Link Tank: Why Spider-Man 2 Is a Perfect Sequel

A retroactive look at Spider-Man 2, facts about Inception, a break down of every streaming giant, and more in today's Link Tank!

Follow-up movies often fail to live up to the greatness of the originals. Spider-Man 2 is not one of those sequels.

“So many follow-ups to successful movies stumble as they chase spectacle at the cost of forgetting what really made their predecessor work in the first place. Sam Raimi’s sophomore Spider-Man movie aimed much higher and bigger than his first movie ever could, in part because of just how keenly it understood Marvel’s mightiest hero.”

Read more at Gizmodo.

Christopher Nolan’s Inception was released a decade ago this month. Check out these mind-blowing facts about this now-classic film.

Ad – content continues below

“After The Dark Knight made $1 billion worldwide, Warner Bros. let director Christopher Nolan to make his passion project, Inception (although most passion projects don’t generally have a budget of $160 million). The confusing-but-exhilarating film, which was released on July 13, 2010, made more than $800 million worldwide. Here are some things you might not know about the film.”

Read more at Mental Floss.

Zac Efron is hosting Down to Earth, a Netflix travel show. So what exactly is it about?

“Within the first seconds of Zac Efron’s new Netflix show Down to Earth a disembodied voice says, ‘That’s Mother Earth, bro.’ And to be honest, that’s really all you need to know to get the vibes of Efron’s foray into travel programming down. It’s about bros bro-ing out and seeing and eating cool things around the world, bro.”

Read more at Thrillist.

Gone are the days of Netflix versus Hulu. Here’s a breakdown of every streaming giants out there competing for subscribers.

Ad – content continues below

“The video-streaming industry is crowded; it can be hard to wrap your head around the scope of the entertainment giants that make up this market. Each service has its own origin story, business interests, and shifting content pile of exclusive originals and licensed content. There’s also a wide assortment of packages, plans, and technology under the surface.”

Read more at PCMag.

James Gunn reportedly made Velma queer in the 2002 live action Scooby-Doo movie, but the studio nixed it.

“File this one under infuriating, but all too par for the course for Hollywood. James Gunn has tweeted that in his initial script for 2002’s live-action Scooby-Doo, the brainy, orange-turtleneck’d character Velma Dinkley was written as queer—until the studio watered down her sexuality into non-existence.”

Read more at The Mary Sue.

An artificial intelligence system called SPOCK is being developed to determine which planets live or die.

Ad – content continues below

“As planets orbit around their common host star, astronomers have often wondered what keeps them from crashing into each other while in orbit. However, they failed to determine what makes for orbital stability, and what makes planets like the ones in the Solar System survive the test of time, and gravitational pull?”

Read more at Inverse.