hitman is a stealth game franchise from the Danish studio IO Interactive, and it began as a deliberately modest idea. Designer Jacob Andersen described the plan like this: "We decided to do a quick game inspired by Hong Kong action…
  • Avatar (franchise)The Avatar franchise, created by James Cameron, announced its sequels before the first film had even reached a cinema. On the 11th of December 2009, 20th Century Fox revealed plans for a sequel series. The original film opened one week…
  • The Day the Earth Stood StillIn The Day the Earth Stood Still, a soldier shoots the alien before he finishes saying he comes in peace.
  • Street FighterStreet Fighter player Daigo Umehara parried 15 hits in a row with one pixel of health left in 2004.
  • The Pink PantherThe Pink Panther is a film franchise whose first installment ends with a cartoon animal being run over by a police car. In the closing seconds of the 1963 original, the car carrying Inspector Jacques Clouseau to prison hits a traffic…
  • The Devil Wears Prada (film)The Devil Wears Prada, a 2006 American comedy-drama directed by David Frankel, has a famous villain who made her entrance in a whisper. At a table read in New York, Meryl Streep spoke Miranda Priestly's first line so softly that the whole…
  • Power RangersPower Rangers owes its existence to a hotel television in Japan. Haim Saban was on a business trip there in the 1980s. The only thing his hotel set would show was a series about five masked people in spandex suits fighting monsters. He was…
  • Alita: Battle AngelAlita: Battle Angel began as a website address registered around June 2000. The film did not arrive until 2019.

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