FRIDAY, AUG. 8: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

Now, Michael Bay has become death, destroyer of worlds. Well, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's the fastest road to the emotional truth of a sea of nerds seeing what he's done to their beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There's a point that comes in every nerd's life when he or she must confront the fact that Donatello has a nose and lips, now, and there's nothing anyone can do or say to stop it. This threshold has arrived, and we must all take a long, hard look in the mirror come this Friday, when the Michael Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles splats onto the big screen. We must, at long last, admit to ourselves that we are truly the ones who are at fault.

We made Michael Bay too powerful, and now he cannot be stopped. Much like Super Shredder at the end of The Secret of the Ooze, Michael Bay has mutated into a monster after coming into contact with toxic sludge (the millions of dollars we have nonsensically decided to give him over the years), and we are powerless to defend ourselves from his rampage. Also, like Super Shredder, I suspect Bay is secretly being puppeted by professional wrestler Kevin Nash.

If we are to rejoice - which we are not, but imagine if we were - we would take solace in the fact that Michael Bay eventually backed away from his threat to forego the mutant angle of it all, and to make the turtles aliens, which is what he had previously dangled over a helpless nation. He's like a super villain with a weather machine who, instead of ravaging the world with an eternal winter, eventually just decided to make it rain really hard for a year. Thank god for small miracles.

On a related note, please do inform me when Michael Bay literally does make a weather machine. It's only a matter of time, and I need to get a heavy coat.

SONY TO MAKE FEMALE SUPERHERO MOVIE

In an effort to end on a bright note, I bring you tentative news from the folks at Sony. After years of people getting more and more frustrated wondering why none of the pantheon of female superheroes have been given their own movie in our current glut of comic book movies (we're just gonna forget about Elektra), Sony has come forward to announce that they intend on padding out Spider-Man's already busy franchise with a film focused on one of Spidey's female associates.

While there's still no word as to what character will take the mantle, the film is already scheduled to arrive in 2017. Still, there's no shortage of women in Peter Parker's life, so it's now time for probably a year or two of idle speculation about who the film will center on. Black Cat seems like the early frontrunner, what with her appearance in the latest Amazing Spider-Man movie, but it's all still up in the air. Even so, it'd be nice for us to get a woman as the lead in a superhero movie, as opposed to just falling back on Black Widow's presence in Marvel movies to justify the disparity.