In a real “didn’t we already know this?” piece of news, HBO has officially greenlit the DCU drama series Lanterns based on the Green Lantern comics. This was one of the titles James Gunn mentioned in his now infamous DCU slate video in early 2023. That certainly made it seem like it was a sure thing. However, given how fickle Warner Bros. is these days, I suppose it wasn’t. At any rate, HBO has given an eight-episode, direct-to-series order to Lanterns. Emmy-nominee Chris Mundy (True Detective: Night Country; Ozark) will serve as showrunner.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Josh Brolin will not star as Hal Jordan in Lanterns. He was eyed for the role but decided to pass on the role. It is not clear why at this time but perhaps he will speak on it in the near future. Meanwhile, new reports indicate that Kyle Chandler could instead take on the mantle of Hal Jordan in Lanterns. He could be a good choice, for sure. There has been no official confirmation yet, but he certainly looks the part.

The synopsis of the series says it follows “new recruit John Stewart and Lantern legend Hal Jordan, two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland.” Pretty interesting concept for a Green Lantern series. Intergalactic cops solving an mystery on Earth. Definitely has True Detective vibes.

Joining Mundy in the writing of the show are none other than heavy hitters Damon Lindelof (Watchmen, The Leftovers) and comic writer Tom King (Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow). James Gunn and Peter Safran said of the announcement: “We’re thrilled to bring this seminal DC title to HBO with Chris, Damon and Tom at the helm. John Stewart and Hal Jordan are two of DC’s most compelling characters, and Lanterns brings them to life in an original detective story that is a foundational part of the unified DCU we’re launching next summer with Superman.”

No word yet on when the series will debut. We will, of course, keep you up to date on any casting news as it develops.

Originally published on June 25, 2024.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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While I don’t love the moniker, the Matt Reeves version of Gotham City, “The Batman Epic Crime Universe,” is pretty apt. While The Batman has a superhero and a terrifying serial killer at its center, the main thrust of the plot centered around organized crime and police and government corruption. Fun! We always knew Gotham’s rot ran deep, but The Batman really highlighted that. Fittingly, it’s this aspect the TV series The Penguin focuses on, despite having a recognizable comic villain as the lead. Much of The Penguin deals with the hierarchy and squabbling between two particular crime families mentioned in The Batman.

Here’s what you need to remember about the Falcone and Maroni criminal organizations and families before you dive into The Penguin.

Boss Carmine Falcone Is Dead

Carmine Falcone (John Turturro in the movie, Mark Strong on the show) was the longtime head of Falcone crime family. In The Batman, he more or less acts as the fulcrum from which all of the other plots in the movie circle. Falcone is Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell)‘s boss, and owner of the Iceberg Lounge which the Penguin runs. He tells Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) of his connection to Bruce’s father, Thomas Wayne. Thomas fixed up Falcone’s mob-related wounds and later when a reporter threatened to expose Martha Wayne’s history of mental illness, Thomas asked Falcone to “put the fear of God” into the reporter. Falcone also had an affair with Maria Kyle, a dancer at the Iceberg, and is the illegitimate father of Selina (Zoe Kravitz).

The big penny-drop moment of the movie is when Batman figures out that Falcone is the rat feeding info to the police in exchange for the cops and politicians leaving him alone. Falcone murdered the reporter, and Selina’s mother, and later Selina’s friend Annika when she learned the truth about him. Part of his ratting consisted of selling out Salvatore Maroni, his criminal rival and operator of the city’s “drops” drug trade, and taking over the business. He puts Oz in charge of running it.

Through the Riddler (Paul Dano)’s clues, Batman uncovers all of this corruption and the uncorrupt members of the GCPD come to arrest Falcone. While doing so, the Riddler assassinates Falcone with a rifle in a nearby building.

The Penguin Sees a Vacuum in the Criminal Underworld

At the end of The Batman, we see the Penguin—who was vehemently against Falcone’s working with the cops—looking out over Gotham, contemplating his rise to the top. The series shows us it’s not that simple. The remaining capos in the Falcone organization aren’t going to just fall in line behind a thug like Cobb. He also has to contend with Carmine’s two legitimate children, Alberto (Michael Zegen) and Sofia (Cristin Milioti). Both have eyes on controlling the organization, and Sofia is freshly out of Arkham for apparently killing several women in the guise of the Hangman.

Salvatore Maroni Also Has a Score to Settle with the Falcone Crime Family

The aforementioned rival boss Salvatore Maroni will also appear in The Penguin, played by motherf***ing Clancy Brown. Maroni was the ruling family in the drops industry before Falcone’s involvement. Now that Carmine is no more and the big secret it exposed, Maroni sees this as an opportunity to take back what’s his. One setback, he’s still in prison. Lucky for him, his wife Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo) is more than capable, and ruthless, to go toe-to-toe with the Penguin and the Falcone kids.

The Falcones, the Maronis, and Their Crime Families in the Batman Comics

The criminal underworld of Gotham City as depicted in The Batman and The Penguin are not wholly new characters to the Batman mythos. In fact, many members of both the Falcone and Maroni families have appeared in comics over the past several decades in prominent ways.

Carmine Falcone

Carmine Falcone first appeared in Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s seminal four-issue mini series Batman: Year One from 1987. He later appeared as a main antagonist in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s iconic 1996-1997 series, Batman: The Long Halloween, which serves as a major inspiration for much of The Batman and The Penguin. The backstory about Thomas Wayne tending to Carmine’s wounds with a young Bruce watching comes right out of that book. Carmine dies in The Long Halloween at Two-Face’s hand.

Sofia and Alberto Falcone

The two Falcone children also both first appear in The Long Halloween and continue on in Loeb and Sale’s other big arc, Dark Victory. (They have another brother in the comics who doesn’t apparently exist in the show.) Sofia aids her father in The Long Halloween in unearthing the true identity of the serial murderer, the Holiday Killer, who kills citizens seemingly at random during specific holidays. Holiday turns out to be Alberto Falcone himself.

Later in the 2000 event Dark Victory, Sofia Falcone returns to Gotham in the guise of the Hangman, a serial murderer taking out members of the GCPD.

Salvatore Maroni

Salvatore Maroni is a very old character indeed. He first appeared in Batman issue #66 from 1942. He’s a gott-dang Bill Finger and Bob Kane creation! As one of the city’s major crime bosses, he appears on and off over the years. His major claim to fame is that he’s the one who tosses acid in Harvey Dent’s face which leads to him becoming Two-Face. This happens in The Long Halloween as well.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The legend of the 300 Spartans is one of the most thrilling in all of Ancient Greece. A small army against a billion guys? How ’bout it! Several movies have featured the story, but the 2006 version from Zack Snyder is very probably the one that will live in people’s memories forever. The film—an adaptation of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s graphic novel—effectively put Snyder on the map and led to his long career of comic book adaptations. Makes perfect sense, then, that Warner Bros. Television would bring Snyder in for a television series adaptation.

In a recent interview with Comicbook.com, Zack Snyder confirmed that the 300 series is moving forward but it is in its early stages. “We’re just getting ready to dive in and get to work on it. It’s super fun, I love the world,” Snyder said. “And even just in the preliminary meetings we’ve had talking about, like, ‘What if this happened or that happened,’ just a lot of it’s just really fun to like go, wow, it’s a rich standard. It’s similar to this [Twilight of the Gods] in a weird way. As far as there’s a lot of underpinnings.”

The 300 TV series is reportedly a prequel, which makes sense considering that we saw all the soldiers die in the film. It could follow the Spartans led by King Leonidas before they went to war with Xerxes. We will see what the actual plot is in the future.

According to Variety, Snyder and his producing partner (and life partner) Deborah Snyder will executive produce the project, with Zack taking on directing duties. Other info is sparse, and no writers or cast are on board. It’s likely an exciting prospect for fans of Snyder’s directing style, to get a full series of his speed-ramping action.

Originally published May 31, 2024.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The Batman in 2022 gave us our first glimpse at Matt Reeves’ version of Gotham City. While not the first “realistic” version of the fictional comic book city, though arguably more in line with a lot of more comic-booky Batman aesthetics, The Batman perfectly thread the line between grounded and fantastical. It’s not The Dark Knight, but it’s also not Batman & Robin. Because of that, several of the sillier elements had to change to fit better. Some of those are the names of characters. Chief among them, the Penguin (Colin Farrell). In the movie, we learn he goes by “Oz,” and the series The Penguin confirms his name is not Oswald Cobblepot.

The series changes the name Oswald Cobblepot to Oswald “Oz” Cobb. Small change, but bigger ramifications. In the comic, Oswald Cobblepot is a criminal in the vein of high-society wannabe. He’s the black sheep of a decidedly white sheep family. That really doesn’t fit The Batman‘s version of the character one bit, a mafia enforcer who fancies himself a bigshot. Similar vibe, wildly different execution. So the easy answer is, “Oswald Cobblepot” is a silly name.

Speaking to SFX (via GameSpot), The Penguin producer Dylan Clark explains the change further. “[DC] never got around to changing his name in the comics like they did with the Riddler, going from Edward Nigma [or Nygma] to Edward Nashton, from an unreal name to a real name.” This, of course, is true. In the comics, we learn Edward Nygma was a retrofitted pseudonym for Edward Nashton once he took on the persona of the Riddler.

“We had a lot of conversations with DC Comics and with Jim Lee [President, Publisher and Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics],” Clark continued. “They had thought about changing his name at some point but had never done it. Matt asked, ‘Can I call our character Oz Cobb?’ And Jim said, ‘Absolutely!’ So we got a blessing from the king himself. That small change of the name allowed us to look at this character in a grounded way.”

Boy, they are really worried about a story where a guy dresses up like a bat feeling grounded. Ah well, it is what it is. Oz Cobb does fit the character better, somehow, so maybe they had the right idea.

The Penguin premieres September 19 on HBO.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The continued popularity of Transformers as a media franchise doesn’t surprise me in the least. It’s giant robots that turn into cars and jets and stuff. No-brainer. Genius concept. But the continued success of the film franchise has been a total shocker. The first movie in 2007 was a fun anomaly. None of the next four were any good. People loved Bumblebee, oh yay, a new beginning! But then last year’s Rise of the Beasts, which I reviewed, was just visual noise… and noise-noise. So now we have Transformers One, a fully animated prequel, and guess what? It’s kinda great.

One of the reasons I ended up not enjoying Rise of the Beasts that much is they made a big deal about the Maximals coming to prominence but then spent most of the runtime with Bumblebee, Optimus, and the rest of the car-based Transformers. I had gotten tired of all those characters, somehow. But what Transformers One has in its favor is a fresh take on those old G-1 characters. We’d never seen the origins of the Transformers we know on Cybertron, in all its vibrant, bustling glory. I think, even 40 years later, Transformers is just better suited to animation.

The story takes place in the distant past of Cybertron. The energon rivers have dried up and the massive city of Iacon is really starting to feel it. Ages ago, the ruling council of Transformers, the Primes, fought against an alien threat and lost, with the Matrix of Leadership missing. Only Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm) remains to protect Iacon and its citizens from the constant threat of destruction.

Zoom in on a couple of hapless mining bots, best friends Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry). They dig down, down, down into the core of Cybertron attempting to find more energon, day in and day out. Orion is a dreamer and a troublemaker while D-16 is a rule follower to the utmost. Despite their meager lives, Orion believes the two of them together can make a difference.

A chance discovery among rubble and garbage leads them to travel to the surface in the hopes of tracking down the Matrix of Leadership. Along the way they recruit mining shift leader Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and motormouth trash sorter B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key) and eventually discover terrible truths about their lives and eventually grow to be the bots we all know they can be (if you’ve ever seen any Transformers media).

So it’s no secret, really, who all of these characters will become. They don’t look that dissimilar to the iconic versions. The fun of the movie is seeing how they get there, and why certain characters go the way they do. Often times prequel or origin movies feel like foregone conclusions. That’s partially the case here. We know where everything ends up, but the journey is enjoyable enough to hold your attention, especially with how dark it gets.

The biggest positive of the movie is the gorgeously vibrant and tactile animation. Iacon is enormous and busy, like what New York was like in 1997’s The Fifth Element but 40 times larger and with way more realistic graphics. I was blown away by sequences like a massive F-Zero-style race through the city early in the film, or fast-paced train escape later on. It’s a blast. Letting the visuals and sound wash over you is just a delight. Transformers One is not attempting artistic heights like the Spider-Verse films or even TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, but what it’s doing succeeds fully.

Now to some less positive parts. Tonally, the movie isn’t at all consistent. Early on, Orion and D-16 get into silly shenanigans, and B-127 says goofy lines constantly, and the movie just feels like it’s totally for kids. Totally fine in and of itself, I love kids movies. However, as the story progresses, the tone gets progressively darker and more upsetting as the lines between good and evil feel more clearly defined. This too isn’t a problem. The stakes are enormous, it only makes sense for it to feel weighty. The problem is, when we get a stray joke or bit of slapstick in the second half, it feels completely at odds with the rest of the movie.

I’m a 40-year-old, so naturally I dug the more outwardly Transformery stuff we get in the second half of the movie. The action is big and exciting and packs a wallop while friends become enemies and enemies become friends. But the early part of the movie is clearly aimed at a younger audience, which I thought was just okay. I’m not saying this is good or bad. I’m merely saying, it gives the movie a bit of an identity crisis.

That said, Transformers One is a fun reminder of why we all liked the robots who were more than meets the eye in the first place. It doesn’t touch the artistic crossover heights of Spider-Verse or Mutant Mayhem but that doesn’t mean it isn’t pretty darn great. The voice cast do an admirable job assaying younger, unrefined versions of established characters. The growth of Orion and D-16 lands more than it has any right to. The movie is just solid. Bumblebee aside, easily makes for the best of the big screen Transformers. Low bar, I know, but it clears it easily.

Transformers One ⭐ (3.5 of 5)

Transformers One hits theaters on September 20.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post TRANSFORMERS ONE Is a Surprisingly Dark Animated Adventure appeared first on Nerdist.

If streaming numbers are anything to go buy, our collective fascination with serial killers and horrifying true crime has all but taken over our lives. People who find bloody action movies distasteful might spend hours every evening hearing about depraved and grisly murders in explicit detail and think nothing of it. It’s an odd fixation we collectively have. How could someone, your neighbor or coworker, do something so heinous? That fixation and central question lies at the heart of Red Rooms one of the most upsetting and pulse-pounding thrillers I’ve seen in a long time.

Red Rooms garnered festival acclaim in 2023 and, as with many smaller titles, finally gets a wider release this year. Writer-director Pascal Plante focuses on the kinds of people—young women in this case—who become obsessed with serial killer cases and even in some instances become infatuated by the accused monsters. His lead character Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) and her motivations are so unknowable and seemingly disturbed and disturbing, and yet so fascinating, that we can’t take our eyes off of her.

The story revolves around the trial of accused serial murderer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). He is suspected of not only the brutal torture and murder of three school girls but of filming his actions. Those tapes went to the highest bidder on the dark web, in so-called Red Rooms. Only two of the videos have surfaced, to screen in the courtroom. While the media has roundly decided Chevalier is guilty, reasonable doubt makes the trial less open-and-shut.

Kelly-Anne, a model and Montreal local, camps out every morning in order to secure a seat in the courtroom to hear all the gory details and observe the accused in the stocks and the families of the victims. Kelly-Anne lives an otherwise modest existence. She’s a fashion model, yes, but her apartment is small and sparse. She spends most of her free time either playing racquetball alone or surfing the dark web. We soon learn she is obsessed with finding the final murder video, but to what end we don’t know.

Not long into her routine she meets Clementine (Laurie Babin), a young runaway who made her way to Montreal for the trial with next to nothing but a strong belief in Chevalier’s innocence. Despite herself, Kelly-Anne starts spending time with Clementine and the two spark a very strained friendship. Has Clementine found an ally in Kelly-Anne? Or is Kelly-Anne merely using Clementine’s fanaticism for her own strange purposes? Like with most everything in Red Rooms, Plante plays everything close to the vest.

We spend so much time with Kelly-Anne but, credit to Plante and to Gariépy’s incredible performance, we never get a sense of her true motivations. We don’t know if she believes in Chevalier’s innocence or is merely obsessed with the crimes themselves. Or if she believes he did it but idolizes him all the same. All we get are Kelly-Anne’s actions which go from confusing to troubling to downright shocking as the movie progresses. People throw around Taxi Driver whenever they talk about a lone, unhinged protagonist. While that’s apt here, the fact that this isn’t the “typical” creepy loner is part of what makes Red Rooms so compelling.

Plante displays some absolutely bravura filmmaking here. The film’s opening is a seven-minute unbroken shot of the two attorneys giving their opening statements to the jury. The camera floats around as we hear the depraved and horrendous fates of the three young victims. We get an absolute sense of the geography of the courtroom, the faces of the major players, before finally resting on Kelly-Anne’s stoic, unmoved face. It’s an amazing way to give us the circumstances, and to show us our protagonist’s unreadable expressions amid all of this horror.

The film also contains one of the tensest sequences of someone typing alone in their apartment I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil what happens or why, but as the climax of the movie, Kelly-Anne going back and forth between illicit websites, and again the tremendous performance from Gariépy, is as breathlessly exciting as anything you’d find in a Mission: Impossible movie. One review from last year said Red Rooms “Out-Finchers Fincher” and this scene is exactly what they mean.

I think Red Rooms is an incredibly poignant and profoundly upsetting movie. I never thought a thriller about true crime junkies would be this effective, but I cannot stop thinking about it. I’m sure you won’t either.

Red Rooms is in limited release now. If you get a chance to see it, don’t miss it.

Red Rooms ⭐ (4.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post Thriller RED ROOMS Will Make You Feel Icky, in the Best Way appeared first on Nerdist.

For the first time in the history of the Spider-Man movies, a fourth official outing with a particular Peter is on the way. The Tom Holland version of the character is one of the standout characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. All three of his solo movies, not to mention his appearances in three others, have made pooploads of money. A fourth movie solo film was inevitable. However, Jon Watts, the director of the previous three, had decided not to return leaving the director’s chair wide open. For whom? Why for Destin Daniel Cretton, it seems!

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cretton, who directed 2021’s Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, is in talks to take over webslinging duties. Originally Cretton had been on tap to direct Avengers 5 when it was going to be Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. After Jonathan Majors’ lawbreaking, Marvel changed course, leaving Kang by the wayside in favor of Robert Downey Jr.’s Dr. Doom in Avengers: Doomsday. Cretton stepped aside to give the Russo Bros. room to direct that film. Cretton went back to only working on the Wonder Man TV series and the Shang-Chi-quel.

This is a pretty nice vote of confidence for Cretton’s work on Wonder Man which is in post-production. Shang-Chi was a highlight of the post-Avengers: Endgame landscape of Marvel Studios features. However, the raging pandemic meant not as many people were able to go see it as they might. So if not an Avengers movie, a Spider-Man movie is a pretty great consolation prize.

Marvel’s Kevin Feige and Sony’s Amy Pascal will be back to produce Spider-Man 4, as will Home trilogy screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. Everyone expects the movie to begin filming early next year. More info as it thwips in.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The degree of success achieved by Todd Phillips’ Joker in 2019 took me by surprise. As a dyed in the wool Batman fan, the idea of a Joker solo movies—depicting the character’s Elseworlds-ass origins without Batman’s involvement—seemed anathema. It also felt incredibly edgelord, setting the movie in a Scorsese-inspired 1970s version of Gotham, overtaken by crime and corruption on a grandiose scale. I honestly felt like the Joker was the absolute wrong character to make a Rorschach-style psychopath for the people. But the movie came out, it made a ton of money, it won some Oscars, and now the sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux is upon us.

Director Phillips said the main reason—aside from the original’s box office—that he and star Joaquin Phoenix wanted to make a sequel is they both loved the character of Arthur Fleck so much. This is abundantly clear in Joker: Folie à Deux. If the first movie endeavored to make the audience sympathize with a mentally disturbed individual pushed to public violence by a horrible system, this one turns his life into a tragic semi-comic love story. The movie certainly contains heavy violence, but most of it is directed toward Arthur, not because of him. This somehow makes the movie more disturbing, not less.

The film opens two years after Arthur assassinated late night host Murray Franklin on live TV. He awaits trial in Arkham Asylum, which essentially acts as more of a prison than a mental health facility. The guards, including Brendan Gleeson’s cheerfully brutal leader, rough people up on the regular. Arthur’s defense attorney (Catherine Keener) is convinced she can play to a jury’s sympathies and claim mental illness. She believes she can make the case that “Joker” is a separate, distinct personality from Arthur and thus he needs psychiatric help, not prison.

And while Arthur himself seems somewhat resigned to this concept, a budding relationship with fellow patient Lee (Lady Gaga) might change things. She sees the “real” him, the Joker, and wants him to show the world. So the movie puts Arthur in a struggle between these two parts of himself. One, a jovial agent of chaos. The other, a sad, mentally disturbed man with a tough life. Which is the real him?

You’ve no doubt heard the big news that Joker: Folie à Deux is a musical. “Kind of,” as Todd Phillips is quick to say. Indeed, we have several musical numbers throughout. While the film always makes sure to show us these are Arthur’s fantasies, some of them simply act as parts of scenes. Others—far too few in my opinion—actually shift into more outright theatrical, clearly unrealistic musical numbers. I do appreciate Phoenix and Gaga’s singing live, with the orchestration added after the fact. Still, I feel like if the movie was going to go for musical numbers, it should have gone for broke.

Singing aside, I can’t help but feel that Phoenix spends most of the film doing little besides smoking. The man certainly knows how to smoke cigarettes, I’ll give him that. But Arthur feels much more like a passenger in this outing, a bystander to most of his own life. If the first movie was him finally taking a stand, this movie is him sitting back down for a while. What I said earlier about Phillips and Phoenix loving Arthur so much seems to have led to them completely letting the character off the hook. They pull their punches, metaphorically, when it comes to Arthur continuing down the path from the last movie.

The first movie made over a billion dollars, and a lot of the online discourse surrounded the messaging, or lack thereof. While it’s certainly a choice to have your clown-faced murderer inspire the disaffected poor people to acts of violence, the amount people looking at Arthur as some kind of hero seems to have worn on the filmmakers. Angry white men don’t need more reason to pick up arms, sad to say. To its credit, Joker: Folie à Deux contends with this ever so slightly. We live in even more of a society in this film than we did in the last one. Arthur was just an unwitting spark, a constantly duped and disappointed fool.

That said, I can’t sit here and pretend like Joker: Folie à Deux also isn’t an excellently well made movie with superb performances. Phoenix is perhaps less iconoclastic than he was in the last movie but he’s still captivating. Gaga doesn’t quite reach the mania that Harley Quinn ought to have but still packs a wallop where it counts. And Gleeson gives another career-best, equal parts terrifying and hilarious.

Neither Joker film is uplifting, but the people who got a perverse power fantasy out of the first one will likely feel disappointed by the sequel. There’s actually a weird element of Passion of the Christ to Joker: Folie à Deux. But with way more smoking. I’m not even entirely convinced the twisted love story aspect works the way they wanted it to.

I guess in the absolute value sense, I enjoyed Joker: Folie à Deux more than Joker. Neither made me feel good. I do wish this one had set itself apart more visually and tonally than the predecessor, but overall I liked the presentation quite a bit. But if you’re wondering who the movie is for, basically it’s for the people who made it. If you enjoy it too, all the better.

Joker: Folie à Deux ⭐ (3 of 5)

Joker: Folie à Deux opens wide October 4.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX Is a Perplexing, Cheerily Downbeat Sequel appeared first on Nerdist.

Smoldering husks of trilogies can’t even cool off these days before studios announce a new chapter. The money train keeps a-chugging. When your last three movies have all surpassed the $1 billion mark, it’s hard to rest on your laurels. Such is the case for Universal’s explicably popular Jurassic World franchise, which “wrapped up” three years ago with Jurassic World Dominion. Perfect time to announce a refresh in the form of Jurassic World Rebirth, hitting cinemas July 2025. This is the blockbuster equivalent of Friday the 13th. In the ’80s, Part V: A New Beginning came out a mere 11 months after Part IV: The Final Chapter.

Rogue One‘s Gareth Edwards will direct the film. He knows a thing or two about giant stuff, having cut his teeth on his indie breakout Monsters and then Legendary’s Godzilla. Original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp has written the screenplay for Jurassic World Rebirth. The movie will costar Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey.

Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures within that tropical biosphere hold the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.

Academy Award^® nominee Johansson plays skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett, contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission to secure genetic material from the world’s three most massive dinosaurs. When Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos, they all find themselves stranded on an island where they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that’s been hidden from the world for decades.

Ali is Duncan Kincaid, Zora’s most trusted team leader; Emmy nominee and Olivier Award winner Jonathan Bailey (Wicked, Bridgerton) plays paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis; Emmy nominee Rupert Friend (Homeland, Obi-Wan Kenobi) appears as Big Pharma representative Martin Krebs and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer, Murder on the Orient Express) plays Reuben Delgado, the father of the shipwrecked civilian family.

The cast includes Luna Blaise (Manifest), David Iacono (The Summer I Turned Pretty) and Audrina Miranda (Lopez vs. Lopez) as Reuben’s family. The film also features, as members of Zora and Krebs’ crews, Philippine Velge (Station Eleven), Bechir Sylvain (BMF) and Ed Skrein (Deadpool). 

Pretty wild Jurassic World Rebirth is only 11 months from release at this point, but that’s Hollywood for ya! I wasn’t a fan of any of the three previous Jurassic World movies, but the dino action still proved exciting for people around the world. Just shows to a go ya, the terrible thunderlizards will never go extinct.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Get ready for another round of adventure, excitement, and murder men as the campaign of Prime Video’s The Legend of Vox Machina gears up for a third season. The new season will consist of 12 episodes, premiering October 3, with the streaming service’s usual three episodes, followed by weekly drops thereafter. So 10 weeks of Vox Machina is what we’re saying. We’ve already seen the season’s new title sequence, and now to get you more hype, Prime has a brand new The Legend of Vox Machina trailer for you to check out below!

They’re still the same band of goobers, but it’s never been more dire for them as they have to (literally) go to hell and back to save Exandria from Thordak and his army. The Chroma Conclave’s path of destruction spreads like wildfire while the Cinder King hunts down Vox Machina. Our lovable band of misfits must rise above inner (and outer) demons to try and save their loved ones, Tal’Dorei, and all of Exandria. It’s bad news bears. But this The Legend of Vox Machina trailer gets us excited to see what’s in store this season.

The Legend of Vox Machina is an Amazon MGM Studios, Critical Role, and Titmouse production for Prime Video. The series stars Critical Role founders and cast members Laura Bailey (The Last of Us: Part II), Taliesin Jaffe (World of Warcraft), Ashley Johnson (The Last of Us), Liam O’Brien (Marvel’s Avengers), Matthew Mercer (Baldur’s Gate 3), Marisha Ray (Fallout 76), Sam Riegel (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and Travis Willingham (Marvel’s Avengers). The Critical Role cast also serves as executive producers alongside Brandon Auman (Star Wars: Resistance), Chris Prynoski (Metalocalypse), Shannon Prynoski (Fairfax), and Ben Kalina (Big Mouth).

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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When you think about the Alien film franchise and The Last of Us games and TV series, you probably don’t see any similarities at all. And why would you? One is a slowburn, cross-country journey about the end of the world with fungus people. The other is…The Last of Us. Wakka wakka wakka, funny joke. At any rate, both are creature horror with sci-fi bits but that’s where the comparisons likely stop. But if you’re a filmmaker like Fede Alvarez, you might have used one to inspire the other, as the filmmaker shared that The Last of Us: Part II did indeed inspire Alien: Romulus.

On Twitter, the Evil Dead director responded to a follower’s question about whether or not he’d played TLOU2. Alvarez shared he was playing the game whilst writing Alien: Romulus and took direct inspiration from it for one of his characters.

“The story of a pregnant Dina made me think of having the character of Kay be pregnant too. Then I cast Isabella Merced to play Kay…. A year later she gets cast to play Dina on the HBO show…. True story.”

That’s less life imitating art but art imitating art, really. The utter happenstance of Isabella Merced playing Kay in Romulus only for HBO to cast her has the analogous character in The Last of Us is super fascinating. In the game, and series, Dina is Ellie’s girlfriend who bears the brunt of the latter’s quest for vengeance.

But that isn’t the only fun parallel. Another Twitter person noticed a visual similarity between the character of Lev in TLOU2 and Navarro in Romulus. Both people of Asian descent with shaved heads. Alvarez confirmed this, too, in gif format.

So the moral of the story: play video games. Thank you.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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With the promise of a spin-off series to WandaVision focusing on the “Vision” half of that equation, speculation as to who or what might appear has run something approaching rampant. Vision, played by Paul Bettany, has had surprisingly few run-ins with out-and-out villains in his tenure in the MCU. Sure, Thanos killed him, but otherwise he tends to just fight other Avengers. That is, with the exception of his first appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Vision’s evil counterpart in that was the titular Ultron, a nefarious AI voiced by James Spader. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ultron’s back, and so is Spader.

The famously stringless creation of Tony Stark, Ultron proved an especially thorny barb in the side of the Avengers in the 2015 movie. His plot eventually led to the destruction of Sokovia, which in turn led to the eponymous Accords which pitted hero against hero in Captain America: Civil War. Ultron did appear in What If…? but not with Spader’s dulcet tones.

The Vision series, Vision Quest, will follow a rebuilt Vision, in his all-white version, as he searches for meaning following the disastrous events of WandaVision. Presumably this Vision will somehow interact with what remains of Ultron’s programming, if not a fully reconstituted Ultron. This will add an interesting layer of pathos to the proceedings. The divide between Vision’s humanity and his robotity is one of the hallmarks of the character, focusing on what it means to truly be alive.

Running Vision Quest is Terry Matalas who is no stranger to sentient robotics. He wrote for Star Trek: Picard season two and showran the wildly successful and beloved third season. According to reports, the Vision Quest series will begin filming in England in early 2025. In the meanwhile, we have another WandaVision spin-off, Agatha All Along, on the way September 18.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The big shocking reveal of the first Terminator movie back in 1984 was that (SPOILERS) John Connor had actually sent his own father, Kyle Reese, back in time to protect his mother, Sarah Connor. As a result of their brief time together, they conceived the savior of humanity against the machines. It’s a causal loop, one of the most complicated ideas in science fiction. So what happens when you turn that Terminator timeline into a franchise? Well, kid, it gets to be a bit of a mess.

Our own Adam Murray lost years of his own life examining the entire 40-year franchise, including all the sequels, the TV spinoff, and the theme park rides, to put together a definitive timeline for the events. It’s…strange. It’s even stranger than the Alien timeline he worked on. From Judgment Day continuing to move to multiple John Connors sending back a half-dozen T-800s, the timeline is messy. But fun to talk about!

And if you’d like to hear the entire breakdown from the horse’s mouth, you can watch Adam’s full video below. It includes all the making-of minutiae and film discrepancies you could ask for, plus an ungodly amount of Los Angeles references. Celebrate the first Judgment Day, August 27, by giving it a watch.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Gamescom is a wonderful time of year for fans of video gaming. Trailers galore! But even more than that, video game-related stuff, from TV shows like Secret Level, to toys! We love toys. Nintendo, never one to let us down in the merch department, has unveiled new LEGO sets based on their popular games. Six new sets will highlight Mario Kart titles and three sets for Animal Crossing. Gallery below!

Click To View Gallery

The new sets include Baby Mario and Luigi, Baby Peach & Grand Prix, Toad’s Garage, and a Standard Kart set. The one I’m most excited about? Jumbo Donkey Kong. The weirdest one? Blue Yoshi riding a Green Yoshi bike. Why would you ride a bike that looks like you? That is perverse.

In addition to these Mario Kart sets, we’ll also get three sets in the Animal Crossing universe. Those are: LEGO® Animal Crossing™ Stargazing with Celeste (77053), LEGO® Animal Crossing™ Leif’s Caravan & Garden Shop (77054) and LEGO® Animal Crossing™ Able Sisters Clothing Shop (77055).

All of these LEGO Nintendo sets will hit retailers January 1, 2025. So get your New Year’s affairs in order and get to building, then get to racing.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Games, both tabletop and video, offer some of the richest and most complex storytelling opportunities in the world at the moment. Sometimes you don’t want to leave a fictional game world when you’ve finished your campaign. Well, now if you’re a fan of 15 different games and gameworlds, the new Prime Video series Secret Level will be for you. The adult animated series from the people behind Love, Death + Robots will adapt an unprecedented number of properties from all over the gaming sphere. And even if you don’t know the games, it looks pretty gorgeous.

If you didn’t catch all of the properties in the teaser—which is astonishingly good looking so far—Prime has provided a list of what we’ll see.

●                Armored Core

●                Concord

●                Crossfire

●                Dungeons & Dragons

●                Exodus

●                Honor of Kings

●                Mega Man

●                New World: Aeternum

●                PAC-MAN

●                PlayStation (Highlighting various PlayStation Studios beloved entities)

●                Sifu

●                Spelunky

●                The Outer Worlds

●                Unreal Tournament

●                Warhammer 40,000

That’s a hefty and impressive list of titles! I’m personally pretty stoked to see Mega Man on the list. And FromSoftware fans will probably be exceptionally interested to see Armored Core among the offering. Whet the whistle for possible Dark Souls or Elden Ring episodes?

We honestly can’t wait to see what this level of animation brings to these beloved games. But we’ll have to! Secret Level premieres on Prime Video December 10.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Well…I bet Gearbox thought the timing of this announcement was going to be much more triumphant initially. The long-gestating feature film adaptation of Borderlands arrived to abysmal reviews and staggeringly small box office returns. But, silver lining, the player count for 2019’s Borderlands 3 saw a spike on Steam the week of release. And hopefully for the game studio, that interest in the series continues with the announcement that Borderlands 4 is on the way. Take a look at the very teasery teaser.

The teaser, which premiered at Gamescom 2024, came with the equally teasery description:

In this next installment of the definitive looter shooter, players will assume the role of a legendary Vault Hunter as they blast their way through hordes of enemies in search of new treasures to loot on an all-new planet.

So, in other words, it’s a Borderlands game. While the teaser seems very serious, the series has always employed a puerile sense of humor along with its trademark cel-shaded animation. The previous mainline entry of the game got decent reviews and sold over 18 million copies. Meanwhile the two spin-off titles, Tiny Tina’s Wonderland and New Tales from the Borderlands, both from 2022, fared less well.

No release date yet for Borderlands 4 but you can wishlist it on Steam if that’s a thing you like to do. Maybe wait to see some actual gameplay footage first.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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UPDATE, 8/20/2024 – The latest Studio Ghibli movie to head to Netflix is Grave of the Fireflies, widely known as one of the saddest Ghibli movies ever. This time, the Studio Ghibli will movie will be available in the United States, unlike previous Studio Ghibli Netflix releases which were only available internationally. It seems like this is because the licensing rights to Grave of the Fireflies is held by Sentai Filmworks (per Slash Film), though Studio Ghibli made the movie. This allowed Sentai Filmworks to strike a deal separate from the overall Max and Studio Ghibli one currently in place for the United States. Grave of the Fireflies will arrive on Netflix on September 16, so prepare for your heart to break.

UPDATE, 1/20/2020 – Ghibli is spreading the wealth! Per a report from Variety, Netflix will also add a handful of Studio Ghibli features to its streaming library as soon as February. (The report explicitly names the Miyazaki-directed features Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and My Neighbor Totoro, as well as The Secret World of Arrietty and The Tale of Princess Kaguya.) The bad news for most of our readers is that such an opportunity for viewing won’t be available in the United States, Canada, or Japan.

As discussed in the below report, HBO Max claimed North American distribution rights for Studio Ghibli’s catalogue en masse. That HBO Max is not expected to be available outside of North America has given Netflix the opportunity to claim the rights to Ghibli within other territories. In short, no matter where you live, you may well get to stream your favorite Miyazaki movies before you know it!

10/28/2019 – The streaming wars continue to claim weaponry left and right. For every “All the Star Wars movies” Disney+ offers, Netflix fires back with “The complete series of Seinfeld.” And it’s starting to get pretty rough out there. Major studios and networks are launching their own streaming services all over the net, promising their own exclusive mixture of must-have favorites and top-tier new stuff. HBO Max, perhaps the upstart most in line to rival Disney+, has just scored a major coup for its side: it is now the exclusive streaming home of the entire Studio Ghibli library.

This is major for a few reasons. One is that, up until a few years ago, Disney had the theatrical and home video rights to the Studio Ghibli library, consisting of all of co-founder Hayao Miyazaki’s movies and quite a few of co-founder Isao Takahata’s. But those rights lapsed and slowly but surely GKIDS picked up the library. Now they’ve released every Ghibli film on Blu-ray and run theatrical screenings nationwide every year. That would have made Disney+’s already impressive offering even more so.

Studio Ghibli

The other reason this is big news is timing. Earlier this week, Polygon ran a piece essentially detailing why Studio Ghibli would never offer its films for streaming.

“Studio Ghibli does not make their films available digitally, whether for download or streaming, anywhere in the world,” a GKids representative told Polygon over email earlier this year. “They continue to believe that presentation is vital and particularly appreciate opportunities for audiences to experience the films together in a theatrical setting.”

It certainly seemed like no one would ever see a Ghibli movie on a streaming service. But before any of us could even wrap our heads around the notion of never getting to put on Howl’s Moving Castle or My Neighbors the Yamadas whenever we felt like it, WarnerMedia released their statement of the rights acquisition.

HBO Max will be the US streaming home to the entire Studio Ghibli film library, one of the world’s most coveted and revered animation catalogues. The landmark deal with North American distributor GKIDS for the twenty-one Studio Ghibli feature films marks the first time these beloved films have been licensed to a streaming platform.

HBO Max, the name given to the WarnerMedia mega streaming service, is expected to launch in late spring of 2020.

The 21 Studio Ghibli films represent perhaps the most beloved animated films of all time. Maybe even strike “animated” from the previous sentence. The attention to detail, story construction, and a sense of wonder meant their films take a long time to make. But they rival only Pixar (and beat it depending on who you ask) in terms of consistent quality and ability to stir emotion.

Studio Ghibli

Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, along with producer Toshio Suzuki, founded Studio Ghibli in June of 1985 following the success of Miyazaki’s second feature, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. In the ensuing 34 years, they produced a wide array of fantasy and drama films. Miyazaki directed 10 of the Studio’s features while Takahata directed five, though Grave of the Fireflies, his most lauded and hearbreaking work, is not among the films coming to HBO Max.

The films in the lineup are:
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Castle in the Sky
My Neighbor Totoro
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Only Yesterday
Porco Rosso
Ocean Waves
Pom Poko
Whisper of the Heart
Princess Mononoke
My Neighbors the Yamadas
Spirited Away
The Cat Returns
Howl’d Moving Castle
Tales from Earthsea
Ponyo
The Secret World of Arrietty
From Up On Poppy Hill
The Wind Rises (coming Fall 2020)
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
When Marnie Was There

Is this a service-buyer for you? Is HBO Max now worth the price of admission? We’ll see; but WarnerMedia has certainly struck a blow, right in the prospective subscriber’s heartstrings.

Featured Image: Studio Ghibli

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

The post Studio Ghibli’s GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES Heads to US Netflix This September So All Our Hearts Can Break appeared first on Nerdist.

Like it or not (and I’m largely in the “not” category), we live in an age of “legacy” sequel/prequels. Those are pseudo-remakes of beloved but rather old franchise movies, feasting on the nostalgia for people of a certain age. Hollywood, in its infinite desire to capitalize on nostalgia, replicates iconography and even whole stories to tick the boxes that make people give them all the money. Alien: Romulus represents the best and worst of this kind of moviemaking. They utilize practical effects and 1979-era aesthetics, but also the troublesome dead-actor-digital-recreation thing.

More and more, new franchise installments will take place within the timeframe of previous entries. Those therefore “require” the participation of characters played by actors who are no longer with us. For example, Rogue One: Star Wars Story in 2016 took place right before A New Hope (1977), and Grand Moff Tarkin would be kicking around. Peter Cushing, the legendary actor who played Tarkin in A New Hope, died in 1994. Actor Guy Henry, who does look and sound a fair bit like Cushing, portrayed Tarkin in the Rogue One film. Rather than heavy makeup, or just performance, the production used an infamous digital replication of Cushing’s face.

At the time, this caused a lot of controversy, not least because, as the actor had died over 20 years prior, he was not able to give consent for the use of his likeness in this way. Lucasfilm got permission from the Cushing estate and paid them for his likeness, but it still drew accusations of creating what amounts to a digitally reanimated corpse.

Since then, Lucasfilm has done this a lot, although generally with digital de-aging techniques rather than full digital zombies. Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian and Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny are the biggest recent ones. However, due to the passing of Carrie Fisher, J.J. Abrams did have to use some trickery for The Rise of Skywalker, though using actual footage of the actor.

Naturally in these instances, where possible, the ethics of doing this never really became an issue. The actors either gave their consent, were in the movie already, or had filmed now-repurposed scenes. But one of the biggest factors in the Screen Actors Guild strike of 2023 was, of course, studios using artists’ likenesses in perpetuity through the use of A.I. or what have you. This will continue to be a hot button issue going forward as technology gets better. Generative A.I. might be on its way out, if you believe various science-bos, but digital face replication is constantly improving.

Which of course brings us to the story at hand. Ian Holm portrayed the secret android Ash in Ridley Scott’s original Alien. Ash, we learn as the movie goes along, is a plant from the greedy Weyland-Yutani company. Ash is one of the standout characters in a film full of great characters. Holm’s performance was a wonderful mix of creepy, erudite, and conniving.

Future installments introduced different synthetic humans and the idea that Weyland Yutani produced different “models” that look like different people. Lance Henriksen played Bishop in Aliens as well as a second version of Bishop, a sinister one, in Alien 3. Later in the Ridley Scott prequels, Michael Fassbender plays both evil android David and not-evil android Walter, different editions of the same model of android.

It’s because of this, Alien: Romulus director and co-writer Fede Alvarez felt justified in including an Ash-model android in his movie, given the film takes place 20 years after the first Alien. The trouble is, of course, Holm died in 2020. And while Holm’s estate supplied permission and received compensation, it becomes a question of morality.

Alvarez, speaking to Variety, said the following:

“Talking with Ridley, both of us came up with this idea that what if it has the likeness of Ian Holm — which is different from being Ian Holm or even being Ash,” Álvarez insists. “We would’ve never dared to reproduce that because you cannot reproduce with any technology, the talent of an actor. You can never capture the nuance of someone’s performance and their choices. So we designed a different character, but it shares the same likeness.”

In the movie, the heroes find the android Rook in a terrible state following a xenomorph overrunning the space station. After the humans plug in his upper torso, Rook gives them the requisite exposition and acts as the de-facto antagonist for the middle of the movie.

With all due respect to Fede Alvarez and Ridley Scott, that justification is nonsense. Ian Holm is Ash because Ian Holm played Ash. If you want to trade on the image of Ash for this other android, you are by default trading on the image of Ian Holm. Actor Daniel Betts provided the performance capture and voice for Rook. In both instances heavily filtered through Ian Holm’s voice and a supremely photorealistic (but still uncanny valley) version of the actor’s face. This kind of splitting hairs is dangerous.

I completely get wanting to pay homage, but the only reason this android had to look like Ian Holm is because of nostalgia pandering. It was so people who know the franchise will do the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing gif meme. The artistic reasons for the movie are far overshadowed by the horrifying implications of this continued practice.

This kind of thing dates back as far as the 2004 film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow which digitally recreated Sir Laurence Olivier’s face as the computerized visage of the villain. Holm is merely the latest actor for whom death is not the end of their career. Not only does it devalue their work by making them little more than a digital puppet, but it also devalues the work of the artist portraying the character underneath the graphics.

For a movie that did its best to hearken back to the way movies were made in 1979, Alien: Romulus added fuel to a very 2024 fire.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The Disney+ era of television series generally means the continuance of a particular show is always in flux. No one expected Loki to have a second season, but, lo and behold it, did. Presumably if Obi-Wan Kenobi had been a monster hit, they may have given that a second season also. Every season could be the last. However, Star Wars: The Acolyte was always designed to have multiple seasons, which makes the fact it has been cancelled…well, I won’t say “surprising,” but possibly evidence that Lucasfilm is listening to audience reaction more than we thought.

The news, which Deadline reported, comes about a month following the finale of The Acolyte‘s first (and only) season. The mystery series set during the High Republic era, about a complacent Jedi Order going after a new dark threat, had a pretty solid premiere week but steadily fell down the streaming ratings in subsequent weeks.

While the series met with pre-launch online hatred given the lesbian showrunner and multicultural cast, the uneven nature of the story and the rewriting of familiar lore seems to have driven others away. It also probably didn’t help that most of the show’s characters died in season one. Showrunner Lesley Headland had submitted ideas for a season two and was hopeful for a pickup, but it was not to be.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Rockwell once opined it always feels like somebody’s watching him. It might be a treatise on existing in the public eye, but we don’t have definitive proof he wasn’t the victim of the floating eyeball known as the Beholder. The monster has been a thorn in the side of Dungeons & Dragons players since the game’s beginning in 1975. Fifty years is a very long time to fight against beasts of this kind. Magic: The Gathering knows it and has announced Secret Lair x Dungeons & Dragons, limited edition card drops with D&D theming. We’re stoked to get to share some exclusive looks at cards dedicated to the Beholder!

Click To View Gallery

These cards come from just one of the planned drops that begin August 27. Each drop will highlight a different legendary character from D&D‘s unprecedented 50-year dominance. The drops are as follows:

• Secret Lair x Dungeons & Dragons®: An Exhibition of Adventure
• Secret Lair x Dungeons & Dragons®: Astarion’s Thirst
• Secret Lair x Dungeons & Dragons®: Karlach’s Rage
• Secret Lair x Dungeons & Dragons®: Death is in the Eyes of the Beholder I
• Secret Lair x Dungeons & Dragons®: Death is in the Eyes of the Beholder II

The above cards all come from “Death is in the Eyes of the Beholder II,” so not only will there be MTG cards celebrating the vampire rogue Astartion and the battle-hardened Karlach, there are double the Beholderings.

“This is a special year for Dungeons & Dragons fans, and we couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate 50 years of such an amazing game than by bringing our two games together,” said Mark Heggen, Vice President of Collectibles, Magic: The Gathering. “Each of these Secret Lair drops represent the legacy and impact of Dungeons & Dragons and it’s thrilling that Magic: The Gathering fans can be part of this celebration.”

“It’s always incredible to see iconic D&D art, monsters, and characters come to life on Magic cards! These Secret Lair cards capture the essence of D&D, giving fans of both games something truly special to add to their collections,” said Jess Lanzillo, VP of Franchise and Product for D&D at Wizards of the Coast. “Whether you’re a D&D fan, a Magic enthusiast, or both, these drops offer a unique way to celebrate and connect with these games that have brought fans so much joy and community for decades.”

Each drop $29.99. A Foil Edition of each drop will also be available at $39.99 each. The drops will be available on MagicSecretLair.com and D&D Beyond Marketplace later this month.

You can learn more about Secret Lair on the official site and sign up to be notified about upcoming Secret Lair drops at MagicSecretLair.com.

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I will always appreciate a massive swing for the conceptual fences from an established franchise. Star Trek doing a lighthearted comedy about endangered space whales for its fourth big screen installment comes to mind. Another is Prey, which set a Predator movie in the 18th century. And because of that mentality, I certainly appreciate Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant for trying to turn the Alien franchise into more contemplative, more thoughtful treatises on existence. But sometimes, especially in this series’ case, a return to form is needed. Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus takes us back to the monster movie in space vibes, and it mostly delivers. Mostly.

I know Alien: Prometheus and Covenant have their defenders, and from a visual and design standpoint, they are unmatched. But often, it felt like the xenomorphs themselves got in the way of a heady discussion of what it means to be human. And the characters were abysmally stupid, which is never that fun to watch. Alvarez, known for the Evil Dead reboot in 2013 and Don’t Breathe in 2016, is a horror director and so smartly took the franchise away from Scott’s ponderousness in favor of a new riff on monsters versus people on a derelict spacecraft. Sheer simplicity.

Alien: Romulus follows Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a young colonist on a dismal mining planet who desperately wants off. Her only family is Andy (David Jonsson), the early generation Weyland Yutani synthetic who raised her after her parents died. The company, always the bastard, keeps raising the work requirements for relocation. Her only chance comes from a group of old friends (Archie Renaux, Isabella Merced, Aileen Wu, Spike Fearn). They plan to raid an adrift space station for its resources and need Andy’s access codes to do it.

Upon arriving on the station—with its two halves, Romulus and Remus—the group finds evidence of something nasty and very quickly the familiar trappings of xenomorph shenanigans appear. Now Rain and her friends have a ticking clock. They need to get what they came for and get off the station before the aliens, the company, or gravity itself kills them.

Alien: Romulus has a lot to love. Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues set the action after 1979’s Alien but before Aliens, and they absolutely capture the grungy futurism from the original. Additionally, they use what we know about the xenomorphs’ life cycle to create some excellent scares early on, from facehuggers to acid blood. When we finally see the fully grown xenomorph, it effectively stalks and hides and could be behind any corner, or in every ceiling duct. It’s a joy.

I won’t spoil anything, but while I was enjoying myself during most of the movie, it was the final act that really kicked it up a notch. Alvarez stages some action set pieces we’ve genuinely never seen before that left me breathless. He also gives us a final Alien: Romulus confrontation that was scary in a way the series often hinted at, even attempted, but never pulled off until now. Giger would be proud.

I also want to specifically call out Benjamin Wallfisch’s score. It’s a big, sweeping, orchestral soundscape that actively calls back Jerry Goldsmith’s score from Alien. Many sci-fi/horrors use synthwave scoring, which I love and am definitely here for. But in keeping with the aesthetic of the 1970s-style of futurism, a full orchestra and leitmotifs really add an air of classiness. It’s a standout, for sure.

So with all of these things to praise, you might expect me to give this movie full marks. Not quite so. I mentioned earlier that Alien: Romulus smartly goes back to basics. That’s true, but it also plays it safe in a way that we’ve seen before. It’s not as egregious as something like Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That is literally just A New Hope again but with references and Easter eggs galore. Here, the setup is familiar, which is fine, but a few, I think, needless references and callouts (and especially digital recreations of things) nearly spoiled the whole thing. I understand why a couple of them are there, thought another one was pretty clever, and one was so groan-worthy I wanted to tear my eyes out. All told, I wish they hadn’t done them.

The characters are also pretty thin. Andy is the only character with any kind of interesting arc—synthetic humans are always the most memorable of these movies—and while Spaeny is a capable and compelling heroine, Rain is only barely deep. The other four people are as two-dimensional as it gets. I will say, at the very least, they aren’t obnoxiously stupid. They’re young people who don’t know what they’re dealing with and make wrong decisions. They aren’t scientists who act moronic or who don’t know how to run perpendicular to a falling object.

Ultimately I was happy with Alien: Romulus, both from a visual and a tension standpoint. I think it delivers the back-to-basics thrill ride that many fans have wanted. While it never fully escapes the continuity of the earlier saga, it also doesn’t feel bogged down by it. And that third act has maybe the most fun and wild Alien stuff in decades. See it large, see it loud, revel in the screams.

Alien: Romulus hits theaters August 16.

⭐ (3.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Corporate restructuring is a fact of life in Hollywood. Entities absorb other entities, divisions get cut loose. It is what it is. For the purposes of fans of movies and TV, often it doesn’t mean much, unless the moves lead to your favorite shows or movie franchises going away. So the news from Variety that Paramount Global is shutting down Paramount Television Studios sounds huge. But in actuality, this was a separate division founded in 2013, rather than CBS Studios, which handles most of the company’s TV output.

The original concept for Paramount Television Studios was to produce television specifically based on Paramount Pictures-owned IP. They own the Jack Ryan movies, and thus made the Jack Ryan TV series. They own The Godfather and made the TV miniseries The Offer. But the tumultuous streaming landscape means that studios have more content to make than they generally receive revenue for. So in order to cut the $500 million per annual cost of PTS, Paramount Global is shutting it down. The continuing programming will fold into CBS Studios. CBS Studios produces all the Star Trek series, Evil, Ghosts, et al.

The report has no word on how many jobs this shuttering will lose, and that is, as always, the most important part of these corporate shufflings. Anyone whose job became redundant following a merger will tell you it’s no comfort to know the projects you worked on will go on without you. But, TV will still exist.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Just the incisive commentary we expect from the director of WALL-E. At D23 Expo 2024, Pixar Chief Creative Officer, Pete Docter, announced a fifth entry in the companies longest running franchise. Their first franchise, really. Toy Story 5 will be directed by Pixar Senior Creative Team member Andrew Stanton. Stanton, of course, directed Finding Nemo as well as the one about the robot. He says the movie will be about our hero toys taking on their biggest foe yet… screens. You can check out the first piece of Toy Story 5 concept art, as well as its release date window information below.

In the 30 years since the first Toy Story debuted and ushered in the era of digital animation, the world has not only caught up to Pixar, it shot forward like a rocket to the moon. YouTube and mobile games have taken the place of figures and pull strings in a child’s heart. If you thought Woody was out of date in ’95, he’s a relic today. Smart of Pixar to take that story on.

This will be Stanton’s first film since 2016’s Finding Dory, and his first time helming a Toy Story movie. That alone has us jazzed. Expect Toy Story 5 in 2026.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We’re here to take a potentially controversial stance: video games are art. I know, it’s pretty wild. Congratulate us on our iconoclasm. But even if video games are an artform unto themselves, the word “cinematic” usually comes out to describe particularly arty games. Games have adapted movie-style visuals and storytelling quite well, but, with a few notable exceptions, movies have yet to really capture what makes a particular game title great. Hasn’t stopped them from trying! And Netflix has set its sights on one of the pillars of modern video gaming with a BioShock movie. After this adaptation announcement earlier this year, the movie is gaining traction with a director and writer on board.

Netflix reveals that “Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I Am Legend, Slumberland) has joined to direct the live-action film adaptation with Michael Green (Logan, Blade Runner 2049, Death on the Nile) writing the screenplay. Both these creators have done some great work, so fans should feel excited.

In February, a brief tweet via Netflix’s Geeked Twitter account announced a movie version of the 2007 first-person shooter from 2K and Take-Two Interactive.

Most recently, in July 2024, producer Roy Lee confirmed the Bioshock movie was still in the works with director Francis Lawrence. But the film is currently being “reconfigured” into a “more personal” with a reduced budget. Lee notes, “The new regime has lowered the budgets… So we’re doing a much smaller version. … It’s going to be a more personal point of view, as opposed to a grander, big project.”

BioShock is a sci-fi mystery about an unnamed protagonist in 1960 whose plane crashes over the ocean only to find an elevator to an opulent, art deco city underwater. But as gorgeous as it looks, it’s anything but idyllic. The brainchild of Randian business mogul Andrew Ryan, the city Rapture was supposed to allow rampant capitalism, exceptionalism, individualism, and Objectivism. Scientists developed genetic upgrades which naturally turned most of the populace into insane nightmare monsters. The player character has to piece together the mystery of their own past, what happened in the city, and avoid the terrifying Big Daddies who can pretty much kill you on sight.

BioShock is a very tough title to translate to a movie. So much of the game’s success depends on the player’s choice—or lack thereof. It’s a scary survival horror game, but it also has complex history and backstory that we only learn about over hours and hours of gameplay. This is not to say it’s an impossible task, of course, but it’ll definitely take a deft hand.

So far, we don’t know anything more than these announcements. No dates or times or anything of that nature have been shared. We don’t even know if it’ll be strictly an adaptation of the first game; the announcement says “franchise,” which means it very well could borrow elements from BioShock 2 or BioShock Infinite as well. But needless to say, we’ll kindly wait with bated breath until we get more updates. And remember: “A man chooses; a slave obeys.”

Originally published on February 15, 2022.

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The second season of House of the Dragon has wrapped and once again fans are in the long, dark until the next season. In a recent interview, showrunner Ryan Cogdal said season three won’t go into production until early next year, so you can bet on another year-long-plus gap as happened between seasons one and two. Another confirmation from Cogdal concerns the show’s total number of seasons. Unlike Game of Thrones that went into season eight, House of the Dragon will end after season four.

The showrunner explained he and the other writers mapped the rest of the show’s story, as explored in George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, after season one wrapped. So while fans are a bit disappointed at the lack of major battles, and therefore major deaths, in the season two finale, Cogdal promises the next season will give you more than your money’s worth.

“One of the things that came into play in season two,” Cogdal said, “is: What is the final destination of the series and where are we going? We wanted to rebalance the story in such a way that we had three great seasons of television [after season one] to round out and tell this story. When you’re trying to mount the show, which requires a tremendous amount of resources, construction, armor, costumes, visual effects … we are trying to give The Gullet — which is arguably the second most anticipated action event of Fire & Blood — trying to give it the time and the space that it deserves.”

The Battle of the Gullet is one of the key major conflicts in the Targaryen Civil War, and this season took great care to lay the groundwork for it and what will come after. “So I apologize for the wait,” Cogdal said. “But with the team that we have together, we’re going to pull off a hell of a win with The Battle of the Gullet.”

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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My absolute favorite thing about the state of horror movies in 2024 is how many filmmakers are going real weird with it. Killers, vampires, ghosts, and especially zombies feel incredibly passé on their own. We need a little uncanny strangeness with our scares, and some existential dread. Yum yum yum, I eat it up. The most recent movie to fit this bill like a glove is Damian McCarthy’s Oddity, which has made the festival rounds and which I saw through Fantasia Fest 2024. Oddity is not lying; it’s a very weird movie, but the scares are plentiful, the imagery creepy, and the story strangely satisfying.

McCarthy’s previous film was Caveat, an intensely grimy little movie about a man who takes a job watching over a psychologically disturbed woman in an abandoned house on an isolated island. While that movie didn’t light the world on fire, it did provide some upsetting concepts and imagery that made me curious to see what he’d do next. Oddity takes much of what worked in Caveat and makes an altogether more approachable, “conventional” movie that lulls the viewer into thinking they know what’s going to happen. They might, but probably not.

Dani (Carolyn Bracken) moves into a very remote house in the Irish countryside with her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee), a doctor at the nearby mental asylum. One night while Ted is at work, a creepy stranger (Tadhg Murphy) knocks on the door and tells Dani that he saw someone, or something, enter the house and that she is in grave danger. Now this presents Dani with a predicament. Believe this man, or not. What she decided, and what actually happened is part of the movie’s fun, so I won’t spoil it.

We then cut to some time later, Dani is out of the picture, and Ted’s new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton) is about to move into the house, under duress. Arriving at just the wrong time is Dani’s vision-impaired twin sister Darcy (also Bracken) who plans to stay the weekend. It isn’t just an unwanted relative. Darcy, who owns a shop full of occult and folklore oddities, brings a human-sized wooden homunculus with which she plans to get to the bottom of what happened to her sister.

Oddity is one of those horror movies that refuses to adhere to any usual story conventions. It keeps you guessing all the way through, which in and of itself builds tension. The laws of the natural and supernatural bleed in interesting ways, keeping viewers on edge. I found so much to like about it, especially to do with the unique location. We go other places, but the majority of the action happens in the remote house. It’s beautiful and welcoming, but the lighting at night plus some large, shadowy areas make it sinister in the best way. Similarly, the mere presence of the weird homunculus, and Darcy’s other cursed objects, leaves us wondering when and how they’ll come into the story. When they do, it’s supremely satisfying.

This is a movie where you aren’t sure what you’re watching at times, or why, but everything comes together by the end. Not necessarily how you think it would, or maybe even should, but that’s literally in the name. Oddity is scary, mysterious, upsetting, and effecting and I had a big grin on my face when the credits rolled. Definitely worth your time.

Oddity ⭐ (4 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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One of Warner Bros.’s earliest coups of the TV age was acquiring the Hanna-Barbera library of animated programming. With it, they own stuff like Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, Jonny Quest, et al. Cable network Cartoon Network began as a joint venture between Warner and Turner as a place to showcase classic animated programming. Once it started making its own new programming, and acquiring newer shows, it spun out Boomerang, a channel specifically for those older ‘toons. Eventually Boomerang launched a separate streaming service, but, as seemed inevitable, WB Discovery is sunsetting Boomerang and will absorb it into Max. Some of it, anyway.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Boomerang streaming service will cease operation on September 30 of this year. Subscribers and “some content” will be moved over to ad-free Max with no immediate change to subscriber price. That is, at least, a bargain. Boomerang is $6 per month while Max’s ad-free tier is currently $17 per month. Max already carries some of Boomerang’s content, including Looney Tunes shorts, Scooby-Doo series, Tom & Jerry, The Flintstones, etc. What else will come over is unclear at this time.

The Boomerang cable and satellite channel will continue to operate, because packages need channels. However this speaks to yet another way Warner Bros. Discovery under David Zaslav continues to consolidate all of its holdings into a single entity. Last month, WBD announced it would join with Disney+ and Hulu for a massive streaming bundle. Surely keeping as much in the Max portfolio as possible makes their end of the deal look more enticing. And I’m not going to say Boomerang was the best service out there. I tried it for a while and it was fairly pedestrian. But more and more, streaming, once the wild west of choice, is turning into mega corporations trying to increase their bottom line.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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I respect any indie filmmakers who have a consistent output and a brand of their own. In the horror space especially, this is part of the fun. Osgood Perkins, for example, has recently proven his own unique take on scary movies can be successful and still stay true to his vision. Similarly, I have the utmost respect for the horror-making consortium known as The Adams Family and their continual turnout of movies. I must confess, however, the movies they make haven’t really done much for me. Their latest, Hell Hole, which I saw at Fantasia International Film Festival 2024, is the one I’ve liked the best, which is something I suppose.

The Adams Family consist of father John Adams, mother Toby Poser, and daughters Lulu Adams and Zelda Adams. All or most of them write, direct, and appear in all of their films. They are undoubtedly talented, and prolific of late. Their previous horror outings have been 2019’s The Deeper You Dig, 2021’s Hellbender, and 2023’s Where the Devil Roams. All of those films had a certain visual eeriness and a muted tone. Where they usually lose me is in the story, which is often so sparse you could drive Rhode Island through it. Hell Hole has more of a story, and a lot more dialogue, which helps to a degree. But it’s still missing something.

The film follows an American-led fracking team in Eastern Europe who uncover strange parasitic caephelopedic creatures underground. More specifically, they find a French soldier from the Napoleonic Wars, perfectly preserved and carrying one of these creatures within him. Like a plague or a virus, the tentacled terror jumps from host to host as the crewmembers and their environmental envoys try to figure out what to do about it.

And that’s it, that’s the whole story. It’s not dissimilar to any number of alien movies. Specifically, Alien. This one deals more in the vein of discussing whether ancient creatures like this deserve to live, even if it means the host body dies in the process. It’s essentially, what if the facehuggers took a lot longer to gestate the alien, and they did it from inside? We get some gruesome body explosions and the creature design itself is grotty, but largely that’s what Hell Hole is.

Poser plays Em, the head of the outfit, who has the best head on her shoulders and knows enough to let the local workers deal with troubles their own way rather than try to assert more dominance. John Adams plays John, one of the other Americans, and Max Portman plays Em’s nephew, a young cook with a crush on Sofija (Olivera Perunicic), one of the two scientists. The cast are all quite good, especially considering half of them are speaking their first language.

But the simplicity here is sort of the problem. The plot mechanics are fine, the actors are good, and the creature itself is effective enough. But so much of the movie is just idle banter while standing around waiting for things to happen. I won’t say it’s boring, and like I said, it ended up being the most I’ve liked one of the Adams Family’s movies. It just doesn’t do much with what it’s working with to get it over the hump. The movie isn’t scary or even particularly exciting. It’s shot more like a comedy than a horror movie but doesn’t have the jokes.

I hope the Adams Family make movies forever, and I hope I eventually like even one of them.

Hell Hole is coming to Shudder on August 23. Maybe you’ll find more to like about it than I did.

⭐ (2.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We here at Nerdist very much enjoyed Deadpool & Wolverine. We know not everyone does. However, we do know a poop-load of people went to go see the movie opening weekend. In its initial bow, the R-rated comic book movie raked in $211 million, making it the sixth highest grossing opening weekend of all time domestically. Disney owns the all six of the top spots, where D&W now only trails Avengers: Endgame ($357.1M), Spider-Man: No Way Home ($260.1M), Avengers: Infinity War ($257.6M), Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($247.9M), and Star Wars: The Last Jedi ($220M) among the top opening weekends at the box office.

Additionally, the movie broke all kinds of records. It’s the highest-grossing weekend for an R-rated movie in history. With $444.1 million worldwide and $211 million domestic, it handily beats the previous record-older… the first Deadpool in 2016. The first movie had $264M WW in like-for-like markets excluding China, $132.4M domestic, according to Deadline. Deadpool & Wolverine is also now by far the biggest opening weekend for a Ryan Reynolds movie (beating Deadpool), for Hugh Jackman (beating X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006!), and definitely director Shawn Levy. His previous best weekend was the $54 million domestic for 2009’s Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

You want more? Oh we’ve got more! Deadpool & Wolverine beat The Lion King (the remake one) as the biggest July opening ever. It’s also the 34th consecutive MCU movie to debut at number one. The MCU as a whole has grossed over $30 billion. With a B.

So at any rate, you can say Deadpool & Wolverine has been a big ol’ success. Is this proof the MCU is back? Or is it just proof people love Deadpool, Wolverine, and X-Men-related characters? The world may never know. Until Captain America: Brave New World in February.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Of all the unsure futures for DC properties and projects once WB and Discovery merged, and DC Studios rebooted their universe, the one I most wanted to continue was Matt Reeves’ The Batman. The big hit movie with a singularly grimy take on Gotham City already had a sequel and a spinoff series in the works. Neither, thankfully, faced the scrap pile, and indeed that spinoff series, The Penguin, is exceedingly close to debuting. With Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb vying for power in Gotham’s criminal underworld, gangsters and goons are bound to clash.

During the Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2024, Farrell (via pre-recorded video) introduced the full trailer for The Penguin. We get to see just how seedy the gang war is in Gotham. Penguin tries to take over the drugs trade in the city, assuming control of the family after Carmine Falcone’s death. However, Falcone’s daughter, Sofia, arrives to assert her own authority after a stint in Arkham Asylum. If she thinks she’s rehabilitating, I’d hate to see the way she was before.

At one point we hear that Sofia was “the Hangman.” While we don’t know what that means in the context of the series, the Hangman in DC Comics is a thing. Sofia Falcone first appeared in The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. By the time of the follow-up series Dark Victory, she assumes the mantle of the serial killer, the Hangman. Her targets were anyone associated with her father’s death. So…great!

Matt Reeves and producer Dylan Clark refer to their Gotham City universe as “The Batman Epic Crime Saga,” outside of any other DC universe. In addition to Farrell, The Penguin stars Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone; Michael Zegan as Alberto Falcone; Michael Kelly as Johnny Vitti; and mother-effing Clancy Brown as Salvatore Maroni.

The Penguin premieres September 19.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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It’s a hefty Star Trek day at the ol’ San Diego Comic-Con this year. In addition to news about Strange New Worlds season three, Starfleet Academy, and Section 31, fans also learned about another, as-yet-unannounced series. During the section of Saturday’s Hall H panel about Lower Decks, Paramount announced a new live-action comedy series from Tawny Newsome and Justin Simien. Newsome, of course, plays Mariner on Lower Decks while Simien, who moderated the panel, wrote Dear White People and directed last year’s Haunted Mansion.

In the series, “Federation Outsiders” serving “a gleaming resort planet” learn all of their exploits are video fodder for the entire quadrant. They call it “25th Century appointment viewing,” meaning we have a time period and little else.

This is obviously in the very early stages Kurtzman, Simien and Newsome executive produce alongside Aaron Baiers, Rod Roddenberry and Trevor Roth. The project comes from the studio behind the Star Trek universe, CBS Studios, where Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout is based. In addition to her role in Lower Decks, Newsome also serves as a writer on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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I got the opportunity to watch Batman: Caped Crusader early. While the excitement about a new Batman cartoon would be high enough, a 1940s-styled one from Bruce Timm, J.J. Abrams, and Matt Reeves kicked it up four notches. Right away, in the very first episode, we got a sense this show was playing fast and loose with established canon and character norms. The first episode shows us a Gotham underworld terrified of one mobster: the Penguin. This is a Penguin as we’ve never seen before. As you can see in the image below, it’s a gender-swapped Penguin, Oswalda Cobblepot, as voiced by Minnie Driver.

The reveal comes out of the official Batman: Caped Crusader panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2024. Timm introduced a screening of the first episode to the Hall H audience and then brought out executive producer Matt Reeves, Driver, and fellow actors Hamish Linklater (Batman), and Jamie Chung (Dr. Harleen Quinzel).

Prime Video also unveiled a clip from the first episode. While it doesn’t show the Penguin herself, it shows just how terrified she makes the corrupt in Gotham City.

While I can’t say much more about individual episodes, I can share that the season is tremendously good. Other villains are remixed and rethought throughout the season in really fun ways. It feels at once very different from Batman: The Animated Series and clearly from the same creator. Excellent stuff. If the other Penguin TV offering this year is as good, Cobblepot fans will be very happy.

Batman: Caped Crusader drops its entire 10-episode first season on August 1 on Prime Video.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We’ve been looking forward to the beginning of James Gunn’s new DCU since he took over last year. While all the Superman and Supergirl news has kept us buzzing, we always knew the first project out of the gate would be the animated Creature Commandos. At SDCC 2024’s “Jim Lee and Friends” panel, Lee brought out Gunn to show all in attendance the first teaser for the series, due out in December. And because Max wants people to watch, they sent it out wide too! Check it out below.

The teaser opens with Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) bringing Rick Flag Sr (Frank Grillo) into Belle Reve to meet his new team. Presumably this takes place after The Suicide Squad, because a) this is Rick Flag’s dad, and 2) congress says Task Force X can be no more. Waller, ever the stickler for loopholes, says congress has disallowed human prisoners to go on missions. Non-humans are fair game. So monsters it is!

Flag’s team consists of fish lady Nina Mazursky (Zoe Chao), G.I. Robot (Sean Gunn), Weasel (also Sean Gunn), Dr. Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk), the Bride (Indira Varma), and Frankenstein (technically’s monster, David Harbour). The tone seems very much in keeping with the Suicide Squad violent irreverence, which makes sense. Other cast members include Steve Agee as Economos, Maria Bakalova as Princess Ilana, and Anya Chalotra as Circe.

With Waller, Economos, and Weasel’s involvement, it seems this series will overlap with Peacemaker and The Suicide Squad in some way. Certainly more than I initially thought. We knew Peacemaker season two would be part of the DCU. I’m honestly okay if they figure out a way to make The Suicide Squad new canon also. In any case, it’s good stuff.

Creature Commandos debuts on Max this December.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Doctor Who is well and truly back, as evidenced by the return of Christmas specials. Last year’s, “The Church on Ruby Road,” introduced Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday and gave us our first full adventure with Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor. Hot on the heels of the finale, which saw a change of the guard, we have the next Christmas special heading our way. My guess? At Christmas. “Joy to the World” will be the very first Christmas special not written by the showrunner. Its writer is a previous showrunner, Steven Moffat. I have to say, Moffat always did write the best Christmas specials.

San Diego Comic-Con 2024’s Friday Hall H panel gave fans our first glimpse of the special in the form of a teaser. Check it out!

Just as you’d expect from a Moffat script, “Joy to the World” is a strange mystery with sci-fi silliness in the mix. The Doctor keeps popping through doors in different ages to present someone with ham and cheese toasty and a pumpkin latte. Eventually he happens upon Joy (Nicola Coughlan), who is alone on Christmas. Out of the locked door that always happens to be in every hotel pops a Silurian in a suit. Joy is terrified and brandishes a hairdryer which scares the Silurian. Just then, the Doctor shows up with the same tray, sees Joy, and smiles.

This doesn’t make a ton of sense to us now, but it will! Oh boy, will it….probably. Locked doors, alien worlds, time-hopping, and delicious food? It must be Christmas! “Joy to the World” will air on Disney+ and BBC One this December.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Almost since we knew Russell T Davies would once again showrun Doctor Who, and that it would be on Disney+ outside the UK, we figured a spinoff or twelve would be in the works. Hell, we even knew one of them would have something to do with UNIT and Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart. Now, as part of the 2024 Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con, we know all of this is true. Davies announced the first spinoff of the D+ age will be a UNIT-centric, five-part limited series, entitled The War Between the Land and the Sea. Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but there you are. The series will feature the return of classic monsters, the Sea Devils.

The official synopsis is as follows:

When a fearsome and ancient species emerges from the ocean, dramatically revealing themselves to humanity, an international crisis is triggered. With the entire population at risk, UNIT steps into action as the land and sea wage war.

Davies co-writes the series along with Pete McTighe, who had previously written “Kerblam!” and “Praxeus” for the Jodie Whittaker years. Additionally, McTighe has penned and produced several featurettes for classic Doctor Who Blu-ray releases. Directing the series will be Dylan Holmes-Williams, who directed “73 Yards” and “Dot and Bubble” from the most recent season.

Starring in the series will be RTD-1-era guest stars Russell Tovey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who will join Redgrave’s Kate Stewart and Alexander Devrient’s Colonel Ibrahim. What we don’t know is whether Tovey and Mbatha-Raw will play the characters they played in the mid-2000s. My guess would be not; Mbatha-Raw played Tish Jones, younger sister of companion Martha Jones. It might make sense for her to be there. However, Tovey played Midshipman Alonso Frame, a space cruise ship crewmember from the distant future. Far less likely, but who can say.

Davies said: “I’m so lucky to work with such a magnificent cast. And this is a huge, muscular, thrilling drama which will shake The Whoniverse to its foundations. When the Doctor’s not in town, the whole of humanity is in trouble.“

No word yet on when The War Between the Land and the Sea will air, but we imagine some time prior to Doctor Who‘s next season. Or, after it. One of the two.

This will mark the first Doctor Who spinoff series since the short-lived 2016 series Class. Davies loves him some Who spinoffs, having created both the adult-aimed Torchwood and younger viewer-focused The Sarah Jane Adventures during his original tenure.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post Russell Tovey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw to Star in DOCTOR WHO Spinoff Series appeared first on Nerdist.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a delightfully dirty superhero movie with multiversal mishaps. It’s also a very clever commentary on the transience of franchise movies. What happens to the characters in an aborted cinematic universe? As such, the movie features a plethora of cameos from versions of characters we know from previous films, most of whom don’t have a home anymore. And some never had a home to begin with. One particular Deadpool & Wolverine cameo made a 10-year promise a hilarious reality.

When Deadpool and Wolverine end up in the Void, they meet a number of variants and characters from pruned universes. Among these are characters like X-23, Elektra, and Johnny Storm. But one character, and more specifically one actor, who shows up is none other than Channing Tatum, finally playing Gambit. For those who don’t know, Tatum had been 20th Century Fox’s choice to play Gambit in the X-Men universe from 2006. Initially, he wanted to do it but was unavailable. Eventually Gambit did appear, with Taylor Kitsch’s less-than-popular turn in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

All the way back in 2014, producer Lauren Shuler Donner signed Tatum to play Gambit for Fox in a solo movie. Presumably, once that movie was a hit, he’d eventually join the rest of the X-Men. Almost immediately after the agreement, the project went into development hell. Directors like Rise of the Planet of the Apes‘ Rupert Wyatt, The Bourne Identity‘s Doug Liman, and Pirates of the Caribbean‘s Gore Verbinski all signed on to direct at various points. Tatum and producing partner Reid Carolin also lobbied to direct.

Tatum was introduced on stage at the 2015 Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con. That panel also debuted teasers for both X-Men: Apocalypse and the first Deadpool. That’s how gosh-darn long ago it was. The project had been on the books for Fox every year after. Disney canned the movie officially when they bought 20th Century in 2019. But even as recently as 2022, Tatum said he’d still like the chance to play Remy LeBeau.

Tatum in Deadpool & Wolverine represents the culmination of the actor’s entire career. Certainly not in heft or resonance, but just in time spent. He wears the comic-accurate Gambit costume, talks in a ridiculously over the top Cajun accent, and makes several references to never being outside the Void. It’s not only an awesome character to have in a big fight scene, but for people who’ve wanted a Tatum Gambit movie for decades, it’s a lovely sigh of relief.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post One DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE Surprise Cameo Was 15 Years in the Making appeared first on Nerdist.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a delightfully dirty superhero movie with multiversal mishaps. It’s also a very clever commentary on the transience of franchise movies. What happens to the characters in an aborted cinematic universe? As such, the movie features a plethora of cameos from versions of characters we know from previous films, most of whom don’t have a home anymore. And some never had a home to begin with. One particular cameo was so unlikely we’re still shocked it happened.

When Deadpool and Wolverine arrive in the Void, they quickly run afoul of Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) and her crew of franchise baddies. They hear of a group of freedom fighters who eventually save them. Among the freedom fighters are X-23 (Dafne Keen), Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Gambit (Channing Tatum), and one other Marvel character whose franchise ended forever ago: Blade, as played by Wesley Snipes. While, hey, fun, Blade, it also represents a bit of moviemaking folklore that seemed unlikely to ever repeat.

Predating X-Men to movie screens by two years, the Blade movies were the first R-rated Marvel adaptations. The first and second movies were huge hits, but the third movie, 2004’s Blade: Trinity was not. It’s a very bad movie, but more than that, the behind-the-scenes stories were the stuff of movie-making nightmares. Infamously, director David S. Goyer did not get along well at all with Snipes, nor did Snipes get along with anyone in the cast. He went method actor for the role and refused to be addressed by anything other than “Blade.” One of those cast members with whom Snipes really clashed was none other than Ryan Reynolds.

Reynolds played Hannibal King, another vampire hunter who works with Blade and Jessica Biel’s Abigail Whistler. According to costar Patton Oswalt, Snipes refused to say a lot of his dialogue so they would toss lines to Reynolds. This made Hannibal King easily the mouthiest character in the movie, and began to hone a foul-mouthed persona that led to Reynolds playing Deadpool. A definite throughline. (You can read about all the behind-the-scenes drama here.)

At any rate, Reynolds left the movie having a very bad time, and Snipes said later he couldn’t stand working with Reynolds. But 20 years later, they appear together in Deadpool & Wolverine. Snipes even came out of retirement to assay the role of Eric Brooks, the Daywalker, again. Presumably time heals all wounds, and the success of the Deadpool movies, plus some dollars in the bank, will definitely help. Snipes and Reynolds never share the frame with Deadpool’s mask off, so maybe they actually didn’t work together again. Still, it’s a fun moment to see Blade, but also extra funny if you know the Blade: Trinity turmoil.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post Why One Major DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE Cameo Seemed Impossible appeared first on Nerdist.

Fresh off his Oscar win for Best Actor in Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy will star in a feature film follow-up to hit period crime drama Peaky Blinders. We saw the news at Deadline. The series initially ran from 2013-2022. True to form with British productions, that nine years encompasses six seasons with a total of 36 episodes. Incredible. Anyway, series creator Steven Knight has written the script and Tom Harper will direct. Harper previously directed the final three episodes of the show’s first season.

In addition to Murphy’s return, the Peaky Blinders film will also star Rebecca Ferguson, who recently starred as Lady Jessica in Dune and Dune: Part Two. As Deadline reports, her role is currently undisclosed.

When asked about the project—which had been kicking around for a bit awaiting the official greenlight—Murphy had this to say. “It seems like Tommy Shelby wasn’t finished with me. … It is very gratifying to be recollaborating with Steven Knight and Tom Harper on the film version of Peaky Blinders. This is one for the fans.”

Knight added: “I’m genuinely thrilled that this movie is about to happen. It will be an explosive chapter in the Peaky Blinders story. No holds barred. Full-on Peaky Blinders at war.” No idea when the movie will come out, but rest assured, those blinders will peak one more time.

Originally published on June 5, 2024.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The charm of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool persona wore thin for me around the time of Deadpool 2. The actor/producer/writer had made his own public image almost indistinguishable from the foul-mouthed quip factory and I got tired of it. As a result, I didn’t really enjoy the second film as much as I would otherwise. Even riding the X-Men-high of this past year, and the promise of Logan’s return, I wasn’t sure Deadpool & Wolverine would do much for me. I sit here corrected. I loved this movie so much.

As a function of spending my entire professional career covering different superhero media, I have certainly felt the so-called “fatigue.” In truth, the last several MCU outings have elicited little more than a consternated shrug. Plus, the mess of Sony’s Spider-Man universe, the demise of the DCEU, and the absorption of the Fox Marvel continuity is kind of exhausting. With all of this in mind, Deadpool & Wolverine was a much-needed release. It’s a roast of all of this nonsense, while still getting to the heart of these characters.

Part of the joy of the movie is discovering its many (many, many) surprises, so I’ll only indulge in the briefest of plot summaries. Wade Wilson (Reynolds) has hit some personal troubles and hangs up his Deadpool costume. Now he sports a stapled-on hairpiece and has a job selling cars. To break up this humdrummery, the TVA and specifically Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) appear and present Wade with a choice. He can either watch his world die or he can try to save it. But in order to do that, he’ll need a Wolverine. Too bad his universe’s died in Logan.

Wade eventually finds a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who has nothing left to lose and everything to gain. The two embark on what amounts to a hyper-violent, expletive-filled road movie through the Void. Anyone worried the two immortals won’t fight enough, fear not. They eventually cross paths with Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), Professor Xavier’s twin who died in-utero (it’s a comics thing) and her evil ways. Snikt snikt, stab stab, quip quip, etc. (Hard to describe this movie without plot stuff.)

Deadpool & Wolverine is less about specific characters within a specific universe and more about what happens to the characters when a cinematic universe goes away. It gets very Theatre of the Absurd. As Deadpool can break the fourth wall, that has always been an excuse to comment on the artifice of the movies and comics. Here, though resting within a narrative with surprisingly resonant emotions, it’s a meta narrative on the transience of franchises from the perspective of characters whose franchises ceased to exist. And somehow it’s not annoying. Deadpool himself is annoying, but that’s his whole raison d’etre.

Reynolds has the unique ability to play up the pathos within Wade Wilson amid a litany of swear words so foul they’d make Sam Kinison blush. I honestly think Ryan Reynolds says the F word with as much musicality as Samuel L. Jackson in the ’90s. Jackman proves what a great actor he is and what a perfect Wolverine he makes. He conveys all the pain and anguish of this particular Logan variant while still getting the tone of the movie. It’s easy to be the boring one opposite Deadpool, but his journey is the heart of the story. It isn’t just who this Wolverine is to his own universe, but who Wolverine is to fans of these movies.

Macfadyen and Corrin are superb as well with what are at times fairly thankless expository roles. They are astonishingly good actors who never wink or overplay the potential silliness of the movie. While certainly the MCU (and really every superhero movie) continues to have a problem with creating compelling villains, Cassandra Nova works much better than most. Maybe it’s just a character I like, and Corrin’s performance helps a lot, but Nova at least felt like she was in the same movie. The same could not be said for villains in other comedic superhero fare. Thor movies specifically.

Reynolds and director Shawn Levy co-wrote the script with returning Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and comic writer Zeb Wells. They had a Herculean task of balancing the meta jokes, myriad cameos, exceedingly bloody violence, filthy dialogue, comic book plotting, and resonant character journeys. In that respect, I think this is the most successful of all the Deadpool films. Deadpool 2 went deep into comic book stuff and it felt dissonant; here it’s part and parcel. It’s 25 years next May since the release of the first X-Men movie and they managed a heartfelt tribute to that wonderful mess while taking every ounce of piss out if it, and a gross of other films besides.

I’m sure people will find fault in some of the convenient plot moments or unclear time/universe mechanics. Ultimately, none of that matters. Deadpool & Wolverine is an unbridled joy. If this be the final time any of these characters appear (and honestly who the hell knows at this point), it’s a worthy, hilariously profane farewell.

Deadpool & Wolverine ⭐ (5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE Is Just the Bloody, Puerile, Heartfelt Movie We Wanted appeared first on Nerdist.

With Dune: Part Two earlier this year, fans got to see Paul Atreides rise to power on Arrakis. But we know there’s way more story to tell both ahead of him, and from generations past. HBO’s new series Dune: Prophecy will depict the struggles and political maneuvering of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood 10,000 years before Muad’dib’s ascension. In the first teaser, we get to see Emily Watson, Travis Fimmel, and more begin to weave a tapestry of Imperium’s past.

The series follows two Harkonnen sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind, and establish the fabled sect that will become known as the Bene Gesserit. From our Dune expert Matt Caron, we can assume the following:

Watson plays Valya Harkonnen, the Reverend Mother Superior of the Bene Gesserit Order by the time of the show. It looks like also get flashbacks to when she first joined the sisterhood and began her training. We see a key shot of her using “the Voice,” which was a skillset she taught herself and developed before using it in full when she became a Bene Gesserit.

We also see Travis Fimmel’s character, Desmond Hart, who appears to be warning someone about how the Bene Gesserit are the ones on the inside actually pulling the strings. How did he know?! Additionally we get a glimpse of what appears to be the Emperor’s palace, which could be on Kaitain or on Salusa Secundus before it was irradiated. Guess we’ll find out!

Based on Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s Sisterhood of Dune, the series, co-produced with Legendary Television, will debut its six-episode season this November on HBO and will be available to stream on Max. 

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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One of the very best film festivals in the world (in my humble opinion) kicks off again this weekend for another fortnight-and-a-bit of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, action, and basically all the great genre movies you could want. Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal once again hosts a number of screenings, both repertory favorites and premieres. The fest kicks off Thursday, July 18, and goes all the way through Sunday, August 4. If you’re curious about world genre cinema, there really is no better place to be.

This year’s edition sees a number of fascinating and intriguing movies for fans to mull over. Here are the five I’m most excited to see!

The Old Man and the Demon Sword

To kick things off we have a movie lovingly described as “Evil Dead meets Kamen Rider,” so how could that not speak directly to me as a person? In the remote village of Pé da Serra in the mountains of Portugal, a monk arrives wielding a demonic sword. Before long, the mystical weapon ends up in the hands of the town drunk António da Luz (who plays himself). Together, the drunkard and the sword will have to learn together to fight the encroaching evil.

This Portuguese film is a love-budget homage to American B-movies using folklore and legends as the basis. Fun!

Shelby Oaks

The feature directorial debut of YouTube star Chris Stuckmann, Shelby Oaks details the mysterious disappearance of (fictional) YouTubers behind a popular paranormal investigation channel. Riley Brennan and her three co-hosts disappeared near the deserted town of Shelby Oaks, Ohio in 2008. Conspiracy theories have run rampant over the years, but none are more determined to get to the truth than Riley’s sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), who has finally agreed to tell Riley’s story to a documentary film crew (Emily Bennett and Rob Grant) in the hopes of finding closure.

After a super successful Kickstarter campaign and over two years of waiting, Stuckmann’s film is finally ready to make its world premiere at Fantasia, and ready to scare people’s pants off.

The Beast Within

Game of Thrones star Kit Harington trades his sword for an axe (and some claws and fangs) in this riff on the werewolf story. Harington plays a father with a secret that he is desperately trying to keep under control. His mysterious excursions at night leave his ailing daughter (Caoilinn Springall) plagued with questions. Where does her father go? Why do his moods seem to change in an instant? And what is the horrifying creature that appears and terrorizes the rural community?

Fantasia says, “The uncanniness of childhood in all its revelry and magnificence is front and centre in The Beast Within, which plunges its audience into a world haunted by a creature that stalks at the full moon.”

You had me at “Jon Snow, Lycanthrope.”

Witchboard

Chuck Russell, who made one of my very favorite horror movies in the 1988 remake of The Blob, returns for a remake of the infamous ’80s Video Nasty. When a couple find a circular “pendulum board” that predates the Ouija by centuries, they think it’s just an antique that can make them some money. Soon the board begins to help them in strange ways. Is something supernatural going on? I mean, yes, it’s a horror movie. Duh.

This distinctive take on the original still apparently maintains gruesome set pieces and a modern gothic aesthetic thanks to its setting of New Orleans (and filming locations in Montreal). Plus it’s just good to see Chuck Russell make a horror movie again.

Brush of the God

Keizo Murase is a renowned effects artist who has made creatures and suits for kaiju and tokusatsu titles since the late-50s. If you’ve seen Ultraman, Godzilla, Kamen Rider, Gamera, or Daimajin entries, you’ve probably seen Murase’s work. How cool then 70 years into his career, he finally makes his directorial debut at the age of 88?

A teen whose late-grandfather was a model maker for monster movies has to use a mystical inkbrush to save the world from a many-headed dragon. How can you not like that premise?! Populated by the kinds of kaiju effects Murase helped pioneer, Brush of the God is a celebration of art and expression as much as a monster movie.

Look for reviews in the coming days here on Nerdist.com. For more information about Fantasia, and for tickets if you’re in Montreal, head to their website. Bon cinema!

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post Fantasia International Film Festival’s 2024 Edition Offers Another Bevy of Genre Goodness appeared first on Nerdist.

Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One was easily one of my favorite movies of 2023. Its heartfelt remix of the original 1954 film acts as a treatise on national shame and banding together in a time of great struggle. It also has some of the best effects we’ve seen in decades, which is probably why it won the Oscar for it! Despite the film scoring big at the U.S. box office, it has taken a surprisingly long time for it to make it to home release. Now, thankfully, the enormous 4K Blu-ray release from Japan is getting an English-friendly release.

The massive set (fitting of the king of the monsters) is the same set as was released in Japan earlier this year. It includes the movie in 4K UHD and Blu-ray as well as a Blu-ray of Godzilla Minus One Minus Color, the black-and-white cut. The only difference from the earlier release is it includes English-language menus and subtitles on the movies. The disc of extras is entirely in Japanese and will NOT include English subtitles. So that is a bummer. However, given how tough it can be for contemporary Japanese films to get any sort of English release, this is still a big win.

The set is only available via the Godzilla website for $65.00. It will ship in September. Full list of technical specs below.

• Disc 1: Godzilla Minus One 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
  • 125 minutes / 3 layers (100G) / 4K 2160p 16:9 scope size / Dolby Vision
  • Audio: (1) Japanese Dolby Atmos (2) Japanese 5.1ch Dolby TrueHD (3) Japanese 2.0ch Dolby TrueHD (4) Barrier-free Japanese audio guide 2.0ch Dolby TrueHD
  • Subtitles: (1) Barrier-free Japanese subtitles (2) English subtitles
• Disc 2: Godzilla Minus One Blu-ray
  • 125 minutes / Trailer compilation / 2 layers (BD50G) / 1080p High Definition 16:9 scope size
  • Audio: (1) Japanese Dolby Atmos (2) Japanese 5.1ch Dolby TrueHD (3) Japanese 2.0ch Dolby TrueHD (4) Barrier-free Japanese audio guide 2.0ch Dolby TrueHD
  • Subtitles: (1) Barrier-free Japanese subtitles (2) English subtitles
  • Trailer Collection (Japanese language only)
    • Special Announcements 1 & 2
    • Trailer
    • TV Spot
    • No. 1 Edition/That’s Godzilla Edition/A Glimmer of Hope Edition/The World Praises Edition/Live and Resist Edition/Against Godzilla Edition
    • 6-Second Bumper
    • IMAX PR Video
    • ScreenX PR Video
    • TOHO CINEMAS MOVIE LINE UP
    • Cinema Mileage Announcement
• Disc 3: Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color Blu-ray
  • Main feature 125 minutes / Godzilla-1.0/C trailer / 2 layers (BD50G) / 1080p High Definition 16:9 scope size
  • Audio: (1) Japanese Dolby Atmos (2) Japanese 5.1ch Dolby TrueHD (3) Japanese 2.0ch Dolby TrueHD (4) Barrier-free Japanese audio guide 2.0ch Dolby TrueHD
  • Subtitles: (1) Barrier-free Japanese subtitles  (2) English subtitles
• Disc 4: Bonus Blu-ray (Japanese language only)
  • Recording length: 240 minutes / 2 layers (BD50G) / 16:9 / 1080p High Definition (some 1080i)
  • Audio: Japanese 2.0ch Dolby Digital
  • Subtitles: NOTE – NO ENGLISH SUBTITLES

Specifications and Enclosures:

• 4-disc Digipack + outer case specifications
• Special booklet (Japanese language only)
• “Special Disaster Response Materials Compilation” Abridged version (Japanese language only)

Region Free

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post GODZILLA MINUS ONE Gets Enormous 4K Blu-ray Release appeared first on Nerdist.

The current state of horror means we’re getting a deluge of films trying to outdo each other in sending chills up the spine. This has resulted in some of the most interesting and risk-taking movies in the genre. While A24’s plaudits for “elevated horror” are fairly passé at this point, I think NEON are the ones releasing just as heady scary films but with a far more sinister edge, often much more my speed. Their latest is Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, which has had one of the most striking ad campaigns in decades. The movie, I’m happy to report, is just as striking.

I’m glad I didn’t have to write this review within the first day or even the first few days after seeing Longlegs. If I had, I would have likely given the impression I didn’t like it, or at least that I didn’t think it was as good as people said. Comparing any movie to Silence of the Lambs is bold to say the least. As a serial killer FBI procedural, Longlegs is not particularly complicated. Many aspects of the investigation are supremely obvious, others completely out of left field. But as a horror movie, as an exploration of creeping dread and occult uncanniness, Longlegs burrows under your skin and stays there for weeks.

The basic story follows newly minted Oregon field agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as she uses her inexplicable intuition to aid Special Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) in one of the Bureau’s most baffling cases. Several completely unrelated men have killed their entire families and themselves over the past several decades. No physical evidence suggests any other person took part. However, each crime scene had a letter written in strange symbols, signed “Longlegs.”

It won’t give anything away to say Nicolas Cage plays the titular Longlegs, and his appearance is so upsetting they won’t show it in ads. It takes a while for the movie to show him, too. While we know this, who exactly Longlegs is, what he does, and how he does it are the real mysteries at the film’s heart. Harker delves deeper into the strange occult circumstances of these massacres, her own connections come to the surface as the inevitability of Longlegs’ masterplan begins to take shape.

Perkins’ directing style and passion for slow and creeping dread in his movies pays off big time in Longlegs. However, unlike some of his more languorous outings, here he punctuates the moody quiet with loud and shocking moments. It constantly keeping the audience nervous about what will come next. For the first two-thirds of the movie, I sat completely wrapt in squinting, white-knuckle anxiety about what might lurk in the corners of the slightly fisheyed frame. What terror could hide in the shadow just behind Harker?

The last third is a different matter. I liken the experience of watching Longlegs to watching Hereditary for the first time. The movies are quite different, but both of their climaxes mixed terror with puzzlement in me. Some of the plot is so obvious I assume there must be something more. Other parts are legitimately silly. So much so that when everything falls into place I thought, “Wait, this is what the movie’s doing?” In both cases my brain got in the way of my body’s reaction to what I was watching. Parts of Longlegs feel so at odds with the rest of it. It contains moments of humor I’m not entirely sure were intentional. People next to me at the screening laughed uproariously toward the end. I can’t decide if they were laughing at or with the movie.

However, and I hate to advocate for turning off your brain when watching anything, Longlegs is a vibes movie first and foremost. It’s not a crime movie with horror elements, it’s a weird horror movie with the FBI. Perkins, I think (I hope) understands what scares us about occultism is also pretty goofy. This is why I’m happy I got to sit with the movie before writing this. Initially I was prepared to say it looks good, that Underwood’s performance is tremendous, but that it’s trying to get by too much on Cage’s creepy look and strangely mannered performance. And now? I just go “yeah, of course it does. That’s why it’s awesome!”

I think Longlegs is a legitimately superb example of a horror movie that knows what it’s doing, knows it’s playing in a very tamped-down sandbox, and uses that to thoroughly unsettle and affect the audience. Tight plotting be damned, this movie’s got moxy! The next dozen times I watch it, I won’t care that the mystery isn’t anything special. It’s got those performances in that setting with those shocks. What more could you want?!

Longlegs ⭐ (4.5 of 5)

Longlegs opens in theaters July 12.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post LONGLEGS Is a Very Weird, Very Upsetting, Thoroughly Captivating Horror Show appeared first on Nerdist.

We love it when companies buy each other, don’t we folks? We can all agree Disney buying 900 things has been great for the entertainment landscape, consumerism, and society as a whole. Why yes, I am being sarcastic. But we live in a capitalist hellscape and this kind of thing will keep happening. Case in point, we now have David Ellison’s Skydance Media reaching an agreement with Shari Redstone to buy out her majority stake in National Amusements, which in turn gives them control over all of Paramount Global, including Paramount film and TV studios, Paramount+, CBS, and cable channels like Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central.

We saw the news via The Hollywood Reporter. The buyout is still pending regulators’ okay, but assuming all goes through, Ellison would become the CEO of Paramount, with former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell (currently working for RedBird Capital, one of the financiers of the deal) taking over as president. Evidently the months-long speculation over whether the Skydance/Paramount deal would happen depended on kicking enough benefit to other shareholders besides Redstone. Rich people need to make sure they get more rich, after all.

This kind of thing sucks, but as I said, it’s bound to keep happening. How this will change things like Paramount+’s rates or programming, or whether the cable networks will keep operating as they are, will shake out in the near future. Hopefully they don’t prematurely cancel Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. That’d be worst case scenario for old Kyle Anderson.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post Skydance Secures Deal to Buy Majority Stake in Paramount Global appeared first on Nerdist.

Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and its myriad spinoffs are up there as my favorite comics of all time. The mix of Gothic, cosmic, and monster horror with a helping of gallows humor works for me so, so much. Guillermo del Toro famously made a couple of Hellboy movies with Ron Perlman. While good in their own GDT way, neither of them (especially the second one) truly felt like a proper adaptation of the source material. The 2019 Neil Marshall Hellboy movie with David Harbour adapted the source material directly, but the movie itself was very, very bad. Now we get Hellboy: The Crooked Man and…well, just take a look. Then we’ll talk.

First some context. The Crooked Man was a three-issue arc from Mignola and artist Richard Corben from 2008. It detailed one of Hellboy’s earlier missions for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. In 1958 Appalachia, Hellboy encounters some witches and witch-adjacent people and eventually cross paths with the titular Crooked Man, a hanged war profiteer from the 18th Century who has returned from Hell to act as the region’s resident Devil. He’s pretty terrifying, especially as Corben illustrates him.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man looks to be a very faithful (and small) adaptation of that particular story. On its face this is a good thing. One of the major issues with the 2019 movie is that it adapted way, way, way too many stories, not least of which The Wild Hunt, the longest and most epic story in the Mignola canon. Focusing on a one-off adventure and maximizing the horror is a pretty good idea.

However, just looking at it, you can see the very low budget. You may have noticed the movie comes our way from Ketchup Entertainment. KETCHUP ENTERTAINMENT. Brian Taylor (of Crank franchise fame) is directing, with himself, Mignola, and Mignola’s Baltimore collaborator Christopher Golden on screenplay duties. Jack Kesy (who very briefly played Black Tom Cassidy in Deadpool 2) portrays Hellboy and he just kind of looks unfinished. If Harbour was TOO made up, Kesy looks like a decent amateur cosplay attempt.

So who knows! It may be good. It certainly seems focused more on the actual horror. Which is the proper direction to go following the dark fantasy mishmash of the last movie. But I’m not convinced after this wack first look. I would love it if one day any live-action outing properly snags the tone of the comics. Whether Hellboy: The Crooked Man can do that will have to wait until it comes out later this year.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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This past spring, Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures launched not one but two movies. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two premiered March 1 and is currently the second highest grossing movie of 2024. Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire hit theaters March 25 and currently occupies the number three slot for the year. So, yeah, makes sense they’d want to do it again. According to Deadline, the two studios have set release dates for the next Monsterverse movie and the next Villeneuve movie.

The Villeneuve movie in question officially has a working title of “Untitled Denis Villeneuve Event Film.” This may in fact be Dune: Messiah, the proposed third film in the Dune franchises, based on the second Frank Herbert book. But it also may be an unrelated Villeneuve movie. In either case, this movie is on the books for December 2026.

As for the next Monsterverse movie, we know it will be directed by Grant Sputore. Now we also know it has a release date of March 26, 2027. Effectively exactly three years after the release of GxK. So get ready for those!

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We currently live in a world where video game movie and TV adaptations have finally, in most people’s estimation, reached their peak. HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us broke ratings records; the Sonic the Hedgehog movies made all kinds of money. And hell, even the 30-year stink of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. live-action movie has given way to what looks to be a pretty excellent animated film. Another franchise with a bad 1990s movie will soon get a similar reprieve. In 2023, we learned that Legendary obtained exclusive live-action film and TV rights to Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise. What’s more, a Street Fighter movie is on the way from Legendary and Sony. The Street Fighter movie will release in 2026.

According to Deadline, the movie lost its original set of directors, Danny and Michael Philippou, who created the popular A24 horror movie, Talk to Me. The publication additionally reports there is no word yet on the Street Fight movie’s plot.

Legendary will co-develop and produce this Street Fighter movie with Sony and Capcom, and Legendary and Capcom will work together on any future titles. Capcom has had success with the Resident Evil movie franchise, though those aren’t particularly faithful to the games. Legendary, meanwhile, saw success with its live-action Pokémon Detective Pikachu movie in 2019.

One of the highest-grossing video game franchises in history, Street Fighter all but invented the fighting game as we know it today. From 1987, the games have introduced and perfected a particular kind of superpowered brawler and introduced memorable and beloved characters like Ryu, Chun-Li, and Guile. Dozens of anime adaptations grew the game’s lore and roster, showcasing a global fight tournament against the evil M. Bison.

A 1994 live-action adaptation starring Jean-Claude Van Damme didn’t quite live up to anybody’s expectations, but is still fun if you’re into that particular mood. We can’t wait to hear more about this Street Fighter movie as it develops.

Editor’s Note: Nerdist is a subsidiary of Legendary Digital Networks

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Finding new and interesting takes on vampire stories is a pretty tough row to hoe at this point. They’re among the oldest and most famous folklore monsters and the lore surrounding them, at least as laid out in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, feels mostly concrete. It’s strange, then, why more movies don’t explore the folklore in a different way, from a different part of the world. Adrien Beau’s debut feature The Vourdalak does this, exploring the Russian/Slavic vampire legend through its most popular written work. Oh, and it also makes the vampire a creepy puppet. That helps.

The Vourdalak adapts Aleksey K. Tolstoy’s 1839 novella, The Family of the Vourdalak, which predates both Le Fanu’s 1873 Carmilla and Stoker’s 1897 Dracula. Vourdalaks differ from our traditional understanding of vampires. They drink blood, sure, and they are undead, but the sun has little to no effect on them, and they tend to only feast on members of their family. That aspect forms the foundation of the story. It’s the breakdown of a family unit in a time and culture that values family, and respecting elders of the family, above all else.

The movie places the action in the late 1700s wherein French nobleman Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfe (Kacey Mottet Klein) finds himself stranded in Eastern Europe, looking for a place to spend the night. The Turks had recently raided the village, but the villager tells the Marquis to seek shelter at the house of an elder named Gorcha. On the way, the Marquis meets Gorcha’s daughter Sdenka (Ariane Labed) and immediately becomes infatuated. Unfortunately for him, Sdenka—who desperately wants to leave for a better life—has other things on her mind.

The Gorcha household, we and the Marquis learn, consists of the aged Gorcha, Gorcha’s three children—eldest Jegor, Sdenka, and younger son Piotr—and Jegor’s wife and son. Jegor left to find the Turkish raiders and, returning after a month, discovers Gorcha himself went out after the Turks. Gorcha told his family if he does not return in six days, they should assume he’s dead. If he returns after the six days, they should assume he’s a vourdalak and refuse him entry. Jegor finds this absurd and the Marquis finds it peculiar.

However, after assuming the missing Gorcha had indeed died, the old man appears at the edge of the forest at exactly six days, to the minute. He looks like a corpse, clearly little more than a skeleton with skin, but he holds so much sway over his children, especially Jegor, they allow him to stay. Would you be surprised to hear he’s a vourdalak?

Beau makes a couple of really clever choices that set this movie apart from other adaptations. Famously, Mario Bava’s 1963 anthology film Black Sabbath adapts the story with Boris Karloff as Gorcha. Less famously, the 1972 Giorgio Ferroni film The Night of the Devils moved the action to the modern day. But Beau in fact moves it further back in time, so that our French nobleman is a ridiculous, white-makeup-faced fop. He’s a ridiculous sight to us, but it makes him especially ridiculous to the locals who know nothing of French courtiers. He’s an outsider.

The other major change, obviously, is that Gorcha himself when we see him is so inhuman, so far gone down the road of undead monster, that he’s not even a person. Gorcha is head to toe a full-size rod puppet, with Beau providing the voice. He has full scenes of dialogue, in full light—more than enough to make it clear, this ain’t a man. This is entirely the point! It’s easy to look at Boris Karloff and, even with some makeup, recognize he’s the man you used to know. It’s impossible to look at the thing in this movie and see anything but a grotesquery. And yet…

The Vourdalak uses its uncanny visuals to its benefit, heightening a story that certainly feels pretty familiar to horror fans. In addition to the puppetry, we have some lovely, gloomy dream sequences and bloody set pieces. The cast acquit themselves very nicely, perfectly playing the severity of the situation, even amid the unreality of the threat. Klein also manages a compelling protagonist who is at once compassionate and forthright, and a ridiculous buffoon who is a rich creep.

I think if The Vourdalak has any downside, it’s that none of it is particularly scary. Parts of it, especially later in the story involving Gorcha’s feeding, should be eerier than they are. Perhaps that isn’t the point, however the aforementioned Italian versions certainly slanted toward a growing creep factor I don’t think The Vourdalak ever comes close to. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie, and if grotesqueness is all you’re after, this French-language offering has plenty for you. The puppet alone is worth the 90 minute watch.

The Vourdalak ⭐ (3.5 of 5)

The Vourdalak opens exclusively in US cinemas on June 28th from Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post THE VOURDALAK Gives Us a Vampire Folk Tale with One Major Selling Point appeared first on Nerdist.

For decades now, LEGO has brought its singular brand of brick-building fun to licensed properties. Almost as long as that, it has also produced video games based on those licensed properties. After dozens of Star Wars, Marvel, Batman, and more titles hit consoles, we finally have an ouroboros. The latest LEGO video game, announced at the Nintendo Direct, is based on a non-LEGO video game for PlayStation. Feast your eyes on LEGO Horizon Adventures.

The open-world action game puts players in control of Aloy, a girl from a future agrarian society after an unspecified apocalypse made animal-like machines the dominant creatures on the planet. She must learn about her past and save her people while also battling robot velociraptors and shit. This LEGO edition will bring together the events and characters from 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn and 2022’s Horizon Forbidden West, but in the inimitable cute building style.

Why this game exists, I don’t really know, but for fans of both the LEGO games and the Horizon games, this is probably a no-brainer. LEGO Horizon Adventures hits Nintendo Switch this holiday season.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Nintendo sure does love putting the Mario Bros. on islands. It feels like that’s all they ever do! But at least they’re together. That continues in Mario & Luigi: Brothership, the latest entry in the franchise which the company announced during the Nintendo Direct. The below announcement trailer starts with Mario once again saving Luigi from any number of silly troubles before arriving on the island…that is also a ship.

The RPG takes the brothers to Shipshape Island, on which they travel the vast world of Concordia. Along the way, players and the brothers will meet new people and familiar faces like Peach and Bowser. They’ll need to use patented Bros. Moves in order to get by obstacles and solve puzzles, and just generally need to be adorable brothers to accomplish anything.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership will hit Nintendo Switch November 7, 2024.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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