You’ve probably heard the news by now that hedge fund Pacificor, LLC has purchased the rights to the Terminator franchise from Halcyon’s bankruptcy auction. This transaction has sparked massive speculation on the franchise’s future. Will McG make more sequels? Will T1 and T2 screenwriter Will Wisher’s treatments turn into the next two sequels? Will Pacificor go for a total reboot?

The future not set: there is no fate but what this shady hedge fund makes, right? Well, I wasn’t content with that. As a rabid Terminator fanboy, I needed to know how this turns out, so I took the liberty of using the Overthinking It Time Displacement Field (OTITDF) to travel ten years into the future to see what will become of our beloved franchise.

My report is as follows. Be warned; it ain’t pretty.

2012-2014: The Sequels

Pacificor’s first move was to get a sequel to Terminator: Salvation out the door as quickly as possible. McG, not having anything else better to do, agreed to helm the sequel. Christian Bale, upon hearing that McG had brought on the same Director of Photography from the last movie, refused to participate.

McG, in a bind, recalled Freddie Prinze, Jr’s fine work in Wing Commander and tapped him for the role of John Connor. Nicolas Cage just showed up on set, and nobody had the heart to tell him he wasn’t actually in the movie.

Pacificor, for its part, contributed the title:

What is it about this guy that makes him look so goofy?

Love him or hate him, it’s safe to say that Nic Cage is a decidedly uneven actor, or at least that the movies he’s in are all over the map. The same filmography that has critically acclaimed character pieces like Adaptation and Leaving Las Vegas also has disposable mindless fare like Ghost Rider and National Treasure II: Book of Gratuitous Sequels.

Critics have been debating the relative merits of Cage for years, but the recent discovery of the “Nic Cage as Everyone” blog, which gleefully toes the line between tribute and mockery, has stirred the fires of Cage-troversy once again.

Words cannot describe how strange this is.

So are Nic Cage movies crap, or what? When we say his movies are all over the place, just how all over the place are they?

Thankfully, we have our friends IMDB, Excel, and Standard Deviation* to answer that question for us. That’s right, it’s time to analyze the Quanta of Cage.

First, our methodology: let’s take the movies of Nicolas Cage (everything that he’s starred in, excluding animated movies and anything released in 2009), analyze those movies’ IMDB ratings, and compare them to other leading men from his era.

It’s not perfect, but it’s what we’ve got. So let’s crunch some numbers, shall we?

*Standard disclaimer applies: I Am Not A Statistician (IANAS). If I made any mistakes, feel free to give me the “Well, actually” in the comments.

One of the key services that we at Overthinking It provide our loyal readers – for absolutely FREE! – is inventing words for concepts you didn’t know needed words. Like the Ghost Ship Moment, for instance. A $19.99 value, yours free just for subscribing.

Today, we let you in on another explosive concept that will unlock your minds to new levels of movie criticism: the benchmark movie.

A benchmark movie stands right on the border between two different classes of movies. Consider the blended genre of “dark comedy.” Serial Mom might be a good example of a benchmark movie for dark comedy. Anything darker than Serial Mom is an outright dark movie; anything funnier than Serial Mom is a straight-up comedy. Serial Mom is the benchmark of dark comedy: the signpost on the border.

You can also use benchmark movies as a standard for movie quality. Anything worse than your benchmark is “bad”; anything better than your benchmark is “good.” The benchmark movie is the perfect median.

A benchmark movie is inherently personal, however. Everyone has different tastes. So the Overthinkers will each contribute some benchmarks of their own. Once you’ve read through ours, post your own in the comments!

Recently, I’ve been doing film reviews for The Rotten Tomatoes Show on Current TV. Or rather, I’ve been doing pieces of film reviews. Current gets a bunch of bloggers, comedians, and other web-types to weigh in on each movie, and then splices them together into frankenreviews. So here’s 10 seconds of me talking about Knowing.

Of course, I had a little more to say.  (Consider this a blanket Spoiler Alert. If you want to remain fresh for Knowing, go read about porn.)