5 - Transformers

4 - The Great Escape

3 - Independence Day

2 - Back to the Future

1 - Terminator 2

Because even the film for which we're making this list isn't technically a July 4th release (Thanks, Hancock), we had to adjust it ever so slightly and incorporate movies released on the July 4th weekend. So, essentially, July 2nd - July 6th is in our sights, because July 4th would fall somewhere within that weekend. Strangely, July 4th is on a Friday this year and the big movie opened two days early. And I don't think that's a terribly smart move.

Broadening the topic certainly helps us fill some gaps, although one of the great movies of all time - one nobody even nominated - is a July 4th release. We got a lot of the same nominees but also movies like Armageddon, Men in Black II, Big Trouble in Little China, Shaft, Sergeant York, Strangers on a Train, The Green Berets, The Apple Dumpling Gang, Die Hard 2, Coming to America, and Boyz N the Hood.

We're also leaving out A Fish Called Wanda and Little Miss Sunshine because they don't really "fit the model" in this instance.

Also, Airplane! and Apollo XIII, which received nearly as many votes as the top two or three suggestions, were released in the last week of June. If I counted them both, I'd have to consider every movie through July 11th. What's the point?

In the end, both the quality and the thematic appropriateness for the Top Five films shaped most of our list. We liked an epic crop, popcorn movies to the Nth degree, and really, they're all very good films, too.

Transformers is just knock-down, drag-out fun. It may not be the smartest movie in the world, but it knows its strengths: Close-ups of Megan Fox, a likable leading man, and CGI robots beating the hell out of each other. If that's not the reason we wanted to break the clutches of the British 230 years ago, I don't know what it was.

Likewise, The Great Escape is kind of the summer movie of its day. The industry worked a lot different back when this film was released on July 4, 1963, but here's an American crowd pleaser about screwing the Nazis, it's loaded with stars, and at the center of the action is Steve McQueen. 'Nuff said.

Independence Day really established a couple of things: Will Smith and the Fourth of July. Ever since 1996, it has been a tremendously coveted weekend. Between 1980 and 1996, only five films released on or around July 4th made it into the top ten in box office for the entire year; one of them is represented at number two. Since then, in only two years, 1999 and 2001, has a July 4th release failed to do top ten damage. And Will Smith has been in three of those movies already - ID4 and both Men in Black movies.

As for its merits, Independence Day, like Transformers is just a lot of fun. They're virtually the same movie in a lot of respects. Aliens descending over D.C.: How cool was that?

Back to the Future, I think, is just one of those agreed upon classics. Do you know anyone who A) Hasn't seen it and B) Doesn't like it? It hits on so many levels, from the sci-fi time travel stuff to the nostalgia of the Baby Boomers for their high school glory days - at a time when that wasn't happening too often in the movies. The movie's quotable, had a great cast for what it was, and it had one of the all-time great movie cars.

Finally, we're up to Terminator 2, which earns its stripes despite being the biggest downer of the bunch. But look, there have only been a dozen or so sequels on this level, and a dozen is probably pushing it, plus you have the best role reversal in the history of movies (the villain from the original is the hero now), and you had the jaw-dropping morphing special effect, which they said cost something like $600,000 a minute back then and now anybody can do it for 40 bucks. Robert Patrick's a total bad-ass...and he's in second place here behind Linda Hamilton.

It's also the first movie in my memory to get away with being called by its initials. T2 still works.