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Curated playlist

Action film franchises

  • Star WarsWithin three weeks of Star Wars opening, Fox's stock price doubled to a record high. Fox had expected limited success.
  • 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…
  • MonsterverseThe Monsterverse is an American film and television franchise that puts Godzilla and King Kong in one shared world. At the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, Legendary showed concept footage that closed on title cards reading "Conflict: inevitable.…
  • Alien (franchise)The Alien franchise has its own holiday, and its date comes from a place name. LV-426 is the desolate planetoid in the first film. Read its number as 4/26 and you get the 26th of April, which fans celebrate as Alien Day. That small joke…
  • Indiana JonesIndiana Jones began with a beach chat in Maui in May 1977.
  • The Matrix (franchise)The Matrix franchise began in 1999 with a film that cost $63 million to make and earned over $460 million worldwide. That success grew into four feature films, plus animation, video games and comics set in the same universe. Joel Silver…
  • Rambo (franchise)The Rambo franchise has earned $819 million at the box office across five films, even though critics were divided about the series. Its hero is John J. Rambo, a United States Army Special Forces veteran played by Sylvester Stallone. The…
  • Fast & FuriousFast & Furious, the franchise first called The Fast and the Furious, began with a magazine article. In May 1998, Vibe published "Racer X" by Ken Li, a report on underground street racing in New York City. Within a few decades, that article…
  • Highlander (franchise)Highlander is an American media franchise created by Gregory Widen, and it began with a film whose tagline promised "There Can Be Only One." That film reached cinemas on the 7th of March 1986. It earned $12.9 million worldwide, with $5.9…
  • Tron (franchise)The Tron franchise, a Disney property built around a 1982 science fiction film, owes part of its legend to a coin-operated machine. Midway Games turned four sequences from the movie into an arcade cabinet. That cabinet earned more than the…

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