With Transformers and Godzilla you're basically seeing the result of marketing and brand recognition.  You can hype almost any movie to a #1 opening weekend if it's got a recognizable brand name to build from. If the movie drops like a rock afterward, that usually means it wasn't all that great - or at least not of interest outside the core market.  So the wider audience wasn't interested and repeat business wasn't very strong. 

See also: Fault in our Stars, Pacific Rim, etc.  Opened huge, then fell off a cliff.   Core audience showed up, but nobody else.  Compare to the first Hunger Games:  built-in audience to get started with, but turned out to be entertaining to the rest of the world as well. Good buzz, good reviews, so - opened big, stayed big.

Other side of the equation - poor lil' Edge of Tomorrow.  Hyped like crazy, but no brand name.  And the Tom Cruise brand is sorta shaky in the US.  So, opened below #1... and then just hung in week after week, staying around #3-5, gradually creeping toward 100 mil (which it STILL hasn't hit, but will in another week or so).     That's repeat biz and good word of mouth at work.

Unfortunately, modern studio deals are set up so they get the biggest take from the opening weekend, and less of a percentage afterward.   So on the books, Godzilla still probably looks pretty good and worth making another half dozen just like it.  But Edge of Tomorrow?  Meh.

I think the wild card of the summer is Guardians of the Galaxy which will certainly do okay, but might be a monster.   Marketing, check.  Brand name, sorta check (Marvel, although this property hasn't been done before).  But speaking as someone who definitely does not say "oh hooray another goddam Marvel movie", I gotta admit this one looks pretty fun, and I'm okay to go.   If Guardians is as nifty as the trailers suggest, it could be this year's Avengers, and for the same reasons.

And the chimpanzees are supposed to be the enlightened ones!  Go figure.

ANYway, that's a good example of why Bechdel shouldn't be used as an automatic pass/fail for every movie.  I think The Grey and Life of Pi deserve an exemption, among others.

On the other hand, it is no surprise at all that movies like Ted and Ghost Rider and The Watch fail the test.  Because of course they do.

And even the "bad guy" is female!

No, Brody's a scaredy-cat Police Chief which is totally cool and heroic.     

Tongue out of cheek now - Bullock isn't an astronaut, she's a payload specialist who had just enough training to get her up there and back.  Clooney's the astronaut.   Bullock's barely hanging on when the mission is still going well.   This isn't unprecedented even in real life, at least not for those of us who remember Barfin' Jake Garn.   

Now, the question of how she's a medical doctor who somehow is a payload specialist installing gizmos on the Hubble - now there I also scratch my head. 

Not that either of us is likely to have this problem anytime soon, but I totally would.

I totally disagree with the assessment that Bullock is a weak character.   She has moments of weakness, then rises above them.   Clooney - who's stuck playing the paper-thin stereotype - saves her bacon a couple of times at first, but he's out of the movie early on.  From then until the end, Bullock saves herself, over and over again.   

Is she weak just because she sometimes gets overwhelmed by her situation, and nearly gives up at one point?  I don't think so.   That's not being weak, that's being a person.  Admittedly one who's more real than we normally get in an action thriller, male or female.   It'd certainly be a surprise to see a male character being so "non-heroic" as that, but wouldn't that be awesome?

At any rate, neither passing nor failing the Bechdel test has any bearing on whether the actual movie is good or bad.  And certainly has nothing to do with whether a female character is to be admired or respected as a superhero badass.  For example Heavenly Creatures passes the Bechdel test by a mile.  And good for Heavenly Creatures.  You go, teen murder girls.  Because at least you are the focus of a movie and aren't cardboard cutouts. 

And that's all Bechdel was asking for.   It's a nice bonus to be able to debate whether a character like Bullock's is weak or strong.   The problem remains that there are so few movies with a female character to even debate about.

As the article itself says, the Bechdel test is often misapplied, or applied too strictly.  Gravity has only one female character and so it "fails" the first part of the test - but there are only TWO characters in the entire movie.  That's a very different circumstance than your average Transformers flick, with twenty male speaking parts and one female for eye candy and rescue purposes.   And even though Gravity "fails" the test, it's otherwise a rare example of a movie with a fully-drawn female character who drives the story.

The "Mori test" is just a similar concept - it accepts that there aren't a lot of female leads in movies - so if there IS one, is she at least a character and not just "the girl"? 

As I've said before, the Bechdel Test is like a doctor taking a temperature - an anomalous reading doesn't automatically mean there's a problem, but it's an easy and quick way to check if there might be one.  Might be a minor problem, might be serious - for that you have to look deeper.    Saving Private Ryan doesn't pass the Bechdel Test OR the Mori test, but that's not really a problem, considering what the movie's about.

Really, both "tests" are about the same thing - is/are the female characters in this movie actual characters, or just there so the boys have something to ogle?   Which is a perfectly valid question to ask, always.

Yeah, the hologram isn't as risky because it isn't meant to simulate a real solid object, and it's also (presumably) self-illuminating.  So you have more wiggle room there before it looks "wrong" to the audience.

And the tracking for something like that isn't TOO hard these days, as long as certain considerations are met when shooting.  In your example, that wristband is what made the shot trackable - it's got several small but clear shapes on it, which are visible to camera during the entire shot.   That's what tracking software needs to do a track most easily. 

If she wasn't wearing the band, or moved her arm more and thus obscured or blurred the trackable points at times, it would still be do-able but would take much more effort.

So if you design a shot that is more or less like the one in the example, that'd be on the "easier" side of the scale, not far above saber roto.

I hope they do the same for "Come On Eileen"!

And so my point has been proven.   Not nearly as much humor to draw from, and what humor there is, is kinda lame.

Best Thread Title Ever

Finally, a chance for the non-GoT-readers to have their revenge. 

"You guys are gonna lose your sh*t when you see what doesn't happen in THIS episode!"

You're correct that I was sketchy on the political details of the Berlin Airlift.  But based on my time in Berlin, the locals (most of whom weren't born yet either) remember it mostly as "that time after the war when the Soviets were really being dicks for some reason and we almost starved."

So yes, there were political reasons at the higher levels, but down on the ground it was more like "damn, those Russians are still really pissed at us."   Which they sorta had reason to be - the German/Russian side of the war was particularly hideous.

Anyway, what I was getting at was that punitive sort of idea could be fodder for a post-Empire SW tale.