Gerald's Secret Boyfriend

It used to be a truth universally acknowledged that each installment in a movie series was worse than the last, and franchises spanning 7 installments were largely restricted to the horror genre (which I assume was viable only because each sequel had a lower budget than the previous movie in the series).

Compare that to today. This morning, I went to see the latest Minions movie, the 7th installment in the Despicable Me franchise. According to Wikipedia (with no citation), many critics called the movie the second-best in the franchise. I wouldn't go that far - in my opinion it was solidly in the middle of the franchise, maybe the fourth-best out of seven - but regardless of the exact ranking you want to give it in the series, I think most people can agree that it matches most of the earlier movies in the franchise in terms of quality ... and that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago.

In addition, the trailers that played before the movie were a bit of an eye-opener for me. There were 6 of them: a new Spider-Man movie, Angry Birds 3, Ice Age 5, a new original Pixar movie, Shrek 5, and a new original Illumination movie. (That's 4 sequels/franchise installments to 2 new original movies.) What surprised me is that of those 6 trailers, the two that made my proverbial ears prick up were Ice Age 5 and Shrek 5, and the reason that those two caught my attention is because Ice Age 4 and Shrek 4 were both the second-best installments in their respective franchises after the original movies [with the caveat that I haven't seen Ice Age 3 or any of the Shrek spin-offs]. Of the remaining 4 trailers, I thought the Spider-Man one looked interesting and Angry Birds 3 looked decent if not great. Meanwhile, even though the Pixar name is the mark of quality in American feature film animation these days, I was not impressed with what they had to show of their new movie Gatto, and the less said about the new Illumination movie trailer the better.