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Curated playlist

Columbia Pictures franchises

  • Sony's Spider-Man UniverseSony's Spider-Man Universe is a film series where Spider-Man is not prominently featured.
  • 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,…
  • 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…
  • UnchartedBy December 2017, the Uncharted series had sold 41.7 million units worldwide. Uncharted is an action-adventure franchise developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Amy Hennig created it. Its heroes are…
  • Spider-Man in filmThe mainstream Spider-Man films have collectively grossed more than eleven billion dollars worldwide. That total makes the series the second highest-grossing film franchise of all time. Yet Spider-Man in film began far from any cinema, as…
  • JumanjiIn Jumanji, every roll of the dice pulls a piece of the jungle into the real world, creatures included. Jumanji is an American media franchise built on that single premise. The game refuses to stay on the table. Its dangers keep arriving…
  • 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…
  • Angry BirdsOn Christmas Day 2011, players around the world downloaded 6.5 million copies of Angry Birds games on that single day. Angry Birds is a franchise created by the Finnish game designer Jaakko Iisalo and owned by Rovio Entertainment. Its…
  • Gran Turismo (series)Sony turned down Gran Turismo when Kazunori Yamauchi first pitched it in 1992. His small team kept working on it anyway.
  • Superman in filmSuperman in film reached a strange milestone in 2023, when The Flash showed Superman played by Henry Cavill, Nicolas Cage, George Reeves and Christopher Reeve. Computer-generated versions stood in for several of them. The gag packs more…
  • ZorroZorro first rode into print in 1919, and the novel that introduced him eventually sold more than 50 million copies. That figure places The Curse of Capistrano among the best-selling books of all time. Its author, the American pulp writer…
  • Final FantasyHironobu Sakaguchi planned to quit games if Final Fantasy failed. The 1987 role-playing game saved Square instead.

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