In the last few years, there's a really good metric for "movie will be bad" that I've noticed: If Subway gets the license for their kids meals, it's not going to be a very good movie.

I first noticed this when Subway got the Brave movie license. By then Pixar had repeatedly fooled me with trailers that didn't seem all that great, but turned into fantastic movies, so even though the Brave trailers didn't wow me, I was open-minded about it. But then Subway got the license, so I put off viewing it. It turned out to be the almost worst Pixar movie to that point, though it narrowly beat the previous year's Cars 2 on metacritic. And I still haven't seen it. (Or Monsters University or The Good Dinosaur.)

Why do I mention this? Well... guess what license Subway has now? Star Wars: The Force Awakens. (That link will rapidly decay, of course, so you'll have to take my word for it in the future.)

That's... uhh... surprising... and probably not a good sign. Personally I'm generally with "Plinkett" on the Star Trek movies that J. J. Abrams made; certainly very fun, felt like a demo reel for Star Wars more than Star Trek. As long as I didn't try to pretend it was Star Trek, it's at least fine entertainment. So I actually expected the new Star Wars to turn out OK.

But the Subway Movie Metric says it's not going to be good. Well... time will tell. I won't call this a "prediction", but it's at least something to keep an eye on.