Per Deadline, Sony Animation’s sequel has started well above expectations with a $208.6 million worldwide start. Domestically, it’s opened to $120.5 million, currently the best start of the summer season (surpassing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3's $118.4 million) and the third-best opening for a Spider-Man flick behind 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home and 2007's Spider-Man 3. As for how it stacks up to its direct predecessor, 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse opened to $35.3 million, meaning Across has surpassed the first film by 241%.
The original Spider-Verse did substantially better than expected thanks to great word of mouth, plus additional momentum from the 2018 Spider-Man game (which released a few months prior) and it being the cinematic introduction of Miles Morales. That it took home numerous awards further cemented the film as something special, meaning Across had some lofty goals to live up to. Despite a delay from its original late 2022 date, anticipation for the sequel has never really wavered, and Sony’s been marketing the film like mad in recent months. With similarly top marks and a sequel just nine months away, it’s clear that Across will have a long tail similar to the first movie. And it also doesn’t hurt that Miles is set to headline Marvel’s Spider-Man 2for the PlayStation 5 in a few months.
With Across now in theaters, Disney’s The Little Mermaid remake dropped down to second place. Across the US and internationally, the film earned $81.2 million (an even split of $40.6 million), bringing its worldwide total to $326.7 million. The film dropped by 56% in the past week, and has also recently been review bombed over on IMDB to the point that the site had to change its user rating system. Finally, 20th Century Studios’ The Boogeyman, which also released on June 2, opened to $20 million worldwide. As the film based on a Stephen King short story has received mixed impressions, $12.3 million of its take came domestically.
Across the Spider-Verse will surely have repeat viewings in the coming weeks, which may have an effect on the other tentpole movies of the month. Transformers: Rise of the Beastsdrops next week on June 9, though some screenings for the film are playing on Wednesday the 7th. On June 16, there are four big movies in the form of WB’s own multiverse flick The Flash, Pixar’s Elemental, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, and Lionsgate’s horror comedy The Blackening. Closing out the month in terms of genre films, Disney’s got Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destinyon June 30, along with Universal’s Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken(trailers of which have been in front of movies such as Spider-Verse).
So yeah, it’s a pretty packed month. Look for io9's reviews on several of those above films in the coming weeks.
Since its release in February, Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaurhas been one of the more charming Marvel shows we’ve gotten, animated or otherwise. Throughout the series’ first season, the titular crimefighting duo (voiced respectively by Diamond White and Fred Tatasciore) have gone up against a variety of Marvel villains, with the most well-known of the bunch being Laurence Fishburne as the Beyonder. And though there isn’t a release date for season two yet, it looks like the show will continue to bring some eclectic villains into its world.
Marvel has revealed Molecule Man as one of the primary antagonists for Moon Girl’s second season. Voiced by Battlestar Galactica and Coco’s Edward James Olmos, he’s set to debut in the premiere and appear throughout the season. In the press release, the creative team explained that they wanted someone with a voice equally as powerful as Fishburne’s, which led them to bringing on Olmos. Molecule Man, who first debuted in 1963's Fantastic Four #20 from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, is best known for porting Miles Morales to the primary Marvel Universe in the aftermath of 2015's Secret Wars after the young Spider-Man gave him a cheeseburger.
In the context of Moon Girl, Molecule Man (whose appearance can be viewed below) is described as an all-powerful being who can manipulate nonliving organic matter. Feeling ostracized due to the immense power he now wields, he fled to another world and has since turned it into “an incredible world of natural wonder,” which has become a tourist trap for aliens and multiversal beings. He and the Beyonder already have a history—in the comics, lab technician Owen Reece gained his cosmic powers after getting blasted with radiation from the dimension housing the Beyonder—and the two cosmic beings have been at each other’s throats ever since. How Lunella fits into their beef, and how she’ll have to deal with catching the attention of both of them, remains to be seen.
Image: Marvel Animation/Disney
Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur will return with new episodes on Disney Channel and Disney+ in the near future. The first season is fully watchable on Disney+.
Throughout all the trailers and promos released for Barbie, it’s clear that director Greta Gerwig is going for a splashier, brighter color palette than most live-action blockbusters these days. Pink is the most pervasive color in the footage shown thus far, and as it turns out, the film basically had a monopoly on the color during production.
According to a recent interview with Architectural Digest, production designer Sarah Greenwood and Gerwig talked about the overwhelming pinkness of Barbie Land. Gerwig said she wanted the pinks to be “very bright, and everything to be almost too much. Maintaining the ‘kid-ness’ was paramount.” To do this, the crew used fluorescent Roscoe paint, and Greenwood noted that so much of this specific shade was used that you couldn’t get it anywhere else in the world. “The world ran out of pink,” Greenwood laughed.
As the name implies, Barbie Land is where all the different versions of Barbie (and also Ken) reside. For Gerwig, she aimed for “authentic artificiality and aimed to “capture what was so ridiculously fun about the Dreamhouses.” Greenwood and set decorator ordered a Barbie Dreamhouse to study in order to figure out how to “make Barbie real through this unreal world,” and their primary influence was the midcentury modernism of Palm Springs. Additionally, the house was designed without any walls or doors, with Gerwig noting that it calls back to the design of Barbie’s Dreamhouse sets. “Dreamhouses assume that you never have anything you wish was private—there is no place to hide.”
Barbie releases in theaters on July 21. You can read Architectural Digest’s full interview here, which contains further insight on Dreamhouse design and additional influences on the movie’s production.
Though Paramount is keen to continue Avatar: The Last Airbender through more shows and films, the action-fantasy series also has a number of books and comics that have helped build out its world and history. Since 2019, Amulet Books has been putting out YA novels dubbed Chronicles of the Avatar that have focused on the predecessors of Aang and Korra. The first pair of novels focused on the fan-favorite Kyoshi of the Earth Kingdom as she came into her identity as the master of all four elements, and now the next book will conclude the story of Yangchen.
F.C. Yee’s upcoming novel, The Legacy of Yangchen, picks up after the events of 2022's Dawn of Yangchen. After successfully bringing peace to the city of Bin-Er, the Air Nomad is working to find the weapon known only as Unanimity and stop it before war across the Four Nations breaks loose. But when the weapon is unleashed and used in an assassination attempt, Yangchen has no choice but to go to her frenemy Kavik for help. As written in the novel’s description, Yangchen will “chart the course of her legacy, finally making peace with her choices and facing Avatarhood with the courage it demands.”
With how the Chronicles books have served as a way for the Avatar series to live on until a new show arrives from Paramount or Netflix, it’s likely the books will continue on after Yangchen’s adventures wrap up. Going by the elemental order, that means a Fire Nation or Water Tribe Avatar would be up next—the former has Roku (Aang’s direct predecessor) or Szeto to its name, while Kuruk hails from the latter. But there are other Avatars mentioned throughout Yee’s books whose nationalities have yet to be revealed, and maybe they’ll headline a novel within the next couple of years.
Image: Amulet Books
Avatar: The Legacy of Yangchen will release in stores and digital on July 18. You can read the first chapter in its entirety over on Polygon.
Superhero movies always come with a mountain of hype and expectations thrust upon them, but Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Versecame with all that and more. Its 2018 predecessor Into the Spider-Versefelt like such a breath air for superhero movies and animation in general that its subsequent praise and awards haul was genuinely surprising. And with each new glimpse of footage and new Spider-hero shown off, anticipation for the sequel has grown almost as much as Miles Morales himself has since we last saw him.
To no one’s surprise, Across the Spider-Verse has earned glowing acclaim on par with the first movie, if not more so. With praise once again heaped onto the animation, story, and pretty much everything else, it’s now pretty clear that the first film’s success was far from a fluke. In what’s going to be a pretty packed summer movie season overall, it’d be hard to argue that Across won’t end up a winner in some regard, whether that’s due to cultural impact or the awards it’ll more than likely eventually pick up towards the end of the year. Even the criticism of it being a two-parter (whose second installment, Beyond the Spider-Verse, is expected to drop in March 2024) doesn’t seem to matter all that much when everything else is taken into account.
There’s a lot to talk about with Across the Spider-Verse beyond its cliffhanger ending, and we want to know your thoughts. Let us know in the comments below what you thought of the sequel, who your favorite Spider was, or whether or not you could hear some of the dialogue at the theater you saw it in.
Hollywood’s managed to avoid another strike, at least with its directors.
On late Saturday night, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP) to form a new labor contract. Under this new three-year deal, directors will receive increased wages and benefits (5% in the first year, then 4% and 3.5% for years two and three), and a 76% boost in residuals from international streaming. Most importantly, they’ll receive protections against AI, a “groundbreaking” agreement that confirms “AI is not a person and that generative AI cannot replace the duties performed by members.”
The vote will be ratified on Tuesday, June 6.
DGA negotiation chair Jon Avnet called the deal between the DGA and AMPTP “truly historic. [...] This deal would not have been possible without the unity of the DGA membership, and we are grateful for the strong support of union members across the industry.” The agreement, he added, has secured “essential protections for our members on new key issues like artificial intelligence – ensuring DGA members will not be replaced by technological advances.”
With a deal currently struck with the DGA, the AMPTP now has to contend with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. The actor organization will be bargaining with the AMPTP in the next few days and is currently voting on whether or not its members will strike alongside the WGA. Whether or not SAG-AFTRA strikes, the new DGA deal is reminiscent of what happened with the 2007-2008 Writers Strike: after over 3 months of picketing writers, the DGA came to a deal with the AMPTP that helped end that strike. In the aftermath of this DGA agreement, TV and film writers made their displeasure with the organization clear throughout social media, with many pointing out the deja vu of it all.
The WGA at large hasn’t certainly forgotten how that went down 15 years ago, either. Negotiating co-chair Chris Keyser recently said that the AMPTP “will find out that [the] 2007-08 playbook doesn’t belong in the negotiating room; it belongs in a museum. Any deal that puts this town back to work runs straight through the WGA and there is no way around us.”
You can read the full details from the DGA’s new contract here.
A few months ago, the Walt Disney Company announced it would be laying off thousands of workers as one of several efforts it was making to reduce costs. Many of those cuts are taking place across its entertainment sector, and as it turns out, that includes its prized animation studio, Pixar.
Per Reuters, 75 staffers from the studio behind Toy Story and Monsters Inc. were let go in late May, and were Pixar’s first job cuts in decade after the underperformance of 2013's The Good Dinosaur. These cuts come after numerous box office disappointments in the last several years. Two of those departures are pretty high up the chain, with one of them being Angus MacLane. He served as an animator on Toy Story 4 and Coco before getting a chance to solo direct 2022's Lightyear, which was one of those aforementioned theatrical duds.
The other senior member is Galyn Susman, a longtime employee who produced Lightyear and is best known for literally saving Toy Story 2 from being completely lost. During the film’s production in 1998, all of the work done up to that point was almost lost due to a deletion command on the film’s assets in Pixar’s internal servers. Susman, who was on maternity leave at the time and remote working, had a backup copy of the movie on her home PC, allowing Pixar to recover near everything that had been lost.
Over the next few years, Pixar’s output will mostly be sequels that are expected to guarantee financial success where the likes of Lightyear and Turning Red could not. Sequels for Toy Story, Zootopia, and Inside Outare in the works, and Disney Animation is developing a third Frozen movie. In terms of non-franchise films from either studio, Pixar has Elio sometime in the near future, and Disney Animation’s Wish (which straddles the line between “original” and “franchise” work) is set to drop in November.
Pixar’s next movie, Elemental, will release in theaters on June 16.
Includes King Tweety, Tweety’s High-Flying Adventure, Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantasic Island, Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters, Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Looney Tunes: Rabbits Run, Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas, Space Jam, Space Jam: A New Legacy, and Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
Anime series about a teenage boy with insomnia who ends up hanging out with a vampire at night. Also available if you subscribe to the Hidive channel on Amazon Video.
Isekai (portal fantasy) anime series about a guy who – look, this is one of those shows that literally explains their premise in the title. Also available if you subscribe to the Hidive channel on Amazon Video.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Isekai (portal fantasy) anime series about an office worker who ends up getting summoned to a fantasy world where they end up becoming a monster trainer. Also available if you subscribe to the Hidive channel on Amazon Video.
Isekai (portal fantasy) anime series where the main character is reincarnated as a sentient magical sword. Also available if you subscribe to the Hidive channel on Amazon Video.
This is the first season of the reboot adaptation of Rumiko Takahashi’s manga, that aired in the tail end of 2022 and early this year. Also available if you subscribe to the Hidive channel on Amazon Video.
Romantic comedy anime series about a young man at wizard school who inadvertently summons a succubus as a familiar. Also available if you subscribe to the Hidive channel on Amazon Video.
Finally, the picks of the week. Alex says, “I’m going with the Kino-Lorber releases of the Man With No Name trilogy, with the Mummy Trilogy release as my 4K pick for the week.” Blaine says, “of the titles I’ve seen, I’d definitely go with the Indiana Jones movies. As a Kubrick fan, that documentary intrigues me, but I’ve never seen it and can’t attest to its quality.”
Towards the middle of May, the CW canceled a handful of shows, one of which was The Winchesters. The prequel-spinoff to the network’s fairly famous (and infamously unkillable) series Supernaturalonly lasted one season before the plug was pulled. Shortly after that, its actors and creative talent said they’d attempt to find a new home for a hypothetical second season, but those plans have come to an end.
Per Deadline, Warner Bros. TV has stopped trying to send The Winchesters to another network or streamer, meaning it’ll remain canceled. According to the outlet, “all possible avenues have been exhausted”; WBTV had reportedly already figured the show wouldn’t get greenlit for season two prior to its cancellation. The production company stepped up its efforts to get its show somewhere else post-cancellation, and the show’s fanbase did what they could to get it picked up via a social media campaign. But the three hopefuls—Max, which is owned by WBTV; Netflix (which has all 15 seasons of Supernatural); and Prime Video, where the production company of executive producer Jensen Ackles and his wife Danneel Ackles has set up shop—elected to snap up Winchesters. On Twitter, Ackles thanked his show’s fanbase for their efforts, calling this “unfortunate timing” between the CW’s regime change and the current WGA strike. “I couldn’t be more proud of what we did,” he wrote. “Until we meet again. Somewhere down the road.”
If you didn’t watch The Winchesters, part of the reason the show ended up a big deal is because it marked the first successful attempt by the CW to build Supernatural into a larger franchise. Twice during its run, the show attempted to grow out its world, neither of which were picked up. A season eight episodeset up the spinoff Supernatural: Bloodlines, which would’ve focused on hunters and monsters clashing in Chicago; Wayward Sisterswas meant to center on a collection of longtime women characters (including Kim Rhodes’ Jody Mills) fighting monsters as Sam and Dean were doing.
As it stands, the Supernatural universe is currently dead, at least under the current CW regime. But who knows, maybe in a couple of years, the Ackles will elect to restart the franchise with a reboot or another show.
In two weeks time, Warner Bros. will finally release The Flash, its loooooooong in development superhero movie. So much of the movie’s marketing has been playing up the movie as an epic team-up between Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen, Michael Keaton’s returning Batman, and newcomer Sasha Calle as Supergirl. You’d think there wouldn’t be anything else in the movie that can really be surprise worthy, given we know the general endpoint of the movie (and at least one cameo), but WB is apparently keeping mum on some things.
Per Variety, WB’s reportedly got a “secret ending” it’s trying to keep a lid on as much as possible, to the point where there’s only one premiere set for a few days before the movie’s release. When the movie premiered at CinemaCon in April, it had a decent amount of its final scene missing and ended pretty abruptly. But more recently, WB’s been making an active effort to hide whatever’s in the film’s closing moments: ahead of CinemaCon, the final scene was changed a handful of times, and more recent screenings in Burbank had key elements blurred out. Part of this is reportedly due to Miller: WB reportedly wants to “keep its options open” on the chance that it needs to recast in light of their PR issues (and subsequent ongoing recovery process).
It’s an interesting contrast compared to how WB’s handled its last two DC Comics movies. The studio had no trouble putting in the respective cameos held in Black Adam(Henry Cavill’s Superman) and Shazam: Fury of the Gods(Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman) in the marketing for those movies. Both of those cameos were intended as incentives to get audiences to see those specific movies, so the question for The Flash is, what’s different here? Is it actually a substantial game changer or just a bog-standard “we’re planting our flags for some future stuff that’ll maybe come to fruition depending on how the next few months go”? We’ll find out when The Flash comes to theaters on June 16.
Star Wars is a franchise full of characters who go through a lot, and Ahsoka Tano has had a pretty eventful life. Since she debuted on Star Wars: The Clone Wars as an apprentice to Anakin Skywalker during the prequels, she’s been caught up in one event after another, from engaging in military skirmishes to surviving Order 66 and being a key player in the growing Rebellion. With her upcoming solo series set to debut in a few months, one of the show’s key threads will see Ahsoka (as played in live-action by Rosario Dawson) learning to let people fully into her life again.
Speaking to Empire Magazine, showrunner Dave Filoni (and also Ahsoka’s co-creator) said the titular show would explore how lonely her life has become since becoming Not a Jedi and jumping around from place to place. He said the show would start off with her as a wanderer who’s “wary of any organization as such because of the power that comes with it as a group.” During the final season of Clone Wars, this was something hinted at once she was reunited with Anakin and Obi-Wan, but will be given more focus here.
Jedi living solitary lives is fairly common, but the circumstances of Ahsoka’s loneliness are more complicated than others like her. Between surviving Order 66, several Inquisitors, and a fight with her old master, she’s got plenty of reason to be closed off. And it should help explain why the character’s live-action appearances in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fetthave felt so...off in one way or another where she dips out anytime she gets a whiff of community being formed. (It’s not even all that exclusive to live-action, as she appeared and disappeared throughout the second season of Star Wars Rebels.)
While it’s been easy for Ahsoka to come and go as she pleases from places in the past, that won’t be quite as easy in her show. In Rebels, she was saved by that show’s protagonist Ezra Bridger (played here by Eman Esfandi), and he told her to come find him. This is her way of returning the favor, and that’ll require her to partner up with fellow Rebels character Sabine Wren (Natasha Bordizzo) as they travel the galaxy looking for their missing friend. Filoni had no problem saying connecting with Sabine during their travels together would be a challenge for her. “[Ahsoka] walks a path that basically died out a long time ago,” Filoni observed. “What is that life like? If you are a loner, you have a very small circle of friends. What is it like, then, when you try to open back up?”
Last week, Disney removed a little over 100 of its original programming from its streaming services such as Disney+ and Hulu around the world. That cut media, which includes the likes of Willow and Marvel’s Runaways, were axed after Disney gave a heads up about a week in advance and for seemingly for no real reason at all. Well, that’s not true—it all came down to money.
According to an SEC filing from late Friday, Disney’s set to write off about $1.5 billion following this streaming purge. It was previously known this was a way for Disney to cut costs, and the filing notes that this will be reflected in the company’s fiscal third quarter. But if you thought this would be a one-and-done affair, that is not the case. Towards the end of the filing, the SEC wrote that Disney is “continuing its review and currently anticipates additional produced content will be removed.” Those removals equate to an additional estimated $400 million. But as far as when these removals may happen (or what canceled shows may be caught in the crossfire), that isn’t touched on in the filing, and Disney hasn’t yet said. Likewise, it’s not known how much the recent shuttering of the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiserexperience contributed to this write-off.
Either way, it continues to follow in the footsteps of Warner Bros. Discovery, which has removed a variety of shows and movies from its streaming service formerly known as HBO Max. While some of those shows have found a home elsewhere on streaming places like Netflix or Prime Video, others haven’t been so lucky. It may be that those unlucky shows just remain in limbo forever, to the point that even their creators don’t have hard copies they can watch in their own time.
It’s going to be the summer of Spider-people, with fashion for everyone including littles and super-heroic furry friends. Take a look at the multiversal merch haul ahead!
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse x BoxLunch
Image: Disney Parks, Experiences and Consumer Products
DC Comics heroes are no stranger to big crossovers that often see them hopping into other timelines or even other universes. Over the decades, marquee characters like Batman and Wonder Woman have wound up crossing paths with the likes of the Avengers, Ninja Turtles, and Epic Games’ Fortnite. The most recent of the bunch is Rooster Teeth’s anime series RWBY(pronounced “ruby”), which received an animated film not that long ago.
RWBY has gradually grown into its own big thing since its 2013 debut and the passing of its creator Monty Oum two years later. Though it’s older than Fortnite, it’s still “new” in that many audiences don’t yet have the series on their radar. With the film Justice League x RWBY: Super Heroes and Huntsmen, Part One, which got a U.S. release earlier this year but just came out in Japan, part of the aim was to introduce the show to a new audience by way of DC’s top-tier characters, and a multiverse story that sees the Justice League reimagined in the show’s science fantasy aesthetic.
io9 recently talked with the film’s writer, Meghan Fitzmartin—whose previous DC experience includes building out Tim Drake’s bisexuality and his recent solo comic book—about bringing the best of RWBY and the Justice League together, along with getting into the show and her general fondness for crossovers and young adult heroes.
Justin Carter, io9: How’s it been growing into a position where you’ve gotten to explore these characters you’ve grown up with, like the Batfamily and DC’s legacy YA heroes? Before getting to write the mainline Batfamily, did you ever consider playing in a more open space like an alternate universe?
Meghan Fitzmartin: It’s been a dream come true [laughs]. Being able to work with these characters who’ve meant the whole world to me my whole life is always the dream. Characters like Batman and Tim Drake end up being so impactful in our lives, and it’s why we get into telling stories in the first place.
I love playing in multiverses, and I’m very keen on the exploration of various story elements you can do when in that space. For me, the best fit is ultimately on a story-by-story basis, and other parts of a character could be used in a more playful element. But with Tim’s coming out, we very much wanted it to be in the main continuity. With that character’s past [queer-coded] history, we wanted to be sure there was no question of his identity.
Image: Rooster Teeth/Warner Bros.
io9: Multiverses are such a thing in Big Two comics, especially nowadays. What multiverse stories have had an effect on you?
Fitzmartin: The first time I ever read a multiverse comic was the Avengers/JLA comic [from 2003], and then I’ve read all the Crises on various Infinites. One of the things that was incredibly impactful for me was actually this TV show called The Lost World, based on the 1912 novel from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s essentially all about multiverses, and I think that became the starting point for my fascination with them.
io9: Is that love of multiverses what drew you to Justice League x RWBY?
Fitzmartin: I came to the movie from the RWBY side of things, actually. The question with multiverses a lot of the time is, “What have we not seen? What is the interesting [or new] thing?” I was really excited by the idea of seeing a more anime version of the Justice League. There’s nothing new under the sun, but we get a chance to do something cool and interesting that is this side of new.
Before the movie, I didn’t know anything about it, partially because I knew that I’d be obsessed with it. With everything I’d heard about it, I knew that I couldn’t let it consume me quite yet. Then in December 2020, my producer Jim Krieg reached out asking me if I knew anything about RWBY, and I told him, “Give me two weeks, and I will know everything about RWBY.” I was just waiting for the right time for someone to tell me I needed to know it so I could properly dive in and mainline it.
Image: Rooster Teeth/Warner Bros.
io9: This movie came out not long after RWBY’s ninth season ended. Did you know what the writers had planned for season nine, and how did that affect how you wrote the movie at all?
Fitzmartin: I was aware of some plans—I asked questions to [showrunner and writer] Kerry [Shawcross], just so I knew where the characters were going. And it totally wasn’t because I wanted to know about certain favorite characters [laughs]. Being able to pull from a lot of stuff that the characters were grappling with in volume nine, we were able to provide clear evidence of these feelings the characters were having in the movie. While there’s hints for certain characters, it’s something you especially see with Ruby. Lindsay [Jones] does a good job of portraying her, and that struggle with leadership is so human and vulnerable. Knowing what was coming in volume nine, being able to play into it was really fun.
io9: Since you came into RWBY so late in the show’s lifecycle, did you have any specific goals with the movie to bring in people who know the Justice League, but not RWBY?
Fitzmartin: Largely, it worked out in my favor that I was newer to the show’s lore. I could come in, look at the pieces that I didn’t know, and play around with it. Working with [series writers] Kerry Shawcross and Eddy Rivas helped a lot with that as well. Like you said, most folks know Justice League, but they might not know RWBY. For me, being able to play in that world and be able to invite JL fans like I was invited in was part of the fun. That show’s world was so fun to explore, so I wanted to try and express that with this movie.
Justice League x RWBY is inspired by a DC miniseries. When I do adaptations, the importance for me is finding the twist on the story we haven’t seen before. I’m not interested in retelling a story over and over again, and I don’t want to step on the original creators’ toes. Comics and animation are two different mediums; I have the extreme privilege of working in both. There’s things that work in comics that don’t work in animation and vice-versa, so it’s similar to multiverses. You’re able to play in the multiverses that fully fit the story that you’re trying to hit.
Justice League x RWBY: Super Heroes and Huntsmen, Part One is available now on Blu-ray/DVD and digital in the U.S.
Step beyond Elm Street with these horror movies and TV series that also happen to feature standout Englund performances. For behind-the-scenes insight into a long and intriguing career (including, yes, lots of Freddy-related stories), Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story streams on Screambox and digital June 6, with a Blu-ray release July 25.
Eaten Alive
Screenshot: Mars Productions Corporation
Two years after shaking up the horror genre with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, director Tobe Hooper returned to the backwoods for 1976's Eaten Alive, which swaps out a prairie house and power tools for a swamp motel and a ravenous giant crocodile. Englund’s role as frisky redneck Buck (as the character points out, his name rhymes with... a thing he likes to do) is minor but memorable, and is excellently capped with a gruesome, chomp-tastic death scene.
V
Screenshot: Warner Bros. Television
Englund’s biggest breakout before Elm Street came in this sci-fi TV franchise; while not technically horror, it certainly frightened audiences (it scared the crap out of little me, for example) with its tale of Earth’s invasion by humanoid-yet-secretly-reptilian aliens known as “Visitors.” The original 1983 mini-series was so popular, it spawned a sequel the next year, followed by a weekly TV show that ran through 1985. One of few actors to appear across all three, Englund—who filmed his first outing as Freddy during a V hiatus—played good-guy alien Willie, whose antics (likes: poetry, Christmas, The Twilight Zone) and sympathetic attitude toward humans made him a fan favorite.
Wishmaster
Screenshot: Live Entertainment
io9 dubbed this film—the tale of a rampaging djinn that’s part gory fantasy, part horror comedy—“one of the best bad movies ever,” and Englund’s cheeky casting (his co-stars include fellow genre icons Kane “Jason Voorhees” Hodder and Tony “Candyman” Todd) greatly adds to its entertainment value. By the time Wishmaster was released in 1997, people were well accustomed to seeing Englund as Freddy or, outside of Elm Street, some other horror-villain variation. Here, however, he’s a wealthy antiques collector (his collection includes a Pazuzu statue, winking at The Exorcist) whose own artwork turns on him after he tangles with the titular demon.
The Mangler
The Mangler Original Trailer (Tobe Hooper, 1995)
Englund teamed with Tobe Hooper again for this 1995 adaptation of Stephen King’s short story; he plays an aging laundry-service owner under the thrall of a demonic laundry press, which demands human sacrifices and wreaks all kinds of malevolent chaos on the surrounding town. Despite all those big names in the credits, the premise is admittedly very silly—maybe not one of King’s best, let’s say—but Englund devours the scenery with pleasing ferocity.
The Phantom of the Opera
The Phantom of the Opera Official Trailer #1 - Robert Englund Movie (1989) HD
In Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares, Englund recalls being disappointed with the marketing of this 1989 horror-intensified adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s classic novel. You can see why; the poster, featuring an image of Englund’s face looking all for the world like crispy Mr. Krueger, shamelessly puts it out there: “Robert Englund was ‘Freddy,’ now he’s the... Phantom of the Opera.” Audiences were also disappointed with the film—though Englund’s performance, trapped in the shadow of Elm Street though it was, is one bright spot.
Urban Legend
Urban Legend (1998) - Official Trailer
Urban Legend didn’t set the world afire like Wes Craven’s Scream (which featured a couple of Freddy Krueger nods), but casting Englund added horror cred and helped distinguish it from the zillions of other slashers released in the late 1990s. In this 1998 tale set on a college campus, he plays a professor who’s added to the list of suspects when a maniac starts racking up a body count by copycatting the urban legends he teaches in his folklore class (“Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?”). Fortunately, or not, his own horrific demise soon lets him off the hook.
Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
JACK BROOKS: MONSTER SLAYER (2008) Theatrical Trailer
This campy horror comedy—which has some culturally iffy elements that haven’t aged very well, though it only dates back to 2007—casts Englund as Professor Crowley, a rumpled science teacher who becomes possessed and eventually transformed by something he unearths in his backyard. Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer mostly follows the title character—a short-tempered plumber with a knack for battling strange creatures—but Englund’s supporting turn, enhanced by some repulsive special effects, makes a tentacle-flailing impression.
Hatchet
Hatchet (2006) Official Trailer
This 2006 slasher throwback actually contains very minimal Englund, but any horror film would be lucky to feature one of the genre’s most famous faces in its opening scene—especially this one, which is set in a swamp just outside of New Orleans, giving fans a nifty callback to Eaten Alive. And there’s even a reptile connection, as Englund’s character is a gator-hunting redneck. However, this time around he meets his end thanks to Hatchet’s mutant maniac (played by his old pal, Friday the 13th’s Kane Hodder)—who murders him off-camera, though we do get to see the guts-ripped-out end result.
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon (2006) - Official Trailer
This 2006 mockumentary is set in a world where supernatural killers like Jason, Freddy, and Halloween’s Michael Myers are real, and follows an ambitious young man who allows a film crew to follow him as he sets out to join their ranks. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon offers a uniquely sly take on the horror genre—it skewers slasher and found-footage clichés—and boasts some excellent casting, including Poltergeist’s Zelda Rubenstein in one of her final roles. Best of all, though, is Englund as Leslie Vernon’s nemesis, or his “Ahab,” to use the film’s own terminology: Doc Halloran, a riff on Halloween’s trenchcoat-clad Dr. Loomis, who swoops in with great theatricality to prevent the aspiring maniac from accomplishing his goal.
Stranger Things
Image: Netflix
Englund’s casting in Netflix’s blockbuster sci-fi horror series perfectly fit with the ‘80s-set show’s season-four themes, which evoked ANightmare on Elm Street’s tactic of having a monster attack victims in a surreal dream world—or in this case, the Upside Down. In Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares, Englund recalls auditioning for Hawkins’ sleazy mayor, a role that eventually went to another ‘80s icon, Cary Elwes. But even though Englund’s Victor Creel is only in one season-four episode, the character’s looming presence—his eerie history, his crumbling former home, his connection to Stranger Things big bad Vecna—makes the part feel less like a cameo than his amount of screen time would suggest. Plus, he’s unsettling as hell, bringing depth to the haunted Creel even beyond the Freddy vibes that so many other TV shows over the years (Knight Rider, Charmed, Married... With Children, Chuck, Bones) have capitalized on when bringing Englund aboard as a guest star.
Flash filmmakers Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti at a screening of the new DC release.Image: Warner Bros.
The year is 2014. Warner Bros. makes a superhero-sized splash and announces not just that Justice League, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman movies are coming, but that a Flash movie is coming and the Flash will be played by Ezra Miller.
Director Andy Muschietti and his sister/producing partner Barbara Muschietti came on board The Flash in late 2019, as all of that was still taking place. Along with them came writer Christina Hodson, who’d also written Batgirl, Birds of Prey, and Bumblebee. The team got to work just as, a few months later, a video of their star Ezra Miller assaulting a fan leaked online. It was the first of several run-ins with the law for Miller, which—especially after Warner Bros.’ new CEO David Zazlav canceled the Hodson-penned Batgirl movie in 2022—seemed like a solid reason to cancel The Flash as well.
So, when io9 got on the phone with both Muschiettis recently, those were the two biggest things on our mind. Why did this version of The Flash make it to the finish line when none of the others could, and did they ever feel like the film wasn’t going to happen after Miller’s legal run-ins?
Ezra Miller (times 2) and Sasha Calle in The Flash.Image: Warner Bros.
“I think a big part of [our version getting made] was the push that we got with Christina Hodson to get the script in shape,” Barbara Muschietti told io9. “And when we bite on a bone, we don’t let go generally [laughs].”
Muschietti added that having time to really focus on the film during the pandemic, and not much else, also helped it along. “We developed it through the pandemic, which was absolutely nuts, but we wanted to keep it going,” she said. “So even if we had to push prep for six months, we just kept on working remotely. And by the time that the pandemic was at a place that we could actually go to the UK and start hard prep, there was enough there to hit the floor running and we got to make our movie.” It didn’t hurt that they had the idea to bring back Michael Keaton as Batman and he said “Yes.”
As for the controversy surrounding Miller, Andy Muschietti says there was never a time they thought that would get in the way of the film being released. “We believed in this project from the beginning and over the course of those two years, during the execution— prep and then production, and especially when the movie was finally shown to the first audiences—our belief and our confidence in the movie just grew.”
Yes, the best lightsaber stance is “gun.”Image: EA/Respawn
Sometimes it’s not fair to tell people they’re playing a video game wrong—in fact, it’s more often than not unfair to tell people they’re playing a video game wrong. But Star Wars fans, I beg of you, as you gallivant through the galaxy in Jedi Survivor, use something other than the single lightsaber.
This distressing (distressing!) information came to light yesterday, when EA Games’ Star Wars social accounts posted a bevy of interesting statistics about players’ adventures in the world of the excellent Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, a video game about dressing up a pretty boy so he can stab things with his laser swords. And other stuff. But it’s mostly the dress-up and stabbing.
Anyway, it’s not good news, folks: too many people are giving Cal a crew cut, when the preferred hair options should be the default Survivor, Choppy Forward (the choice of those with elite taste, i.e., myself), and Windswept. But anyway, even worse news: just 8% of people are using the best lightsaber stance in the game, Blaster, barely eking its way from bottom place position.
Now in some ways, I understand. You don’t unlock the blaster stance until a quite a bit into Jedi Survivor, and at that point in the game players are likely more used to the already available stances; they’ve also sunk skill points into their ability trees to enhance them further. When you can only use two stances at a time, I get that investing in the last two you unlock might not be of interest. I also understand that Star Wars is by and large a story of Jedi propaganda, and thus fans have been indoctrinated to generations of stories where it’s perhaps considereduntoward for a Jedi to use a blaster pistol. You’re playing a Jedi game. You wanna be like the Jedi from the movies and have your lightsaber, so why would you shoot a gun when there’s a zillion other games to do that in?
Image: EA/Respawn
Like I said, I get it. But this is an injustice that cannot stand. The blaster stance is the best stance in Jedi Survivor, and I’m not just talking mechanically, but thematically as well. Mechanically it’s superior because it’s much easier for a Jedi to simply shoot someone shooting at them instead of running towards them batting their laser sword around (especially in hectic instances of group combat where you can find your stamina bar depleted and can no longer deflect bolts, and you really want that one asshole over there to be dead on the ground). The blaster stance eventually unlocks the ability to have custom charged shots Cal can deploy, from overcharged power shots that can level normal foes or even interrupt otherwise unblockable attacks, to a ricochet volley that gives you crowd control in a stance that is otherwise largely dedicated to one-on-one combat. Your blaster evens the odds in Survivor’s often varied combat situations, where Cal is asked to deal with threats at close and long range at the same time. Out of Force juice? My guy, just shoot them.
But that’s all gameplay. I’ve also got arguments in favor of the blaster stance as the superior narrative choice for Cal Kestis and his journey as a wandering Jedi resistor in a galaxy increasingly in the grips of the Empire. Silly enough as it is that Cal runs around not at all hiding that he’s a Jedi Knight to anyone and everyone (he practically yells it at everyone he meets), the blaster stance at least gives a little more pretense that he’s not a space wizard. The way Cal learns the stance too—being gifted a blaster to use by his mercenary ally Bode Akuna as the two work and become closer to each other—is an important step for his character. Cal sheepishly tells Bode that his former Jedi master frowned upon blasters. Cal is a child of the Clone Wars, a padawan who came of age only to be thrust into an interstellar conflict on a scale unlike anything the galaxy had seen in generations. He was surrounded by blaster fire as he grew up on the front lines, he watched the same master that shunned the weapon ultimately cut down by them during Order 66.
Image: EA/Respawn
A lot of Jedi Survivor’s narrative is about characters wrestling with their place in the Imperial machine, from collaborators to resistors, and figuring out what they can do as individuals and as groups to, well, survive. In doing so, those characters also have to confront the fact that things have simply changed as much as the galaxy has. Friendships that were once close grow apart, romantic dalliances wax and wane, people’s desires in the grip of a galaxy under fascism change. Cal accepting Bode’s gift of a hand-me-down blaster pistol—something that only becomes more poignant as the game develops—is a moment where Cal chooses to put some of his doubts and some of his Jedi past, and some of the traumas tied to it, behind him and find a path for himself that is not strictly Jedi, but simply his own. Cal is still a Jedi; that is a very important part of his personhood and identity. But times change, and so must Cal, and in learning to put aside the doctrine and dogma he grew up with, he must find his own tools to continue fighting the Empire. You see that in him as he takes up the blaster, and it’s a touching moment of evolution in his journey.
Also: it cannot be stressed enough that with the blaster stance, you get to stab and shoot people. In many ways, Han Solo was right—ancient weapons and hokey religions are no match for a blaster by your side. But when you can have both, por qué no los dos?
The wink is in this image. Do you get it? We’ll explain.Screenshot: Sony
Watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, there was a scene where I jumped out of my seat. Actually, if we’re being honest, there were several moments where that happened, but one in particular was so random, so unexpected, so subtly connected to the Spider-Man universe, and so in tune with my personal interests, that it stood above the rest. And it’s not a spoiler. At all. In fact, you’re looking at the moment above.
Early in the film, Miles Morales returns to his dorm room at school to find his roommate, Ganke Lee, playing video games (a very specific game actually so keep an eye out) wearing Miles’ Jordans. You can watch the full moment on Instagram at this link.
On the wall, you’ll notice a poster of a soccer player. But not just any soccer player. It’s Heung-min Son, a South Korean legend who plays for Tottenham Hotspur in the English Premier League. Now, Ganke’s character in the comics is Korean American, so to have a poster of a player like Son on his wall certainly makes sense. And maybe that’s all there is to it. However, if you follow soccer (or football, as it’s called everywhere else but here), you know that Tom Holland is not just a huge Tottenham fan, he’s a huge Son fan, and Son is a fan of Holland in return. In fact, check out these photos and clips. Yes, that’s Son with Holland and Son doing the Spider-man web-slinging gesture after scoring a goal.
Still skeptical? Those could just be photos, right? Well, we can’t embed it here, but watch this video. It’s Holland interviewing Son and he fanboys out like a Spidey fan would talking to him.
Now, did the team behind Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse put that in there for Tom Holland specifically? I know that, as a fellow fan of both Tottenham Hotspur and Heung-min Son, I felt like it was in there for me, so maybe not? Then again though, I’m not actually Spider-Man, so odds are it’s in there partially because it made sense, and partially because Holland would love it.
We’ll have much much more on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse soon.
io9 has got your exclusive first look at five new figures from Playmates’ upcoming action figure series for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Although you can see the new versions of Leo, Donnie, Mikey, and Raph hanging out above, any good hero in a half-shell needs both a mentor to guide them and some bad guys to put those ninja skills to the test. And befitting the title, Mutant Mayhem will give the boys plenty of baddies to get manic with!
Click through to see the first look at figures for Master Splinter (voiced by the legendary Jackie Chan), newly created villain Superfly (Ice Cube), and Mutant Mayhem’s riff on the classic TMNT villains Bebop (Mutant Mayhem producer Seth Rogan), Rocksteady (John Cena), and Leatherhead (Rose Byrne). Each figure—villain and hero alike—will come with accessories of their primary weapons, as well as a separate rack of extra accessories and gear to go into battle with. Standing at roughly 4-5" tall, Mutant Mayhem figures will cost $10 each and are set to go on sale everywhere on June 25, ahead of the movie’s release August 2.
As disciples of the riff know, it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ‘n’ roll—a quest made even more difficult when annoyances like high school and monsters get in the way. A new Dark Horse release, The Rock Gods of Jackson, Tennessee, brings this adventure to life, and io9 has a fun preview to share today.
The Rock Gods of Jackson, Tennessee comes from writer Rafer Roberts, artist Mike Norton (who also did the cover), colorist Allen Passalaqua, and letterer Crank! Here’s the set-up for this tale of head-banging and monster-slaying—and the friendships built along the way:
“It’s 1989 and Marty Ward, Jackson Tennessee’s number one juvenile delinquent, never wanted to join the Rock Gods. After all, who wants to play with nerds like Jonny, Lenny, and Doug? But after the high schoolers stumble into the gig of a lifetime—opening for local rock legend Tommi Tungstun—the four outcasts must put aside their differences and play together if they want to achieve their dreams of fame, freedom, and popularity. Standing in these future superstars’ way are: their parents, their teachers, a school full of jerks and bullies, a townful of bad bosses, sanctimonious preachers, corrupt politicians, each other, and a rampaging horde of mutated monsters tearing through Jackson and eating everything in their path.”
Click through for a preview of The Rock Gods of Jackson, Tennessee, hitting shelves July 5! (Make sure you get to the end to see pictures of the comic’s creators in their own high-school glory days.) You can also pre-order a copy here.
The first book in an “action-packed science fantasy series,” The Combat Codes takes place in a world where individual fighters take to rings to fight for their nation rather than risk all-out war. Alexander Darwin crafts a lone-wolf-and-cub mentor/mentee pair with Murray and Cego as he merges politics and intensely researched hand-to-hand combat scenes.
Check out the exclusive reveal of The Combat Codes JRPG-inspired trailer below.
The Combat Codes jRPG
The trailer was developed by Angus Doolan. The book cover (courtesy of Orbit) followed by the first chapter excerpt is below. Meet Murray and Cego as they fight for their nations and their lives.
We fight neither to inflict pain nor to prolong suffering. We fight neither to mollify anger nor to satisfy vendetta. We fight neither to accumulate wealth nor to promote social standing. We fight so the rest shall not have to.
First Precept of the Combat Codes
Murray wasn’t fond of the crowd at Thaloo’s. Mostly scum with no respect for combat who liked to think themselves experts in the craft.
His boots clung to the sticky floor as he shouldered his way to the bar. Patrons lined the counter, drinking, smoking, and shouting at the overhead lightboards broadcasting SystemView feeds.
Murray grabbed a head‑sized draught of ale before making his way toward the center of the den, where the crowd grew thicker. Beams of light cut through clouds of pipe smoke and penetrated the gaps between clustered, sweaty bodies.
His heart fluttered and the hairs on the back of his neck bristled as he approached. He wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow. Even after all these years, even in a pitiful place like this, the light still got to him.
He pushed past the inner throng of spectators and emerged at the edge of the action.
Thaloo’s Circle was eight meters in diameter, made of auralite‑compound steel fused into the dirt. Standard Underground dimensions. On the Surface, Circles tended to be wider, usually ten meters in diameter, which Murray preferred. More room to maneuver.
Glowing blue streaks veined the steel Circle, and a central cluster of lights pulsed above the ring like a heartbeat, shining down on two boys grappling in the dirt.
“Aha! The big Scout’s back. You runnin’ out of kids already?” A man at the edge of the Circle clapped Murray on the shoulder. “Name’s Calsans.”
Murray ignored the greeting and focused on the two boys fighting. One of them looked to be barely ten years old and had the gaunt build of a lacklight street urchin. His rib cage heaved in and out from beneath the bulk of a boy who outweighed him by at least sixty pounds.
Many of the onlookers flicked their eyes between the action and a large lightboard that hung from the ceiling. Biometric readings for each boy in the Circle flashed across the screen: heart rate, brain wave speed, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, hydration levels. The bottom of the board displayed an image of each boy’s skeletal and muscular frame, down to their chipped teeth.
As the large boy lifted his elbow and drove it into the smaller boy’s chin, a red fracture lit up on the board. The little boy’s heart rate shot up.
The large boy threw knees into his opponent’s rib cage as he continued to hold him down in the dirt. The little boy writhed, turning his back to his opponent and curling into a ball.
“Shouldn’t give your back like that,” Murray muttered, as if trying to communicate with the battered boy.
The large boy dropped another vicious elbow on his downed prey. Murray winced as he heard the sharp crack of bone on skull. Two more elbows found their target before the little one stiffened, his eyes rolling into his head as he fell limp.
The ball of light floating above the Circle flickered before it dissipated into a swarm of smoldering wisps that fanned out into the crowd.
“They call the big one there N’jal; he’s been cleaning up like that all week. One of Thaloo’s newest in‑housers,” Calsans said as the boy raised his arms in victory.
Beyond a few clapping drunks, there was little fanfare. N’jal walked to the side of his Tasker at the sidelines, a bearded man who patted the boy on the head like a dog. The loser’s crew entered the Circle and dragged the fallen fighter out by his feet.
“Thaloo’s been buyin’ up some hard Grievar this cycle,” Calsans continued, trying to strike up conversation with Murray again. “Bet he’s tryin’ to work a bulk sale to the Citadel, y’know? Even though they won’t all pan out with that level of competition, there’s bound to be a gem in the lot of ’em.”
Murray barely acknowledged the man, but Calsans kept speaking. “It’s not like it used to be, y’know? Everything kept under strict Citadel regulations. All the organized breeding, the training camps,” Calsans said. “I mean, course you know all about that. But now that the Kirothians are breathin’ down our necks, Deep Circles are hoppin’ again, and folk like Thaloo and you are making the best of it.”
“I’m nothing like Thaloo,” Murray growled, his shoulders tensing.
Calsans shrank back, as if suddenly aware of how large Murray was beside him. “No, no, of course not, friend. You two are completely different. Thaloo’s like every other Circle slaver trying to make a bit, and you’re a . . . or used to be . . . a Grievar Knight . . .” His voice trailed off.
The glowing spectral wisps returned to the Circle like flies gathering on a fresh kill. They landed on the cold auralite steel ring and balled up again in a floating cluster above. As more of the wisps arrived, the light shining on the Circle grew brighter. Fresh biometrics flashed onto the feed.
It was time for the next fight, and Murray needed another ale.
Murray drew the cowl of his cloak over his head as he exited Thaloo’s den, stepping directly into the clamor of Markspar Row.
Stores, bars, and inns lined the street, with smaller carts selling acrid‑scented foods on the cobbles out front. Gaudily dressed hawkers peddled their wares, yapping like bayhounds in a variety of tongues. Buyers jostled past him as ragged, soot‑faced children darted underfoot.
Much had changed since Murray had first returned to the Underground.
Two decades ago, he’d proudly walked Markspar Row with an entourage of trainers in tow. He’d been met with cheers, claps on the back, the awed eyes of Deep brood looking up at him. He’d been proud to represent the Grievar from below.
Now Murray made a habit of staying off the main thoroughfares. He came to the Deep alone and quietly. He doubted anyone would recognize him after all these years, with his overgrown beard and sagging stomach.
A man in a nearby stall shrieked at Murray, “Top‑shelf protein! Tested for the Cimmerian Shade! Vat‑grown in Ezo’s central plant! Certified for real taste by the Growers Guild!” The small bald hawker held up a case with a mess of labels stamped across it.
Compared to the wiry hawker, Murray was large. Though his gut had expanded over the past decade and his ruffled beard was now grey‑streaked, he posed a formidable presence. From beneath the cut‑off sleeves of his cloak, his knotted forearms and callused hands hung like twin cudgels. Flux tattoos crisscrossed the length of Murray’s arms from elbows to fingertips, shifting their pigmented curves as he clenched his fists. His sharp nose twisted at the center, many times broken, and his ears swelled like fat toads. His face was overcast, with two alarmingly bright yellow eyes penetrating from beneath his brow.
Murray turned in to a narrow stone passageway sheltered from the central clamor of the row. He passed another hawker, a white‑haired lady hidden behind her stand of fruit.
“The best heartbeat grapes. Clerics say eat just a few per day and you’ll outlive an archivist.” She smiled at him and gestured to her selection of fruit, each swollen and pulsing with ripeness. Halfway down the alley, as the sounds of the market continued to fade, Murray stopped in front of a beat‑up oaken door. A picture of a bat with its teeth bared was barely visible on the faded awning overhead.
The Bat always smelled of spilled ale and sweat. An assortment of Grievar and Grunt patrons crowded the floor. Mercs keeping an ear to the ground for contract jobs, harvesters taking a break from planting on the steppe, diggers dressed in dirt from a nearby excavation project.
SystemView was live and blaring from several old boards hanging from the far wall. And now... broadcasting from Ezo’s Capital, in magnificent Albright Stadium...
The one thing that brought together the different breeds was a good SystemView fight. Though most of the folk living in the Underground were Ezonian citizens, their allegiances often were more aligned with the wagers they placed in the Circles.
Most of the Bat’s patrons were tuned in to the screens, some swaying and nearly falling out of their chairs, with empty bottles surrounding them. Two dirt‑encrusted Grunts slurred their words as Murray pushed past them toward the bar.
“Fegar’s got the darkin’ reach! No way ’e’ll be able to take my boy down!”
“You tappin’ those neuros too hard, man? He took Samson down an’ he’s ten times the wrestler!”
Grunts weren’t known for their smarts. They were bred for hard labor like mining, hauling, harvesting, or clearing, though Murray often wondered if drinking might be their real talent. He didn’t mind the Grunts, though—they did their jobs and didn’t bother anyone. They didn’t meddle with Grievar lives. They didn’t govern from the shadows. They weren’t Daimyo.
The man behind the bar was tall and corded, with near‑obsidian skin. The left side of his face drooped, and his bald head gleamed with sweat as he wiped down the counter.
Murray approached the bar and caught the man’s good eye. “Your finest Deep ale.”
The man poured a stein of the only ale on tap, then broke into a wide half grin. “Old Grievar, what brings you to my fine establishment on such a sunny day in the Deep?”
Murray took a swig of the ale, wiping the foam off his lips. “Same thing every year, Anderson. I’m here to lay back and sweat out my worries at the hot springs. Then I figure I’ll stop by the Courtesan Houses for a week or so ’fore returning to my Adar Hills mansion back Upworld.”
Anderson chuckled, giving Murray a firm wrist‑to‑wrist grasp from across the bar. “Good to see you, old friend. Though you’re uglier than I remember.”
“Same to you.” Murray feigned a grimace. “That face of yours reminds me of how you always forgot to cover up the right high kick.”
Anderson grinned as he wiped down the bar. Both men were quiet as they watched the SystemView broadcast on the lightboard above.
The feed panned across Albright Stadium, showing thousands of cheering spectators in the stands before swooping toward the gleaming Circle at the heart of the arena. Two Grievar squared off in the Circle—one standing for Ezo and the other for the empire of Kiroth.
Murray downed his ale and set the cup on the bar for Anderson to refill.
A list of grievances popped up in one corner of the screen to remind viewers of what was at stake in the bout: rubellium reserves in one of the long‑disputed border regions between Ezo and Kiroth, worth millions of bits, thousands of jobs, and the servitude of the pastoral harvesters who lived out there.
The fate of nations held in the sway of our fists.
The fight began, and Murray watched quietly, respectfully, as a Grievar should. Not like crowds modernday—booing and clapping, hissing and spitting. No respect for combat.
Anderson sighed as Ezo’s Grievar Knight attacked the Kirothian with a flurry of punches. “Do you remember it? Even taking those hits, those were good days.”
“Prefer not to remember it.” Murray took another gulp of his ale.
“I know you don’t, friend. But I hold on to my memories. Blood, sweat, and broken bones. Locking on a choke or putting a guy down with a solid cross. That feeling after, lying awake and knowing you’d done something—made a difference.”
“What’s the darkin’ difference? I don’t see any. Same lofty bat shit going on up above.” Murray sniffed the air. “Still got that same dank smell down here.”
“You know what I mean,” Anderson said. “Fighting for the good of the nation. Making sure Ezo stays on top.”
“I know what you mean, and that’s just what those Daimyo politiks up there say all the time. For the good of the nation. That’s why I’m down here. Every year, the same thing for a decade now. Sent Deep to find fresh Grievar meat.”
“You don’t think the Scout program is working?” Anderson asked.
Murray took another long swig. “We’ll discover the next Artemis Halberd. That’s what that smug bastard Callen always says. The man doesn’t know how to piss straight in a Circle, yet he’s got command of an entire wing of Citadel.”
“You never saw eye to eye with Commander Albright—”
“The man’s a coward! How can he lead? The Daimyo might as well have installed one of their own to Command. Either way, doesn’t make a difference. Scouts—the whole division is deepshit. Grievar‑kin are born to fight. Thousands of years of breeding says so. We’re not made to creep around corners, dealing out bits like hawkers.”
“Times are different, old friend,” Anderson said. “Things are more complicated. Citadel has got to keep up; otherwise, Ezo falls behind. Kiroth’s had a Scout program for two decades now. They say even the Desovians are on their way to developing one.”
“They know it’s just the scraps down here, Anderson,” Murray said. “Kids that don’t fare a chance. And even if one of them did make it? What have we got to show for it? Me and you. For all those years we put in together in service. The sacrifices—”
Their conversation was interrupted as the door to the bar swung open with a thud. Three men walked in. Grievar.
Anderson sighed and put his hand on Murray’s shoulder. “Take it easy.”
The first to enter had piercings running along his jawline, glinting beside a series of dark flux tattoos stamped on his cheekbones. The other two were as thick as Murray and looked to be twins, with matching grizzled faces and cauliflowered ears.
The fluxed man immediately caught Murray’s stare from the bar. “Ah! If it isn’t the mighty one himself!”
Murray left his seat with alarming speed and moved toward the man.
Anderson shouted a warning from behind the bar. The man threw a wide haymaker at Murray, who casually tucked his shoulder, deflecting the blow, before dropping levels and exploding from a crouch into the man’s midline. Murray wrapped his arms around the man’s knees, hoisted him into the air, then drove him straight through a nearby table, which splintered in every direction.
Murray blinked. He was still in his seat by the bar, the pierced Grievar hovering over him with a derisive smirk on his face.
“Nothing to say anymore, huh, old man? I can’t imagine what it’s like. Getting sent down here to do the dirty work. Digging through the trash every year.”
Murray ignored the man and took another swig of his ale. “Think any of your trash will even make it through the Trials this year?” the man taunted. “Didn’t one of your kids make it once? What ever happened to him? Oh, I remember now...”
Anderson pushed three ales across the bar. “Cydek, these are on the house. Why don’t you and your boys find a place over in that corner there so we don’t have any trouble?”
Cydek smirked as he took the drinks. He turned to Murray as he was walking away. “I’m scouting Lampai tomorrow. Why don’t you tail me and I can show you how it’s done? You can see some real Grievar in action. Nice change of pace from watching kids fighting in the dirt.”
Murray kept his eyes fixed on the lightboard above the bar. SystemView was now replaying the fight’s finish in slow motion. The broadcaster’s voice cut through the quieted Ezonian crowd at Albright Stadium.
What an upset! And with the simple justice of a swift knee, Kiroth takes the Adarian Reserves!
Anderson leaned against the bar in front of Murray and poured himself an ale as he watched the knockout on replay. “The way things are going, I hope the Scout program starts working... or anything, for that matter. Otherwise, we’ll be drinking that Kirothian swill they call mead next time I see you.”
Murray let a smile crease his face, though he felt the tension racking his muscles. He downed his ale.
Murray realized he’d had a few too many, even for a man of his size, as he stumbled down Markspar Row. The duskshift was at its end and the arrays that lined the cavern ceiling bathed the Underground in a dying red glow. Murray had stayed at the Bat chatting about old times with Anderson for the entire evening.
Though he often denied it, he did miss the light. He wished he were back in fighting form, as he had been during his service.
That’s the thing with us Grievar. We rot.
He cracked his knuckles as he walked in no particular direction. Murray felt his body decaying like the old foundations of this crumbling Underground city. His back always hurt. Nerve pain shot up his sides whether sitting, standing, sleeping—it didn’t matter. His neck was always stiff as a board. His wrists, elbows, and ankles had been broken multiple times and seemed like they could give way at any moment. Even his face was numb, a leathery exterior that didn’t feel like his own anymore. He remembered a time when his body was fluid. His arms and legs had moved as if there were a slick layer of oil between every joint, seamlessly connecting takedowns into punches into submissions.
He’d seen his fair share of trips to medwards to sew up gashes and mend broken bones, but he’d always felt smooth, hydraulic. Now Murray’s joints and bones scraped together with dry friction as he walked.
It was his own fault, though. Murray had his chance to stay young and he’d missed it. The first generation of neurostimulants had debuted when he was at the top of his fight game. Most of his team had started popping the stims under the recommendation of then–Deputy Commander Memnon. “We need the edge over the enemy,” Memnon had urged the team of Grievar Knights.
Coach hadn’t agreed with Memnon—the two had been at each other’s throats for those last few years. Coach believed taking stims was sacrilege, against the Combat Codes. The simplest precept of them all: No tools, no tech.
The man would often mutter to Murray, “Live and die like we’re born—screaming, with two clenched, bloody fists.”
It wasn’t long after the stims started circulating that Coach left his post. The breach in Command had grown too wide. Memnon would do anything to give Ezo the edge, even if that meant harnessing Daimyo tech. Coach would rather die than forsake the Codes.
Even after Coach left, Murray kept to his master’s teachings. He’d refused to take stims. A few of his teammates had stayed clean too—Anderson, Leyna, Hanrin, old Two‑Tooth. At first, they’d kept up with the rest of the team. Murray had even held on to the captain’s belt. It wasn’t until a few years later that he’d felt it.
It had been barely perceptible: a takedown getting stuffed, a jab snapping in front of his face before he realized it was coming. Those moments started adding up, though. Murray aged. He got slower and weaker while the rest of Ezo’s Grievar Knights main‑ tained their strength under the neurostimulants.
And then came the end. That fight in Kiroth. His whole team, his whole nation, depending on Murray. Everything riding on his back. And he’d failed.
Wherever Coach was right now, he’d be spitting in the dirt if he could see what Murray had become. Skulking in the shadows, stuck with a lowly Grievar Scout job, to be forgotten. Another cog in the Daimyo machine.
Before Murray realized it, the light had nearly faded. The streets were quiet as most Deep folk returned to their homes for the blackshift.
Murray was walking on autopilot toward Lampai Stadium, now only a stone’s throw away, looming above him like a hibernating beast. Shadows clung to him here, deep pockets of darkness filling the folds of his cloak as he made his way to the base of the stadium. Murray stopped abruptly, standing in front of Lampai’s entrance.
He stared at the old concrete wall and the black wrought‑iron gates. He craned his head at the stadium’s rafters towering above him.
Murray placed his hand against a gold plaque on the gate. It was cold to the touch. It read: Lampai Stadium, Construction Date: 121 P.A.
Let this be the first of many arenas, to serve as a symbol of our sworn Armistice and a constant reminder of the destruction we are capable of. Here shall Grievar give their blood, in honor and privilege. They fight so the rest shall not have to.
“We fight so the rest shall not have to,” Murray whispered. He had once believed those words. The first precept of the Codes. He would repeat the mantra over and over before his fights, shouting it as he made entrances into stadiums around the world.
The Mighty Murray Pearson. He’d been a force of nature, a terror in the Circle. Now he was just another shadow under these rafters.
Murray inhaled deeply, his chest filling with air. He pushed it all out again.
Murray returned to Thaloo’s every day that week and saw more of the same. Just like it had been every year before. The well‑nourished, stronger Grievar brood beating down the weaker lack‑lights. There was little skill involved; the brutal process pitted the weak against the strong. The strong always won.
Eventually, the weaker brood wore down. Patrons didn’t want to buy the broken ones, which meant that Thaloo’s team of Taskers was wasting their time training them. Thaloo was wasting bits on their upkeep. So, like rotten fruit, the slave Circle owner would throw the kids back to the streets where he found them. Their chance of survival was slim.
Murray’s head throbbed as he stepped back to the edge of the Circle. Spectral wisps gathered above as the light intensified on the dirt fighting floor.
The first Grievar emerged from the side entrance, stopping by his Tasker’s corner. He looked to be about fifteen, tall for his age, with all the hallmarks of purelight Grievar blood—cauliflowered ears, a thick brow, bulging forearms, bright eyes.
The boy’s head was shaved like all the brood at Thaloo’s to show off the brand fluxed on his scalp. Like any other product in the Deep, patrons needed to see his bit‑price. This kid looked to be of some value—several of the vultures were eyeing him like a slab of meat.
The Tasker slapped the boy in the face several times, grip‑ ping his shoulders and shaking him before prodding him into the Circle. The boy responded to the aggression with his own, gnashing his teeth and slamming his fist against his chest as he stalked the perimeter. The crowd clapped and hooted with anticipation.
The second boy did not look like he belonged in the Circle. He was younger than his opponent and gaunt, his thin arms dangling at his sides. A mop of black hair hung over the boy’s brow. Murray shook his head. They’d just taken the kid off the streets, and hadn’t even put in the effort to brand him yet.
The boy walked into the Circle without expression, avoiding eye contact with his opponent and the crowd around him. He found his designated start position and stood completely still as the glowing spectrals rose from the Circle’s frame and began to cluster above.
“The taller, dark one—name’s Marcus. Saw ’im yesterday.” Cal‑ sans pulled up to Murray’s side, just as he’d done every day this week. Murray expected the parasite to ask him for a favor any moment now. Or perhaps he was one of Callen’s spies, sent to ensure Murray didn’t go rogue.
“Nearly kicked right through some lacklight.” Calsans smirked. “This little sod is gonna get thrashed.”
The skinny boy stood motionless, his arms straight by his sides. At first, Murray thought the boy’s eyes were cast at the dirt floor, but at second glance, Murray saw his eyes were closed. Clamped shut.
“Thaloo’s putting blind kids in the Circle now...” Murray growled.
“Sometimes, he likes to give the patrons a show,” Calsans said. “Bet he’s workin’ on building Marcus’s bit‑price. Fattening him up for sale.”
The fight began as Marcus assumed a combat stance and bobbed forward, feinting jabs and bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“It’s like one of them Ezonian eels about to eat a guppy,” Calsans remarked.
Murray looked curiously at the blind boy as his opponent stalked toward him. The boy still wasn’t moving. Though his posture wasn’t aggressive, he didn’t look afraid. He almost looked . . . relaxed.
“Wouldn’t be so sure,” Murray replied.
Marcus approached striking distance and feigned a punch at the blind boy before whipping a high round kick toward his head. A split second before the shin connected, the boy dropped below the kick and shot forward like a coiled spring, wrapping around one of the kicker’s legs. The boy clung to the leg as his opponent tried to shake him off vigorously, but he stayed attached. He drove his shoulder into Marcus’s knee, throwing him off‑balance into the dirt.
The boy began to climb his opponent’s body, immobilizing his legs and crawling onto his torso.
“Now this is getting good,” Murray said as he watched the blind boy go to work.
Marcus heaved forward with his full strength, pushing the boy off him while reversing to top position. Hungry for a finish again, Marcus straddled the younger boy’s torso, reared up, and hurled a punch downward. The boy slipped the punch, angling his chin at just the right moment, his opponent’s fist glancing off his jaw.
Marcus howled in pain as his hand crunched against the hard dirt. Biometrics flashed red on the lightboard above.
Capitalizing on bottom position, the blind boy grasped Marcus’s elbow and dragged the limp arm across his body, using the leverage to pull himself up and around onto his opponent’s back.
Murray raised an eyebrow. “Well, look at that. Darkin’ smooth back take.”
The crowd suddenly was paying close attention to the turn of events. Several spectators hooted in approval of the upset while others jeered at a potential bit‑loss on their bets.
Murray saw the shock in Marcus’s eyes. This was supposed to be an easy win for the Grievar, a fight to pad his record. His Tasker probably told him to finish the blind boy in a brutal fashion. Instead, Marcus was the one fighting for survival, looking like he was treading water in a tank of razor sharks. Marcus grunted as he pushed himself off the ground. He stood and tried to shuck the boy off his back, bucking wildly, but the climber wrapped around him even tighter.
The blind boy began to snake his hands across Marcus’s neck, shooting his forearm beneath the chin to apply a choke. Either as a last resort or out of pure helplessness, Marcus dropped backward like a felled tree, slamming the boy on his back into the dirt with a thud. A cloud of dust billowed into the air on impact. The crowd hushed as the little boy was crushed beneath his larger opponent’s bulk.
Murray held his breath as the dust settled.
The blind boy was still clinging to his opponent, his two bony arms latched around his neck, constricting, ratcheting tighter. The boy squeezed until Marcus’s eyes rolled back into his head and his arms went limp.
The light flared and died out, the spectrals breaking from their cluster and dissipating into the den.
The boy rolled out from beneath his unconscious opponent, his face covered in dirt and blood, his eyes clamped shut.
Excerpt from The Combat Codes by Alexander Darwin reprinted by permission of Orbit.
The Combat Codes by Alexander Darwin will be released on June 13. You can preorder a copy here.
In a streamed video interview earlier today Toshio Suzuki, the co-founder and former president of Studio Ghibli who has been a producer on nearly every Ghibli film you can think of, revealed that there would be no additional images released for the newest Ghibli film, How Do You Live? The poster, included below, will be the only promotional image that will be available for viewers. Catsuka, on Twitter, provided a public translation of the video.
Image: Studio Ghibli
While the movie is inspired on the Japanese young adult book of the same name by Genzaburo Yoshino, it will not be a direct adaptation and will be a fantasy film—a huge departure from the grounded drama of the novel. We don’t know much about the film at all, but Hayao Miyazaki has said in the past that this will be his final film before he retires. Granted, he’s said that before, but he could really mean it this time.
Earlier this year, Studio Ghibli collaborated with Star Wars on a short film, Grogu and the Dust Bunnies. There is no word if they will continue to collaborate with Star Wars.
How Do You Live? will be released in Japan on July 14. There is no set date for an international release.
16 years ago, J. Michael Straczynski inadvertantly gave the Marvel Comics world one of the all time great Captain America moments in the pages of his Civil War-era run on Amazing Spider-Man. Now, it’s time for him to move: in a major return to the publisher, to put the spotlight on Steve Rogers for real in a brand new run of Captain America.
io9 can exclusively reveal that Straczynski—the renowned comics and TV writer already in the midst of returning to one of his other iconic works, the sci-fi series Babylon 5—will team up with Jesús Saiz for the relaunch of Captain America later this year. The series will see Steve thrust into a shadowy plot to prevent Captain America from changing the world of superheroes forever as he did bursting onto the scene in the age of heroes... and a sinister foe that wants to plunge the world into darkness, no matter the cost.
Image: Jesús Saiz
io9 briefly spoke to Straczynski over email to learn more about his decision to return to Marvel Comics in an ongoing capacity, his legacy with Captain America and the influence of his famous “No, you move” speech in Amazing Spider-Man #537, and what readers can expect for his vision of Steven Rogers all these years after he made such a small but indelible mark on the character in Civil War. Check it out below!
James Whitbrook, io9: Why was now the time for you to return to Marvel in an ongoing capacity, and why was Captain America the character that drew you back?
J. Michael Straczynski: Like most things, the process was incremental. It started when Wil Moss asked me to do a short piece for the big Thor anniversary issue, which ended up getting a fair bit of attention. Then he asked me to do a Thanos story for that big issue, which also drew a lot of eyeballs, which led to me writing yet another piece for Marvel Age 1000 coming out soon. During all this, Wil Moss asked if I’d write a six-issue mini-series that would be a bit of an Event. [Editors note: more on that coming soon!] I did so, it was a ton of fun for everyone involved, and Wil gave Alanna [Smith, Marvel comics editor] one of my scripts that involved Captain America.
Alanna liked how I handled the character, and sends an email asking if I’d like to take over the monthly Captain America book…and that was pretty much the best thing ever, because I’ve always had a strong affinity for Cap, which is why I would sneak him into just about everything I wrote for Spider-Man and Thor.
io9: Tell us a little bit about what you have in store for Steve in this new run. What do you want to say about Captain America?
Straczynski: Here’s the thing: I come from television, where the #1 rule is that you must service the main character above all else. When I took on The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter had been all but lost in a crowd of supporting characters, so I set them aside to delve deep into him, his relationships, his fears and his dreams, along the way setting the stage for the Spider-Verse. I did much the same when I came aboard Thor, and began asking what it actually means to be a god, and putting Asgard in Oklahoma to see how he and the others relate to the mortal world, making them both more god-like but also more personal. Ditto for Supreme Power and Mark Milton. Again, it’s all about servicing the main character first and foremost.
I’ve often heard writers say how hard it is to write for Captain America because in recent years he’s become a symbol more than a person, and because they see him as “a man out of time,” which is true but that needn’t define him. In a sense, we’re all people out of time because the world we live in at age 30 isn’t the same it was when we were six. It doesn’t change the fundamental question: who is this character at their absolute core? Push them to their limits, put them up against a wall, make them stand when standing is the hardest thing in the world…and what do you see? Who do you see?
One thing about Steve Rogers that’s never really been addressed is the period between when his parents died, and when he became Captain America. We’re talking about a sickly, skinny 17 year old kid, trying to survive on his own for because he’s stubborn and independent, on the street for several years, hustling for any gig he can get, even if it’s bigger than he is, trying to afford food and a place to stay. So we will counterpoint a present-tense story in which Captain America faces off against a new villain of supernatural origin, with a story about his younger self, with both stories tightly interwoven.
Because there’s one other, key aspect to that period that we will be addressing. The years young Steve was on his own were the same years during which the American Bund – for all intents and purposes the Nazi Party in America – was growing very powerful in real world New York, blocks from where he lived. They held public marches and rallies, harassed people, and spread hate, all part of an effort to get America on the side of the Nazis, a campaign that came to a head with the biggest Nazi rally on American soil in history, as tens of thousands of people, Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, crammed into Madison Square Garden to celebrate their dream of a thousand-year Reich.
We are going to put young Steve right into the middle of that real-life vortex, where despite terrible odds he will make a crucial difference at an even more crucial moment. For a young Peter Parker, the murder of his uncle Ben was a transformational event putting him on the path to becoming Spider-Man. This story will be equally transformational, putting a young Steve Rogers on the path to being the hero he eventually becomes.
To balance all that, the contemporary story has a lot of fun and action, and in both storylines we get to see more flashes of humor from Steve, because I think that range is essential to good storytelling. We will loosen him up, and make him even more of a compelling character on his own terms.
io9: Obviously your Marvel history is largely with other characters, but fans know you were part of one of Cap’s most iconic moments with the “No, you move” speech in ASM #537. What’s it been like seeing the legacy of that moment evolve in the years since you wrote it, from the comics all the way to its nod in Captain America: Civil War in the MCU?
Straczynski: It’s just fun. There have been lots of those little legacy moments from both my Spidey and Thor runs, and as someone who’s worked in movies as well as comics, it’s a blast for me to see them on the big screen.
io9: Steve’s relationship to the iconography of America as a political entity is something he’s always grappled with throughout his career as a hero. How do you approach writing Steve and his relationship with America in this new book?
Straczynski: As you note, this has been dealt with a lot in the title, so rather than go up against all that to redefine it one more time, I’d rather go in a different direction at the start. Not to ignore it, because that bill always comes due sooner or later, but just to give it a bit of a rest while we focus on Steve as a character, as a person, rather than one symbol trying to figure out how he relates to another symbol.
io9: You’re working with Jesús Saiz on the new Cap series - after you previously crossed paths over at DC for Team-ups of the Brave and the Bold. What’s it been like working with Jesús again, and what has he brought to the new series?
Straczynski: We’ve seen the first issue’s worth of art from Jesús, and it’s just beautiful. He was on my short list from day one, because so much of my work lives or dies by whether or not you can read emotion in the faces of the characters, and Jesús excels at that. He gets to explore the contemporary story with a lot of action, much of it of a supernatural origin, then go into a period look for the book as we follow Steve in New York in the late 1930s, so he gets to play with all the fun toys and show what he can do. So yeah…it’s a really great looking book.
So overall, the goal is to do some really challenging stories, some really fun stories, and get inside Steve’s head to see who he really is in ways that may not have been fully explored before. If folks like what I did with Peter in ASM, and Thor in, well, Thor, then they should really give this a shot, because I’m really swinging for the bleachers in this one.
Captain America relaunches with a new issue 1 this September.
Get a look at Good Omens season 2's new opening titles. It’s going to be a while before The Batman 2 starts filming. Plus, even more Transformers: Rise of the Beasts posters, and the CW teases what’s next on Riverdale, Superman & Lois, and more. Spoilers, away!
Superman: Legacy
Variety reports that James Gunn’s list of potential candidates for the new Man of Steel includes Bold and the Beautiful’s Pierson Fodé, citing an allegedly impressive audition tape sent in by the actor.
The Batman 2
According to a new report from The Midgard Times (via Comic Book Movie), filming on the sequel to Matt Reeves’ The Batman has been delayed to March of 2024.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
The Autobots and Maximals have their insignias calligraphied on two new Rise of the Beasts posters from China.
Relatedly, Tobe Nwigwe, Nas and Jacob Banks have released a music video for “On My Soul,” their song from the film’s tie-in soundtrack.
ON MY SOUL | TOBE NWIGWE & NAS ft. JACOB BANKS
The Last of Us
During a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Bella Ramsey stated The Last of Us hopes to begin production “as soon as the end of this year.”
It’s darker. It’s really a story about revenge, and a continuation from the first season about the dangers of unconditional love.
Nancy Drew
Nancy Drew investigates mysterious happenings on the set of a horror film in the synopsis for “The Return of the Killer’s Hook,” her June 21 episode on The CW.
BESS LANDS A ROLE IN A HORROR FILM SHOOTING IN HORSESHOE BAY – Nancy (Kennedy McMann) runs into an old friend who is in town directing a remake of a horror film called “Longhook,” where strange things are happening on set. She’s hoping that solving a new case will help get her out of her funk, and a worried Ryan (Riley Smith) offers to help Nancy since he is a self-proclaimed expert on the original version of the film. Meanwhile, Ace (Alex Saxon) helps Bess (Madison Jaizani) rehearse for her role as Victim #1 in the movie. Lastly, George (Leah Lewis) and Nick (Tunji Kasim) discover that they were both stood up for meetings by councilwoman, Brie, which gives them both an uneasy feeling. Pascal Verschooris directed the episode written by Jen Vestuto & Melissa Marlette Terrell (#404). Original airdate 6/21/2023.
The Gotham Knights are this close to exonerating themselves of Bruce Wayne’s murder in the synopsis for their June 20 episode, “City of Owls.”
INTO THE LION’S DEN — The team springs into action after uncovering the existence of evidence that could clear their names. Harvey (Misha Collins) follows a lead that could help him finally piece together what happened the night Bruce Wayne was murdered. After reuniting with her mother, Duela (Olivia Rose Keegan) begins to have second thoughts. Oscar Morgan, Navia Robinson, Fallon Smythe, Tyler DiChiara, Anna Lore and Rahart Adams also star. Ben Hernandez Bray directed the episode written by Brooke Pohl & Amy Do Thurlow (#112). Original airdate 6/20/2023.
Lex Luthor is released from prison in the synopsis for “Injustice,” the June 20 episode of Superman & Lois.
MICHAEL CUDLITZ “THE WALKING DEAD” GUEST STARS – Lois (Elizabeth Tulloch) and Clark (Tyler Hoechlin) clash with Jordan (Alex Garfin) over his carelessness around using his powers in public, while Jonathan (Michael Bishop) struggles with Kyle’s (Erik Valdez) change in behavior at the firehouse. Meanwhile, Sarah (Inde Navarrette) grows frustrated with Lana (Emmanuelle Chriqui) after she accidentally makes things more complicated with Jordan. And finally, after seventeen years behind bars, Lex Luthor (guest star Michael Cudlitz (The Walking Dead, set to be released from prison. Sudz Sutherland directed the episode written by Michael Narducci (#312). Original airdate 6/20/2023.
Meanwhile, Betty and Veronica host a boy-girl slumber party in the synopsis for “After the Fall,” the June 21 episode of Riverdale.
THE AFTERMATH — Archie (KJ Apa) and Reggie (Charles Melton) lean on each other as they prepare for their big basketball game against Stonewall Prep. Meanwhile, as they deal with ongoing issues with their parents, Betty (Lili Reinhart) and Veronica (Camila Mendes) decide to throw a slumber party with Kevin (Casey Cott) and Clay (guest star Karl Walcott). Cole Sprouse, Madelaine Petsch, Madchen Amick and Drew Ray Tanner also star. Julia Bettencourt directed the episode written by Gigi Swift (#712). Original airdate 6/21/2023.
What’s better than one Optimus, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts asks? Two Optimuses. Optimii? Anyway, what’s even better than that? When one of those Optimuses/Optimiiis in fact a giant transforming mechanical gorilla.
Thankfully, not only are we getting that in Rise of the Beasts—as the movie franchise finally brings forth the Maximals, Terrorcons, and Predacons of the Transformers series to the big screen—we got to get up close and personal with both Optimus Prime and Optimus Primal in person today, when Paramount and Hasbro brought the giant-sized robot heroes to Times Square in New York City to celebrate the upcoming movie.
The classically G-1 inspired Optimus Prime design that first dazzled us in Bumblebee is always a pleasure to see, but the chance to see Rise of the Beasts’ take on Primal’s simian form in all its glory was one we couldn’t miss—click through to see tons of awesome little details from Prime and Primal alike, because you probably won’t be able to spot and appreciate the fine points of Transformer design aesthetic when they’re up on the big screen smashing their foes into scrap when Rise of the Beasts hits theaters next week on June 9.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Optimus Prime and Optimus Primal Statues in Times Square, NYC
When Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse hits theaters tonight, one thing is very clear from the very first scene. This is not simply a Miles Morales movie. It’s a Gwen Stacy movie too. The film starts with Gwen, gives her more context, backstory, and a heck of a lot of very difficult to problems to deal with along the way.
After you see the film, if you weren’t already, you are going to be a big Gwen fan. Maybe you’ll even want to take after Miles and put art of her on your wall. That’s where the Plush Art Club comes in. It’s recruited ultra-popular anime artist Ilya Kuvshinov to do a Spider-Gwen poster, and it’s rad.
Releasing Friday, June 2 at 3:00pm EST at Plush Art Club, Spider-Gwen by Ilya Kuvshinov is an 18 x 24 inch, 10-color screen print in an edition of 195. It costs $60. And if the poster was just Kuvshinov doing a kick-ass anime version of it would be enough. But look a little closer.
The title of the poster is done as a UV ghost layer, meaning it’s only visible from certain angles. You can see it in the bottom images.
Image: Plush Art ClubImage: Plush Art ClubImage: Plush Art ClubImage: Plush Art ClubImage: Plush Art Club
Spider-Gwen by Ilya Kuvshinov is an 18 x 24 inch, 10-color screen print in an edition of 195. Snag one Friday, June 2 at 3:00pm EST at Plush Art Club.
A crop of the poster art for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.Image: Lucasfilm
Of all the Indiana Jones movies, I’ve seen Temple of Doom the most. Between a worn-out VHS copy and watching on TV, I’ve probably seen it 100 times. I know every wink, every expression, every inflection of every line reading. I love it unconditionally and figured, watching it again in the lead-up to Indy’s fifth and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I wouldn’t really find much to talk about. I was wrong.
In the weeks ahead, io9 is going to revisit each of the Indiana Jones films just to see what, if anything, stands out about them now, in 2023, as Dial of Destiny is coming to theaters. Last week it was Raiders of the Lost Ark, widely considered to be one of the best action films ever made. Temple of Doom doesn’t hold that distinction, and it’s easy to see why. It’s like a whole other genre of movie.
Rewatching Temple of Doom today, you can’t help but look at it through the window of many modern franchises. Franchises that stick to the same formula every single time, and the choice few that don’t. On the surface, Temple of Doom is an Indiana Jones movie. That much is clear. But it’s not at all a film that feels like its predecessor. From the very opening of the film, with its Busby Berkeley-inspired song and dance, through the screwball comedy of the first hour, which then takes a hard pivot into almost horror before a character literally looks at you, smiles, and things get back to action adventure, it’s a beautiful symphony of genre and tone. One where all bets are off, all realities are unimportant, and you just enjoy the ride.
Indy and WillieImage: Lucasfilm
The first clue to the film’s purposeful irreverence is in that opening musical number. First of all, it’s called “Anything Goes,” which pretty much says it all. But also, while things start in the actual club the scene takes place in—Club Obi-Wan, for you Star Wars fans out there—when Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) walks into a statue, the film relocates to an alternate reality. Where are all these leggy blond women dancing? It’s certainly not in a club in 1935 Shanghai. But it doesn’t matter; it’s beautifully staged, choreographed, and when Willie reemerges back to the club, director Steven Spielberg has set you up for excitement.
After not one (the club), not two (the car chase), but three (the plane crash) action sequences where you can barely catch your breath, we finally find out the story of the movie: a small, poor Indian village has had its children taken from it, as well as a rock which residents believe gives life to the land. The villagers also think that Indy (Harrison Ford) was sent to save them by their deity, Shiva. Which, on the one hand, seems a little silly. But watching the film again, I think I now believe the villagers. (Temple of Doom’s portrayal of the villagers and the surrounding community isn’t always, shall we say, culturally sensitive—not entirely surprising for a movie made four decades ago, but something that might stand out for a first-time viewer in 2023.)
Look at the evidence. The villagers prayed for someone to help them. Then, out of nowhere, a man who knows all about their magic rock falls out of the sky into their village. Indy’s plane could have run out of gas anywhere. The raft they used to get out could have landed anywhere. The river the raft was in could have taken them anywhere. But no, somehow the perfect person to do the job was right where he needed to be. Later, when the film shows that magic and otherworldly forces do exist, that all but seals it. I’ll never watch Temple of Doom again without believing Shiva did, in fact, send Indy.
Image: Lucasfilm
That’s about as serious things get in this section of the movie though. After Indy decides to go to the palace where this is all happening, we’re given this incredibly beautiful but also incredibly silly extended sequence of Indy, Short Round (future Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan, in his feature debut), and Willie traveling through the jungle, complete with wild animals, over-the-top screams, gambling, cheating, and all manner of jokes. It feels like a comedy and the comedy continues once they arrive at the palace.
The early scenes at the palace are some of my favorite movie scenes ever. The unforgettable dinner sequence is gross but wildly funny. Indy and Willie’s romantic flirting is completely over the top but still somehow sexy. And, finally, Indy and Short Round’s journey into the caves, with the bugs and the spikes and all that good stuff, is all handled with a knowing wink. Everything is fun, exciting, and silly.
Then, at almost exactly the one-hour mark (which is probably a coincidence but is still interesting), Indy and his friends find the underground Thuggee cult and the movie turns on a dime. For the next 20 or so minutes, we’re presented with some of the most terrifying, disgusting, upsetting imagery imaginable, especially for a PG movie. A heart is ripped out, a body goes up in flames, Indy is flogged and possessed, children are beaten, and people drink blood. This is not the same movie where a character screams at a giant animal and throws a snake because she thinks it’s an elephant trunk. This is dark disturbing stuff.
A turning point moment. Image: Lucasfilm
But Spielberg knows this. Short Round escapes, John Williams’ rousing music starts playing again, and after he gets up the ladder, Short Round looks into the camera and smiles. It’s a funny moment that kind of just passed me by in previous watches but this time, at this moment, I read it differently. I read Short Round’s expression almost as Spielberg himself saying “Sorry about all that, let’s get back to the fun stuff.” Because after the smile, Temple of Doom gets back to business.
Short Round saves Indy, Indy saves Willie, they save the kids, a Thuggee bad guy is crushed in a steamroller, then there’s the super-duper awesome (but not at all realistic) mine cart sequence. The movie is back to its adventurous first-half tone, culminating in the gorgeously staged, but still funny and scary, bridge sequence where Indy kills the bad guy and saves the day, another personal favorite.
The mine cart sequence rules.Image: Lucasfilm
Finally, to really drive it all of this home, Temple of Doom has one of the happiest endings ever. Not only does Indy win. Not only do the bad guys lose. Not only does Indy get the stone. All of the village’s kids return in a joyous outpouring of emotion that’s just the cherry on top of this wild, incredible ride. As Paul Simon said, “the mother and child reunion is only a motion away.”
The magic of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is how big it swings. It knows we loved Raiders of the Lost Ark but it trusts us to go on an adventure that’s even wilder, hitting on all different notes. Maybe that’s why some people don’t like it as much, and why the subsequent Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade went back to a similar structure and tone as the original. But to me, Temple of Doom is the Indiana Jones—both the character and the movie—that I love most.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is available to stream on both Disney+ and Paramount +. Next week: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Let’s warp back into kids and beg the adults in our lives for the incredible dolls Mattel just dropped, featuring the already iconic Barbie and Ken looks from the movie. Oh, wait—we’re the adults in our lives? Our poor wallets.
Here’s a look at the dolls that will have you immediately running to Toys R’ Us—er, Mattel’s internet storefront. Barbie hits theaters July 21.
Six months after the fallout Wizards of the Coast experienced because of its mishandling of Dungeons & Dragons’ Open Game License, Paizo, another TTRPG publisher (known for Pathfinder and Starfinder) has released the third—and what it hopes will be the final—draft of the Open RPG Creative License. Paizo doesn’t own the license, nor is this a license just for Paizo’s work. Much like the OGL or the Creative Commons, it will be a freely available license.
Not only is the full ORC license now available to read, but Paizo also included an Answers and Explanations (AxE) document that identifies pressure points, details exactly how to use the license, and shows how the license protects both original and derivative work. The full ORC license is very broad and detailed, covering a lot of ground in order to future-proof the license. The authors “opted for simplicity wherever possible but when we were faced with a decision between precision or simplicity, we opted for precision.”
For a long time Paizo’s communications hinted that it wanted to establish a trust of some kind to shepherd and maintain the license, but now one of the big changes seems to be that the license will be entered into the public record via the Library of Congress. While this is more or less the final license, there is a small period where people who see mistakes can point them out for consideration on the ORC License Discord.
The ORC License is, in Paizo’s own words, “a system-agnostic, perpetual, and irrevocable open gaming license that provides a legal ‘safe harbor’ for sharing rules mechanics and encourages collaboration and innovation in the tabletop gaming space.” The company has worked with “hundreds” of publishers on crafting this document in a way that allows some rights to be retained and others to be open to derivative content. Azora Law worked extensively on the documents which will basically serve to split copyright law in half within any document that is licensed under the ORC.
The Final Interim ORC License is available on the Azora Law site. Copyright registrations are being filed with the Library of Congress, and Paizo expects to have the final ORC License and AxE available to the public in about six months. The only difference between the Interim license and the final license will be the addition of a notice of public copyright.
Ezra Miller and Sasha Calle in The Flash. Image: Warner Bros.
When The Flash hits theaters later this month, audiences are in for a whole lot of surprises. We know there are two Batmen in it. We know that Supergirl is in it. We know that General Zod is in it. Some other things have leaked too and there’s much, much more. One thing many fans might be expectingisn’t in it though, and we asked the film’s director and producer why.
Note: the people behind this have already confirmed on the record that it doesn’t happen, so we’re running it now. But if you want to go into The Flash completely cold and brimming with possibility, you should leave now. We won’t spoil anything that happens in the movie, only something that’s not in it at all.
Back in early 2020, months after director Andy Muschietti came on boardThe Flash with his producer partner, Barbara Muschietti, Ezra Miller appeared on The Flash TV series as his version of the Flash. Miller’s Barry found themselves opposite the star of that show, Grant Gustin, as Barry, and it was fun and weird and surprising. Here it is.
Crisis on Infinite Earths Cameo | DCEU Barry Allen meets Barry Allen Scene
The conclusion would be, then, that Gustin himself would appear in the movie. Well, earlier this year, as The Flash TV show was getting set to wrap up, Gustin confirmed to TV Line that he doesn’t. “There’s been a lot of rumors out there for a long time and no one’s come out directly and asked me ever on the record,” Gustin said. “People ask me on the street all the time but no, I’m not keeping some big, elaborate secret.”
io9 spoke to the Muschiettis recently and asked if a theatrical crossover was ever going to happen. “Someone mentioned it in the early stages of the project ... and I thought it was a great idea, but unfortunately we couldn’t put everyone [in]. We had to choose,” Andy said. “But we love Grant,” Barbara added. “And he’s done clearly an amazing job to bring the Flash to life for so many seasons.”
Not having the space for a third version of the Flash (remember, Miller plays two versions) makes sense. The film already has to do so much with Barry, Barry’s parents, Batman one, Batman two, Supergirl, Zod, etc. And hey, at least Flash fans will always have the TV crossover.
The Flash movie opens June 16. Check back next week for our review.
The film, which was written by Fast and Furious mainstay Chris Morgan, will be a bridge between Fast Xand Fast 11 following Johnson’s character, Luke Hobbs. It’s not, however, a sequel to the franchise’s first spinoff, Hobbs and Shaw, even though other Fast and Furious characters are expected to return. The Wrap broke the news.
Does that mean Deckard Shaw, Jason Statham’s character who co-starred with Johnson in Hobbs & Shaw, could be back? Hypothetically. He’s one of the very few Fast characters who aren’t either presumed dead, about to die, or in Antarctica at the end of Fast X. The one person who definitely isn’t going to appear though is Vin Diesel’s character, Domenic Toretto. Diesel is, however, a producer of the new film.
“The next Fast & Furious film you’ll see the legendary lawman in will be the Hobbs movie that will serve as a fresh, new chapter & set up for Fast X: Part II,” Johnson wrote on Twitter. “Last summer Vin and I put all the past behind us. We’ll lead with brotherhood and resolve—and always take care of the franchise, characters & fans that we love.”
Bringing Hobbs back into the Fast and Furious franchise was a no-brainer, but a spinoff that links the two movies? That just doesn’t seem very interesting. It can’t actually take place between the two movies because of where Fast X left the other characters, so you’d imagine this movie will probably be taking place simultaneously, ending with the Fast X end credits scene of Jason Momoa’s Dante calling out Shaw, setting the table for the 11th film. The 11th film will be directed by Louis Letterier with a tentative 2025 release date.
Does that now get pushed with the Hobbs movie? And is this script actually written or will the ongoing writers strike delay it? We don’t know but we do know there are more questions here than answers.
To celebrate Strange New Worlds season two in a few weeks, Paramount has released the first season in its entirety on YouTube to stream for a limited time. The big catch is that while Star Trek presents a future with a united earth, we don’t have that right now: so it’s only streaming on YouTube if you’re based in the United States. I’m sure the most intrepid of Star Trek fans outside of the U.S. can boldly find a way to circumnavigate that without beaming themselves to a different country, however.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | Season 1, Episode 1 | Full Episode | Paramount+
But however you’re watching, if it’s the first time you’re watching if you’re in for a treat. Although Star Trek as a franchise has had a historical reputation for rocky premiere seasons, unearned or otherwise, it’s largely uncontroversial to say that Strange New Worlds came out with one of, if not the strongest debut seasons in the franchise across its first 10 episodes. Delivering a heady mix of classic Trek riffs that hit everything from full-on fantastical farce to chilling horror, and even extrapolations on some of the original series’ greatest episodes, there’s hardly a miss among the collection.
And if you’re rewatching? Why not brush up with the help of io9’s full season of Star Trek: Strange New World recaps and along the way—click through for links to our initial spoiler-free review of the season, and our spoiler-laden episodic recaps.
Spoiler Free Review: Strange New Worlds Has the Classic Star Trek Vibe You’ve Been Waiting For
Image: Paramount
Star Trek’s grand return, first with Discovery, and now with what feels like a whole flotilla of series, transformed the franchise into a series of heavily serialized adventures for the most part—a distinct break from the style that had largely guided the franchise for half a century prior. With Strange New Worlds, it re-embraces that format once more: and in doing so, stands apart among its contemporaries as some of the best Trek around.
Star Trek, from its very beginning, has been about a lot of things, but one thing above all: beautiful people performing competence porn. The idealized future utopia, the spaceships and costumes, the action and adventure, the sci-fi of it all, that can be brushed aside if Star Trek gives you people who really enjoy being good at their jobs. So what do you do when you take one of its brightest and imagine them in a place where they’re not quite sure they’re that good yet?
Three weeks in and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is already settling into a satisfying groove: one part riff on a formula that Star Trek loves, one part focus on a singular character, one part classic morality tale. This week, you get bang for your buck with not one, but two formula riffs—and a whole lot more in a fascinating look at Rebecca Romijn’s Una Chin-Riley, better known as Number One.
So far, so Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has given us a really solid formula between riffing on classic Trek premises and taking one of its main characters for a little deeper dive along the way. This week is no exception, but with an especially great riff: What if modern Star Trek did its own “Balance of Terror,”with a dash of “Year of Hell,” and even a little whiff of The Wrath of Khan?
Any good episodic TV series knows how to deal with often dramatic tone shifts that, in our era of heavily serialized programming, might seem tone-deaf or jarring. Star Trek, of course, is no exception to this having been episodic for so much of its 50+ year history—some weeks you fight god, some weeks the holodeck’s Moriarty replica is trying to gain sentience and break free. That’s Star Trek, and Strange New Worlds is more than happy to re-prove that.
So far, Strange New Worlds has found strength in simplicity: week in, week out, a new adventure, a new bit of fun, and it’s done and dealt with before moving onto the next. Even the higher-stakes moments have always ended with a clarity that our Starfleet heroes overcame hardship, did the right thing, and saved the day. This week’s episode offers something to challenge that, but it doesn’t always quite work.
After last week’s attempts at more moral complexity didn’t quite hit the mark, this week Star Trek: Strange New Worlds re-centered on what’s worked for it in the past: a camp, tropey bit of action hung around a central member of the Enterprise crew. This time, Ethan Peck’s Spock took the limelight again—and although this was a little more self-serious on the surface than the last time that happened, we still had a lot of fun along the way.
Although it has largely treated its characters with great care in its debut season, Star Trek: Strange New World’s general sense of episodic breeziness has also given those characters a light touch—moments of highlights, but nothing too deep with our crewmates. This week’s episode changes that, wrapping up one of its most sincere stories yet in the show’s most zany caper.
Strange New Worlds has prided itself in its first season on a somewhat sense of ephemerality—that even at its direst of stakes, our enterprising heroes would come out the other side and move on to the next big adventure. This week’s penultimate episode of the season proved just how scary and incredible the series can be when it confronts arguably its truest idea of horror: lasting consequence.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a show both in love with, and unable to escape, its place in the Star Trek timeline. From the get-go it’s known that inherently—as a series following the captain of the Enterprise we know is going to be replaced by the captain of the Enterprise—Strange New Worlds would as much about destiny as it is legacy. But its debut season’s finale masterfully balanced those two threads together to create something magical.
If your idea of “beach reads” includes subjects like aliens, space battles, fantasy battles, time-travel, monsters, demons, vampires, magical circus performers, and fresh takes on classic mythology... this list of 42 new sci-fi, fantasy, and horror releases for June has got you covered.
Image: William Morrow
The Battle of Maldon and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth by J.R.R. Tolkien,edited by Peter Grybauskas
“Leading Tolkien scholar Peter Grybauskas, presents for the very first time J.R.R. Tolkien’s own prose translation of The Battle of Maldon together with the definitive treatment of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and its accompanying essays.” (June 6)
Image: SparkPress
The Byways by Mary Pascual
When a misfit high schooler is pulled into the byways—“a world of alleys, magic, and forgotten people . . . some that aren’t even human”—she must figure out how to escape, as well as why she ended up there in the first place. (June 6)
Image: Mira
Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale
A woman starts using her newfound ability to “rewind” her life to fix past mistakes, but things don’t improve the way she assumes they will. (June 6)
Image: Headpress
Corman/Poe: Interviews and Essays Exploring the Making of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe Films, 1960-1964 by Chris Alexander
This film-history book features interviews with Roger Corman (who also wrote the foreword) as well as critical analysis of each of the eight Poe adaptations he made with American International Pictures, plus “dozens of photographs and stills, many of which have never been published before.” (June 6)
Image: Harper Perennial
The Endless Vessel by Charles Soule
In a world being consumed by a “depression plague,” a young scientist struggles to keep her sense of hope and joy alive, embarking on a journey across time and space to find the source of happiness. (June 6)
Image: Delacorte Press
The Grimoire of Grave Fates created by Hanna Alkaf and Margaret Owen
“Crack open your spell book and enter the world of the illustrious Galileo Academy for the Extraordinary. There’s been a murder on campus, and it’s up to the students of Galileo to solve it. Follow 18 authors and 18 students as they puzzle out the clues and find the guilty party.” (June 6)
Image: Crown
The Last Action Heroes: The Trimphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage by Nick de Semlyen
“The behind-the-scenes story of the action heroes who ruled 1980s and ’90s Hollywood and the beloved films that made them stars, including Die Hard, First Blood, The Terminator, and more,” featuring interviews with the stars and their cinematic collaborators.(June 6)
Image: Scholastic Books
The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson
When the daughter of a Library god meets two people in desperate need of help, she’s uniquely poised to access the Library’s many mystical secrets—which lead her to shocking discoveries that could reshape the future for all involved. (June 6)
Image: Tor Nightfire
Maeve Fly by CJ Leede
By day, she’s a theme-park princess; by night, she’s a Sunset Strip barfly. But things take a turn for the gruesome when she meets her best friend’s brother and starts modeling her life after American Psycho. (June 6)
Image: Tin House Books
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller
Amid a frightening pandemic, a disgraced marine biologist volunteers for an experimental vaccine trial that could be humanity’s last hope. (June 6)
Image: Blackstone Publishing
The Moon Represents My Heart by Pim Wangtechawat
When the parents in a British Chinese family of time travelers fail to return from a journey, the kids they left behind must figure out their own place in the past, present, and future. (June 6)
Image: Riverhead Books
My Murder by Katie Williams
After a young mother is murdered by a serial killer, a government project resurrects her—but her joy at getting a second chance is tempered with her growing fascination with uncovering what happened in her life in the lead-up to her death. (June 6)
Image: Melville House
Relentless Melt by Jeremy P. Bushnell
In 1909 Boston, a department-store salesgirl disguises herself as a boy so that she can learn to become a detective, then teams up with an occult-obsessed wannabe magician to dig into a supernatural mystery plaguing the city. Read an excerpt here. (June 6)
Image: Entangled: Teen
Ruling Destiny by Alyson Noel
The Stealing Infinity series continues as the time-traveling students of Gray Wolf Academy puzzle through a mystery that stretches across history. (June 6)
Image: Orbit
Translation State by Ann Leckie
“The mystery of a missing translator sets three lives on a collision course that will have a ripple effect across the stars.” Read an excerpt here. (June 6)
Image: Sourcebooks Fire
The Warning by Kristy Acevedo
When a high-school student encounters a hologram claiming to be a human from the future, carrying a warning that the world’s about to end, she must decide whether she trusts it enough to step through a portal it claims offers safety on the other side. (June 6)
Image: Orbit
The Combat Codes by Alexander Darwin
This first book in a new sci-fantasy trilogy takes place “In a world where battle-hardened warriors determine the fate of empires, war-ravaged nations seek out a new champion.” (June 13)
Image: Ace
Demons of Good and Evil by Kim Harrison
The latest entry in the long-running Hollows series brings in an evil new adversary for witch-born demon Rachel Morgan as she tries to protect Cincinnati’s paranormal population. (June 13)
Image: Harper Voyager
The Evergreen Heir by A.K. Mulford
The Five Crowns of Okrith fantasy series continues, following the adventures of a “neurodivergent bookworm” reluctantly facing an arranged marriage with a fae warrior—all while dealing with a witchy uprising that threatens the rule of their mother, the kingdom’s troubled queen. (June 13)
Image: Tor Books
The First Bright Thing by J.R. Dawson
In post-World War I America, a time-traveling ringmaster runs a circus for “magical misfits and outcasts” with her trapeze-artist wife—but the safe haven they’ve created soon comes under threat from a rival circus ruled by a far more sinister leader. (June 13)
Image: Flatiron Books
Maddalena and the Dark by Julia Fine
In this fairytale set in 18th century Venice, two teenage girls meet at an elite music school and form a deep friendship that takes a strangely magical turn. (June 13)
Image: Random House Canada
Morgan Is My Name by Sophie Keetch
This feminist retelling of Arthurian villainess Morgan le Fay explores the world of “a woman both mortal and magical, formidable and misunderstood, told in her own words.” (June 13)
Image: Hyperion Avenue
On Earth as It Is on Television by Emily Jane
When aliens touch down on Earth for a brief visit, different characters across America grapple with the weirdness: a meek dad who does whatever his wife and TV-addicted kids want, a lonely woman trapped in her own not-ideal family situation, and a coma victim who suddenly awakens and sets out on a road trip of self-discovery. (June 13)
Image: William Morrow
Psyche and Eros by Luna McNamara
In this fresh retelling of the Greek myth, a rebellious woman spends her life training for a fated battle—until she meets the god of desire, who falls for her after accidentally pricking himself with one of his own arrows, and must team up with him as the Trojan War rises around them. (June 13)
Image: Random House
The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni
“Reality and the supernatural collide when an expert puzzle maker is thrust into an ancient mystery—one with explosive consequences for the fate of humanity.” (June 13)
Image: Gallery / Saga Press
Savage Crowns by Matt Wallace
The Savage Rebellion trilogy concludes with the final war for Crache, pitting those in power (and their cruel military) against its army of rebellious citizens. Can the women who control each side come to an understanding before all is lost? (June 13)
Image: Tor.com
Book of Gems by Fran Wilde
The Gem Universe series continues as a determined scientist journeys to the recently rediscovered Palace of Gems, intent on tracking down her research-stealing mentor while also digging into the truth about the Jeweled Valley. (June 20)
Image: Harper Voyager
Capture the Sun by Jessie Mihalik
The Starlight’s Shadow trilogy concludes as “an intergalactic thief must join forces with the charming teleporter who stole her last job—and may now be her only hope for saving her former crew.” (June 20)
Image: Blackstone Publishing
Citadel by C.M. Alongi
In this sci-fi debut, “a nonverbal autistic woman refuses to crumble as she stands against a dogmatic society clinging to a centuries-long conflict built on lies.” (June 20)
Image: Razorbill
A Crooked Mark by Linda Kao
A teenaged boy who has spent his life traveling with his father, hunting down people marked by the devil, must reevaluate his entire existence when he befriends their latest target, a young car-crash survivor. (June 20)
Image: St. Martin’s Press
The Edge of Sleep by Jake Emanuel and Willie Block
A nightwatchman who’s long suffered night terrors bands together with friends and strangers when a strange phenomenon takes over the world: everyone who falls asleep dies. (June 20)
Image: Blackstone Publishing
The Infinite Miles by Hannah Fergesen
When a woman’s long-missing best friend suddenly reappears—along with the fictional hero of their favorite Doctor Who-ish sci-fi TV series—she’s pulled into a wild time-travel adventure with an evil alien entity in hot pursuit. (June 20)
Image: Henry Holt and Co.
Garden of the Cursed by Katy Rose Pool
In this fantasy mystery, “cursebreaker Marlow Briggs reluctantly pretends to be in love with a powerful noble to gain entry into an illustrious—and deadly—society that holds clues to her mother’s disappearance.” (June 20)
Image: Tor Nightfire
Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin
This tale that’s already been earmarked for the TV series treatment follows a young woman who’s grown up protecting her mother’s monstrous secret—but finds new hope for the future when she meets a rebellious musician. (June 20)
Image: Penguin Books
The Shadow Cabinet by Juno Dawson
The Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series continues as the witchy friend group strives to keep their coven together—all while facing a world that’s suspicious of their powers but may need their help to save it. (June 20)
Image: Tordotcom
The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon
The Downworld Sequence sci-fi series begins by exploring a world “where AI deities and brutal police states clash, wielding giant robots steered by pilot-priests with corrupted bodies.” (June 27)
Image: Tor Books
The Frugal Wizard’s Guide to Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson
This blend of “Jason Bourne and epic fantasy” follows a wizard who awakens in a strange time and place with no memory of who he is—and missing his copy of the one book that could possibly help him (see: this book’s title). (June 27)
Image: Sourcebooks Landmark
How to Be Remembered by Michael Thompson
Once a year, a man wakes up to find that everyone in his life has forgotten him—something he endures until he falls in love, and sets out on a quest to free himself from the “Reset” that’s ruled his entire existence. (June 27)
Image: Harper Voyager
The Ghosts of Trappist by K.B. Wagers
“NeoG—the Near-Earth Orbital Guard, a diverse military force that patrols and protects the solar system, inspired by the real-life mission of the Coast Guard—and the crew of Zuma’s Ghost are under attack, and shocking truths are about to be exposed.” (June 27)
Image: Orbit
Gods of the Wyrdwood by RJ Barker
An expert forest guide helps a woman searching for a lost child—but they both serve different gods, a fact which will cloud certain loyalties along the way. (June 27)
Image: William Morrow
Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs
In this debut novel, “estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family’s library of magical books must work together to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection—a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of magic and power.” (June 27)
Image: Del Rey
The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis
A woman visiting Roswell, New Mexico for her friend’s UFO-themed wedding is abducted by a curiously sympathetic alien—and that’s just the start of the adventure in this road-trip rom-com sci-fi tale. (June 27)
You might want to dig out a night light and keep those closet doors secured after watching The Boogeyman.
Stephen King’s 1973 short story taps into fear drawn from the eponymous Boogeyman legend, which has long taken the form of the darkness in childhoods before there was even a name to give it. Now, director Rob Savage, whose downright scary as hell Host film dominated the horror sphere during lockdown (watch it on Shudder), takes on more horrors at home with a script by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place) and Mark Heyman (Black Swan). The horror filmmakers take a King rite of passage differently than most by doing less of a straight-up adaptation of the Night Shift short story, instead rather fantastically using it as groundwork for a new story.
Image: 20th Century Studios
It does include the short’s main character Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian), who turns up at the home of Will Harper (Chris Messina), a therapist whose family is mourning the loss of his wife and mother of his children. Billings recounts the harrowing horrors of the Boogeyman, who took his kids and wrongfully framed him for their deaths, and inadvertently passes its demonic need to feed onto the Harper family.
Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Vivien Lyra Blair star as Sadie and Sawyer Harper, who in the midst of their dealing with the death of their mom are haunted by the Boogeyman. The young acting duo really has their characters’ sibling relationship on lock; you absolutely believe them as sisters, and they carry the film. Savage’s choices in framing their encounters with the Boogeyman and getting those very real moments of horror—he truly has a knack for scares—demonstrate his flair for close collaboration with his actors.
Image: 20th Century Studios
For most of the film you’re rooting for the Harper girls’ safety as their father spirals, trying to avoid the danger they’re in—while what he really needs to do is listen to his kids before losing them for good. You never feel like he’s a bad dad, though; this family, like most going through the unimaginable, are worth rooting for, making the stakes higher as the body count rises. Thatcher secures her place as a performer to watch in a turn that centers The Boogeyman’s coming-of-age story. It also provides the perfect final girl vehicle for the young actress, who demonstrates her chops in a role where she nails both emotional gravitas and kick-ass horror moments. As for little Princess Leia, Blair makes you believe the Boogeyman is real in her breakout film role.
The Boogeyman is a frightfully fantastic movie filled with solid scares, a sick creature design, and family drama. It’s also a chilling throwback that will make you feel like a kid again in the scariest way possible. It’s the sort of movie that will linger with you and rear its head when you turn off the lights, no matter how old you are.
Building something perfectly round using Lego bricks is a task seemingly as impossible as drawing a perfect circle with an Etch A Sketch. And yet, Lego’s designers have somehow managed to engineer a brilliant replica of Captain America’s shield and while it’s not exactly life-size, it still measures in at an impressive 18-inches across.
The set weighs in at a beefy 3,128 pieces, and while the end result looks like a fantastic cosplay accessory, unless you’re building it with a tube of Kragle in hand, the last thing you’ll want to do is attempt to throw this thing like a frisbee. Unlike Captain America’s shield, which is made from a nearly indestructible Vibranium-metal alloy, this shield is an all plastic affair and will come apart on impact faster than wet Kleenex. Lego hasn’t provided any images of the back of the shield, but we’re assuming it deliberately doesn’t come with a way to strap it to your arm.
This is also one of those sets that looks like the build process is going to be a bit of a mind-numbing marathon, with lots and lots of repetitive sections, both front and back. The end result looks great, but you might not enjoy the journey as much for this one.
The shield also comes with a buildable display base that keeps it propped up, including a nameplate, and a Captain America minifigure wielding their own tiny shield, and a miniature replica of Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir.
The Lego Captain America’s Shield won’t officially hit store shelves or ship out until August 1, but it’s currently available for pre-order through Lego’s website for $200.
Grammy award-winning R&B songwriter, producer and New Orleans’ own PJ Morton has been announced as Disney Imagineering’s musical collaborator for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.
io9 attended the in-the-field research trip hosted by Disney Parks with Disney Imagineering and Walt Disney Animation Studios in New Orleans, Louisiana to dig a little deeper into what goes into making an attraction inspired by The Princess and the Frog. In order to homage Disney’s First Black and American Princess, Imagineering creatives went back to the city that started it all like their Disney Animation counterparts did for the film. During a presentation at the historic Jazz music Preservation Hall in the heart of the French Quarter, the team behind the attraction announced that for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will feature new original music in collaboration with PJ Morton. Actors Anika Noni Rose (Princess Tiana), Jennifer Lewis (Mama Odie), Bruno Campos (Prince Naveen), Michael Leon Wooley (Louis), are all set to reprise their roles in content made for the new attraction.
“For me personally, it’s a dream come true. First of all, Disney is an institution and it’s always been so closely connected to the music—it’s always so intentional.” Morton shared with attending press during the announcement, citing watching Mary Poppins in class as a touchstone on his path that led him to work on Tiana’s Bayou. “Hearing those [Sherman Brothers] songs, it connected to me. It hit me deeply, and continued to. [From] me and my sister harmonizing with The Little Mermaid and making our own versions to me now, actually being able to create some original music for Disney is just really a full circle moment. I get to be me and represent New Orleans. I don’t think you get New Orleans and get the movement and the rhythm of New Orlean without the music. You don’t get the history of New Orleans without jazz fest and what that brings in—all the talent. And we have it on the street. I mean, you can find it at any moment, at any time, any age.”
Concept Art: Naveen’s little brother Prince Ralphie animatronic to be featured on Tiana’s Bayou AdventureImage: Disney Parks
Imagineering Executive Creative Director Ted Robledo, in conversation with Morton, really emphasized the importance of giving Tiana a new story with an exclusive song for the attraction—but don’t worry Princess and the Frog fans, some familiar songs from the film will also be featured. “It was time for our next chapter story. I think that the people who love Princess Tiana, the fans, I think they deserve more of what was captured in Princess in the Frog. And I think that’s why we brought folks on like PJ to help us deliver more of whats already great.” he shared. To really understand what that meant, I think it was so important to actually be in New Orleans for this jazz club chat. Growing up going to Disneyland, having my favorite land be New Orleans Square (home of my fave ride The Haunted Mansion) I simply had no idea of what to expect. The real New Orleans is the most alive city I’ve ever visited, it inhales the scent of food and exhales the sound of music in a way that no other place does.
Robledo elaborated on the importance of authentically representing New Orleans. “Research is what we do. And for those of us lucky to be here with PJ, we wanted to share that experience of research with you, just to just to give you as much of that feeling that we had. Being so impressed by what this city has, what’s part of its history, just how much a part of it is music and how it’s revered here in such a way. You know some places are oil towns, some places are movie towns, this is music and yeah, food.”
Morton explained how it’s full circle to bring New Orleans back to the parks, “We know as New Orleanians how many times people tell us how New Orleans is supposed to be presented. And we’ve seen movies and things where it’s like, ‘Okay that’s not necessarily my home, but I see what piece of New Orleans that is.’ But these guys were being so intentional about making sure that the story is told in an authentic way and that the music is done in an authentic way. Everybody who bring it along to be a part of this is just very authentic to New Orleans and very real. You know, not trying to make a caricature of New Orleans is really is but being our city.” he explained. The Music the lifeblood of the fabric of cultures that weave a history through art that’s first nature for a whole place. It’s adorable and quaint to think New Orleans Square holds a candle. Sure, it’s a love letter that speaks to how the city which fills the air with music on every street corner impacted Walt Disney, no doubt an inspiration he brought back from his visits in the 1950's for the constant atmospheric music loops and live performers at Disneyland.
PJ Morton being presented with portrait by Imagineer Ted RobledoPhoto: Sabina Graves/Gizmodo
Robledo and his team went back to the roots, “When you look around it starts here and it goes around the world. The research it’s very important to us because we want to be as authentic as possible. We want to give people the feeling that we’re feeling.” It’s the real deal. Oh, you’ll fall in love and it’s people know it.
“Music was literally everywhere a part of my life but I think New Orleans is that is one of the only places where you’ll find fourth generation musicians.I’m saying it’s a lineage and that’s all I’ve ever known. It’s omnipresent. So whatever you do here, music is the underbed. You know, it’s always there. And I didn’t fully appreciate that until I left home and noticed ‘Oh wait, there’s not music everywhere I go. And there’s not music a part of everything I’m doing?’ Wow that’s unique to my home.” Morton shared of leaving his hometown to pursue his career, “I’m born and raised in New Orleans, I also represent something else. We talk about our past a lot, but sometimes we stay there in New Orleans and we only talk about that past. But there’s also so much happening with this new generation of New Orleanian musicians who respect that and love that, but also bring it forward. And I think that’s what this this whole thing is about, you know, is carrying that torch.”
The original song written, arranged and produced by Morton, continues the Disney Parks tradition of attractions with their own theme song—think X Atencio’s “Grim Grinning Ghosts” for the Haunted Mansion or the Sherman Brothers’ “It’s a Small World”. Robledo continued, “There’s a long legacy of music as part of our attractions. For me as a fan as kid, it’s like that was as much of the experience of going to Disneyland—those songs: “It’s a small world”, “A Pirate’s Life for Me”—that theme from the Haunted Mansion. My lola [Filipino for Grandmother], her favorite attraction was the Country Bears Jamboree—a bunch of bears playing Ho-Down music. She loved it. And I realized later in life that it’s as much the experience of what we do and what we deliver as imagineers. The Sherman brothers wrote some of my favorite songs, both for Disney films and Disney parks.”
Art of PJ Morton and one of the new critter musicians which will be an animatronic in the attractionImage: Disney Parks
Morton, music arranger Terrence Blanchard, and the band of New Orleans musicians enlisted to bring new music to life for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure were ready to represent her as their own and continue her legacy. “Because the story’s been told through both the [Randy Newman] songs and the music I just felt a big responsibility. I just wanted to make sure that it represented well and that in all humility fit right in with those amazing songs that existed already...” he said of the experience working on the music to explore Tiana’s life as a restauranteur bringing her community together for a big Mardi Gras celebration, that’s the focus of the ride Imagineers are cooking up, “...but the fun part for me was because it doesn’t exist I had to imagine Tiana now and what she’s doing, what she’s running and how you know, how her dreams are coming true and what you know, what’s going on. That’s the kid part of me, which I look up to all of you guys [the Imagineers], because you get to be grown kids all your life, you know, coming up with stories. I don’t want to grow up.”
As long as Tiana is a part of the Disney Princess legacy, we don’t either.
Princess Tiana building her communityImage: Disney Parks
Throughout 2023 and into 2024, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will be under construction as it’s new story will be homed in the bi-coastal log flume attraction formerly known as Splash Mountain, with a 2024 opening date set for Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom and Disneyland sometime after.
Could another Resident Evil movie be on the way? The live-action Moana remake has found its director. Get a glimpse into Barbie’s dream house. Taika Waititi talks about the struggle of writing his Star Wars movie. Plus, what’s coming on Superman & Lois and Gotham Knights. To me, my spoilers!
The Thing 2
During a recent appearance at Texas Frightmare Weekend (via Creepy Catalog), John Carpenter stated there “may” be a sequel to The Thing in development but the director is “sworn to secrecy.”
I have been sworn to secrecy, okay, because there may be, I don’t know if there will be, there may be a Thing 2.
John Carpenter Q&A @ Texas Frightmare Weekend 2023. Was Childs ‘The Thing’ ?
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles
According to Sudbury.com (via Bloody-Disgusting), the city of Greater Sudbury, Northern Ontario has received funding for a film titled The Umbrella Chronicles speculated to be a new entry in the Resident Evil franchise.
Terrifier 3
Deadline adlso reports a new Terrifier film is officially in development, boasting “a budget in the low-mid seven figure range, a significant increase on that of the [first] sequel.”
Moana
According to THR, Hamilton’s Thomas Kail as been hired to direct Disney’s live-action Moana remake.
Taika Waititi’s Star Wars
During a recent interview with THR, Taika Waititi admitted he’s having trouble writing the “middle part” of his upcoming Star Wars movie.
I’ve got a really good idea for it. It’s just as with all films, it’s this middle part. You’re like, ‘What’s going to happen?’ And then you look at all of those films that are so great, you’re like, ‘Well, I guess they can’t meet some smuggler with an alien sidekick.
Photo: Warner Bros.Photo: Warner Bros.Photo: Warner Bros.Photo: Warner Bros.Photo: Warner Bros.Photo: Warner Bros.
Poor Thing
Elsewhere, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Frankenstein-esque Poor Things now has a poster.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
We also have two new posters for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Director Steven Caple, Jr. breaks down his “new vision” for the Transformers movie franchise in a new featurette.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts | “Caple’s New Vision” Featurette (2023 Movie)
Ironheart
According to entertainment insiders @CanWeGetToast and @MyTimetoShineH, the upcoming Ironheart series will see The Hood stealing tech for Mephisto, who allegedly owns a company in his human form.
Superman & Lois
Onomatopoeia (or Peia) threatens to destroy the city in the trailer for “Complications,” next week’s episode of Superman & Lois.
They’re going to be making sequels to Jurassic Park until the end of time, and hopefully one of them takes inspiration from the recent Hasbro Transformers x Jurassic Park mashups, which now include a Dilophosaurus and a Jeep Wrangler that transform into robots—finally giving visitors a fighting chance when the park’s residents inevitably escape and hunt for a meal.
Hasbro has been doing these Transformers collaborations for a few years now, with memorable releases including bots inspired by Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, and even the animated X-Men series. For Jurassic Park fans, a collaboration back in 2021 stands out as one of the highlights, recreating the film’s iconic T. rex tour vehicle attack scene, but with a Cybertronian twist. The T. rex transformed into the formidable Decepticon Tyrannocon Rex, while the Ford Explorer tour vehicle transformed into Autobot JP93 wearing a recreation of Alan Grant’s hat, and wielding game warden Robert Muldoon’s SPAS-12 shotgun.
The Decepticon Dilophocon’s two transformation modes (left) and the Autobot JP12's two transformation modes.Image: Hasbro, NBC Universal
For the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park, we’re getting another dino vs. vehicle Transformers mashup, but this time based on the scene where Dennis Nedry has an unfortunate run-in with a Dilophosaurus who has no interest in playing fetch. The two-pack includes the new Decepticon Dilophocon who transforms from Dilophosaurus to robot in 20 steps and includes a “venom blast effect” accessory, and the Autobot JP12, based on the Jeep Wrangler Sahara staff vehicle, that converts to its robot mode in 23 steps.
Image: Hasbro, NBC Universal
JP12 appears to be loosely based on Nedry, with a rain hat, glasses, and a can of Barbasol shaving cream that’s presumably filled with stolen dinosaur embryos—which is kind of confusing given JP12 identifies as an Autobot. Maybe the Autobots are looking to rewrite the Dinobots’ origin story? We can’t say for sure.
The Decepticon Dilophocon and Autobot JP12 two-pack’s packaging.Image: Hasbro, NBC Universal
An artistic rendering of the Die-Force.Image: Legend of Zelda | Shutterstock/Cadmium_Red
Last night, Critical Roleplayed a Legend of Zelda-inspired tabletop roleplaying game, and we might never get to see it, play it, or hear about it ever again. This could change but... who knows. The point is that there is a Nintendo-approved Zelda-inspired TTRPG out there, totally playable, and nobody is handing it out or even telling us how we might be able to see it, eventually.
io9 reached out to Critical Role and Nintendo for a comment. The only thing we heard back was that this is Nintendo’s call. We await the company’s response with bated breath.
So here’s what we know. Critical Role and Nintendo Treehouse collaborated to create this custom Legend of Zelda TTRPG that is based on the events and lore in Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo actually sponsored the stream, which makes this a semi-official Legend of Zelda TTRPG. It uses both a D20, turn-based combat mechanic system which includes initiative and hit point-based damage. A slimmed-down Dungeons and Dragons combat is the best way to think about this. Kind of like Knave, a little like Into the Odd. Very Old School Roleplaying structures.
The TTRPG also takes inspiration from Apocalypse World by Vincent and Meguey Baker—in game design parlance, a game that does this is called “Powered by the Apocalypse”—and uses two D6 dice to determine success, success-with-complication, or failure. It has at least three stats—Wisdom, Courage, and Power, which can add bonuses or subtract from a roll.
Really, this is very little, this is almost nothing, but it’s something, and I am going fully out of my head thinking that out there, somewhere, is 20-ish page document that details all of this and was created under the auspices of Nintendo. It’s a great franchise to put into a TTRPG, and the fact that a lightweight, easy-to-play game is basically ready to go sends me into a tizzy. A lot of this is probably due to the fact that Matt Mercer, Critical Role’s resident GM and the game master for this one-shot voices Ganondorf in Tears of the Kingdom. I simply can’t imagine any universe in which “Critical Role creates a semi-official Zelda TTRPG” and “Matt Mercer voices Ganandorf” aren’t related.
So here we go, let’s see if this works. Dear Nintendo and Critical Role: Release the Zelda TTRPG! Let me read it! Give it to me!! Free the people’s princess!! Show me the Die-Force! If anyone—literally anyone—emails me back with more information I will absolutely let y’all know.
The Legend of Zelda One-Shot: Lookout, Here We Come! aired on Tuesday, May 30 on Twitch and YouTube. It will be released on YouTube Thursday, June 1 at 12:00 pm Pacific. The podcast version will be out June 6.
You might actually become a vampire after you read this version of Dracula.Image: Canterbury Classics
Horror fans are already quite familiar with Dracula, Frankenstein, and Sherlock Holmes adventure The Hound of the Baskervilles, but Canterbury Classics makes a compelling case for a re-read with these beautifully illustrated, cleverly engineered, genuinely frightening pop-up versions.
The striking, startling art comes courtesy of DC and Marvel veteran Anthony Williams, and the oversized 3D cut-outs are the work of acclaimed paper engineer David Hawcock. Click through for looks at Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’ The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Speaking to Variety, long-time Spider-Man producer Amy Pascal said that in addition to next year’s Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales is making his way into a live-action movie, and an animated Spider-Woman solo film is in the works. “You’ll see all of it,” she said. “It’s all happening.” How soon and in what capacity are the bigger questions, but one of her fellow producers, Avi Arad, did offer up this tidbit. He said the Spider-Woman movie at least is “sooner than you expect.” “I cannot tell you yet, but it’s coming,” Arad added.
Which is all very exciting, but let’s not forget Peter Parker is out there too. The massively successful Spider-Man: No Way Homebeautifully teed up a new film for Tom Holland’s version of the character and while no official word is out there yet, Pascal did confirm it’s happening eventually. “Are we going to make another movie? Of course, we are,” Pascal told the trade. “We’re in the process, but the writer’s strike, nobody is working during the strike. We’re all being supporters and whenever they get themselves together, we’ll get started.”
That’s all well and fine, but it’s been 18 months since the release of No Way Home. Is anyone doing anything? Not a lot of specifics here but one thing is for sure: Spider-Man, in all his different iterations, will be living on the big screen for years to come.
The endeavor spanned three years and Ovidio Cartagena, the lead art director, commissioned hundreds of new art pieces. From the start, Magic: The Gathering was committed to creating a Middle-earth that reflects our world, which meant illustrating diverse peoples across many races and ethnicities. So nobody should have been surprised when some characters traditionally represented as white were now more obviously illustrated in a way that reflects Black, Latino, Pacific Islander, and Asian heritages.
Some people have had opinions about this. For example, Aragorn was one of the first characters revealed (leaked, technically), and one of these early cards—“Aragorn and Arwen Wed”—showed a Black man in a crown dressed in white, standing next to a white elfin woman dressed in green. The usual suspects immediately hated this. By usual suspects, I mean racists. Racists hated this, because Aragorn has been traditionally depicted as a white man. But I think what people are fixating on is a kind of misplaced nostalgia—the assumption that simply because Aragorn is white in that edition or whoever’s version, it means that singular depiction becomes immutable, when in reality, it’s all just in service to the story that people want to tell. And for Magic: The Gathering, that story is “originality and diversity.”
Image: Wizards of the Coast
“Some characters may look different from previous depictions—and that’s intentional,” Wizards of the Coast said in an announcement ahead of the release. This is also where the company declared its guiding pillars of originality and diversity. While the announcement didn’t directly address the racist backlash, it doesn’t take a palantír to see that Wizards of the Coast knows what’s happening out on Al Gore’s internet. During the YouTube premiere of the set, many commentators expressed “disappointment” that their fictional faves weren’t white this time around. You can read some annoyance in the comments that remain under the video.
Here’s one that I found particularly silly: “So Aragorn is now an Easterling and not Numenorian (misspelled, I know)? If you don’t care about the lore, why work with the property?” Numenorians are the first men of Middle-earth. They can be Black, much like the first men of the world were African. One’s fastidious reliance on lore is a crutch to expansive interpretation. Here are a few more that are more obviously racist. “Black Aragorn is nonsense and madness.” “They turned Aragorn and Galadryl [sic] black? That isn’t in the books. I’ll be skipping this one and just buy singles I want.” These people are so unserious, as if skipping the release but still buying the product does anything to support “what’s in the books,” as if the books actually matter in the context.
The Magic: The Gathering expansion is not canon. The books are canon. Honoring the books is not the same as catering to a preconceived idea of interpretation, such as “Aragorn is a white man” or “Éowyn shouldn’t be Black.” If this is your vision of the fiction, I want you to ask yourself why these characters being white matters. If your answer is any variant of “because of the books,” I want to ask you to check again. There is nothing in those books that is dependent on skin color or on contemporary ideas of race. Nothing. Those characters could be mapped onto any heritage and it would not change the story. (We won’t dive into the racist depictions of orcs in Lord of the Rings, I simply don’t have the time, but there is an argument to be made that this set is taking steps to develop a more nuanced understanding of good and evil than depicted in Tolkien’s work.)
Essentially, the change in this set is a deliberate aesthetic and (more cynically) a marketing choice. But it’s still a choice that fundamentally does not change the books, canon, lore, or even the story. Race shouldn’t matter when it comes to how we portray these characters. But it does matter to the fans. It matters to people who finally see themselves reflected in this artwork. White people have had white Aragorn for decades. If Magic: The Gathering wants to show a different Aragorn, it takes nothing away from any other interpretation. Celebrate the stories you love, regardless of the race of one of the main characters.
This set, while it does indulge in obvious fan service, is still honoring Lord of the Rings. Honoring the books means bringing them to life with your own interpretation. Honoring the books means expanding them to include the audiences that were always there to begin with. Honoring the books means bringing more depth, nuance, understanding, and, ultimately, a loving critique to the books. Honoring the books is a modern audience looking at all this gorgeous art and saying “maybe Tolkien should have just made Aragorn Black to begin with.”
Ever since early leaks confirmed Marvel’s plans to kill off one of its most influential new creations of the 21st century, fans have feared the worst for Kamala Khan in this week’s Amazing Spider-Man #26. And yet somehow her exit is even hollower than we could’ve predicted, laying bare the awkward artifice of superhero comics with none of their spectacle or cleverness.
As previously and regularly mentioned whenever a major comics publisher teases that Everything Will Change with the death of one of their prominent characters, death means startlingly little in the world of superhero comics. Long gone are the days when the prophecy of a hero’s fall actually shocked people enough to check out a new book—there’s a reason people remember the death of Superman, and not the times Superman has died in various capacities in the years since that iconic storyline. Instead, superhero comics have, in the wake of losing that shock effectiveness as their audience becomes more and more familiar with the wrestling-esque kayfabe of it all—the unspoken artifice and understanding of Just How Things Work—had to lean on dealing with death in many other ways. Take a look elsewhere in Marvel currently, for example, and you’ll see the Krakoan Age of the X-Men, where death is as meaningless as it is metatextually within the text itself; mutantkind has figured out the process of resurrection to establish itself as a sovereign state flourishing at a height the oft-persecuted group has never seen the likes of in decades of publishing history. When death no longer has to mean anything in the narrative, the potential for stories about death becomes much more varied and interesting.
This artifice has evolved even further with the advent of the superhero movie boom, especially at Marvel, as the MCU reigns ascendant (more often in spite of itself lately, compared to the halcyon days of its meteoric rise). As Marvel’s comics have become not just their own tales, but incubators for adaptations that will be seen by audiences much larger than the size of the current western superhero comics market, so it has come an even wider audience understanding of that aforementioned kayfabe. That character’s about to be in an MCU movie or a Disney+ show? Odds are you can expect either a series relaunch in the months around its release or, if anything particularly status-quo-changing has happened in their storytelling recently, it’ll be all back to normal by the time audiences are sitting down in front of TVs or movie screens to see what their cinematic counterpart is up to. So, for example, when Marvel heralded “The Death of Doctor Strange” in the months before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, as a reader you can be pretty sure that Stephen Strange is going to be a-okay in the comics just in time, in case anyone seeing Benedict Cumberbatch on the big screen wants to walk into their local comic store after and pick up some new Doctor Strange books.
Image: Marvel Comics
All that then, brings us to today’s release of The Amazing Spider-Man #26–by Zeb Wells, John Romita Jr., Scott Hanna, Marcio Menyz, Erick Arciniega, and Joe Caramagna—and the now-advertised Death of Ms. Marvel. While it’s safe to say that Marvel Comics would’ve preferred to announce that it was killing off one of its most popular young characters of the century on its own terms, for the past few weeks we’ve already known coming into this issue that Kamala would end it lying dead in Peter Parker’s arms. And so she does indeed on the final page of the issue, but instead the surprise here is how hollow the whole thing feels, not just within the story itself, but in that greater context of the kayfabe behind superhero comics.
It’s not really much of a spoiler to say that Kamala dies at this point, and it’s not really much of one to tell you that her death does not feel particularly well justified to go through the aforementioned controversial news cycle of revealing that you’re killing off a young, female South Asian character lauded and beloved as one of the best additions to the world of superhero comics this side of the year 2000, either. Kamala’s presence in Amazing Spider-Man so far has been on the fringes of its story, an intern at Oscorp using her geeky passions as a cover to keep an eye on Norman Osborn as he becomes the anti-hero Gold Goblin. She’s been kept away from Peter and Mary Jane’s tussle with the sinister Ben Rabin, also known as the Emissary, a pan-dimensional threat that, having previously trapped Peter and MJ in an alternate world, now desires to come over to Marvel’s main reality and evolve into the avatar of the Mayan god Wayeb’ in a prophetic turn that requires killing Mary Jane. Suffice to say, it’s been a lot, and Kamala hasn’t been much of a part of it.
Image: Marvel Comics
So when the Emissary finally arrives in this week’s issue, and Kamala—alongside Gold Goblin, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four—battles to keep MJ safe from his clutches (and more specifically a ritual knife he needs to stab her with), you can already see how things are going to go. To be at least somewhat fair to the issue, Kamala’s sacrifice to save MJ from the Emisarry’s prophecy is a simple, but clever usage of her powers. Kamala runs away from the battle with Mary Jane, but splits off from her to act as a distraction—using her powers to shapeshift into a facsimile of MJ, luring the Emissary into falsely stabbing her instead. And so, Rabin’s ritual is broken, leading to Wayeb’s spirit devouring him whole for his supposed attempt at deceiving it with a false sacrifice; Mary Jane is saved, and Kamala Khan pays the price, exposing herself as Ms. Marvel to her superpowered allies in the process.
But that is all about this tragedy that is in any way clever or surprising. Obviously there is more of Kamala’s story to tell—and not just because, as soon as the leaks first dropped, Marvel began touting a special one-shot issue to mournfully celebrate the soon-to-be-fallen friend—beyond the pages of Amazing Spider-Man. But in the here and now, Kamala’s death is not in service of her own story but the pain of others—the pain of people who barely know her. Currently without her own ongoing series at Marvel, Kamala has felt aimless in the periphery of the story being told for Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson in this run of Amazing, amplifying just how little dramatic weight her death has beyond the naked attempt at shock value. Further hammering that home is that the shock of her death, had it not been revealed ahead of time, is primarily in the bait-and-switch of seeing Mary Jane seemingly killed before the reveal that it was a disguised Kamala, not in that it’s necessarily Kamala herself perishing in that moment. Even her final whispered words—echoing the famous line from Kamala’s debut run as Ms. Marvel, “Good is not a thing you are, it is a thing you do”—feel less like a poignant reflection and more like an awkward acknowledgement that Kamala wasn’t even given the respect of dying for her own story.
Image: Marvel Comics
If all this feels as empty as it does already, that feeling is only amplified further by the elephant in the room: there are far more people in the world who are aware that Ms. Marvel is months away from being in a Marvel movie with Captain Marvel and Monica Rambeau (The Marvels, in case we had not said “Marvel” enough lately) than there are people who will purchase and read Amazing Spider-Man #26 this month. I know this, you know this, the creative team at Marvel Comics knows this, somebody at Marvel Studios certainly knows this. Iman Vellani, the comics-loving actress who plays Kamala in the MCU, is probably telling people this and other nerdy factoids as we speak. It is an unspoken and yet clear truth that Kamala will be alive in the comics, and hopefully relaunching her own solo series, by the time The Marvels is hitting theaters in November. You could even speculate further and wonder if her rebirth will tie her more closely to her cinematic counterpart by tweaking her Inhuman background from the comics to reflect her Mutant status in the MCU—because that happens in symbiotic relationship these comics and movies have with each other now, and has happened for decades (Peter getting organic webshooters in the comics because of the Raimi movies, anyone?).
So in the end, what was the point of all this if in five months it won’t have mattered? What do we gain from the ire raised in killing off such a beloved character both in and beyond her source material, in a story that is barely about her, if it is going to be undone in half a year’s time or less? We don’t have the full story of the death and inevitable rebirth of Ms. Marvel just yet, but we know enough about how this all works at this point to make a reasonable guess: it’s going to mean nothing more than artificial shock value. And a superhero comic that’s all artifice just isn’t a very interesting superhero comic at all.
In Andy Muschietti’s 2023 film The Flash, General Zod does the same thing. He comes to Earth looking for a crucial Kryptonian, but since this is a multiverse Barry Allen has royally messed up by being there at all, some things go the same, and some things do not. And the way The Flash handles the good, and bad, of what happened in Man of Steel was very on purpose.
One thing that happens similarly in both films is General Zod and his minions unleash the devastating World Engine on Metropolis. However, in Man of Steel, Superman and Zod end up fighting in the same city, causing even more damage than the machine itself. In fact, they cause so much damage that it created some controversy at the time, with some viewers thinking Superman wouldn’t have let the fight continue in the city.
We aren’t going to spoil The Flash but if you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen that a big battle with Zod takes place in the film—only, it’s not in the city, it’s out in a desert somewhere. Timing-wise, it’s happening as the World Engine is on, meaning it’s at about the same time Superman and Zod were fighting in the city. We asked the film’s director, Andy Muschietti, if the decision to keep the fight outside of the city had anything at all to do with the backlash.
“Dramatically we use that,” the director told io9. “The death of so many people is used dramatically in our story because basically, it adds to the guilt and the trauma of Barry Allen... Now, having said that, the tone of the movie is different from Man of Steel. And we don’t want to want to, you know, go deeper into that apocalypse. So there it is.”
Yup, there it is. The Flash kept the action away from the city because there were already enough people dying in Metropolis—and Muschietti wanted to use the events of that previous film to his advantage, but also make them his own. Plus, logistically, it was probably way cheaper to film and do visual effects for a battle out in the middle of nowhere than in a big city, though no one is going to actually say that. It’s certainly a nice benefit though.
We have a personal message from Science Fiction and Fanytasy Master Kevin J. Anderson and an opportunity to participate in his Kickstarter with some pretty special offers:
Dear Readers,
Many of you know me for the Star Wars or Dune universes. I also have my very fun and popular Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. series — like The Naked Gun meets the Addams Family.
Shamble’s next adventure, “Fire in the Hole,” is the cover story of Writers of the Future 39. This was a cool, unique project—the story is inspired by the amazing cover art, and I agreed to write the story before I even saw the painting. After seeing the fire dragon, how in the world was I going to fit a Zombie Detective into THAT? Well, I did—and the result is hilarious.
As a judge for the Writers of the Future Contest, I’m thrilled to present this year’s award-winning stories and stunning illustrations by the best of tomorrow. And for the audiobook, my actor friend Jim Meskimen knocked it out of the park!
More Dan Shamble news: I’m almost finished with the draft of BATS IN THE BELFRY, the new novel. Check out the Kickstarter campaign where I am offering some very special bonus items. You’ll laugh so hard, brains will come out your nose!
Get ready to dive into the sixth season of the groundbreaking anthology series Black Mirror, set to premiere on June 15, 2023. Netflix just dropped a trailer with five episodes that explore the dark side of technology and its impact on society. — Read the rest
A few of the films and franchises coming to streaming this month.Image: Uni, Fox, Paramount, Disney
Let’s get streaming! Welcome to io9's latest edition of the Nerd’s Watch, where we pare down the enormous lists of new films and television shows arriving on all your favorite streaming services into the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror titles we think you’ll like most. (And sometimes, just the ones that we like most.)
As always, we’re including the best new films and TV coming to Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Disney+, and Max (formerly HBO Max)—as well as Paramount+, Shudder, and Peacock. Folks, there may be too many streaming services.
Here’s the best of what’s streaming in June 2023. If you’re only interested in the services you subscribe to, you can jump directly to that page with these links:
In a new interview with GQ, Ryan Gosling takes the interviewer on a train ride and for a long time, they just talk. While the Barbie film is obviously the reason this profile is getting published now, the interview touches on his earlier roles, his break from Hollywood, and his family life. But we’re here for Barbie. And so is Ken.
Ken is an accessory. He’s Barbie’s boyfriend, he’s her houseboy, he’s hers. Barbie is never Ken’s. Which is exactly the kind of vibes you get from Gosling when you read this profile. None of this should be about him, but by virtue of casting, talent, and a more than a little bit of charm, here he is. Ken’s job, Gosling said “is beach. For 60 years, his job has been beach. What the fuck does that even mean?”
When asked why he took the role, Gosling stated that he was excited to work on a project that centered women. He also mentions that his children–two daughters–play with Barbie and Ken. “I did see [Ken], like, face down in the mud outside one day, next to a squished lemon and it was like, This guy’s story does need to be told, you know?” He said in the interview, re-confirming the story that he had told on Jimmy Kimmel nearly a year ago.
While Gosling is eager to deflect attention from himself, he said in the profile that he’s starting to feel a kinship with Ken. A Kenship. “I care about this dude now. I’m like his representative. ‘Ken couldn’t show up to receive this award, so I’m here to accept it for him.’ ” He mentions that there were some people who weren’t exactly thrilled that he was cast to play Ken. Gosling doesn’t seem too bothered,“If people don’t want to play with my Ken, there are many other Kens to play with.”
He does mention that the whole idea of people upset that he was cast seems a little absurd. It’s as if there was a whole movement “kind of clutching-your-pearls idea of, like, #notmyken. Like you ever thought about Ken before this? And everyone was fine with [Ken’s job being ‘beach’], for him to have a job that is nothing. But suddenly, it’s like, ‘No, we’ve cared about Ken this whole time’.” This is where Gosling seems to have the most verve in the entire profile, which is a rather sedate, charming look at a man who loves his family, his job, and Ken; in that order.
“No, you didn’t. You never did. You never cared,” he continued. “Barbie never fucked with Ken. That’s the point. If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed. This is why his story must be told.”
Read the full profile on GQ. Barbie comes out in theaters on July 21.
New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem posters show off the turtle bros’ arsenal. Boots Riley’s surreal new Amazon show I’m a Virgo gets a suitably perplexing new trailer. Plus, even more maximal madness in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts footage. Spoilers now!
Deadpool 3
According to insider @CanWeGetSomeToast, Deadpool 3 will see the returns of Halle Berry’s Storm, Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey and James Marsden’s Cyclops in addition to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.
Marshmallow
Deadline also reports Corbin Bernsen, Kue Lawrence, Kai Cech and Max Malas will star in Marshmallow, a summer camp-set horror film from director Daniel DelPurgatorio boasting special make-up effects from Robert Kurtzman. Based on a script by Andy Greskoviak, the story follows Morgan (Lawrence), a “timid and introverted 12-year-old” who is “thrust into a waking nightmare when a once-fabled campfire tale becomes real. As a mysterious figure descends upon the camp, Morgan and his newfound friends must embark on a treacherous journey to uncover a sinister reality buried beneath the surface. Little do they know that the truth harbors a secret that will test their resilience and unravel the very fabric of their reality.”
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Rue Morgue additionally reports Debbie Rochon, Kane Hodder and Bill Moseley will appear in 6, an upcoming horror anthology described as “a sextet of separate tales with a common theme of strong female protagonists and slasher moments.”
Robert Egger’s Nosferatu
According to the Prague Reporter, filming has officially wrapped on Robert Egger’s Nosferatu remake.
The Flash
Batman and Supergirl give chase to two separate incarnations of Ezra Miller’s Flash on a new poster from China.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
Elsewhere, a quartet of Mutant Mayhem posters spotlight each of the TMNT’s signature weapons.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
The Autobots and Maximals encourage you to do some breathing exercises before watching Rise of the Beasts in a new TV spot.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts NEW OFFICIAL TV Spot - “Breathe”
Nina and the Hedgehog’s Secret
A little girl teams up with her father’s original character (a cartoon hedgehog) to thwart the embezzler that got him fired in the trailer for Nina and the Hedgehog’s Secret.
‘Nina And The Hedgehog’s Secret’: first trailer for Annecy title
Cocaine Crabs from Outer Space
Meanwhile, a police detective teams up with a pet store employee to investigate a string of mutilation murders in the trailer for Cocaine Crabs from Outer Space.
Cocaine Crabs from Outer Space | Official Trailer | SRS Cinema
The Walking Dead: Rick and Michonne
Production has also wrapped on the first season of the new Walking Dead spinoff starring Rick and Michonne.
The Walking Dead: Dead City
Relatedly, Comic Book has word The Walking Dead: Dead City will air at 9PM ET—one hour earlier than previously reported— Sunday, June 18th on AMC.
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Spoiler TV has a synopsis for “Once Upon a Time...,” the second season finale of From.
Boyd fears he may have finally run out of answers, as the residents of town prepare for the end; Tabitha clings to the belief that the children could be the key to their salvation.
I’m A Virgo
Finally, Amazon has released a new trailer for I’m A Virgo, Boots Riley’s new series about a 13-foot tall man.
Although most people’s thoughts turn towards getting outside and soaking up the sun when June arrives, for Lego fans, it’s just another month to hunker down with a thick instruction book and thousands of plastic bricks. Although June arrives with dozens of new Lego sets in tow, we’ve sifted through the impending arrivals and highlighted the best sets to add to your collection.
Leading the charge in June is the new Batman Batcave Shadow Box that will scratch both display and play itches, as well as another addition to Lego’s ever-growing collection of retro gaming homages with a miniature replica of a Pac-Man arcade cabinet that won’t drain your pockets of quarters.
Available starting on June 4 for $270, the 2,651-piece Lego Icons Pac-Man Arcade machine will be impossible for ‘80s kids raised in shopping mall arcades to resist. It not only features authentic graphics from the original Pac-Man arcade cabinets, it’s also got a light-up coin slot, and a hand-cranked mechanism that makes Pac-Man, Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde navigate brick-built maze.
The honor of being the largest Lego set arriving in June is the 3,981-piece Batcave Shadow Box recreating the Dark Knight’s headquarters as seen in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. The set includes a Batmobile, a lair full of play features including a Batcomputer and a vault full of Battoys, plus seven minifigures featuring our first Christopher Walken fig. The whole thing even folds away into a shadowbox with the interior left revealed through the iconic Batlogo. It will be available starting on June 8 for $400.
You can’t have a hero without a villain to foil, and Lego is finally acknowledging that the baddies play a big part in making iconic Disney animated films as memorable as they are. The 1,540-piece Villain Icons set highlights four of them: Maleficent, Jafar in genie form from Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast’s Gaston, and the disguised Evil Queen from Snow White, alongside a vignette packed full of Easter Eggs and secret compartments to store the minifigures. (We’re particularly fond of that The Little Mermaid Lego VHS tape.) The set will be available starting on June 1 for $130.
Disney usually prefers its sidekick characters to come in pairs so they always have someone to interact with when the star of the movie is caught up doing something else. This 553-piece set celebrates some of those dynamic duos and includes buildable versions of Cogsworth and Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast, Pua and Hei Hei from Moana, Nemo and Squirt from Finding Nemo, and Percy and Meeko from Pocahontas. Lego Disney Duos will be available starting on June 1 for $45.
Starting on June 1, you can express your love of Disney through Lego with this $60, 1,022-piece set that includes build instructions to recreate 72 different Disney characters on 12, 8x8-stud plates that can be framed and individually displayed on a desk, or grouped into a 3x3 collage and hung on a wall.
You could only buy Lego’s scaled-up Captain Redbeard minifigure by visiting the company’s HQ in Denmark, which was a genuine tragedy given Redbeard is often considered the best Lego minifigure of all time. As a consolation prize, starting on June 1 you can grab this 654-piece, generic Up-Scaled Lego Minifigure for $50, which features the same level of articulation as smaller minifigures, which can actually ride inside and control this towering twin from a secret cockpit under its hat.
Celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original Jurassic Park first hitting theaters with five new themed Lego sets recreating iconic moments from the film. The largest is the 693-piece Visitor Center: T. rex & Raptor Attack that includes six minifigures, a velociraptor, a T. rex skeleton, and a moulded T. rex figure that can go on a rampage and destroy the entire set. It will be available starting on June 1 for $130.
Do you worry your Lego collection doesn’t have as much poop as you’d like? The easy solution is to drop $50 on this 281-piece Triceratops Research set on June 1, which includes a Jurassic Park tour vehicle, Ellie and Malcolm minifigures, a moulded triceratops, and one big pile of brick-built poop.
The 512-piece, Brachiosaurus Discovery set includes the tallest minifigure-scale Lego dino figure released to date, with a moulded Brachiosaurus towering over Ellie Sattler, Alan Grant, and John Hammond. The set also includes a Jurassic Park Jeep Wrangler that can hold all three minifigures, and a tall tree with an observation deck. It will be available starting on June 1 for $80.
Is it worth spending $20 on a 211-piece set just to get a minifigure-scale can of Barbasol shaving cream? Obviously, but the Dilophosaurus Ambush will also come with a Jurassic Park Jeep Wrangler, a Dilophosaurus, and a Dennis Nedry minifigure when it’s available starting on June 1.
Technically, this set is designed for younger builders aged four and up with a simplified design and just 137-pieces which means it should be fully assembled before they lose interest. But it’s still worth considering for older collectors with Ellie Satler and Robert Muldoon minifigures, and a moulded Velociraptor looking for an easy meal. “Clever girl!” It will be available starting on June 1 for $40.
The third largest set this month, available starting on June 4 for $370, comes from one of Lego’s longest running collections and animated series. The 2,405-piece Ninjago City Markets is absolutely packed with four levels of play features including a working cable car, a wheelchair lift from the subway station, 21 minifigures, and a bathroom at Sushimi’s sushi bar with a toilet that actually flushes poop down to the sewer.
Don’t have $240 to spend on Lego’s 2,336-piece Land Rover Defender 90 model? You can save yourself $225 and opt for this 150-piece, minifigure scale Land Rover Defender instead. It doesn’t have anywhere near as much functionality, but it’s got four wheels plus a spare, a roof rack, storage space in the back, and a $15 price tag when it’s available starting on June 1.
Netflix—not above allowing itself to be skewered, from the looks of it—is here to make you even more excited by declaring season six of the anthology series, which is created and written by Charlie Brooker, “the most unpredictable, unclassifiable, and unexpected yet.” Here’s a list of the episodes, and the briefest of descriptions to go with them:
Joan Is Awful: “An average woman is stunned to discover a global streaming platform has launched a prestige TV drama adaptation of her life—in which she is portrayed by Hollywood A-lister Salma Hayek.”
Cast: Annie Murphy, Ben Barnes, Himesh Patel, Michael Cera, Rob Delaney, Salma Hayek Pinault
Director: Ally Pankiw
Written by: Charlie Brooker
Filmed in: UK
Loch Henry: “A young couple travel to a sleepy Scottish town to start work on a genteel nature documentary—but find themselves drawn to a juicy local story involving shocking events of the past.”
Cast: Daniel Portman, John Hannah, Monica Dolan, Myha’la Herrold, Samuel Blenkin
Director: Sam Miller
Written by: Charlie Brooker
Filmed in: UK (Scotland)
Beyond the Sea: “In an alternative 1969, two men on a perilous high-tech mission wrestle with the consequences of an unimaginable tragedy.”
Miles Morales soaring through the air in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.Image: Sony (Other)
As the credits rolled on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, it felt like waking up from a dream. In this dream, something impossible happened. A team of talented filmmakers made a sequel to one of the, if not the, best superhero films of all-time that was not just worthy of that original film, it actually made the original better. Truly, this couldn’t be real. How could it actually be possible that a sequel to a basically perfect movie could, itself, be so incredible?
And yet, it wasn’t a dream. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is that incredible. It’s everything everyone loved about the first film, but more human, more complex, and more visually stunning. Directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson lead a tour-de-force of filmmaking that transcends animation and will leave you heartbroken, breathless, and utterly dazzled.
Gwen Stacy and Jessica Drew.Image: Sony
That starts from scene one, as writers Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and David Callaham bring us back not with Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), as one would expect, but instead with Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld). Gwen played a huge role in the first film but here is given much more depth. Her previously only-touched-upon backstory gets filled out, including some heavy scenes with her dad (Shea Wingham) instantly endearing her to the audience even more. These scenes—all of which, shockingly, take place before the opening credits—make it very clear that Across the Spider-Verse is not pulling any punches in terms of stakes or emotion.
In comparison, things with Miles seem almost normal. He’s now been Spider-Man for over a year, and while he loves it and is good at it, it’s taking a toll on his life. His parents (Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Vélez) don’t know why he’s being so flakey, especially because he seems to be out at all hours without any friends. Miles does his best to cover, but he’s struggling and you get the sense Miles is spending too much time as Spider-Man. He wants other things. By the time Gwen comes back into his life after a year, it’s a friendship and trust he desperately needs.
As all this is happening, Spider-Verse beautifully weaves the first of many (many, did we say “many?”) new characters into the mix. Characters like Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), who comes to Gwen’s universe with Jessica Drew (Issa Rae) to help fight an interdimensional villain. There’s also The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) a mysterious being who is made of holes and has some sort of connection, at least he thinks, to Spider-Man.
Miguel O’Hara and Miles MoralesImage: Sony
In the first third of the film, as we get reacquainted with Gwen, Miles, and these new characters they’re dealing with, Across the Spider-Verse is decidedly methodical. There are moments of exciting, beautiful action, but the main story is always kept just slightly outside what we’re seeing. It takes its time to make sure we know where all these characters are mentally so that when Miles and Gwen finally kick off their journey, we’re ready for anything and still slightly unclear on what exactly this is all leading to.
If there’s one big issue with Across the Spider-Verse it’s that, from there, things snowball so wildly, it can be hard to keep up. After a more traditionally paced first act, the rest of the film is like a runaway train lit on fire. As Miles and Gwen start to travel across the Spider-Verse, more and more Spider-people get introduced, more and more surprises are waiting around every turn, and seemingly every single frame in the film will have you wanting to pause because you know you’re missing something.
The story escalates and escalates. Reveals get bigger and bigger, all leading to not one but several massive revelations that shake the series to its core. And yet, it all happens so fast, and is so significant, it’s almost hard to get your head around it all. By the end, I had that dream-like feeling not just because the movie was so good, but because it was so much to take in.
Shattered GwenImage: Sony
And yet, even with the story and visuals picking up pace and density, the core parts of the story are never lost. Miles just wants friends. He just wants to be understood. Gwen, with these new Spider-people she’s around, seems to have that. But is it helping her with her issues? The filmmakers never let you forget that we’re not just watching a bunch of weird, wild, Spider-folks running and jumping around on the screen, they’re there to serve the story of these characters, what they want, and how they can make themselves and each other better.
All of this is elevated by every single facet of the filmmaking. The animation is stunning, which almost goes without saying, but the variety and way it all blends together is what really stands out. The score, once again by Daniel Pemberton, adds near palpable energy to drama and action scenes alike. And while the song choices are solid, there isn’t anything quite as standout as “Sunflower” or “What’s Up Danger?” from the original film which is maybe another tiny demerit.
Or, at least, that’s my thought on first viewing. Talking about a film as complex, and wonderful as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is almost a sin after a single viewing. It’s a film that demands multiple viewings and is sure to only get better once the excitement of discovering the story is gone and more attention can be paid to every detail. Because make no mistake, every single detail in this movie was toiled over. You can just tell. From the billboards to the comic references to things I would love to spoil but won’t, passion pours off the screen. It’s built to revel in, which is good because Across the Spider-Verse has a whopper of a cliffhanger that’ll make you wish you could jump through time to see the next movie right now (it’s currently scheduled for release in March but we’ll see).
Gwen with Peter Parker from the previous film.Image: Sony
Since we can’t travel through time though, we’ll just have to keep watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse over and over and marveling (pun intended) at it. Plus there’s so much more to gush over. Seriously, it’s all great. All the new characters, new dimensions, the voice actors, hilarious callbacks, easter eggs, you name it. It’s a special sequel, an unforgettable superhero movie, and one of the best films of the year.
Our first look at TMNT: Mutant Mayhem introduced us to a vivid, animated world of some truly teenaged mutant heroes—it’s the first time Leo, Raph, Mikey, and Donnie have actually been voiced by teens. But what’s bringing these kids to the surface world of NYC? A major new threat that no version of the TMNT have ever faced before.
That sinister figure is Superfly, played by Ice Cube, a new fly mutant created for directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears’ new movie—not to be confused with the classic fly-themed TMNT villain Baxter Stockman, voiced in Mutant Mayhem by Giancarlo Esposito. Even though the new trailer teases a mighty mutant mashup as the kids and their new friend April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri) try to discover what life is like outside of the watchful eye of Splinter (Jackie Chan) in their sewer home, with all sorts of TMNT classic baddies along for the ride, it’s clear that Superfly is going to be the big threat that sees our Turtle teens rise to become the ninja heroes we know and love them to be.
Aside from continuing to look absolutely stunning visually—the “scribble in the side of your school notebook” grungy aesthetic is a welcome extrapolation of the cleaner style in something like the incoming Across the Spider-Verse—it’s nice that this trailer also gives us a little more downtime with the Turtles, and their yearning for a life a little more normal than the one provided from being a mutant ninja teen. They’ve still got to put those slick moves Splinter taught them to the test if they want to go up against Superfly and his mutant mob, however.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, starring Nicholas Cantu, Brady Noon, Shamon Brown Jr., and Micah Abbey, as Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello, respectively, hits theaters August 2.
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The wink is in this image. Do you get it? We’ll explain.Screenshot: Sony
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Image: Tordotcom
Image: Tor Books
Image: Sourcebooks Landmark
Image: Harper Voyager
Image: Orbit
Image: William Morrow
Image: Del Rey
Image: 20th Century Studios
Image: 20th Century Studios
Image: 20th Century Studios
Image: 
Image: 
Image: 
Image: 
Image: Disney Parks
Concept Art: Naveen’s little brother Prince Ralphie animatronic to be featured on Tiana’s Bayou AdventureImage: Disney Parks
PJ Morton being presented with portrait by Imagineer Ted RobledoPhoto: Sabina Graves/Gizmodo
Art of PJ Morton and one of the new critter musicians which will be an animatronic in the attractionImage: Disney Parks
Princess Tiana building her communityImage: Disney Parks
Image: Universal
Photo: Warner Bros.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Gif: Hasbro, NBC Universal
The Decepticon Dilophocon’s two transformation modes (left) and the Autobot JP12's two transformation modes.Image: Hasbro, NBC Universal
Image: Hasbro, NBC Universal
The Decepticon Dilophocon and Autobot JP12 two-pack’s packaging.Image: Hasbro, NBC Universal
An artistic rendering of the Die-Force.Image: Legend of Zelda | Shutterstock/Cadmium_Red
You might actually become a vampire after you read this version of Dracula.Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Image: Canterbury Classics
Is Miles coming to live-action?Image: Sony Pictures
Image: Wizards of the Coast | Illustration by Magali Villenuve
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Image: Marvel Comics
Image: Marvel Comics
Image: Marvel Comics
Image: Marvel Comics
A major battle with Zod takes place somewhere else in The Flash. Image: Warner Bros.
A few of the films and franchises coming to streaming this month.Image: Uni, Fox, Paramount, Disney
David Lynch’s Dune is coming to Netflix. Image: Warner Bros.
Arrival is coming to Prime.Image: Paramount
Barbarian is coming to streaming.Image: Fox
Avatar: The Way of Water is coming to streaming.Image: Disney
Ready Player OneImage: Warner Bros.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of KhanImage: Paramount
Ethan Embry in The Devil’s Candy.Image: Shudder
The Fast and the Furious Image: Universal
Image: Gabe Ginsberg / Stringer (Getty Images)
Screenshot: 
Image: Disney
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Image: Lego
Ben Barnes and Salma Hayek Pinault in season six’s meta-Netflix episode “Joan Is Awful.”Image: Ana Blumekron/Netflix
Miles Morales soaring through the air in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.Image: Sony (Other)
Gwen Stacy and Jessica Drew.Image: Sony
Miguel O’Hara and Miles MoralesImage: Sony
Shattered GwenImage: Sony
Gwen with Peter Parker from the previous film.Image: Sony
Gif: Paramount
