The last time we saw Imperator Furiosa, in the dystopian chase thriller "Mad Max: Fury Road" (2015), she had just returned from the heat of battle, her face streaked with blood, one eye swollen shut, her body so fatigued and battered that she could hardly stand. Furiosa, played by a stupendous Charlize Theron, had spent several days and nights driving an enormous truck, the War Rig, across miles of open desert, withstanding fiery assaults, a lethal sandstorm, and the surly company of a reluctant ally named Max (Tom Hardy). But triumph, at last, was hers: the vile warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) lay dead at her feet, and hundreds of newly liberated desert dwellers were erupting in celebration. Amid the chaos, Furiosa scanned the crowd for Max and caught him slinking away. For a moment, he looked back and gave her an approving nod--then turned and vanished into the throng.

George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road may have spent almost 20 years stuck in development hell, but the filmmaker had always envisioned the project without Mel Gibson in the lead. The 1979 original was the breakthrough role of the actor's career, and the sequel remains one of the greatest action movies ever made, but Miller was adamant that the title hero be recast after the Lethal Weapon star had aged out of consideration. Tom Hardy, 22 years Gibson's junior, was chosen to play the new Max Rockatansky instead, but in terms of the franchise's canon, he's the same character, just at a different stage of his life. The choice to recast was a wise one, too, as Fury Road left audiences with their jaws on the floor when it exploded onto the scene and almost instantly gained a reputation as a modern action classic, scoring the rare combination of box office success, universal critical acclaim and awards season glory. The post-apocalyptic blockbuster earned ten Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, and ended up walking away with six prizes in the technical categories.

This article originally appeared in Vulture. Nothing is ever as it seems when it comes to James Franco. The man makes a lot of baffling "artistic" choices, any of which could conceivably be explained away as one of the performance-art pranks he so enjoys pulling on the public, and in a greater sense, on himself. Is he penning a column of film criticism, or engaging in an Adaptation-style interrogation of a self divorced from the self? Is he challenging the pillars of historical thought, or just putting goo on stuff?

Oof, this one is rough. Over the weekend, despite good buzz and glowing reviews from critics, Blade Runner 2049 opened by bringing in a meager $31.5 million domestically at the box office, a figure well below expectations and one that looks particularly bleak when you factor in that the film reportedly cost more than $150 million to make. Were fans just unwilling to go back to Blade Runner's future 35 years after Ridley Scott's original film? Did women not want to see a movie where they had such limited roles? Or did the performance of Denis Villeneuve's Runner reboot just speak to the fact that not that many folks wanted to spend nearly three hours watching a moody--if stunning--sci-fi film when things are already so gloomy outside the multiplex?