I don't think the COVID pandemic gets enough credit for its positives—such as limiting the number of “Transformers” movies we're subjected to. We used to get one every 2-3 years, but the latest, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” is the first since 2018's “Bumblebee,” which itself was a kind of spinoff. The last time we had a true “Transformers, colon” movie was in 2017: “Transformers: The Last Knight.”

Alas, it wasn't the last. 

Of course, the drop off might've happened anyway. The series was fading at the box office.

* Annual ranking at domestic box office

“Beasts,” starring “Hamilton”'s John Laurens, opened better than the two most recent “Transformers,” but even unadjusted it's nowhere near the box-office powerhouse it once was. One assumes its Millennial fanbase, which grew up on the '80s cartoon, has aged out of the moviegoing demographic and hasn't been easily replaced, since, for the rest of us, the series has always been a WTF proposition. Wait, they're what? And pretend to be what? And have been around for how long? And there's evil ones? And they're all really from another pla-- Fuck it, I'm outta here. It's the stupidity, stupid, and everyone just got tired. The first had a nearly positive Rotten Tomatoes rating (57%) but it was all downhill from there, except for the Hailee Steinfeld one, which was hailed by critics (91%), and then, as if to underline how little its audience wants that (not to mention smart female leads), promptly died at the box office.

Man, I remember the early days of this blog when I would rail against “Revenge of the Fallen”'s dominance at the summer box office as if democracy itself depended upon it. As if the popularity of something this stupid meant that someday we might be dumb enough to do something really stupid—like, I don't know, elect an evil game-show host president of the United States.

No. 2 at the box office was the second weekend of the second “Spider-Verse” movie, at $55 million, a not-bad 54% dropoff. No. 3 was the third weekend of “Little Mermaid” ($22), followed by the sixth weekend of “Guardians Vol. 3” ($7). “Guardians” is currently No. 2 for the year at $335, a fer piece behind “Super Mario Bros.”'s $570.