Resident Evil Review: A Decent Raccoon City Movie That Comes Well-Armed
Alfred Hitchcock once mused surprise is a bomb going off beneath a table that neither the characters nor the audience knows is there. Suspense is the public knowing about the bomb whilst the characters sit blissfully unaware.
Zach Cregger knows about suspense as much or more as he does a well-timed jump scare. The wunderkind genre filmmaker—who became the toast of midnight madness festivals after the demented Barbarian, and improbably Oscar voters via the political allegory film he claims is only coincidentally incendiary, Weapons—appreciates that you remember and most likely care about Resident Evil. Many of us have played at least a few of the survival horror Capcom staples of the 1990s and 2000s; or saw the once popular (albeit uniformly awful) Paul W.S. Anderson movies back at the day. Hell, even the uninitiated at least caught how a zombie movie works at some point.
So we are invited to intuitively recognize well before the hapless medical courier played by Austin Abrams that this kid absolutely should not be stopping his car to check on that stranger who jumped out in front of the vehicle on a snowy night; we certainly know better than to invite her into the passenger seat; and like hell we’d be caught driving her ever closer to a place called Raccoon City!
But Abrams’ Bryan knows none of these things; he’s never played Resident Evil. More’s the pity for him since at least the first act or two of this movie derives most of its pleasure, tension, and even carefully baked gallows humor from appreciating ahead of time how screwed this poor bastard is. And Cregger is at his best when he is playing it, if not exactly straight, then with a bloodthirsty twinkle. While never straying fully into Edgar Wright/Shaun of the Dead territory, Cregger and the movie delights in the shudder that goes down a viewer’s spine when a dog barks in the distance, or poor, poor Bryan sees he only has four bullets in a gun he barely knows how to aim.
Not that I imagine all gamers will savor the filmmaker’s instincts. The highest compliment I can give the movie is that during this earlier half of the picture, Cregger elicits for the first time in live-action the atmosphere of the video games. It’s a curious thing since not a single character in the film has appeared in the games, and indeed more than a few monsters will do things gamers have never seen before. But the constant sense of helpless doom and giggle-inducing anxiety that comes when Bryan warily aims his flashlight around a dark corner does a better job of adapting the spirit of Resident Evil than a million easter egg callbacks or slices of fan service cosplaying outfits.
The premise certainly feels like it could be one of the background stories Leon S. Kennedy or Jill Valentine found written down in an abandoned police station’s journal (if you know, you know). If they did, they’d see a tale about a chap named Bryan, who is at the end of his shift in a small town Colorado hospital when he is offered double for delivering a mystery, life-saving package to Raccoon City General Hospital. It also fortuitously comes on a night he is dreading going home because his girlfriend Michelle has apparently just told him she’s pregnant. He responded by saying he’d support whatever decision she makes, and then high-tailing it out the door.
That of course turns out to be a mistake, even before the first zombie manifests. Still, those undead sure don’t make things better!
That is pretty much it for this fleet, and to be perfectly honest, slight movie. When, like the game, Cregger and his film go into pure survival mode, Resident Evil 2026 plays like gangbusters, lingering on the creepier emotions that multiplex horror can sometimes paper over—such as what it’s like to find an infected child who hasn’t turned yet and just wants a reassuring hug. But when it tries to use the same incidents to gesture toward some profundity about accepting parenthood, or worse half-baked genre subversion, the movie runs into a tonal disharmony that Barbarian and Weapons were able to avoid despite having far more complex narratives and ideas.
In truth, the movie is modeled after the games, which were in turn modeled after old drive-thru B-movies—less George Romero than his copycats that left the politics out but kept the zombies and gun action. Cregger’s movie has plenty of both, albeit perhaps more of a Resident Evil 4 variety than ‘90s-only gamers might remember. He also structures this around an everyman who must unravel the layers of Umbrella’s Raccoon City shenanigans until he is standing inevitably in a futuristic lab where everything has gone to hell.
Nonetheless, there is a shallowness to the work that might disappoint those wanting more meat on the zombie-gnawed bone after Weapons, and there s also a bold swing of a finale that simultaneously honors the games from a skewed angle while failing to serve its own tone or the thin story that Cregger blazes through like he’s on easy mode. The final twists are definitely amusing, but their implications belie just how empty the whole enterprise is once you get past those stellar graphics.
Nonetheless, I cannot deny it’s the best Resident Evil movie ever made. So much so, it probably deserves better than that faintest of faint praise. There are sequences, such as when Bryan must run through an American city and evade a sight that is the true stuff of nightmares 20 years ago, that will launch a thousand think pieces and thrice as many memes. Another set piece where Bryan has picked up, like the viewer, on the fact he’s in a horror game as a creature tries to lure him into a dark room is similarly sublime.
The movie is a blast, but perhaps more in the end like one of those Dead Shot arcade rail-shooters that Capcom still makes sometimes on the side with Bandai. It eats your quarters and whizzes by with a smile on its face. But the next day when you’re asked to describe what it is… you just remember the relentless motion of moving forward and wishing the character would look over their shoulder.
Resident Evil is in theaters Friday, Sept. 18.
Brooklyn Horror Film Festival Line-Up Features World Premieres, New Favorites, and Restored Classics
Anime NYC has finished this year, with New York Film Festival and New York Comic Con yet to come. But for those who love the strange and the macabre, the region’s big event is the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, October 15–22, at the Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg. To celebrate its 11th edition, the 2026 Brooklyn Horror Fest will kick off with the U.S. Premiere of the vampire mockumentary I Love Paris, directed by Nick Murphy. From there, the festival offers horror fans an unmissable mix of new masterpieces and old favorites.
In addition to the domestic debut of I Love Paris, Brooklyn Horror Film Fest will host several world premieres. The Australian slasher The Only One, directed by Michael Schwarz, stars Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter actor Mel Jarnson as a woman whose former lovers keep getting killed. Directed by Marion Le Corroller, the French body horror film Species (Sanguine) follows a medical intern (Mara Taquin) who discovers the strange truth behind the upsetting symptoms of the patients who come into her emergency room.
For those more interested in the history of horror, the festival will premiere documentaries about legends of the genre. In Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson, director Nick Taylor introduces viewers to the gripping story of Steve Johnson, a special effects master whose name is unknown, but whose work has been seen by millions. Full Moon Rising: The Charles Band Story, directed by Sarah Appleton, introduces viewers to the infamous B-movie producer and director Charles Band, founder of Full Moon Features.
Of course, film festivals aren’t just all about the premieres. They also give moviegoers the opportunity to see the newest and most exciting horror movies, often before the works have wider distribution. Some of this year’s standouts include Sender, a psychological horror film about unwanted deliveries, starring Severance’s Britt Lower, Pluribus’ Rhea Seehorn, and Scream Queen Jamie Lee Curtis. With American Dollhouse, director John Valley offers a dark Christmas story, in which a woman discovers a horrible secret when she returns to her childhood home.
As a gathering of horror lovers, the festival is a great time to revisit favorites and celebrate them with other enthusiasts. Accordingly, the Brooklyn Horror Film Fest will be hosting several screenings of classics, some in restored versions and some to mark anniversaries. 1993’s Ghost in the Machine, directed by Rachel Talalay and starring Karen Allen, will be screened in 35mm, as will the Blaxploitation great J.D.’s Revenge, the latter for its 50th anniversary. Wes Craven‘s social commentary film The People Under the Stars will receive a 35th anniversary screening, and a 35mm print of 2007’s Trick ‘R Treat will play alongside the short “Season’s Greetings,” followed by Q&A session with director Michael Dougherty.
And for those interested in the next generation of classics, the festival will be showing We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the debut feature from I Saw the TV Glow and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma director Jane Schoenbrun.
Finally, no festival would be complete without a chance to formally recognize excellence in the medium. To that end, the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival will be presenting the annual Leviathan Award to the Adams Family, who will be on hand to screen their latest work, The Glorious Dead.
Add in live podcast recordings, trivia contests, and a closing night Halloween party, and the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival is ready to mark its eleventh birthday in style. You can find the full line-up and purchase festival passes here.
The Brooklyn Horror Film Festival runs October 15–22, 2026, at the Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg.
How Many More Seasons of Slow Horses Could There Be?
Ahead of its season 6 release in September 2026, Apple TV renewed Slow Horses for an eighth season. The renewal made the British spy thriller series the longest-running show on the streamer, and fans seemed pretty happy. Why wouldn’t they be? While other great shows are getting canceled or wrapping up their stories, Slow Horses just keeps on running, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
Yet season 8 could inspire some big behind-the-scenes decisions for those shepherding the TV version of Mick Herron’s bestselling book series onto the small screen, as it will adapt the events of his most recent Slough House entry, Clown Town. After season 8, the Apple TV series could be up to date with Herron’s beloved tales of hapless espionage, which may mean some changes ahead.
Slow Horses typically releases a season every year, so season 8 could realistically arrive in 2028. Herron isn’t done writing Slough House books, but if he doesn’t release another one (or even two) in good time before then, the series will be faced with a few choices: keep going with the writing team’s own ideas à la Game of Thrones, consult with Herron about any firm or detailed ideas he has for future instalments, delay work on further seasons and wait for the author to create more books, or put an end to the show.
Herron has churned out nine Slough House novels and five novellas since 2010, so we can’t imagine Slow Horses fans will be left dealing with a Winds of Winter-esque situation here, but a lack of source material is already something that the creators of the series have had to consider.
“Most TV shows don’t have books, so we can figure this out,” executive producer Douglas Urbanski told THR. “And there’s another thing: Mick Herron hasn’t stopped writing. I can’t speak for Mick, but you never know, more books might be coming.” Indeed, Herron confirmed to the Radio Times last year that “There will be more to come. I haven’t decided how many yet but I’m enjoying myself and don’t plan to stop just yet.”
Yet until any new books are released, season 8’s spin on Clown Town could mark the end of one particular creative road for those adapting Herron’s work. As many fans already know, the story features Jackson Lamb and Diana Taverner’s ageing spies (played by Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas, respectively) as they’re forced into a dramatic face-off after someone tries to blackmail the Park.
Oldman recently revealed at the Edinburgh TV Festival that it’s a “struggle and a fight” to keep the cast together and “keep on top of the quality” of Slow Horses, but he also told TV Insider that Apple TV will ultimately decide whether to “keep it going or end it.”
With Season 8’s renewal confirmed, it seems fans will have another two seasons of Slow Horses to look forward to after the current one wraps up. Beyond that, the show’s future is currently unclear.
The Worst Movie Reboots and Why They Failed
Creating a hard reboot for a movie franchise is a minefield. When a studio loses its big stars, changes direction, or wants to forge a new path after years of watching a tempting IP gather dust on a shelf, it has to eventually decide where it will go and whether that path could lead to a profitable future. And if it avoids remakes, requels, or legacy sequels, its hard reboot idea better be worth the gamble.
A handful of hard franchise reboots have succeeded (we wrote about them here), but others simply haven’t, and those are the ones we’ll be digging into today. Some reboot failures stem from behind-the-scenes creative issues or fan pushback. Others are just plain bad! Ultimately, they didn’t land butter-side up.
We could spend a lot of time on horror reboots alone because those franchises have been relaunched ad nauseam over the decades, but since we’d be here all week doing that (and we still may do a separate article on them), we’ll focus on some more notable examples from the last 10 years or so across sci-fi, horror, and superhero fare today instead, which will give us a nice mix of failures that had their own unique problems in our modern cinematic landscape.
Fantastic Four (2015)
Although Tim Story’s 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four movies were profitable, Fox decided the Marvel franchise needed a fresh start, and after a few years of tinkering, they landed on Chronicle director Josh Trank to helm its doomed reboot.
Fox wasn’t happy with the film Trank made, yet according to the director, the battle behind the scenes began long before that. Trank and screenwriter Jeremy Slater had disagreed over the tone, with Slater suggesting he wanted to keep things light, like Marvel’s super successful 2012 Avengers movie, while Trank may have been more in favor of Christopher Nolan’s darker comic book tone.
Fans also reacted badly to Trank casting Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, which would seem ludicrous now if we hadn’t all just been subjected to the entirely tiresome Helen of Troy online discourse leading up to The Odyssey’s release. Trank said he also tried to cast a Black actress as Johnny’s sister, Sue, but Fox pushed back and they became “adopted” siblings. Hutch Parker and Simon Kinberg later joined to rewrite the film during production, and they tried to change the ending. It was still too downbeat for Fox, yet the altered version they released after ordering reshoots was also bloody terrible.
In the end, Fox lost around $80–$100 million on the gamble. Trank eventually disowned the film, but one of his Fantastic Four cast members stood up for his unreleased cut: Toby Kebbell, who played Victor Von Doom, described it as “great.”
The Mummy (2017)
After the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies ended with a whimper in 2008’s Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Universal was very excited to reboot the franchise with Tom Cruise as the lead in The Mummy. The studio even planned to create a whole shared cinematic universe around it, dubbed “the Dark Universe.”
We don’t need to tell you it didn’t happen. The project’s problems may have worsened with such notions and behind-the-scenes hubris, but the first proper trailer for the Cruise-led monster movie also hit an unfortunate hiccup when it launched with the wrong audio track. After being memed into oblivion, The Mummy then headed to theaters, where it was eviscerated by critics and audiences alike, who found it derivative and occasionally incomprehensible.
As a hard reboot for Universal’s beloved franchise, it failed on basically every level. The story wasn’t compelling, Cruise felt miscast, it cost the studio a ton of money, and those who had trumpeted the start of its Dark Universe launch were left humiliated and licking their wounds for the foreseeable future.
Men in Black: International (2019)
Technically set in the same universe as the original Men in Black trilogy but retaining little of its charm, the 2019 franchise reboot may no longer have had the surefire chemistry of leads Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, but the studio saw some definite buddy cop potential in Thor: Ragnarok duo Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, hiring them to front a new spin on the franchise.
Unfortunately, it all went downhill from there. Men in Black: International producer Walter F. Parkes and director F. Gary Gray were at loggerheads throughout the production over what the film ought to be, and its “edgy” and modern immigration commentary got pushed further and further into the background. There was a slew of rewrites, with Parkes and Gray arguing long into post-production, despite the latter’s fruitless attempts to abandon ship.
With such conflicting ideas happening behind the scenes, you’d imagine that International would turn out to be a real mess, but the resulting movie was something even worse: completely forgettable. The original trilogy’s appealing, goofy sci-fi fun was gone, replaced by a string of extraterrestrial moments that just fell flat. Thompson and Hemsworth clearly tried their best, but the story lacked any depth, leaving fans asking why the movie existed in the first place.
Ghostbusters (2016)
As a concept, an all-female Ghostbusters reboot was bound to ruffle the worst kind of feathers when it was announced, but a subsection of “fans” of the original two Ghostbusters movies dedicated a staggering amount of hours to miring Paul Feig’s comedic effort in misogyny, racism, pine-ons, and review-bombing before it was even released, collectively creating one of the worst eras of fan entitlement we’ve ever had the misfortune to witness.
Despite the vitriol aimed at it, 2016’s Ghostbusters wasn’t even a bad movie. It was basically fine and genuinely funny in places, no different to any average multiplex comedy that comes and goes. It just wasn’t the Ghostbusters people remembered. Nothing is. Not Ghostbusters 2, nor legacy sequels Afterlife or Frozen Empire. None of them has lived up to the first one because it was a flash in the pan where no amount of injecting new characters or stories can wow audiences.
Ghostbusters cast some of the funniest female comedians going, and it was co-written by Katie Dippold, who is only now getting the recognition she deserves with the phenomenal Widow’s Bay, so there was a notable level of talent behind the film. It may be a culturally significant bad movie reboot, but the negative reaction toward it was largely for reasons that have little to do with the film itself. Sony’s 2016 effort simply remains part of an ongoing failure to relaunch the IP in any creatively significant way.
Hellboy (2019)
How do you follow Guillermo del Toro’s ambitious, visually stunning Hellboy movies with an appealing new actor playing Big Red and a reboot story that will have fans crying out for more? Apparently, you can’t, as proven by Neil Marshall’s 2019 attempt.
Stranger Things star David Harbour may have been a decent Hellboy, but the film reportedly suffered from conflicts between its producers and its director, and the production itself was described as “contentious,” with rewrites and arguments aplenty. Marshall apparently didn’t even have final cut.
Not only did the resulting film fail to reboot the Hellboy franchise, but it also wasn’t any good. No amount of Harbour’s moxie or impressive creature design could save it from its tonal issues and misguided attempts to push its story into R-rated territory. Audiences impressed by del Toro’s films expected more from the franchise, and fans expected more from Marshall, who had previously helmed incredible horror fare like Dog Soldiers and The Descent.
A second reboot, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, would follow in 2024. It was also pish.
The Crow (2024)
This fifth entry in The Crow film series was doing the rounds for a while. Hardly anyone wanted to remake the original. It had become a tragic yet beloved cult classic, and the idea felt almost sacrilegious after star Brandon Lee died during production. Yet the films that followed didn’t inspire confidence that anyone else could be acceptable in the role of The Crow, even if it were a different version than the one Lee embodied (Edward Furlong, anyone?).
Despite various objections from the original director and cast about continually revisiting the IP well, yet another effort pushed ahead, briefly touted as a potential remake then once again reimagined as a reboot. Directors and stars came and went. Legal issues and bankruptcy followed behind the scenes. Years passed, then a reboot finally began production in 2022 with the well-regarded Bill Skarsgård in the lead role. Rupert Sanders, who had already faced criticism for his live-action Ghost in the Shell, was on directing duties.
For anyone patiently waiting for a Crow reboot (and there’s an argument to say not many had been), disappointment followed. The movie had made enough changes to avoid technically being thought of as a remake, but it still flopped at the box office, and you’d be hard-pressed to find many people with anything good to say about it. Even Skarsgård, who had cut himself a nice little niche in Hollywood as a go-to creepy-handsome guy for hire by this point, wasn’t anywhere near top form.
Return to Silent Hill (2026)
How do you solve a problem like Silent Hill? The Konami video games are scary; there’s no doubt about it, but their stories can be fairly confusing and the dialogue isn’t great either, so making films out of them seems destined to be a fool’s errand. French director Christophe Gans, dedicated to slavishly recreating their visuals in live action, didn’t make much of a splash with his first effort, but he became a natural choice for a reboot because the 2012 sequel to his film, Revelation, was somehow even worse.
Fans became tentatively excited when they heard that he’d be adapting the second game. But although it was arguably the best of Konami’s Silent Hill series, expectations were kept in check. The game’s central character, James Sunderland, was complex but still mired in puzzle-solving, monster shooting, and reacting to weird crap. Would even a faithful take on his story make for a good movie?
No. No, it would not. Slow and uninvolving, it had no scares to offer, and its budget was stretched to breaking, with its star wearing a ludicrous false beard at one point that inspired a clutch of hilarious memes. No doubt there’ll be another Silent Hill reboot one day, but Return to Silent Hill is unfortunately heading for “so bad it’s good” cult classic territory in the meantime.
9 Internet Series That Deserve Movie or TV Screen Adaptations
The internet is a scary place. It’s filled with deviants, unicorn cake-decorating tutorials, and D&D cosplays. It’s also the hub for pure imagination, creating a land for the craziest entertainment known to man.
Now the internet has made its way into movie studios. While it has been a rocky start for many, Gen Zers are finally making their way into the industry. Backrooms has proven successful as part of the YouTube-to-onscreen pipeline; showing how internet stories can become blockbuster opportunities for studios.
As digital natives, many zoomers get their start and inspiration from online projects. From creepypasta stories to adult comedy, here are some stories that deserve their chance on the big and small screens.
The Walten Files Takes Late-Night Creepshow to New Heights
The Walten Files, created by Martín Paredes, focuses on the events surrounding the animatronic-based entertainment company Bunny Smiles Incorporated and its Bon’s Burgers restaurant. In the mythology, the eatery was created by college friends Jack Walten and Felix Kranken. Shortly after the restaurant’s opening, everyone connected to it disappears. Years later, Sophia Walten, the last remaining member of the original families, investigates what happened. We also get to follow those who have disappeared ourselves, seeing what they lived like before vanishing.
Why It Would Work As a TV Series: The analog series builds the story in a way that makes the viewer feel like an investigator. The audience follows the events of the show through VHS tapes, ‘80s-styled commercials, arcade games, and flashbacks—in a true embodiment of the analog genre. There is a Twilight Zone-esque application to the show. That is why it works; it keeps audiences on their toes, not being too difficult to follow while also not spoon-feeding its audience.
The Risk: While The Walten Files would make a great horror series, mixing both live-action and animated formats, it comes with the risk of excessive camp. Just look toward the adaptation of comparable project Five Nights at Freddy’s that took many liberties with the horror elements and lore of the games to make it a more “family-friendly” horror movie. Without the proper execution of its lore and aesthetic, The Walten Files could come off as a cheap knockoff. This needs to be a fully fleshed out, TV-MA series.
Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want to be a Magical Girl Is So Real
Have you ever wondered why magical girls don’t just bust people in their kneecaps with a pipe? Don’t worry, this show answers that question. In Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want to be a Magical Girl, series creator Kiana Khansmith shows us what it looks like to be “burdened with glorious purpose” as 15-year-old Aika finds her bad guy-kicking spark again with the help of her talking angel-winged star sidekick, Hoshi and best friend Zira. Together, they learn how to balance girlhood and teenagedom all while fighting evil magic users.
Why It Would Work As a TV Series: It’s funny. It’s different. It represents girlhood phenomenally. It also serves a demographic that isn’t being represented right now: pre-teens. In a time in which everything is populated by adult humor, sex, violence, and abrasive language, this gives the younger generation their Disney XD and Teen Nick moment. It has a very Sailor Moon meets Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja feeling.
The Risk: Though that can also be a worry — this series has a very 24-episode-a-season, long-form plot air to it which, in the current age of streaming, isn’t the norm. This feels like a Disney+ or Prime Video saga, but neither of those platforms is good at giving shows the episode-count to properly flesh out stories. Time and execution are going to be big factors in the success of this show.
Knights of Guinevere Brings Hope, Horror, and a Half-Dead Robot Warrior Princess
Another project from Glitch Productions (the studio supporting ultra indie hit The Amazing Digital Circus, Knights of Guinevere follows childhood besties Frankie and Andi as they discover an old animatronic model of Princess Guinevere, the mascot of Park Planet. The giant, kingdom-sized amusement park acts as an overseer that keeps the rest of the world, and the numerous others under their thumb, impoverished, sickly, and controlled. This discovery puts Andi and Frankie at the heart of a decades-old, possibly centuries-old mystery and in the hurricane of the Park’s wrath. To think, all these two dreamers wanted to do was Walt Disney their way into fame.
Why It Would Work As a TV Series: A murderous amusement park regime that colonizes planets like Paul Atreides; how is that not a compelling plot line? It would be therapeutic for audiences to see an evil Walt Disney World that takes the genius and ingenuity of workers, creates evil bounty-hunting killing animatronics, and discovers the lies of an interstellar “amuse-matainment” conglomerate. Knights of Guinevere is a literal shock to the system, with a pilot that acts as a master class on laying the foundations for a story’s plot.
The Risk: That being said, shows like this tend to not maintain momentum. It needs to follow a Gravity Falls-esque format when it comes to detail and filler episodes. Famously, the creators of Gravity Falls would take fan theories and add details of them into the show in order to throw viewers off from the build up of the main storyline. This series needs to have the same level of ingenuity. In a world surrounding a colonizing amusement park-enterprise, the story needs to feel alive with curveballs, subplots and hidden details that only make sense 10 years later.
Marmalade is Missing Gives TV-MA Tom & Jerry Realness
AMMO Animation’s Marmalade is Missing is an animated short directed by James Nutting, showcasing the world of 1930s burlesque. Viewers follow Marmalade, the mischievously lovable feline of world-famous burlesque performer Margo Munro. Marmalade, who is a part of Margo’s act, goes missing from their dressing room just before their show. Turns out she is chasing a magical glove across the stage and backstage, and has to find their way back to Margo before their stage cue.
Why It Would Work as a Movie: A very risque short, it blends humor with the provocativeness of burlesque. Showcasing women of all body shapes, sizes, heights, and ethnicities, it reminds beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Admittedly that’s an unusual setting for the animal-comedy genre, but it works well, showcasing the burlesque stars as not only objects of sexuality but also as unique characters with very unique personalities. Through their dance styles, fashion sense, and body language, we learn the demeanor of each character in 10 minutes.
The Risk: The creative team behind the short is currently crowdfunding to raise enough money for a full film. With much hope, the team will reach their goal to bring the hilariously fun story fully to life. Though with stories like these, the worry becomes about how much stories change from their source material, especially when toeing the line between hypersexualization and body empowerment. The stage quality of burlesque needs to stay the same, without reducing it to something so hypersexual it loses its purpose.
Regrettably, My Boyfriend is a Vampire: Vampires Aren’t The Only Thing That Will Suck You Dry
After vampires and humans call a truce, the realm of social media has immortalized the undead species in more ways than one. Now the trailblazers of the manosphere, vampires have made themselves the object of envy — promoting humans to transform into vampires in their content, dividing humans and vampires even further. Unfortunately for Mandy Moore (no, not that Mandy Moore), this is even more infuriating when her boyfriend Josh, becomes a vampire, and her best friends become vampire hunters. Stuck in the middle, Mandy is now battling anti-living propaganda, vampires, social media, her 20s, and a dead relationship.
Why It Would Work as a TV Series: A metaphor for the impacts of social media as bloodsucking vampires? Count this writer interested. Its commentary on a growing disregard for human existence, while balancing a rather wholesome animation style, makes it engrossing. It’s crafted as an everyday story with vampires being a tool, not a focus, which makes for a concept in animation. Its use of reds, purples, greens, blues—colors connected to the supernatural—is more relaxing than scary or intense.
The Risk:Regrettably, My Boyfriend is a Vampire is an interesting concept that would do well as a weekday cartoon, but it needs to avoid dragging out the relationship between Mandy and Josh. Relationship plots and the process of grieving tend to be drawn out in serial dramas, often without any real character development toward either party. If the show can balance both the emotional and narrative plots of the story, it will do well.
The Rake Brings Appalachian Horror too Close for Comfort
The Rake, first introduced in 2013, is one of the most popular ever creepypasta stories and takes place, initially, in the summer of 2003, somewhere in the Appalachian region of the Northeastern U.S. Sightings of a bald, pale humanoid-like creature populate social media in the region — only to be scrubbed from the internet. Witnesses, primarily in rural New York State, publish their accounts of the creature, while others begin looking for older historical accounts of it. In journal entries from 1691 to 2006, the Rake has haunted the forests of the U.S. for centuries — claiming the land as its own.
Why It Would Work as a TV Series: Similar to the Changelings in 2024’s The Watchers, the Rake’s presence in its territory predates the settlers of the country it resides in. Its inhuman appearance, yet being human-adjacent enough to learn to communicate with humans, makes the legend terrifying. Terrifying the internet through audio dramas, the Rake is atmospheric. The frightening aspects come from the ability to build a simple scenario and create a figure that haunts the narrative.
The Risk: The challenge with adapting a story like that is losing that radio-show-like narration. Adapting words into visuals always has a bleeding effect — losing the impact that the literary source had in creating a visual atmosphere. The Rake needs carefully crafted dialogue in order to convey the true impact of the story.
Jeff the Killer Takes the Slasher Title to Malevolent Lows
While this one is apparently in development with creator-led studio Tongal and filmmaker Savannah Moss, Jeff the Killer’s internet infamy rivals that of Slenderman himself. Jeff the Killer is identified by his bleach-white skin, noseless face, dark black hair, and permanent grin. Jeffrey Alan Woods, or Jeff C. Hodek, depending on the storyteller, moves to a new town with his parents and brother, Lui. Three bullies target the brothers with knives, resulting in them being brutally beaten by Jeff. Lui takes the fall for his brother, which leaves Jeff guilt-ridden, rapidly declining mentally, and vulnerable to a second attack from the bullies that leaves him permanently scarred. Jeff goes on to mutilate himself, kill his family, and continue on to a larger killing spree.
Why It Would Work as a TV Series: This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg of Jeff the Killer’s story. There has been a very popular Jeff the Killer vs. Slenderman story that was voiced by Mr. Creepypasta, a popular creepypasta narrator on YouTube. This opens the door to the creepypasta universe. This would be Gen Z’s version of Freddy vs. Jason. With a movie being in the works, which should give hope for creepypasta fans, the medium of a film may not be enough to fully introduce Jeff.
The Risk: A Criminal Minds or Sleepy Hollow-like show would be the dream format for a character like Jeff — with over a decade of stories from hundreds of writers internationally, there is a lot to work with on top of the actual source material. Conveying the supernatural-unhinged villainy of Jeff may not mesh well in a time that wants sympathetic characters — Jeff is definitely not that.
Skin Flick’s Demonic Influence Gives Horror-Comedy a Romantic Twist
Skin Flick is a dark animated comedic horror-romance following SKIN FLICK – Graduation short film 2025, It follows Gasoline, a female-demon whose deal with the devil keeps her in a beautiful body to hide her demonic insides, in exchange for ratings. Sent to lure a runaway bride, they fall in love as she accepts Gasoline’s fluid frame and must now escape the devil’s wrath.
Why It Would Work As a TV Series: The short can become a very visually distinct horror-comedy show that teaches important lessons about self-acceptance. Gasoline’s struggle with body image do to her gelatin unhumanoid form, makes her story very uniquely human. In tandom with her, the story’s runaway bride — whose backstory remain unknown — is hinted to be running from a religious background. Viewers can hypothesize that this conflicts with her sexual orientation, as there is a visible hesitance/shyness to her approaching Gasoline.
Their journey through self-discovery, acceptance, and eventually freedom, all while dodging a tyrannical pimp devil in a crazy world of snuff-film porn, gives a lot of creative wiggle room.
The Risk: With stories built on a thin premise, creators may feel compelled to dig into the lore. However, this story doesn’t need Gravity Falls level lore. It is a story focused on two characters growing into a future of both self-acceptance, understanding, and love. Romance should be the plot of this show.
Junichiro Jackson (JJ) Takes Afro-Samurai to an Oni-Infested Brooklyn
Set in a near-future Brooklyn, Junichiro Jackson (J.J.) takes on the psychological thriller genre as it follows private investigator Junichiro Jackson, who can see Oni demons and becomes ingrained in a supernatural plot that threatens the world. The anime-style show mixes action, dark humor, and hip-hop to give life to a truly Brooklyn underworld atmosphere.
Why It Would Work as a TV Series: The introduction of yokai mythology mixed with Black American culture gives a unique flavor to both the genre and setting. A mixture of cultural, musical, and visual identities, along with a 12+ episode season, would make this show a hit. With good dialogue and clever, current pop culture references, the story feels fresh enough to gain the interest of young adults.
The Risk: The show needs to stay true to its pilot and the vibes they introduce. When non-Japanese studios try too hard to make something feel like “anime,” it can often feel like a mockery more so than a homage. It also causes the projects to lose the essence that drew people to it in the first place. As long as the creators of J.J. stay focused, it will be successful.
Every James Gunn Directorial Effort Ranked
With Lanterns doing great numbers for HBO and anticipation for Man of Tomorrow building every day, James Gunn has become one of the most recognizable and bankable figures in media today. Of course, no one starts out as a successful blockbuster filmmaker and studio co-head, but Gunn’s rise to the top of DC Studios is particularly shocking. After all, he started out writing for the notorious B-movie studio Troma Entertainment and penning scripts for two Scooby-Doo movies. His earliest directorial works were edgy cheapies, an attitude that briefly got him fired from Disney, even after making two hit Marvel films.
And yet, it’s abundantly clear that James Gunn is the right person at the right time, joining Peter Safran as the heads of DC Studios right when audiences want more distinctive superhero media. In fact, one can see a pretty clear line of progression across the shorts, shows, and movies that Gunn directed, which all reveal a love of odd and flamboyant characters, a nasty humor streak, and an emotional openness. Even if the works sometimes vary in quality, they show us how Gunn became the world’s premiere superhero auteur.
11. Tromaville Cafe (1997-2000)
While James Gunn didn’t go to a traditional film school, he did get his start working for infamous schlock studio Troma Entertainment, which is absolutely its own type of education. While working under Troma co-founder Lloyd Kauffman, Gunn did a number of projects for the company, including co-writing the 1996 feature Tromeo and Juliet and starring in 2004 satirical mockumentary Lollilove, directed by and co-starring his then-wife Jenna Fischer of The Office. But his only directorial work for Troma came in the form of wrap-around segments filmed for the TV series Tromaville Cafe.
Aired on the BBC between 1997 and 2000, Tromaville Cafe played some of the studio’s most beloved movies, including The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High. Each episode began and ended with a skit featuring Kauffman, standout characters Toxie, the Toxic Avenger, and Sgt. Kabukiman, as well as various news reporters introducing the audience to the set. The segments only last for about five minutes, and the televisual style leaves no room for distinctive imagery, but the Tromaville Cafe skits do have the comedic style that will remain throughout Gunn’s career.
10. James Gunn’s PG Porn (2008)
Everything you need to know about James Gunn’s PG Porn, the web series that Gunn and his brothers Brian and Sean made for the laddie website Spike.com, can be found in the title. Each of the eleven episodes plays like a pornagraphic film, except they’re rated PG, which means that they lack all nudity or sexual content. So while the episodes feature scenarios you’d find in a porn film, they take shocking turns away from the endings you’d expect.
Case in point, the episode “Genital Hospital” begins with Sean Gunn receiving a testicular exam from the seductive Dr. Poonwater (real adult actress Belladonna). As expected, the doctor begins talking about the big thing in his pants. But instead of this observation leading to raunchy fun, the doctor instead explains that the big thing in the man’s pants is a cancerous tumor and he has six months to live. As that example demonstrates, the PG Porn shorts find Gunn still embracing the edgy humor of his Troma days, but he executes the jokes with greater precision—a feat helped by the fact that he’s working with top-level actors, including Nathan Fillion, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk.
9. Super (2010)
Superheroes have always been close to James Gunn’s heart. Even before he stepped behind the director’s chair, Gunn had written The Specials, a (not very good) vérité-style movie about a team of C-listers. So it comes as no surprise that he would make superheroes the subject of his second movie, 2010’s Super. Rainn Wilson plays Frank Darbo, an utter loser who hits rock bottom after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for smarmy criminal Jacques (Kevin Bacon). After seeing a vision of the Christian superhero the Holy Avenger (Fillion), Frank decides to become a superhero himself, donning red pajamas and beating people with a wrench as the Crimson Bolt.
As that summary indicates, Super touches on most of Gunn’s favorite themes. We’ve got a loser who finds meaning through his costume and mission, and plenty of wry observations about the genre. However, there’s a meanness to Super that, unlike Gunn’s other projects, doesn’t get balanced out by any softness. Frank is pathetic and cruel when he pummels people with his wrench, and the addition of psychotic teen sidekick Boltie (Elliot Page) only ups the nastiness. Not a terrible movie by any stretch, Super finds Gunn exorcising some of the brattiness he needed to shed before becoming an auteur of superhero movies.
8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
One of the most impressive things about Gunn’s career is how he went from working on lean indies with tiny budgets to managing huge spectacles, full of big ideas but never losing sight of the characters. In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only time that one feels Gunn getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the project, resulting in a film that’s excellent in many ways, but still often overstuffed and unwieldy. That may be a result of a production cycle extended by Gunn’s brief firing and the making of The Suicide Squad, but whatever the reason, Guardians 3 lags behind its two predecessors.
And yet, Guardians 3 is still pretty great. Only Gunn has got a genuinely emotional performance out of Chris Pratt, who is never better as a Peter Quill turned self-destructive after losing Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) in Avengers: Infinity War. Even more powerful is Bradley Cooper‘s vocal performance as Rocket Raccoon, who gets tortured alongside his animal friends by the movie’s villain, the High Evolutionary (a delightfully imperious Chukwudi Iwuji). Despite the upsetting animal abuse themes and disparaging states of the characters, Gunn still manages to find notes of humor and grace, including the MCU’s first F-bomb, saving Guardians 3 from getting completely weighed down.
7. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)
The central appeal of the MCU has always been watching a bunch of likable characters hang out together, whether they’re saving the universe or eating schwarma. So it felt like only a matter of time before the MCU produced a Christmas special. In addition, the mixture of endless sniping and emotional proclamations make the Guardians the perfect choice for the season, and Gunn executes the story to perfection.
Even though the The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special‘s positioning right before Guardians 3 does result in some awkward plot mechanics (the Guardians run Knowhere now?), it does allow Quill to stay in the background and send Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Drax (Dave Bautista) to Earth to retrieve Kevin Bacon. The two characters make the most of their extended screen time, giving us a fantastic romp that comes with a playlist of Christmas tunes to revisit every year.
6. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Believe it or not, everyone expected the Guardians of the Galaxy to sink the MCU. Sure, Marvel had managed to turn the unexpected success of Iron Man into a shared universe franchise that every other studio wanted to emulate. But even Iron Man had some name recognition before the 2008 movie. The same could not be said of any of the Guardians, who weren’t even well-known to most comic fans at the time. Who would be interested in a movie about a bunch of losers, who spend so much time arguing with one another that they can barely make time to save the world.
Turns out, James Gunn was interested. The very things that made them seem so risky to the average fan made Guardians the ideal vehicle for Gunn, giving him a chance to show off what he loves about the heroes that others ignore. By the time Peter Quill challenges Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) to a dance off, audiences had fallen in love with deep cuts like Rocket and Groot (Vin Diesel), and Gunn had finally found his true calling, as a director of blockbuster superhero movies.
5. Slither (2006)
Obviously, James Gunn is synonymous with superheroes. But his first directorial feature suggested that Gunn might follow a different trajectory, one toward blood and guts instead of capes and cowls. Slither owes a debt to the gooey horror movies of the 1970s and ’80s, paying direct homage to films such as David Cronenberg‘s Shivers and Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street, complete with stomach-churning body horror effects. However, Gunn adds a level of emotional vulnerability that shocked viewers at the time, but has proven to be one of his signature moves.
Slither stars Nathan Fillion as Chief Bill Pardy, a small-town cop who never got over his crush on schoolteacher Starla (Elizabeth Banks), despite the fact that she’s long-since married the local rich bully, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). When a meteor filled with alien worms transforms Grant into a flesh-eating mutant, Bill and his friends must fight the invasion and rescue Starla from joining a gloopy horde of bodies, a story that builds to one of the most tender, if slimy, climaxes in Gunn’s filmography.
4. The Suicide Squad (2021)
James Gunn loves his loser superheroes, even if he also loves it when horrible things happen to them. Those two facts make The Suicide Squad the ideal Gunn superhero movie, even if it’s not quite his best superhero movie. Essentially given carte blanche by Warner Bros to make a DC film (still then an extension of Zack Snyder‘s DCEU) after being fired by Disney, Gunn leans into both of his passions for a movie about a government program that forces hapless supervillains to go on deadly black-ops missions.
In the first 10 minutes, Gunn introduces and then gleefully kills a set of Z-list baddies, including deep cuts like Savant (Michael Rooker), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), and Javelin (Flula Borg). But from there, he not only spends time developing the second group of oddities, turning Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man into three-dimensional characters with genuine depth. Even better, Gunn uses superheroes as a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction in international relations, making The Suicide Squad a surprisingly trenchant critique of American interventions overseas. Throw in a couple of visually stunning sequences with Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and it’s easy to see how The Suicide Squad led to Gunn running the entire DC Universe.
3. Peacemaker (2022, 2025)
Gunn had originally planned for the Peacemaker Chris Smith to die at the end of The Suicide Squad, a decision nobody would have second-guessed. After all, Peacemaker is an ultimate D-lister of DC Comics, more famous for inspiring the Comedian in Watchmen than for anything he did in his handful of comic appearances. If Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Polka-Dot Man can’t make it through the movie, what hope does a nobody like Peacemaker have?
And yet, Gunn found John Cena‘s performance so compelling that he not only changed to ending to keep Chris around, but he gave Peacemaker two seasons of an HBO show. Even better, Peacemaker contained some of Gunn’s best work, turning a one-note meathead bully into a complicated portrait of a man trying to untangle himself from a heritage of racism and toxic masculinity. Anchored by a truly nuanced performance by Cena and adorned with superhero nonsense like alternate realities and evil alien butterflies, Peacemaker finds the real human beings within superhero spectacle.
2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
By this point, it’s an easy cliché to criticize Kevin Feige and the limitations that the Marvel house style puts on directors. But when you see a movie as vibrant and compelling as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, arguably the best movie in the entire MCU, it’s hard not to wonder what the film could have been if Gunn was given full control over the entire film.
On the surface, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays like an obvious Marvel sequel, with the misfits gathered in the first movie finding it harder than they expected to be a real team and facing a new threat in the form of Ego, the Living Planet (Kurt Russell). However, Gunn uses the success of the first Guardians movie to go not just bigger and more colorful, established immediately in the rainbow opening sequence, but to also go deeper. By forcing Peter to face his father, forcing Gamora to deal with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillan), and forcing Rocket to face his own self-destructive tendencies, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 turns the lovable goofballs from the first movie into fully developed people, worthy of attention beyond the action and the quips.
1. Superman (2025)
Nobody would have expected James Gunn to make a good Superman movie, least of all James Gunn. He famously turned down Warner Bros. the first time they asked him to direct, choosing to make The Suicide Squad instead. While he cites a general apprehension about taking on the world’s first superhero, one also assumes that Gunn felt more comfortable with the foul-mouthed failures in the Suicide Squad than he did with the squeaky-clean Man of Steel. How can a guy as cynical as Gunn make a movie about the ultimate optimist?
Turns out, the answer was, “Let Superman be optimistic and make everyone else cynical.” Right from the very beginning, Superman establishes David Corenswet’s character as an unrepentant cornball, someone who truly finds everyone on Earth beautiful and wants nothing more than to save the world. Gunn gives his cynicism to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), to the Justice Gang, and to Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and then watches as it melts away in the light of Superman’s pure goodness. The approach gives us a Superman film that’s not only politically resonant and refreshingly romantic, but is also the best and most unlikely entry in Gunn’s filmography.
TV Premiere Dates: 2026 Calendar
Wondering when your favorite shows are coming back and what new series you can look forward to? We’ve got you covered with the Den of Geek 2026 TV Premiere Dates Calendar, where we keep track of TV series premiere dates, return dates, and more for the year and beyond.
We’ll continue to update this page weekly as networks and streamers announce dates. A lot of these shows we’ll be watching or covering, so be sure to follow along with us!
Please note that all times are ET.
Note: These are U.S. releases. For upcoming British releases, head on over here.
DATE
SHOW
NETWORK
Tuesday, September 15
Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence
BritBox
Tuesday, September 15
Dancing With the Stars Season 35 (8:00 p.m.)
ABC
Tuesday, September 15
R.J. Decker Season 2 (10:00 p.m.)
ABC
Wednesday, September 16
The Doll
Netflix
Wednesday, September 16
Neagley
Prime Video
Wednesday, September 16
Slow Horses Season 6
Apple TV
Wednesday, September 16
Golden Axe
Paramount+
Wednesday, September 16
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Season 7 (8:00 p.m.)
Bravo
Wednesday, September 16
South Park Season 29 (10:00 p.m.)
Comedy Central
Thursday, September 17
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story
Netflix
Thursday, September 17
The Fixers
Netflix
Thursday, September 17
Not a Stranger
Netflix
Thursday, September 17
Plastic Beauty
Netflix
Thursday, September 17
Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 Season 2
Netflix
Friday, September 18
Jay-Z in 8
HBO
Friday, September 18
The Traitors: New Blood
Peacock
Friday, September 18
Outlander: Blood of My Blood Season 2
Starz
Friday, September 18
MobLand Season 2
Paramount+
Sunday, September 20
Youth
HBO
Sunday, September 20
American Hostage
MGM+
Monday, September 21
Celebrity Name That Tune Season 6 (8:00 p.m.)
Fox
Monday, September 21
The Voice Season 30 (8:00 p.m.)
NBC
Monday, September 21
Celebrity Weakest Link Season 2(9:00 p.m.)
Fox
Monday, September 21
Line of Fire (10:00 p.m.)
NBC
Tuesday, September 22
Minerva Academy
Netflix
Tuesday, September 22
Best Medicine Season 2 (8:00 p.m.)
Fox
Tuesday, September 22
Doc Season 3 (9:00 p.m.)
Fox
Wednesday, September 23
Habeas Corpus
Netflix
Wednesday, September 23
Wonka’s The Golden Ticket
Netflix
Wednesday, September 23
Brothers
Apple TV
Wednesday, September 23
Survivor Season 51 (8:00 p.m.)
CBS
Wednesday, September 23
The Floor Season 6 (8:00 p.m.)
Fox
Wednesday, September 23
99 to Beat Season 2 (9:00 p.m.)
Fox
Thursday, September 24
A Different World
Netflix
Thursday, September 24
Delusion
Netflix
Thursday, September 24
My Sad Dead
Netflix
Thursday, September 24
Team Moms: Baseball
Paramount+
Thursday, September 24
Hell’s Kitchen Season 25 (8:00 p.m.)
Fox
Thursday, September 24
Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test (9:00 p.m.)
Fox
Thursday, September 24
American Horror Story Season 13 (9:00 p.m.)
FX
Friday, September 25
Steel Ball Run JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: 2nd-3rd Stage
Netflix
Friday, September 25
The Final Problem
Netflix
Friday, September 25
Four Blocks Zero
HBO Max
Friday, September 25
SWAT Exiles
Starz
Friday, September 25
20/20 Season 48 (9:00 p.m.)
ABC
Friday, September 25
Dateline Season 35 (9:00 p.m.)
NBC
Sunday, September 27
The Simpsons Season 38 (8:00 p.m.)
Fox
Sunday, September 27
Animal Control Season 5 (8:30 p.m.)
Fox
Sunday, September 27
Universal Basic Guys Season 3 (9:00 p.m.)
Fox
Sunday, September 27
Grimsburg Season 3 (9:30 p.m.)
Fox
Tuesday, September 29
LEGO ONE PIECE
Netflix
Wednesday, September 30
The Arena
Netflix
Wednesday, September 30
Sacrifice Season 2
Paramount+
Wednesday, September 30
Scrubs Season 2 (8:00 p.m.)
ABC
Wednesday, September 30
Shark Tank Season 18 (9:00 p.m.)
ABC
Wednesday, September 30
The Amazing Race Season 38 (9:30 p.m.)
CBS
Thursday, October 1
East of Eden
Netflix
Thursday, October 1
War (9:00 p.m.)
HBO
Friday, October 2
Celebrity Wheel of Fortune Season 7 (8:00 p.m.)
ABC
Friday, October 2
Adventure Time: Side Quests
Hulu | Disney+
Friday, October 2
Kill Jackie
AMC+
Saturday, October 3
Get Jiro (12:00 a.m.)
Adult Swim
Sunday, October 4
Marshals Season 2 (8:30 p.m.)
CBS
Sunday, October 4
Tracker Season 4 (9:30 p.m.)
CBS
Monday, October 5
FBI Season 9 (8:00 p.m.)
CBS
Monday, October 5
Private Eyes West Coast (8:00 p.m.)
The CW
Monday, October 5
CIA Season 2 (9:00 p.m.)
CBS
Monday, October 5
Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent (9:00 p.m.)
The CW
Monday, October 5
Harlan Coben’s Final Twist (10:00 p.m.)
CBS
Tuesday, October 6
Bass x Machina
Netflix
Tuesday, October 6
NCIS Season 24 (8:00 p.m.)
CBS
Tuesday, October 6
NCIS: New York Season 1 (9:00 p.m.)
CBS
Tuesday, October 6
NCIS: Origins Season 3 (10:00 p.m.)
CBS
Wednesday, October 7
Carrie
Prime Video
Wednesday, October 7
Chicago Fire Season 15 (8:00 p.m.)
NBC
Wednesday, October 7
Abbott Elementary Season 6 (8:30 p.m.)
ABC
Wednesday, October 7
Chicago Med Season 12 (9:00 p.m.)
NBC
Wednesday, October 7
Chicago P.D. Season 14 (10:00 p.m.)
NBC
Wednesday, October 7
Small Prophets
Apple TV
Thursday, October 8
Below
Netflix
Thursday, October 8
Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage Season 3 (8:00 p.m.)
CBS
Thursday, October 8
Eternally Yours (8:30 p.m.)
CBS
Thursday, October 8
Law & Order: SVU Season 28 (9:00 p.m.)
NBC
Thursday, October 8
Elsbeth Season 4 (9:00 p.m.)
CBS
Thursday, October 8
Cupertino (10:00 p.m.)
CBS
Thursday, October 8
Law & Order Season 26 (10:00 p.m.)
NBC
Friday, October 9
Avatar: Seven Havens
Paramount+
Friday, October 9
Sheriff Country Season 2 (8:00 p.m.)
CBS
Friday, October 9
Fire Country Season 5 (9:00 p.m.)
CBS
Friday, October 9
Boston Blue Season 2 (10:00 p.m.)
CBS
Saturday, October 11
The Real Housewives of Potomac (8:00 p.m.)
Bravo
Tuesday, October 13
Ludwig Season 2
BritBox
Wednesday, October 14
The Lowdown Season 2 (9:00 p.m.)
FX/Hulu
Wednesday, October 14
NOVA: Evolution
PBS
Wednesday, October 14
Helluva Boss
Prime Video
Wednesday, October 14
VisionQuest
Apple TV
Thursday, October 15
The Diplomat Season 4
Netflix
Thursday, October 15
Hollywood Arts
Netflix
Thursday, October 15
Crystal Lake
Peacock
Thursday, October 15
9-1-1 Season 10 (8:00 p.m.)
ABC
Thursday, October 15
9-1-1: Nashville Season 2 (9:00 p.m.)
ABC
Thursday, October 15
Grey’s Anatomy Season 23 (10:00 p.m.)
ABC
Friday, October 16
Tulsa King Season 4
Paramount+
Friday, October 16
The Rainmaker (10:00 p.m.)
USA Network
Sunday, October 18
Maigret (9:00 p.m.)
PBS
Sunday, October 18
The Gold (10:00 p.m.)
PBS
Wednesday, October 21
The Terminal List Season 2
Prime Video
Thursday, October 22
Nobody Wants This Season 3
Netflix
Friday, October 23
Lupin Part 4
Netflix
Friday, October 23
Yaga
AMC+
Friday, October 23
Happy’s Place Season 3 (8:00 p.m.)
NBC
Friday, October 23
Newlyweds (8:30 p.m.)
NBC
Monday, October 26
The Mob
Hulu
Tuesday, October 27
The One About Matthew Perry
Netflix
Thursday, October 29
Ghosts Halloween Special (9:00 p.m.)
CBS
Friday, October 30
Dexter: Resurrection Season 2
Paramount+
Friday, October 30
Nocturne
Apple TV
Sunday, November 1
The Gilded Age Season 4 (9:00 p.m.)
HBO
Monday, November 2
St. Denis Medical Season 3 (8:00 p.m.)
NBC
Monday, November 2
The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins Season 2 (8:30 p.m.)
NBC
Tuesday, November
Bass x Machina
Netflix
Wednesday, November 4
The Greatest
Prime Video
Thursday, November 5
Black Doves
Netflix
Wednesday, November 11
The Body
Netflix
Wednesday, November 11
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Prime Video
Thursday, November 12
The Good Daughter
Peacock
Friday, November 13
12 12 12
Apple TV
Sunday, November 15
The Chosen
Prime Video
Thursday, November 19
The Altruists
Netflix
Friday, November 20
Yellowjackets Season 4
Paramount+
Friday, November 20
Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 3
Disney+
Monday, November 23
Dig
Peacock
Wednesday, November 25
Blade Runner 2099
Prime Video
Thursday, November 26
The Hunting Wives Season 2
Netflix
Wednesday, December 2
Bad Monkey Season 2
Apple TV
Tuesday, December 8
Only Murders in London
Hulu
Thursday, December 10
Ghosts Christmas Special (9:00 p.m.)
CBS
Thursday, December 10
The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey
Netflix
Thursday, December 24
Emily in Paris Season 6
Netflix
Friday, December 25
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
HBO Max
Friday, January 22
Neuromancer
Apple TV
If we’ve forgotten a show, feel free to drop a reminder in the comment section below!
Want to know what big movies are coming out in 2026? We’ve got you covered here.
How Theorist Media Built a Media Empire for the Earnest
“I grew up online at probably too young of an age trying to find people to talk about the things that I liked,” reflects Amy Roberts, the manager of business development at Theorist Media and creative director and host of its fashion-forward brand Style Theory. “Being able to do that for a living is a huge gift. It really just makes you excited to be able to hop onto a mic and have those conversations that hopefully the audience will carry on even after you’ve stepped out of it. It’s such an exciting thing to do. It really is a privilege to be someone who puts that out there and have that be your job.”
For the uninitiated, Game Theory has been around in some form and on some platform since 2011, providing fans with deep dives on gaming lore, adding fresh perspectives and new dimensions to the classic properties that gamers love. The brand has since expanded into channels and programming based on everything from movies (Film Theory), to food (Food Theory), to the aforementioned fashion (Style Theory), and more. Game Theory boasts over 19 million subscribers on YouTube alone, while the brands are also available through Spotify and Theorist Media’s new streaming service TheoryVerse.
Roberts began working for Theorist Media in 2018, starting out as a channel manager, rising through the ranks of the company, including becoming its brand manager for a time. Throughout her time with the company, Roberts has held a multitude of roles, both behind-the-scenes and on camera and mic as a host or in a supporting capacity, gaining tremendous perspective and insight on its operations. It also means that Roberts is exceptionally clear about what connects and defines all the different programs and personalities that make up the content being produced by Game Theory across all of its platforms.
“When you boil it down to the very bare-bones, it’s an earnestness, a curiosity, and a want to learn and educate alongside being entertaining,” Roberts explains. “As long as we can keep those core values in anything that we do, we’re able to sustain itself and still feel like a brand, even with so many voices being a part of it. We look to see who would best represent that voice. We just want to make sure that they have that passion for the subject matter that they’re talking about.”
One of the exciting new platforms for Theorist Media and its popular programs, including Game Theory, is Spotify, with the company publishing its content on the service starting in April 2023. The positive response on the service has been quick and effective, introducing the company’s programming to both existing audiences and, perhaps more interestingly, audiences that had never followed the company on its other platforms before. All of Theorist Media’s verticals and fan-favorite programming, including livestreams, are available through Spotify, providing the company with an impressive avenue to grow its audience across the board.
“Spotify is fascinating because what it’s let us do is grow an entirely new subset of the audience,” Roberts observes. “People who listen to us on Spotify aren’t necessarily the same people who find us on YouTube. It’s only been additive for us. We can see that in the data that we have available to us from Spotify. The demographics are different, the way people that listen to us are different, and the episodes that do well are different. Some episodes that are mid to low tier on YouTube are some of our most popular episodes on Spotify.”
Of course, Theorist Media’s content coming to Spotify doesn’t just mean that its new programming is on the platform, but also its considerable backlog across all of its shows. With series like Style Theory and Food Theory, that means audiences are going back to the earliest episodes of these shows after finding a program and/or voice that they’ve come to enjoy and appreciate. For Roberts, whose seen viewership performance through other platforms, she’s found how audiences embrace the various programming through Spotify to be noticeably unique.
“The beauty of Spotify is that it’s already an audience that is trained to want to go back when they find shows,” Roberts shares. “A lot of people think of it as a music streaming service, but it is also a place where people go when they want that long-form content they can binge for a very long time. Whether it’s podcasts, audiobooks, or shows like ours, it is an audience that’s built for that. They’re built to want to learn and find something that’ll give them new knowledge as a companion piece for whatever else they’re doing.”
While Amy Roberts certainly has held and holds many roles within Theorist Media, she is certainly not the only one keeping the ship running, something that she’s quick to point out. Emphasizing that the company has always been a team effort, Roberts notes that the team is always carefully working together and trusting each other to get the job done, especially when working with so many external partners, each with their own project details.
“I’ll never put myself as the front mask to everything that’s going on,” Roberts adds. “We have found people in our Game Theorist community that really can help navigate it. It’s about being able to trust those team members to lead these conversations and working with our management so that we know what we need to deliver. It is not a one-person thing. It’s a team effort. If we didn’t have that, I don’t think we’d be nearly as on top of everything”
With new content being published regularly, including through Spotify, covering a multitude of topics, there is always something new and informative being produced by Theorist Media. Roberts is also excited about the launch of TheoryVerse and its new shows, including the game show and hot take show Just a Theory and Dead Wrong, respectively. And with new shows coming to TheoryVerse in early October, things appear to be as delightfully busy as ever for Theorist Media.
Primetime Review: You Can’t Look Away from Robert Pattinson’s Weirdest Antihero
Fifty years ago, Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s Network was startling for how prescient it appeared. In the era of Woodward and Bernstein, and Walter Cronkite, here was a film about a blossoming rot undergirding American news media, and a capitalistic profit-motive that threatened to write doom across the future of serious journalism and the public it served.
Now, I will be the first to admit that serious journalism is not necessarily a term I associate with Chris Hansen, the once ubiquitous face of To Catch a Predator, Dateline NBC’s voyeuristic pedophile profiler. But there is an unexpected symmetry in his role in television news history and how he’s depicted in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime , which arrives 20 years after Hansen’s heyday and half a century after Network.
What seemed like prophecy 50 years ago is now literally a period piece; a retro reverie of one of the many inflection points at the turn of the 21st century when news programs and networks that postured to be the gatekeepers of public discourse increasingly veered toward the salacious and bawdy, the lurid and lascivious. Even in this context, Hansen is an oddity, a self-aggrandizing rising star at NBC whose milieu doesn’t seem so far removed from the National Inquirer tabloid muckrakers he claims to detest in the film. Yet even the NBC News heavyweights Hansen envies in this same movie are depicted as salivating at the ratings that come with covering the trial and sure-to-be imminent execution of Saddam Hussein during the film’s 2006 setting.
Still, what once was a chilling warning about the hollowness of ratings-fixated news programs now plays like a quaint, even cozy relic; a throwback to when exploitative sleaze was at least contained to, ahem, primetime television instead of around the clock Facebook or Twitter algorithm feeds. Robert Pattinson’s Hansen isn’t the idol of his age, but our glorious paterfamilias—an ancestral benefactor who passed down a world of infotainment that ostensibly is doing a public service. He is, after all, unmasking likely (and in many instances later convicted) child predators. Yet the cloudiness of the motivations that drive him to make To Catch a Predator a hit on TV, or simply his drive to have a hit on TV, poisons his crusade into something obscene. Even so, it’s never not watchable, which indeed appears to be the point.
One might be forgiven, then, for wondering if on some level the real Hansen is delighted to have an honest-to-Gotham Batman play him in a film. The Batman in question is certainly having a ball, with Pattinson getting the big heroic camera dolly closeups that mid-2000s candid camera rigs could never provide. The movie’s To Catch a Predator host practically purrs, “I’m Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC” when he confronts the first predator of the film, with the camera pushing into his face like he just ordered a shaken, and not stirred, martini. This Hansen knows, like the audience 20 years ago did, that we’re not here to watch a predator be apprehended, but a monster be humiliated, groveling to keep this interview from running on national television. Hansen nor the weight of his righteous pose can be bargained with, however, and Pattinson plays him as a guy convinced he is delivering a big goddamn Hollywood movie quote that will one day be cut into a trailer. (If true, mission finally accomplished, Chris.)
But the brilliance of Pattinson’s performance is how otherwise vacant and devoid of humanity it is. At one point in the picture, the character boasts he is not an actor; he’s a journalist. And yet, never once does this man seem genuine or capable of stopping what is obviously performative play-pretend. When left alone in his hotel room, Pattinson’s Hansen still puts on a hell of a show for his mirror, spitting out his mouthwash with the vigor and indignation of Atticus Finch.
In a year full of weirdo, oddball performances by Pattinson, this Hansen might be the oddest and weirdest. He is a guy who is by every definition doing a good deed—getting probable pedophiles off the streets, or at least on law enforcement’s radar—but the eerie uncanny valley he lives in, out of reach of man or beast, not to mention his estranged wife (a cameoing Anna Faris), makes him an enigma. Despite traditional matinee good looks, Pattinson seems to be on a Nicolas Cage-like trajectory of making big, idiosyncratic choices in terms of both roles and the counterintuitive ways he inhabits them. In the case of Hansen, the characterization is akin to a reptile or pod person doing an approximation of what he read heroic humans behave like. It’s all an abstraction.
This is both Primetime’s greatest strength, as well as a kind of ceiling that caps how far the film can really go with its nihilism. When your central character is ultimately an empty vessel of self-aggrandizement, any insights into his inevitable fall will also be somewhat hollow. Oppenheim, a documentarian by training prior to his first narrative film, attempts to circumvent that limitation by building out supporting characters with some semblance of a character arc or self-realization that is impossible for this Hansen. Thus enters Merritt Wever as Hansen’s long-suffering producer Andie Bender and Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plumb, aka Decoy Dan!
Both are well performed, although Gisondo’s young, struggling actor who agrees at the age of 24 to play 13-year-old boys is the only personality in the film offering some counterweight to the hellish darkness. Poor Dan is a musical theater kid who is introduced literally singing “Seasons of Love” from Rent (another ‘90s and early 2000s staple) during his audition. He’s completely unprepared for the “role” he is going up for—and how during his first day on the show’s production, a predator takes off his pants right in front of him with a canister of whipped cream in hand.
Gisondo, who plays Jimmy Olsen in the new Superman movies, provides a flicker of innocence, sure, but he is also a barometer that allows any viewer with some kind of conscience to measure the cynicism of everything around poor Dan, including the film. Wever is excellent as a ceaselessly fatigued Andie, but the producer proves only a few clicks less vampiric than Pattinson’s Hansen, and is depicted as literally choosing the poisoned circus of To Catch a Predator’s production at every opportunity. All the other lackies lack any awareness at all as they claim their show to be righteous activism, even as they gleefully chase “whales” and the most sensationalistic of grotesque marks. How else are they going to compete against Lost at 9pm on Wednesdays?!
The film is an obvious time capsule of the period where everything was becoming so transactional that journalists and their subjects alike blurred the lines between serious professionals and reality TV carnival barkers. Now the carnival is everywhere, from the social media sphere filled with wannabe Chris Hansens and QAnon conspiracy theorists, to the most obnoxious reality TV star of them all in the White House. None of it is particularly shocking anymore; we’ve been denoting this downward descent for 50 years. But you can’t look away, which as Oppenheim so coolly observes, became the entire metric of success when Chris Hansen went primetime. So… success?
Primetime opens in theaters on Sept. 25.
A24’s Crystal Lake Trailer Promises to Solve the Biggest Friday the 13th Mystery
For the most part, the latest trailer for the Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake tells us what we already knew. Set in 1971, the series stars Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, a few years after her son Jason drowned to death at Camp Crystal Lake, but a few years before she started killing counselors who tried to reopen the camp in 1980. Along the way, we get looks at important characters, such as Nick Cordileone as local cook Crazy Ralph and William Catlett as Levon Brooks, the beleaguered town sheriff.
But the real interesting part of the trailer comes with the reveal of the plot. Turns out, Pamela does not leave Crystal Lake because she hasn’t stopped looking for her son. She believes that he’s still alive—somewhere, somehow. Anyone who has seen a Friday the 13th movie knows that Pamela’s right. But Crystal Lake might finally show us how right she was.
Friday the 13th has never been a series invested in the idea of continuity. The first movie came into existence because producer and director Sean S. Cunningham wanted to copy the success of 1978’s Halloween, telling a cheap slasher story built around a holiday. Writer Victor Miller came up with a whodunnit story, making people think that Jason had come back to the dead, only to reveal that the kills were done by his mother Pamela, played by Betsy Palmer.
However, when special effects artist Tom Savini pitched the idea of doing a shock ending like the one in Carrie, the makers of Friday the 13th added a sting, in which Jason emerges from the water to attack final girl Alice. Then, after the first movie made a ton of money, Friday the 13th Part II hit theaters in 1981, which begins with Jason, alive and well, killing Alice in revenge for her killing his mom… who was getting revenge on Camp Crystal Lake for killing Jason… who actually isn’t dead.
Obviously, that timeline doesn’t make sense. But nothing in Friday the 13th makes sense, and that’s part of the fun.
Over the 12 movies that make up the franchise, we’re given multiple images of what the young Jason looked like, we’ve seen him as a regular human and a zombie and some sort of demon worm. We’re told that he hates water, that he can move quickly through water. And we’ve seen him die time and again, even before he gets fully resurrected in Part VI.
However, the Crystal Lake trailer suggests that the events of the first few films actually do make a certain amount of sense. Cardellini plays Pamela not just as a woman driven mad by her son’s death, but as a woman who has been scorned by the town, who has always been an outsider, and who would do anything for her son. Moreover, she plays her as a woman who believes that her son still lives, no matter what she’s been told. So if both of those things are true… and if the son reappears and starts killing off towns people, townspeople who were never kind to Pamela in the first place? Well, it’s not hard to imagine her taking credit for things that Jason actually did.
While all that’s plausible, one hopes that Crystal Lake has more than continuity fixes in mind. Although the show goes straight to streaming on Peacock, it does come from A24, a distributor known for rich, psychological—okay, we’ll say it—elevated horror. And with an actress as accomplished as Cardellini in the lead (and given several episodes to develop her character, instead of the minutes of screen time allotted to Palmer) we’re likely to get a complex character study instead of just shocking scares.
Will Crystal Lake be able to deliver a coherent story and a full character portrait? We don’t know, but as long as we get some nasty kills in the process, we’ll be happy. This is Friday the 13th after all.
Crystal Lake streams on Peacock on October 15, 2026.
Zack Snyder Admits His DC Approach May Have Been a Mistake
Fans of superhero cinema can sometimes have quite strong feelings about Zack Snyder’s DC movies. While some argue that the tone he chose for projects like Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was too dark, brooding, or humorless for their DC comic book characters, others have often raced enthusiastically to his defense, noting his unique visual style and focus on building mythology over delivering crowd-pleasing moments.
Years after Snyder’s relationship with Warner Bros. grew strained and he left the cinematic universe behind, James Gunn and Peter Safran became co-CEOs of DC Studios and took over its creative direction. Snyder has supported longtime friend and collaborator Gunn in his endeavors, but remains thoughtful about his time working with the studio in the past.
During the making of his new indie film, The Last Photograph, Snyder spoke with THR about the changes in responsibility and working methods between his current experience and his days directing big-budget fare, telling the outlet that the stakes are lower and that “You’re not trying to sell the audience something. You’re just giving them an experience and that experience doesn’t necessarily have to end with a sequel. I’m not trying to get them to go to another movie or buy a toy. The why of the movie is completely different.”
The director also reflected on the differences between his own DC movies and Marvel’s output, suggesting that his vision may have been a mistake and less fun. “[Marvel is] like an amusement park ride, right? The ups, the drops, the kind of cruising part, and then another drop. At the end, you’re like, ‘Wow, that was crazy, that was awesome.’ I had no interest in that. And you know, maybe that was a mistake. But I don’t think that way. I can’t do that. I’d rather just kind of talk about the mythology of them. And maybe that’s not as fun.”
Snyder still has a passionate fan base that will regularly show up on social media to champion his return to the DC universe. Though the filmmaker seems uninterested, he has used his own platform to post behind-the-scenes images from his DC days, including concept art for a Green Lantern appearance and a shot of Joe Manganiello’s Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke, who was once set to be the villain in Ben Affleck’s canceled solo Batman movie.
Snyder has also previously given fans a glimpse of an unused, brutal Wonder Woman concept photo, showing her posing with decapitated heads as trophies from one war victory.
They’re Saying Digger Isn’t a Musical and That’s a Shame
A portion of the internet has been having a good time recently, imagining it has uncovered a secret musical behind the curious trailers for Tom Cruise’s upcoming black comedy, Digger. One trailer even showed the 64-year-old actor atop a rotating platform, while other background characters appeared open-mouthed, as though mid-song. Clearly a musical, the internet proposed!
Well, no. Apparently not. Variety, citing sources “familiar with the production,” says Digger is not actually a movie musical. Time to pack up the conspiracy and go home, eh? Find something else to read far too much into.
Still, I reckon it’s a shame that Digger hasn’t turned out to be a musical. We simply don’t get enough of them these days. Aside from Disney’s family films, trotting out the kind of toe-tapping tunes that will haunt your days until one of your kids’ toys, low on batteries, slowly garbles “whaaaat caaan I saaaay except yoooou’re welcooooooome!” for a 9,000th and hopefully final time, Hollywood movie musicals are pretty thin on the ground.
When they do pop up, they tend to be stage-to-screen projects and do quite well at the box office. I don’t need to tell you that the recent Wicked films raked in a ton of money. But it’s much rarer to see an original movie musical take off at the multiplex. In fact, only a few come to mind from the last 10 years, such as La La Land and The Greatest Showman, and perhaps 2023’s Wonka, which was still based on a known IP and also one of a handful of films that hid their musical components in pre-release marketing, lest people shy away from buying tickets.
Why go to such lengths when audiences have historically loved movie musicals? And where are the other big, original live-action musicals of the 2020s? Did the tragic fate of DC’s rather more jukebox affair, Joker: Folie à Deux, really make that much of an impact on Hollywood’s efforts to try to be a little more ambitious about these things, targeting remakes and sure things from the stage instead?
It’s all a bit baffling because so many people love films where the stars break into song and dance at the drop of a hat. Movie musicals became a Hollywood staple for that very reason, and audiences have often turned out for a decent splash of whimsy. Even smaller movies that arguably flopped on release can achieve cult status given enough time, as any Labyrinth or Phantom of the Paradise fan will tell you.
So, yes. Say what you will, it might have actually been fun to see Tom Cruise, John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemons sing and dance in Digger. The quasi-mysterious plot, which seems to be that a very wealthy man has done bad things and wants everyone to think he’s humanity’s savior rather than their destroyer, could have potentially been a lot wilder with some good tunes. And director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who has gained a reputation as a filmmaker who loves exploring the human condition, might have pulled off quite the coup by getting Cruise back into the musical game after he dipped his toe in the 2012 flop Rock of Ages.
Yet, whether Digger turns out to be a disappointment or not, there’ll always be the opportunity to adapt it into a stage musical later on. Maybe then we’ll see what was going on in the collective minds of the internet’s sleuths in the month before the film’s release.
Digger will be released on October 2.
The Other Lantern Corps That Deserve Their Own Show
This article contains light spoilers for the first several episodes ofLanterns.
DC’s Green Lantern mantle has been shared and passed down across generations. With each new Lantern, whether it be the original Golden Age of comics character Alan Scott, the most recognizable Lantern Corps member Hal Jordan, or the modern beloved Green Lantern, John Stewart, the Lantern mythos has never been deeper. Now HBO’s Lanterns has propelled the complex rainbow that is the Lantern Corps into the mainstream, leaving the Green Lantern with a larger audience than ever before.
While Lanterns watchers have only seen the traditional Green Lantern Corps in action so far, the show will almost inevitably introduce some of the other Lantern Corps down the line. There are plenty in the comics, including a special cult following the newly introduced Sinestro currently rotting in Hal Jordan’s prison. But if there is one organization that most deserves to make the jump to the new DCU, it is the Red Lantern Corps.
For those who are unfamiliar with the crimson corps, they are a group of Lanterns powered by anger and emotional volatility, whose ruby hue represents unthinking, reactionary violence, and they tie right back to the beginning of it all: the Manhunters.
As has slowly been unspooled in the series, the Manhunters are enigmatic robots of immense power with minimal explanation (yet). But on the page we already know that Manhunters were robotic peacekeepers created by the celestial Guardians of the Universe to patrol the galaxy. Unfortunately, they committed a number of villainous acts, including massacring the inhabitants of Space Sector 666, which marked one of the bloodiest moments in DC comic history. They left a few survivors in the carnage, though, and one was named Atros, who is so consumed with rage that he becomes the first Red Lantern and kills several other remaining survivors in the process. Afterward he renames himself Atrocitus.
Manhunters have already been mentioned in the Lanterns television series, so there is a clear way to introduce the Red Lanterns into the rest of the show. Additionally, although it might seem cartoonish to have a monstrous scarlet alien lead a group of other monstrous aliens, all of whom collectively represent uninhibited anger, the Red Lanterns are deeply compelling antagonists in the DC Universe.
Atrocitus is born out of the Guardians’ hubristic desire to control the universe. The genocide of Sector 666’s residents was the result of a glitch in the Manhunters that made each of them believe they needed to exterminate all life in the area. The inhuman look of the sector’s members, in addition to the number which humans associate with evil, is not the reason they are evil. The Red Lanterns are created by instances as out of their control as their appearance and the color of their skin—a metaphor that should speak for itself.
The fact that they are born out of inadvertent glitches and chance makes the Red Lanterns that much more volatile, and therefore narratively intriguing. Genre stories and science fiction often rely on deterministic tropes and bio-essentialism; characters with inhuman aesthetics (aliens, animals, creatures less humanoid than a Vulcan) are the “bad guys” and often have a long history of being the bad guys, while the human (or humanoid, in some cases) characters are the “good guys” (hello there again, Spock). At a surface level, this seems true for the Red Lanterns vs. the Green Lanterns, but the Red Lanterns were thrust into their antagonistic role by the characters who are supposed to be good.
After learning the backstory of the Red Lantern Corps, it is difficult to describe them as pure evil. They do commit acts of extreme violence that must be stopped by Hal Jordan and several other Lanterns in the comics, but a majority of its members are victims of injustice. For example, the character of Bleez was a princess on her home planet before being kidnapped, tortured, and sexually assaulted by members of the Sinestro Corps. After escaping, her insatiable rage over the way the Sinestro Corps treated her led to her induction into the Red Lantern Corps. She would later attack a group of Green Lanterns who were transporting Sinestro to another planet for execution.
Other Red Lanterns have similarly tragic backstories. Dex-Starr was an ordinary house-cat who watched his owner get murdered in a break-in, while the jellyfish-esque Ratchet was mutilated for resisting his species’ custom of not making social connections.
It is easy to find sympathy for many of the Red Lanterns, despite their rampage across the galaxy in various storylines. Popular superheroes, including Supergirl, Guy Gardner, and even Jordan himself have succumbed to the temptation of a Red Lantern Ring. DC Studios co-chief James Gunn’s interest in adding nuance and complexity to the live-action DCU, especially with what is happening in Lanterns, synergizes well with the Red Lantern Corps. If fans of Lanterns could ever be so lucky as to get another show focused on one of the Corps other than the Green Lanterns, it should absolutely be their crimson counterparts.
Lanterns Rewrites the Worst Moment in Green Lantern History
This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 5
From episode one, Lanterns has made it clear that Hal Jordan and John Stewart don’t trust each other. But we really thought that when the chips are down and things get bad, these guys would pull it together and figure out how to work with one another. After all, these guys are heroes, right? Yet, when Antaan finally gets confirmation that Zoe is the Manhunter he has been looking for and starts their attack, and as Zoe and her husband Will Macon launch their counter-offensive and tear Rushville apart, Hal and John spend just as much time sniping at each other as they do fighting the bad guys.
Episode five, “Lights Out,” is the lowest point for this version of Hal and John, a problem made worse by the fact that the episode is a marked step down in quality for a season that has been great otherwise. But it is not, in fact, the worst point in either character’s life, at least not when you take into account the comics. We talked a bit about John’s worst moment a few weeks back, when his arrogance led to the destruction of the planet Xanshi. But “Lights Out” isn’t the worst moment for Hal Jordan, not while Emerald Twilight still exists.
Lights Out for Hal Jordan
Go to any comic book forum supporting or decrying the treatment of Hal Jordan in Lanterns, and you’ll quickly find a series of well-documented offenses against Earth’s most famous Green Lantern. Like all GL’s, Hal is a cop, and the beloved Green Lantern/Green Arrow series of the 1970s never missed an opportunity to call out his bootlicking. Throughout that period, and even before, Hal would regularly get bummed out about the whole superheroing thing and would wander around the United States, trying his hand at various jobs such as truck driving, insurance selling, and even toy selling. And, yes, most infamously, he dated Arisia, who was 13 when he met her and then used her ring to give herself an adult body.
Yet, Hal Jordan’s blackest night came with the Emerald Twilight storyline from 1994, written by Ron Marz and penciled by Darryl Banks. Emerald Twilight spins out of the Reign of the Superman storyline happening in Superman comics, in which a cyborg who looks like Superman attacks the Earth, destroying Hal’s hometown of Coast City, killing everyone he loves, including on and off romantic interest Carol Ferris and his best friend Tom Kalmaku.
As a Green Lantern, Hal has the most powerful weapon in the universe on his finger. And he has more willpower than perhaps any other GL, especially when stricken with grief. So he initially uses his ring to rebuild the city. But when one ring proves insufficient to recreate a major metropolis full of people, Hal entreats the Guardians to either increase his power or send other GLs to help. The Guardians, as made abundantly clear in Lanterns, are capricious, untrustworthy jerks, so they refuse.
So Hal snaps. Most of Green Lantern #48–50 follows Hal as he attacks his fellow members of the Green Lantern Corps, stealing their rings and sapping the power from the Guardians. Hal even goes so far as to murder Kilowog, his friend and a respected Corps member. In a final desperate move, the Guardians resurrect Sinestro, the renegade Green Lantern, whose soul had been held in the Central Power Battery, the source of all GL power, since his execution years ago. But even he cannot stop Hal, who snaps Sinestro’s neck and, knowing that he’s gone too far, enters the Central Power Battery to claim as much power as he can.
The Rise of Parallax
When Hal emerges, he’s no longer Green Lantern. He now calls himself Parallax, and spends the next several years terrorizing the DC Universe and, for some readers, finally being interesting. It’s not just that Hal sometimes suffered from the same flat personality that many Silver Age heroes had; it’s also that the attempt to rewrite him as a more flawed, Marvel-style character in the ’70s sent him down a flawed path that could only end in villainy. Those readers found Hal’s replacement, Kyle Rayner—who becomes the last Green Lantern after the surviving Guardian Ganthet gathers enough power to make one more ring—far more compelling. Furthermore, Parallax was an interesting villain because he thought he was doing the right thing, constantly trying to remake reality to fit his vision of a better world, even if his former friends opposed him.
While those are all fine arguments for keeping Hal a villain, there’s one, undeniable point: Emerald Twilight was a terrible story. It stemmed from DC’s attempt to repeat the success of the Death of Superman storyline by ending an established hero and replacing them with a new, hip version. Batman gets his back broken in Knightfall and gets replaced by Jean-Paul Valley, the cool Batman with razor hands. Wonder Woman loses her title to Artemis, the angry hunter. Green Arrow blows up and gets replaced by his long-lost son Connor who… is actually a pretty cool guy, far more even-keeled than his dad.
Whatever the merits for or against forcing a legacy, Emerald Twilight not only rushed Hal’s heel turn, it also required a massive suspension of disbelief. Hal had proven himself an exemplary GL, for sure. But nothing in previous stories suggested that he could best legions of Lanterns working together, especially not elites like Kilowog. Moreover, Sinestro has always been a master manipulator and trickster. Why would he try to engage in hand-to-hand combat with Hal, which could only end with him getting his butt kicked?
A New Emerald Dawn
Given how shoddy the Emerald Twilight storyline was, it’s easy to forgive the retcons that Geoff Johns put in place when he made Hal Jordan the main Green Lantern again in the 2000s. In Green Lantern: Rebirth (2004-2005), Johns reveals that Sinestro had long been manipulating Hal from inside the Central Power Battery. Moreover, Sinestro discovered that the Yellow Impurity that prevented Green Lantern rings from working on anything yellow (the arbitrary Kryptonite-esque weakness assigned to Green Lanterns in the Silver Age) came from the fact that the Guardians had trapped an evil symbiote called Parallax inside of the battery.
The retcon let Hal off the hook, making him the victim of an evil entity that possessed him, not a hero who made bad decisions. While the change hurt fans of Kyle Rayner, who has never again been prioritized by DC Comics as he was in the ’90s, and while it did return Hal to his more obviously heroic (and, for some, less interesting) status, it did make for a more consistent story.
And so, no matter how bleak things might look for Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart, Emerald Night reminds us that it could be so much worse, in terms of character development and storytelling.
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9pm EST on HBO and HBO Max.
Lanterns Episode 5 Review: Emerald Twilight
This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 5
At the climax of “Lights Out,” the fifth episode of Lanterns, every conflict the show has been building to boils over. Macon activates his men and his defenses to protect the Manhunter Zoe from not just the Green Lanterns, but also Antaan and his people, who have arrived to take her in. Zoe also begins destroying Rushville via the red light lasers she used to fake her death in the previous episode, decimating the town she once called her home.
And what are our heroes doing while all this devastation occurs? They’re punching each other in the face over who gets to wear the ring. Written by Justin Britt-Gibson and directed by Geeta Vasant Patel, “Lights Out” represents both the culmination of Lanterns‘s main plots and a betrayal of everything it set up. Even its attempts at action and complex themes feel mishandled, resulting in not just the worst episode of an otherwise excellent show, but a worrying sign as Lanterns moves into its back half.
“Lights Out” picks up right where the previous episode ended, with Zoe confirmed as the Manhunter and Hal crashing the car with John inside, leaving his trainee trapped while he goes to deal with the threat. Hal contacts Antaan and arranges for them to come get Zoe, hoping that they will fight it out with Macon’s men, providing cover that would allow him to sneak away with the Manhunter. Then, he can deliver the Manhunter to the Guardians, thus securing his position as Earth’s true Green Lantern.
Of course, it doesn’t go as planned, for a variety of reasons. Hal apparently left John to burn alive in the wrecked car and never came back to check on him, giving space for Zoe to arrive and rebuild his charred body using Manhunter tech. Hal also neglects to recharge his ring before rendezvousing with Antaan, so when Antaan and his men start exploding themselves and when the Macon satellites start destroying Rushville from the sky, Hal’s ring has barely enough power to contain some of the blasts. Worse, when Hal does steal away to charge his ring, he gets interrupted by John, who has arrived to take what belongs to him.
Yes, that’s right: while scores of innocent people die in a conflict that John and Hal exacerbated, our heroes duke it out in a hotel room.
Before we get too angry at what has been heretofore a great TV show, let’s get a little context. “Lights Out” is just the fifth part of an eight-episode series, the right time for a surprising fall from grace. Moreover, Lanterns has never been more devoted to the True Detective model, putting its big action set-piece midway through the season instead of at the end. In the first season of that show, the flashy oner in episode four represented the break in the past that required Marty and Rust to reconvene in the present. The fact that Hal is dead in 2026 complicates Lanterns‘s ability to perfectly follow in the footsteps of its HBO big brother, but we can probably guess that there’s more to Hal and John’s actions than what we see on screen.
Finally, there is the fact that John ultimately uses the defeated Hal to draw Zoe into the open so he can kill her with a sniper shot. And in his final exchange with the Guardian, when he gives up the ring he spent his whole life chasing, John admits that he had been on the wrong path, which suggests that his heroic turn actually begins now.
But is that consistent with what this show has been building thus far? For all his arrogance, Hal has been shown to be constantly competent. And while his gut was bound to be wrong eventually, forgetting to charge his ring or letting John burn to death feels like the actions of a different person, not intuition gone wrong. Likewise, John may be disillusioned by his parents’ expectations and drawn to Zoe’s frankness, but he’s repeatedly shown attention and care to regular people, as when he taught Noah how to throw a football. He wouldn’t pause his quest for the ring for a moment to deal with the devastation around him?
Beyond poor character choices, “Lights Out” betrays two other things that have been impressive thus far. We’ve been able to forgive the show’s decision to keep superhero shenanigans on the periphery and let the character-driven mystery play out. But when you have lasers blasting from the sky and aliens blowing up, a path has been opened to fanciful Green Lantern constructs. We do get to see Hal make bubbles and shields and cyclones to deal with the chaos, but he has to rely on infrared goggles to get through a black cloud and he uses fists to deal with most of Macon’s men. If ever there was a time for Lanterns to be a superhero show, this was it.
Worst of all, “Lights Out” makes thematic decisions that sour much of what came before. While Zoe rebuilds John, the two have a conversation about race—a reasonable topic of conversation between the only two people of color in Rushville, even if aliens weren’t attacking. Zoe explains that she chose her current skin because it allowed her to approach the town as an outsider and assess the target’s power structures and customs. What does she do with that information? Sure, she forms attachments and helps people, but she ultimately blows up the town with her sky lasers while drawing the attention of suicide bombers, who are also aliens who look like humans.
Given the way the show has used Macon to draw explicit parallels between the actions of Manhunters in the fiction of the show and real-world acts of genocide, how are we supposed to read the actions of Zoe and Antaan? It sure seems like the show is saying that it’s dangerous to let outsiders into your community, especially those with different skin colors or different ideologies, because they’ll just explode your idyllic home.
Surely, that can’t be the theme Lanterns intends. And the show still has three more episodes of story to tell, plenty of space to complicate what we see. But given the way “Lights Out” bobbles its central characters and its superhero conceit, one fears that the bright light that Lanterns cast in its first episodes is starting to dim.
Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.
Green Lantern Illuminations
To be clear, John and Hal have made major mistakes in the comics too. Hal, of course, goes crazy in the mid-’90s, kills most of the Green Lanterns, and becomes the villain Parallax. Even though most of those he killed have been resurrected and Parallax has been ret-conned into a parasite that possessed him, a black cloud still hangs over Hal.
In the 1988–89 miniseries Cosmic Odyssey by Jim Starlin and Mike Mignola, John decides to ignore Martian Manhunter’s warnings while dealing with a threat to the planet Xanshi. When John gets depowered (because of the color yellow, but we can’t get into that now), Xanshi explodes, haunting John forever.
For all that Hal and John get wrong in this episode, they are right about one thing: you can’t trust the Guardians. Time and again in the comics, the Guardians prove to be manipulative, uncaring, and given to hubris. Also, they accidentally introduced the concept of evil into the universe, but that’s another story.
The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked
Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.
With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.
10. BlackKklansman (2018)
BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.
Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty.
9. He Got Game (1998)
Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.
In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.
8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)
Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.
Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.
7. Inside Man (2006)
Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.
Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.
6. School Daze (1988)
Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.
School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.
5. Jungle Fever (1991)
On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).
However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.
4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)
Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.
Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.
3. 25th Hour (2002)
In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.
Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.
2. Malcolm X (1992)
Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.
Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.
1. Do the Right Thing (1989)
Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.
Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.
The Movie That Best Captured That Post-9/11 Feeling
This article originally appeared as part of the Den of Geek “Absolute Cinema” newsletter. Find out how to subscribe here.
Twenty-five years is obviously a long time. In a quarter-century, social media services flourished, smartphones multiplied, and entire generations were born and came of age. That distance is probably why today’s sobering 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks has been met with a curious new trend on TikTok, X, and various other apps: younger users apprehensive or baffled by how solemnly folks become around this date. Others still incredulously opine that this seismic event had no serious impact on the culture, cinematic or otherwise.
The latter point seems odd in a world where superhero movies still define pop culture in ways great and small. Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man famously released only eight months after that terrible Tuesday morning. And in a hastily filmed reshoot set on the Queensboro bridge, the movie added a band of New Yorkers exclaiming, “When you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!” That film would kickstart decades of wish fulfillment where, as Chad Kroeger once crooned, “they say that a hero could save us!” Some of these genre pictures did it with greater sophistication, such as Raimi’s more authentically optimistic Spider-Man 2, or via creeping despair, a la Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, but the cultural memory still undergirds our escapism to this day, just as it did all those dour 2000s and early 2010s thrillers, be it Kathryn Bigelow war movies or the three JBs of spy entertainment: Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne, and (Daniel Craig’s) James Bond.
So yes, 9/11 is in the bones of our pop culture, if ever increasingly in the form of a self-interrogation about the legacy of that era and the wars that followed. But whether it’s Claire Danes’ Homeland or Nolan’s Batman three films deep into moral relativism, all of that media is made with the assumption that audiences remember the psychic scars that came after the towers fell. But what about those who were too young to watch the sight live on television? What of those not yet born?
If you really need to learn what the mood of the country was in the direct aftermath, or want a reminder, the cinematic time capsule of the era remains Spike Lee’s haunting masterpiece, 25th Hour.
Not unlike Raimi’s original Spidey flick, 25th Hour was originally divorced from anything to do with terrorist attacks. It was a screen-transfer of David Benioff’s career-making novel, which Benioff adapted himself in the screenplay. A decade before co-creating Game of Thrones, Benioff was a hotshot scribe fresh out of Trinity College, which he attended following a stint at Dartmouth and a childhood in Manhattan. He understood the privileged side of New York, and its deep cracks like the one he created for Monty Brogan (Edward Norton in the film), an Outer-Borough kid whose intelligence got him into the private schools and on the Ivy League path, but whose greed and failings veered him toward dealing drugs in those ivory halls… and finally facing a shattering seven-year prison sentence. The film picks up on his final 24 hours with childhood friends, family, and his girlfriend Naturelle Riviera (Rosario Dawson) before he must report to prison.
The movie is on the surface a drama, as well as a bit of a crime thriller, as Monty comes to terms with why his life turned out this way, and who among his inner circle really loves him. It also was in its heart a New York story, so much so that the venerated Spike Lee first circled the project specifically because of a four-letter soliloquy of bigotry, self-loathing, and pain that Monty gives to himself while staring in a mirror. It’s a devastating speech that Benioff considered cutting in his script, but which becomes one of the centerpieces of Lee’s film.
The other is the long deep shadow of a city in catastrophic mourning.
While the film was still in pre-production in September 2001, the marrow of the project seems transformed by the agony felt by Lee, arguably the defining chronicler of life in late 20th and early 21st century New York. Every one of Lee’s pictures is informed by NYC, even the ones set in 1940s Italy or the South Side of Chicago. As a character in 25th Hour says, “You’re a New Yorker, that will never change. You got New York in your bones. Spend the rest of your life out West, but you’re still a New Yorker.”
And when Lee rolled film on the first day of production for 25th Hour in early 2002, New York was hurting in a profound, unutterable way. As was America. That grief is still set in amber so thick on the film that you can see the tear stains in its celluloid.
During the movie’s opening credits, composer Terence Blanchard’s magisterial and sweeping score weeps, as do the snow flakes captured like ghostly teardrops on the floodlights above Ground Zero. As a New Yorker myself these days, the spectral sight of the 9/11 floodlights in Lower Manhattan are still an annual occurrence, but now as a tribute and even a kind of reassuring memory of the past. In 2002, when 25th Hour was filmed and released, they were a nightly wake, an anguished scream of loss; a sense of shared identity and community shattered, and dead still not buried or identified.
Their inclusion in the film’s opening credits sets a doleful, even apocalyptic tone that the rest of the film follows to its bitter end. It is indeed the End Times for a privileged and ostensibly “nice” guy like Monty—at least as far as exploitative drug dealers profiting on the misery of others can be. He is about to go to Otisville with a pretty face and a lifetime of never being in a real fight. But the film becomes about more than just Monty’s doom; it is of a city that will never be able to go back to the world and illusions it once took for granted.
This is captured in ways both subtle and monumental. The latter is most unforgettably crystallized when two characters, one a hotshot Wall Streeter, look out from his Tribeca apartment onto the gaping wound of Ground Zero, still in ruins and covered in debris. The actors in the scene, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper, speak of their own personal miseries and regrets, but it is dwarfed by the cosmic one out the window and swallowing Lee’s frame.
In the quieter sequences, though, the film more demurely documents that time when every NYC stoop and office was decorated with the American flag, from the homes of the Upper West Side to the financial bullpens on Wall Street, and most especially in the bar owned by Monty’s working class father James (Brian Cox). James was a firefighter once and he built a watering hole for firefighters. This was always in the script, but the wall decorations of folded American flags and photos of first responders who died in the towers, and the memorials left in their memory, feels too raw to be scripted.
It’s also in that bar Monty gives his now famous “fuck you” soliloquy, which was obviously modeled as a successor to the most famous scene of communal grievances and bigotries in Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). In that earlier film, every supporting character and passerby in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood is filled with simmering rage and anger at New York’s eternal racial tensions and rigged hierarchies. But in a post-9/11 25th Hour, it becomes something different. Monty’s epic pity party is filled with racist loathing and apparent disdain for neighbors of every complexion, religion, or creed. But as he seethes, the imagery in Lee’s montage shifts.
“Fuck this whole city and everyone in it,” he hisses. “From the rowhouses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue, from the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in SoHo, from the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park Slope, to the split levels in Staten Island. Let an earthquake crumble it, let the fires rage, let it burn to fucking ash, and let the waters rise and submerge this whole rat-infested place.”
As Monty raves, we see many and all the neighborhoods he curses, but we also see the people. And unlike Do the Right Thing, we are not witnessing the Americans who make victims of one another through their prejudices and systems, but the joy Monty has lost; the innocence of smiling children among the populations Monty dismisses, and the kindness of strangers who dot Harlem and Times Square alike. What appeared in the book as a scene of nihilism becomes a cathartic screed of lamentation. This is confirmed when many of the same extras we see during this montage are all there smiling to say goodbye to Monty at the end of the film as his father drives him to prison upstate.
The city he loved and now claims to hate is still there, and the New Yorkers will persevere, but Monty like so many Americans in those frightful days can only see its beauty after it seems stolen, forcefully ripped away from your desperate grasp. No film, piece of media, or time capsule might better capture that cataclysmic despair, or the dawning appreciation for one’s community, even while staring down the hell of the next seven years. That and longer, too, if you look to the future for America that followed.
DC’s Gorilla Grodd Set Leaks Reveal Incredibly Promising Details
Not all that long ago, few expected a superhero movie to actually care about the comics. We just had to accept that the Batman of the movies would blow up a chemical factory, the Red Skull would be an Italian guy who got facial reconstruction surgery as soon as possible, and that the X-Men would scoff at the very idea of yellow spandex. Of course that really began to change with the incredible suit that Tobey Maguire sported in his Spider-Man movies, and by the time that the Avengers wearing outrageous costumes on multiversal adventures, it seemed as if comic books had finally hit the mainstream.
But some recently leaked set photos from the upcoming HBO seriesThe People vs. Gorilla Grodd have shown just how far superhero adaptations had yet to go… and what they’ve finally achieved with this series about Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) investigating a super simian. In these photos, we clearly see someone on set in an old-school gorilla costume as Grodd graduates college (complete with cap and gown) or has a romantic outing (dressed in a fancy tux). With those photos, we have reason to believe that the perfect superhero adaptation has arrived.
The People vs. Gorilla Grodd takes the form of a true crime documentary, which makes sense when you realize that the showrunners are Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda, creators of the Netflix series American Vandal. They reteam with American Vandal star Jimmy Tatro, who plays Gorilla Grodd, a classic nemesis of the Flash. First introduced in The Flash #106 (1959), by John Broome and Carmine Infantino, Gorilla Grodd hails from Gorilla City, an enclave of intelligent gorillas. Although most of Gorilla City’s citizens are peaceful, including the wise leader Solovar, our dear Grodd thirsts for power and uses his psychic abilities to attempt to conquer the world.
As the title The People vs. Gorilla Grodd indicates, Grodd will be just as ambitious in the DCU. However, the set photos suggest that there’s more to Grodd than just a maniacal lust for power. The show will focus on a report put together by Olsen and other reporters at the Daily Planet from Superman, including Steve Lombard (Beck Bennett), Cat Grant (Mikaela Hoover), and editor Perry White (Wendell Pierce). Together, they’ll uncover the backstory of the would-be world-ruler, which apparently includes time at a university and a potential romance.
Which is, of course, great. Ever since James Gunn and Peter Safran took over as heads of DC Studios, Warner Bros. superhero projects have begun embracing the weirdest part of comic books, while still telling moving, character-driven stories. Peacemaker is indeed about a guy with a shiny helmet who fends off alien invasions and visits a Nazi alternate reality, but it’s also about a man recovering from toxic masculinity to understand his feelings. Superman addressed black site prisons, and Supergirl dealt with human trafficking, but both did so through weird concepts like pocket dimensions and intergalactic bounty hunters. Even Lanterns, which initially seemed like a grounded buddy cop mystery, has shape-shifting androids and all-powerful alien overseers.
Yet it’s still exciting and refreshing to see The People vs. Gorilla Grodd so openly embrace super-simians. As weird and goofy as the concept of a monkey or ape with superpowers is, it’s also baked into superhero comics, especially those at DC. Sure, Marvel has characters like the Fantastic Four villain the Red Ghost, who commands an army of Super Apes, and Gorilla-Man, but its DC who really perfected the trope. In addition to Gorilla Grodd and Solovar, the company has featured Beppo the Supermonkey from Krypton, Congorilla (a pulp adventurer has his mind placed inside that of a golden ape), Titano (think King Kong, if the Eighth Wonder of the World also shot kryptonite lasers from his eyes), the Francophone revolutionary Monsieur Mallah, and the Ultra-Humanite, DC’s first supervillain.
Given how integral to the DC Universe these primates are, it’s no surprise that some have shown up in previous comic book adaptations. Most famously, Gorilla Grodd appeared in several CW shows, and even went back in time to try to kill a young Barak Obama in Legends of Tomorrow.
But those were shoddy CGI recreations. As we see in the new set photos, The People vs. Gorilla Grodd is going practical, at least as a base (surely, the on-set suit will be enhanced with CGI effects, not unlike the Thing suit that Ebon Moss-Bachrach wore while shooting Fantastic Four: First Steps). That they’re letting a silly premise be as weird as possible and still finding places for real pathos proves that the series will take this goofy concept with complete seriousness. Which is what superhero stories fundamentally are, silly ideas taken seriously and given weight. Previous adaptations have come close, but if these photos are to be believed, then The People vs. Gorilla Grodd will be the point where superhero adaptations finally evolve.
The People vs. Gorilla Grodd is now in production.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 8 Review — Orders of Magnitude
The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4, episode 8.
Bad admirals appear throughout Star Trek, from The Original Series (“The Doomsday Machine”) and The Next Generation (“The Pegasus”) to Deep Space Nine (the “Homefront”/”Paradise Lost” two-parter). It was probably well past time for Strange New Worlds to do something similar and, as such things go, “Orders of Magnitude” is a solid entry into the canon of such installments even if its conclusion pulls its punches more than some of us (read: me) might like.
A tense episode that wrestles with some of the big philosophical questions that this franchise is best known for, “Magnitude” puts James Kirk squarely in the middle of a leadership crisis on the bridge of the ship he’ll one day command and adds some intriguing new layers to our understanding of his family. As Strange New Worlds moves toward its final season, the show is deliberately highlighting the ways that the characters we see now are growing into the people we know from The Original Series.
This hour also revisits some of the thematic issues raised by season 3’s “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail,” particularly how Kirk was irrevocably altered by the consequences of the choices he made during that episode. Though he saved the Enterprise and a planet full of innocents, his decision to destroy the Scavenger ship killed over 7,000 people. His behavior throughout this hour indicates that he isn’t—and likely never will be—over the trauma, and that experience is guiding many of his actions here. It is one of the first examples we’ve seen of Kirk’s famed insistence on beating seemingly no-win scenarios by finding an unconsidered third option that somehow allows him to succeed. Here, it involves drugging one of his superiors and bluffing that he’s about to destroy the ship, but, hey, everybody has to start somewhere!
Joe Morton is excellent in a delightfully unbalanced guest turn as Admiral Simon Reeger, a legendary Starfleet captain from the Klingon War that half the crew is immediately starstruck by, and that everyone watching at home probably immediately realized that we couldn’t exactly trust. He arrives on board while Captain Pike is off-ship, investigating a distress signal on an M-class planet below with Una, Chapel, Uhura, and Ensign A’Sha, who’s on her very first away mission. (And being predictably unpleasant about it.)
Though Pike and team are out of comms range, Reegar pulls rank and immediately commandeers the Enterprise to help him chase down a mysterious ship he claims is responsible for the infamous Vaardan Massacre, an attack on a Federation colony that led to five million casualties. This ship remains unidentified throughout the episode and is not shown onscreen. But references to a new type of cloaking device—as well as the attack’s proximity to the Romulan Star Empire, laid out in a map full of gloriously nerdy Easter eggs—certainly seem to point toward a specific culprit. Though the show obviously has to tread carefully when it comes to confirming it one way or the other, since the “official” first interaction between Starfleet and the Romulans takes place in The Original Series episode “Balance of Terror.”
Kirk falls into all of this almost by accident, having come aboard the Enterprise to see La’an after the whole unfortunate stabbing incident from a few episodes back. But since he’s the highest-ranking person remaining onboard, he becomes Reeger’s first officer, which, in case it wasn’t clear, ends up being a frankly terrible job. The two almost immediately start butting heads about almost everything, a situation that is made exponentially worse when the crew tracks the ship to Argus 2, a small non-Federation planet, which he immediately assumes is the enemy’s home base. Determined to eliminate the threat at all costs, he invokes General Order 24, which translates to “destroy the entire surface of the planet and every living thing on it”. That’s at least 5,000 inhabitants, maybe more. And it’s not even entirely clear that the ship they’re chasing has even landed on the planet at all. Reeger doesn’t care. The possibility that it might have is apparently enough.
Lots of Star Trek stories (and subsequent debates about them) revolve around Spock’s famous quote that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. True, many of those stories are also about people finding ways to flout that conventional wisdom, including this one. But the debate is worth having: if a ship that killed five million people can be destroyed by sacrificing five thousand? Whose lives are worth more in this scenario, the people living on the planet they’re about to raze, or an unnamed future group who may or may not be endangered by this deadly ship? Kirk’s position is simple: “Killing an entire planet is wrong.” But is it always? Those are precisely the kind of stories that science fiction like Star Trek is meant to explore.
By removing Pike from the equation (we all know how he would have reacted), Strange New Worlds gives Kirk a real test and a chance to step up in an intriguing new way. After all, Reegar is seen as a hero throughout Starfleet. What does it cost him to be the man who tries to say no to that? (Is this the source of his love for challenging Federation authority? Maybe.)
It’s unfortunate that “Orders of Magnitude” takes a bit of an easy way out, in the end. Sure, Kirk’s largely one-man mutiny makes for compelling TV, and allows the show to explore how his father, George Kirk, knew of Reeger’s issues, but kept them to himself for the good of Starfleet. (There’s always something moving about a young man realizing that most of his unkind assumptions about his father were probably wrong.)
But the episode tips Reeger a bit too far into mad king territory, giving him a tragic personal connection to the Vaardan Massacre (his wife and daughters were killed there!) and sending him into the kind of unhinged rage that not only sees him strike Kirk several times but also point a phaser in his face. Yes, he did all of this under the influence of drugs meant to make him lash out so that M’Benga could declare him unfit, but none of his behavior under the influence feels like a terrible stretch for the man he’s revealed himself to be.
Still, in the end, his collapse is an awfully neat and convenient solution for the complicated questions this episode raises. M’Benga’s sacrifice, taking the blame for drugging the admiral and sparing Kirk’s future while undoubtedly getting himself demoted into the position we meet him in on The Original Series, feels like the only thing that’s going to have a real long-tail impact. (Chapel, at least, looks pissed.) Hey, at least Uhura got to fight a squad of Andorian smugglers all by herself. Win some, lose some, I suppose.
Hachette Unveils the Ultimate Dungeons & Dragons Novel Collection
This article is sponsored by Hachette Partworks.
For over 50 years, Dungeons & Dragons has brought together fantasy fans of all ages with everything from tabletop gameplay to stories based on its epic realms. Now Hachette Partworks is sharing a whole treasure trove of Dungeons & Dragons literary stories with its novels collection, bringing together 100 of the greatest D&D novels ever written. This includes some stories that have long been out of print, with fans finally able to read these classics for the first time in years. And to commemorate such an extensive launch, Hachette has pulled out all the stops to make this collection a must-own for all Dungeons & Dragons fans.
Among the highlights in the Dungeons & Dragons novels collection are the works of celebrated author R.A. Salvatore, including his landmark set of stories The Legend of Drizzt, which originally began publication in 1988. Salvatore’s work helped define the Forgotten Realms, a fan-favorite setting that has been immortalized further in video games like Baldur’s Gate and gone on to inspire many a D&D campaign. Even beyond the familiar trappings of Dungeons & Dragons, these are among the most beloved high fantasy stories of all time and should be a fixture in any fantasy fan’s bookshelf.
Another gem in Hachette’s Dungeons & Dragons novels collection is The Finder’s Stone, a trilogy of novels written by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb. Also set within the Forgotten Realms, these stories follow adventurers Alias and Olive Ruskettle as they embark on quests and vanquish evil wherever it surfaces throughout their journeys. The Dragonlance Chronicles are also part of this novel collection, republishing stories by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman that detail an epic saga of might and magic during a sweeping conflict known as the War of the Lance. This collection is carefully curated by Matt Chapman, the current editor of Tabletop Gaming Magazine and the former editor-in-chief of Dragon+, with Chapman providing introductions identifying the importance of each story and ensuring this collection is by fans and for fans.
For readers who have more specific books that they want from across the wide, wide world of Dungeons & Dragons, the books will begin receiving a trade release on Sept. 9, with new books available approximately every two weeks. But Hachette has truly gone above and beyond to make the whole set stand out together, even as impressive as each of the individual books in the collection are. Which, of course, leads us to talk about the publisher’s subscription service, with the first two books starting at a reduced introductory price of £2.99 for the first book and £6.99 for the second book before moving to £11.99 for the remainder of the subscription run.
Hachette has opened a subscription service for fans to ensure that they get the novels on a regular basis as well as offering the novels through trade release starting Sept. 9. The novels in this collection are being published as hardback books with foiled covers and exclusive spine artwork by Javier Charro, showing an interconnected image of fan-favorite Dungeons & Dragons characters together in action, which will really get the books to visually pop from one’s bookshelf. The subscription ships two novels each month, steadily providing 40 years of Dungeons & Dragons to subscribers.
To sweeten the subscription deal, Hachette is offering primo incentives for people who subscribe to the novels collection before the end of 2026 while supplies last. Subscribers get a set of engraved silver and gold-colored bookmarks, a mug designed after Dungeons & Dragons, a pair of bookends with the Dungeons & Dragons symbol, a specially branded dice tray for your next D&D campaign, and a free book as part of the subscription. These are all impressive bits of swag for any Dungeons & Dragons fan to show off with their books, giving other players a strong sense of FOMO.
Speaking of FOMO, this is all a limited time offer so don’t wait until it’s too late to get in on Hachette’s extensive Dungeons & Dragons novels collection. With 100 novels in an impressive hardback and illustrated spine format, just the books themselves alone are well worth the price of the subscription for this high fantasy labor of love project. Really, no major Dungeons & Dragons fan can go without it, bringing back some of the most beloved stories the enduring fantasy franchise has ever told, some for the first time back in print in decades. Hachette Partworks have been delivering fan-forward publications for years, and with the Dungeons & Dragons novels collection, they’re setting a new bar for curated book collections.
The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time Reminds Remakes Are Interpretations, Not Copies
“Hey, listen!” Just reading those words is enough to make anyone who has played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time sit up and pay attention. Link’s fairy guide Navi says those words approximately ten billion times while traversing across Hyrule’s past and present to prevent Ganondorf from using the Triforce to conquer the world. Annoying at first… and second… and third, Navi’s little interjections are as much a part of the game as the various puzzles and boss battles.
So fans would be forgiven for being slightly taken aback by the trailer for Nintendo‘s remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The trailer is full of familiar sights and sounds, from Link’s various grunts as a kid and an adult to him targeting the enemies he strikes with a sword to the sound of the Ocarina itself. Moreover, the remake has a darker, more realistic feel, replacing the bright cartoon visuals of the originals—which is exactly what a remake should do.
Remakes are, of course, nothing new to video games. As soon as Pong left arcades and made its way into living rooms, people learned that games had to go through some sort of change in order to work on a different system. Often, the changes are a result of hardware abilities and limitations. Pac-Manat home, whether the depressing Atari version or the impressive Intellivision port, didn’t look and sound the same as it did in the arcades. As much as we loved to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game on NES, we knew it fell short of the four-player brawler we got at Chuck-E-Cheese.
However, Nintendo also showed us that remakes can take advantage of stronger hardware to give us a game that retains the same basic mechanics, but presents them with better graphics and sound. TheSuper Mario All-Stars compilation on the SNES played as both an update and a celebration of the games from the previous generation, allowing the screen to match the way the games made us feel.
But with the Ocarina of Time remake, Nintendo is showing us something different. It’s showing a game that has a lot of qualities of the version we first played on the Nintendo 64 decades ago, but is ultimately a new game. The first half of the trailer plays the greatest hits, giving us shots of Link doing the usual combat and puzzle actions that we’ve done during hundreds of replays. However, the shadows are a bit darker and the textures a bit more pronounced, creating a change that goes beyond transitioning from polygons to fully-rendered people and involves matters of tone.
The second half of the trailer only intensifies those feelings, as it adds voice acting and newly designed cut scenes, replacing the mostly static images and subtitles of the original game. Suddenly, Zelda and Darunia the Goron have voices, and they don’t sound like we expected when first played the game. Suddenly, Ocarina of Time isn’t the same game we played before.
But that’s not a bad thing, especially if we think of video games as art instead of just entertainment technology. If they’re just entertainment technology, then we can and should complain when the new technology doesn’t entertain like the previous technology did. But if they’re art, then we need to allow room for the work to change in order to be perceived differently. We need to let video game remakes be interpretations.
Other forms of art have long had to wrestle with questions of interpretation in adaptations and remakes. Consider one of the best examples of adaptation and remake, the 1938 novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell and the three movies based on it, 1951’s The Thing from Another World, 1982’s John Carpenter‘sThe Thing, and 2011’s The Thing.
Campbell’s original story focuses on a group of researchers in the Antarctic who repel the attack of a telepathic and shapeshifting alien. The 1951 movie takes the premise and turns it into the sort of sci-fi adventure popular during the nuclear era, complete with a group of jocular soldiers and scientists battling a vegetable creature with a definitive shape. Carpenter’s version amps up the gore and the cynicism that reflects his view of the 1980s, building to a far more ambiguous ending than either of the two other versions. Likewise, the 2011 movie is a product of its time, a Hollywood IP cash in that repeats familiar beats and emphasizes audience recognition.
While audiences may prefer one version of The Thing over the others, no one thinks that the worse versions cancel out the best. Heck, few think that even the worst versions shouldn’t exist. Instead, we understand them each as interpretations of the same story, valid in some degree in their own way.
In fact, we don’t even need to leave the world of video games to understand the importance of interpretation. Recall the 2002 Resident Evilremake, which still confounds people expecting simply an updated version of the original game. Resident Evil 2002 cuts out whole scenes and moments, giving the characters new voices and dialogue, creating a game that doesn’t just play differently from its predecessor—it’s effectively a whole new experience. While gamers hardly embraced the remake upon first release, it’s now accepted as the definitive way to play Resident Evil, especially for newcomers. The original version now only appeals to purists who want to recreate the experience of the game in 1996.
Which is also fine. The 1996 version of Resident Evil didn’t disappear when the remake came out, and those who want the pure experience can still find copies to play, anymore than each version of The Thing erased previous versions. If anything, Resident Evil 2002 enhanced the 1996 game by highlighting two different approaches to the same material.
Ultimately, gamers need to view The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time through the same lens. They need to accept this new version not as a copy, but as a distinct game that interprets the original without repeating it. And if gamers prefer one version over another, that’s all the better, because those good points of the original stand out even more. They can still get yelled at by Navi in every version of the game, whether she’s telling us to look at bright polygons or shadowy modern textures.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake releases on the Nintendo Switch on November 5, 2026.
Paul Greengrass Reveals The Uprising Began With the Title ‘The Hood’
Paul Greengrass knew he always wanted to make a quasi-Robin Hood movie well before his deeply naturalistic historical epic, The Uprising, had the famous rogue’s name added to the poster. The film is still very much in the vein of the realpolitik thrillers Greengrass made his bones on early in his career with the Irish Troubles-set Bloody Sunday (2002) and the 9/11-based United 93 (2006), plus more recently in Captain Phillips (2013)—although this time with a far more exotic sheen in 1381 England on the eve of the fabled Peasants’ Revolt. Even so, he didn’t mind when Focus Features revealed in the marketing that the movie about peasants marching on London is also a chance to “Witness the Rise of Robin Hood.”
“When I wrote the original screenplay, I called it The Hood, so that tells you where I was,” Greengrass tells us during a Zoom conversation. “I called it The Hood because after the Peasants’ Revolt, people told stories of outlaws, most particularly outlaws of the hood, and so my hero’s journey was always gonna go from being a simple farmer to ending up being an outlaw. I never called him ‘The Hood,’ but he puts the hood on and he puts the mask on, and he confronts the king, and at that point, you’re in a cinematic world. You’re in a sort of mythic world.”
So he never had a problem with the film’s marketing revealing that facet of the movie: “You have to suggest what your movie is about, [and] it’s totally part of it.” However, the movie is so much more. It is, in fact, a passion project that began for Greengrass back in the days of the pandemic when he discovered a book by Barbara Tuchman about another world that came out of an even worse time of pestilence and paranoia. In England, it’s estimated anywhere between a third and half the population died from bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. For the survivors, the wheels of the world had come off… including for the peasants who revolted by marching on London after their taxes were raised yet again to fight a distant war in France.
Below we discuss with Greengrass the historical reality of 1381 England, what echoes and lessons he sees in it for our world today… and why he thinks it is the reason we have the Robin Hood we know and love in the 21st century.
I imagine like a lot of children of the British school system that you were at least somewhat familiar with the Peasants’ Revolt.
Very much so. I don’t think children today are taught about the Peasants’ Revolt in England, but when I was a boy you were.
You’re saying it’s taught even less now? Because I was curious if in the UK it was taught as a success for the rights of individual freedom.
I think that’s what it was for sure. I think that we were taught it was one of the important moments, but I don’t recall my kids being taught about it if I must be honest, but I wouldn’t read too much into that… but history was sort of taught [in my time] mostly about how the power of the king, or the kings and queens and aristocrats, and how that power ultimately over centuries was transformed into people having individual and democratic rights.
That was the structure that you were taught, and in that story the Peasants’ Revolt was a very important moment, of course, because it’s the first moment in European history when the ordinary man and woman come center stage to say my rights matter and they articulated a very clear set of economic and political rights… but obviously the rebellion was crushed, and yet the dream of the rebellion lived on and it succeeded. And it succeeded in a number of important ways.
It changed the way people felt about themselves. They understood that they mattered, and you can see that because after the rebellion, that’s when the legend, these outlaw legends really began in England, particularly Robin Hood, but not only Robin Hood, although he was the most popular of those outlaws. Because people told outlaw stories, I’m not talking about courtly poets, I’m talking about the people down in the taverns and village squares, they told stories about outlaws because it was a way of keeping the dream alive. We tell these stories about this outlaw who stands up against the powerful at a time when we feel powerless.
That’s interesting because on this side of the pond we obviously know about Robin Hood, and we hear a lot about Richard the Lionheart, and we’re taught in our schools about Magna Carta, but we are not taught about the Peasants’ Revolt. I believe you’re one of the few films that have been made about the subject. So I wonder if you think that’s at all because it is seen as such a demarcation point, especially on the left and among socialist groups?
Let me take those point by point, because this is a really interesting set of questions. First of all, the Robin Hood that you’re talking about is Robin of Locksley, the dispossessed aristocrat at the time of King John. That Robin Hood is a Victorian version of the Robin Hood legend. The original authentic Robin Hood ballads were the story of a simple man, a yeoman who was an outlaw, much like the character who ends up in The Uprising.
So there was no person called Robin Hood. The phrase Robin Hood, or Rob Hood or Rob of the Hood, existed before the Peasants’ Revolt, and it just basically meant a criminal. It’s some moniker given to a criminal or an outlaw. It was after the Peasants’ Revolt in the years and decades after that the legend and ballads of Robin Hood began to emerge and other outlaw ballads, that’s when people really told stories about this character who stood up against the king. But he was an outlaw and a much, much different figure to the Robin Locksley that you’re talking about. That’s hundreds and hundreds of years later.
So that’s point one, but as to your second point: on the left, people have always pointed to the Peasants’ Revolt for sure, but I think that’s a pretty obscure sort of part of the discourse, if I could put it that way. The Peasants’ Revolt, when I was a kid, was different to Magna Carta, because Magna Carta was the king meeting the nobles. It was an aristocratic fight. The Peasants’ Revolt was different.
They didn’t care about the peasants in the Magna Carta.
No, they were irrelevant! What was fascinating to me about writing this film was that it was a spontaneous uprising. It came out of nowhere. Of course you can look at the world as it was then, ravaged by plague, a failing government, corrupt oligarchs jealously guarding their power, a weak young king who was deeply mentally ill too, and an enraged population believing that the elites were corrupt and not listening to them, and rigging the system against them. That was the world of 1381, and it sounds quite like our world today, really, doesn’t it? That’s as it seemed to me when I started writing the film.
While obviously there wasn’t a real man called Ploughman, he’s my fictional hero, but that village looks pretty much like Brentwood would have looked like, and the tax collection would have been the tax collection, and for sure it began with a violent altercation when the tax collector came to town and started roughly assaulting the young women in the village. It’s attested that that’s how it began. What was unusual was it spread incredibly rapidly all across southern England within a matter of days and coalesced into this coordinated march by ordinary men and women in their tens of thousands on London at a time when there were no armies there. The armies were in Scotland and France, and the crown was effectively defenseless.
You had then this week of high drama as they got to London, negotiated with the king, were betrayed and the rebellion was crushed, but they got inside the place and trashed the place. It began peacefully with very clear and specific aims and was actually initially highly disciplined, but then like all revolutions do, it descended into violence and chaos.
That violence, as well as the ideals and aspirations, it all begins with people challenging their institutions. After the plague, peasants began challenging their governments, their churches, in the 1300s, but I feel like right now, we’re living in a moment of retrenchment where people are pulling away or burrowing down. Do you see this movie as a reminder to the opportunity we as a society might have at this moment?
When you make a movie you start by trying to decide what sort of movie you want to make. Do you wanna make a sci-fi movie, do you want to make a romantic comedy? I wanted to make a sort of historical epic, that’s kind of what was in my mind. I very much admired Spartacus, [Stanley] Kubrick’s movie, very much, and I very much admired Ridley’s movie Gladiator. I love those kinds of movies. So when I was looking to do a story about an English [event], I thought, ‘Oh, I could do like a Gladiator, Spartacus type movie, but it’d be my version of one of those movies, because I’m not going to have the same sensibility as either Ridley or Kubrick.
So I’ll create a fictional character and I’ll try to tell a hero’s journey through these dramatic events, which were so important in the evolution of the story of individual rights in our societies, I mean, historians hold a mirror up to the Peasants’ Revolt [to today]. There’s a brilliant book by a historian called Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, and it’s about the 14th century, the chaos of the 14th century, but it’s really all about how that instability of which the Peasants’ Revolt was the most important part of it, led the way to the evolution of individual rights and on through the individual rights, the fight against the crown, the American Revolution, the Constitution, it’s an unfolding story of the Enlightenment and the evolution of democracy, and it was a foundational moment.
But all of that’s irrelevant because you’ve got to craft an entertainment, you’ve got to craft a movie. Although I was very struck by how contemporary it all felt, to go to your question—this starkly divided world between the oligarchs protecting their wealth and this sense generally of rage out there that people feel a bit locked out by a system rigged against them—that all felt very contemporary, but in the end, it doesn’t give you your film. It’s part of what you’re dealing with, but you’ve got to craft your hero’s journey, your entertainment, characters that you want to follow, and tell it with economy and give it scale and drama and all the rest of it.
So it’s in your mind, it’s part of what makes the film interesting, but it’s not your purpose; its purpose is to give people a great experience. Like I loved when I saw Spartacus in the cinema or when I saw Gladiator.
The Uprising is in theaters on Friday, Sept. 11.
The Best Movie Reboots That Were Actually Worth Watching
Hard reboots, soft reboots, remakes, legacy sequels… Hollywood uses many tactics to keep valuable IP alive. Yet those tactics have also made the definition of “reboot” fairly muddy.
Mad Max: Fury Road stretches the limits of what we consider a “soft” reboot, in that director George Miller engineered it to fit into the franchise without erasing his original films. 2018’s Halloween is a soft reboot “requel” that also functions as a direct sequel, while Ocean’s 11 kickstarted a new series of successful films off a remake.
But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, very few studios have the guts to wipe their franchise slate completely clean, start again, and actually get a good movie out of that effort, so today I’ll shine a light on the movies that pulled off the near-impossible and gave us a hard reboot truly worth watching.
I’ll set aside my personal appreciation for certain reboots here. I quite liked 2016’s Ghostbusters, but I know I’m in the minority. Man of Steel is great to some, disastrous to others. I also genuinely enjoyed Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider effort compared to the Angelina Jolie-starring adaptations of that video game series, but its mixed reception keeps it off this list, and the same goes for Mortal Kombat.
I could argue all those films are worth watching, but many would simply disagree, so let’s take a look at the real, solid-gold franchise reboot gems of the last 20 years…
Casino Royale (2006)
Casino Royale was definitely not a remake of the 1967 parody of the same name, though that was loosely based on Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book. Instead, this 2006 Bond reboot forged its own path, propelling Daniel Craig into the limelight as the new 007 in a franchise reboot that dispensed with most of the cheekiness and tropes of the previous films and reinvented the character for the 2000s.
Fighting fan perception that he had been miscast as the suave secret agent, Daniel Craig shut up those doubters pretty damn quickly in his first Bond outing, which saw a more brutal 007 set out to take down terrorism financier Le Chiffre (a typically frightening Mads Mikkelsen) at a poker game at the titular Montenegro casino.
Along the way, Bond’s genitals are tortured, and he manages to evade other attempts on his life, but is still hit with tragedy despite ultimately succeeding in his mission. This was a new Bond, a new style, and a new day for the franchise: a desperately needed fresh start that succeeded by shedding the cringier side of 007 and embracing a colder reboot that really paid off in the post-9/11 era of geopolitical nastiness.
Batman Begins (2005)
Who better to tackle a superhero franchise than Christopher Nolan, a man who could never knowingly put less than 100% into making something very silly, like a wealthy man dressing up in a rubber suit and beating up bad guys, into a very serious and dark matter indeed that felt true to some of the greatest DC Comics stories featuring the character?
Gone were the comic book splashes, dark fantasy, and whimsy of the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher era when Batman Begins first came to town, replaced by a jaw-clenching Bruce Wayne in Christian Bale and genuinely terrifying villains in Liam Neeson’s bin Laden-esque Ra’s al Ghul and Cillian Murphy’s psychologically twisted Scarecrow.
Batman Begins marked a whole new trilogy and style for the Caped Crusader, rebooting the franchise from its previously campy Batnipples and dizzy color wheel into a compelling arc for Bruce Wayne, whose attempts to heal from his childhood trauma were at war with his desire for vengeance and love, and although the film would later sit in the shadow of its sequel, The Dark Knight, it remains a solid reboot that finally got audiences to take Batman seriously.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
After the original Apes movie series dwindled in the early 1970s, a panned remake followed much later in 2001. But its box-office success didn’t help to signal renewed interest in seeing those damned apes on the big screen anytime soon, and Fox went back to the drawing board.
Eventually, 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes came from extensive behind-the-scenes tinkering. The work absolutely paid off, and the first film in the reboot trilogy found critical and commercial success.
The film’s upsetting, altered origin story wisely begins earlier, in an all-too-human 2016, when a biotechnology company tests its Alzheimer’s drugs on chimpanzees. These scenes are upsetting and scary, with a female chimp rampaging and being shot to death, and her intelligent baby chimp, Caesar, later locked in a cruel animal shelter.
Featuring a stellar motion capture performance from Andy Serkis that brought Caesar to life onscreen, and real emotional stakes between the character and the humans he grows up with, Rise builds logically toward the original films without feeling the need to dismiss them, even when deftly rebooting the universe and promising more profound depth to it in the future.
Star Trek (2009)
Rebooting Trek was no small feat, but J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman proved they were up to the task when they chucked out decades of memorable adventures in the final frontier and put their own spin on the Original Series characters for 2009’s Star Trek.
Casting was half the battle. We didn’t really need anyone pretending they could do a good impression of William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy; we needed actors who could take the characters of Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc and make them their own, and Abrams found actors who could harness some of the original cast’s energy, yet were still dedicated to making the sci-fi hokum of the film’s “United Federation of Planets good guys vs alien villains” story fly.
Where Star Trek fails a little as a hard reboot is in its decision to bring back Nimoy’s Spock with some timey-wimey space nonsense, but even that serves the story in its efforts to reboot the franchise by drawing a new timeline in the sand so that people who were only just getting into Trek understood that they could go back and check the old stuff out, or not. It was entirely up to the individual.
Subsequent films and their issues may have ultimately derailed Abrams’ reboot series, but Star Trek worked on almost every level, surprising many who thought it would fail outright.
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
While many fans agree that Andrew Garfield was a great Spidey, his Amazing Spider-Man reboot movies felt like they were lacking crucial pieces of the superhero crowd-pleaser puzzle that would have made them truly memorable. Uneven pacing, underdeveloped villains, and a sense that Garfield was just a little too cool as Peter Parker undercut some great lead performances and a romance between Garfield and co-star Emma Stone that crackled on and off the screen.
But when Tom Holland arrived to reboot Peter Parker in Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Civil War, audiences immediately warmed to him and suspected he’d be one of the greatest casting choices ever made. That was later confirmed in his first reboot movie, Spider-Man: Homecoming, where he managed to embody both the sadness of Tobey Maguire’s spin on the character and some of the coolness Garfield brought, while also putting his own stamp on Peter Parker’s wholesome and wide-eyed yet utterly awkward enthusiasm.
Though Homecoming was mired in the MCU’s ongoing continuity, the movie kicked off a new era for Spider-Man that has become Sony and Marvel’s most financially successful series, proving a hard reboot can overhaul a franchise without bringing in legacy actors and storylines for nostalgia’s sake. At least, until No Way Home came along.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)
It may have been a disappointment at the box office, but that doesn’t make Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a bad movie. It’s certainly worth watching despite its failure to make a splash in theaters. Indeed, with no connections to the previous Dungeons & Dragons trilogy, Honor Among Thieves was wildly popular with critics who couldn’t have imagined it turning out to be such a terrific and funny reboot, and it still has fans crying out for a sequel today!
The filmmakers and cast do a phenomenal job of capturing all the larks of role-playing fantasy game characters, including a cheeky bard played by an energetic Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez as a tough barbarian who is tired of putting up with him, Justice Smith’s pining sorcerer, and Hugh Grant on fine form as a smarmy rogue.
With plenty of jokes and a heist structure that works for both the group and the story, Honor Among Thieves is a tremendously good time that puts the uniquely crap previous trilogy in the rearview and yells “hey, let’s have a great time!” It’s really unfortunate that not enough people wanted to play.
The Batman (2022)
Batman makes the list twice thanks to Matt Reeves’ 2022 reboot, The Batman, which not only had the unenviable task of trying something new after Christopher Nolan had impressed audiences with his own DC trilogy about the Caped Crusader, but also had to quickly follow Ben Affleck’s spin on the character from the DCEU’s muddled movies Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, which the actor had suddenly stepped away from due to various issues.
Against all odds, The Batman successfully rebooted DC’s popular character yet again with a story about a younger Bruce Wayne, played by Robert Pattinson, whose real-life weirdness seemed to fit a stranger, more disconnected Wayne as he faced major comic-book villains in only his second year fighting crime in Gotham City. Colin Farrell’s hilarious Penguin juxtaposed nicely with Paul Dano’s squirrely, oddball villain, The Riddler, while the movie thoroughly embraced the noir detective angle of Bruce Wayne, rarely seen in previous live-action Batman movies.
Tense and visually impressive, Reeves certainly understood the assignment with The Batman, and while the film’s reliance on exposition occasionally got in the way of its pacing, it was largely viewed as an excellent reboot that probably would have been followed up with several sequels by now, had it not been for big changes behind the scenes at both Warner Bros. and DC.
Star Trek-Loving Billionaires Just Don’t Seem to Get Gene Roddenberry
“You wanna know what my vision is? Dollar signs, money! I didn’t build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity.”
You would be forgiven for thinking those words were spoken by Jeff Bezos, the megabillionaire who owns Amazon and the aerospace company Blue Origin. But as most Trekkies could tell you, those words were spoken by Zefram Cochrane, as played by James Cromwell in the movie Star Trek: First Contact.
Of course among those Trekkers is also Bezos. In fact, Bezos got to tell William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself, how much Star Trek meant to him in the latter’s new book, William Shatner … and You, excerpted in Variety. After explaining the ways in which he loved Star Trek as a child, Bezos said that one of his goals with Blue Origin “is to help humanity on its journey to the Star Trek future.” Yet if Bezos is going to realize that dream, he needs to pay as much attention to Star Trek‘s material reality as he does to its depiction of the stars.
To be sure, the primary plot in Star Trek: First Contact deals with the Borg plan to go back in time and conquer Earth before the advent of deep space flight and the founding of the Federation. However, the film is also about Zefram Cochrane himself. First introduced in the Original Series episode “Metamorphosis,” where he was played by Glenn Corbett, Cochrane is a hero of Starfleet and the Federation, the man whose selfless construction of Earth’s first warp-capable ship set humanity on a path into the franchise’s utopian future. However, when the Enterprise crew goes back in time to 2030 and meet Cochrane (now played by James Cromwell) on the eve of his historic flight, they find not just a slovenly drunk who considers himself a failure with Cochrane’s ID card; they also discover a craven capitalist, who hopes that his invention will make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.
Whatever Cromwell thought when he delivered those lines in First Contact, released in 1996, he probably wouldn’t have dreamed that any one person could one day be worth $265 billion, like Bezos is in 2026. Inequality has grown widely over the past 30 years, to the point that Bezos, Elon Musk, and Larry Page hold the lion’s share of the world’s wealth, while the masses go without. And yet, Bezos looks to Star Trek of all things as a model for the future.
Save for an poorly-chosen nod to Elon Musk in Discovery (and even then, it came from the mouth of someone from the evil Mirror Universe), Star Trek has always understood inequality and the pursuit of wealth as contrary to the good of society. Captain Picard puts it plainly in the season one Next Generation episode, “The Neutral Zone,” when a rich man who cryogenically froze himself awakens aboard the Enterprise and starts making demands based on his money. A confused Picard tries to explain that such things no longer matter. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions,” he states, before putting it bluntly, “We’ve grown out of our infancy.”
Conversely, the Deep Space Nine two-parter “Past Tense” shows how massive inequality leaves humanity hamstrung, unable to advance. Only when the poor rise up in the Bell Riots, ultimately caused by Captain Sisko, does humanity begin moving toward its better future.
Yet the best example of Star Trek‘s ethos may be Cochrane himself, as portrayed in First Contact. Materialistic as he is, Cochrane is not heartless or craven. Rather he simply cannot imagine anything beyond the capitalist system put in place. In his mind, one succeeds by earning lots of money, therefore he puts his genius to work, creating a product that he can exchange for cash.
However, the arrival of Riker and the Enterprise crew shows Cochrane something different. As Picard tells Cochrane’s partner Lily (Alfre Woodard), “The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.” When Lily asks if that means people don’t get paid for their labor, Picard reveals that such a system no longer even exists. “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity,” he declares.
It’s this example that eventually expands Cochrane’s mind and shows him a different way. For us viewers, Star Trek does that expansion, reminding us that the system we currently have in place does not need to be, that other forms of life are possible. Of course that requires someone paying attention to the actual message of the show and looking beyond the limitations of their imagination, something Bezos might seem incapable of doing. But if even Zefram Cochrane can change, perhaps there’s hope for Bezos yet. If Star Trek has taught us anything, it’s that there’s always hope in the future.
