Sequel Bits: 'Resident Evil: The Final Chapter,' 'Fast 8,' 'Transformers: The Last Knight,' 'Alien: Covenant'

In this edition of Sequel Bits:

At its best, the Resident Evil film series has been wildly entertaining junk food, with the best entries in this long-running series tapping into our base desire to watch attractive men and women battle icky monsters in the slowest of slow motion. At its worst, the Resident Evil series has given us Resident Evil: Apocalypse, a frontrunner for the loudest goddamn movie ever made. Now, the franchise looks to becoming to an end with the upcoming Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and can you blame 'em? Milla Jovovich's Alice looks about as weary as you can get in the first official still:

Since these movies tend to go in one ear and out the other, you may not recall that 2012's Resident Evil: Retribution was, inexplicably, the best movie of the series so far and that it ended with a totally insane cliffhanger...a cliffhanger that looks like it will be instantly undone, if the official synopsis is any indication:

Alice is the only survivor of what was meant to be humanity's final stand against the undead. Now, she must return to where the nightmare began – The Hive in Raccoon City, where the Umbrella Corporation is gathering its forces for a final strike against the only remaining survivors of the apocalypse.

And as you'd expect (and maybe hope) the official poster is all about flames and guns and Jovovich's trademark scowl.

Most of the weekly videos coming out of the set of Fast 8 involve dangerous stunts and exploding cars, but this week's entry is a little different. It seems that, at some point, the film will pause long enough for Dwayne Johnson's Hobbs to lead his daughter's soccer team in a traditional Haka, a "traditional war cry, dance, or challenge" that originates in Maori culture (thanks, Wikipedia). Johnson has always been proud of his Samoan heritage (that pride is permanently inked across the left side of his body, after all) and it looks like a little bit of that has slipped in the Fast and Furious saga. And that's pretty appropriate for an action series that only pauses the chaos and the carnage so characters can sit around and talk about how important family is to each of them. You do you, Mr. The Rock, sir.

A new image of Crosshairs, the green, long-coated Autobot who made his big screen debut in Transformers: Age of Extinction and is set to return in Transformers: The Last Knight, has arrived online and I honestly can't tell you if he has changed between movies. I've never been fond of the character designs in Michael Bay's live-action Transformers movies (everyone looks like a jumbled mess at the end of the day) and this guy looks mostly the same to me. Still, it's hard to complete hate a robot who manages to wear goggles and a duster despite being made entirely out of metal. It's my kind of silly...and I wish that extended to the rest of these movies.

Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant wrapped a few weeks ago, but that doesn't mean that the steady trickle of behind-the-scenes images and out-of-context teases has to stop. To celebrate the film being officially one year from release, the production released the video above, which features star Katherine Waterston in a strange white suit next to...some kind of machine. If I had to wager a guess, it certainly looks she's in a stasis pod, hyper-sleeping her way through a long space journey. We still know precious little about the follow-up to Prometheus – Michael Fassbender is back as the android David and Waterston's mystery heroine is named Daniels – but it's much easier to not care about stuff like that when these little teases keep on arriving like clockwork. Anyway, here's the official synopsis for the film:

Set as the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that began with Prometheus, Alien: Covenant connects directly to Ridley Scott's 1979 seminal work of science fiction. It begins with the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy. There, the crew discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world — whose sole inhabitant is the "synthetic" David, survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.