Elon Musk’s AI Odyssey Redo Should Kill AI Movie Talk Once and for All
In the first line of Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the poet beseeches the Muses, “Tell me about a complicated man.” That line, of course, refers to Odysseus, the crafty genius whose journey back home to Ithaca takes up most of The Odyssey. It could also refer to Christopher Nolan, who worked from Wilson’s translation to make an idiosyncratic, historically inaccurate, but critically and commercially successful film adaptation of The Odyssey.
It could not, however, refer to Elon Musk. Not because he’s any less worthy of complication than any other human being. But rather because the inheritor of riches his parents hoarded from diamond mines in Apartheid South Africa works so hard to present himself as a great man, a genius, an innovator, and anything but complicated. Musk demonstrated that tendency again when he took to his social media platform to repost an AI-generated recreation of a scene from the poem, boasting, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” In that line, Musk proves not only the lack of genius that made Odysseus an enduring hero but also an adherence to technology that lacks the humanity which allows Nolan to make flawed, inaccurate, but nonetheless resonate masterpieces.
A History of Inaccuracy
The first problem with this new AI Odyssey is evident in Musk’s post. What, exactly, is a “historically accurate” version of The Odyssey?
This may come as a surprise to those with no concept of the past, but The Odyssey was a work of historical fiction even at the time it was new. Scholars cannot pin down the exact origins of the poem, estimating it was committed to paper for the first time somewhere between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, while allowing that it likely existed in oral tradition centuries earlier. Even then, the Trojan War that serves as the inciting incident for The Odyssey is supposed to have happened in the 13th or 12th centuries BCE, meaning there’s a gap of hundreds of years between the events of the story and its telling.
Furthermore, an emphasis on historical accuracy is inaccurate to the historical fact of The Odyssey. Ancient peoples didn’t have the same understanding or expectations of empirical truth that we have today, and thus would have easily accepted a blurred line between fact and fiction. Moreover, they would have understood the poem to be a mixture of historical myth (not unlike the way Americans tell ourselves inaccurate versions of the first Thanksgiving or Washington cutting down a cherry tree), community-building entertainment, and moral teaching.
But this isn’t about facts, is it? Musk is simply once again repeating bad-faith, poorly informed talking points about the casting of Black actors Travis Scott and Lupita Nyong’o and trans actor Elliot Page. Ironically, Musk is making an interpretation here; a hateful, noxious interpretation, but an interpretation nonetheless. Interpretations are the soul of art, and something done by everyone from the translators who brought The Odyssey into English to Angelica Kauffman to Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Nolan himself. If Musk were an artist, he could have just made his own version of The Odyssey.
But being an artist requires vulnerability, an acceptance that you might be wrong; it requires being so committed to your unique vision that you must expound upon it, even though no one agrees with you. And that’s where Musk fails, especially in his allegiance to AI.
Mistakes and Influences
No one understood the importance of human error better than critic Harold Bloom, a useful touchpoint for this conversation. An avowed conservative who advocated for defending the Western literary canon, Bloom is exactly the type of white, male intellectual that Musk and his ilk pretend they’re supporting. Yet in one of his most important books, 1973’s The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom argued that predecessors limit artists, and that the best poets are those who break away from their predecessors, even if they do so through “misreadings.” For Bloom, good art occurred when the poet did his (pronoun used intentionally here) own version of a form or a trope or a theme, regardless of what came before.
Musk and other tech bros love to position themselves as trailblazers and independent thinkers. Remember that Crypto.com ad that Matt Damon, Odysseus himself, did years ago, comparing cryptocurrency to the work of inventors like the Wright Brothers? But Grok can never blaze trails because it is a large language model, and is thus beholden to those models. It simply regurgitates output based on input that already exists, often in an even more derivative, even more calcified version.
For proof, one need only look at the post that prompted Musk’s declaration. Musk made his prediction while reposting a thread from the account @heavypulp, which included a three-minute Odyssey clip made with Grok Imagine. Even if we ignored the Roman-style armor, the brush-top helmets, and other historical inaccuracies, the clip fails to excite anyone. The landscapes and lighting are flat, the lines delivered by Odysseus and Calypso lack conviction and emotion, and the music fails to inspire. The entire thing is derivative, from Odysseus’ faux-Laurence Olivier accent to the indistinct 1950s Hollywood beauty of Calypso, to the sub-Hans Zimmer score.
Because, of course, it is. Grok Odyssey can only copy Hollywood epics. It can’t feel anything when reading about Hermes arriving to demand that Calypso set Odysseus free, or Odysseus recovering the will to see his wife and son. It can only repeat what others have already done, removing anything that stands out until it spits out something generic and bland.
The Human Epic
Without a doubt, Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is very much his story, and not that of Homer. Odysseus’ guilt over his actions in Troy, his emotional longing for Penelope and Telemachus, even the relationship with his men all feel more like something from Inception or Oppenheimer than what we know of the Ancient Greeks.
But Nolan’s version of The Odyssey resonates with viewers for those very reasons. They don’t go to the movie to see history accurately portrayed on screen, nor do they go to praise the technology for being technological. They go to the movie for the same reason that they engage with any other type of art, to experience humanity in all its messiness and imperfection and complication. They go to feel something. That’s nothing any machine could make, no matter how advanced, nor is it anything that could be made by a person who refuses to let themselves be vulnerable and wrong, who refuses to be complicated.
Christopher Nolan’s perfectly imperfect The Odyssey is now playing in theaters worldwide.
Clayface Trailer Teases Other Batman Villains
While we’re all a little disappointed that Matt Reeves has pushed The Batman: Part IIback to 2028, and we’re all annoyed that we still have no details on an official DCUBatman, that doesn’t mean we have to stay out of Gotham City. The upcoming film Clayface will bring the shapeshifting villain to the screen before the Dark Knight, telling the story of up-and-coming actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) who tests an experimental serum after a mobster mangles his face.
The latest trailer for Clayface helps us get over the lack of Batman by leaning hard into its horror tone. Not only do we meet Naomi Ackie as mad scientist Caitlyn Corrand Max Minghella as a Gotham City detective, but we get to see Hagen struggling to keep his melting flesh together. The trailer even builds to a stomach-churning set piece in which Hagen takes extreme measures to deal with his oozing eyelids. But in between all the gross body stuff, one might catch a glimpse of an important Gotham landmark, one that involves baddies Black Mask and Firefly.
Throughout the trailer, Hagen visits Club Vesuvius, a minor venue used in Batman comics and other media. For the most part, the Vesuvius serves as a background location, a place where the magician Zatanna performs her act and small-time hood Johnny Sabatino does his dirty deeds. However, in the 2009 series Batman: Streets of Gotham, Club Vesuvius gained a new purpose.
Written by Paul Dini and penciled by Dustin Nguyen, the first arcs of Streets of Gotham saw Batman and Robin investigating the criminal activities among the city’s rich and famous. Along the way, they encounter Firefly, a minor villain who had been hiding out in the abandoned club. Across the arc, we learn Black Mask acquired Vesuvius at some point and has given it to Firefly in exchange for his services. However, Firefly has his own agenda and sets large swaths of the city on fire in retaliation for all that’s gone wrong in his life. Black Mask confronts Firefly at Vesuvius, and the two attempt to kill one another until Batman and Robin arrive to stop them.
So why include Club Vesuvius in Clayface? The answer is more simple than you’d think. Clayface writer Mike Flanagan has cited as inspiration the Batman: The Animated Series entry “Feat of Clay,” and the trailer’s shots of a mangled Matt Hagen recall the character design from that classic two-parter. Batman: The Animated Series was primarily developed by Bruce Timm, Mitch Brian, and Paul Dini, the guy who wrote Streets of Gotham.
The inclusion of Club Vesuvius is likely a nod to Dini’s work and, in particular, his love of Zatanna. But it might also be a way to sneak Black Mask and Firefly into the new DCU. For those of us counting the days until we can see Batman again, we say, “The more Bat-baddies, the merrier!”
Clayface comes to theaters on October 23, 2026.
X-Men ’97 Revisited One of the Worst Story Ideas in Marvel History
This article contains spoilers for X-Men ’97 season 2, episode 6.
The latest episode of X-Men ’97, “Danger.exe” opens with a satisfying action scene, in which the government-sponsored X-Factor takes on the Purifiers, an anti-mutant religious cult led by Reverend William Stryker. Satisfying as it is to see Polaris unleash on the hate-mongers, the real fight occurs shortly afterward, when team leader Havok accosts her for going too far. Havok defends himself by insisting that the team does good, finding mutants before other, more hostile forces can and getting them to safety—even if that safety is a prison cell.
Havok’s logic fails to convince Polaris, however, who storms off and eventually joins the X-Men. Viewers won’t find it convincing either. Nonetheless, the idea of X-Factor posing as mutant hunters to secretly find and help wayward mutants comes straight from the comics. In fact, that ethos drove the first incarnation of X-Factor, a concept lifted in part from the movie Ghostbusters.
When X-Factor #1 hit comic stands in 1985, it lacked Havok, Polaris, or any of the members seen in “Danger.exe.” Instead it featured the original five X-Men introduced in 1964’s X-Men #1—Cyclops, Marvel Girl (Jean Grey), Beast, Angel, and Iceman—forming a team called X-Factor. Well, sort of.
Through most of the first issues of X-Factor, the five members advertise throughout the U.S. as the world’s premier set of mutant hunters. They present themselves as humans, wear blue jumpsuits, and even carry high-tech equipment, including a backpack that Angel wore to disguise his wings. When a human hears about a mutant causing a problem, as when the flame-producing Rusty sets fire to a bar, they call X-Factor to come and neutralize the threat.
After capturing the mutant and taking them back to their headquarters, the members of X-Factor would reveal their true plan, providing shelter and training for the wayward mutant. Also they would sometimes put on their standard superhero costumes and call themselves the X-Terminators, mutant terrorists who would wage war against X-Factor and protect the hunted mutants.
If that wasn’t convoluted enough, X-Factor hid their identities from the rest of the X-Men, which meant that the team’s former allies would express anger toward X-Factor and even come to blows with them, not realizing they’re all on the same side. Even more galling, X-Factor came to be after Jean Grey suddenly came back to life after sacrificing herself at the end of The Dark Phoenix Saga, prompting Cyclops to ditch his wife, Madelyne Pryor and son Nathan (the future Cable), and run back to his old girlfriend.
In short, it was a mess, one almost entirely the fault of Marvel editorial. Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter oversaw the rise of the X-Men when writer Chris Claremont took over the book in 1975 and transformed it from a C-tier property to the most popular comic on shelves. But he also took a famously heavy-handed approach to editing and demanded that Jean Grey die at the end of The Dark Phoenix Saga against the intentions of Claremont and co-writer/artist John Byrne.
Yet when Marvel wanted a second X-Men spin-off to go with New Mutants, Shooter entertained a pitch/brainstorm from artist Jackson Guice and writer Bob Layton about reuniting the surviving original X-Men to explore the adult lives of Xavier’s graduates. Despite originally demanding her death, Shooter insisted upon resurrecting Jean as a publicity stunt. Then because Jean’s return and the reunion of the original five X-Men apparently weren’t enough, the creative team added one more hook and decided to copy Ghostbusters, still a blockbuster playing in theaters around the world.
Thus we got one of the most convoluted and tiresome storylines in comics history. The X-Factor disguises looked stupid and stretched credulity (no one notices that X-Factor has the exact same composition as the X-Terminators, complete with a guy wearing red glasses?). The schism between X-Factor and their friends undermined the whole purpose of a shared universe. Worst of all, it took years to rehabilitate Cyclops after his nonsensical decision to abandon his family.
Fortunately, new writer Louise Simonson dropped the mutant hunter concept shortly after she took over the book with X-Factor #6 (1986) and eventually pinned the whole idea on Cameron Hodge, who became one of the most memorable X-Men villains. By the time the original team rejoined the X-Men and a whole new team arrived in X-Factor #71 (1991), both the X-Terminators and the mutant hunters were a distant memory… that is, until X-Men ’97 resurrected it for “Danger.exe.”
X-Men ’97 streams new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.
The Best Animated Villains Ever
Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time.
The very best animated villains linger in the mind long after the TV or movie credits have rolled. Disney alone has produced more than its fair share of legendary antagonists, but we’ve deliberately kept their presence to a minimum here. Those villains deserve a spotlight all their own, and they have one right here.
Instead, this list celebrates some of the greatest animated villains from across the wider world of animation, proving that evil comes in many forms, no matter who brings it to life.
The Joker – Batman: The Animated Series
Standing out as a chaotic streak of color against the noir and art deco-style design of Batman: The Animated Series, this Joker became one for the ages. Voiced with a playful menace by Mark Hamill, the show’s version of the Joker was never overused, which made his appearances all the more unsettling. Still, The Animated Series had a lot of fun with its take on DC villain, having been given the opportunity to twist his red grin into a menacing scowl in an instant and giving a whole new generation of comic book kids a reason to fear and love the Clown Prince of Crime more than a decade ahead of Heath Ledger’s scene-stealing live action performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
Megatron – The Transformers: The Movie
“Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost,” says Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, and he means it, because in a film that features a literal planet-sized Transformer, Megatron remains the number one villain of the piece. Having already slain a number of Autobots along with his Decepticon crew, he finally battles Optimus Prime and both are mortally wounded. But ol’ Megs isn’t gone for long, because he’s soon remade into Galvatron and re-ignites his mission to become the biggest animated metal bastard of all time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way! Y’see, although The Transformers: The Movie initially annoyed the crap out of some fans by notching up a slasher movie-level number of Transformer kills, it’s now considered a classic, and absolute peak Megatron.
Omni-Man – Invincible
Invincible‘s Nolan Grayson may be the most powerful superhero on Earth, but he is also an alien and initially works as an agent of the Viltrum Empire, sent here to weaken our planet and prepare it for an invasion. The way he goes about this mission is explored in an absolutely horrifying string of incidents during season 1 of Prime Video’s animated series, from ripping apart Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Guardians of the Globe, to a devastating rageathon through Chicago that kills thousands of innocent people. But what makes Omni-Man such a great villain is that it’s clear that he has been deeply affected by the love of his family and friends on Earth, yet he still moves forward with his deadly plans. Later, he begins a real redemption arc, but season 1 Omni-Man is as dark as they come.
Aku – Samurai Jack
Aku isn’t just a rote villain plopped into Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack story to be a bit of an opp to our hero. He’s already won by sending Jack into a future where his rule has seeped into every crack, so Jack’s main mission can’t ever be to simply stop him. He has to travel back in time and get home first! Indeed, this proves to be a much harder mission, and this way, even when Aku’s dishing out grandiose monologues, having childish outbursts, or not even in the episode at all, he remains a menacing, credible danger, whether by trying to break Jack’s spirit through a string of hopeless situations or forcing him to question whether his mission is even possible. The late Mako Iwamatsu also gave such a rich, theatrical performance as Aku; it helped Samurai Jack (and his villain) become so beloved.
King Haggard – The Last Unicorn
1982’s The Last Unicorn remains a massively underrated animated movie. Peter S. Beagle wrote the script for it based on his terrific fantasy novel following a unicorn who sets out to discover what happened to all the rest of her kind when she realizes she’s the last one left. The late and great Sir Christopher Lee voices the villainous King Haggard, leader of the depressing Hagsgate, in the adaptation, and hoo boy does he sell this cursed man well, because when we find out that the only thing that makes the king happy is looking at unicorns, we also find out that he’s found a way to keep them around forever by chasing them into the sea outside his castle. It allows him to watch them come in and out with the tides. Frightened in their captivity, the unicorns are eventually freed and, along with his castle, Haggard falls to his death in the very sea that kept them prisoner. Good riddance.
Azula – Avatar: The Last Airbender
It’s harder than you’d think to craft an emotionally complex animated villain, but they knocked it out of the park with Azula, who tends to rely on strategy over strength to defeat her opponents in The Last Airbender. A notably skilled firebender, her ruthless nature has nonetheless been tragically shaped by her upbringing and her obsession with perfection. As a consequence, her fear of failure and inability to trust others cause her to unravel. Azula’s eventual downfall is accidentally driven by her own flaws, but that’s just one of the many reasons why she remains one of the most compelling animated villains ever.
Venger – Dungeons & Dragons
As the main antagonist of the 80s cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons series, Venger was such a menacing sorcerer that even his massive and arguably cumbersome gray skirt couldn’t dampen the threat of his arrival. Forcing children to fend off his sorcery and help poor villagers escape his terrorism, Venger traumatized 80s kids everywhere with his single red horn and vampiric teeth, riding in on his black horse to put so many spanners in the works that the young crew never found their way back home. In that respect, he became a kind of nightmare villain; the kind you can’t get away from in your dreams no matter how hard you try.
A script for the unproduced finale confirmed that Venger was set to be revealed as the Dungeon Master’s estranged son, but although that knowledge certainly would have added a tragic footnote to his story, it wouldn’t have helped the countless heroes whom he eliminated before the show’s new gang arrived to thwart his evil plans.
Lord Shen – Kung Fu Panda 2
While Kung Fu Panda‘s Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is much more of a moustache-twirling villain than some others on this list, he’s definitely earned his place on it. He’s also probably the dumbest smart villain here, because his intelligent manoeuvres are regularly countered by his inability to escape a prophecy he himself is helping come to pass. After his role in the destruction of Po’s village and the loss of his family, Shen makes a series of increasingly cruel decisions to turn fate in his favour, refusing to accept responsibility for his past and ultimately falling to Po, who has made peace with his. Shen is one of those tragic villains who might have eventually found some kind of redemption if he’d just found a way to let go of his fear.
Cruella de Vil – One Hundred and One Dalmatians
What could be more upsetting to animal lovers than a vain, greedy person who wants nothing more than to kidnap puppies and skin them for fashion? Disney’s animated version of Dodie Smith’s “cruel devil,” voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, was the walking, talking epitome of evil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and although she’s been portrayed by many other actresses since, the animated Cruella de Vil’s wild, twisted red mouth and pale complexion have always been truly upsetting to witness. Unlike other villains on this list, she doesn’t want power or revenge. She isn’t a supernatural monster. Cruella is a regular human being, and she just wants to kill puppies. Awful woman.
The Lich – Adventure Time
Revenge? Power? Good, old-fashioned greed? Pah! A true villain doesn’t truck with such pathetic motivations. The Lich is more than happy to simply exterminate all life. Giving off “death is inevitable and life is meaningless” vibes, when The Lich appeared, you know the situation just got very real in the normally whimsical land of Adventure Time. His quiet, philosophical demeanor and cosmic nature make his power feel beyond the control of our heroes, possibly infinite, and the nihilism he brings to the show smothers it in ancient and unstoppable evil. Great guy. Good times.
Hexxus – FernGully: The Last Rainforest
Voiced by the always sensational Tim Curry, Hexxus is a malevolent entity that feeds on the byproducts of human-caused environmental destruction in 1982’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, delighting in corruption and growing stronger every time he encounters sludge, toxic waste, or pollution. By the end of the movie, he’s become a smoky, skeletal monster filled with horrors, embodying industrial devastation and putting the fear of god into kids who finish the movie and realize that there are human forces that will stop at nothing to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the world we live in. Oh, and he also has a fun song, “Toxic Love,” if you need a breather from thinking about everything he represents.
Scar – The Lion King
Scar is such a good emotional manipulator, and although he’s a literal lion, he doesn’t resort to physical force to reach the top. Why would he, when his psychological tactics work so well? No, Scar plots and plans until he finally gets the opportunity to murder his brother and steal the throne in The Lion King, convincing little Simba that he’s to blame, then letting his land rot as he basks in his own majesty. Jeremy Irons’ sharp, theatrical line-readings add an extra layer of threat to Scar’s inevitable rule, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (and hyenas).
Judge Doom – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
The reveal of Judge Doom as not merely a villainous Dip enjoyer but a homicidal toon continues to traumatize many a child, with his bulging, animated eyes and screeching voice pretty hard to forget during the climax of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Actor Christopher Lloyd plays him with an enormous amount of menace in his live-action moments, but when Judge Doom toons out, he is terrifying on another level. The kindly Doc Brown of the Back to the Future films is immediately forgotten, replaced with a twisted amalgamation of surreal, hand-drawn intimidation, live-action, and a very real threat to kill all toons, which director Robert Zemeckis himself likened to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Chilling and unforgettable.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day Promises Darkest Spidey Movie Yet
This article samples interviews from the newest issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. Find out how you can subscribe to get the full physical copy right here!
They don’t call him your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man for nothing. The adventures of Peter Parker, aka the guy in the red and blue costume, can be traumatic, they can be angst-ridden in that way every young adult knows, and they can even flirt with tragedy. But more often than not, there’s a reason his main comic line has Amazing in the title. It’s about the joy of youth!
That’s perhaps doubly so for Tom Holland, who’s donned the Web-Head’s mask in six previous Marvel Studios films. And yet, as Holland and his co-stars in this month’s upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Daytease in the latest Den of Geek cover story, that appears to be changing with the first Spidey film to deal with the character confronting the totality of adulthood… and the lingering effects of burying a parental figure like Marisa Tomei’s May Parker.
“We’re dealing with a dark version of Spider-Man, where he’s closing himself off and trying to figure out who he is,” actor Jon Bernthal revealed while discussing the addition of the Punisher to the onscreen Spider-Man mythos. The character of the Punisher of course first appeared in a Spidey comic (1974’s The Amazing Spider-Man #129 to be exact), but Bernthal’s version of despondent vigilante Frank Castle has been a decidedly R-rated affair on various Netflix and Disney+ shows. Yet Bernthal thinks Castle will meet Spidey somewhere perfectly in the middle during this month’s PG-13 superhero extravaganza.
“Frank doesn’t buy into all this stuff,” Bernthal said. “He’s a level guy and he gets frustrated with all this superhero stuff. But there’s a sense of mutual respect with Spider-Man. Frank knows that Spider-Man can do things that he can’t. Spider-Man’s embracing darkness in his life, and, as someone who’s been down that road, Frank doesn’t love that for anybody. It cracks open Frank’s heart. He’s begging Spider-Man not to go to the places he goes.”
Confronting those darker elements of Peter Parker makes sense, as it’s always been the B-side of the Spider-Man comics where Peter has had to deal with burying friends and family at a young age, and the weight of doing the right thing in a world that doesn’t care. Brand New Day seems to mark a chance for Holland to fully explore those elements which were only beginning to be teased out during the ending of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the film where Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin kills Peter’s aunt and ends with the world forgetting Peter Parker exists because of timey-wimey shenanigans.
“The loss of Aunt May should be devastating,” Holland said in the new issue of Den of Geek. “It should take up the entire third act of [No Way Home]. But we were trying to make something fun and exciting, so he meets these two other Spider-Men, the most iconic Spider-Men. We couldn’t have Tobey [Maguire] and Andrew [Garfield] having the time of their lives while my character’s crying all the time. It wouldn’t have worked… Brand New Day deals with some of those things we had to gloss over in No Way Home.”
Hence in the new movie, we jump ahead five years and find Peter still mourning May, as well the loss of his great love in MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), and how their absence leaves Peter in a place where he and Punisher can connect. For actors with so much history working together like Holland, Zendaya, and Batalon, all of the above creates unique acting challenges.
“Honestly, we felt bad for Tom,” Zendaya laughed. “Jacob and I are just having a good time, minding our business. And Tom, bless him, is standing off in a corner alone, staring at us from afar! It was like an acting exercise, to play as if you’ve never met this person before. We had to imagine this life that Ned and MJ had without Peter’s presence.”
It’s an interesting note, as is playing these characters at the end of their academic careers. No previous live-action Spider-Man movies has ever reached that point in a young person’s life when the full horizon after school stands before them. It can be an exhilarating time for some. For others, perhaps, a darker one. Although the way director Destin Daniel Cretton framed it, this is less about darkness as that universal anxiety that accompanies uncertainty.
“Brand New Day has a more mature Spider-Man, but I don’t like the word ‘darker,’” Cretton asserted. “Spider-Man isn’t Batman… When I graduated from college, I had a communications degree and no job prospects. I struggled through my 20s, sharing an apartment with three to eight guys, all of us looking for work. The reality of the world hit me in the face. In that stage, I learned what it really feels like to lose someone, to go through sadness and darker times, and I learned what was important in life for the first time. That’s the stage that Peter Parker happens to be going through.”
Audiences will soon learn for themselves what shades of light, and dark, Brand New Day weaves in its web when the movie opens on Friday, July 31. In the meantime, you can subscribe and get your own physical copy of the Den of Geek magazine with our complete conversations with Holland, Zendaya, Bernthal, and Cretton right here.
Avengers: Doomsday – Is Steve Rogers Really Steve Rogers?
Half the fun of a new Marvel movie’s trailer release is digging into its smaller, easy-to-miss details, so when a first proper look at Avengers: Doomsday was released earlier this week, we broke as much of the big stuff down as possible.
The internet at large has spotted a few other things in the days since. For example, when we see a shot of Loki’s TVA card in the trailer, the hand holding it sports a gold wedding ring. This has led people to believe that Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is the one checking the official ID, and that he and Loki may have met in a branch timeline during the events of the Loki TV show—we just haven’t seen it yet.
Yet it’s Evans’ full appearance at the end of the trailer that’s got people talking. See, some aren’t convinced that the Steve Rogers who pops up and summons Mjolnir to prove to Thor that he’s worthy is really Steve Rogers. There’s no obvious reason to think this, just a sense that something is “off” about him. If you’re sitting there right now going “what do you mean? Of course that’s our Steve Rogers!” then we’re here to help break down the reasoning and best guesses of our online sleuths. We’re also going to rank them by how likely they are to be right, because why not?
6. Mephisto
Long after the heady days of WandaVision, when the internet was convinced that Mephisto was the one behind the strange occurrences in Westview, he really did show up in a Marvel TV show: Ironheart. Played by Sacha Baron Cohen, Mephisto revealed himself to Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) in the finale, admitting that he was the one who’d given the show’s villain his magical cloak.
Mephisto is a telekinetic master manipulator (and actual demon) who can shapeshift, manipulate time and reality, and even bring people back to life. Oh, and he just loves making pacts that destroy lives. If there was a way to swing the events of Doomsday to his advantage, or even just for kicks, Mephisto might choose to do so. And yes, he could also pretend to be Steve Rogers. But how could he wield Mjolnir, you may ask? To answer that question, you simply have to think like Mephisto: by conjuring a fake version of Mjolnir to fool Thor into thinking he was offering him the real one.
Though Mephisto is always a fun addition to key crossover events in the comics (and the main villain in Secret Wars II), we think it’s pretty unlikely that he’s pretending to be Steve here. You may have noticed that no one introduced in the Disney+ TV shows appears in the Doomsday trailer save for the new Falcon, who has since been established in the MCU movies thanks to Brave New World, so explaining TV Mephisto during a Doctor Doom movie seems like a headache Marvel could simply avoid.
5. Mystique
Mystique has rarely met a person she wouldn’t pretend to be. In the X-Men movies, the blue-skinned mutant has previously taken the guise of everyone from Rogue to Wolverine to William Stryker to even Hugh Hefner, and during the Doomsday trailer, we see her fake being Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) to get the upper hand.
Could she pretend to be Steve Rogers? Maybe, at a stretch. She would probably need to have seen photos or videos of Steve to accurately impersonate him, and there’s no reason to believe she’d have had access to those in the X-Men universe. As for wielding Mjolnir, it’s possible, but again, at a stretch. Magneto can manipulate magnetic fields around much bigger objects than Thor’s hammer, but he wouldn’t be able to bypass Odin’s enchantment to allow anyone to actually wield it. However, in that particular moment between Steve and Thor shown in the trailer, Mystique might just be able to get away with a basic ruse. But not for long.
4. The Beyonder
The Beyonder was key to both Secret Wars and Secret Wars II, while a race of Beyonders appeared in 2015’s Secret Wars run. Though there’s been no MCU set-up for the Beyonder to show up in Doomsday or 2027’s follow-up, Avengers: Secret Wars, fans have often wondered if the omnipotent being from beyond the Marvel multiverse would pop up at some point. After all, the character is such an important aspect of those earlier Secret Wars runs, during which he was notably impressed by Steve Rogers’ ability to prioritise selflessness and reasoning over power or revenge, and once modeled himself after Steve.
If Doctor Doom is messing with the multiverse in Doomsday, the Beyonder could potentially take the form of Steve to insert himself into the narrative. His power would also likely outweigh Odin’s enchantment, leaving him free to toss Mjolnir wherever he chooses.
3. Captain Hydra
One of the most popular “Steve isn’t Steve” theories around is that the version of him we see in the Doomsday trailer is actually Captain Hydra. About a decade ago, Marvel Comics flirted with a storyline in which Cosmic Cube shenanigans rewrote Steve’s past so he believed in Hydra’s ideals from childhood. If we add this dastardly Steve into Doomsday, it would mean a Captain Hydra variant has taken Steve’s place. Fans make a good point that we already have an “evil” version of Iron Man (kinda) here, with Robert Downey Jr. now playing Doctor Doom. Why not throw another big one in?
The idea of tricking the audience into thinking Steve Rogers is back to save the day, only to reveal that he’s an evil variant, is admittedly quite delicious, but Marvel already has enough on their hands explaining who Doctor Doom is and why he looks exactly like Iron Man, not to mention having to catch people up on what happened to Loki for anyone who skipped that show. They’ve also added in so many extra teams and characters. The Thunderbolts, the Fantastic Four, the Wakandans, and the X-Men will all need to get their moment to shine. Wouldn’t bringing more variants into the equation just make things super, super convoluted? Besides, Captain Hydra isn’t in the least bit worthy. Yeah, we aren’t buying into this one!
2. Loki
This is the theory that makes the most emotional and narrative sense. Thor still believes that Loki is dead (and his version of Loki actually is dead), so the villainous variant who escaped during the Time Heist in Avengers: Endgame and went on to become a genuine good guy by working with the TVA might not want to confuse Thor by showing up out of the blue to help the Avengers. He could choose to appear as Steve Rogers instead.
Loki would arguably be much more likely to gain Thor’s trust that way, especially if he proves he’s worthy of summoning Mjolnir. Moreover, the payoff of Loki’s variant being able to wield the hammer would indeed be considerable. Many people would understand how much the character grew and evolved during his TV show arc, even sacrificing the rest of his days to keep the multiverse afloat alone. Who’s to say Loki isn’t worthy at this point? It also wouldn’t be the first time Loki has chosen to impersonate Captain America. He’s previously pretended to be Steve to get under Thor’s skin, and let’s not forget that when Steve saw another version of himself during Endgame, even he thought that version was Loki! That was his first and only thought!
It’s also worth noting that the moment when Thor says “it’s not possible” in the trailer has been embraced by different fan theories elsewhere, after people noticed someone standing in the shadows behind him. Marvel’s mischievous history of editing context in their trailers could have struck again. Could Thor actually be looking at the real Loki there, and that’s why he’s so shocked? Or is he looking at someone he believes to be the late Tony Stark? All we know is our gut says “maybe.”
1. Steve Rogers
Occam’s razor time: Doomsday’s Steve Rogers is probably just our Steve Rogers, and the internet is probably just being the internet again.
Avengers: Doomsday will be released on December 18, where all will be revealed.
X-Men ’97 Finally Brings Back a Fan Favorite in Villainous Form
This article contains spoilers for X-Men ’97 season 2, episode 6.
Before sacrificing himself to stop the Omega Sentinel that was decimating Genosha, Gambit flashed his trademark smirk and said, “The name’s Gambit, mon ami. Remember it.” Of course, we could never forget. We think of Gambit not just because of his act of heroism but also for the indefatigable sense of style he kept as he went out.
Also we think of Gambit because he never really went away. From the post-credit scene of season one and throughout this second season, X-Men ’97 has reminded us again and again that Apocalypse has plans for the late Remy LeBeau. Those plans finally come to fruition in the post-credit scene of “Danger.exe,” but the comics have long warned us that when Gambit rises again, he’ll arrive in the form of Death itself.
Before we can talk about Gambit’s transformation, we might need a refresher on what the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are. As we’ve seen throughout season two of X-Men ’97, the ancient Egyptian mutant En Sabah Nur transformed into Apocalypse when he encountered the Celestials, the intergalactic deities responsible for seeding Earth and other planets. Nur challenged the Celestials by entering the shrine on Ship and gaining the armor that turned him into Apocalypse. Then to prepare for the moment when the Celestials would return and judge the Earth, Apocalypse expanded the survival of the fittest ethos of his clan the Sandstormers and began testing those with power.
To prepare the way for his tests, Apocalypse transforms four people into his horsemen: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. These hosts rarely tend to last long, because they either die or rebel, as in the case of founding X-Man Warren Worthington III, aka Angel, who was turned into the Angel of Death Archangel back in the original run of X-Men: The Animated Series.
Gambit first became linked to Apocalypse via the villain Mister Sinister, who had been using Gambit to torment the X-Men even before his first appearance in 1990’s Uncanny X-Men #266. Over the years, Gambit’s history and relation to Mister Sinister evolved to something other than what co-creator Chris Claremont had intended (to read more about that, and how Claremont delved into Gambit’s intended origin in X-Men: The End, see this week’s comics newsletter). But by 2006’s X-Men #182, part one of The Blood of Apocalypse, Gambit was ready to make another deal with the devil if it could help his fellow mutants. This time, the devil was Apocalypse.
Written by Peter Milligan and penciled by Salvador Larroca, The Blood of Apocalypse takes place after M Day, the moment when Scarlet Witch used her magic to de-power all but 198 of the world’s mutants. Sensing a change in the world order, Apocalypse begins gathering his new Horsemen for an attack. At the same time, Gambit feels particularly troubled, in part because of M Day, but also because Rogue’s mother Mystique had joined the team with the goal of separating Remy from her daughter. So when he hears about Apocalypse’s plan to revive the mutant race, Gambit leaves the X-Men and aligns himself with their enemy, recognizing him as the mutant messiah.
Gambit voluntarily becomes the Horseman Death but with one caveat: he refuses to allow Apocalypse to control his mind, even if that means he will feel everything that happens to him during the transformation. Gambit wants to retain his personality and free will, even while serving his new master. Also he keeps his head sock on, which looks weird, but certainly fits the character.
Despite his insistence that he controls his own mind, Gambit fights against the X-Men in general and Rogue in particular. Worse, the experience leads him to once again join Mister Sinister and the Marauders, the same group of killers to whom he betrayed the X-Men way back before his first appearance. Even stranger, Gambit stays with the Marauders even after Mystique joins them, despite the fact that her intervention was the reason that Remy left the X-Men in the first place. Of course much if it turns out to be a long con involving rescuing Rogue from a coma and saving Hope, the first mutant born after M Day, but it takes a long time to get to that reveal.
From that quick synopsis, we can see that X-Men ’97 must take a different route to Gambit’s transformation. As far as we can tell, Gambit fully died on Genosha, so he cannot willingly make a deal with Apocalypse. Moreover, M Day hasn’t happened in X-Men ’97, meaning that the character has a very different relationship with his fellow mutants.
Do these differences mean that Gambit is stuck as a slave of Apocalypse? Or could some other plan be at work? Whatever happens, Gambit is, above else, a thief and a gambler, so even when he’s Death incarnate, he’s still Gambit—and only a fool would fail to remember it.
X-Men ’97 streams new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.
X-Men ’97 Season 2 Episode 6 Review: The Dangers of Evolution
This article contains spoilers for X-Men ’97 season 2 episode 6.
The X-Men should make us uncomfortable. Where the Avengers or Justice League exist only to protect us and inspire us, the X-Men represent the next stage of human evolution. Yes, they’re willing to protect a world that hates and fears them and, yes, they’ll pursue a dream of humans and mutants living in harmony. But people can only be pushed so far, and the X-Men are no different. The best X-Men stories should also have a sense of menace, the realization that they’ll shift tactics to protect themselves if humanity continues to oppress them.
In its best moments, “Danger.exe” invokes that sense of danger, especially at the end, when it invokes both Grant Morrison‘s reinvention from 2001 and the Krakoa era that Jonathan Hickman launched in 2019, two of the most daring approaches to Marvel‘s mutants. But the episode invokes a different sort of discomfort by integrating concepts and scenes from Joss Whedon‘s Astonishing X-Men run, including the villain Danger.
“Danger.exe” sees the team trying to get back to business as usual after the events of the first half of the season. Class is back in session at Xavier’s School for Gifted Children, with Storm taking over as headmistress and a student body that includes some favorites from the comics (Doop! Shark Girl! Eye Boy! Glob Herman! ugh, Quentin Quire). We even have new members in the form of Bishop, finally here full time, and Polaris, who gets booted from X-Factor after her patience with Reverend Stryker’s Purifiers.
Yet, the X-Men have no normal, and must always evolve. So, in addition to adopting the biker-style costumes that Frank Quitely designed for Morrison’s run, Xavier rethinks his dream. By the end of the episode, he has transitioned his focus away the school and launches X-Corp. The episode doesn’t entirely explain what X-Corp is, and knowledge of the comics doesn’t help much. But Val Cooper’s irritation at the end indicates that Xavier’s making a play for international sovereignty, not unlike Krakoa.
In short, a lot happens in “Danger.exe,” as has been the case for every episode of X-Men ’97. For as much as last week’s “Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs” too quickly glossed over important character details, “Danger.exe” hits just the right combination of spectacular action and character attention. The episode deftly blends character progression with plot beats, making room for the big set-pieces.
We see that precision in the first scene, in which Xavier uses the Danger Room to relive the final moments of Magneto’s life. The repetition suggests self-harm, but when Xavier scolds the room for failing to adhere to safety protocols, we realize two things: first, of course, that the Danger Room has a mind of its own, setting up the episode’s villain; but also, second, that Xavier retains control over himself, and uses the sequence to ask hard questions about his methods, setting up the X-Corps reveal.
Xavier’s mental state mirrors that of Lorna Dane a.k.a. Polaris, who finally gets the spotlight here. Lorna has been trying to play “good mutant” in X-Force, serving alongside her boyfriend Havok, who’s portrayed accurate to the comics here as a naive himbo given to fits of self-righteousness (to be clear, I love him). When she can no longer tolerate the oppressors who want her eradicated, Polaris gets kicked off the team and returns to the X-Men.
Carolina Ravassa gives Polaris a raspy pluck that perfectly suits a woman who wants to adhere to Xavier’s dream, but has lost patience. Her internal struggle, wanting to honor the high ideals of her mentor but increasingly sympathetic to her father’s worldview, not only pairs nicely with the no-nonsense Bishop, but also dovetails with Xavier’s turn to the radical with the establishment of X-Corp. Fitting, then, that the revelation comes while fighting an opponent called Danger.
Danger and other elements from the episode, such as the fake Sentinel attack during a school assembly, come directly from Joss Whedon’s run with artist John Cassidy. Astonishing is pure Whedon, often quite brilliant and extremely uncomfortable in hindsight, which makes it kind of surprising that X-Men ’97 would pay homage so openly.
Yet, the inclusion of Whedon’s contributions gets at the central idea of the episode and the concept of the X-Men in general. Mutants are not safe. They must make us uncomfortable, both in terms of subject matter and history. The inclusion of work from guys like Whedon (who is far from the only problematic figure invoked or credited in this episode, let alone in the history of X-Men comics) reminds us that we will make mistakes and bad actors will be involved. But we must continue to grow, even through the danger. That’s what evolution is all about.
X-Men ’97 season 2 streams new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.
X-Tra Thoughts
While in Val Cooper’s office, Polaris uses her powers to make Einstein balls start clacking. While a similar thing happened in the first X-Men movie, I’m betting that it’s more a reference to X-Factor #87 (1993), perhaps the single best superhero comic of all time (despite the Joe Quesada art). Written by the legend Peter David, the entire issue consists of the team in therapy with Leonard Samson, sessions that turn jokey C-list heroes into three-dimensional people. It hits just as hard today as it did thirty years ago, when young me brought it home from my comic book shop.
As someone who read all those Peter David issues as they came out in the ’90s, I have to take issue with the shot of Wolfsbane just hanging out in a towel with Havok and Polaris in the X-Factor locker room. There’s no way that Rahne would have been fine being in a state of undress with those two! She’d make an awkward pass, start yelling about Reverend Craig, attack one of them—anything but just stand around!
One more old nerd observation: I can’t help but chuckle at the juxtaposition of the Quitely costumes with elements from the Whedon and Cassidy run. An early Morrison issue had Cyclops praise the new suits, wondering aloud why Xavier had them ever dress up like superheroes, while Whedon’s first issue has Cyclops declare that they need to wear costumes because they are superheroes.
Oh yeah, Gambit’s back! We all knew he would return as Apocalypse’s Horseman Death, and he doesn’t do much here but transform. But the evil version of the Ragin’ Cajun will be a going concern from here, and we’ll have a deeper dive into his transformation as a separate article.
Clayface’s Timeline Confirmation Raises Questions About the DCU
Ever since he first debuted in 1940’s Detective Comics #40, Clayface has been one of Batman‘s most compelling villains. A master of disguise, Clayface can take any form and fit into any situation. The codename has been used by several different people, and Clayface even recently changed his moral alignment to join Batman in the fight to protect Gotham City.
So when news came down that horror master Mike Flanagan had written a movie about Clayface, and that it would be in the DCU, no one was too bothered by the fact that Clayface had already appeared in season one of Creature Commandos. However, DC Studios co-head Peter Safran has complicated issues, telling Entertainment Weekly that the character played by Tom Rhys Harries is “the same Clayface” we saw in Creature Commandos, albeit before the events of that show. While that may be confusing for those who watched that animated series, the fact that the same character can exist in two very different projects is a good sign for the new DCU.
Written by the other head of DC Studios, James Gunn, Creature Commandos followed a group of monsters assembled into a Suicide Squad-style team dispatched to protect a small European country from the Wonder Woman villain Circe. After getting suspicious of an academic working for Amanda Waller named Aisla MacPherson, team leader Rick Flag (Frank Grillo) investigates and discovers that Clayface (Alan Tudyk) has been impersonating the professor as part of a larger plan. With the help of Eric Frankenstein (David Harbour), Flag defeats Clayface, seemingly killing him.
According to Flanagan and director James Watkins, the protagonist of the upcoming movie is something of a tragic hero. Drawing inspiration from the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Feat of Clay” and the Grant Morrison and Dave McKean comic book Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Clayface follows up-and-coming actor Matt Hagen, who starts using an experimental serum to restore the looks he lost when a vengeful gangster carves up his face. The serum starts changing Hagen’s body, granting him new abilities and making it harder for him to resist his darkest urges.
“We meet Matt at a real turning point in his career and then, very quickly, at a real turning point in his life,” Harries explained. “It’s a horror, but it’s a thriller. It asks, How far would you go to reclaim your life that you’ve built?”
That description does not fit the character we saw in Creature Commandos. In that show, Clayface acts like a typical bro, as he hits on female students while in the form of Professor MacPherson and spends his evenings trash-talking online video game opponents while eating junk food. Hardly the three-dimensional figure that the movie seems to showcase.
Comic fans know that Hagen is only the second person to use the name Clayface, a criminal treasure hunter whose body transformed after being exposed to a mysterious ooze. Other Clayfaces include scientist Preston Payne, who injected himself with Hagen’s blood to cure a rare disease, Sondra Fuller aka Lady Clay, Payne and Fuller’s son Cassius, and the ill-fated law enforcement officer Peter Malley.
Even though Clayface director James Watkins admits his version of Hagen is “an amalgam”—”We’ve pinched elements from all over the place,” he explained—one still has to wonder: Why not just pick a different version of the character to feature in the movie? That way, they could avoid the confusion with Creature Commandos.
Neither Safran nor Flanagan nor Watkins has an answer, but it doesn’t really matter. Not only is Clayface a mutable character, but all of superhero comics can change to meet the moment. Within just the world of Batman comics, sometimes the stories are gritty and hard-edged and sometimes they are goofy and over-the-top. Sometimes, they make the villains into sympathetic monsters, and sometimes Batman fights remorseless humans. Some of Batman’s adventures are made for young readers, and sometimes he’s adults-only.
Part of the reason we still care about Batman, almost ninety years after he debuted, is because he can change to fit into any sort of story. While the DCU certainly wants to follow the MCU’s model and bring a shared universe to the big screen, it has to follow the comics’ lead and accept that Superman may act one way in his own stories and be different when playing a supporting role in a different story.
If the DCU wants to survive, it has to be able to change to meet the demands of the story. With Clayface, they have the perfect shape-shifting character to prove that it can be done.
Clayface arrives in theaters on October 23, 2026.
Final Spider-Man: Brand New Day Trailer Confirms Peter and MJ Will Always Be Endgame
The essence of Spider-Man can be boiled down to one phrase, and it was written down at the end of his first appearance in 1962’s Amazing Fantasy #15 (albeit in a slightly, wordier form): With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility. That statement means that Spider-Man must always do the right thing with the amazing abilities thrust upon him, even if it means he cannot live the life he wants.
As the final trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day reminds us, the life he wants, more than anything else, is to be with MJ. In fact, much of the final trailer consists of footage from the previous MCU Spider-Man movies starring Tom Holland, showing everything he’s sacrificed before building to the cruelest loss of all, having all knowledge of his existence wiped from everyone, including MJ. As Zendaya told Den of Geek in this month’s exclusive cover story (order your copy here!), Brand New Day finds Peter “more vulnerable and intense than we’ve seen before,” having to “face all these challenges alone.” Turns out, the hardest challenge is being away from MJ.
Believe it or not, Mary Jane Watson wasn’t originally part of Spider-Man’s supporting cast on the page. For the first few years of Amazing Spider-Man, Peter dated Betty Brant, Gwen Stacy, and often, no one at all. Mary Jane initially appeared as something of a running joke, as her Aunt Anna, best friend to Aunt May, would cajole Peter about taking her niece out on a date. Sensing a responsibility he did not need to take on, and afraid that he wouldn’t find MJ attractive, Peter would duck the suggestions. In fact, from 1965’s Amazing Spider-Man #25 onward, MJ appeared only in silhouette or with her face obscured, leading readers to assume that he was right.
All of that changed with the final page of 1966’s Amazing Spider-Man #42, by Stan Lee and John Romita Sr. There a beaten Peter finally agrees to take MJ on a date. He pulls open the door to find the beautiful Mary Jane waiting for him. She then delivers the iconic line, “Face it Tiger, you just hit the jackpot.” Despite that initial date, Peter and MJ weren’t immediately a couple. She stayed within his friend group and dated his best friend Harry Osborn for a while, meanwhile Peter stayed with Gwen Stacy. Even after Gwen’s death, the two couldn’t accept being together.
Yet once they did get together and finally married in 1987’s Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, by David Michelinie, Jim Shooter, and Paul Ryan, the couple seemed inseparable.
So important has the relationship been to Spider-Man stories that it’s driven most adaptations, including the Sam Raimi movies. As Tobey Maguire‘s Peter Parker tells us in the first lines of the 2002 film, his story is “all about a girl… Mary Jane Watson.” Peter’s connection to MJ provides the emotional core of those three movies, resulting in memorable images, such as the rainy upside kiss from the first movie or MJ returning to him in her wedding dress at the end of Spider-Man 2.
The Amazing Spider-Man movies tried to distinguish themselves by pairing Peter with Gwen Stacy, but that only worked because of Andrew Garfield‘s electric chemistry with Emma Stone, and even then it all built to a tragic end.
More successful have been the MCU movies’ attempts to distinguish themselves by casting Zendaya as a different type of MJ. Michelle Jones is the cynical intellectual whose cool reserve won over the excitable Peter Parker; for her part, MJ could not help but be charmed by Peter’s boundless optimism. The slow romance built over three movies before a heartbreaking conclusion in No Way Home, setting up Peter’s dire new status quo in Brand New Day.
Making matters worse is the fact that Marvel seems determined to keep Peter and MJ apart in the comics as well. Ever since Marvel editorial demanded that the marriage be dissolved in the abysmal 2007 miniseries Spider-Man: One More Day—which led to the (really good!) comic book storyline that gives the latest movie its subtitle,Brand New Day—Peter and Mary Jane have been kept apart by everything from new beaux (including the dreaded Paul!), supervillain body swaps, and multiple superhero identities (fun fact: Mary Jane is Venom in the current continuity).
All of which makes the final trailer for Brand New Day more exciting. Will Peter find a way to reunite with Ned and connect again with MJ? Or will the cavalcade of guest stars such as Punisher, Hulk, and a gaggle of Hand Ninjas keep them apart? In a sizzle reel that both promises “a brand new day” and a kind of ending to Holland’s vision for the character, can Peter and MJ do what the Marvel eidtorial gods have long denied? Prove they’re endgame for each other.
Only Kevin Feige and the creators of Brand New Day have the power to make that happen. We’ll have to see if they’ll take on the responsibility of letting Peter be with MJ again.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters on July 31.
15 Lame Horror Movies That Wouldn’t Frighten a Cat
Fear changes faster than almost any other part of filmmaking. A movie that once had audiences covering their eyes can end up feeling surprisingly tame a few decades later, especially after horror keeps finding new ways to shock people. That’s part of the fun of revisiting older scarefests. Some are packed with lovable monsters, others lean on effects that no longer fool anyone, and a few simply take themselves so seriously that they’re hard not to laugh at today. None of that means they’re impossible to enjoy. If anything, many have become cult favorites for entirely different reasons than their creators probably expected.
Here are 15 horror movies that probably wouldn’t frighten a cat.
Despite its title, there aren’t actually any trolls in Troll 2. Between the famously awkward performances, bizarre dialogue, and unintentionally hilarious scenes, it’s remembered as a cult classic that inspires far more laughter than fear.
Ed Wood’s low-budget sci-fi horror mixes aliens, zombies, and flying saucers into one unforgettable mess. The homemade effects have become legendary, but nobody is watching it for the scares anymore.
The movie embraces its ridiculous premise from the very beginning. The colorful alien clowns are far more entertaining than frightening, which is exactly why the film has built such a loyal cult following.
Everything builds toward the arrival of a terrifying monster, only for audiences to meet what looks like an oversized puppet bird. The reveal has become one of classic horror’s funniest moments.
Stephen King’s only directing credit features killer trucks, soda machines, and lawn equipment. The nonstop chaos is undeniably fun, but it’s difficult to find any of it genuinely unsettling today.
Warwick Davis throws himself into the title role with endless energy, delivering more jokes and one-liners than genuine scares. The mischievous villain quickly steals the movie for all the right reasons.
A horror movie about giant killer tomatoes was never going to be subtle. Instead of chasing realism, the film leans into complete absurdity and becomes a comedy disguised as horror.
The infamous computer-generated birds flap awkwardly across the screen in scenes that became internet favorites almost overnight. They’re memorable, just not for the reasons the filmmakers intended.
Nicolas Cage’s increasingly frantic performance has inspired countless memes over the years. Instead of building suspense, many scenes have become famous for their unintentional comedy.
The idea of nature fighting back sounded promising, but the flat delivery and awkward dialogue drain much of the tension. Today, it’s remembered more for its strange moments than its horror.
The opening scene is genuinely shocking, but the movie struggles to match that energy afterward. Once the mystery takes over, the scares become much easier to see coming.
The wax museum offers a creepy setting, but the movie follows so many familiar slasher conventions that very few surprises are left once the story gets moving.
The slowly creeping creature terrified audiences in the 1950s, yet modern viewers are more likely to appreciate the practical effects than panic every time it appears.
The filmmakers famously dressed dogs in shaggy costumes to play the monsters. It’s impossible not to notice, and once you do, the illusion disappears completely.
A killer shark wearing a Santa hat tells you almost everything you need to know. The movie fully embraces its ridiculous concept, making it much better suited for laughs than late-night nightmares.
Ryan Reynolds Drops Huge Deadpool 4 Update and Biggest Avengers Hint Yet
Deadpool 4 is indeed happening. Star Ryan Reynolds confirmed that there will “eventually” be a fourquel for the Merc with a Mouth during an appearance this past weekend at Fanatics Fest in New York City, also noting that there is “stuff upcoming” for the character.
Reynolds first told the crowd about some lingering Deadpool stories left to tell after taking the stage. “There’s a few really deep cuts that are missing from the movies; I think there’s a few deep cuts missing from some of the comics. There’s certainly some stuff that I love that Fabian [Nicieza] wrote that is incredible. Gerry Duggan is a friend and an incredible comic book writer,” he said, adding, “There’s stuff upcoming; there eventually will be another Deadpool film. It’s going to be great.”
Reynolds’ nod to “stuff upcoming” at Fanatics Fest seems to be the strongest hint yet that Deadpool will appear in another Marvel project before a fourth movie gets going. It’s long been rumored that both Reynolds and Hugh Jackman will reprise their roles as Deadpool and Wolverine in either Avengers: Doomsday or Avengers: Secret Wars, and despite this latest hint, it remains a rumor. However, that hasn’t stopped fans from getting excited about the idea.
Wade Wilson’s MCU fate has been less than certain since the release of Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024, with Reynolds telling THR last May that he was mulling more of an X-Men team-up next for his Marvel antihero. “His ultimate dream is to be accepted and appreciated,” he explained. “But he can’t be accepted. His coping mechanism of deflecting shame through humor works only when used to pave over his many inadequacies. If and when he does become an Avenger or X-Man, we’re at the end of his journey.”
It’s not surprising to hear that Reynolds will eventually suit up again as Deadpool, though. All three of the character’s movies have been huge box office successes, with the third one making $1.3 billion globally at a time when “superhero fatigue” was supposedly in full swing.
We’ll likely find out exactly how and when Deadpool will return before the end of 2027. In the meantime, Reynolds is set to star in a remake of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and a Netflix adaptation of Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight’s Eloise book series, in which he’ll play the villain.
The Odyssey Completes a Career-Long Journey into Christopher Nolan’s Greatest Fear
During one of the few scenes shared by Odysseus and Penelope in the new, staggeringly realized adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, our married couple is in a state of mourning while lying in bed. The grief that snuffs their hushed whispers and moistens downcast eyelines is not due to a loved one who is lost, or a memory of pain long gone by. It’s agony felt for the years yet to come where they will be separated. And as played by Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway in the new Christopher Nolan film, these versions of the mythical Greek figures find no comfort in the prospect of Troy’s sacking. Odysseus leaves solely out of obligation; otherwise his home can never know peace. All Penelope asks for in return is that Odysseus promise her he will return.
“What if I can’t?” Damon’s broods.
It’s a question left hanging over the final edit of the film like how the shadow of Athena haunts Odysseus’ steps. It is also an articulation of one of the chief, driving obsessions of Nolan’s career, which has only deepened with time and age before culminating in The Odyssey’s monumental bloodlust of a finale.
“I’ve written a few dead wives, that’s true,” Nolan once joked about a running motif throughout his early work, which usually involved men and the deceased women who trail behind them. “But you try to put your relatable fears in these things, that’s what film noir is, and I do view Inception as film noir. You take the things that you’re actually worried about in real life, or things that you care about in real life, and extrapolate it into a universal [story].”
It is a (perhaps) sweet gesture toward his real-life wife, producing partner, and raven-haired muse, Emma Thomas, that the best way Nolan could think of heightening the pathos of his hero in Inception —or Memento, or The Prestige, or The Dark Knight, or…—was via this great and terrible fear. Yet as Nolan has evolved as a screenwriter and storyteller, he has put a finer point on his dread by not only revealing what it is, but considering why it is so terrifying.
In a separate interview on her own, Thomas told 60 Minutes, “I cannot imagine Chris if he wasn’t making film, and outside of family which is probablythe most important thing to him… it is horrifying to think how frustrated he would be if he wasn’t able to tell stories by the medium of film.”
Nolan is aware of the mystique he’s cultivated with as much care and effort as he’s put into emphasizing practical effects and the magic of IMAX photography. His reputation as the Hollywood genius of his era grants him the capital to turn a project about the father of the atomic bomb into a three-hour summer blockbuster, and an adaptation of a 3,000-year-old myth into a quarter-billion-dollar event. Yet the more movies he’s made, the better he interrogates the myth behind the Great Man™, plus the often destroyed home life he throws away.
Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper leaves to literally save the world on the other end of the cosmos in Interstellar, but only once he’s on the far side of a wormhole can he confront the enormity of his sacrifice. He realizes he’s missed his children’s entire lives as they age from adolescence to middle-age in the span of a few minutes on his TV screen. He felt what he was doing was important, but only after he spent that most invaluable resource that hovers above all of Nolan’s oeuvre—time —does Coop appreciate what he’s lost. Meanwhile J. Robert Oppenheimer is the epitome of the lauded genius who in real life changed the world by building a team of similarly ambitious minds. That, too, is a theme consistent throughout Nolan’s work, be it Interstellar’s Coop, Inception’s Cobb, or even the gosh darn Batman and his network of public servant accomplices throughout Gotham City.
Yet unlike The Dark Knight trilogy, Oppenheimer carries on past the team’s greatest triumph and sits with the totality of their brilliance. Which in this case was able to level cities, kill tens of thousands, and shape the world for the worst. Also, once again, Oppenheimer’s domestic homelife as a spouse… took some hits along the way.
As Damon told me the other week, Odyssey feels like the ancient flip-side of Oppenheimer’s modern foreboding: “The first thing I said to Chris when I read the script was, ‘Wow, this traffic’s in a lot of the same themes as Oppenheimer… I just felt that’s a story about accountability for what you’ve done and the decisions you’ve made. Odysseus is very much responsible for his own ingenuity and living with the effects of that.”
Here is yet another genius whose greatest contribution to history is winning a war by annihilating a city and condemning its inhabitants to mass death and suffering. He is celebrated because of it, but more so than Homer’s Odysseus, he also is forced to reckon with the psychic horrors it unleashed not only on Troy but also his own homeland where the bonds of what is considered moral and justifiable corrode.
This time he’s even deprived of the opportunity of going home to the wife, who is very much not dead. In fact, as played by Hathaway, Penelope’s more alive than Odysseus has been in years, making his dutiful choice to leave—and to theoretically do great things—all the more painful. It transforms the eventual homecoming during the film’s final, and most pensively paced act, into something cathartic but inevitably bittersweet.
Despite adapting perhaps the greatest of epics, The Odyssey achieves Nolan’s quietest intimacy. At last we get to sit in what happens when one of his heroes go home.
Avengers: Doomsday Poster Sets Up an Incredible Doctor Strange Story
Like most Marvel fans, we’ve spent the day here at Den of Geek poring over the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, looking for clues, cameos, and just enjoying seeing our favorites on the screen again. So exciting has the trailer been that it’s easy to overlook the other thing that Marvel dropped today, a new poster for the movie.
The Avengers: Doomsday poster lacks any actual Avengers. None of the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Wakandans, or most of the other characters highlighted in the trailer appear. Instead, we just see Doom from behind as he ascends stairs to look at a tapestry on the wall. At the center of the tapestry is a planet, above which stand a young boy and his mother, presumably Victor Von Doom and his mother Cynthia. Certainly, Cynthia’s fate will have some meaning for the Victor we see in the movie, played by Robert Downey Jr. But for comic book fans, the sight of Cynthia Von Doom only brings to mind an all-time great story, one co-starring Doctor Strange.
Believe it or not, Cynthia Von Doom isn’t the most important figure in the life of Victor Von Doom. As much as he hates to admit it, Doom cares most about his old college roommate and arch-enemy Reed Richards, as everything he does is to prove his superiority to the Fantastic Four founder. Further, his heart forever yearns for his first love, Valeria von Frazen, after whom he named his goddaughter (and daughter of Reed and Sue—it’s complicated) and whose soul he sacrificed to gain ultimate power.
Yet, Cynthia does matter to Victor, not just because she was his mother. A Romani woman living in Latveria, Cynthia mastered the ways of magic, which drew the attention of a local baron. When Cynthia failed to heal the baron’s wife, he murdered her, sending her husband Werner and son Victor into exile. Of course, Victor would later return to Latveria to become its benevolent despot, and he would eventually follow in his mother’s footsteps as a magician after science failed him while at university in the United States. But his mother remains largely a footnote in his life, except for one memorable story.
In 1989, Marvel released the graphic novel Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment, written by Roger Stern and penciled by Mike Mignola. The story flashes back to the point where Stephen Strange becomes Sorcerer Supreme, a title that comes with a requirement. To take the title, Strange must grant a boon, and the mystic triumvirate known as the Vishanti determine the boon must be given to one of Strange’s competitors for the title, Victor Von Doom.
Though loath to accept help from anyone, Doom ultimately decides to enlist Strange’s help in traveling into the Underworld. There, they will find Cynthia’s soul and free it from the demonic Mephisto, who has been keeping her captive since he tricked her in the plot that led to her death.
What follows is one of the best Doctor Strange comics ever made. Stern writes in a Bronze Age style that might be difficult for modern readers to enjoy, but it works particularly well for Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom. The two verbose characters love making dramatic declarations, as do all of the monsters and magicians they face, making for highly surreal drama.
Even better is the art by Mike Mignola. These days, Mignola is best known as the creator of Hellboy, and his love of monsters and horror are on full display in Triumph and Torment. The influence of Jack Kirby is present in Mignola’s blocky figures and his dynamic action scenes. But the strong blacks and use of negative space that would become his calling card are less pronounced, as Mignola employs light lines and a sketchier style, which pairs well with the softer inks and color washes from finisher Mark Badger. The contrast gives the story as much pathos as it does foreboding, as we can feel the sorrow weighing on Victor as he heads into the underworld to rescue his mother.
Certainly, Triumph and Torment has all the superhero action one wants from a Marvel comic. Panels of Doom and Strange blasting away demons stand up to anything you’d find in the pages of The Avengers or Fantastic Four. And while Mephisto remains a trickster who cannot be defeated through force, the comic still gives us plenty of shots of Doom and Strange battling their way through the underworld.
Yet, satisfying as the action is, it isn’t the point of Triumph and Torment. Instead, the comic serves to reframe the way we think about both characters. For Strange, it teaches him how to have humility and see beyond simple binaries of good and evil, an important lesson as he becomes Sorcerer Supreme. For Doom, it shows the fundamental sadness at the center of the character, a villain who could seem like a one-dimensional megalomaniac.
If Avengers: Doomsday can capture even a fraction of the pathos and artistry in Triumph and Torment, then it won’t just be a great superhero movie—it will be a rich film, one that stands up with the best works of the year.
Avengers: Doomsday releases in theaters on December 18, 2026.
The Odyssey Is a Secret Prequel to Dune
With Christopher Nolan‘s latest dominating the box office, cinema lovers aren’t just excited to learn what the director has planned next. They’re also excited about the second epic we have this year, another massive movie helmed by a filmmaker whose name evokes big ticket sales: Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune: Part Three. It’s not hard to see the similarities, as both films feature mythic heroes on strange adventures, and they even share cast members in Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.
However, fans of the books know that the connections between Dune and The Odyssey go deeper than one might expect. The secret is right there in the name of Frank Herbert‘s lead character, Paul Atreides. The surname “Atreides” means “Son of Atreus,” referring to the Greek hero Atreus, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. However, nothing is quite as it seems in either Greek mythology or the world of Dune, meaning the connections are far more complicated than just lineage.
The Founding and Fall of the House of Atreus
Fittingly enough for a story that leaves us longing for more, we have to begin with Tantalus, son of Zeus and Pluto. Tantalus established his family’s penchant for infanticide by killing his son Pelops, in order to test the gods. Most of the gods passed that test, except for the agricultural goddess Demeter, who actually ate some of the meal that Tantalus made out of Pelops. Infuriated, Demeter sentenced Tantalus to the underworld, where grapes and water remained forever out of reach, giving us the word “tantalizing.”
His father punished, the gods resurrected Pelops, who later married Hippodamia by sabotaging her father’s chariot race, a decision that results in his line being cursed… which might account for the family killing that happens in the next generation. Pelops and Hippodamia give birth to Atreus and Thyestes, who kill their half-brother Chrysippus, and then get banished. Later, Atreus learns that his wife is having an affair with Thyestes, and also they’re fighting for the throne. So he channels his granddad and kills Thyestes’ sons and cooks them in a meal he serves to his brother, and then also engaged in incest, which eventually gets him killed. But not before he gives birth to two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus.
At this point, people who saw The Odyssey know about those guys, as Jon Bernthal stepped into the role of Menelaus, and Telemachus (Tom Holland) let Menelaus tell him something about Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), who sacrificed his daughter for good winds and got killed by his wife Clytemnestra (Lupita Nyong’o) because these Atreides boys never learn.
So what does that have to do with Paul of Dune?
Paul’s Cyborg Great Granddad
The first Dune novel takes place 20,000 years in the future, and while much has changed, humanity’s love of myths has not. The stories have mutated over time, mixing together, but religion and myth still have power, which is why Paul’s surname resonates with people of the empire. But, as we saw in the first Villeneuve movie, Paul and his father Duke Leto think more often about the former’s grandfather, a celebrated bullfighter. Thus, readers could be forgiven for dismissing the name Atreides as a meaningless word grandfathered into their language.
However, the third novel Children of Dune revealed that the name had meaning. While consulting her Ancestral Memories, the Bene Gesserit ability to “speak” with previous members of one’s bloodline, Paul’s sister Alia briefly encounters a person the text identifies as Agamemnon. However, Alia gets overpowered by the memory of her maternal grandfather Baron Harkonnen, and the Mycenaean king is never heard from again.
How, you might wonder, could someone like Harkonnen overpower such a mighty warrior? The answer might be that, despite what the characters say about Paul’s lineage, he is not in fact descended from the hero of myth. Instead, Paul’s true ancestor may be a different Agamemnon, a guy born Andrew Skorous, and here’s where things get really weird.
Frank Herbert only wrote six Dune novels before his death in 1986. Later, his son Brian took over, writing a number of prequels with Kevin J. Anderson. Although not nearly as good as his father’s work, Brian’s novels make up for their lack of quality with a quantity of lore, fleshing out the centuries leading up to the moment that Duke Leto takes stewardship of Arrakis.
In 2001’s Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, Herbert and Anderson introduce General Agamemnon, the Cymek Titan and father of Vorian Atreides, a leader of the Butlerian Jihad that saw the destruction of all thinking machines (or, as we’d call them, Artificial Intelligence). Vorian’s rebellion shocked the world because of his father’s status as a Cymek Titan. Cymeks are this world’s word for cyborgs, specifically humans who sought to augment themselves by placing their brains inside robotic bodies, allowing them to live forever.
Before becoming a Cymek, Agamemnon was born Andrew Skorous in the year 1300 BG (the first Dune book takes place in 10191 AG, to give you an idea of the timeline). As an adult, Skorous leads a revolt against the Old Empire, the rotting government that existed long after humanity discovered faster-than-light space travel. Calling themselves the Twenty Titans, Skorous and his allies inaugurated a new golden age for humanity. However, they succumbed to a lust for power, which led them to become Cymeks and rule for centuries, growing increasingly brutal. During this period, Skorous took the name Agamemnon and declared his people House Atreides, in an attempt to establish himself as an eternal leader with roots deep in humanity’s past.
Thus, the Agamemnon who speaks to Alia may not have been the man who waged war against Troy so long ago. It may have been a man who forfeited his humanity in search of power, and made myths around himself to justify it.
Mistakes of the Past and Future
Of course, The Odyssey isn’t really a prequel to Dune. Herbert invokes Homer’s poem as part of the detritus of humanity’s past, just one more lesson that people failed to learn about the cost of pursuing power. Yet, it’s not hard to see thematic similarities between the two stories, especially Christopher Nolan’s take on the myth.
Nolan changes The Odyssey‘s final act into a meditation on the cost of war, as Odysseus’ great victory via the Trojan Horse comes only because he sacrificed his values and his humanity. In this telling, he stays far from home not just because he’s been trapped by Calypso, but because he no longer feels worthy of his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus.
Ultimately, Dune warns against charismatic leaders, arguing that they always give into a lust for power. In doing so, they’ll sacrifice their humanity, whether that involves becoming a brain in a robotic tin can or launching a jihad in the name of progress. What better person to link the two stories than Agamemnon, the angry king who killed even his own daughter to expand his control?
The Odyssey is now playing in theaters worldwide.
Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Hints at a Dark Ant-Man Storyline
This post contains potential spoilers for Avengers: Doomsday.
As Kang the Conquerer knows well, one overlooks Ant-Man at their own peril. Still, viewers would be forgiven for not paying much attention to Scott Lang in the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. The first full look at the upcoming event film is jam-packed with heroes across the multiverse, including two sets of Avengers, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four, to say nothing of Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Victor Von Doom in all his power.
Yet, anyone who slows down and spends time with the trailer will notice a quick shot of Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, hugging his daughter Cassie a.k.a. Stature, played by Kathryn Newton. Obviously, with such high stakes, people are going to hug their loved ones—we see Johnny Storm embrace his sister Sue in another shot. And Cassie has been a motivating factor for Scott since the first Ant-Man movie in 2015. However, for comic book readers, seeing Scott share a tender moment with Cassie in a Doctor Doom story raises some alarms.
Cassie Lang has been a part of Scott’s life ever since he’s been Ant-Man. She made her first appearance as a young girl in 1979’s Marvel Premiere #47, by David Michelinie and John Byrne, the issue that saw Lang first don the Ant-Man moniker. In addition to his criminal background, Lang’s status as a father helped distinguish him from his predecessor Hank Pym, an oft-disturbed genius.
For most of her history, Cassie served little purpose beyond being Scott’s lil’ moppet at home. That changed in 2005, with the release of Young Avengers #6 by Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung. In that issue, founding member Iron Lad, who was actually a younger version of Kang the Conquerer who formed the team to repel an attack by his older self, leaves to return to his timeline. With a gap in the lineup, Cassie reveals that she has access to her father’s tech, and begins her tenure as the giant girl Stature.
That tenure ended with the 2010 miniseries Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, by Heinberg and Cheung. That story finds the Avengers being paternalistic to other heroes again (see also: Avengers vs X-Men two years later) and putting Wiccan under supervision. Turns out, that’s bad timing, as Wiccan and the Young Avengers discover his mother Scarlet Witch with her memory gone and engaged to be married to Doctor Doom. Further complicating things is the fact that Scarlet Witch lost her memory as a direct result of her going mad a few years earlier, a madness that claimed the life of many Avengers, including Scott Lang.
The multilayered conflict had its own share of casualties, most notably Cassie herself. While the adventure brings Scott back to life, he shrinks down to attack Doom alongside his teammates, and seemingly dies again in the process. Infuriated by the prospect of losing her father again, Stature attacks Doom, and her anger and youth leave her vulnerable to the Latverian monarch. His patience spent and his power increased, Doom strikes back, killing Cassie.
By our timeline, Cassie only stays dead for four years. When a moral shift causes many of Marvel‘s supervillains to become good, Doom seeks to atone for his wrongs by resurrecting Cassie, and she’s been with us ever since.
However, the Cassie of the MCU has no such guarantees. It appears that Doomsday and its follow-up Avengers: Secret Wars will follow the model of Infinity War and Endgame. Scott’s relationship with Cassie drove the first part of Endgame, providing the event movie with some much-needed emotional stakes. While it would certainly dark for Doom, a villain who the casual viewer doesn’t know well yet, to just kill a character we’ve watched grow up on screen, it would also prove to the viewer that he’s a threat worth taking seriously.
It is, after all, Doomsday. We expect nothing less than devastation.
Avengers: Doomsday comes to theaters on December 18, 2026.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day – Exclusive Inside Look at Tom Holland’s Passion Project
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Almost five full years ago, Spider-Man: No Way Home ended on a triumphant note when Peter Parker swung over Rockefeller Center in a homemade suit. Certainly No Way Home gave Spidey lots to savor in that moment. He’d just defeated the Sinister Six in all but name, cured his arch-nemesis the Green Goblin and got to rub shoulders with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield on their own meta victory laps. Oh, plus, it was also the highest-grossing Spidey flick ever.
Yet for all its success, No Way Home also saw Peter lose both his beloved Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and his identity as magic wiped the memory of Peter from everyone on Earth, including his best friends MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon). To star Tom Holland, those darker points left No Way Home feeling unresolved and the story unfinished. In his core, Holland felt the character still needed a Brand New Day.
“I always felt like Peter got over Aunt May’s death too easily,” Holland tells us. “The loss of Aunt May should be devastating. It should take up the entire third act of the movie. But we were trying to make something fun and exciting, so he meets these two other Spider-Men, the most iconic Spider-Men. We couldn’t have Tobey and Andrew having the time of their lives while my character’s crying all the time. It wouldn’t have worked.”
For that reason, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, is not just a new beginning; it’s an expansion on the lingering traumas of a Peter we’ve watched grow across six movies. In between dealing with baddies like Scorpion (Michael Mando) and Tombstone (Marvin Jones III), teaming the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), reuniting with MJ and Ned, and dealing with a mysterious newcomer played by Sadie Sink, Peter has to work on himself.
As Holland puts it, “Brand New Day deals with some of those things we had to gloss over in No Way Home.” In short, Peter Parker is finally finding the time to grow up.
Caught in a Dark Web
Peter Parker didn’t just lose his friends and his aunt in No Way Home. He also lost his childhood in a film that ended with MJ and Ned’s graduation. Peter got a GED. Now five years later, Brand New Day finds the trio at the end of their college careers, ready to enter adulthood. And as far as Peter’s concerned, it’s not going well.
“The first half of this movie is a really good example of someone handling his problems poorly,” Holland says. Zendaya agrees, describing Peter to us as “more vulnerable and intense than we’ve seen before. We’ve never seen him have to face all these challenges alone.”
So desperate is the situation that the kid from Queens turns to an unlikely ally: Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher. For actor Bernthal, his gritty Punisher fits in the world of Spider-Man not because Castle has become lighter, but because Peter has gotten heavier.
“We’re dealing with a dark version of Spider-Man, where he’s closing himself off and trying to figure out who he is,” Bernthal observes. That situation means the Punisher treats Spider-Man differently from most superheroes. “Frank doesn’t buy into all this stuff. He’s a level guy and he gets frustrated with all this superhero stuff. But there’s a sense of mutual respect with Spider-Man. Frank knows that Spider-Man can do things that he can’t. Spider-Man’s embracing darkness in his life, and, as someone who’s been down that road, Frank doesn’t love that for anybody. It cracks open Frank’s heart. He’s begging Spider-Man not to go to the places he goes.”
The bond between Punisher and Spider-Man isn’t the only surprising personal shift in Brand New Day, as the pessimistic MJ has done her own maturing in the intervening years.
“In this moment, she’s juxtaposed against Peter’s situation,” Zendaya explains. “It’s a transformative point in a young person’s life where you finish college or start a new job and realize, ‘I am an adult now.’ You have to start making adult decisions and being responsible for them in a way that feels different. MJ’s trying to figure out who she is while retaining her relentless pursuit of the truth. She has these core values, and that’s where she and Peter connect. In his optimistic way, Peter’s always trying to stay true to who he is, and MJ’s trying to do the same.”
Such an emphasis on growth might be why director Cretton doesn’t completely accept Bernthal’s assessment. “Brand New Day has a more mature Spider-Man, but I don’t like the word ‘darker,’” he counters. “Spider-Man isn’t Batman.”
In the filmmaker’s mind, Peter is experiencing the same daunting big choices most young adults face. “When I graduated from college, I had a communications degree and no job prospects. I struggled through my 20s, sharing an apartment with three to eight guys, all of us looking for work. The reality of the world hit me in the face. In that stage, I learned what it really feels like to lose someone, to go through sadness and darker times, and I learned what was important in life for the first time. That’s the stage that Peter Parker happens to be going through. Does that make the movie darker? Maybe in moments, but it’s more a reflection of where Peter’s at.”
Jay Maidment / Sony Pictures
The World Outside Your Window
It’s not just Peter and MJ’s lives that are changing. Holland and Zendaya have come a long way in their careers and experiences since Spider-Man: Homecoming released almost a decade ago, to say nothing of the five-year gap between No Way Home and Brand New Day.
Holland explains, “One of the reasons we took a big break between No Way Home and Brand New Day was to allow the characters to grow up off-screen. Audiences who love the original franchise will see a different version of these characters from the outset. These movies have nods to my own personal life. After what I’ve been through as a young man, it felt right for the character to leave high school.”
Zendaya puts a finer point on it, suggesting her previous MCU movies with Holland represent “the college experience that we never got to have.”
Even Bernthal, a more established actor several decades senior to his co-stars, sees parallels between his life and that of the Punisher.
“I would never have been able to play Frank if I weren’t a father and a husband,” he acknowledges. “You can’t play him until you love people so much more than you love yourself, and you’d happily give your life for them. Then you can try to understand what it would be like if they were taken from you.”
As Bernthal’s description makes clear, Punisher comes from a drearier place than Spidey. That’s especially true of the MCU version of Frank Castle, last seen in the first season of Daredevil: Born Again and in the recent special The Punisher: One Last Kill, both decidedly R-level projects. Yet Bernthal believes that his friendship with Holland helped find a place for Frank in a PG-13 Spider-Man movie. “Frank and Spider-Man have a big brother/little brother relationship, reminiscent of my friendship with Tom,” Bernthal reveals. “It’s really a testament to Tom and Destin for making that work.”
Cretton knew to look for those real-world relationships while making a big superhero movie because he was doing the same thing, examining Peter’s loneliness through the connections in his own life.
“I think the human brain has a tendency to spin bigger problems from the issues in front of you,” he muses. “So exploring that tendency in the context of Peter Parker is therapeutic. I watch him go through this journey that reminds me of my personal experiences.”
More accurately, Cretton understands the devastating effects of Peter’s isolation because the director has lived his entire life in a community. “I grew up in a family with six kids, living in a small house in Haiku, Maui,” he says. “A two-bedroom house with a loft and one shared bathroom. My whole existence was communal. I shared a room with someone until I was 26. Even through college, because I was an indie filmmaker who had to save money, I shared a bunk bed with another person.”
The emphasis on community drives everything from his independent films Short Term 12 and Just Mercy to his Marvel projects Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Wonder Man. Communal thinking also helps Cretton accept the scrutiny he’s under as a person telling the story of the most popular superhero in the world.
“There’s nothing like working with Marvel,” he says with a smile. “There’s nothing like the response you get from the fans, the good and the bad. They look at every frame and look for every little decision we made. It’s fun to have that type of participation in the movie we’re making. It really does feel like you’re participating in a big conversation. To me, that’s what cinema is all about.”
Yet for that conversation to continue in a satisfying way, Spider-Man movies need to have something to say, and that was the challenge coming out of the definitive ending posed by Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Jay Maidment / Sony Pictures
A New Way Home
Beyond its nostalgia plays, No Way Home worked because it finished the arc running through the previous MCU Spider-Man trilogy, all of which were directed by Jon Watts. From his first appearance in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, Holland established his Web-Head as something different from what we’ve seen before, with a hip young aunt and a billionaire benefactor.
No Way Home stripped all of that away from Peter, essentially turning him into a new character with endless storytelling options—so many, in fact, that Holland and company weren’t sure where they wanted to go next.
Holland divulges, “We asked ourselves why we should make another one. The third was so fantastic in its nostalgia and its success that it felt like the perfect sign-off for Spider-Man as we knew him. It wasn’t enough to say that these movies do great business. We needed a reason to tell a story beyond the business of making another Spider-Man movie. So there were lots of conversations between [Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group CEO] Tom Rothman, [Marvel Studios President] Kevin Feige, and [producer] Amy Pascal. Once we figured out the movie’s message, everything started falling into place. Suddenly, it felt like we had a movie that was worthy of fans’ time, something fulfilling and satisfying.”
Holland’s description of the process brings to mind Spider-Man himself, swinging with ease past every obstacle. But the reality is that wallcrawler movies are exceptionally hard to make, if only because they involve both Sony Pictures, which has held film adaptation rights to the character since 1999, and Marvel Studios. Add to the mix actors such as Holland and Bernthal, who feel a sense of ownership over their characters, to say nothing of the legions of fans who have been following these heroes for decades, and the potential for conflict only grows.
Yet everyone making Brand New Day felt that the additional voices only made for stronger conversations and, in the end, a better movie.
“I found this group of people to be entirely egoless,” observes Bernthal. Even though he demurs when the issue of ownership comes up—“Frank belongs to the comic book fans, members of the military, and first responders,” he insists—Bernthal allows he’s invested in the Punisher, and that mattered to those making Brand New Day. “They were open to my ideas. Destin appreciated that I’ve been with Frank for a long time and knows how much I care about the character and the fanbase.”
Zendaya remained similarly cognizant of the fans, even though her character differs from the Mary Jane Watson of the comics.
“I want to pay homage to the character that people know,” she admits before disclosing, “I even tried to find a way to make her hair a little reddish” to match Mary Jane’s flaming locks. But she, too, prioritized good storytelling. “Ultimately, it was important that I didn’t neglect the character we’ve built over the years. She has this quirkiness and pessimism that complements Peter’s quirkiness and optimism. They brought these things out of each other, and it seems that their personalities have swapped because of the absence of the other person.”
“It was a lot of fun!” Cretton adds. “I worried that making the movie would be a disaster, with all these giant opinions battling each other and me right in the middle of it. Thank goodness that wasn’t how it went. It’s not as complicated as you’d think. I want each actor to own their character. Because then they can teach me about that character.”
Foregrounding collaboration allowed the team to navigate the expectations of a huge superhero movie, filled with beloved characters. Moreover, it enacted the communal spirit at the heart of Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
Jay Maidment / Sony Pictures
Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends
“Spider-Man: Brand New Day is about the power of human connection,” states Holland. “It’s about love and the power of friendship, the power of community. And it’s about the importance of asking for help when you need it.”
The movie couldn’t explore that theme without bringing back the two people Peter needs most, even if they don’t know who he is anymore and have spent the last five years living their own lives.
“It was a challenge, but both Destin and I were adamant that these movies don’t exist without Zendaya and Jacob,” Holland contends. “We wanted to make the audience miss MJ and Ned while still making their presence known. You still get all the fun of their presence, and there are some fun moments where Peter’s interacting with them, even though they don’t know who he is.”
“Honestly, we felt bad for Tom,” laughs Zendaya. “Jacob and I are just having a good time, minding our business. And Tom, bless him, is standing off in a corner alone, staring at us from afar! It was like an acting exercise, to play as if you’ve never met this person before. We had to imagine this life that Ned and MJ had without Peter’s presence.”
As befitting his character, Frank, Bernthal takes a more serious approach to the film’s central theme. He explains, “The movie shows what happens when you build a wall around your heart. Essentially being human means that light will shine through the chinks in your armor, and we’ll see that Peter and Frank, like all human beings, need companionship. They need friendship and love.”
Bernthal finds that theme not just in the movie, but also in the process of making it with Tom Holland. “I’ve known Tom since he was 17 years old. I’m so proud of him, and I love working with him.”
Zendaya goes further, stating that her reason for returning for a fourth movie as MJ can be summed up in two words: “Tom Holland.” Even after laughing off her confession and insisting that she returned because she found the character compelling, she cites his enthusiasm as a driving force. “It was really important to Tom that we didn’t just make another Spider-Man movie for the sake of making another movie.”
“Tom Holland has mastered the art of acting behind a mask,” Cretton says. “It’s a bit of Buster Keaton, a bit of Charlie Chaplin, a bit of Kabuki theater. I never worried about working with an actor who kept his face hidden, because Tom expressed it all with his body.”
Yet Holland himself shrugs off the praise to point out, “Spider-Man is one of the most beloved characters. It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that he’s just a young kid going through all the things we go through.”
So if Spider-Man’s loved by so many, and Spider-Man is the central draw, why does Brand New Day also have Hulk and Punisher and legions of villains, to say nothing of the various other characters who will pop up along the way? Will Brand New Day make Spider-Man a supporting character in a Spider-Man movie?
Cretton laughs off the question. “Oh, you’re going to get so much Spider-Man,” he insists. “Every one of these characters exists because they serve Peter Parker’s journey.”
Holland concurs, urging, “Watch the movie, and you’ll see. Spider-Man fans won’t be disappointed.”
Sony Pictures
Swinging Through the Suffering
In the pages of Marvel Comics, Spider-Man accidentally killed his girlfriend Gwen Stacy and saw countless allies die; he’s had his best friends turn into supervillains, was replaced by clones and arch-enemies, and was forced to choose between his aunt and his wife that one time. With all that in mind, the MCU Peter, with his friendship with Tony Stark and his acceptance by the Avengers, has lived a pretty charmed life.
But Holland would disagree. “There’s no shortage of trauma in Peter Parker’s life,” Holland observes. “He’s lost his mentor, his aunt. We don’t know what happened to his uncle in my universe, but we know he’s not in the picture. He’s lost the love of his life and his best friend.”
Such is the case for every incarnation of Spider-Man, not just the one in the MCU. Across the comics, cartoons, movies, and video games that make up the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man loses the people he loves again and again. Thus Brand New Day starts in a familiar place for poor Peter Parker. But for most fans, that’s where the hope of Spider-Man shines through.
“I connect with so much about Peter Parker,” Cretton says. “His eagerness to be a good person, his fumbling through it, but there’s so much joy in Spider-Man at the same time. It’s a lot of fun being a Spider-Man fan.”
Zendaya finds that joy and chaos in perhaps her character’s most iconic moment from the franchise when the otherwise unflappable MJ loses her cool while swinging across the city with Spidey. “Jon Watts came up with the idea MJ should be afraid of heights,” she remembers. “So we figured out how to realistically wrap yourself around someone swinging around a building. You’d just grab onto them with all your limbs. We’ve all wondered what it would be like to do that.”
The fantasy of spinning webs and swinging through the city is, of course, one of Spider-Man’s central appeals. But for Holland, it comes down to Peter’s perseverance.
“The suffering grounds Peter. It reminds you that he’s human,” Holland states. “I always thought that Peter Parker was special because of Spider-Man. Making this movie, I realized that Spider-Man is special because of Peter Parker. The grief that he experiences resonates with people.”
So even though Spider-Man: Brand New Day brings Peter lower than he’s ever been before, the depths only make the heroic moments more inspiring and the joyful moments more ecstatic. Swinging through the suffering is what Spider-Man, and growing up, is all about.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens on Friday, July 31.
The Thunderbolts Easter Egg You May Have Missed in the Avengers: Doomsday Trailer
The first full trailer for Avengers: Doomsday has been released this week, and it has plenty to show us. Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom easily thwarts an attack from Thor, Gambit battles Shang-Chi, Yelena Belova is unmasked as Mystique at one point before Yelena fights “Yelena,” Steve Rogers is back (with his beard!), Loki does some pondering, and there’s more besides. But in all the excitement, one quiet, key moment has the Fantastic Four, Thor, Ant-Man, and Sam Wilson standing around in the new Avengers watchtower with the Thunderbolts, all looking very serious.
At the end of the reformed gang’s underrated MCU movie last year, a post-credits scene saw them discussing a feud they were having with Wilson, who was apparently suing them for copyright infringement for using the Avengers name. They then detected the arrival of the Fantastic Four’s spacecraft coming in hot.
In that very post-credits scene, they were wearing exactly the same outfits as they are in the Doomsday trailer, including Red Guardian (David Harbour) in his hilarious copyright-dodging “Avengerzzz, with a ‘Z’!” head-to-toe “baby seal butt” suit and Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman) in his rather casual dressing gown and sandals.
This meeting of the minds in Doomsday then pulls the current MCU timeline a little tighter, suggesting these characters come together hours or even minutes after the events of Thunderbolts’ post-credits scene. Either way, very little time has passed—which makes total sense, because the Russo brothers filmed it on the set of Doomsday a month before Thunderbolts was even released.
When (or in what universe) some of the other scenes in the trailer are taking place will likely remain a mystery for a while, but one of the biggest questions we have about this specific Thunderbolts moment is how and why the Fantastic Four happened to run into Thor on their way to the Avengers’ world. Hey, since the Guardians of the Galaxy simply happened upon him floating in space wreckage during Avengers: Endgame, it feels like a chance meeting with the God of Thunder could happen to anyone at any moment!
Despite Thor’s mysterious team-up with Marvel’s first family, he’s the only OG Avenger in that room and seems to immediately be taking on the role of their de facto leader. With Thor leading them into battle, surely no one can stop them. That is, except Doom…
Avengers: Doomsday will be released on December 18.
Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Breakdown – Doctor Doom, X-Men, Captain America Returns
The end of the world is nigh for the Marvel Universe—not just the mainline world of Earth-616, but all possible realities within it. Now it will take all of the Earths’ Mightiest Heroes to stop Doomsday.
The first trailer for the long-awaited Avengers: Doomsday is finally here, giving us not only our first chance to hear Robert Downey Jr.’s accented voice as villain Doctor Doom, but also a vision of a franchise world in crisis, as only Thor still remains from the primary lineup who stopped Thanos seven years ago in Avengers: Endgame. But that doesn’t mean the Marvel Universe lacks heroes, so let’s breakdown the trailer to see who can answer the call.
Doctor Doom’s Accent
Of course, the biggest draw to the Doomsday trailer is our first taste of Robert Downey Jr.’s as Victor Von Doom. Downey’s casting as the greatest villain in comic book history has long been the biggest head-scratcher in this entire project and as much as directors Joe and Anthony Russo insist that there’s a very good reason indeed for bringing back the guy who started the MCU as Tony Stark, most of us have been skeptical. Here, we hear him warn about “something” coming, something that will force them to make “an unthinkable decision,” intoning in a vaguely Eastern European accent that stands for his home country, the fictional nation of Latveria.
These opening lines suggest that the heroes face a threat other than Doom himself. Yet, later we see Thor attacking Doom, who casually deflects any attempt to go for the head by reflecting Stormbreaker with just a couple of fingers. Anyone who knows Doctor Doom stories from the comics can easily decipher what’s going on here. Clearly, Doom will rally the heroes behind him to deal with the reality-destroying Incursions that have been teased in the MCU since Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Yet, as soon as an advantage presents itself, Doom will make his move to take power, forcing the Avengers to assemble against him.
Avengers Disassembled
About that assembling… As we’ve known since Thunderbolts*, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes aren’t as mighty as they used to be. Not only did they lose Iron Man, Captain America, and Black Widow—leaving Thor and Hulk as the sole heavy hitters and also Hawkeye is there (subscribe to the Den of Geek comics newsletter for more uncharitable thoughts about Clint Barton!)—but the team is currently split into two. Bucky leads the New Avengers, consisting of fellow Thunderbolts such as Red Guardian and White Widow, while Sam Wilson takes the role of Captain America to lead a ragtag group of heroes, which includes, uh… just Ant-Man?
With no disrespect to Scott Lang, who did kick Kang the Conqueror out of Phase Six, that’s not enough to deal with Doctor Doom. Fortunately, there are a host of non-Avengers on hand, including Shuri as Black Panther, along with fellow Wakandan M’Baku, and her arch-enemy Namor, as well as the Fantastic Four, who have made their way into the mainline 616. If that’s not enough, the X-Men are also around—but whose side are they on?
Avengers vs. X-Men
Outside of Spider-Man, the X-Men have long been the most popular Marvel property. Yet, even after Disney bought 20th Century Fox and acquired adaptation rights to the Fantastic Four and to X-Men, the MCU has been slow to integrate mutants into their universe. Judging by the trailer, Avengers: Doomsday plans to make up for lost time, as many of the scenes take place inside of Xavier’s School for Gifted Children, complete with an aged Professor X sitting alongside his archenemy and the love of his life Magneto, once again played by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. They’ve brought with them other actors from the Fox X-Men series, including James Marsden as Cyclops, Rebecca Romijn as Mystique, and Channing Tatum as Gambit.
However, where those actors famously chose black leather over yellow spandex in the original films, they’re now outfitted in costumes from the Jim Lee era of the comics, the same looks they have in X-Men: The Animated Series. Even more importantly, the X-Men seem to be fighting against the Avengers, as we see Gambit go toe-to-toe with Shang-Chi and Mystique shape shift into Florence Pugh to fight White Widow (I guess Scarlett Johansson‘s still too mad about residuals for Mystique to become Black Widow). Is this the usual prerequisite fight that heroes need to have before joining forces? Or are the Avengers and X-Men forced to fight to save their realities?
What Is the Fantastic Four Up To?
Did we mention that the Fantastic Four are here? Because they are, but they’re very much in the background of the trailer. We’ve long known that Marvel’s first family would leave their universe of a retro-futuristic 1960s and join the 616, and we saw in the previous teasers that Ben Grimm, the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, would spend some time with the Wakandans. But outside of some shots of them standing around with the Avengers and Johnny sharing a hug with his sister Sue, the FF don’t get much to do.
And that’s a huge problem because this movie is called Doomsday and is all about Doctor Doom. In the comics, Doom’s primary motivation for anything is his burning hatred for Reed Richards. Doom’s mask, his return to Latveria, his mastery of magic, all stem from the fact that Richards understood a math equation better than him back when they were in college together. To see Pedro Pascal’s Reed just standing around while Doom fights Thor has us very worried that Doomsday will forget this key element of the character.
The Miracle of Cap’s Return
If Reed doesn’t really matter to Doomsday, then Thor nails it when he says the Marvel heroes will need a miracle. Fortunately, he gets that miracle when Steve Rogers makes his prophesied return. Thor responds as any right-thinking person would when faced with bearded Cap, extending his hammer for Rogers to grasp. More than a call-back to the crowd-pleasing moment from Avengers: Endgame, when Rogers takes Thor’s hammer firmly in his hand, he dispels some of the theories surrounding Cap’s return.
The first teaser for Avengers: Doomsday told us not that Captain America would return, but that Steve Rogers would return. Together with the multiversal shenanigans baked into Doomsday, including the Leader’s warning of heroes from other realities in the post-credit scene of Captain America: Brave New World, some had wondered if we would get an evil Cap fighting alongside Doom. However, as Avengers: Age of Ultron taught us long ago, anyone who wields Mjolner is worthy of our trust, meaning that Thor can fully give himself over to his comrade again.
Cameos No More!
Perhaps the most important part of the Doomsday trailer are the things we don’t see. With the exception of folks like Kelsey Grammer’s Beast or Lewis Pullman’s Sentry, everyone promised to appear in merchandising leaks and press events shows up. But as a multiversal story set to reboot the MCU as we know it, Doomsday seemed poised to include a ton of cameos and surprises, none of which show up in the trailer. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and the Netflix heroes seem destined to once again miss out on Avengers action. No Spider-Man shows up—not Tom Holland, not Tobey Maguire, not Andrew Garfield, not even Nicholas Hammond. We don’t see Nicolas Cage or Gabriel Luna as Ghost Rider, Michael Chiklis as the Thing, and neither Dolph Lundgren nor Jon Bernthal nor Thomas Jane appear as Punisher.
Most notably of all, we don’t see Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool or Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. But we do see Loki holding his TVA card, which deserves attention. Deadpool & Wolverine already did a deep dive into the history of Marvel adaptations, even convincing Wesley Snipes to once again share the screen as Blade with Reynolds. The TVA played a central role in that story, and while no one other than Wunmi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15 crossed over from Loki to that movie, a connection did exist. Will Loki be the connective tissue to bring back these favorites for one last appearance? Or will he be too busy as the God of Stories to bother with such petty fan service?
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on December 18, 2026.
Christopher Nolan Is Right About Horror Movies and That’s Exactly Why He Should Make One
This article contains The Odyssey spoilers
The Odyssey is really impressive. The sheer scale of Christopher Nolan’s epic new movie is wowing audiences worldwide right now, but unfortunately—and inevitably—people will eventually start asking him how he will top it with his next film.
The answer to that question from any notable filmmaker tends to be the same: they’re not thinking about what’s next, they’ve only just brought this project to fruition, and it took a really long time. That’s understandable, yet we would argue that when Nolan is finally ready to make another film, he shouldn’t necessarily try to top the massive effort of The Odyssey and feel trapped by the expectations of escalation. Why go bigger when the real challenge could be going deeper into a genre he’s been circling for decades instead: horror.
Nolan recently told Empire that he’s always wanted to do a horror movie, but that so far he’s “never clicked with a particular idea or concept that worked” for him. He has, however, proven that he’s capable of creating some incredibly disturbing stuff. Leonard’s terrifying loss of identity and grip on reality in Memento made that film work beyond a traditional mystery. The Prestige hid elements of body horror inside its period drama. Scarecrow’s Batman Begins trips were arguably the highlight of that movie. Mal Cobb appears as a slasher killer-esque jump scare again and again in Inception. Then there’s The Odyssey, where Circe transforms Odysseus’ men into pigs during one unforgettable sequence. People can’t stop talking about how gross and unsettling Circe’s section of the film is, anchored by a stunning performance from Samantha Morton.
Still, Nolan already seems aware of how challenging it would be for him to fully embrace horror. “Of all genres, it is the most visceral,” he explained. “Where the direct response to the audience is the most important. That is to say, you’re trying to make people literally feel something in their bones about what’s going on on-screen.” He also added that he now sees a lot of horror movies with his kids and seems impressed by how risky they are. “You’ll see things in the first half an hour, 45 minutes of any horror film that you’d never see in another genre. Risks that are taken. Dangerous approaches to things and all the rest. Admittedly, a lot of movies can’t sustain that to the end. But in the horror genre, that kind of innovation is not just respected—it’s really demanded.”
He’s right to say it, and that’s why we hope he does finally find that elusive idea or concept to work with in the future. Though he believes there are “very few really great horror movies,” Nolan has already refined many filmmaking strengths that horror depends on, so they give him a much better chance of making one. Imagine his skills with time manipulation in Inception and Tenet applied to dread; the anxiety of Dunkirk being much more intimate; his ambitious logic grounded in the rules of the genre, making the unknowable that much more frightening.
Not only does Nolan have the skills to pay the horror bills, but the genre itself has freed itself from the unfair dismissal it was still subject to a couple of decades ago. Prestige horror has paved the way for critically and commercially successful movies, with Hereditary, The Witch, Get Out, and The Substance now discussed as major works of contemporary cinema rather than just cheap scares for genre lovers or the popcorn crowd.
Studios like A24 and Neon have also supported horror filmmakers who want to make visually distinctive and ambitious projects, and those vital concepts and ideas that Nolan refers to are consequently on the rise as low-budget fare like Backrooms and Obsession dominate both the cultural conversation and the box office. Nolan wouldn’t be “lowering” himself into horror; he’d be joining one of the most artistically challenging filmmaking spaces possible right now. He’d also be in the historically prestigious company of Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Demme, and William Friedkin.
Now that he’s admitted he’s keen to make a horror movie, and he’s mastered spectacle, puzzles, historical drama, and mysteries, we’d love to find out if Nolan can add to the classics of this particular genre. He’s right that horror movies take risks and dangerous approaches that you just can’t find elsewhere. Making a great one could be his next big challenge.
Marvel Had the Chance to Do Something So Funny with Avengers: Doomsday at SDCC 2026
Update: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN! The following article, which features the premise that it would be both funny and creatively satisfying if Marvel continued to hide the Avengers: Doomsday trailer through San Diego Comic-Con, was published at 9 a.m. ET on July 20. The Avengers: Doomsday trailer was officially released at 9:01 a.m. ET on July 20. We’re not saying “you’re welcome,” but…
*****
If last year’s five-and-a-half-hour Avengers: Doomsdaycast announcement livestream didn’t give it away, Marvel was heading for an aloof—and elusive—marketing run with its new superhero team-up movie. The stream in question notched up almost six million views as chairs printed with actors’ names were placed alongside each other, and while it was an impressive roster, it ended with Robert Downey Jr. showing up to view the long line of chairs, eyeballing the camera and making a “shushing” motion as he placed a finger to his lips.
Arguably, that “shush” was the start of what would become a marketing campaign so weirdly secretive that many fans would begin asking themselves, “What the hell is even going on with this movie?” From a countdown clock to a string of give-basically-nothing-away trailers that the Russo Brothers claimed were actually “clues,” to June’s exciting Avengers: Doomsday tease that ended up being …a pop-up coffee shop, very little has actually been confirmed or revealed about the plot of this year’s blockbuster or Downey Jr’s new role as Doctor Doom as the movie gears up for its December release, and I’m here to say: Good. Keep it up.
This week, fans are once again getting their hopes up for a first proper Doomsday trailer to come out of Marvel’s (only potentially triumphant) return to Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con. In the past, head honcho Kevin Feige has made some big reveals there for Marvel Studios, bringing out Tom Hiddleston in full Loki costume and even announcing plans for entire phases of the MCU, but now that Marvel has kept up its cryptic Doomsday campaign for so long, it’s even funnier to cross the line from amusing to absurd through sheer commitment and reveal very little or nothing at all.
It could actually become the marketing equivalent of the henchman screaming as the slow, steady pace of a steamroller heads toward him in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, or the puking scene in Team America: World Police. String this out as long as possible, please, because I’m finding it more hilarious the longer it goes on. While I know it infuriates others, such as my good friend, fellow Den of Geek writer and podcast co-host, Joe George, I simply love a gag that doesn’t know when to stop.
More than just being incredibly funny to me, Doomsday’s lack of build-up has given something back to Marvel that it desperately needed: the wonder of the unknown. Laying out exhaustive phases full of MCU movies and TV shows has not only drained the creative well but also made many of Marvel’s projects feel like mere stepping stones. As soon as one finished, there was a post-credits scene teasing the next thing, and fans became aware that X couldn’t die because they were in Y project, or that Z’s plot didn’t matter because they had already told us Thing Would Happen. For the first time in a long time, we don’t really know what will happen next. Yes, we know there’ll be another Avengers movie, and that other films are in development, but the longer the Doomsday secrecy goes on, the less we can predict about what Marvel has up its sleeve.
It may not feel like it right now, but Marvel is trying to go back to basics here. It needs to make people feel excited about the MCU again, and some of that excitement will naturally lie in the unknown. “We were both talking about this concept that we are back to phase zero,” Doomsday co-director Joe Russo told SXSW London last month. “This is starting over from scratch.” Maybe it’s time to believe him and embrace this weird new era, rather than expect the MCU to somehow continue at the level of hype that led to Avengers: Endgame. This “phase zero” might be cryptic, but it’s also embracing a pretty funny edging approach that Marvel has never really attempted before.
Of course, part of me still hopes that everyone who wants a big Avengers: Doomsday trailer out of Marvel’s SDCC appearance gets what they so desperately crave. That this incredible footage finally lands and properly ignites the hype train for the film. In fact, Marvel has already begun teasing it via its Fantastic Four social media accounts. But since Marvel has yet another chance to do the unexpected at SDCC, I would no longer be surprised if it takes it. Casting rumors for the studio’s X-Men reboot have gone into overdrive this month, and a full cast reveal for that movie would certainly be something else to witness instead.
If you do get a revealing Doomsday trailer this week [Editor’s Note: Lol], I hope you’re happy with it. If you don’t? Well, I hope you’ll spare a moment to imagine me having a good old chuckle about it.
The Odyssey Box Office Marks New Peak for Nolan, New Low for Social Media Malcontents
As it turns out, audiences love a Christopher Nolan movie that leans into the epic imagery of heroes and monsters, and all with grand emotional stakes. Who would have guessed otherwise?
Apparently quite a few folks, as you might have noticed if you spent any significant time on social media and video sharing apps like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and especially X, the latter of which is owned by the richest man in the world. Indeed, in one week alone last May, Elon Musk posted 60 times about his vocal misgivings for the then upcoming Nolan adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Even so, this apprehension clearly hasn’t trickled down to regular moviegoers.
This past weekend’s release of The Odysseygrossed an estimated $124.5 million across three days—plus Thursday night previews—well above what prognosticators last week were suggesting would open around $105 million. Furthermore, it is the highest domestic start of the year for a live-action movie, falling only behind Toy Story 5($159.7 million) and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie($131.7 million). It’s also something of a coup for Nolan, marking the highest domestic opening of his career that is neither a sequel or a Batman movie. (His biggest openings remain The Dark Knightand The Dark Knight Rises with $158.4 million and $160.9 million, respectively.) And it is also his biggest global release, period, hitting $264.1 million across the weekend.
Domestically these might not be Batman numbers, but the fact The Odyssey is outpacing what became leggy and beloved hits like Inception, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer, the latter of which benefitted greatly from being one-half of the “Barbenheimer”phenomenon in 2023, and Odyssey is doing that while still being a sprawling three-hour and R-rated epic, is a testament to Nolan’s popularity. In a summer when traditional franchise films appear to be faltering, the box office is still growing and healthy because, in part, of audience excitement for ambitious filmmakers who can turn their name recognition into something of a brand. Odyssey’s “A” CinemaScore also suggests we might be headed toward another leggy run, similar to Oppenheimer dropping only 43.4 percent in its second weekend after receiving an “A” CinemaScore.
The implications of Odyssey’s success are tantalizing in a few ways. The first is of course being a welcome reminder that social media noise is often more a tempest in a teacup than the zeitgeist-defining battleground the culture warriors imagine. Plenty of social media malcontents have made a penny off manipulating YouTube, X, TikTok, and other algorithms by feeding negative content and amplifying racially-tinged toxicity over the casting of Black actors in Odyssey, as well as trans actor Elliot Page in the role of a Greek soldier, and yet for all the rage-filled engagement it generates on the internet, the online vitriol likely has no more to do with general audience attitudes than similar campaigns targeting flops in genres that audiences may have become exhausted by.
In other words, the only thing online echo chambers seething over Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o being cast as Helen of Troy achieved appears to be the further feeding of ad revenues for certain social media personalities.
Beyond the culture war nonsense, The Odyssey’s success is not surprising but it’s still illuminating. As we wrote last week, the box office has seen four or five disappointments from massively marketed franchise (or intended to be franchise) films. Several were new installments in storied brands with decades-long cinematic history, others were new live-action remakes in a franchise that saw its last installment gross more than $1 billion not even two years ago.
Despite these underperformances, the general sentiment around Hollywood, and definitely among theater owners, is that this has so far been a solid year at the movies. That’s because box office on the whole is up from this time last year, as is attendance. It just appears to be what audiences are more keen to see is shifting. There remains plenty of room for the big splashy blockbuster epic. But unlike Moana, Masters of the Universe, or Supergirl, the selling point of Odyssey isn’t the intellectual property (although the fact most audiences around the world should have heard of Homer’s 2,800-year-old epic at some point in their lives certainly helps); it’s that the audience trusts in the filmmaker and the way he and Universal Pictures were able to leverage that in the marketing campaign.
As with Ryan Coogler’s unapologetically film-nerdy marketing push to explain the appeal of IMAX 70mm projection last year during Sinners’ rollout, or Phil Lord and Chris Miller doing something similar for Project Hail Marythis spring, the fact Nolan is the first filmmaker in history to shoot an entire narrative film with 65mm IMAX cameras became one of The Odyssey’s biggest assets. Granted, Nolan was the original pioneer of using IMAX photography in Hollywood productions, beginning with The Dark Knight almost 20 years ago, but at that time it was more of a novelty adored by cinephiles and Nolan’s most ardent fans. Eighteen years later, it’s one of the biggest selling points, one that might matter more than shared universe interconnectivity.
The film’s success also suggests movie stars continue to be an added value, if not the greatest selling point, considering The Odyssey’s cast, like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, is absolutely stacked with familiar and recognizable faces. From the top of the call sheet performers like Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and Tom Holland, all the way down to the supporting ensemble including Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, John Leguizamo, Mia Goth, and Robert Pattinson among its ranks, The Odyssey seemed to benefit from the kind of retro all-star cast trick that ironically was a mainstay of the type of 1950s sword and sandal epics Nolan seemed to be partially channeling here.
It is not a small irony that one of the biggest hits of the year is relying on larger format presentations and starry ensemble casts like the Hollywood of 70 years ago. But when coupled with the success this summer of original, young-skewing horror movies like Obsession and Backrooms, as well as the return of adult-leaning sci-fi movies like Hail Mary and even the middle-aged-skewing comedy of Devil Wears Prada 2, it does create a glimpse into the future of what might be working.
And when it comes to selling tickets, winning the online grifters and malcontents seems fairly irrelevant. Still.
House of the Dragon Season 3: Who Is Prince Joffrey?
This article contains spoilers for House of the Dragon season 3 episode 5.
“Your Grace, glad news! [Ed Note: See, I wasn’t lying about the ‘glad news’ part]” a nameless servant informs the dragonqueen. “Young Prince Joffrey has returned this hour from The Vale. I’m told he’s asked for you.”
Rhaenyra’s reaction to this statement is inscrutable. It seems as though both one million and precisely zero emotions cross her face all at once. Ultimately she responds with a curt “I will come to him when I’m able. I’m sure he’s tired.” Later on, after another day filled with the weight of governance, Rhaenyra finally does visit this Prince Joffrey, only to find the little child fast asleep in his bed, watched over by yet another nameless attendant.
“He tried to stay awake for you, Your Grace,” the woman says. This time Rhaenyra says nothing, just gazes at the snoozing boy meaningfully and walks out of the room.
So who is this Prince Joffrey? He’s one of Rhaenyra’s five sons, of course – sent to the Vale for safety while the Dance of the Dragons rages across the continent. Most of you reading this probably recalled that fact but still wanted to make sure, hence the “house of the dragon who is prince joffrey” googling.
And there’s no shame in that! There are many, many, many named characters in these series, some of whom have similar names (or in Joffrey’s case an identical name to another prince from Game of Thrones). Even if you remembered who Joffrey is, you might need some help recalling where he’s been and why Rhaenyra seems so unsteady about his return. Let us help out with that.
Prince Joffrey Velaryon (played by Oscar Eskinazi) is Queen Rhaenyra Tagaryen’s third of five children (all of them sons) and the last child she “had” with her first husband Laenor Velaryon. We put “had” in quotation marks because it’s common knowledge across the realm that none of Laenor’s three children – Jacaerys, Lucerys, and Joffrey – with Rhaenyra are actually his biological offspring.
Before he was “killed” (but in actuality fled to Essos) Laenor infamously preferred the romantic company of men. In fact, Prince Joffrey is named after Laenor’s first love Ser Joffrey Lonmouth, who was cruelly beaten to death by Criston Cole over a petty slight at Laenor and Rhaenyra’s wedding. In actuality, Jace, Luke, and Joff were all sired by Rhaenyra’s lover Ser Harwin Strong (He’s dead now too. Basically everyone is dead or soon-to-be-dead in this show).
Shortly after the death of Joffrey’s elder brother Luke and a brazen attempt on his mother’s life on Dragonstone, Rhaenyra decided to send him to stay with her mom’s side of the family in the Vale of Arryn for safe-keeping. Now that her eldest son Jacaerys is also dead, that appears to have been a shrewd decision as Joffrey is suddenly heir to the Iron Throne, ahead of his half-brothers Aegon and Viserys (both children Rhaenyra had with her uncle/husband Daemon) in the line of succession. With King’s Landing firmly-ish in her grasp, Rhaenyra sent Daemon off to the Vale to retrieve Joffrey and bring him back to the capital. Daemon returned well ahead of Joffrey because, though the little prince is bonded with his equally little dragon Tyraxes, the pair are probably too young for a solo flight to King’s Landing and had to hitch a ride on a boat or carriage.
Getting Joffrey from Dragonstone to the Vale and then to King’s Landing cannot have possibly been an easy logistical endeavor, especially during a time of war. So why then does Rhaenyra seem not particularly eager to talk to her son and heir? The answer to that is fairly simple: she’s terrified for him.
While Rhaenyra obviously loves Joffrey, he’s also a living reminder of how miserably she’s failed her other sons. Joffrey should not be her heir. He should not even be the heir to her heir. But the deaths of both Jace and Luke have not only shattered Rhaenyra’s heart, they’ve transformed what could have been a peaceful, playful childhood for Joffrey into a crucible of impossible expectations and danger.
It’s no wonder that Rhaenyra wants to let the little guy sleep. That may be the last truly restful night he has for awhile.
New episodes of House of the Dragon season 3 premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on August 9.
House of the Dragon Season 3 Episode 5 Review: The Stranger Offers Us Rest
This review for House of the Dragon season 3 episode 5 contains spoilers.
What does Criston Cole want?
That’s the question that Westerosi nobles and House of the Dragonviewers alike have pondered ever since the Dornish marcher knight arrived on the scene by unhorsing the great Daemon Targaryen at a King’s Landing tourney.
At first it seemed as though Ser Criston (Fabien Frankel) wanted the usual things that one would expect a member of a lowly vassal house to want: fame, respect, glory – you know, the full Ser Duncan the Tall package. Then, immediately upon achieving some semblance of prestige through his elevation to King Viserys I’s Kingsguard, Criston was prepared to throw it all away for love, begging a young Princess Rhaenyra to renounce her royal birthright and run away with him to Essos for a lifetime of kisses and pomegranates. When Rhaenyra turned down this generous offer, Criston fucked her best friend, killed her fiancé’s lover, and crowned her half-brother king.
Now we’re roughly a year into the civil war that Criston’s actions helped spurn and are no closer to the answer of what drives him. Or at least we weren’t until House of the Dragon season 3 episode 5. It turns out that Ser Criston Cole wants a lot of things – honor, fame, love, power, autonomy – but above all else, Ser Criston Cole wants to die.
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The fifth episode of House of the Dragon‘s third season isn’t especially bleak as far as this franchise goes. There are no “Red Wedding” or “Blood and Cheese” level atrocities and the body count of named characters isn’t even unusually high for the Seven Kingdoms (in fact, we actually gain two bodies here with the returns of Ser Tyland Lannister and Prince Joffrey Velaryon). But by focusing on arcs like Criston’s doomed insurgency in the Riverlands, Prince Aemond’s internment in a spooky haunted castle, and a banquet for the dead, this hour goes further in articulating the bleak nature of life at war than the show’s previous depictions of war itself.
At the center of it all, of course, is the man history will come to know as “The Kingmaker.” While Criston initially seemed excited at the prospect of deploying guerrilla tactics to slow down Lord Oscar Tully and Roddy the Ruin’s massive armies, it quickly becomes apparent that guerrilla warfare can go both ways. Criston, Ser Gwayne Hightower (Freddie Fox), and their increasingly disheveled soldiers are left stranded between rivers, their dams destroyed and their warhorses fallen to Medieval landmines. Gwayne, accustomed to a life of luxury and privilege running up the Hightower to see the dawning sun with his brother in Oldtown, wonders what Criston has up his sleeve now. Surely, there is one weird trick this Kingmaker… this Great Man of History, has cooked up to overcome the reality that Roddy and Oscar have 200 men for every one of theirs.
Criston has no such answer but to die. And he’s not particularly bummed about it. As he tells Gwayne, dying beats the hell out of serving. “You have offered me service to your House and I’m grateful. But I’ve been a servant all my life. To Green or to Black. I have defined myself by oaths, through unyielding devotion. The high born have made much of me while it pleased them to do so. But I will not let them diminish me now. I will not return, spurned, rejected. I am the realm’s greatest warrior and I will die as such. Clear-eyed, unbent, glorious in battle. And not in their service… finally.”
As a member of a noble house, Criston is not “low born” per se. But the stewards of House Cole are closer in experience to the “smallfolk” of Westeros than the Hightowers. He understands better than most that the real currency of Westeros – more so than money, secrets, or dragons – is service. It wasn’t just witnessing the biblical destruction wrought by dragons that turned Ser Criston the Kingmaker into Ser Criston the Emo; he was always more concerned with the human beings riding those dragons. A dragon can merely swallow you whole and put your whole city to flame. A human being can compel you to kneel… to serve.
There’s a reason why the Faceless Men of Braavos utter “valar doeharis (all men must serve)” in response to “valar morghulis (all men must die).” Those are the only two possible states of existence for a man in this world. If you’re not servin’, you’re dyin’, and many indeed prefer the latter. The Faceless Men serve (there’s that word again) “The Many-Faced God,” an amalgamation of every god of death from every culture across Westeros and Essos. Criston himself invokes one of those deathly gods in the episode’s haunting final line “The Stranger offers us rest.”
Moreso than the Father, the Mother, the Crone, or any other face of the Seven, the Stranger has always offered the most respite for poor wretches like Criston. Over in Harrenhal, Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) even pays tribute to those the Stranger has whisked away when some schmucks arrive to kill her, enticed by Queen Rhaenyra’s sizable bounty on Prince Aemond’s head.
“Seems you’ve not learned your history of this place – of the laborers who built it, who died here in chains, in service to Harren the Cruel,” she says. (He’s more commonly known as “Harren the Black” but point taken.)
Alys understands the principles of valar doeharis and valar morghulis as well as anyone and her magical mastery over the bones of Harrenhal has made her quite the formidable figure. It’s no wonder that an injured and ailing Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) is helpless in her presence, having found yet another mommy to latch onto. One might say he’s even ready to serve.
If only Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) could see Aemond now. Sure, Aegon has every reason to hate his younger brother since he, you know, tried to kill him at Rook’s Rest. But phrasing like “poor darling Aemond and his scabby little eye” betrays that his animus all still boils down to petty childhood grievances. Larys Strong (Matthew Needham), ever cast as the servant to more powerful men, finally reads the Brat King the riot act, describing him as a terrible king and an even worse man. Later on when Larys and Aegon stumble upon a disfigured but very much alive Ser Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall), Aegon seems properly chastened by the dressing down, or at least he becomes more useful as he swiftly and silently kills an urchin who discovers his secret crown.
House of the Dragon is making little attempt to hide where it’s going with Aegon and Larys’ journey on the road. “The king secretly spends time among his subjects and learns to better empathize with their plight” is a common enough fantasy trope that its also forms the dramatic backbone of the show’s sister series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Though it’s all a bit obvious, it works. And intended or not, the storyline also operates as a Team Green mea culpa from a show accused of (at times not unfairly) “favoring” one side of this war over the other.
While Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) was always the Realm’s Delight and Aegon its annoying pain in the ass, the two characters’ arcs make clear that they’re on diverging upwards and downwards moral trajectories, seemingly destined to meet somewhere in the middle. In the episode’s best non-Criston scene, Rhaenyra and Daemon (Matt Smith) meet in the sept where the former is praying to the Seven, or more accurately: berating the gods for their inability to get the High Septon and smallfolk in line despite so graciously hoisting her up onto the Iron Throne. The pair’s extended conversation in High Valyrian is some of the best fictional foreign language acting this franchise has produced yet and goes a long way towards establishing Rhaenyra’s deteriorating mental state and paranoia.
That’s not to say some paranoia isn’t warranted. As if it weren’t bad enough that Lord Ormund (James Norton) is now printing his own King Daeron coinage, someone in the capital is killing gold cloaks. What starts as the odd homicide here or there progresses into a gruesome tableau of dead cops with their eyes gouged out and “A FEAST FOR TRAITORS” message scrawled in blood on a wall of the Red Keep. Less theatrical but no less traitorous are the actions of Alicent (Olivia Cooke), who tries to spirit Helaena (Phia Saban) away from their confinement upon finding out she’s pregnant. Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) puts a stop to that, receives a half-earnest “IOU,” and then just…lets it happen again?
As is the case with many episodes in House of the Dragon season 3, this hour is filled with interesting ideas executed imperfectly. The heart is there in Philippa Goslett’s script but the eye doesn’t always follow through in Nina Lopez-Corrado’s direction. Even the largely successful Criston plotline doesn’t feel quite as visually striking as it should. Criston and Gwayne’s host is believably battered and broken from its time in the woods but it has not gone through the appropriately Dante-level hell that a production with more time, money, and creativity might have achieved. “The Stranger offers us rest” hits hard because how could it not? But it could have hit harder.
Still, it’s hard to complain too much about an episode this thematically on point. Even the quieter, seemingly more disposable scenes like Ormund and Daeron playing cyvasse feel indispensable in light of Criston’s plight. Not only does Ormund continue to justify social media’s Dennis Reynolds comparisons of him by melting down after losing a board game to a child, his subsequent lesson to Daeron (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) about what really kept Dorne independent is surprisingly insightful, even if accidentally so.
Ormund may think that the parable of Meria Martell a.k.a. the Yellow Toad of Dorne is all about one woman’s cunning military mind being able to outwit and outlast the might of Aegon the Conqueror, his sisters, and their dragons. But it wasn’t merely Meria’s aptitude for strategy that kept Dorne unbowed, unbent, and unbroken; it was her stubborn insistence on being unbowed, unbent, and unbroken in the first place that so stymied House Targaryen.
It’s amazing what someone can accomplish when they politely say “not today” to the god of death. The Stranger’s offer of rest to Ser Criston is just that: an offer. The fact that he’s so eager to accept it says more about him than the supposed inevitability of his situation. Yeah, going out in blaze of glory bright enough for the singers to remember would be nice. But so too would be simply rebuilding the stupid dam and retiring to Oldtown.
New episodes of House of the Dragon season 3 premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on August 9.
