Batman Fans Prepared Christopher Nolan for Criticism of The Odyssey

The Odyssey is one of the most important works of Western Literature. For centuries, Homer’s epic has shaped the way we think about fundamental concepts such as duty and hospitality. Its depiction of the cunning Odysseus has influenced heroes from Sherlock Holmes to Superman. Countless of people have studied The Odyssey closely, have built their lives around it, and even more have heard and enjoyed it time and again. And yet, devotees of The Odyssey have nothing on Bat-fans.

When asked by The Telegrah about the various online critiques leveled at his upcoming film, director Christopher Nolan puts things in perspective. “I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman,” he points out. “When I came on to Batman Begins, writers and artists had been working on this beloved character for almost 65 years, and a lot of freighted thoughts were out there about what he represents.”

Even though The Odyssey still doesn’t release in theaters for another week, and even though there have been precious few adaptations of the story, and certainly none on a Hollywood blockbuster scale, commentators online have had strong opinions about the story. Perhaps the most gentle and reasonable critique came with the first images, when a Twitter user noted that the helmet worn by Matt Damon differs from the one described in the text.

However, since then, reactions have only grown more unhinged. People complain that Nolan has cast Elliot Page, a celebrated actor with whom he worked on Inception, because Page is trans. Others have grouched about Nolan casting rapper and actor Travis Scott, a man famous for his ability to tell stories in rhyme, as a bard. Most ludicrously of all, commentators were infuriated that Academy Award-winning actress, polyglot, and international model Lupita Nyong’o would play the face that launched a thousand ships, Helen of Troy.

These absurd complaints pale in comparison to the more reasonable knocks against Nolan’s Batman work. Leaving aside problems with The Dark Knight‘s final 20 minutes or the death of Talia in The Dark Knight Rises, fans took issue with the way Nolan altered long-established characters. He turned Bane from a South American mastermind into a thug with a non-distinct accent. The Lazarus Pit that resurrected Ra’s al Ghul time and again was replaced with a succession plan that allowed both Ken Watanabe and Liam Neeson to portray the character. And he cast a pretty-boy teen idol Heath Ledger to play the Joker, a decision that infuriated fans at the time, hard as it is to believe today.

But Nolan has the right attitude to dealing with these things. Batman stories have been told by hundreds of creators over decades, in every imaginable medium for a range of audiences. Bruce Wayne and his allies and rogues have never been one thing. The same is true of The Odyssey which was an imaginative work of historical fiction at the time it was new. “[Homer] and his audience were looking back centuries at what they viewed as a superior civilisation, this long-past Age of Heroes, and there had been this social and cultural collapse in between,” Nolan points out.

“What I learnt over my time on [the Dark Knight] trilogy is you can’t worry about any of that at all,” Nolan states. “What you have to do is honour the original text by interpreting it in the strongest way you personally can.” And if people don’t like it, well, they’ll get over the next time someone lights the bat-signal wrong and they can complain about that instead.

The Odyssey arrives in theaters on July 17, 2026.

Evil Dead Burn Proves That the Franchise Needs More Comedy

This article contains full spoilers for Evil Dead Burn.

About halfway through Evil Dead Burn, Bruce Campbell finally makes an appearance. No, he’s not there in person, nor does he seem to be playing Ashley Williams, the put-upon protagonist of the first three Evil Dead films. Instead, we just see his portrait on a wall as the camera pans to follow grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) as she rides her wheelchair elevator up the stairs.

Fittingly, Bruce’s appearance coincides with one of the few moments of levity in Evil Dead Burn. For most of its runtime, Evil Dead Burn follows the model set by Fede Álvarez‘s 2013 remake of The Evil Dead, as does Lee Cronin‘s 2023 follow-up Evil Dead Rise. These movies set out to challenge their audience, daring viewers to endure their grueling story beats and unrepentant nastiness. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach and even Burn, easily the weakest of the three, has its good qualities. But for as much as these movies pay deference to the original films by Sam Raimi, they do lack the humor that once made Evil Dead so special.

The Birth of Evil

Really, it’s all the fault of The Evil Dead from 1981. While most prefer Evil Dead II to its original, and as much as the 1987 second movie is essentially a remake of the first, The Evil Dead is a nasty movie. Shot for just $90,000, which Raimi and producer Robert Tapert raised from Detroit-area businessmen, The Evil Dead sets the premise that each subsequent movie (with the exception of Army of Darkness) will follow: a small group of people goes to a remote location, accidentally reads from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, and unleashes demons called Deadites, who torment them through the night.

In The Evil Dead, that group consists of friends studying at Michigan State University, including Campbell’s Ash. After Scott (Hal Delrich) reads from the Necronomicon, Ash’s sister Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) runs into the woods and gets sexually assaulted by the trees. From there, the Deadites use Cheryl and the rest of Ash’s friends to torture him, doing everything from stabbing him in the leg with a pencil to forcing him to decapitate his would-be betrothed Linda (Betsy Baker) with a shovel.

Raimi plays none of this for laughs. He uses his manic camera movements to make the characters seem as if they’re constantly under attack, and asks Campbell to play Ash’s emotional trauma without a smirk. But the camaraderie between Raimi and Campbell, and especially the former’s puckish spirit, still shines through. So by the time the duo remakes the first for Evil Dead II, the slapstick gags and Campbell’s hammier take on Ash feels less like a course correction from the first film and more like it’s accentuating what is already there.

Of course, humor becomes the driving force in the 1993 sequel Army of Darkness and the TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead, which ran for three seasons between 2015 and 2018. Those works turn Ash into a lovable blowhard, a gigantic doofus who tosses off one-liners with all the confidence in the world, despite just barely surviving each encounter with Deadites.

No Laughing Matter

Comedy came to so define the Evil Dead franchise that it felt like breath of fresh air when Fede Álvarez remade The Evil Dead in 2013. He and co-writer Rodo Sayagues seemed to be recovering something lost in the franchise, restoring all of the nastiness that Raimi and Campbell had left behind. Moreover, Álvarez and Sayagues added a level of thematic depth, making the MSU students go to a secluded cabin to help Mia (Jane Levy) overcome her drug addiction. The punishing visuals get so excessive, climaxing with gallons of blood poured on Mia, who must sever her own arm to survive, that it felt like the spirit of Raimi remained in the work, even if the humor was gone.

Lee Cronin moved his movie from a cabin in the woods to a metropolitan apartment for Evil Dead Rise, but he followed in the footsteps of Álvarez and Sayagues. By focusing on a fractured family brought back together, Cronin used the Deadites to explore the unspoken hurt feelings between people who love one another, adding more thematic weight to the franchise. Evil Dead Rise has just as many extreme moments as its predecessor, including needles and a cheese grater, but save for some character-driven reaction shots, it lacks humor.

This is where Evil Dead Burn swerves from the previous two movies, but only a little. French director Sébastien Vaniček, who co-wrote the script with Florent Bernard, imports much of his homeland’s New Extremity movement of the 2000s, crafting stomach-churning scenes involving a pen in the ear and the grossest possible example of parents kissing. It uses the Deadites as a metaphor as well, as protagonist Alice (Souheila Yacoub) must spend time with her cruel in-laws after the death of her abusive husband Will (George Pullar), in-laws who become Deadites.

Nasty and heavy as the movie often is, Evil Dead Burn does find moments for humor. The opening scene whip pans from the Deadite Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas) stepping on the hand of a person she boiled alive to a hard cut to a woman’s butt shaking at Will’s restaurant. The jokes made at the expense of Polly’s dementia may be tasteless, but they are jokes, even if it’s just the asides she mutters to herself as the world around her gets increasingly strange. In perhaps the best scene, the Deadite Thya (Luciane Buchanan) pulls out Polly’s false teeth, slurps on them a bit, and then returns them to the older woman’s mouth. It’s so uncomfortable and strange that the audience can’t help but laugh, despite how icky the whole thing is.

Great as the bit in Burn is, it also reminds us that such weird jokes regularly appeared in Evil Dead movies, back when they could be more than just dire gorefests.

More Than Gore

Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a dire gorefest. All three later Evil Dead films have instances of top-quality filmmaking, and there’s clearly an audience for nasty, mean-spirited cinema. But as anyone who has seen a Rob Zombie picture can tell you, it doesn’t take a lot of skill to be nasty. All one need do is throw the unthinkable on screen, and that’s enough to make the audience cringe. In some cases, they’ll look away from the screen so hard, be so viscerally affected by the mere idea of what’s happening, that they won’t notice how poorly the idea is executed. The inference of effect exists without any cinematic cause.

Contrast that to the predecessor to the false teeth bit in Evil Dead Burns. In Evil Dead II, when an eyeball pops out of the Deadite Henrietta and lands in the mouth of Bobby Joe (Kassie Wesley). Gross as the scene gets, it also comes directly from The Three Stooges, and has a vaudevillian sense of showmanship that keeps us watching, despite the ick. We laugh and shudder at the same time, in part because we cannot look away.

Such moments used to regularly occur in Evil Dead films, but rarely happened in even quality horror comedies, which set the franchise apart from its contemporaries. For all they do well, the modern Evil Dead movies don’t offer too much that can’t be found in other recent nasty films. To make Evil Dead films special once again, the modern entries need to put some humor back into the mix, just like Grandpa Bruce used to make them.

Evil Dead Burns is now playing in theaters worldwide.

House of the Dragon Season 3 Is Therapeutic for Game of Thrones Fans

This article contains spoilers for the first three episodes of House of the Dragon Season 3.

It was never going to be easy. Right down to its last crimson-stained step, Rhaenyra Targaryen’s journey to the Iron Throne—a seat which according to the oath every great house in Westeros swore was hers by rights—could never be anything less than a bloodbath. The lords, armies, and especially a fractured Targaryen family insisted upon it, snuffing out whatever luminescence likely remained in the Realm’s Delight before she claimed her father’s chair.

Yet in the second episode of House of the Dragon’s third season, claim it she did in a sequence that was so immediately gratifying for longtime fans of Westeros, Game of Thrones, and the wider world of George R.R. Martin, that it did the rare thing for a television show in the 2020s: it broke through the pop culture white noise to be a genuine watercooler moment toasted by memes and reported as alleged news on pop culture social media channels. Obviously the latter bit was done with its tongue in cheek, but it reflected a catharsis that was palpable both on and off the screen.

In the context of the TV show, it’s the transgression House of the Dragon has been building to ever since a 2022 cold open staged the Great Council of Harrenhal, a political summit wherein all the noble houses of Westeros came together and forcefully declared that no woman should ever sit the Iron Throne. Despite Rhaenyra and her father King Viserys attempting to reverse that precedent a scant decade and change later, it probably was inevitable that for Rhaenyra to succeed Papa Viserys, she’d have to wade through a pool of blood. Albeit, one imagines Ser Otto Hightower, Viserys’ scheming and manipulative second-in-command, never entertained it would be literally his own that she’d make tracks in on the fateful day.

For the audience at home, however, the wait was almost as long when you factor in the time since the original Game of Thrones season 1 promo premiered more than 15 years ago in 2010. Aye, that was the first and last time viewers ever saw Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen in the same seat now claimed by her direct ancestor Rhaenyra in House of the Dragon. Granted, that brilliant piece of early Game of Thrones marketing showed a lot of possible futures for Westeros, both likely (look out for Cersei Lannister in her husband and sons’ chair!) and impossible (sorry, Robb Stark stans).

But the image of Dany on the Iron Throne stuck in the cultural imagination for the entire run of Game of Thrones, with the character becoming something of a pop icon who transcended the textual narrative of her series to become a metatextual idol. One imagines many viewers in the 2010s were so swept up in the hype and majestic trappings of Dany’s stylings—Mother of (Cinematic) Dragons, Breaker of Chains, Fashionista of Meereen—that they likely missed the telltale signs and heavy foreshadowing of a possible fall from grace.

Yet for so much of Game of Thrones’ run, that is all they were. Hinted at and teased shadows on the wall of one possible future for Dany. When it actually came time for that original series to lay its cards on the table and reveal Dany’s tragic fate to die mere feet from her family’s reclaimed seat of power, and then only to be slaughtered a tyrant, the execution was near as catastrophic as Dany’s final choices to raze King’s Landing.

There was always the possibility Dany would indulge her dynastic instincts, but they were superseded by the qualities that made her such a compelling leader to so many viewers: her sense of sweeping vision, compassion for the weak and vulnerable, and her demands for justice. In the final three episodes of Game of Thrones, though, the series infamously rushed what is meant to be a tragic hero’s final descent into, ultimately, “Dragon Lady got too emotional and did an oopsie.” And then, in the epicenter of her family’s legacy, Dany could only just touch her father’s chair, brushing her fingers over what was supposed to be her birthright, before it and everything else was taken from her in a treacherous red gush.

Deserved or not in the context of the series, this released in the grander cultural landscape of a world not yet three years removed from the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And it all amounted to yet another woman being declared mad and denied even the opportunity of even attempting national power. And they called it justice.

So the sight of Rhaenyra Targaryen sitting the Iron Throne is its own kind of therapeutic healing. After being teased a Targaryen restoration for nine years in Game of Thrones before it was as rudely (and clumsily) snatched away, the ostensible heroine of House of the Dragon claimed a seat that was far more her own. Unlike Dany, Rhaenyra is the eldest child of the last uncontested ruler, her father King Viserys. Yet due to Viserys’ own ineptitude and fecklessness as a monarch, and the scheming treachery of the men on his Small Council and the wife in his bed—plus, to be honest, Rhaenyra’s own shortsighted choice to brood far from court on Dragonstone while the Queen Mother and Rhaenyra’s half-brother plotted—her rule was usurped. Her opportunity to govern was stolen.

There is thus great catharsis, indeed, in Rhaenyra finally sitting in that chair. But also for the writers of House of the Dragon, opportunity as well to expand on George R.R. Martin’s larger thesis about the inherent unreliability of rulers and those who seek power, even sympathetic ones who do so out of a sense of fairness.

While House of the Dragon has at this point infamously made more changes than Martin likes, writer Sarah Hess in particular has zeroed in on both Rhaenyra’s vulnerabilities and her blindspots in a way that can continue the Dance past Rhaenyra’s ascent. Even the way Rhaenyra haphazardly beheads her late father’s best friend sows seeds of danger. Viewers can rationalize a scene by considering the sorrow a woman would feel after just losing her third child in this war over her sex, just as we know the emotional knots that would come with condemning a paternal figure from your youth, even a duplicitous and treasonous one. But in a feudal and highly patriarchal society, her shaky swings of a sword between teardrops will read as weakness.

And in any context, Rhaenyra’s complacent trivializing of the requests of Corlys Velaryon—a staunch ally who has given Rhaenyra’s claim everything over the past 20 years and now asks her only to legitimize bastard sons who already demonstrated fierce loyalty—is arrogant and, again, shortsighted.

Similarly, it is easy for viewers to cheer on a self-styled Queen of the People humiliating and demoralizing the wealthy elite of King’s Landing by serving them a dinner of rats, but any passing study of history shows the danger of alienating the ruling class. Taxing their assets during a time of want and war? Necessary. Heroic, even. Taxing their pride and self-regard? Unnecessarily risky.

By taking the extra time to really wallow in the satisfaction, and also the agonies, of the character you root for getting everything she wants, House of the Dragon is taking the opportunity to explore the nuance—and mayhaps the tragedy—Game of Thrones so hurriedly stumbled through and threw away.

House of the Dragon is playing on HBO now.

15 Celebs With Some Real Big-Time Brains

Celebrities have lives that are as complex as that of any human being, making them more than just what they are famous for. Other than their fame, several stars earned prestigious degrees, excelled in demanding academic fields, or built impressive résumés outside the entertainment industry.

Their fame tends to overshadow their academic backgrounds, yet these celebrities prove that intelligence and star power can go hand in hand. Here are just a few famous faces whose educational credentials and accomplishments show they have plenty of brains to match their talent.

Mayim Bialik

Long before playing neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory, Mayim Bialik earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles, with research focusing on obsessive-compulsive disorder in adolescents.

Brian May

While famous as Queen’s legendary guitarist, Brian May also earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College London. He completed the degree decades after pausing his studies to pursue one of rock’s greatest careers.

Ken Jeong

Before becoming a comedian and actor, Ken Jeong earned his M.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He completed a residency in internal medicine and practiced as a licensed physician before acting full-time.

Dolph Lundgren

Action star Dolph Lundgren holds a degree in chemical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before choosing acting.

Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology while continuing her acting career. She has also co-authored scientific research and spoken openly about prioritizing education alongside Hollywood success.

Rowan Atkinson

Best known as Mr. Bean, Rowan Atkinson earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from The Queen’s College, Oxford. His technical background contrasts sharply with the delightfully clueless characters that made him internationally famous.

Lisa Kudrow

Before finding fame on Friends, Lisa Kudrow earned a biology degree from Vassar College. She even worked with her father, a physician and headache specialist, on medical research before pursuing acting.

Cindy Crawford

Cindy Crawford was valedictorian of her high school class and earned an academic scholarship to Northwestern University to study chemical engineering. She left to pursue modeling but has often spoken about the importance of education.

James Franco

James Franco became known almost as much for attending university as for acting. He earned degrees from UCLA, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and Yale while studying subjects ranging from creative writing to filmmaking.

David Duchovny

David Duchovny graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English literature before earning a master’s from Yale University. He was pursuing a Ph.D. when acting opportunities led him away from academia.

Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster graduated magna c laude from Yale University with a degree in literature. Fluent in French, she has also served as a translator and frequently conducts interviews in multiple languages.

Geena Davis

Geena Davis earned a bachelor’s degree in drama from Boston University, but her achievements extend further. She later founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which researches representation in entertainment using data-driven analysis.

Shaquille O’Neal

Although primarily known for basketball, Shaquille O’Neal has steadily pursued higher education. He earned a doctoral degree in education from Barry University, demonstrating a long-term commitment to learning after his NBA career began.

John Legend

John Legend graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English and an emphasis on African American literature. He completed his studies before launching his award-winning music career.

Emma Watson

Emma Watson balanced a demanding film career with higher education, graduating from Brown University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She completed her studies while filming major projects and later became a prominent advocate for education and gender equality.

15 of the Funniest Gags from the Austin Powers Franchise

Mike Myers’ Austin Powers movies became comedy staples by spoofing spy films, swinging-’60s culture, and blockbuster sequels all at once. The franchise mixed outrageous visual gags, ridiculous villains, and endlessly quotable dialogue into a style that felt both goofy and surprisingly clever.

Many of its funniest moments come from jokes that escalate far beyond where they logically should, whether it’s a tiny misunderstanding turning into a massive scene or a simple sight gag becoming comedy gold. These are some of the franchise’s most memorable laughs that fans still quote decades later.

The Never-Ending Hallway Turn

In Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Austin gets trapped trying to turn a luggage cart in a narrow hallway. The joke keeps escalating as he repeatedly reverses and crashes instead of simply getting out.

Dr. Evil Wants One Million Dollars

Fresh from decades of cryogenic freezing, Dr. Evil demands “one million dollars” as ransom. His organization reacts with confusion because the amount sounds laughably small by modern standards.

The Steamroller That Takes Forever

A guard screams in terror as a painfully slow steamroller inches toward him. The absurdly long buildup makes the eventual impact far funnier than a quick gag ever could.

Austin’s Awkward Medical Exam

After being thawed out, Austin undergoes a medical checkup while making increasingly inappropriate comments. The scene perfectly establishes how hilariously out of place he is in the 1990s.

The Mole Obsession

Dr. Evil becomes fixated on a henchman’s facial mole, repeatedly interrupting serious business to comment on it. The running gag grows funnier because nobody else knows how to respond.

Mini-Me’s Silent Attitude

Mini-Me barely speaks, yet constantly steals scenes through exaggerated reactions and tiny acts of aggression. His deadpan presence becomes one of the franchise’s most reliable comedy weapons.

The Swedish Enlarger Pump

Austin insists a suspicious-looking device is “not mine” while explaining it’s a Swedish “enlarger” pump. The increasingly desperate denial turns an already ridiculous prop into a classic gag.

Fat Bastard’s Introductions

Fat Bastard repeatedly introduces himself with outrageous confidence and crude jokes. His shameless self-description became one of the most quoted recurring bits in the entire franchise.

The Zip-It Scene

Dr. Evil repeatedly tells Scott to “zip it” during family arguments. Their dysfunctional father-son dynamic hilariously clashes with the fact that one of them is trying to conquer the world.

Austin Mistakes a Robot for a Real Person

In Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Austin mourns a robot guard he just destroyed, imagining a tragic family life for the machine. The over-the-top guilt makes the scene unforgettable.

The Tent Shadow Illusion

Silhouettes behind a tent make innocent actions look wildly inappropriate. The joke relies entirely on visual misunderstanding, and the escalating reactions from onlookers sell every second.

Dr. Evil Joins a Therapy Group

Dr. Evil attends group therapy with other villains and complains about his childhood. Treating supervillains like ordinary patients creates a surprisingly effective parody of self-help culture.

Goldmember Loves Gold

In Austin Powers in Goldmember, Goldmember’s obsession with gold extends to his clothes, food, and bizarre personal habits. The character is funny simply because every sentence returns to gold.

The Long Urination After Cryogenic Sleep

Austin emerges from cryogenic freezing and immediately needs the bathroom. The scene stretches the obvious joke far beyond normal limits, which is exactly why it works.

Dr. Evil’s Ridiculous Family Reveal

The franchise eventually reveals increasingly absurd connections between Austin, Dr. Evil, and other characters. Each sequel adds another layer of ridiculous family history, turning the spy saga into a soap opera.

15 Quick Facts Worth Knowing About the Movie Business

The movie business is far more complex than simply making a film and releasing it in theaters. Behind every blockbuster or indie hit is a network of financing, distribution, marketing, contracts, and audience data that determines whether a project succeeds or disappears without a trace.

While technology and streaming have changed many aspects of the industry, the fundamentals of how movies are funded, sold, and promoted continue to shape what reaches audiences. These few facts offer a glimpse into the business side of filmmaking that most movie fans rarely think about.

Marketing Can Match the Production Budget

A major studio film’s marketing campaign can cost as much as its production budget. Advertising, trailers, premieres, television spots, and digital campaigns often require hundreds of millions of dollars for the biggest releases.

Opening Weekend Still Matters

Even in the streaming era, a strong opening weekend remains one of Hollywood’s most important performance indicators. Early ticket sales influence media coverage, theater retention, and the perception of a film’s success.

Studios Rarely Finance Everything Alone

Large productions are often funded through partnerships involving multiple studios, production companies, and outside investors. Sharing costs also spreads financial risk if a movie underperforms at the box office.

Streaming Rights Are Major Revenue Sources

A movie’s financial life doesn’t end after theaters. Licensing films to streaming services, television networks, airlines, and international distributors has become a crucial part of modern studio revenue.

Tax Incentives Shape Filming Locations

Many productions shoot in places like Georgia, Canada, Australia, or the United Kingdom because governments offer tax credits and financial incentives that can significantly reduce production costs.

Theatrical Windows Are Much Shorter

Exclusive theatrical releases once lasted several months. Today, many films become available digitally within weeks of their cinema debut, reflecting changing audience habits and studio distribution strategies.

Test Screenings Influence Final Cuts

Studios frequently hold advance screenings for selected audiences before release. Feedback from these previews can lead to edited scenes, altered endings, or pacing changes before the movie reaches theaters.

International Box Office Is Essential

For many blockbusters, international audiences generate more revenue than domestic ones. Global appeal now influences casting, storytelling, and release strategies for many big-budget productions.

Visual Effects Work Is Often Outsourced

Modern visual effects are commonly divided among multiple specialized companies across different countries. Hundreds or even thousands of artists may contribute to a single film’s finished effects.

Product Placement Helps Fund Movies

Brands frequently pay to feature their products in films or provide equipment during production. These partnerships can offset costs while giving companies valuable exposure to worldwide audiences.

Completion Bonds Protect Investors

Many major productions purchase completion bonds, which guarantee that a film will be finished even if unexpected financial or production problems arise. They provide reassurance to lenders and investors.

Residuals Remain a Major Industry Issue

Actors, writers, and other creative professionals often receive residual payments when projects are rebroadcast or licensed. How those payments apply to streaming platforms has become a significant issue in recent years.

Film Festivals Can Launch Distribution Deals

Prestigious festivals such as Sundance, Cannes, and Toronto often serve as marketplaces where distributors purchase completed films. A successful festival premiere can dramatically increase a movie’s commercial prospects.

Release Dates Are Carefully Chosen

Studios strategically schedule releases to avoid direct competition or capitalize on holidays and school breaks. Moving a premiere by even one week can significantly affect box office performance.

Not Every Movie Turns a Profit

A film can earn hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide and still struggle to become profitable if its production costs, marketing expenses, and distribution fees are exceptionally high. Box office revenue tells only part of the financial story.

15 Celebs With Some Extra-Odd Health, Workout, & Diet Practices

Celebrities often have access to the world’s best trainers, nutritionists, and wellness experts, leading to them often seeking less than conventional advice. Over the years, many stars have shared unusual workout routines, strict diets, and wellness habits that range from quirky to downright bizarre.

No matter if these routines are followed as a law or a pastime, they have sparked debate among health professionals and fans alike. These celebrities have all embraced health practices that stand out from the crowd and keep people talking, but due keep in mind that you shouldn’t try them at home.

Mark Wahlberg

Mark Wahlberg famously begins many days before sunrise, often waking around 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. to fit in prayer, multiple workouts, meals, and work commitments before most people are awake.

Tom Brady

Although now retired from football, Tom Brady continues promoting the TB12 lifestyle. His diet emphasizes hydration while avoiding foods such as tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, eggplant, and processed sugar.

Madonna

Madonna has long been associated with a macrobiotic-style diet emphasizing vegetables, whole grains, and carefully selected foods. Her disciplined nutritional approach has remained a recurring topic throughout her career.

Chris Hemsworth

Chris Hemsworth frequently incorporates cold-water immersion into his recovery routine. He has openly discussed using ice baths to aid muscle recovery and improve resilience following demanding workouts.

Shailene Woodley

Shailene Woodley once revealed that she occasionally consumed small amounts of edible clay, saying she learned about the practice from a taxi driver and believed it offered digestive benefits.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth Paltrow has promoted a variety of alternative wellness practices, including oil pulling, an oral hygiene technique involving swishing oil in the mouth for several minutes before brushing.

Zac Efron

For roles like Baywatch, Zac Efron followed exceptionally restrictive diets and intense training. He later explained that maintaining such low body fat year-round was unhealthy and unsustainable.

Kourtney Kardashian

Kourtney Kardashian has frequently shared unconventional recipes, including avocado-based puddings and strict organic eating habits. Her wellness routines often prioritize unusual ingredient substitutions over conventional desserts.

Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan has publicly experimented with the carnivore diet, temporarily eating almost exclusively meat while documenting both the perceived benefits and unexpected side effects during the self-imposed challenge.

Jared Leto

Jared Leto has credited occasional fasting and moderation with helping him maintain his appearance. He has discussed skipping meals at times and embracing simple eating habits rather than constant snacking.

Hugh Jackman

To prepare for physically demanding roles, Hugh Jackman has combined intense strength training with intermittent fasting. He timed his meals carefully around workouts to support muscle gain while remaining lean.

Jessica Biel

Jessica Biel has joked about and participated in goat yoga, a fitness trend where participants perform yoga while goats wander freely around them, creating a surprisingly challenging and entertaining workout.

David Blaine

Magician David Blaine has trained extensively in breath-holding and physiological conditioning to perform endurance stunts. His unusual routines involve techniques more commonly associated with elite free divers than entertainers.

Mayim Bialik

Mayim Bialik follows a vegan lifestyle and has long advocated plant-based eating. Her approach combines nutritional choices with broader ethical beliefs, making it a defining part of her public wellness philosophy.

Bryan Johnson

Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson follows one of the world’s most publicized longevity routines, involving strict meal timing, constant biometric monitoring, dozens of daily supplements, and carefully measured exercise in pursuit of slowing biological aging.

15 People Share the Movie So Disturbing They Couldn’t Get Through It

There is a time for every hardcore movie fan, particularly during their teen years, where they are dared (by themselves or others) to watch harrowing films. These are movies with subject matters, content, or just vibes that make them near impossible to watch all the way through.

Different users of Reddit came together to share their experiences, including the movies that made them take a break before finishing them, if they finished them at all. Consider this list not a dare for you to follow in their footsteps, but a fair warning to avoid most if not all of these movies.

Inside

Part of the New French Extremity movement, Inside has earned a reputation as one of the most intense horror films ever made. Its relentless atmosphere and uncompromising violence have caused countless viewers to abandon it before the credits roll.

The Last House on the Left

Wes Craven’s debut remains one of horror’s most controversial films. Its raw filmmaking style and deeply upsetting subject matter continue to make it an exceptionally difficult watch for many audiences.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The original Swedish adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s novel is widely praised for its performances and faithful storytelling. At the same time, its bleak atmosphere and disturbing subject matter make it an emotionally demanding watch that many viewers struggle to finish.

The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez

This true crime documentary series chronicles a heartbreaking real-life case that many find emotionally unbearable. Its devastating subject matter makes it one of the most difficult documentaries to watch from beginning to end.

Watership Down

Although animated, Watership Down is far from a typical family film. Its surprisingly dark tone and unsettling imagery have traumatized unsuspecting viewers for generations.

Threads

This British television film presents the aftermath of nuclear war with chilling realism. Its relentlessly bleak depiction of societal collapse has left many viewers emotionally drained long before the final scene.

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial drama remains infamous for its shocking content and political themes. Its disturbing imagery has made it one of cinema’s most notoriously difficult films to sit through.

I Spit on Your Grave

Known as one of exploitation cinema’s most controversial titles, I Spit on Your Grave pushes audiences with prolonged scenes of brutality that many find too upsetting to continue watching.

Cannibal Holocaust

Few horror films have generated as much controversy as Cannibal Holocaust. Its graphic violence, documentary presentation, and inclusion of real animal deaths continue to make it an especially challenging experience.

Bone Tomahawk

What begins as a slow-burning western gradually transforms into brutal horror. One particularly infamous sequence has become legendary for catching audiences completely off guard with its graphic violence.

Ghosts of Rwanda

This PBS documentary examines the Rwandan genocide through firsthand accounts and historical footage. Its emotionally devastating subject matter makes it an incredibly difficult viewing experience despite its historical importance.

A Serbian Film

Few films have achieved the notorious reputation of A Serbian Film. Its deliberately shocking content has made it a benchmark for extreme cinema and one that many viewers simply cannot finish.

Free Solo

Not every entry discussed on the thread was horror-themed, as shown by the inclusion of Free Solo. The documentary’s real-life footage of Alex Honnold climbing without ropes creates an overwhelming sense of anxiety that some viewers find physically unbearable.

The Impossible

Based on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, The Impossible recreates the disaster with remarkable realism. Its relentless tension and emotional intensity can be overwhelming, particularly for viewers affected by real-world tragedies.

The Road

Starring Viggo Mortensen, The Road depicts a father and son’s struggle through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Its crushing atmosphere and persistent sense of hopelessness make it one of the bleakest survival films ever made.

15 Horror Movies Where the ‘Scare’ Hits a Little Too Close to Home

Stories of ghosts, demons, and all kinds of supernatural horrors have their own sense of dread. When used well, they are incredibly effective, although we can always take comfort in the fact that none of that exists. We are safe in our reality.

But what happens when movies depict situations that can potentially happen? The reality you’re living in isn’t as safe anymore, since you don’t know if your neighbour has any ulterior motives for your physical wellbeing. These are the horror movies that, like it or not, are incredibly plausible.

The Strangers

A couple’s quiet night turns into a nightmare when masked intruders terrorize them for no apparent reason. The randomness of the attack makes the film especially disturbing, echoing real-life home invasion fears rather than supernatural horror.

Funny Games

Two polite young men invade a family’s vacation home and subject them to psychological torture. The film’s greatest horror comes from its realistic violence and the unsettling absence of any larger motive behind the cruelty.

Hush

A deaf writer living alone in the woods becomes the target of a masked killer. The film builds suspense from believable circumstances, forcing its protagonist to rely on intelligence instead of impossible action-movie heroics.

Green Room

After witnessing a murder backstage at a remote music venue, a punk band is trapped by violent white supremacists. Every escalation feels grounded, making the story’s brutality frighteningly believable.

Eden Lake

A weekend getaway spirals into horror after a confrontation with a group of violent teenagers. The film’s realistic setting and plausible chain of events make its relentless tension especially difficult to shake.

Creep

A videographer accepts what seems like a simple freelance job in a remote cabin. The increasingly uncomfortable interactions mirror real-world situations where ignoring red flags can have terrifying consequences.

The Invitation

A dinner party slowly becomes more unsettling as old friends reunite under unusual circumstances. The horror grows from emotional manipulation and cult psychology rather than supernatural events.

The Gift

An unexpected reunion with an old acquaintance gradually exposes buried secrets and growing paranoia. The film demonstrates how unresolved personal history can become frightening without relying on traditional horror tropes.

Misery

After a car accident, a novelist is rescued by his self-proclaimed biggest fan. His captor’s obsessive behavior is terrifying precisely because dangerous celebrity fixations have occurred in the real world.

The Vanishing

When a woman disappears during a roadside stop, her boyfriend becomes consumed by finding answers. The film’s chilling realism and ordinary setting make its final revelation particularly haunting.

Compliance

Based on the real strip-search phone call scam, the film follows employees manipulated into committing disturbing acts by someone falsely claiming to be a police officer. Its events are unsettling because similar crimes actually occurred.

Speak No Evil

A family accepts an invitation from friendly vacation acquaintances, only to ignore increasingly alarming behavior out of politeness. The horror stems from the relatable discomfort of avoiding social confrontation for far too long.

Watcher

An American woman living abroad becomes convinced someone is following her. The film explores isolation, dismissed concerns, and the fear of not being believed, all within an entirely realistic framework.

Vacancy

A stranded couple checks into a remote motel and discovers they are being targeted for snuff films. The isolated location and human perpetrators make the premise far more believable than supernatural horror.

The Rental

What begins as a relaxing weekend in a vacation rental turns terrifying when two couples realize someone may be secretly watching them. The film taps into modern anxieties surrounding hidden cameras, privacy, and trusting complete strangers with temporary accommodations.

Buddy: Too Many Cooks Creator Delivers His Horror Take on Barney

It takes a lot to make a stew, or so we were taught by the 2014 viral sensation “Too Many Cooks.” The Adult Swim short took viewers through a genre-bending walk through television history, beginning with the title credits of a TGIF sitcom like Full House, transitioning to a gritty cop show or a ’90s sci-fi program, with plenty of slasher horror in between. With the release of Buddy this August, “Too Many Cooks” creator Casper Kelly hopes to show it doesn’t take much to make a horror movie—it just takes adding a sinister layer to something made for kids.

The first teaser for Buddy mostly consists of grainy footage of a ’90s children’s program, in which the orange unicorn Buddy beckons the viewer closer while kids frolic in the playground behind him. A cheery theme song plays in the background, though occasionally distorted or interrupted by sharp tones, accompanied by images of frightened and mangled kids. A single shot of a concerned woman played by The Penguin‘s Cristin Milioti gives us our one look at the movie’s protagonist Grace, a suburbanite who investigates the truth of Buddy‘s world.

Co-written by Kelly and Jamie King, Buddy co-stars Topher Grace as Grace’s husband, alongside the exact people you’d expect to appear in a horror take on Barney. Keegan-Michael Key voices the central figure, while Patton Oswalt voices a backpack called Strappy, Clint Howard plays the crazy cowboy puppet George, and Michael Shannon does double duty as the voice of a train and a ventriloquist’s dummy.

All of that casting makes sense, as does Kelly’s involvement. Half of the fun of “Too Many Cooks” was, of course, the level of detail that Kelly brought to the material. The other half, of course, was the way he made those elements turn surreal and terrifying. It wasn’t just that a serial killer appeared alongside the ever-expanding cast of the fictional sitcom. It’s that the line between reality and fiction blurred as the characters ran through backlots to hide from the killer, their glowing title credits giving them away.

If Kelly can bring that same approach to Buddy, then he’ll be able to find sublime terror in a kid’s show, while still attending to the details of that show. However, a bigger question remains: can he do that in a way that’s unique and engaging?

Five Nights at Freddy’s came out the same year as “Too Many Cooks,” and has expanded into a multimedia franchise. The 2018 short “The Hug” did it’s own take, while Warner Bros. released The Banana Splits Movie in 2019, another killer kid’s show movie, this time with officially-licensed characters from that show. Even the Terrifier franchise got in on the act, with an extended kid’s program sequence in the second movie. As of this writing, Daniel Kaluuya and Ayo Edebiri are making an official Barney movie for A24, which may have horror elements, or may be a more dramatic take on the material, like 2017’s Brigsby Bear.

With so many similar works already out there, can Buddy stand out? After all, too many cooks can spoil the broth.

Buddy releases in theaters on August 28, 2026.

Godzilla Minus Zero Teaser Returns to the Franchise’s Central Moral

For decades, Godzilla movies have been about one thing: people in giant rubber monster costumes stomping around tiny little sets. Especially in America, where the films that Toho made for its native Japan were imported as badly dubbed B-movies, Godzilla felt more like Saturday morning escapism than proper art. Of course, we all knew that the original film from 1954 was a response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And entries such as Godzilla 1985 and, more recently, Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One wrapped rich social themes around the central kaiju. But there was always a sense of fun and adventure, even in these outings.

The first teaser for the much-anticipated sequel Godzilla Minus Zero suggests that playtime is over, and it’s time to get back to the central question that launched the franchise: how do we live in a world with atomic weapons? In the short teaser, we see two of our main characters from the first film, Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), arguing over the decision to drop an atomic bomb. “Our Crime and Punishment,” reads the on-screen text. “Returning to Zero Is Not an Option.” A bomb drops, and Godzilla arises again, letting loose his signiture roar.

From the few minutes of footage shown, we can guess that Godzilla Minus Zero will see Japan consider using atomic weapons to destroy Godzilla, despite the fact that such weaponry created the King of the Monsters in the first place. Such a plot would be in keeping with the themes of Godzilla Minus One, in which writer and director Takashi Yamazaki turned his attention away from American sins during World War II to examine Japan’s actions. He doesn’t let America off the hook—an early scene ties the birth of Godzilla directly to U.S. testing weapons at Bikini Atoll—but he’s more interested in his country’s response to what happened.

That approach permitted Godzilla Minus One to go in a different direction from previous Godzilla movies, allowing it to grapple with new heavy themes.

Where the original film dealt with the specter of atomic weaponry manifesting in the form of a monster that destroys cities anew, Shin Godzilla from 2016 took inspiration from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. In that movie, Godzilla was a threat, but worse was the beaucracy that proved totally unable to handle a crisis. In Godzilla Minus One, American attacks created the monster, but Japan added death to death through its practice of using kamikaze pilots. In its triumphant final moments, Kōichi chooses life and decides against sacrificing himself.

From the teaser, we can see that Godzilla Minus Zero will ask Kōichi and Kenji to make that choice again. Against the threat of an unstoppable force, while they give into their fears and become monsters themselves? Or will they find a way to embrace life once again, and walk a different path? Godzilla Minus Zero may bring the franchise back to the horror of atomic weapons, but maybe it too will chart out a new path for the series.

Godzilla Minus Zero arrives in theaters on November 6, 2026.

Ian McKellen Single-Handedly Elevated Nerd Culture in the 2000s

“We are the future, Charles. Not them.” When Ian McKellen delivered this line in 2000’s X-Men, he did so as Erik Lehnsherr a.k.a. Magneto. By “we,” he meant mutants, people who develop incredible powers at puberty; by “them,” he meant the rest of humanity. But the phrase may very well also refer to a different change happening in the world, one way more successful than any of the plots that Magneto hatched with his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

Along with 1998’s Blade, 2002’s Spider-Man, and 2005’s Batman Begins, X-Men helped pave the way for the era of superhero domination, best represented by the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At the same time, McKellen also brought his significant gravitas to Gandalf the Grey in the Lord of the Rings franchise, aiding that trilogy’s eventual victory at the 2004 Academy Awards. Thus, in the early 2000s, nerds were the future, not the average moviegoer. And thanks to McKellen’s committed work in both series, nerd culture didn’t just become popular—it became respectable.

[Editor’s Note: Ian McKellen is fine. This is not a eulogy. We were just thinking about how awesome he was in X-Men and Lord of the Rings and wanted to write about it.]

Of course, both X-Men and Lord of the Rings had their rabid fans before 2000. Although they initially received a mixed reception when released in the mid-1950s, the Lord of the Rings novels exploded in popularity among fantasy fans in the 1960s, and directly contributed to the growth of the genre. “Frodo Lives!” appeared in graffiti across the U.S. and Led Zeppelin sang about Gollum in “Ramble On,” but most considered the story too dense for general consumption—a point seemingly confirmed by the visually-stunning but narratively messy Ralph Bakshi animated features.

Likewise, the X-Men were the most popular franchise in comics by the time writer Chris Claremont completed his 17-year run in 1991, turning a C-tier Marvel property into a sensation. Claremont’s work was known for its denseness, from the florid prose he stuffed into caption boxes to his soap operatic plots about clones, time-travel, and aliens, many of which unfolded over years of ongoing stories. The X-Men popped up in cartoons and video games, but never got so much as a proper TV show.

In both cases, the movie adaptations worked, in part, because they streamlined the narratives and cut out some of the weirdest stuff. Gone were Tom Bombadil and (most of) the songs from Lord of the Rings. The X-Men wore black leather instead of yellow spandex, and the short, hairy, Canadian Wolverine was played by the tall, handsome Australian Hugh Jackman. There was a sense that as much as these movies loved their source material, there were parts deemed too goofy, too embarrassing for wider public.

Not so with McKellen’s performance. In Lord of the Rings, McKellen had to glue hair to his face and don a false nose. He had to pretend that he towered over his cast mates and deliver phrases like “Fool of a Took!” as if his life depended on it. In X-Men, McKellen wore a goofy helmet and had to address people who called themselves Sabretooth and Toad as if those were normal names that anyone could have.

Yet, he did it, fully embodying the humanity of both over-the-top characters. McKellen found realism in explicitly unrealistic worlds, whether it be the affection that Gandalf has for Frodo or the bond between Magneto and Xavier. Even better are the scenes in which McKellen got to unleash his gravitas. McKellen’s voice booms when Gandalf stares down the Balrog and bellows, “You shall not pass!” He may have been an actor on a set, delivering his lines to a stand in for a digital effect, but no one doubted that the words he muttered were a spell summoning deep magics, that his commands would cause the elements to stop. We have no problem suspending disbelief as Magneto floats across an expanse while his plastic cell collapses, because McKellen has such power when he mocks the guards for not killing him earlier.

Nerds watching these scenes recognize McKellen as the wizard and supervillain they’ve loved for years. But for the larger viewing audience, these scenes played as high drama, just as powerful as the Shakespeare works that McKellen had done on stage. Thanks to McKellen’s commitment, Lord of the Rings and X-Men weren’t just a novelty that briefly captured the public’s attention. They were art, worthy of elevating the form, moving to the future of cinema.

The 20 Greatest Cop Shows of All Time

Even in these days of endless entertainment options, it’s hard to turn on a TV and not see a cop. Police have been a mainstay of the medium since the now-lost series The Plainclothesman debuted in 1949, and especially when Dragnet made the jump from radio to television two years later. Yet, as omnipresent as they are on television, professional police are a relatively recent part of American life, only coming into being after the first departments were established in Boston and New York in 1838 and 1844, respectively. Yet, television helped normalize policing in the American consciousness, just as much as police stories helped make TV the preferred home for episodic adventures and drama.

That combination can make it difficult to enjoy TV shows about police, and yet even the most ardent defunding advocate can admire the artistry of a tense thrill sequence or enjoy a workplace comedy joke. So it’s through that lens that we look back at the history of television to rank the best cop shows of all time.

But first, just the facts: we’re dealing with only American shows about police on the state or local level. So you won’t find Cracker or Prime Suspect here, nor will you find shows about FBI agents, sheriffs, or marshals; sorry Dale Cooper, Andy Taylor, and Raylan Givens. But with that out of the way, let’s examine this line-up of compelling shows about those who enforce law and order.

20. T.J. Hooker (1982–1986)

If you know T.J. Hooker at all, you probably think of it as the show that William Shatner did after Star Trek, co-starring heartthrobs Adrian Zmed and Heather Locklear, as well as future Star Trek: Voyager and Deep Space Nine actors Richard Herd and James Darren. In your memory, T.J. Hooker is probably a quaint, if kind of corny, show about a veteran officer who delivers hammy speeches to cop and criminal alike.

Certainly, a lot of T.J. Hooker is exactly that, with the star going full Shatner when not grinning in bewilderment at the wholesome shenanigans of Zmed’s Vincent Romano and Locklear’s Stacy Sheridan. Everything else in the show is a gritty crime drama in the vein of Dirty Harry—the second episode even rips off the school bus scene from that movie. The show presents Southern California as a place of constant danger, with murderers and rapists at every turn. Furthermore, most of Hooker’s melodramatic speeches are about how lawyers, psychologists, and reporters show too much sympathy for criminals, and keep cops from stopping the bad guys by any means necessary. It’s a weird juxtaposition, one that results in a show that isn’t good, really, but is fascinating to watch.

19. Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–1999)

The cop show landscape of the 1990s was ruled by two series: the gritty, boundary-pushing NYPD Blue and the reliable Law & Order. Homicide: Life on the Street came in distant third place, as it does on this list, a fact that irritates its fans. It’s easy to see why people love Homicide so much. It has an incredible pedigree, created by two-time Oscar nominee Paul Attanasio and based on the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon. Its ensemble cast included Andre Braugher, Yaphet Kotto, Melissa Leo, and Richard Belzer, who debuted his character John Munch on the show. Film legends such as Barry Levinson, Whit Stillman, Barbara Koppell, and Kathryn Bigelow directed episodes.

So why is Homicide still falling so far down the list, even in 2026? Because the show never figured out what it wanted to be. Despite drawing inspiration from Simon’s true crime reporting, Homicide borrowed heavily from independent cinema to highlight its artifice. Hard cuts would show multiple takes of a single line reading, and interactions in “the Box,” the precinct’s interrogation room, became opportunities for theatrical scenery-chewing. Worse, NBC began toying with the show after season 3, culminating with a disastrous and unrecognizable seventh season. In the end, Homicide had nothing more than potential, potential that would be realized by the second series based on Simon’s book.

18. Dragnet (1951–1959)

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Dragnet, the series created by and starring Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday. Originally a popular radio show that became a sensation when it went to TV, Dragnet realized the ambitions of reformers who sought to change the public’s perception of police. Where most Americans thought of police as inconveniences, if not the very type of standing army warned against in the Declaration of Independence, Dragnet presented its officers as professional, dispassionate, and effective. And, thanks to Webb’s cooperation with the LAPD, Dragnet got to present its episodes as realistic, a strategy countless other shows would emulate.

That said, influence isn’t the same as quality, and Dragnet‘s a tough watch in 2026. Each episode follows the same basic formula, in which Friday and his partner (most often Frank Smith, played by Ben Alexander) arrive to investigate a crime, talk to some witnesses and suspects, and solve the case. While the cases do have their flamboyant moments, as demonstrated by the stunts in premiere episode “The Human Bomb,” the show played it safe, something the public craved at the time, but has aged poorly.

17. The Rookie (2018–Present)

In a lot of ways, The Rookie feels like an update on T.J. Hooker. Once again, we have a charismatic actor known for playing a space traveller, now playing a man who becomes a beat cop later in life. And, as with T. J. Hooker, the star’s considerable charm helps to smooth over some of the more unsavory parts of the series.

In this case, that star is Nathan Fillion as John Nolan, a 45-year-old builder who moves from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles after his divorce to become a police officer. Despite the unlikely premise, The Rookie sticks to the standard police procedural formula: a new case every week, tough chiefs and fresh-faced newcomers, character actors as vibrant villains. But Fillion’s natural charisma allows The Rookie to laugh itself, softening the self-importance that plagues so many modern cop shows.

16. Sledge Hammer! (1986–1988)

Everything you need to know about Sledge Hammer! can be learned by watching the finale of the first season. Believing that the show’s low ratings meant it was bound for cancellation, creator Alan Spencer had his reactionary hero Inspector Sledge Hammer (David Rasche, better known today for Succession) fail to stop a terrorist’s nuclear bomb. As a result, the season ends with not just the death of every character, but also the destruction of Los Angeles. When the show returned for a surprise second season, Spencer just began the first episode “five years before that nuclear explosion” and carried on.

The ridiculous storytelling choice works because Sledge Hammer! is a ridiculous show, intentionally so. Inspector Hammer follows in the footsteps of Inspector Harry Callahan of Dirty Harry fame, albeit in the shiny, overheated form that violent cop movies took in the 1980s. Carrying a .44 Magnum with his namesake engraved on the handle, Hammer must not only deal with the criminal scum of San Francisco, but also his sensitive new partner Dori Doreau (Anne-Marie Martin) and his oft-apoplectic boss, Captain Trunk (Harrison Page). Fortunately, he can just shoot the criminals, which Sledge Hammer! plays for absurd comedy.

15. Car 54 Where Are You? (1961–1963)

Much milder than Sledge Hammer! but no less funny, Car 54, Where Are You? was the first sitcom about police, and still one of the best. The series paired the short, excitable Gunther Toody (Joe E. Ross) with the tall and taciturn Frances Muldoon (Fred Gwynne) as partners in the New York police department. The easy chemistry between the two, combined with sharp comedy writing of the era, make Car 54, Where Are You? incredibly fun, even today.

For example of what the show does best, see season one episode “Something Nice for Sol,” in which Toody convinces the precinct to get some new shoes for their desk sergeant, Sol Abrams (Nathaniel Frey). Toody and Muldoon spend the entire episode trying to discretely measure Sol’s shoe size, shenanigans made all the more heightened because they happen in a police department. The show’s style might be outdated, but the gags are as funny as ever.

14. Cagney & Lacey (1982–1988)

While actual policing is inherently conservative and works to maintain the status quo, police shows tend to be quite progressive. Thus, you get Nipsey Russell on Car 54, Where Are You?, and gay characters portrayed in a positive light in Barney Miller and NYPD Blue. Cagney & Lacey is one of the best examples of the phenomenon, a series that stars Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly as Detectives Mary Beth Lacey and Christine Cagney.

Certainly, Cagney & Lacey dealt with sexism on the force, but no more so than The Mary Tyler Moore Show or any other series about working women. Gless played Cagney as a no-nonsense career woman, who wanted on-the-job success more than a husband or children. Daly’s Lacey had to balance her police work with her duties as a wife and mother, often creating tension. While those dynamics could make episodes didactic, Gless and Daly brought a lightness and humanity to the part that made even the preachiest moments feel human.

13. The Shield (2002–2008)

Obviously, The Shield isn’t a bad a show, or it wouldn’t be on this list at all. But now, nearly two decades after its conclusion, it’s clear that The Shield was never the show it pretended to be. During its original run on FX, The Shield purported to be a study about the grey morality of policing, the compromises we have to make in order to feel safe. Inspired by the Rampart Scandal, creator Shawn Ryan cast Michael Chiklis (who formerly played a cuddly officer on The Commish) as Detective Vic Mackey, whose Strike Team has broad leeway to deal with exceptional crimes, and yet he still crosses line after line.

Looking back, we can see that The Shield never took its question seriously. From the moment that Mackey tortures a suspect to find a missing girl in the pilot, its clear that The Shield believes that we unquestionably need guys like Mackey to deal with the increasingly terrifying villains introduced each new season. That belief makes The Shield morally reprehensible pulp, but the show’s cast and big-time guest stars, including heralded turns by Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker, make it high-quality, morally reprehensible pulp.

12. Starsky & Hutch (1975–1979)

In the same way that cop shows made policing look progressive, they also make it look cool. Before that approach reached its apex with Miami Vice, there was Starsky & Hutch, which brought to television the buddy cop formula being developed by Freebie and the Bean and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul play David Starsky and Kenneth “Hutch” Hutchison, a mismatched pair of detectives working in Southern California.

While the series definitely addressed antagonisms between the leads, most episodes emphasized their friendship. The camaraderie and chemistry that Glaser and Soul brought to the part paired well the with the show’s action, especially in the first two seasons. Moreover, the friendship made Starsky & Hutch feel like two of the coolest dudes on television, even if they were stopping trouble instead of causing it.

11. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–2015)

Cop shows don’t just portray officers as moral and efficient defenders of the weak. They also depict policing as cutting-edge technology, positioning the forces of law and order as advanced and civilized, in contrast to the barbarian criminal element. Such has been the case since August Vollmer, “the father of modern policing,” advocated for the science of criminology in the 1920s and integrated it into his interactions with the media, but rarely has the technological side been as foregrounded as it was on the CBS series CSI.

CSI starred Manhunter‘s William Petersen as Dr. Gil Grissom, leader of a team of forensic scientists in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Along with Catherine Willows (Marg Helgenberger), Grissom and his unit analyze blood-splatter, run fingerprints through databases, and decode DNA to find ironclad proof of guilt, even in the most unlikely of cases. The series was a true phenomenon throughout the 2000s, making fans of Quentin Tarantino (who directed the season five finale “Grave Danger”) and convincing the public that human police may be fallible, but police science is not.

10. True Detective (2014–Present)

Few television shows are harder to rank than True Detective. Had the series ended after its electric first season, then it would easily be in the top five. Had it ceased after its disastrous second season, it wouldn’t make this list at all. Thankfully, the solid third and fourth seasons are enough to not just secure its position in our rankings, but to make the top 10.

Created by Nic Pizzolatto, True Detective takes an anthology approach inspired by the pulp magazines that give the show its name. Pizzolatto and director Cary Joji Fukunaga caught lightning in a bottle for its first season, which paired Woody Harrelson‘s straight-laced hypocrite with Matthew McConaughey‘s burn-out weirdo as detectives on a case with supernatural overtones. Pizzolatto’s style became a liability with season two, but the additions of filmmakers such as Jeremy Saulnier and Issa López helped return True Detective to some of its former glory.

9. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013–2021)

A spiritual successor to co-creator Michael Schur’s workplace comedies The Office and Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine wisely eschewed the documentary conceit of those series and committed itself to being a workplace comedy. Schur and co-creator/showrunner Dan Goor took what could have been just an Andy Samberg vehicle and turned it into one of the most delightful ensemble shows on television, one that used its police precinct setting as a reliable story engine.

Joining Samberg’s lovable slacker Jake Peralta is a cast of well-drawn characters that include Melissa Fumero as overachiever Amy Santiago, Stephanie Beatriz as the tough Rosa Diaz, and Terry Crews as soft-hearted muscleman Terry Jeffords. The true standout is Andre Braugher as Captain Raymond Holt, who retains all the gravitas of his days on Homicide: Life on the Street, but adds a layer of comedic precision that no one would have expected.

8. NYPD Blue (1993–2005)

Some will certainly see this low ranking and immediately get angry, so let’s get this out of the way first: NYPD Blue is excellent. Not only does the series achieve the rare feat of surviving the loss of multiple handsome male leads, elevating Dennis Franz’ Andy Sipowicz to the position of prime-time mainstay, but it tells compelling, boundary-pushing stories on network TV. It’s no understatement to say that NYPD Blue paved the way for the Golden Age of Television. And yet, NYPD Blue remains in the shadow of the show that paved its way, a series that holds up even better and will be discussed a few entries higher.

But let’s set that aside to praise NYPD Blue for what it does well. Shot on gritty film and employing a day-in-the-life format, the series focused largely on Sipowicz and his colleagues through the daily grind of their jobs. Although just as supportive of policing as any other show on this list, NYPD Blue creators Steven Bochco and David Milch do turn their attention to the unsavory parts of the institution. The results don’t always work (see Gordon Clapp’s Medavoy, perhaps the most irritating character in television history), but they also allow Franz to make Sipowicz into a three-dimensional figure rarely seen before on a cop show.

7. Miami Vice (1984–1989)

All of the shows on this list endeavor to make police look competent and effective. But Miami Vice takes it one more step to make police officers look cool. Created by television veteran Anthony Yerkovich, Miami Vice made Don Johnson‘s Sonny Crockett and Philip Michael Thomas’ Rico Tubbs two of the hippest figures of the ’80s, despite the show’s reactionary War on Drugs politics.

The story of undercover detectives working the drug trade of Southern Florida, Miami Vice still holds to standard police procedural conventions. Yet, it coats them with a hip aesthetic, from its neon color palette to its Jan Hammer theme to the visual contributions of filmmaker Michael Mann, who also served as executive producer. So dominant was Miami Vice in the ’80s that no attempt to revive the franchise, including a 2006 movie directed by Mann, could replicate the success of the original series.

6. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999–Present)

Created in 1990 by Dick Wolf, Law & Order was the purest update of the Dragnet model. Each episode purported to be “ripped from the headlines,” promising realistic cases, investigated by dedicated professionals and prosecuted by lawyers with a passion for justice. Law & Order forever changed the way we think about the criminal justice system, and spawning a host of spinoffs, none more successful than Special Victims Unit.

SVU did away with the high-minded pretensions of the original series and embraced its nasty pulp heart. Focusing on a division dedicated to sexual crimes allowed the show to deal with only the most sensational stories, and while the series has a pleasing supporting cast—including John Munch, imported from Homicide, and Ice-T’s Fin Tutuola—the show’s anchor has always been Mariska Hargitay’s dedicated but haunted Olivia Benson, who worked best when partnered with Christopher Meloni’s violent family man Elliot Stabler. Flawed heroes for a nasty show, SVU gives the masses the dark pleasures of noir and exploitation works, while staying safely within the police procedural genre.

5. Police Squad! (1982)

Police Squad! aired just six episodes. But it was so funny, so packed with jokes, that it became an immediate cult hit, soon spawning three Naked Gun films with original star Leslie Nielsen and a recent legacy sequel with Liam Neeson. Creators David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker applied the same formula that brought them great success with 1980’s Airplane!, riffing on straight-laced material (specifically the Lee Marvin series M Squad) by amping up the absurdity around Nielsen’s stoic Frank Drebin.

Each of Police Squad!‘s six episodes are packed with jokes, starting with the opening credits, in which see each character introduced by returning fire at an unseen gunman (including Abraham Lincoln, who survives his assassination attempt to shoot back at John Wilkes Booth). The gags range from the subtle (a stretcher from a crime scene persists in the background of several shots) to the corny (“I told you, no sax before the fight,” Frank tells a boxer) to the sublime (when a gangster asks, “Who are you? How did you get in here?” Frank answers, “I’m a locksmith, and I’m a locksmith”). With such quality jokes, six episodes is enough to make Police Squad! one of the best police shows of all time.

4. Columbo (1971–1979, 1989–2003)

By 1971, the New Hollywood movement was well underway. But television audiences were not necessarily ready to welcome gritty male heroes like Harry Callahan and Popeye Doyle into their living rooms. So they got the softer, kinder vision in Peter Falk as the titular detective of Columbo, and the results were spectacular. Originally created by Richard Levinson and William Link in their short story “Enough Rope,” which they then turned into a successful stage play, Columbo first hit the screen in a TV movie, played by Bert Freed. But when the story was remade in 1968 as “Prescription: Murder” with Falk in the part, the stage was set for television history.

Neither “Prescription: Murder” nor its 1971 follow-up “Ransom for a Dead Man” featured the fully-formed Columbo. But by the time the premiere episode “Murder By the Book” (directed by a young Steven Spielberg!) hit the airwaves in 1971, all the hallmarks were there: the dirty raincoat, the references to his wife, the stopping criminals for just one more thing. Combined with a host of great guest stars that included William Shatner, Dick Van Dyke, and Janet Leigh, Columbo is cozy comfort viewing at its finest.

3. Hill Street Blues (1981–1987)

Remember how we said that NYPD Blue is good, but still in the shadow of its predecessor? Here is the predecessor, Hill Street Blues, created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll. Inspired (unofficially) by writer Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, Hill Street Blues was the first cop show to foreground the work of policing. The series takes an ensemble approach, with characters with a range of roles in the department each pursuing their own storylines, which occur between morning roll call (concluded by Sgt. Phil Esterhaus’s admonition, “Let’s be safe out there”) and the evening, when Captain Frank Furillo convenes with his girlfriend, defense attorney Joyce Davenport.

In addition to Esterhaus (Michael Conrad), Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti), and Davenport (Veronica Hamel), most episodes also check in on beat cops Bobby Hill (Michael Warren) and Andy Renko (Charles Haid), detective Henry Goldblume (Joe Spano), and undercover officers Washington (Taurean Blacque) and LaRue (Kiel Martin). Although often messy, Hill Street Blues adds a level of realism that breaks the cop show out of the confines of the procedural and opens new dramatic avenues.

2. Barney Miller (1975–1982)

Most of the shows on this list have pretty great theme songs. But none, absolutely none, go as unnecessarily hard as the theme to Barney Miller. Despite the promise of action by the rocking opening credits, Barney Miller is an unfailingly gentle show. Early on, the series establishes a formula that works, with each episode featuring an A-plot built around a suspect brought into the precinct and a B-plot following a cast member’s personal issue. Violence rarely occurs, only a handful of episodes leave the central precinct set, and nearly every conflict resolves through Barney’s level-headed intercession.

Such a low-stakes approach might get boring, but Barney Miller works because of its fantastic cast. As the paternalistic and endlessly patient Barney, Hal Linden is the ideal straight man, always ready with a perfect reaction shot. Max Gail’s lovable himbo Wojciehowicz (it’s spelled like it sounds) and Ron Glass’ sophisticated Harris may be the only characters to remain in all seven seasons, but the others who come in and out, especially Abe Vigoda’s old-timer Fish and Nick Soo’s sardonic Yemana, make the most of their stays. Although often cited as the most realistic depiction of actual police work, Barney Miller presents the ultimate fantasy of policing, that the departments consist of understanding people who solve problems through empathetic debate, never force.

1. The Wire (2002–2008)

In the very first scene of The Wire, Baltimore homicide detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) listens to the story of a recent murder victim, nicknamed Snot Boogey. After a witness (Jamal Bostic-Smith) recounts how Snot would constantly steal from crap games, despite threats of violence, McNulty asks why they would let him play. “You got to, man,” answers the incredulous friend. “This is America.”

That one scene captures everything great about The Wire, created by journalist and Homicide author David Simon. It’s not just that the scene looks directly at the way economic disparity and the criminal justice system create suffering in America. It’s the deft way the show turns realistic, street-level dialogue into the stuff of poetry, a feat surpassed later when McNulty and his partner Bunk (Wendell Pierce) conduct an entire investigation while only exchanging f-bombs. The Wire managed to present its cops and criminals as normal, fallible people, and to address some of the most pressing issues in the country, without ever failing to be impeccably-crafted and endlessly-engaging art.

15 Times a Movie Accidentally Predicted Real Events

Movies are built to imagine possibilities, but every so often fiction ends up colliding with reality in ways nobody could have planned. A scene, idea, or entire plot can feel purely invented when it premieres, only for real life to echo it years later with unsettling accuracy. Sometimes it is technology, politics, disasters, or cultural shifts that line up so closely it feels almost impossible. These moments are not always exact, but the similarities can still be striking enough to make people look back with new perspective. Here are fifteen films that seemed fictional at first, but later felt much closer to reality.

The Truman Show (1998)

Long before social media turned everyday life into constant performance, this film explored living under nonstop observation and public consumption.

Contagion (2011)

Its depiction of a fast spreading global virus, public panic, misinformation, and lockdowns felt eerily close to the COVID 19 pandemic years later.

Network (1976)

The film anticipated the rise of outrage driven news cycles and media built around emotional reactions rather than information.

Idiocracy (2006)

Its exaggerated world of anti intellectualism and corporate dominance has become a frequent comparison point in modern public discourse.

The China Syndrome (1979)

Released just days before the Three Mile Island accident, its nuclear disaster plot suddenly felt terrifyingly relevant.

Enemy of the State (1998)

Years before the Snowden revelations, it imagined mass surveillance and government data tracking on a massive scale.

Back to the Future Part II (1989)

While many predictions missed, it strangely got video calls, wearable tech, and cashless payments surprisingly close.

Minority Report (2002)

Personalized ads, gesture based interfaces, and predictive policing all moved closer to reality than expected.

The Social Network (2010)

It captured the coming scale of social media influence and how deeply online platforms would shape real life relationships.

Her (2013)

Its emotionally complex AI relationships feel much less distant now as conversational AI becomes part of daily life.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The film imagined tablet like devices, voice controlled systems, and advanced AI decades before they became normal.

The Running Man (1987)

Its world of violent entertainment blended with reality television feels less exaggerated after decades of media escalation.

Wag the Dog (1997)

Its story of manufactured media narratives and political distraction still feels sharply relevant in modern politics.

Children of Men (2006)

The themes of migration crises, social collapse, and widespread instability feel much closer to current global tensions.

Soylent Green (1973)

Its warnings about overpopulation, environmental collapse, and resource scarcity continue to feel disturbingly current.

15 Times a Character Should Have Just Gone Home

Movies need a reason to happen, and said reason can’t always be an external force leaving a character without a choice. We always prefer to follow characters that decide their fate, even if their decisions lead them to end up worse than how they started.

In hindsight, the safest option would have been to head home and let someone else deal with the problem. Of course, that wouldn’t make for much of a movie or television episode. Still, it’s hard not to wonder how many fictional lives could have been saved if these characters had simply minded their own business.

Jeff, Rear Window

Confined to his apartment with a broken leg, Jeff becomes obsessed with watching his neighbors. Reporting his suspicions and leaving the investigation to the police would have spared him a deadly confrontation with Lars Thorwald.

Ellen Ripley, Alien

Ripley initially argues against letting Kane back aboard the Nostromo because of quarantine regulations. Once overruled, she stays with the mission instead of leaving, leading to the crew’s deadly encounter with the Xenomorph.

Marion Crane, Psycho

Marion could have continued driving and returned the stolen money before reaching the Bates Motel. Choosing to stop for the night instead places her directly in Norman Bates’ path with fatal consequences.

Clarice Starling, The Silence of the Lambs

Clarice follows the Buffalo Bill investigation with remarkable courage, but the climax leaves her alone in a serial killer’s basement. Calling for backup before entering the house would have been the safer option.

Peter Parker, Spider-Man: No Way Home

Peter’s decision to ask Doctor Strange for a reality-altering spell rather than accepting college admissions results unleashes multiversal chaos. Sometimes going home and filling out transfer applications would have been the better plan.

Jonathan Harker, Dracula

Ignoring countless warnings, Jonathan continues his business trip to Castle Dracula. Had he abandoned the assignment and returned to England, he would have avoided imprisonment and the Count’s terrifying schemes.

The Warrens, The Conjuring

Ed and Lorraine Warren repeatedly choose to investigate the Perron family’s haunting themselves. While heroic, walking away from such dangerous paranormal cases would likely have spared them repeated brushes with supernatural evil.

OJ Haywood, Nope

OJ initially recognizes the danger posed by the mysterious creature and considers leaving. Instead, he and Emerald decide to document it for fame and profit, turning a survivable situation into a life-threatening mission.

Paxton, Hostel

Paxton has already enjoyed his European vacation when he chooses to follow a stranger’s recommendation to visit a remote Slovak hostel. Ignoring the tip and continuing his trip would have avoided unimaginable torture.

Curt Vaughan, Cabin in the Woods

Curt and his friends repeatedly ignore opportunities to leave the isolated cabin. Choosing to drive home before exploring the strange basement would have prevented them from becoming unwilling participants in a deadly ritual.

Chris, Get Out

Chris accepts Rose’s invitation to meet her parents despite his understandable concerns. Trusting his instincts and declining the weekend trip would have saved him from one of horror’s most disturbing conspiracies.

Sue Snell, Carrie

Feeling guilty, Sue tries to make amends by arranging for Tommy Ross to take Carrie White to the prom. Her well-intentioned involvement places her at the center of one of horror’s most infamous tragedies.

David Kessler, An American Werewolf in London

Ignoring repeated warnings to stay on the road during a nighttime walk across the moors changes David’s life forever. Returning to the pub instead would have prevented the werewolf attack entirely.

Harlan Thrombey, Knives Out

After believing Marta accidentally administered a fatal overdose, Harlan chooses to stage an elaborate suicide to protect her. Calling an ambulance and waiting for medical professionals would have been the far wiser course of action.

Frank Cotton, Hellraiser

Frank’s obsession with solving the Lament Configuration opens a gateway to the Cenobites. Simply leaving the mysterious puzzle box alone would have spared him unimaginable suffering and everyone caught in its aftermath.

15 Actors Who Were Too Old to Star in Action Flicks

Action heroes are supposed to sprint across rooftops, trade punches with trained killers, and survive impossible odds. Yet Hollywood has increasingly asked audiences to believe actors well into their sixties, seventies, and even eighties could still do it all.

Granted, many relied on stunt doubles, careful editing, and decades of star power to push away our disbelief. We don’t know if audiences found it inspiring or a little hard to believe, but that hasn’t stopped them; these stars proved that age rarely stops Hollywood from handing someone another gun, car chase, or fistfight.

Harrison Ford

At 81, Harrison Ford returned as Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023). While digital de-aging and stunt doubles helped, the film still centered on octogenarian action sequences.

Liam Neeson

Liam Neeson reinvented himself as an action star in his mid-50s and continued leading films like Retribution and Absolution into his 70s, becoming one of Hollywood’s defining “late-life” action heroes.

Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester Stallone kept returning to physically demanding roles in Rambo: Last Blood, The Expendables series, and Armor well into his 70s, continuing to play characters decades younger than his actual age.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

After years away from starring roles, Arnold Schwarzenegger returned for films like The Last Stand, Sabotage, and Terminator: Dark Fate. Even in his 70s, Hollywood still cast him as an unstoppable action hero.

Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis continued making numerous action thrillers throughout his 60s. Although many later productions drew criticism, studios kept casting him as the capable lone hero until his retirement from acting.

Jackie Chan

Jackie Chan built his reputation performing his own stunts, yet continued starring in action movies such as Ride On and Hidden Strike after turning 65, despite naturally slowing down with age.

Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood was already in his late 70s when he starred in Gran Torino, portraying a veteran willing to confront violent gangs. Even with fewer fight scenes, the role still demanded action hero credibility.

Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren embraced blockbuster action surprisingly late, appearing in the RED films, the Fast & Furious franchise, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. She continued taking action roles well into her late 70s.

Denzel Washington

Denzel Washington was in his 60s while filming The Equalizer 3, continuing to portray Robert McCall as a relentless vigilante capable of defeating much younger opponents in brutal hand-to-hand combat.

John Travolta

John Travolta continued headlining action thrillers such as Speed Kills, Paradise City, and Cash Out into his late 60s and early 70s. Many of these films relied heavily on editing and stunt work to sell the action sequences.

Robert De Niro

At 76, Robert De Niro starred in The Irishman. While not a traditional action movie, the film’s de-aging technology drew attention during fight scenes, where his movements often betrayed the character’s supposedly younger age.

Pierce Brosnan

Long after leaving James Bond behind, Pierce Brosnan returned to action with films such as The November Man and Fast Charlie, proving Hollywood still viewed him as a convincing action lead in his 60s.

Mel Gibson

Mel Gibson continued appearing in action-heavy productions like Blood Father and Force of Nature after turning 60. His characters remained capable fighters despite the actor entering an age where most stars slow down.

Sean Connery

Sean Connery was 63 when he led The Rock and 73 during The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Both films expected him to remain an imposing action figure despite being well past traditional leading-man age.

Dolph Lundgren

Dolph Lundgren never fully left the genre, continuing to appear in The Expendables films, Aquaman, and numerous action thrillers throughout his 60s while maintaining the imposing screen presence that made him famous.

15 Behind-the-Scenes Movie Photos Where Things Don’t Look as Glamorous in Real Life

Movie magic works very similar to regular magic, since as long as you don’t see the trick, you can let yourself believe anything. However, we know that actors don’t have superpowers and that alien planets don’t exist, so special effects and camera work need to be used to sell us on the fantasy.

If you want to keep believing in that magic, then look away, because we are about to delve into the backstage of some incredibly well made films. A lot of green screens, gray suits and miniatures went into the creation of modern classics, with the end result so good it’s surprising it wasn’t real at all.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

To make the blue aliens look as good as they do, the actors wore suits to record their movements and face cameras for their expressions. For the actors, the movie didn’t happen in a lush forest, rather in a dull grey warehouse.

The Avengers

Mark Ruffalo didn’t just portray Bruce Banner in The Avengers, he also gave life to The Hulk, both in voice and body. You might think the green giant was purely CGI, but they had the actor wear a silly suit to keep his character consistent.

The Lord of the Rings

Gandalf and Saruman are great adversaries that travel the world in stallions, winged beasts, or through their arcane magic. Once the cameras are off, the actors need to traverse the landscape with tiny little golf carts.

Jurassic Park

Granted, the animatronic that gave life to the T-Rex (and nearly kills the movie by going over budget) is impressive, but much less imposing when you see the several technicians that need to coordinate its every move.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Davy Jones had Bill Nighy give a legendary performance, something that reaches audiences from beyond the tentacles. The other actors actually interacted with the legend himself, although in a less intimidating gray suit.

Mad Max: Fury Road

The high-speed chase in the film is actually not going that fast for most of the actors. Several scenes had the dust clouds added in post production, and the speed simulated on several occasions.

The Matrix

Neo’s world famous emergency dodge of several bullets has been widely referenced and parodied in media for decades, but it has a not-so glamorous origin. The move has Keanu Reeves flailing his arms at nothing, with cables for support.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Making cartoon characters interact with real-world objects was certainly a challenge, particularly when it came to acting opposed to them. This particular gun was first moved along with a string, until it was placed on the hand of a remote-controlled robot arm.

Gravity

George Clooney’s moment in space has him wearing the classic space suit, but that wasn’t what he was wearing in reality. Here, we have a bright stage light representing the sun, and a bunch of markers to create the suit in post production.

Life of Pi

The film has the audience question what really happened when Pi was lost in the ocean. The movie was, of course, not filmed in open waters, but in a closed off swimming pool.

300

Nearly the entire movie was filmed inside a sound stage, with the dream-like scenarios added later. Most of what the actors saw during the making of the film was a blue screen, so they had to try really hard to interpret what was going on around them.

Barbie

The city where Barbie lives in already has a doll-like aesthetic, so for wider shots, it’s no wonder the filmmakers created a miniature version of the place. This shows that they didn’t build the entire neighborhood for the movie, rather just a couple of key sets.

The Dark Crystal

The characters in The Dark Crystal are outlandish creatures, brought to life by puppeteers, animatronics and careful editing. These creatures need makeup too, although it is easier to apply when you can remove the head of the performer.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

The main alien itself was a puppet created through hard work and careful camera placement. The director, Steven Spielberg, was very deliberate on how the creature should act, where it was located and how it talked.

The NeverEnding Story

Falkor is a large and majestic creature when encountered in the movie, and it clearly demanded a lot of work to get right. Now, the animatronic version at the studio is still large, but it loses some majestic points when not with its fur.

15 Movies from the 1960s You Can’t Watch Anymore

We can learn a lot about movies of old, both from what they innovated but also what they got away with. The films of that era are now hard to watch, either literally as lost media or because they’re hard to stomach. You could say there’s something to learn about them as well, but mostly as examples of what not to do.

They might be controversial, but they’re classics in their own right. All in all, these movies have become increasingly difficult to revisit for reasons that go well beyond their age. These are the features that we’ve chosen to highlight for today.

Titicut Follies

Frederick Wiseman’s documentary about conditions inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane was effectively banned from general public exhibition for more than two decades because of privacy concerns involving the inmates it depicted.

The Green Berets

John Wayne’s Vietnam War film presented a strongly pro-war perspective that quickly fell out of step with changing public opinion. Today, it is often criticized for its simplistic portrayal of the conflict and political messaging.

The Conqueror

Although released in 1956, The Conqueror remained widely shown on television during the 1960s. It became infamous because filming near a nuclear test site was later linked, though not conclusively proven, to numerous cast and crew cancer diagnoses.

The Killing of Sister George

Its frank depiction of lesbian relationships led to censorship and controversy upon release. While historically significant, the film’s treatment of sexuality and its reputation made it difficult to see in many places for years.

The Wild Angels

Starring Peter Fonda, this biker drama shocked audiences with its depictions of violence, drug use, and sexual assault. Several sequences remain deeply uncomfortable for modern viewers despite the film’s counterculture significance.

Goodbye, Uncle Tom

Presented as a pseudo-documentary about American slavery, this Italian film has long been condemned for its graphic imagery and exploitative approach. It remains one of the most controversial historical films ever produced.

The Illustrated Man

Despite starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, this adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s stories has spent long stretches out of print on home video, making it surprisingly difficult for audiences to watch legally.

The Cremator

This Czechoslovak psychological horror masterpiece was suppressed after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Although later restored, political censorship kept it unavailable to many audiences for years.

The Devils

Ken Russell’s controversial historical drama faced extensive censorship because of its graphic violence, sexuality, and religious themes. Even today, the original uncut version remains difficult to view through official channels.

The Touch of Flesh

This obscure 1960s exploitation horror film received only limited distribution and has largely disappeared from mainstream circulation, surviving primarily through private collectors and specialized archive screenings.

I Am Curious (Yellow)

The Swedish drama sparked obscenity trials in several countries because of its explicit content. Although eventually cleared in court, its reputation as a banned film overshadowed its political and artistic ambitions.

The Brig

Based on the off-Broadway play, this stark prison drama received limited theatrical distribution and remained difficult to find for decades. Its experimental style also kept it outside the mainstream film conversation.

Mondo Cane

This influential documentary popularized the “mondo” genre with sensationalized depictions of cultures around the world. Modern audiences frequently criticize it for exploitation, manipulation, and questionable documentary ethics.

Peeping Tom

Released in 1960, Michael Powell’s thriller was so harshly condemned by British critics that it effectively destroyed his directing career. The film later gained recognition as a psychological horror classic.

Flaming Creatures

Jack Smith’s experimental film was repeatedly seized by police and banned in several U.S. jurisdictions on obscenity grounds. Decades later, it remains difficult to find through mainstream distribution and is most often screened by museums and film archives.

15 Celebs You Never Knew Were Legit Athletes

Acting and performing isn’t the only thing that interests the world’s most famous celebrities, even if that’s all we know them for. While we’re used to seeing them fit, some of them have a background that takes their performance beyond the stage and into serious athletic environments.

For some, their athletic backgrounds often explain the discipline, stamina, and physical presence they later brought to Hollywood and beyond. While fans usually know them for blockbuster films or hit songs, these stars once spent just as much time training, competing, and chasing victories in the world of sports.

Jason Statham

Before becoming an action star, Jason Statham competed internationally as a diver. He represented England in the 1990 Commonwealth Games and spent more than a decade on Britain’s National Diving Squad.

Kurt Russell

Kurt Russell looked destined for professional baseball before a shoulder injury ended his career. He played in the California Angels’ minor league system before fully committing to acting.

Carl Weathers

Long before playing Apollo Creed, Carl Weathers was a professional football player. He suited up for the Oakland Raiders before later joining the Canadian Football League with the BC Lions.

Terry Crews

Before finding success in comedy and television, Terry Crews played in the NFL. The former linebacker spent time with several teams after starring at Western Michigan University.

Burt Reynolds

Burt Reynolds earned a football scholarship to Florida State University and showed significant promise before serious injuries derailed his athletic career, ultimately leading him toward acting instead.

Geena Davis

Geena Davis became an elite archer later in life, reaching a level where she competed for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team ahead of the 2000 Sydney Games.

Mark Harmon

Before television fame, Mark Harmon was the starting quarterback for UCLA. He led the Bruins during the early 1970s and earned recognition for his leadership on the field.

Dolph Lundgren

Not only does he have several academic achievements, Dolph Lundgren is also an accomplished martial artist. He earned a fourth-degree black belt in Kyokushin karate and won the 1982 European Championship.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger is synonymous with bodybuilding, winning seven Mr. Olympia titles. His dominance helped transform competitive bodybuilding into a global spectator sport before his transition into blockbuster films.

Dwayne Johnson

Before becoming one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Dwayne Johnson played defensive tackle at the University of Miami, winning a national championship before beginning his professional wrestling career.

Forest Whitaker

Forest Whitaker attended college on a football scholarship as a linebacker. An injury ended his playing career, prompting him to shift his focus toward music and eventually acting.

Hailee Steinfeld

Before her acting career took off, Hailee Steinfeld trained extensively in gymnastics as a child. Although she never competed professionally, the discipline contributed to the physical skills she later displayed on screen.

Ed O’Neill

Years before starring in Married with Children, Ed O’Neill played college football at Ohio University and Youngstown State. He even signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers before being released during training camp.

Mickey Rourke

After stepping away from acting in the 1990s, Mickey Rourke pursued professional boxing. He fought several sanctioned bouts, finishing his comeback run undefeated before returning to Hollywood.

Gina Carano

Gina Carano first gained fame as one of the pioneers of women’s mixed martial arts. Her success in EliteXC and Strikeforce helped introduce female MMA to a much wider audience before her acting career.

Dune 3 Trailer Just Revealed the Most Important Character in the Franchise

This article contains spoilers for Dune: Part Three and several Frank Herbert books.

It’s not really about Paul Atreides. Paul may be Lisan al-Gaib, he may be the Kwisatz Haderach, but Paul is not actually the main character of the Dune franchise. Instead, that honor goes to the character introduced in the latest trailer for Dune: Part Three, the character you knew as Duncan Idaho.

The latest trailer shows the internal fractures in Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) life as he continues the Fremen jihad launched after he dethroned Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) at the end of the previous movie. His partner Chani (Zendaya) feels betrayed by his actions and his legal wife, Shaddam IV’s daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) joins the plot that the Face Dancer Scytale (Robert Pattinson) launches against him. Central to this conspiracy is the introduction of the man we first met as Duncan Idaho, played by Jason Momoa. Despite what he appears to be, this man is actually called Hayt, and he is the most important character in Frank Herbert‘s Dune novels.

With his incongruous name and skill in battle, Duncan Idaho was one of the standout characters of the first Dune movie. Played by a chummy Momoa, Duncan went ahead to scout Arrakis for Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), where he befriended Stilgar (Javier Bardem) of the Freman and formed alliances that would allow Paul to defeat the usurper Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård). However, when Harkonnen’s forces first attacked and killed Leto, Duncan sacrificed himself to allow Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) to escape, setting into motion his final ascension as Lisan al-Gaib.

Although the world of Dune is full of dissemblances and secrets, Duncan’s death was not faked. He did indeed die battling Harkonnen’s elite Sardaukar. But as viewers of the HBO series Dune: Prophecy already know, cloning exists in the franchise. An invention of the Bene Tleilax (a sect like the Bene Gesserit, except they work through technology instead of religion), clones or “gholas” are a mistrusted, but real part of the world. Yet, if someone was lonely enough, if someone missed the person who had been cloned and wants to recreate those experiences, then they may accept the gholas, despite their misgivings.

Which is exactly what Scytale plans. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, who co-wrote the screenplay with comic book scribe Brian K. Vaughan, and based on the 1969 novel Dune Messiah, Dune: Part Three sees Paul start to crack under the pressure of enacting his master plan. While his prescience convinces him that brutal measures are needed to save humanity, others doubt him, which makes Paul feel lonely. Enter Scytale, who preys on that loneliness by bringing back the man who once loved and protected Paul, who provided the direction and security who so desperately wants.

But Hayt is not Duncan. He’s been trained as a Mentat, a mental computer like Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Piter De Vries (David Dastmalchian). In this role, Hayt offers advice to Paul, including the advice to destroy him immediately. Hayt is one of the most compelling parts of Dune Messiah, and the trailer promises that he’ll be a key part of the adaptation.

The trailer also positions Dune: Part Three as the end of Villeneuve’s story, but that still leaves four more Herbert books left to adapt. And if Villeneuve or another filmmaker (potentially Gareth Edwards) wants to pick up Children of Dune or God Emperor of Dune, Part Three will leave them in a good spot, because Duncan returns as a major character there, too.

Set nine years after Messiah, Children of Dune sees a Duncan ghola paired with Paul’s sister Alia (Anya Taylor-Joy) and protecting Leto II and Ghanima, the children of Paul and Chani. The next book, God Emperor of Dune, jumps 3500 years in the future. And yet, Duncan’s still around, serving the Atreides line like he always has, while trying to recover the memories of his previous forms. Set 1500 years after God Emperor, Heretics of Dune has all-new Bene Gesserit and Bene Tleilax and revelations about the spice; and yet, there’s Duncan Idaho, running around as a ghola once again. There’s no time jump for Chapterhouse: Dune, but there is a sexy offshoot of the Bene Gesserit, so of course a Duncan Idaho ghola is involved.

Duncan is never the protagonist of these books. But he exists forever as a reminder of the innocence young Paul once held, the good intentions that drive him, even as he brings destruction to the universe and drives away everyone who loves him.

Dune: Part Three comes to theaters on December 18, 2026.

Antony Starr Will Never Be Properly Recognized for His Greatness as Homelander

Over the course of five seasons, Antony Starr brought The Boys’ central villain Homelander to life, quickly becoming the cornerstone of the Prime Video comic adaptation. His performance created an antagonist that was manipulative and terrifying, while also being unstable and weak-willed. Starr was so good at being the fictional face of American fascism, he unwittingly convinced real-life fascists his Homelander wasn’t actually that bad of a guy.

Despite this career-defining performance, Starr was not given an Emmy nomination for his role in The Boys even once. And the reveal of this year’s Emmy nominations confirm he never will. With this final disregard, Starr will have never won an Emmy for his portrayal of Homelander.

Award snubs are subjective, and discourse around who is and isn’t nominated is as reliable as the sun rising in the East and setting in the West. Never will nominations meet what everyone wants from an awards’ show perfectly.

This snub, however, is different. The Boys has been nominated for both technical and more mainstream award categories; it has nominations for Outstanding Writing For a Drama Series and Outstanding Drama Series (both in 2021) as well as nominations (and wins) in Outstanding Stunt Coordination in a Drama Series, Limited or Anthology Series, or Movie and Outstanding Stunt Performance (across several different awards cycles). The Television Academy has previously been able to recognize the show’s merits in categories typically exclusionary to comic book media.

Ignoring the most recognizable and frontrunning performance in the show when the art of The Boys has been acknowledged before feels like a slap in the face. There are many reasons The Boys was able to be the flagship show for Prime Video’s television productions, including thousands of hours from behind the scenes crewmembers and writers alongside an ensemble of incredible actors. But no one doubts Antony Starr was always, for lack of a better word, the star of the show.

It is deeply unfortunate the Television Academy was unable to see this since The Boys premiered in 2019. As soon as Homelander landed on screen, killing two armed bank robbers with a Captain America attitude that was chillingly forced, The Boys fans knew they were in for a wild ride.

That’s just one example of Starr’s sinister masterclass. From the season 1 airplane scene to his death at the hands of Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), every second he was on screen made The Boys worth watching.

Even off screen, Starr’s Homelander was everywhere. Gifs of Homelander wagging his finger appeared under posts across social media platforms, and he is the frequent subject of reaction images. Starr’s extremely expressive face made his emotional reactions as Homelander both recognizable yet raw, communicating Homelander’s instability and emotional volatility. Online discourse and powerscaling (comparing power levels of fictional characters to each other) debates on online forums often center on Starr’s Homelander.

Awards aren’t the only validation an actor can get. Emmys aren’t what define a career; performances are. Audiences will always be the final arbiter of who gets remembered and who doesn’t. But awards are recognition for the complexities and thought an actor brings to their performance, and Starr will never get that specific kind of recognition for spending years portraying a real monster.

The Television Academy left a major hole in its awards this year by leaving Starr out of the nominations, but The Boys fans will always remember the fear and disgust he was able to evoke in viewers for years to come.

7 Songs that Deserve a Narrative Adaptations

Storytelling is an integral part of music, and many of the most genre-defining songs of each generation follow a plot structure of some kind. Rarely, however, do these songs get more than a music video.

That all changed this summer, though. With the release of Girls Like Girls, the Hayley Kiyoko- directed adaptation of her 2023 book and 2015 song of the same name, the pathway for music to go from soundtrack to center stage has never been clearer. Whether they become movies, books, or television shows, the following seven songs all deserve to be brought to the masses in a new form.

Goodbye Earl by The Chicks

A no-brainer inclusion, The Chicks’ 2000 twangy murder ballad smash hit combines the country music genre’s storytelling tradition with themes of womanhood and female friendship not often awarded with commercial success in Nashville. In the song, best friends Mary Ann and Wanda hatch a plan to kill Wanda’s abusive ex-husband, the titular Earl. They get away with the murder after realizing Earl was a “missing person who nobody missed at all,” and by the end are living together and selling “Tennessee ham and strawberry jam” together.

The song’s music video is already a mini adaptation of the lyrics, but that’s not enough. A feature film for Wanda and Mary Ann would take the Southern Gothic aesthetic foundational to the country murder ballad genre with the playful attitude of similar movies like 9 to 5. Emma Seligman (Bottoms, Shiva Baby) or Aleshea Harris (Is God Is) are both current writer-directors who would be fantastic at the helm of a big screen adaptation of The Chicks’ masterpiece.

All of Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain

The entirety of Preacher’s Daughter is a masterclass in both musical innovation and narrative construction, so narrowing it down to just one song for the sake of a list would do singer-songwriter and producer Ethel Cain a major disservice. A harrowing tale of a girl also named Ethel Cain fleeing her cultish Chirstian home in the rural South and falling for dangerous men (one of whom kills and cannibalizes her), Preacher’s Daughter was immediately lauded as one of the best albums of 2022 upon its release.

Hayden Silas Anhedönia, the real name behind the Ethel Cain persona, has already stated she wants to write a series of novels adapting the story of Preacher’s Daughter and direct a film adaptation. Steeped in themes of intergenerational trauma and religion, and with clear intentions for modes of storytelling beyond music, Cain should absolutely take Ethel’s story out of the recording studio and onto the page. A limited series by either Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass) or Karyn Kusama (Yellowjackets) based on the album would also do numbers.

Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst by Kendrick Lamar

This 12-minute lyrical odyssey about street violence, grief, vengeance, and spirituality is Kendrick Lamar at his best. The song is split between multiple different perspectives, each describing the K-Dot experiences that made him steer away from gang culture and find his own faith. It is situated perfectly as track 10 on the album good kid, m.A.A.d. city, tying together the overarching narrative of the record in the introspective fashion Kendrick fans have come to love about his music.

Directors such as Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), F. Gary Gray (Straight Outta Compton), and Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) are hypothetical frontrunners for a big screen adaptation of one of Lamar’s greatest musical achievements. However, up-and-coming Black directors like Ryan Coogler (Sinners) or RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys) could also provide a fresh adaptation of “Sing About Me.”

Hallowed Be Thy Name by Iron Maiden

Most Iron Maiden songs could make an appearance on this list, but “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is the best of many good choices. Told from the perspective of a prisoner on the day he is to be executed at the gallows, “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is a haunting heavy metal opera that represents the genre at its prime.

Although the song is not lengthy or complex in its plot structure, there are so many unknowns about the narrator that would allow for more narrative development. His denial of actually being there (“Can it be there’s some sort of error?”, “Is it really the end, not some crazy dream?”) hint at a wrongful conviction, while the entirety of the song’s fourth verse being told from beyond the grave adds a supernatural aspect to the very real horror of impending death. Audiences could get a great horror project from filmmakers such as Nia DaCosta (28 Years Later: The Bone Temple) or Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) with “Hallowed Be Thy Name” as the source of inspiration.

Off to the Races by Lana Del Rey

Similar to many of the other entries on this list, Lana Del Rey has several candidates for adaptations in her extensive discography. She often finds inspiration in visual art and literature for the themes and sonic quality of each of her albums, but none are more apparent than the song “Off to the Races.”

From Del Rey’s debut studio album Born to Die, “Off to the Races” quotes Vladimir Nabokov’s opening lines in Lolita throughout, using the classic Russian novel as its central inspiration for the volatile relationship between the narrator and her much older lover. The song has a chaotic, fast-paced tempo that few other Del Rey tracks have, and its flirtation with mafia aesthetics provide a foundation for any crime thriller writer or director looking for a female-led story. In a dream world, Francesca Scorsese would have introduced her father Martin Scorsese to this song and changed the landscape of cinema forever.

Twin Size Mattress by The Front Bottoms

The Front Bottoms’ most popular song is among the most heartwrenching songs in contemporary rock music. The song tells the story of a friendship that is ultimately ruined by addiction. Its devastating lyrics and overarching narrative of guilt and grief are told expertly across the tracks four-minute and 25-second runtime.

If it were adapted into a film, “Twin Size Mattress” would run away with critical acclaim. Its lyrical content provides ample inspiration for many of the auteurs currently in Hollywood. A Greta Gerwig (Ladybird) or Felix van Groeningen (Beautiful Boy) film production based on the song would blow audiences out of the water.

Kokomo, IN by Japanese Breakfast

Jubilee, the highly-praised 2021 album from Japanese Breakfast, is full of emotional depth and vibrant swells of synth and string music. Michelle Zauner, the woman behind Japanese Breakfast, is among the music industry’s most talented producers and songwriters, and her writing on “Kokomo, IN” is Zauner at her best.

The song is told from the perspective of a narrator who is stuck in her Midwestern hometown, presumably Kokomo, Indiana, while her ex-lover made it out. It’s an upbeat reflection on place and potential, quietly showcasing the longing to be somewhere else with someone who the narrator is still in love with.

Zauner has already proven her writing skills with her debut memoir, Crying in H Mart. Her next literary creative project should be taking “Kokomo, IN” to the bookstore.

X-Men ’97 Teases a Hidden Connection Between Wolverine and Captain America

This article contains spoilers for X-Men ’97 season 2 episode 4.

Most of the X-Men ’97 episode “Rise of Apocalypse Part II” focuses on, well, Apocalypse and the X-Men sent back to Ancient Egypt to prevent his transformation from En Sabah Nur into the big blue supervillain we know and love. But in the Mighty Marvel manner, the episode ends with a post-credits scene, one that sets up a new storyline that has nothing to do with the characters in the rest of the episode. Wolverine, dressed in black, meets up with Captain America and Black Widow, who give him a file marked “Weapon X.”

The trio’s meet-up nods toward Jim Lee‘s cover for 1990’s Uncanny X-Men #268, and the folder that Cap gives Logan recalls the cover of 1991’s Wolverine #50. And when Wolvie says he’s “Getting the band back together,” he may very well be referring to Team X, the group of adamantium-infused soldiers that includes Sabertooth, Silver Fox, and Maverick, seen in the Original Series. But given X-Men ’97‘s attention to stories published after the end of X-Men: The Animated Series, the post-credits may be setting up a different arc, one that changed the way we think about Captain America.

Even the most casual X-Men fan probably knows the gist of Weapon X. Introduced alongside Wolverine in 1974’s Incredible Hulk #180, Weapon X was the secret government program that conducted experiments in the super-metal adamantium. As seen in X-Men: The Animated Series, the program not only gave Wolverine his metal skeleton, but also enhanced Sabertooth and gave Deadpool his healing factor. Furthermore, “Weapon X” also refers to Wolverine, considered the program’s greatest achievement.

Almost everything about Weapon X is shrouded in secrecy, even to readers, because Wolverine could not remember his past until the 2005 storyline House of M. That secrecy meant that information about Wolverine’s past was doled out in small, and often contradictory, chunks. For example, Wolverine has no real name for his first several appearances in Incredible Hulk and Uncanny X-Men, and even after a leprechaun calls him “Logan” in 1977’s Uncanny X-Men #103 (yes, you read that right), it takes a while for his teammates to find out this information and start using the name regularly. Likewise, Wolverine originally said that his claws were part of his costume, and then later says they were given to him with his adamantium skeleton, only to reveal that he has had bone claws he was a child.

All of that is a long way of saying that even though the original X-Men series did sometimes delve into the history of Weapon X, that history has changed a lot in the thirty years since the show ended.

One of the most important changes occurs in Assault on Weapon Plus, a four-part storyline by Grant Morrison and Chris Bachalo that appeared in New X-Men #142–145 (2003). The story begins with Cyclops in a bar, trying to shed his boy-scout persona and drown his sorrows after Jean Grey learned about his psychic affair with Emma Frost. He finds Wolverine sitting across the bar, who has come with a masked man called Fantomex to look for Cyclops. Wolverine needs Cyclops’ help to come with him and Fantomex and find Weapon Plus. The evolved version of Weapon X, Weapon Plus holds the files of its predecessor, and Wolverine wants to find what’s in them.

The quest takes the trio into the World, an advanced metauniverse (it is a Grant Morrison comic, after all) operated by Marvel superscientists. Within the World, Wolverine and we readers learn important information about Weapon X. First, it’s not “Weapon X,” it is “Weapon 10,” as in “the tenth version of the Weapon Plus program.” Fantomex comes from Weapon XIII, the storyline builds to a battle against the super-sentinal Ultimaton from Weapon XV, and several other characters have been retconned as projects of previous Weapon Plus Programs. For example, 2019’s Wolverine & Captain America: Weapon Plus reveals that Ted Sallis was turned into Man-Thing through Weapon IV and the procedure that gave Luke Cage his powers stems from Weapon VI.

But the biggest revelation points to the source of the whole debacle. Weapon I, the first of the Weapon Plus programs, was led by Dr. Abraham Erskine in World War II, and led to the transformation of Steve Rogers into Captain America. In that moment, we realize that all the lies, suffering, and destruction caused by the Weapon Plus program occurred because Captain America exists.

Of course, this is yet another retcon to the two characters’ pasts. But it’s one that deepens them both, in opposite directions. For Captain America, it reminds him that all the good he does carries the taint of governments willing to destroy people in pursuit of power. They made him to be a weapon, and he must continue to overcome that intention. Conversely, that same fact provides hope for Wolverine, who has always worried that he’s an irredeemable beast. If Captain America can transcend from a weapon into something good, maybe he can as well.

Will X-Men ’97 delve into all of these details? It’s hard to say. Weapon X did show up in a few original series episodes, a very different program from the one that Morrison imagined. But if it does, the show can make for a more morally-complicated Wolverine, and further bring the rest of Marvel into the world of the X-Men.

X-Men ’97 season 2 streams new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.

Evil Dead Burn Review – Grueling Horror, But Not in the Good Way

No one would ever accuse Sam Raimi’s original The Evil Dead of being a particularly deep movie, or a picture concerned with matters of taste. It was quite literally marketed as “the ultimate experience in grueling horror” nearly a half century ago and sought to deliver on that hype train. It was violent, grotesque, and so happily gonzo in its depravity that it became the case to study in UK censorship battles during the Video Nasties debacle of the 1980s.

It was also, we should add, full of youthful ingenuity and an almost mirthful sense of play. Whether you knew the backstory or not, the sensation of former school-day chums innovating new camera techniques in the woods of Tennessee was palpable and giddy. There was slaughter, sure, chainsaws, of course, and gore galore. But even that OG film—which played the scares with a straighter face than Raimi’s outright camp sequels—still did it nearly all with a smile on its face and a twinkle in its eye.

Since its inception, this series has been as much about amusement, if in an often bleak, gallows fashion, as chills. Recent 21st century attempts have sought to steer the series back to its more gruesome roots, but be it Fede Alvarez’ beyond-credulity buckets of blood and demonic banter with a sing-songy Jane Levy in neon contacts, or Lee Cronin’s wicked portrait of a family in dissolution, they had thus far sought to retain that dark sense of mischief that makes it go down smooth.

In which case, Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn is here to break the mold. Out later this week, this one is also about a family in collapse, and it’s got demons and buckets of blood aplenty. Yet the mischief is gone, the twinkle faded, and the only thing grueling is the slapdash aesthetics applied to a series once renowned for turning bloodletting into a visual art form of swooshing cameras and bemusing gags. There remain a few neat tricks at play in Vaniček’s variations, but by and large Evil Dead Burn is simply crude and cruel, a movie full of misanthropy and as unpleasant to sit through as the scatological splatter of mid-2000s torture porn.

There are still a handful of aesthetic flourishes, including a solid third act one-er where hell literally breaks loose in a family’s lakeside home, but they are exceptions to the rule of what is a deeply ugly film, inside and out. It’s a movie that begins in earnest during a beleaguered funeral and only sees its vibe plummet from there.

The funeral in question is for one William (George Pullar), a barely-drawn crap husband and presumably crap brother, who inside of 90 seconds berates his French wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub) and his milquetoast sibling Joseph (Hunter Doohan) during the latter’s birthday party. Shortly afterward, Will is blessedly burned alive by the Deadite forces of the Nine Circles, who taunt their proverbial pig on the spit that they have been searching for him so he can lead them “to your family.”

Hence the discount shelf sendoff the character gets in a depressing service attended only by his estranged and guilt-ridden spouse, brother and prospective sister-in-law (Luciane Buchanan), as well as parents Susan and Edgar (Sandi Wright and Erroll Shand), plus a dementia-addled grandmother (Maude Davey). All parties are part of a family condemned to a grim legacy by Grandpa (squint at the family photos for a cameo), who apparently enjoyed summoning the Devil in their dilapidated vacation home’s attic during his leisure time. And now those distant, spiritual in-laws have come to pay their respects.

There is ostensibly a metaphor about toxic families and the generational scars they spread in the screenplay, which Vaniček co-wrote with Florent Bernard. Via exhausted and despondent Alice as our requisite final girl, hers is a perspective both within and without three generations of bad choices festering a family from within, damning them long before the demons show up. We slowly discover that a violent and abusive marriage has corroded the soul of poor Susan, who in turn had learned long ago from her own parents how to turn a blind eye to acts of deviltry, great and small. How that’s influenced the men William and Joseph grew up to be, and the women who put up with them, becomes its own dark prophecy. The metaphor in all this is technically meatier than anything approaching a plot in the first couple of Evil Dead cult classics, but it’s also rote and delivered without conviction.

When a movie is this filled with piss and venom for the characters, of whom it basks in the suffering and misery of, any tacked-on concessions to an elevated subtext amounts to the only hint of farce present. Evil Dead Burn is an inferno of nihilism too consumed with contempt for its characters, its setting, and possibly the audience, to have any emotional or cathartic heat. It exists as a gross-out, shock machine wherein human bodies are destroyed, dismantled, and defiled in as putrid a manner as possible.

Of course the desecration of characters has always been Evil Dead’s meat and potatoes, but this one is not college kids at play or fanboys emulating a cult classic in wry good humor; it’s a sadist picking at the wings of flies in extreme, endless closeup, be it of what Papa Edgar is so obviously about to do to the family dog during a tense family dinner, or how grandma’s mental decline from Alzheimer’s is glibly mocked and exploited as the only source at attempted—and wildly misjudged—humor in an otherwise quite funereal endurance test.

There is little to nothing to redeem this empty exercise in franchise extension, not its performances, not its production design, definitely not its cinematography, and not necessarily even its gore, lest seeing people disemboweled in dreary closeup is the lone threshold for your idea of entertainment.

Forty years after being so wrongfully accused, Evil Dead has finally attached something irredeemably nasty to its name. Unnecessarily too.

Evil Dead Burn opens on Friday, July 10.