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Traffic report

Pop goes the culture, again.

Pop culture rules the top 10 this week; the list is bookended by the week's top film at the US box office X-Men: Apocalypse, while Captain America: Civil War remained in the top 10 for the fifth consecutive week. Game of Thrones gained a burst of popularity thanks to a deeply affecting final few minutes of last week's episode, "The Door", while another eternally popular manufactured conflict, professional wrestling, reappeared on the list thanks to Extreme Rules. The failing marriage of Hollywood stars Johnny Depp and Amber Heard has drawn some undeserved ogling, showing that pop culture need not confine itself to screens and stages.

For the full top-25 lists (and our archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see WP:MOSTEDITED. For the most popular articles that ORES models predict are low quality, see WP:POPULARLOWQUALITY.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of May 22 to 28, 2016, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WMF TopViews, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 X-Men: Apocalypse Start-class 1,385,606
Hopes were high for this after the rapturous critical and commercial reception given to Bryan Singer's previous X-Men film, Days of Future Past; unfortunately the reviews for the followup have been largely negative, with the film struggling to reach a 60% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The $250 million it has so far earned so far worldwide is in line with Fox's expectations, but in a world where Batman v Superman can be considered a failure for not making $1 billion, this film is looking a bit pallid.
2 Game of Thrones (season 6) Start-class 964,616
The latest season of this eternally popular TV series premiered on HBO on 24 April. And after this week's shock revelation, people doubtless turned to Wikipedia to check out future titles and see if they could guess where the story was going.
3 Captain America: Civil War B-Class 796,085
Off the top for the first time this week, though it can rest easy now that it has joined the increasingly not exclusive $1 billion club.
4 Frankie Manning Start-class 730,246
The pioneering dancer and co-creator of the Lindy hop got a Google Doodle on his 102nd birthday on May 26.
5 Game of Thrones B-class 693,475
See #2.
6 Amber Heard Start-class 679,903
Oh boy, here we go again. It was bad enough readers revelled in the public humiliation meted on her and Johnny Depp (see #7) by the people of Australia, now there is more attention directed at what appears to be a very rapid and messy marital dissolution. I could go into specifics, but I won't, because I neither know these people, nor care about their private lives.
7 Johnny Depp B-Class 658,094
After a string of tabloid-fuelling relationships in the 1990s, the cult star appeared to settle down for good with French actress Vanessa Paradis, only to separate from her in 2012 after 14 years. His subsequent much shorter relationship with actress Amber Heard (see #6) has not proven as successful.
8 Deaths in 2016 List 641,993
The annual list of deaths, always a fairly consistent visitor to this list, saw its average views jump after the death of David Bowie.
9 Extreme Rules (2016) Start-class 561,021
WWE's latest pay-per-view pantomime took place on May 22, 2016, at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. The designated winner was Roman Reigns (pictured).
10 X-Men (film series) Good Article 561,021
The ever-more convoluted film series looks safe for now, and, thanks to the rather boring but still perplexing post-credits tease, people want to know what happens next.
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