Emma Stefansky

It’s almost the end of the month, and you know what that means: new stuff is coming to a streaming service near you. Here is everything arriving to Netflix in August to keep you busy on one of those rainy late-summer nights.

Sounds like our good friends across the pond have gotten tired of all the rumors swirling about the future of the James Bond franchise, because the series has just officially announced a new movie is definitely coming, and it already has a release date.

One of the best things about Star Wars — given that it’s set in a galaxy far, far away full of fabulous planets and fantastic species — is how many weird alien creatures sneak their way into these movies. The original trilogy gave us wampas, banthas, Ewoks, and tauntauns, on Geonosis we saw Anakin, Padme, and Obi-wan fight the reek, the nexu, and (my favorite), the acklay, and The Force Awakens gave us a very thirsty happabore. Earlier this week, Lucasfilm gave us a closer behind-the-scenes look at The Last Jedi and while a lot of the stuff in there was cool, the best part was the porgs.

Paramount’s Transformers spinoff Bumblebee is on the fast track, and quickly gathering cast members. After Hailee Steinfeld, another rising star has just joined the Transformers family: Jorge Lendeborg Jr. has been cast as the male counterpart to Steinfeld’s heroine in the movie.

We knew Thor: Ragnarok was about to change things for the MCU as soon as we heard what the subtitle was going to be. The Asgardian Apocalypse, involving a literal goddess of death bringing an end to the mightiest civilization in the multiverse, is probably going to shake up the rest of our universe a little too. Recently, Marvel chief Kevin Feige confirmed that Ragnarok would indeed bring the MCU to a place it can’t go back from, and lead right into Infinity War.

Sometimes Avengers: Infinity War feels like it’s just an excuse for a bunch of actors to have a giant get-together, film it, and add in some special effects later to make them all look cool. Like the shawarma post-credits scene from the first Avengers, but for two-plus hours. Today on set, two scientists, a doctor, and a librarian walked into a La Croix commercial… and made sure to snap a pic.

The Fantastic Four haven’t had a ton of luck in the cinematic arena, mostly due to their movies being somewhere in the range of bland-to-terrible, but because humanity is, by and large, a stubborn bunch of carbon-based organisms, we’re gonna keep making these movies until something sticks and we land on a good one. The infinite monkey theorem does state, after all that an infinite number of monkeys working an infinite number of typewriters will eventually come up with a passable Fantastic Four movie.

Transformers: The Last Knight probably won’t be the end of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, and the series seems to be expanding, whether the people want it to or not. There’s a planned Bumblebee spinoff in the works, which will focus on the smallest of the Autobots before the events of the main Transformers series. Since we’re going back into the past with this, and since Hasbro’s Transformers toys first hit the market 30 years ago, it seems fitting that the Bumblebee movie is going to be set in the 1980s.

Mission: Impossible 6 is currently filming on location in Middle Earth — I mean, New Zealand, and director Christopher McQuarrie is still taking Instagrams of the cast. Today, McQuarrie posted a fantastic portrait of Henry Cavill in his spy outfit sitting in what’s probably a helicopter. There’s no telling whether he’ll actually be in a helicopter in a movie or if this was taken while the actors were being flown to whatever location they’d be filming in. It is New Zealand, after all.

Tom Cruise’s The Mummy is the beginning of a new Dark Universe for Universal Studios, and as such is tasked with connecting this film to a bunch of other ones in the franchise. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Bride of Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, and a bunch of others will soon be hitting the big screen, all under the Dark Universe umbrella. So, what fits them all together? The plot device — I mean, the Prodigium, of course.