Hailee Steinfeld

Bumblebee definitely has the cutest car of the franchise in the new ‘Transformers’ spinoff.

The Bellas head to Europe for one last farewell tour in the new trailer for ‘Pitch Perfect 3.’

Production on the new Transformers spinoff Bumblebee is now underway, and, from the looks of things at this early stage, it sounds like they’re definitely trying for a more fun, kid-friendly angle with this one. It’s been described as an Iron Giant type of story, involving children befriending giant robots (the purest genre), plus it stars Hailee Steinfeld — who, in the first image from the film, looks like the cool alt-rock girl in high school who you didn’t know whether you wanted to be friends with or become.

Look, I’m no stranger to college acapella groups. When I was an undergraduate, a ragtag group of choir kids — myself most definitely included  —  organized the first men’s acapella group in the modern history of the university, and a quick Google search shows that the group is still alive and well to this day (no, I won’t tell you the name of the university or the name of the ensemble, so don’t bother asking). So am I pretty much as cool and influential as the Bellas in the Pitch Perfect movie series? Why, yes. I’d like to think so, yes.

Spend long enough interviewing actors for a living, you start to pick little things up. For instance, whenever a performer’s discussing their most recent production and utters any variant on the phrase “it really felt like the cast and crew was one big family,” that’s a major red flag that they’re full of crap. Costars are coworkers, and usually for about six months, and that’s on the longer side. But the ladies of Pitch Perfect 3 seem to be pretty earnest when they gush about the spirit of sisterhood and camaraderie that dominated the atmosphere on set. And for those as skeptical of myself, they proved it with video evidence.

While fans might be a little cynical about a Transformers multi-verse, there are plenty of reasons to be excited about their planned Bumblebee prequel. For one, Christina Hodson’s script has widely been praised as a standout in the franchise thus far. For two, the film will serve as the live-action directorial debut of Kubo and the Two Strings director Travis Knight, whose visuals in that film  —  and whose overall body of work with animation studio Lakia  —  make him a name to remember in future projects. Oh, and there’s this small little tidbit: the movie may now be adding a pretty talented star as its (human) lead.

Ever since Tina Fey blessed us with Mean Girls, we’ve been hopelessly waiting for a worthy successor — a film just as hilariously honest and cleverly perceptive about the teenage girl coming-of-age experience, or something like it. The Edge of Seventeen is that film, a gloriously real story that feels as timeless as the great teen comedies of John Hughes, and as blissfully painful as My So-Called Life. It’s the kind of movie that only comes around once every decade or so, but it’s well worth the wait.

The “high school experience,” such as it is, is a popular environment for adult filmmakers to try and make sense of the world of the youths of today. There’s as much if not more drama, intrigue, and romance than a Shakespeare play, and yet very few are able to do the setting the justice it deserves. Enter Hailee Steinfeld’s The Edge of Seventeen, which just released a new Red-Band trailer and looks like the perfect blend of honest, funny, and weird.

How bad is Vince Vaughn’s hair in this movie? So bad there’s actually a joke about it in the trailer, presumably because everyone in the audience is already thinking about it already.

The original Pitch Perfect grossed a modest $65 million at the domestic box office, which was just enough to justify a sequel. Three years later, Pitch Perfect 2 has just passed $160 million on a budget of only $29 million, so yeah, of course Universal is officially moving forward with Pitch Perfect 3. It turns out that a combination of snarky comedy and a capella remixes of pop hits is a license to print money. So much money.