New Supergirl Clip Might Be Hiding a Man of Tomorrow Connection

In the latest clip from Supergirl, Earth gets a new hero in the form of Kara Zor-El, cousin of Superman. But did she bring something more sinister with her?

The scene in the clip comes directly from Supergirl’s first appearance in 1959’s Action Comics #252, by Otto Binder and Al Plastino. But where Plastino drew Supergirl emerging from a rocket, not unlike the one that baby Kal-El took to Earth, Milly Alcock arrives via a silver sphere, with a very unsettling pattern. The sphere consists of hexagons, a pattern new to Supergirl’s rocket, but not to DC Comics. In fact, the hexagons bring to mind the villain of the next Superman movie, Brainiac.

Those just paying attention to the images that James Gunn has been sharing to social media may be surprised by the connection. Most often, Gunn and outlets covering Brainiac news (Den of Geek included) use images that portray the villain as a green-skinned humanoid, often in a purple suit. That depiction does indeed come straight from the comics, starting with Brainiac’s first appearance just a year prior to Supergirl, in Action Comics #242, also by Binder and Plastino.

Traditionally, Brainiac hails from the planet Colu, a planet of super-intelligent humanoids who enhance their brains with cybernetic parts. But in 1982, DC Comics revamped Brainiac for the Bronze Age. In Action Comics #544 (1983), by Marv Wolfman and Gil Kane, Brainiac melded with a world-destroying machine to gain a new skeletal form. Not only did he have a hexagon pattern around his skull, sometimes colored silver and sometimes colored gold, but he flew a giant ship with the same design.

Brainiac did not stay in his robotic form for long, soon returning to variations of his green and purple look. But the robot form may be important to Man of Tomorrow, for a few different reasons.

Gunn has described Man of Tomorrow as not just a sequel to Superman, but also a Lex Luthor story, in which Nicholas Hoult plays co-lead as Superman must team up with his archenemy to fight Brainiac. In the influential 1986 Alan Moore and Curt Swan story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Brainiac possesses Lex Luthor to combine his intellect with that of Superman’s greatest enemy. How does he do this? By using his robot form and attaching his hexagons to Luthor’s head.

Recently, set photos from Man of Tomorrow have shown Hoult as Lex wearing his warsuit, a green and purple mech outfit. That suit comes straight from the comics, first appearing in 1983’s Action Comics #544, the same issue that introduced Brainiac’s skeletal form.

Interesting as these connections are, they still leave a question. Why would Kara be in a Brainiac ship? For a possible answer, we need to look past the comics, to the cartoons. Superman: The Animated Series offered a compelling revision to the origins of both Superman and Brainiac. Here, Brainiac was first an AI used on Krypton, who turned against his masters and lied about the dire state of the planet. Brainiac eventually took humanoid form to fight against Superman. Years later, Smallville repeated the plot, casting James Marsters as the human form that Brainiac takes after arriving on Earth from Krypton.

Superman has already established that the Kryptonians of the new DCU aren’t as benevolent as their comic book counterparts. Supergirl will probably give us a slightly more likable take, given that Kara grew up in Argo City, a portion of Krypton that survived the planet’s explosion, and we’ll spend more time with her parents, Zor-El (David Krumholtz) and Alura In-Ze (Emily Beecham). But that doesn’t exempt them from birthing Brainiac, even unintentionally.

If they did, Superman’s happy reunion in Supergirl may turn out to be a nightmare in Man of Tomorrow.

Supergirl arrives in theaters on June 26, 2026.

Masters of the Universe Reminds Us That Not Every Silly Thing Needs to Be a Joke

This article contains spoilers for Masters of the Universe

In the first big payoff moment of Masters of the Universe, kindhearted HR rep Adam Glenn (Nicholas Galitzine) raises the power sword into the air and declares, “By the power of Grayskull… I have the power!” Where once stood a milquetoast man in a powder pink shirt now stands a certified hunk, all rippling biceps, with a tiny metal plate over his impressive pecs and a loin cloth keeping the movie PG-13. Now in He-Man mode, Adam lunges toward his enemy, a blue-skinned pirate guy with a red metal mouth and retracting weapons on his arm, who goes by the name Trap Jaw (Sam C. Wilson).

The scene looks every bit like the toy line adaptation it is, the big-budget effects only intensifying the feeling that you’re watching a five-year-old bash his action figures together. And it absolutely rules. The fight works so much better than the scene leading up to it, when Adam tries to employ his corporate conflict resolution skills to talk Trap Jaw out of the battle, if only because Masters of the Universe stops making self-aware quips about how silly the whole thing is.

Bested By Barbie

It’s hard to blame director Travis Knight and his screenwriting team, which includes frequent collaborator Chris Butler as well as Adam Nee, Aaron Nee, and Dave Callaham, who have worked on the script through previous iterations. Masters of the Universe is extremely silly, a property that began as a toy line transparently designed to appeal to little boys who like Conan the Barbarian and Star Wars. It combines outlandish concepts, such as a guy who fights by extending his neck really, really far, with the most obvious execution, naming that guy Mekaneck (James Wilkinson). Others include a guy who rams people called Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang), a skeleton man called Skeletor (Jared Leto), and Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie), who is indeed evil.

Furthermore, Masters of the Universe enters a cinematic landscape defined by self-awareness. Love or hate it, nerd culture still exists in the shadow of Joss Whedon, who wrote characters that were both pop culture savvy and unimpressed with the whole thing. Whedon brought that approach to movies by writing and directing the first two Avengers movies, in which Tony Stark dismissively refers to the team as “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes,” dismissing the tagline that debuted in 1963’s Avengers #1.

Moreover, Masters of the Universe sits in the shadow of Barbie, a wildly successful adaptation of Mattel’s other toy line. Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach filled their movie with jokes about the appropriateness of a pregnant doll sold to kids or the uselessness of Alan. But those quips came with a point.

Take one of Barbie‘s best gags, when Stereotypical Barbie bawls about never being conventionally attractive enough, a claim undercut when Helen Mirren’s narrator interjects to point out that Margot Robbie is the definition of conventionally attractive. That’s a metajoke about the silliness of the story and the scene, but it has a point, one tied to the history of the toy line. As a product, Barbie has reinforced limited standards of beauty, and the knowing gag operates less as the filmmakers’ condescension and more like their acknowledgment that these toys matter, that they have larger social effects. The film feels an obligation to address those effects, and it does so through a metajoke.

Get More Stupider

Masters of the Universe has no such obligations. The screenplay tries to say something about how Skeletor uses power to hurt and how He-Man uses power to help, and how listening and friendship is its own type of power. But all that falls flat, for the exact reason stated by the film. Adam tries to talk it out with a blue-skinned pirate monster or to an evil wizard with a skull for a face, who openly declares that he loves being evil. By the climax of the film, even He-Man says “The time for talk is done,” and wallops Skeletor with his bare fists.

In short, He-Man doesn’t have same cultural impact as Barbie and doesn’t have nearly as much to say about masculinity. Moreover, attempting to talk about masculinity and power undermines the sole reason for Masters of the Universe‘s existence, the opportunity to watch crazy musclemen beat each other up.

The same is true of the metatextual jokes in Masters of the Universe. Yes, we all know that it’s silly for Ram-Man to slam into people with his head. And, yes, all of us grown-ups now realize that the name “Fisto” has an extreme double entendre. But when Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) declares that he’s going to fist all the bad guys and tells Ram-Man to “give them head,” we don’t need him to then stop and apologize with embarrassment.

Thinking of Barbie while watching the toys duke it out on screen, one cannot help but recall that old schoolyard taunt and think, at least in the case of Masters of the Universe, maybe boys should go to Jupiter to get more stupider.

What’s Best in Life is Dumbest in Life

In its best moments, Masters of the Universe recognizes what it is and embraces it without embarrassment. Daniel Pemberton’s synth score and the bright costumes bring us right back to the matte-painted worlds that the toy line was trying to emulate, movies like Conan the Barbarian, The Beastmaster, and The NeverEnding Story. Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t wink when Conan told us what is best in life. He just talked about crushing and driving enemies and hearing women’s lamentations, in a way that was unironic, problematic, utterly stupid, and utterly awesome.

So few movies get to be so stupid and cool, especially on a studio level. Time and again, today’s movies have to make sure everyone knows that we’re all smarter than the material, even though the studio happily takes your money for engaging the material. More than almost any other IP, Masters of the Universe has the power to ignore the pretensions and just be dumb fun. The movie’s makers should have used it.

Masters of the Universe is now playing in theaters worldwide.

Documentary Stealing Magic Takes on Trickery Within the World of Illusions

Magicians have been using the art of illusion to deceive the mind for centuries, yet it appears that even they can fall victim to trickery. In Fish Bowl Films and Magic Castle Entertainment Production’s documentary Stealing Magic, the audience will follow British illusionist Andi Gladwin as he launches a multi-year global investigation of an online piracy ring whose mark is any and everyone with a magic trick.

Gladwin teams up with magicians from across the world to follow a trail of encrypted messages, aliases, and suspicious transactions through an underground marketplace built on stolen magic. The team of magicians faces intimidation, threats, and the possibility that the traitor is one of their very own. Check out an exclusive first look below:

The film explores the behind-the-scenes of what makes magic, well, magic. It’s about the value of creativity and how those who are willing to fight for it have to go up against those who use their sleight of hand to, literally, steal magic.

Stealing Magic director Matthew Testa has worked on numerous notable projects, including Manifesto of a Serial Killer (2023), The Toolbox Killer (2021), the miniseries The Witnesses (2020), Gold Rush (2010-2011), and the 2017 documentary Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story.

In a press release provided to Den of Geek, Testa notes that he came into the project with a limited understanding of magic and used his magical naivety to understand the community of illusion artisans, highlighting them in a way that shows the core of the trade.

“The film became not just an investigation into piracy, but an exploration of the people behind the illusions — creators whose work is often invisible even as it inspires wonder around the world,” Testa says.

With the idea of uplifting a community whose livelihood and integrity were being breached, Testa set out to create a renewed appreciation for the artists who spend their lives creating wonder, and the Jason Bourne-like lengths they will go to protect it.

The documentary explores, at its essence, the lack of protections that has created a billion-dollar global market. Kearney, a management consulting firm, estimates that globally, internet piracy costs the entertainment industry around $75 billion annually.

In a world that is already talking so much about the theft of intellectual and creative property at the dawn of the age of AI, the lack of protections for creatives is jarring.

With a 1-hour and 27-minute runtime, Stealing Magic explores the magic community’s identity, dedication to the craft, and the real impacts piracy has on not only the livelihood of creatives but also the price of leaving fantasy unprotected.

Stealing Magic premieres Friday, June 5 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

10 Reasons Why Xbox Lost The Console War

The console war was the constant back and forth of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to be the main household name for the video game console. It’s been a long time coming, and it hasn’t always been these three, but they are the main names associated today to this ‘console war,’ but it seems to be finally over.

Nintendo was never seemingly interested in this competition, since they were doing their own thing, and it was enough to be in a ‘second place’ of sorts (except in Japan where it is the undisputed number one). But the Xbox console could never achieve even a fraction of the PlayStation success, and after a few decades, Microsoft and Xbox seem to have thrown the towel. But how did we get here?

The Xbox One Reveal Disaster

Microsoft’s 2013 Xbox One reveal remains one of the biggest public relations missteps in gaming history. Early messaging focused heavily on television features, always-online requirements, and restrictions on used games. Sony’s response was simple, clear, and overwhelmingly popular with consumers.

Sony Dominated the Exclusive Game Conversation

Throughout much of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 generation, Sony consistently delivered critically acclaimed exclusives. Games like God of War, Spider-Man, and The Last of Us Part II helped define the platform while Xbox struggled to match that level of consistency.

Too Many Promising Studios Were Closed

Over the years, Microsoft acquired and later shut down several talented studios. Closures involving teams behind beloved franchises created the perception that Xbox lacked a long-term strategy for nurturing exclusive game development.

The Halo Decline Hurt the Brand

For years, Halo was Xbox’s defining franchise. While later entries still attracted audiences, many fans felt the series never fully recaptured the cultural dominance it enjoyed during the Xbox and Xbox 360 eras.

The Kinect Gamble Backfired

Microsoft invested heavily in Kinect technology and initially bundled it with the Xbox One. While innovative, the accessory increased the console’s price and failed to become the revolutionary platform feature the company envisioned.

PlayStation Built Stronger Global Momentum

Xbox remained highly competitive in North America, but Sony often performed much better in Europe, Asia, and other international markets. That broader global appeal helped PlayStation build larger audiences and stronger long-term market dominance.

Mixed Messaging Confused Consumers

During several key moments, Microsoft struggled to communicate its strategy clearly. Changes involving digital ownership, exclusives, subscriptions, and platform identity sometimes left players unsure exactly what Xbox wanted to be.

Too Few Must-Have Exclusives

While Xbox offered quality games, many players felt there were fewer console-selling exclusives compared to PlayStation. When consumers can play most major third-party releases elsewhere, exclusive content becomes one of the strongest reasons to choose a platform.

The Brand Shifted Away from Consoles

In recent years, Microsoft has emphasized ecosystems, cloud gaming, PC integration, and Game Pass rather than console sales alone. It reduced the sense that Xbox hardware itself was the company’s primary focus, and damaged the brand so highly the new leadership is now walking those claims back.

Game Pass Changed the Battle, But Not the Winner

Xbox Game Pass is widely regarded as one of gaming’s best subscription services. However, despite its popularity, it arrived after PlayStation had already built a significant lead. The service improved Xbox’s position but did not fully reverse years of lost momentum, and the pricing was not something that would last. With several price hikes, Game Pass no longer is what was promised.

The 16 Best Adult Animated Series You’ve Probably Never Seen

Animated shows are often aimed at children, and that doesn’t make them bad; several of those shows, like Gravity Falls or Star vs. the Forces of Evil, have a lot for adults to enjoy. That doesn’t mean, however, that every single animated show is for children. Several of them are created exclusively for adults.

While most of them focus on the comedic side of animation, these shows also have action, drama, and lots of introspection. Animation doesn’t just let you draw funny faces, it lets you explore universes that might be too expensive (or cheap-looking) if tried in live action.

Hazbin Hotel

Vivienne Medrano’s Hazbin Hotel exploded in popularity online, but many mainstream viewers still have not seen it. The musical comedy follows the princess of Hell as she attempts to rehabilitate sinners rather than punish them forever.

Blue Eye Samurai

Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai earned widespread critical acclaim for its animation, action, and storytelling. Despite rave reviews, many casual viewers missed this mature revenge tale set in Edo-period Japan.

Scavengers Reign

One of the most visually imaginative animated series in years, Scavengers Reign follows survivors stranded on a hostile alien world. Its focus on strange ecosystems and mature storytelling earned passionate praise from critics.

Pantheon

Based on stories by author Ken Liu, Pantheon explores uploaded human consciousness and artificial intelligence. Despite excellent reviews, the series flew under the radar compared to larger science-fiction releases.

Undone

Undone combines rotoscope animation with psychological drama and science-fiction elements. The series explores trauma, family history, and time perception in ways rarely attempted by animated television.

Primal

Created by Genndy Tartakovsky, Primal tells much of its story with little dialogue. The brutal tale of a caveman and a dinosaur surviving together became one of Adult Swim’s most acclaimed shows.

The Venture Bros.

While it developed a devoted fanbase, The Venture Bros. never reached the mainstream popularity of other Adult Swim hits. Its sharp parody of adventure cartoons evolved into one of television’s richest animated universes.

The Maxx

MTV’s The Maxx remains one of the strangest animated adaptations ever produced. Mixing psychological drama, surreal fantasy, and comic book storytelling, it became a cult favorite rather than a mainstream success.

Superjail!

Known for its wildly chaotic animation and over-the-top violence, Superjail! developed a dedicated following on Adult Swim. Its bizarre visual style remains unlike almost anything else in television animation.

Harley Quinn

Although based on a famous DC character, Harley Quinn often feels overlooked compared to live-action superhero shows. Its adult humor, strong voice cast, and surprisingly heartfelt character arcs earned widespread praise.

Hit-Monkey

Marvel’s MCU Hit-Monkey follows a Japanese macaque trained as an assassin by the ghost of a murdered hitman. The absurd premise masks a surprisingly entertaining action-comedy series.

Fired on Mars

This workplace comedy imagines a future where a corporate employee becomes stranded on a Mars colony. The show combines adult animation, existential humor, and social satire in a way that attracted critical attention.

Captain Fall

Created by writers behind Norsemen, Captain Fall follows a naive sea captain unknowingly working for a criminal organization. Despite arriving on Netflix, it received far less attention than many animated contemporaries.

The Legend of Vox Machina

Based on the enormously popular Critical Role campaign, The Legend of Vox Machina delivers fantasy adventure aimed squarely at adults. Strong character work and mature humor helped it win over newcomers as well.

Common Side Effects

Adult Swim’s Common Side Effects follows a conspiracy involving a mysterious mushroom with extraordinary medical properties. Its mix of thriller elements, satire, and adult animation has earned strong reviews while remaining relatively undiscovered.

Carol & the End of the World

Netflix’s Carol & the End of the World takes place after humanity learns an extinction-level event is inevitable. Instead of focusing on panic, the series explores routine, loneliness, and purpose through a quiet, deeply human perspective that many viewers overlooked.

The 15 Scariest True Crime Documentaries

Scary movies can unnerve and jolt us to no end, but at the end of the day, they are fiction. We can go back to the comfort of our reality knowing that, all in all, we live in a world where those terrors don’t exist. Except, they do, and that’s what true crime documentaries show: the dark side of society.

Among these true stories, there are ones that can scare us more deeply than any other story, fiction or otherwise. These are what we’ve collected over the years, and if you’re brave enough to see them, you’ll know that reality beats fiction in almost every way.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father

What begins as a tribute to a murdered friend transforms into one of the most devastating true crime documentaries ever made. The shocking twists and heartbreaking consequences leave many viewers emotionally exhausted long after it ends.

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst

This HBO series follows eccentric real estate heir Robert Durst and the suspicious deaths connected to him. Its unforgettable finale became one of the most talked-about moments in true crime television history.

The Keepers

Exploring the unsolved murder of nun Cathy Cesnik, The Keepers uncovers allegations of abuse, institutional cover-ups, and decades of unanswered questions. The deeper it goes, the more disturbing the story becomes.

Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer

Focusing on Richard Ramirez’s reign of terror in California during the 1980s, this documentary captures the fear that gripped entire communities as authorities struggled to identify and capture the killer.

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes

Featuring archival interviews with Ted Bundy himself, this documentary examines one of America’s most notorious serial killers. The contrast between Bundy’s charm and his crimes remains deeply unsettling.

Abducted in Plain Sight

This unbelievable documentary tells the story of a family repeatedly manipulated by child abductor Robert Berchtold. The shocking decisions and revelations throughout the film often leave viewers questioning how any of it happened.

Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist

Beginning with a bizarre bank robbery involving a bomb strapped to a man’s neck, Evil Genius uncovers a twisted conspiracy stranger than fiction. The case grows more disturbing with every episode.

American Murder: The Family Next Door

Using social media posts, text messages, and police footage, this documentary reconstructs the Watts family murders. Its intimate presentation makes the tragedy feel especially chilling and difficult to watch.

The Staircase

The mysterious death of Kathleen Peterson and the prosecution of her husband Michael Peterson fuel this long-running documentary. Conflicting evidence and endless theories have kept audiences debating the case for years.

Capturing the Friedmans

What begins as an investigation into allegations against a father and son evolves into a deeply uncomfortable exploration of memory, testimony, and uncertainty. Few documentaries leave viewers with so many lingering doubts.

There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane

This documentary examines the horrific Taconic State Parkway crash involving Diane Schuler. The unanswered questions surrounding her actions that day continue to disturb audiences years after the film’s release.

The Imposter

A French con artist successfully convinced a Texas family that he was their missing teenage son. The bizarre deception at the center of this documentary becomes increasingly unsettling the more details emerge.

Murder Among the Mormons

This series investigates a bombing case that shocked Utah in the 1980s. What initially appeared to be religious intrigue gradually revealed an elaborate web of fraud, forgery, and murder.

Girl in the Picture

One of Netflix’s most disturbing true crime documentaries, Girl in the Picture unravels the hidden identity of a woman trapped in a horrifying situation. Each revelation proves more shocking than the last.

The Cheshire Murders

This documentary examines the 2007 home invasion that devastated the Petit family in Connecticut. The brutality of the crime and the emotional interviews make it one of the most difficult true crime films to watch.

The 13 Most Obtrusive NBA Fans of All Time

With the NBA Finals just starting, basketball fans aren’t the only people preparing for tipoff. Every year, the league’s biggest games attract a long list of celebrity spectators, many of whom have become nearly as famous for their courtside appearances as their actual careers.

This includes both lifelong supporters who rarely miss a home game, as well as others who have become recurring fixtures whenever the cameras are rolling. As the spotlight returns to the hardwood, here are some of the most visible celebrity NBA fans ever to occupy a courtside seat.

Spike Lee

No celebrity is more closely associated with a single NBA team than Spike Lee is with the New York Knicks. For decades, he has occupied premium seats at Madison Square Garden and occasionally become part of the story itself through courtside interactions.

Jack Nicholson

For generations of basketball fans, seeing Jack Nicholson courtside at a Los Angeles Lakers game felt almost as inevitable as seeing the team itself. His long-running presence helped define the celebrity culture surrounding Lakers basketball.

Drake

As the Toronto Raptors’ global ambassador, Drake has become one of the most recognizable celebrity fans in modern basketball. His courtside celebrations, reactions, and occasional exchanges with opposing players frequently generate headlines of their own.

Billy Crystal

Billy Crystal has remained one of the Los Angeles Clippers’ most loyal supporters through good seasons and bad ones. His dedication became so well known that he was often considered one of the franchise’s most recognizable public faces.

Ben Stiller

Ben Stiller’s devotion to the Knicks has made him a regular sight at Madison Square Garden. Whether celebrating playoff victories or enduring another difficult season, he has become one of the team’s most recognizable celebrity supporters.

Timothée Chalamet

Timothée Chalamet has emerged as one of the NBA’s newer celebrity regulars, particularly during high-profile Knicks games. His frequent courtside appearances have made him a familiar figure whenever New York makes a postseason run.

Kylie Jenner

Kylie Jenner has attended numerous NBA games over the years, often attracting almost as much attention from photographers as the action on the court. Her appearances have become a regular part of the league’s celebrity ecosystem.

Jason Sudeikis

Jason Sudeikis frequently turns up at major NBA events and playoff contests. While many know him for his Kansas City sports fandom, his appearances at basketball games have made him another recognizable courtside presence.

Kevin Hart

Kevin Hart’s passion for the Philadelphia 76ers is difficult to miss. Whether cheering, celebrating, or joking with players and fans, he brings the same high-energy personality to basketball games that audiences know from his comedy.

Snoop Dogg

Snoop Dogg has spent years supporting Los Angeles sports teams, including the Lakers. His courtside appearances, social media commentary, and connections throughout the sports world have made him a familiar face around the NBA.

Flea

The Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist has been a devoted Lakers supporter for years. Although quieter than some celebrity fans, Flea’s frequent appearances have made him a recognizable fixture at games in Los Angeles.

Denzel Washington

Denzel Washington is another celebrity often spotted at Lakers games. While he tends to keep a lower profile than some courtside regulars, his attendance has become a familiar sight for longtime NBA viewers.

Mark Cuban

Although better known as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks than a traditional fan, Mark Cuban’s emotional courtside reactions have become legendary. Few people in basketball display their enthusiasm as openly during games.

12 Disney Stars That Didn’t Continue Acting

The Disney platform is one seemingly made to create stars, since unforgettable personalities like Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling come from that background. Children star in massively popular shows and movies and, through connections and fame, jump-start their careers. Many children and young adults dream of such a possibility.

But no matter how alluring, not everyone wants to follow that dream. While fun during childhood (or perhaps pressured by their parents), these child actors decided to make something else out of their lives. It’s not that they didn’t have the talent, their focus ended up being somewhere else.

Dylan Sprouse

After co-starring in The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and The Suite Life on Deck, Dylan Sprouse largely stepped away from mainstream acting. He focused on college, business ventures, and running a meadery before occasionally returning for select projects.

Bridgit Mendler

The Good Luck Charlie star chose a dramatically different path after Disney. Rather than pursuing a major Hollywood career, she focused on higher education, earning advanced degrees and eventually co-founding a space technology company.

Jennifer Stone

Known as Harper on Wizards of Waverly Place, Jennifer Stone shifted her focus away from acting and became a registered nurse. She has occasionally remained connected to her Disney roots through fan projects and podcasts.

Tiffany Thornton

After starring in Sonny with a Chance and So Random!, Tiffany Thornton largely left acting behind. Her later career included radio work and other pursuits outside Hollywood, with acting credits becoming increasingly rare.

Kay Panabaker

A familiar face from Phil of the Future and several Disney productions, Kay Panabaker retired from acting in 2012. She later studied zoology and eventually became an animal caretaker at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

Adam Lamberg

Best known as Gordo from Lizzie McGuire, Adam Lamberg quietly left the entertainment industry after a handful of post-Disney appearances. For years, many fans assumed he had completely disappeared from the public eye.

Ashlie Brillault

Ashlie Brillault played Kate Sanders on Lizzie McGuire, but unlike many child stars, she left acting entirely. She attended law school and built a career as a criminal defense attorney.

Brandon Baker

Disney Channel viewers remember Brandon Baker from Johnny Tsunami. Rather than chasing a lifelong acting career, he eventually stepped away from Hollywood and moved into other professional pursuits outside the entertainment industry.

Erik von Detten

A Disney favorite thanks to projects like Brink! and So Weird, Erik von Detten gradually withdrew from acting after years in the business. He has largely remained out of the spotlight since leaving Hollywood.

Morgan York

After appearing in Hannah Montana and several family films, Morgan York decided acting was no longer for her. She later explained that she preferred focusing on writing rather than continuing a screen career.

Nicole Anderson

Disney fans know Nicole Anderson from Jonas and other teen-oriented series. After several years of television work, she gradually stepped away from acting and has maintained a much lower public profile since.

Micah Williams

Micah Williams appeared on Good Luck Charlie as Emmett and had several television credits before that. However, after his Disney years ended, he largely exited the acting world and pursued other interests.

20 Vintage Muscle Cars in Their Natural Habitat for All the Gearheads

The 1970s were a fascinating time for American muscle cars. While changing regulations and rising fuel prices were beginning to reshape the automotive landscape, plenty of powerful machines were still roaming the streets, drag strips, and parking lots of America.

These weren’t museum pieces or meticulously restored collector cars. They were daily drivers, weekend racers, and symbols of a culture built around horsepower. Looking back at vintage photographs offers a rare glimpse into the era when these machines were still part of everyday life. For gearheads, these images capture muscle cars exactly where they belonged: out in the wild and doing what they were built to do.

Fire Paintjob

There are few things as classic as the fire paintjob in a muscle car, representing the rider going through the symbolic ‘highway to hell.’ Many games and media have depicted cars with this style, but only back then were drivers using it on the daily.

Race Ready Muscles

What’s better than one muscle car? Yes, three of them, and these ones are race-track ready. We are used to seeing the same type of hood on many of these cars, but being aerodynamic is important when racing legitimately.

Passion Red

The full black muscle car tends to be what we associate with the brand, but the deep red tones go fantastically with the car as well. As the picture shows, it shows off the car far better during the day.

Custom Painted Cobra Jet

The Mustang Cobra Jet was already a staple of the Muscle car, with many drivers customizing the vehicle even further. This one has a cartoonish cobra being fed when the tank is filled, a rather humorous detail.

Impactful Traction

That smoke you see there? The car isn’t suffering from spontaneous combustion, this is the effect achieved often by accelerating with the hand break on. It makes for quite a menacing start to a race.

Made To Be Shown

Even back in the day, this type of vehicle was already gathering crowds and having its own conventions. The nets on the back windshield aren’t for show; it was often used by professional racers as added protection to themselves, and to the car.

The Visible Engine

Was there an actual advantage to the engine being visible like that? Perhaps in some models, but in most cases it left the engine vulnerable to accidents. The reality is that this is a statement, a power move that makes the car look like it has a royal horn.

Towed Everywhere

When these cars are in such pristine condition, they weren’t really driven to places, they were taken. This still happens today, with collectors not wanting even the tires dirty, so they tow their cars to their destinations.

Proper Protection

Another of the look-at-my-engine type of cars, this one makes sure the engine is protected from mother nature by having it properly encased. Best of all, you can pretend to have one of the expensive engines, since who’s going to check if it’s hollow?

The Black Sabbath Fan

No, this Muscle owner isn’t into witchcraft; they are into the Ozzy Osbourne band, Black Sabbath, and they showcase their fandom proudly on their vehicle.

The Marriage Cruise

Today, it might be the dream of many a grearhead to drive away in their Muscle car after being married, but back in the day, it was a constant reality. The driver didn’t have a budget for a sign, but those massive tires aren’t exactly cheap.

Kill Bill

If this is a reference to anything, it would be to what the film Kill Bill was alluding to with the Bride’s attire: Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. Still, what both the martial artist, the actress and the car have in common is one thing: they look incredibly good in that color scheme.

Side To Side

This picture can be a lot of things: Muscle owners traveling the road together, vehicles going to the same expo, or a simple coincidence of vehicle brand that happened to be photographed. But we know what it is: a high stakes race about to start.

Subtle Flames

Not all paintjobs need to make a statement, since sometimes, less is more. Here, we see the classic flaming theme barely visible on the sides of this car, but make no mistake: they are more than visible during the dark of night.

Massive Machine

There is a possibility that the woman sitting on the trunk of the car is, simply put, quite tiny. But the truth is the truth: these cars were massive, made to dominate the road. As such, they make us normal humans feel quite small.

Ready For The Race

Cars need sustenance just as much as we do, and they can’t roam the great roads, or challenge the best racers, without a moment for a pit stop. Here we have to Muscle cars getting ready for their day.

Proper Polish

There’s nothing like a car with the right amount of polish, looking mean and clean under the sunlight. Since these are vintage images, you know that the shine isn’t photoshop or AI: this is the real deal.

Family Ride

Muscle cars aren’t the most comfortable vehicles to carry more than two passengers, but since children are tiny, we can let it slide. After all, what child wouldn’t want to see the country roads on their parent’s cool car.

Newly Bought

There’s pride in this picture, since this is the moment this person acquired their very own Muscle pride. Of course, we can’t know if this is the first or tenth car the person bought, but considering it was worthy of celluloid, we can say it was a special occasion nonetheless.

Speed Away

This is a car made for speed, for the road, and to conquer others. The stylings and decorations are of a man that wants his car to be seen from miles away, just before it passes you on the highway.

Remember the Guardians: Stan Lee’s Ill-Fated Collaboration With the NHL

Stan Lee played a role in coming up with some of the greatest villains of all time: Doctor Doom, Magneto, Devin Dark. Oh, you don’t know that last one? Well, clearly, you weren’t watching the NHL All-Star Game on January 30, 2011, in Raleigh, North Carolina. That was not just the night when Team Lidstrom, led by the Perfect Human Nicklas Lidstrom, beat Team Staal, led by then-Carolina Hurricanes captain Eric Staal. It was also the night when the NHL Guardians gathered to do battle with the evil cloud man known as Devin Dark.

Okay, even if you were watching, you probably don’t remember. Because even though the flashy, CG-generated video of the Guardians saving attendees from Devin Dark ended on a cliffhanger, in which Dark kidnapped all the Guardians except the Hurricane and revealed the secret identity of the team leader, absolutely no one (except, perhaps, the hosts of the Puck Podcast) have mentioned it even once in the past 15 years. That’s because the Guardian Project was a spectacular failure, one that bored both fans of hockey and superheroes.

Not the All-Stars

The basic idea behind the Guardian Project did make a bit of sense. Each team has a cool mascot and they all wear colorful costumes. It shouldn’t be that much of a jump to turn them into superheroes, right? And Stan Lee created Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Hulk, so who better than to make this new generation of costumed avengers? What could go wrong?

A quick glance at the Guardian Project quickly reveals the answer. Lee (or, more likely, some intern who will never be credited) created a hero for each of the (then) 30 teams in the NHL. And in every case, he went for the most obvious possible choice. It isn’t just that each hero just has the name of the mascot; eg, the Duck, the Devil, the King. It’s that they all have generic power sets, derived from already established heroes.

Take Pittsburgh’s Guardian, the Penguin. “The gritty young savior of Steel City,” reads the copy attached to his picture. “Can project ice missiles from his hands and travels on a frozen ice sheet.” Obviously, those are the same powers as Iceman from the X-Men. But to top it off, the Penguin wears a visor across his eyes, just like fellow X-Men Cyclops. Put together, the Penguin seems like Frozone from The Incredibles, but as a white guy in yellow and black.

Or maybe you’d prefer Montreal’s hero the Canadian, a guy in a blue and red power suit who shoots blasters from his hands, just like Iron Man. How about the Arizona Coyote, aka Wolverine in a trench coat, or the Panther, who imagines what it would be like if Black Panther came not from the futuristic utopia Wakanda, but from Florida? At least the Edmonton Oiler, with blocky costume and goo gun, had the decency to rip off a good character, Paste-Pot Pete.

Occasionally, an unwieldily mascot forced Lee to take some creative leaps. Sure, the Columbus Blue Jacket looks like a B-tier Go-Bot, but not often do you see a revived Civil War soldier with cannons in his robot legs. Lee didn’t just steal Falcon’s pet bird for the Detroit Red Wing, but embraced the team’s Motor City roots by sticking awkward wheels and pedals on what otherwise looks like Mach-1 of the Thunderbolts. And the St. Louis Blue may be kind of a rip-off of forgotten Ultraverse hero Night Man (jazz musician by night, superhero by later at night), but he looks kind of cool.

Ultimately, the dull designs and generic power sets bring to mind not legends in the making, but the drawings of some random kid who just watched Hockey Night in Canada. Which they are, canonically-speaking.

Unguarded Hockey

According to the shared universe lore revealed in the graphic novel The Guardian Project Special Edition, the Guardians actually came from the mind of Mike Mason, a nondescript teenager who sketched out a series of superheroes in his notebook. Somehow, the pictures came to life, giving 30 North American cities their own superheroes… at least until the Thrasher leaves Atlanta to become the Jet and the Coyote decides Salt Lake City is nice and renames himself the Mammoth.

The Guardian Project Special Edition boasts some supplemental artwork by the legendary Neal Adams and scripts by Chuck Dixon, then still closer to his incredible work on Batman and Birds of Prey and not the right-wing nonsense he does these days. It contains six-page origin stories for each of the heroes, all illustrated well and handsomely put together, but deadly boring.

You’ll have to take my word on that assessment, because unless you still have your copy from 2011 or want to buy a copy from an eBay seller (including one selling their copy for $5000 dollars), you’ll never read The Guardian Project. Not even any of the shady sites that retrain digital copies of Marvel‘s Christian comic The Illuminator or Superman‘s team-up with Jared from Subway have bothered to upload The Guardian Project, because nobody cares.

Sad as the Guardian Project is, it isn’t totally unexpected. Hockey has always been the fourth to seventh most popular sport in the United States, and Commissioner Gary Bettman has been willing to try almost anything to grow the sport, even putting a team in Utah. Even less surprising is the fact that Stan Lee would put his name on forgettable schlock. Lee was always more of a pitchman than he was a writer, and without guys like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko to crib from, his projects have been uniformly cloying and dull.

With a Stanley Cup final that has already had one incredibly exciting game against the Vegas Golden Knights—who joined the League in 2017 and thus, never suffered the ignominy of having a Guardian—the Hurricanes have once again drawn the eyes of hockey fans back to Raleigh. Hopefully, this experience will be more memorable than the time the Guardians battled Devin Dark.

Judith Light Breaks Down Dorry’s Tragic Decision on The Terror: Devil in Silver

The following contains major spoilers for The Terror: Devil in Silver episode 5 “Vermillion.”

The penultimate episode of The Terror: Devil in Silver is a tragedy on many levels. An hour that not only features another tragic death but a look back into the dark history of New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital, it’s disturbing in ways that have almost nothing to do with the malicious supernatural entity prowling the institution’s halls.

The bulk of the episode focuses on Dorry, a schizophrenic woman who has been a resident at New Hyde for most of her life. Her history is firmly intertwined with the hospital’s, and she’s the unofficial keeper of information about its past, its residents, and the very real danger that stalks its halls. But in “Vermillion,” we finally get a glimpse at the woman she used to be.

As a young woman, Dorry — or Dorinda as she was known then — was forcibly committed to New Hyde by her husband, a man who had little patience with her emotional needs and the artistic outlets that helped her manage them. And like many women of the time period who were seen as non-conforming, hysterical, or otherwise unhappy, she was forced into compliance through drugs and medical violence (a lobotomy) before essentially being left to rot.

“She’s such a really moving example of how people can get lost in the system,” Judith Light, who plays Dorry, tells Den of Geek. “So much of her life has been sacrificed to the system, and she had no control over it. Her character is so beautifully crafted, and you get to really see all of those things that make her who she is, and the abuse that she’s suffered. What does it mean to have a husband who cannot put up with your mood swings or your creative artistry and who puts you in an institution and leaves you there and never comes back to get you, and suddenly 30 years pass? The sorrow of that is so deep for me.”

At its heart, The Devil in Silver is a story that’s as much about human monsters as it is supernatural creatures. The residents of New Hyde are unwilling cogs in a devastating system, trapped in, as star Dan Stevens himself put it, “a waiting room without a door,” and their experiences reflect the very real concerns about the modern mental health industry that are reflected in author Victor LaValle’s novel.

“I didn’t know a lot about Victor’s work. I knew that he was a bestselling New York Times novelist, but I didn’t know a lot about [his writing]. When I started to read the novel, what I found compelling was the way he talked about Dorry and who she was in the dynamics of the system,” Light says. “I think it’s a really great way to talk about the context of our world right now, about mental health and what the challenges there are. The script was incredible — I read two lines and called my agents and my managers and said ‘I’m in’.”

For Light, The Devil in Silver isn’t a horror story in the traditional sense, though it has plenty of frightening elements. They’re just based firmly in a world we can see and understand.

“This is a psychological thriller. I don’t call it horror so much — I know that there are huge horror fans out there, and I get it. But it is horrifying. That’s a perfect way to describe it, to describe what happens [in New Hyde]. Where is our compassion for each other? Where is our empathy for each other? What does it mean to live your life for so many years in a mental facility? What does it mean to have mental challenges and to have no one there to help you and guide you? That’s what terrifies us. That’s what keeps us up at night. And there’s a tipping point for every one of these characters, who are so frustrated with their lives, and just put away for who knows how long.”

In the wake of Coffee’s death, the hospital administration decides that New Hyde will be shuttered permanently, its patients shifted to different locations. For its residents, this is simply another in a long line of failures whose adverse effects they must live with, whether they like it or not. But it’s also a very real threat — to Dorry, Pepper, and the rest of the patients, it means releasing a dark entity they know to be both real and extremely dangerous.

Determined not to let this happen, Dorry confronts Dr. Assad (Aasif Mandvi), ultimately bludgeoning him to death when he refuses to help her stop the monster they’ve both enabled for so long. But, to hear Light tell it, what seems like a psychotic break may actually be the first time Dorry’s seen things clearly, and been able to choose her future on her own terms.

“It looks like she’s mentally lost it. But what’s really happened is that she’s finally claiming her choices, claiming her life. Dorry is taking hold of control in a way that she’s never had it before,” she says. “She also has sorrow about the things that she has done — that she was co-opted by the system and how she succumbed to that. That she tried to live her life just so she could get by. She’s made choices that were untoward and problematic. And she knows that she has let down many, many people.”

To survive in a place like New Hyde for as long as she has, Dorry has become a resource — both for the newcomers to the hospital and for the dark creature that may or may not be feeding off their pain and suffering. That she chooses to reject the complicity she previously so thoroughly embraced is, for Light, an empowering decision, ultimately sacrificing her own life in a bid to escape the entity’s control and reclaim her own story.

“I think this is a very heroic moment. And people on the set when it happened who hadn’t read the future scripts were devastated. They were just devastated. If you talk to Victor or to Chris or to Karyn [Kusama, director], they’ll tell you how people came up to them and said ‘Oh my God, you cannot do this to Dorry’, because so many people had come to love her so much. But Dorry never holds herself as a victim. Don’t we love all the people we see striving to keep their heads above water in the most dire circumstances? Those are the people we most root for. Those are the people that we adore. She knows what’s going to happen to her when people find out what she did. This is her moment, and it’s her choice.”

New episodes of The Terror: Devil in Silver premiere Thursdays on AMC+ and Shudder, culminating with a finale on June 11.

Scary Movie 6 Review: High on Fumes

Oh, how do you solve a problem like Scary Movie? Ever since its inception a quarter century ago, here has been a comedy series defined by its crassness; its cruelty; its happy-go-lucky, stoned-out-of-its-goddamn-mind bad taste.

Criticizing it for crossing a line too taboo, or a joke too mean, is to highlight a feature and not a bug. I recall rolling my eyes as a kid at the negative reviews aimed at the original while anxiously anticipating every vulgar, four-letter-laced fart joke the 2000 movie could throw my way. And to be sure, in almost just as long a time since Marlon and Shawn Wayans were cast aside from their own franchise, the pop culture landscape has done its damndest to stay the same too.

Twenty-five years since the Weinsteins ripped the series away from its creators following 2001’s Scary Movie 2, we’re still getting some good, hardy belly laughs about the metatextual pretensions of Scream. But, perhaps older and more pretentious myself, there’s also some incredibly unpleasant cringes when the Wayans use the avarice of their own backers (first Miramax and now Paramount) to transgress into a realm some might consider obscene. For myself, the real issue is when it stops punching up at Hollywood, and starts punching down at some of its viewers. That’s new.

I’d be lying though if I didn’t say I laughed plenty during this weekend’s Scary Movie 6 (or, mockingly, just “Scary Movie” on the poster). Even with the long stretches where you could hear a pin drop in my theater, on the metric of a standard joke-bag movie, where comedy is measured by how often you laugh, I’d say the hit rate is about 40/60 against. In baseball, that’s a terrific average, and for a Scary Movie it’s definitely better than most installments (though the best remain the first and the Zucker Brother’d Scary Movie 3).

The gist of this one, of course, is making fun of long-in-the-tooth franchises being dragged out of the mothballs for yet another legacy sequel. And appropriately for Scary Movie, the main targets are most specifically Radio Silence’s Scream 5 and VI, right down to mocking those movies’ attempt to make the term “requel” happen. Scary Movie 6 is a “rebootquel,” as Marlon Wayans’ always welcome Shorty enthuses when coming up for air between bong hits.

If you’ve seen Scream 5, the skeleton of that movie is pretty much identical, complete with a Jenna Ortega lookalike (Savannah Lee Nassif), here named Tuesday for “legal reasons,” getting stabbed in the opening sequence but living long enough to bring her estranged big sister Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) back to town alongside a totally not sketchy looking boyfriend (Cameron Scott Roberts). Turns out Sara and Tuesday are the daughters of Cindy Campbell, the OG Anna Farris, who is now in Jamie Lee Curtis’ fright wig from Halloween (2018).

At this point, it should be clear this is going to be a kitchen sink approach to just about every horror flick the Scary Movie franchise has missed out on since 2013. Cindy and a delightful Regina Hall as Brenda Meeks are back as the “legacy” characters, a la Scream or Halloween—but NEVER I Know What You Did Last Summer, a movie the olds tell the young kids not to worry about in this movie when they ask if it’s related to The Summer I Turned Pretty— but Brenda is now rocking Octavia Spencer’s haircut and vibes from Ma while living in the house from Get Out; Cindy’s daughter works at the Final Destination Theme Park where “everybody dies!;” and their estranged buddies Shorty and the perpetually closeted Ray (Shawn Wayans) find themselves dragging the kids into parodies of M3GAN and Sinners.

Intriguingly, the prevalent trend of “elevated” (or artistic) horror movies from the last decade are mostly side-stepped. There’s a line where Cindy mentions It Follows, but says “that movie’s too obscure for a flashback.” That or perhaps too hard to insert poop, sex, or transphobic jokes into. With that said, there’s a solid gag about Nosferatu during the post-credits—and a flat one about Longlegs.

But it is the aforementioned scatological humor that really makes or breaks Scary Movie and the Wayans’ oeuvre in general. Their comedies, especially in this series, are less movies than a series of thinly tied together sketches. It’s R-rated, filthy-minded SNL that’ll dare do a lynching gag. Some of the gonzo bits work, some don’t, and a few are outright hilarious, such as Shawn Wayans revealing Shorty is in his 25th senior year at the local high school. And when it skips horror altogether and swerves into a John Wick parody? The best stuff here. But by design all of it feels antiquated and, um… old.

The Wayans would likely say that is because they’re bringing back raunchy comedy and the days where it was fun to offend everyone. Yet it’s noticeable when entire sequences become about “man, kids these days,” such as when Shorty and Ghostface end up getting some killer Twitch content. That one can still get a chuckle because it has a twinkle in its eye, but when the twinkle shifts to malice, and Scary Movie 6 gets blood in its mouth, it becomes something ugly.

A lot of it boils down to jokes about trans kids and nonbinary people. The Wayans have always enjoyed making fun of the differences in cultures and classes, and there is something eternally funny about Shawn Wayans’ Ray Ray being a self-loathing gay man who now shows up to a Halloween party dressed as his manly hero, Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain. But those bits, even with their 20-year-old references, use differences and stereotypes to highlight a “live and let live” sense of community in these movies. It’s a party where everyone gets hazed and everyone’s invited.

Scary Movie 6, however, pulls up the drawbridge and curls its lip when trans characters walk into the scene. It’s the subtle difference between laughing with someone and laughing at them. Or in parody movie parlance, at some point Scary Movie 6 stops siding with Sheriff Bart and the Waco Kid, and starts giggling with Hedley Lamar’s nitwit followers.

That harms the movie, as does the fact that despite parodying Radio Silence’s Scream 5 and VI, those films did a better job of satirizing modern horror trends, including making fun of that “obscure” A24 stuff in the original “Ghostface and Wednesday” scene.

Scary Movie has never produced the best spoofs. It’s less focused than Mel Brooks’ 1970s output, and never as narratively committed to the bit as The Naked Gun, both the original and last year’s surprisingly great reboot. Scary Movie aims low and wide, and in its better installments hits enough to be worth the price of admission. Well, if you want to gaggle about gay panic jokes and celebrity cameos—including an admittedly great one in the cold open that I won’t spoil—then the new Scary Movie lives up to its legacy. But it also sinks beneath it too often to give it a free pass.

Scary Movie 6 is in theaters now.

Marvel’s Wolverine Delivers Gruesome Gameplay First Look

He is the best at what he does, and it isn’t very nice. Sony Interactive Entertainment is giving the X-Men’s most iconic, violent, and animalistic member his own game in what may be Insomniac Games’ most violent outing yet. Now, the 2026 PlayStation State of Play presentation has provided gamers with their first look at the highly-anticipated single-player action-adventure game, Marvel’s Wolverine.

Three years after leaving his team, James “Logan” Howlett, a.k.a. Wolverine rejoins Task Force X as they face one of their darkest challenges yet. Bolivar Trask is kidnapping mutants based on his belief in human superiority, and Wolverine is the only one who can stop him.

Years after hanging up his Wolverine mask, Logan must travel across the globe through locations like Canada, Japan, and Marvel’s fictional country of Madripoor to work with a network of mutants in a fight for the future. With the fate of humanity and mutantkind alike in the balance, Logan crosses paths with allies Jean Grey, Mystique, and Sabertooth in brutally bloody combat and adventure.

In a world that wants a hero, Wolverine will be the brute that they need. Playing the Adamantium-clawed antihero is Liam McIntyre, known for his role as Spartacus in Spartacus, and JD Fenix in the 2016 video game Gears of War 4.

In the gameplay trailer, fans follow Logan as he tracks an elusive Jean Grey and finds Trask’s newest kidnappees. Here, the game reveals Logan’s attack methods – a mix of stealth and brutal takedowns. Insomniac Games did an amazing job at showing the combat potential of both Peter Parker and Miles Morales in the Spider-Man games, and it looks to be transferring over to Wolverine.

In Tasmanian devil-style combat, Logan’s wolverine-like animalistic nature shines through. Taking on multiple foes with ease, his takedown approach is reminiscent of the Arkham Knight series’ Red Hood story pack. Logan is significantly more brutal and takes a far more grunge approach to stealth than Isomniac’s Spider-Man.

In a seven-minute extended gameplay trailer, the essence of Wolverine’s identity radiates from the screen. It is like watching an animated comic book that features a seasoned Wolverine – not old man Logan, but a truly established, maybe slightly out of his prime Wolverine.

Fans also get to see what his team-based combat will look like with allied characters. Wolverine uses coordinating attacks with Jean Grey as they try and rescue the Trask detainees. He also fights interactively with his surroundings, killing a Trask agent by pushing them into the blades of a forklift and stealing a motorcycle to chase down Trask’s goons.

While an official story trailer has yet to be released, this first look shows Wolverine fighting Omega Red, along with glimpses at Wolverine in a James Bond-like suit. We also see multiple glimpses of Sabertooth, Mystique, a mysterious Samurai, and Logan in Madipoor.

Insomniac is really raising the stakes both inside and outside of the game.

Marvel’s Wolverine will be released on September 15 on PS5. It is available for pre-order for $69.99.

Batman: Caped Crusader to Mash Up Two Beloved Batman Stories in Season 2

No one would argue that Batman: The Animated Series got better when it was redesigned and renamed The New Batman Adventures in 1997, but that latter run still had its bright spots. Case in point, season 2’s “Legends of the Dark Knight,” which homages several classic Batman stories, including Frank Miller‘s The Dark Knight Returns. Prime Video series Batman: Caped Crusader, the Bruce Timm-created spiritual sequel to the Animated Series, hopes to follow in the footsteps of The New Batman Adventures, but not only referencing Dark Knight Returns, but mashing it up with one of the most beloved episodes of The Animated Series.

A sneak-peek of Caped Crusader season 2 features an images of Batman talking to a kid wearing a mask and a grey suit. According to IGN, that kid is Carrie Kelley, the Robin of The Dark Knight Returns. And the suit she’s wearing is that of the Grey Ghost, the character voiced by Adam West in the great Animated Series episode “Beware the Gray Ghost.”

The mashup is a clever bit of homage, mixing together looks at Batman’s past and his future. The Dark Knight Returns is the defining future story for the Caped Crusader, in which Batman returns from retirement after 20 years to battle the mutants who have conquered Gotham. Grizzled and violent, Batman gains an ally in Carrie Kelley, a young girl inspired by the hero’s reemergence to become the next Robin.

“Beware the Grey Ghost” looks backward, and not just because it features Adam West, who was the defining Batman actor when the episode premiered in 1992. The episode slightly revises Batman’s origin to make the Grey Ghost, a fedora-wearing crimefighter in the vein of the Green Hornet, into Bruce Wayne’s inspiration, more than the traditional Zorro. When a criminal starts recreating attacks from the old TV series The Grey Ghost, Batman teams up with actor Simon Trent (West) to help solve the crime. By the end of the episode, Batman thanks Grey Ghost for inspiring him as an adult, a clear nod from voice actor Kevin Conroy and the Animated Series team to West and Batman 1966.

While we can see the thematic connection between Carrie Kelley and Grey Ghost, the image doesn’t tell us how the character will be used in Caped Crusader. Much of the pleasures of Caped Crusader‘s first season came from the way it played with expectations, giving us a radically different version of Harley Quinn and reimagining the various Robins as urchins who help Batman, but never suit up.

As the released pictures indicate, Caped Crusader will be using more traditional characters in its second season. In addition to the Riddler, Scarecrow, and Mad Hatter, all longtime foes of Batman, the second season will finally bring in the Clown Prince of Crime, the Joker. And judging by the image of a man killed by smile toxin, he’ll have the same MO as the Joker we know and fear.

Obviously, Batman will need help wherever he can get it in season 2 of Caped Crusader, even help from his own past and his future.

Batman: Caped Crusader season 2 streams on Prime Video on July 31, 2026.

Backrooms Kids: Now’s the Time to Watch Twin Peaks

This article contains light spoilers for Backrooms.

For everything that Backrooms does right, there is one accolade that doesn’t quite fit. No, Backrooms may not be based on a major IP, but it isn’t entirely accurate to say that it’s an original film, owing as it does to not just director Kane Parson’s YouTube videos, but also to the creepypasta 4chan and Reddit posts that made liminal spaces into a legitimate horror genre.

For Parsons, the debt goes back even deeper. Speaking to Collider about the influence of David Lynch on his work, Parsons revealed that after his parents’ separation, his father “decorated the entirety of the interior of this space in the house he was renting with those red curtains [and] the zigzag carpet [from] Twin Peaks.” Parsons goes on to downplay the influence of Lynch on his work, calling the space “the dreamscape sort of environment” instead of the Black Lodge and dismissing the experience of anecdotal, the connection is there.

And that’s good for people who grew up watching Parsons’ videos, because it means that it’s time for Backrooms fans to check out Twin Peaks.

Entering the Black Lodge

Even if you have never seen the series, you probably know what Parsons means when he talks about his dad’s place. A room with thick red curtains, zigzag walls, and a small man who speaks backwards and does a dance. The imagery has been repeated and homaged time and again (perhaps Parsons fans best know it from an episode of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated).

The specific name of that space changes over the course of Twin Peaks‘s three seasons, two aired between 1990 and 1991 and a revival series in 2017, and the 1992 prequel movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Generally, however, it’s called the Black Lodge, an ethereal space that FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) visits while investigating the murder of high school sweetheart Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee).

That last point cannot be understated for those coming to Twin Peaks for the first time. While the surreal imagery of the Black Lodge absolutely matters, it is not the driving focus of the show, especially in its original seasons. Instead, the series is about the investigation into Laura Palmer’s death.

The show begins with kindly Pete Martell (Jack Nance) discovering the body of Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic. A homecoming queen beloved for her acts of service, Laura’s death affects everyone in the town, from Sheriff Truman (Michael Ontkean) and his deputies Hawk (Michael Horse) and Andy (Harry Goaz), to workers at the lumber mill owned by Josie Packard (Joan Chen) and operated by Pete’s wife Catherine (Piper Laurie), to Laura’s main boyfriend Bobby (Dana Ashbrook) and secret boyfriend James (James Marshall). Hit worst of all are Laura’s parents, Leland (Ray Wise) and Sarah (Grace Zabriskie).

Eventually, the FBI gets involved in the case, sending Agent Cooper to investigate. A clean-cut G-man with indefatigable optimism, Cooper combines traditional detective work with more surreal techniques, including using dream logic. As he and Truman work together to uncover the clues, they discover a deep sadness and strangeness in the small town, leading to moments of comedy, soap operatic romance, character-driven drama, and sublime horror.

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange

Those conflicting qualities are both the chief appeal and greatest stumbling block for people coming to Twin Peaks. Anyone new to the show in 2026 probably knows about the Black Lodge and its imagery. But they may not realize how soapy and silly the show gets. Created by Lynch and Mark Frost, a veteran TV writer, Twin Peaks was originally a network television show as it was a weird horror series.

Sometimes, that means it parodies soap opera tropes, as seen with the fake TV show “Invitation to Love” that the townspeople watch. Sometimes, it plays the cheesy stuff straight, as when James sings a corny love song with Laura’s best friend Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) and Laura’s cousin Maddy (also portrayed by Lee). The series features some horrific images of the supernatural evil Bob (Frank Silva) menacing the camera, but also gives space for Deputy Andy to do a silly walk after being bumped in the head.

Network TV problems famously dogged the original seasons of Twin Peaks, with ABC forcing Lynch and Frost to reveal Laura’s killer early in season 2 and driving the creators away. Without Lynch and Frost driving things, the series becomes a parody of itself, all cooky characters with none of the depth.

Lynch does return for an absolutely mesmerizing final episode of the original series, and he makes the prequel movie Fire Walk With Me without Frost. The story of the final week in the life of Laura Palmer, Fire Walk With Me alienated fans and critics at the time, as it eschewed all the wackiness of the show to take seriously a teen girl’s rape and murder.

Today, the movie is recognized as a classic, especially after the 2017 revival series, completely made by Lynch and Frost. Twin Peaks: The Return does indeed do what you’d expect from a revival show, bringing back most of the main cast and finishing dangling plot lines from the original show, including the disappearance of Agent Cooper and various romantic entanglements. But it does so by frustrating expectations, leaving major characters off screen for long stretches and replacing them with weirdos that many viewers neither expected nor wanted.

However, that approach allowed Lynch and Frost to create a powerful work about aging and nostalgia. Twin Peaks: The Return is in no hurry for Cooper to finish his long, circuitous journey back to Twin Peaks, and all of the digressions explore concepts of identity and expectation. The sometimes glacial pace forces viewers to think about what they expected and remembered, and how those expectations can make us miss something beautiful or terrifying.

Before the Backrooms

So why should Backrooms fans check out Twin Peaks? The most obvious answer is the thing that Parsons identifies, the Black Lodge. The Black Lodge is a liminal space, a weird non-reality that people visit through cracks in reality, where they deal with inverted doppelgängers and upsetting deviations from the real world. The doors in the furniture store, the misshapen figures in the hallways, even the confused scientists all are of a piece with Twin Peaks.

However, Twin Peaks goes further to deal with themes that Backrooms only touches upon. Backrooms protagonists Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Mary(Renate Reinsve) are indeed stuck in their memories and expectations, which get visualized in the terrors of the backrooms. But as evocative as the images are, Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik too often rely on characters declaring their themes and feelings. Whatever the film has to say about memory and trauma, it says so loudly and thinly.

That’s not the case with Twin Peaks. Cheesy as it can sometimes be, with Agent Cooper gushing about damn good coffee or two longtime unrequited lovers finally coming together in The Return, Twin Peaks understands that small acts of kindness and cruelty have cosmic reverberation, coming back to us in forms that are sometimes unspeakably beautiful and sometimes sublimely terrifying. Moreover, The Return in particular knows that memories can be as debilitating as they are comforting, and can open the door for something horrible.

Again, Backrooms does touch on these themes. But for those who were compelled by the way an up-and-comer tackled those ideas and want to see what a cinematic great can do with them, it’s time to enter the Black Lodge and watch Twin Peaks.

Backrooms is now playing in theaters worldwide. Twin Peaks is streaming on Paramount+.

New Documentary American Zoo Bridges Nostalgia and the Unbelievable

Den of Geek got an exclusive first look at a new documentary film, and it couldn’t be more intriguing. With a bizarre synopsis and cohesive surreal visual style, American Zoo might just be a sleeper hit of New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. Give it a look below:

American Zoo follows two families — the Lindemanns and the Hecks — and their ownership of the now-abandoned Catskill Game Farm, the first private zoo in America. Although that might sound more like We Bought a Zoo than a real-life Lynchian tale, it gets much more interesting. Both families behind Catskill Game Farm sought to bring primeval creatures back from extinction, motivated by Nazi-influenced ideologies about the natural world and man’s influence over it.

From director Tim Travers Hawkins, the filmmaker behind previous documentaries such as XY Chelsea and Capturing the Killer Nurse, American Zoo unarchives footage from previously unknown chapters of the Catskill zoo, bringing new light to the sinister activities happening yards away from families making memories together.

Press stills from the film show scenes of kids riding alpacas, well-dressed visitors posing with apes, and long lines waiting to cross under a sign proclaiming “Catskill Game Farm: Fun For the Whole Family” between two large wooden giraffe cutouts. All of these are old film frames and pictures, putting nostalgia for the road-side attractions you begged your parents to stop at on a 14-hour car ride to Florida at the forefront.

However, there’s also an eerie sense of dread that prompts a brief questioning of what is truly happening at Catskill, and who’s really running it. One still in particular shows a group of men and a woman posing for a picture seemingly on some sort of Safari, with two of the men holding huge hunting rifles. Another still shows a man in a bolo hat and button-up shirt and tie feeding a rhinoceros through thick steel bars while the animal stares blankly out from its dingy, ramshackle enclosure.

Each image mixes the sweet taste of Americana-influenced nostalgia with the unpleasant aftertaste of lingering discomfort with what you’re looking at and romanticizing. Hawkins has gone to great lengths to bridge the secret history with a strikingly familiar visual style, turning that bitter aftertaste of discomfort up to its max.

American Zoo is ultimately about more than just Catskill, though. It spans the entire globe, tracking down former zoo workers and descendants of the Lindemanns and Hecks who are willing to share their families’ absurd history, mapping the story of fascist zoology across multiple generations.

Catskill Game Farm was open for 73 years, welcoming millions of visitors who were unfamiliar with the actions of its owners over its lifetime. Hawkins goes to great lengths to not indict the unknowing visitors who formed early attachments to Catskill, while also not flinching in the face of disgusting conduct. The dreamlike quality of the stills of young families and children combined with their lurking uncanniness, an uncanniness only viewers of American Zoo can see, is evidence of that.

Widow’s Bay Just Put Every Final Girl to Shame

This article contains full spoilers for Widow’s Bay episode eight “Your Baggage.”

Midway through the eighth episode of the Apple TV series Widow’s Bay, “Your Baggage,” the masked killer (Airon Armstrong) who has been chasing local sad lady Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) seems to have been defeated. He has fallen through a top window to land hard onto the floor. For a moment, Patricia thinks that the chase has ended. But after a beat, the slasher bolts upright and begins his pursuit anew.

Anyone who has ever seen a slasher movie knew that the killer wasn’t dead, but it’s especially obvious to those who have watched Halloween. “Your Baggage” director Andrew DeYoung and writer Emma Ketchum fill the story with nods to the John Carpenter film, from the killer being dubbed “the Boogeyman” to a sequence of Patricia pounding on her neighbor’s doors and being denied help. But the homage goes only so far, and “Your Baggage” ends with Patricia doing something that never occurred to Laurie Strode, Sidney Prescott, or any of the other final girls.

Patricia’s showdown with the Boogeyman occurs at a gas station, where a teenage employee (David Armstrong) talks with Sheriff Bechir (Kevin Carroll). Bechir and the employee watch as Patricia sprays gas on the ground and waits for the Boogieman to arrive, holding a taser to the puddle. When Patricia sets the ground and the Boogieman ablaze, the teen runs outside while, in perhaps the most realistic part of the show, the policeman Bechir just stands there. After the Boogeyman tosses the teen aside, Bechir finally takes action, grabbing a shotgun but getting slashed before he can shoot. However, Patricia takes the shotgun and blasts the Boogeyman before he can kill Bechir.

But Patricia doesn’t stop there. Having learned her lesson, she walks up to the Boogeyman and keeps the shotgun trained at his head. Next, we’re treated to a montage of the Boogeyman being loaded into an ambulance, being pronounced dead by a medical examiner, and then loaded into a cremation oven, all with Patricia holding the shotgun to his head. Only when the oven opens to reveal the killer’s ashes does she finally lower her weapon.

It’s an incredible joke, a perfect example of the knowing, character-based humor that has made Widow’s Bay such a delight. Further, the scene challenges the conventional wisdom around horror movies, that too often assume people need to make dumb decisions for scary scenes to happen.

The paradigmatic example is, of course, Halloween, where Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) repeatedly drops her guard and turns her back to Michael Meyers, even after he’s recovered from a seemingly-fatal injury. But Laurie has had just as many imitators: the Camp Crystal Lake counselors in Friday the 13th, the Woodsboro teens in Scream, the citizens of Elm Street. Time and again, even the final girl survives not by their wits or ingenuity, but by luck and determination to finally beat the killer in the end.

Of course, Widow’s Bay is both an homage and a comedy, and thus doesn’t have the same demands as a straightforward horror movie. While the show can sometimes be scary (remember the possessed people in the last Patricia episode?), viewers come to it primarily to laugh and to identify the way it plays with horror tropes. Laurie and Sidney don’t have that luxury.

Still, the joke at the end of “Your Baggage” shows that horror writers have too often relied on stupidity as an excuse to put their characters in danger, and it’s just as tiresome as tropes about losing cellphone service. Widow’s Bay issues a challenge for horror writers: let your characters be smart. Or else Patricia will come for them.

Widow’s Bay streams new episodes every Wednesday on Apple TV.

Lee Cronin Isn’t Just Trying to Gross You Out

This article contains spoilers for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.

Anyone coming to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy for a slow-burn horror in the vein of the classic Universal movies is in for a shock. The latest take on the mythical monster spends minimal time in haunted pyramids or tracking a love that spans centuries. But it does have a little girl who yanks out her own teeth and replaces them with her dead grandmother’s dentures.

You might find that disgusting or you might find it delightful. Cronin is fine either way. “I see horror movies as an opportunity to create an experience, and not all experiences necessarily need to be comfortable,” the Irish filmmaker tells Den of Geek. “It depends on the story that you’re telling, and the reaction you’re trying to elicit.”

With The Mummy, Cronin tells a story unlike anything you’ve seen in Boris Karloff or Brendan Fraser films. Jack Reynor and Laia Costa star as Charlie and Larissa Cannon, whose daughter Katie (Natalie Grace) goes missing when the family is living in Egypt, where Charlie was on assignment as a TV reporter. Eight years later, Charlie and Larissa learn that their daughter was discovered alive, kept in a sarcophagus, malformed but relatively healthy. When the parents bring Katie home to live with her siblings Seb (Shylo Molina) and Maudie (Billie Roy) and her grandmother Carmen (Verónica Falcón), the Cannons slowly realize that something evil has invaded their family.

For Cronin, the family aspect drives his story, much more than its spectacular imagery. “I think it’s very important in a horror movie that you identify with the circumstances and the characters. I remember when the trailer dropped, you’d see a lot of comments with people saying ‘Hell no, I’m not bringing her home.’ And I think that’s absolutely right, watching a 90-second trailer. But you go watch the movie and get to know these people, and it changes.

“As a filmmaker, you’re always trying to trap your characters or your audience inside the mechanics of a horror movie. In this film, I didn’t need a burned-down bridge or a cutoff mobile phone signal or whatever. Charlie and Larissa are trapped by their own guilt, trapped by their own remorse, and trapped by the circumstances of having lost their daughter. Therefore, they would do anything for her.”

Anyone who has seen Cronin’s previous films The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise knows that he understands the bonds of family. Like The Mummy, those movies feature people who cannot escape their horrible situations because the monster is within their sons and daughters, mothers and sisters.

“Family is a wonderful shortcut to communicating with people,” explains Cronin. “For good or bad, everybody has a family as a frame of reference. There’s no perfect family, and sometimes the families that appear to be perfect are kind of the freakiest. And even if it’s just a tight friendship group with the people closest to you, everybody understands some type of family.

“Family also gets at what really frightens me. I’m not really scared by the notion of a monster bursting through my door because it would probably be so unreal that I’d just look and wave and carry on.

“But, to me, the destruction of the structures that underpin your life, the loving relationships that offer you support—that’s terrifying. That scares the hell out of me. And it’s something that we all have to face in our lives, through troubles and traumas and losing people to death. It frightens me greatly.

“So there’s no more fertile, terrifying place to play than with the construct of family and their demise.”

That ground helped Cronin find his take on The Mummy, a monster that comes with certain iconic images and lore. Instead of replicating those beats, Cronin began by thinking about family dynamics. “In this case, I started to imagine how a loved one might get mummified and then back in my home. That led me to the house and the lore, with the kidnapping and all those aspects. And I realized that I wanted to tell a detective story, to have someone on the hunt.

“I tend to try and get the character sketches and circumstances in the world right before I start to slide in stuff from my bag of tricks with all the horror moments. Because if you start purely with the horror, you might struggle to get the characters as real I like them to be. When my movies work, it’s from a mashup of grounded behavior and really out there horror moments.”

“Out there” might seem like an understatement to describe scenes in which Larissa tries trimming Katie’s toenails and rips hunks of skin off her leg, or a particularly gnarly sequence involving a cheese grater in Evil Dead Rise. Cronin knows that these instances could overwhelm the character parts he finds so important, and so he’s careful to balance the more extreme scenes with pathos and true terror.

“It’s funny, I always know a scene is right where I want it to be when I’m on set and I start to laugh,” he confesses. “If something that’s so out there starts to work, it’s probably a relief of nervous tension.”

Cronin’s also quick to point out that even though gross things happen in his movie, “it could be way worse.” Using the infamous cheese grater scene from Evil Dead Rise as an example, he points out that “in terms of what you see, it’s only on screen for two and a half seconds. I think if you go back and look at some of the gnarlier moments in my films, they don’t linger.

“And if they do linger, it’s like the unbinding sequence in The Mummy. We spend a lot of time looking at that, because that’s the contract I’ve made with the audience. You want to know what happened to Katie, and I’m going to show you.

“To me, that’s the most terrifying sequence in the movie, when Charlie and Larissa have to watch the VHS tape of their daughter put through this ritual. It was intentional in terms of the emotional roller coaster, because it comes right after the wake scene, which was this wild body horror moment. It has some gallows humor, and people are laughing and screaming and hiding.

“But then I know they won’t make a noise when the next bit comes along. And it’s what the audience asked for, because they want to know what happened to Katie. That’s why they’re here, so let’s look at it together.”

From the grueling terror of a parent’s worst nightmare to the complexities of family to the gooey fun of a gross-out gag, Cronin is willing to do it all on screen.

“I think the greatest sin of all is not to elicit a reaction. So long as people are watching a horror movie and reacting to it in some way, shape, or form, that’s far more appealing to me than being boring,” he admits. No one who has seen Lee Cronin’s The Mummy would disagree.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy releases on digital on July 14, 2026.

Sci-Fi Storytelling Continues to Evolve Without AI

The sudden insertion of generative artificial intelligence into the mainstream has resulted in fears of creative bankruptcy across all mediums, ranging from digital art to blockbuster filmmaking. At SXSW London on Tuesday, Patrice Vermette — the Oscar-winning production designer behind the Dune films — attacked the push for GenAI’s inclusion in his work.

“When it comes to the push for AI, I push it back,” Vermette told the crowd at the event, which discussed the intersection of science, world building, and storytelling in fiction.

Science fiction has often been the strongest vessel for delivering lessons on morality, humanity, and technology. In recent years, however, that role has played out in a surprisingly meta way; the leading sci-fi storytellers play a direct role in defining where emerging technology belongs in everyday life, but this time in their own lives and not in their works of fiction.

Vermette is not the only prominent mind in speculative fiction taking a stance against GenAI. Fellow film professional Guillermo del Toro, the writer-director behind Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, and Frankenstein, has repeatedly bashed the inclusion of GenAI in film and creative works. Margaret Atwood, the speculative fiction author and poet behind classics such as The Handmaid’s Tale, has called AI a “crap” poetry and fiction writer.

Many creatives have claimed GenAI isn’t going anywhere, including actress Demi Moore and legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese, but the backlash for both instances was fierce. Mediums other than film have had similar instances of praise and pushback; Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s self-admitted love of AI and use of it in her creative process ignited a fiery debate among writers across the world and left many readers feeling betrayed.

Despite the claims made by Moore, Scorsese, Tokarczuk, and others, GenAI has not made any real progress pushing science fiction forward. All of the innovations in Frankenstein, Dune: Part One, and Dune: Part Two were the result of human ingenuity. Old guard authors such as Atwood and Stephen King have joined contemporary authors in their dismissal and even disdain for the technology. The recent success of Project Hail Mary, a film directed by two people who have vocalized their dislike of GenAI, is particularly insightful; it made over $670 million at the global box office, a huge success for a post-COVID release that’s not a superhero movie.

GenAI has not been a part of the progress made by science fiction artists across a plethora of backgrounds and styles for decades. Before the development of GenAI, foundational novels and epics such as Frank Herbert’s Dune and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness have brought readers to new worlds, while filmmakers like George Lucas have inspired awe across time with sci-fi blockbusters.

A centuries-old archive of film, literature, video games, and more prove to the world that creators do not need AI to be creative. In science fiction, where many stories have been told about AI before (Terminator comes to mind), that is even more true. Audiences are craving originality now more than ever, something GenAI can by definition never truly achieve.

People like Vermette — the next generation of artists leading human ingenuity to new planets and new life — reaffirm the truth of creativity in science fiction: AI needs to be a part of the narrative, but as a subject and not a creator.

1983’s 15 Biggest Box Office Hits

The 80s were memorable, but 1983 was a remarkably strong year for Hollywood, delivering everything from blockbuster sci-fi adventures to action spectacles. It was a year when Star Wars closed out its original trilogy, Tom Cruise took a major step toward stardom, and audiences packed theaters for everything from dance movies to Cold War thrillers.

We even had the Battle of the Bonds, where two competing studios released a movie with the same (albeit with different actors) main character. Looking back at the box office charts offers a fascinating snapshot of what moviegoers were excited to see during one of the most memorable years of the 1980s.

Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi

The final chapter of the original Star Wars trilogy dominated 1983’s box office. Audiences packed theaters to watch Luke Skywalker confront Darth Vader and the Emperor, turning the film into the year’s biggest hit by a massive margin.

Terms of Endearment

This emotional comedy-drama became one of the year’s biggest surprises. Powered by acclaimed performances from Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, and Jack Nicholson, Terms of Endearment balanced humor and heartbreak while drawing huge audiences.

Flashdance

Flashdance turned a relatively simple story about an aspiring dancer into a cultural phenomenon. Its soundtrack, fashion influence, and music-video-style filmmaking helped make it one of 1983’s defining box office successes.

Trading Places

Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd powered this comedy about social class and financial manipulation into one of the year’s biggest hits. Trading Places remains one of the most beloved comedies of the decade.

WarGames

Cold War paranoia and emerging computer technology helped WarGames connect with audiences. Matthew Broderick’s story about accidentally triggering a military crisis became both a major hit and an influential piece of science fiction.

Octopuss[ie]

Roger Moore’s sixth outing as James Bond performed strongly at the box office despite facing competition from rival Bond film Never Say Never Again. The globe-trotting adventure became one of 1983’s biggest earners.

Sudden Impact

Clint Eastwood returned as Dirty Harry in Sudden Impact, delivering one of the franchise’s most memorable entries. The film’s action and famous “Go ahead, make my day” line helped drive strong ticket sales.

Staying Alive

The sequel to Saturday Night Fever brought John Travolta back as Tony Manero. While critics were mixed, audiences still showed up in large numbers, making it one of the year’s highest-grossing releases.

Mr. Mom

Michael Keaton scored one of his earliest major hits with this family comedy about a father unexpectedly becoming a stay-at-home parent. Its relatable humor helped it become a substantial box office success.

Risky Business

Tom Cruise’s breakout role transformed Risky Business into a major hit. The famous dancing scene in sunglasses and socks became instantly iconic, helping launch Cruise into full movie-star status.

Superman 3

Christopher Reeve returned as the Man of Steel in one of the franchise’s stranger installments. Despite mixed reviews, the popularity of Superman and Reeve’s performance helped the film become a major box office performer.

National Lampoon’s Vacation

Chevy Chase’s disastrous family road trip became one of the most influential comedies of the decade. Vacation introduced audiences to the Griswold family and launched a franchise that lasted for years.

Jaws 3-D

Universal brought its killer shark back with a heavy emphasis on 3D gimmicks. While it never matched the original film’s reputation, curiosity and franchise popularity still helped make it a sizable box office hit.

Scarface

Brian De Palma’s crime epic received mixed reviews upon release but still drew significant audiences. Al Pacino’s performance as Tony Montana eventually became legendary, helping the film grow into a cultural phenomenon.

Blue Thunder

This action thriller centered on a heavily armed experimental helicopter and tapped into audiences’ fascination with military technology. Strong action sequences helped Blue Thunder secure a place among 1983’s notable commercial successes.

David Lynch Movies That Still Confuse Audiences

David Lynch built a career on making films that feel unlike anything else in cinema. He has made movies that tell relatively straightforward stories, but he is known for works that blur the line between dreams and reality, introduce mysteries that never receive clear answers, and leave audiences debating their meaning decades later.

Part of the appeal is that Lynch rarely explained his work, encouraging viewers to draw their own conclusions. As a result, entire communities have formed around interpreting his films. Moving from his most accessible work to his most baffling, here are the David Lynch movies that continue to confuse audiences long after the credits roll.

The Straight Story

Among Lynch’s feature films, The Straight Story is easily the most straightforward. Based on the real-life journey of Alvin Straight, who traveled across several states on a lawnmower, the film unfolds as a simple and heartfelt road movie. It contains little of the ambiguity typically associated with Lynch.

The Elephant Man

The Elephant Man is another surprisingly accessible entry in Lynch’s filmography. The story follows Joseph Merrick and his struggle against exploitation and prejudice. While Lynch’s visual style occasionally shines through, the narrative remains clear and emotionally direct from beginning to end.

Wild at Heart

Though packed with eccentric characters, surreal imagery, and references to The Wizard of Oz, Wild at Heart tells a relatively easy-to-follow story about lovers on the run. Most of its strangeness comes from atmosphere and presentation rather than narrative complexity.

Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet begins like a mystery and largely remains one, but the central plot is understandable. The confusion comes from its unsettling dreamlike tone, symbolic imagery, and disturbing exploration of the darkness lurking beneath seemingly ordinary suburban life.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Viewers unfamiliar with Twin Peaks often find Fire Walk with Me bewildering. While Laura Palmer’s tragic story is fairly clear, the film introduces cryptic supernatural elements and recurring symbols that would become central to Lynch’s larger mythology.

Eraserhead

Lynch’s debut feature remains one of his most discussed works. Audiences can follow the basic outline of Henry Spencer’s life, but nearly everything else is open to interpretation. The mutant baby, industrial landscapes, and bizarre dream sequences continue to fuel endless theories.

Lost Highway

Lost Highway is where Lynch fully embraces fractured storytelling. What begins as a psychological mystery suddenly transforms into an entirely different narrative involving a new protagonist. The film never explains exactly what happened, leaving viewers to piece together their own conclusions.

Mulholland Drive

Many critics consider Mulholland Drive one of the greatest films ever made, but understanding it is another matter entirely. The movie presents shifting identities, altered realities, and dream logic that challenge viewers to determine which parts, if any, represent reality.

Inland Empire

Even seasoned Lynch fans often struggle with Inland Empire. Shot largely on digital video, the film abandons conventional storytelling in favor of interconnected fragments, shifting realities, and unexplained events. More than any other Lynch movie, it feels like experiencing someone else’s dream without a guidebook.

The 11 Types Of ‘Real’ Vampires

The vampire is a fascinating concept, hence why it has been explored countless times in different forms of media. Fiction, however, isn’t the only place that vampires dwell; there are entire communities of real people that consider themselves ‘real vampires.’

What that actually means depends on the individual, but yes, it means some of these people think they need to consume blood to survive. Some might feed from entirely different energy emissions, while others are just role-playing a gothic overlord. These are the different types of ‘real’ vampires living among us today.

Lifestylers

Lifestylers generally do not claim supernatural abilities or special needs. Instead, they embrace vampire-inspired fashion, symbolism, social customs, and aesthetics as part of their personal identity and lifestyle.

Sanguinarians

Sanguinarians are perhaps the most widely known type of real-world vampire. They believe they require small amounts of blood from willing donors to maintain their physical, emotional, or spiritual well-being.

Psychic Vampires

Psychic vampires claim to draw energy from people, environments, or other external sources rather than consuming blood. Many describe this process as absorbing life force, qi, prana, or emotional energy.

Empathic Vampires

Empathic vampires are often considered a subtype of psychic vampire. They specifically focus on emotional energy, claiming they absorb feelings and emotional states from the people around them.

Sexual Vampires

Sexual vampires believe they obtain energy through intimate interactions, attraction, or sexual activity. Within vampire communities, this is generally discussed as an energetic exchange rather than a purely physical one.

Soul Vampires

Soul vampires describe their feeding process as drawing energy from a person’s deeper spiritual essence rather than emotions, blood, or physical presence. The concept is rooted in spiritual and metaphysical beliefs.

Elemental Vampires

Elemental vampires claim to draw energy from natural forces such as fire, water, earth, air, storms, or, surprisingly, sunlight. They view these elements as alternative sources of nourishment or balance.

Astral Vampires

Astral vampires focus on the astral plane, a concept common in various spiritual traditions. They believe energy can be obtained through astral projection, meditation, or interactions beyond the physical world.

Dreamscape Vampires

Dreamscape vampires claim to interact with and gather energy through dreams. Some believe they can feed during their own dreams, while others describe encounters within shared dream experiences.

Magickal Vampires

Magickal vampires combine vampire identity with ritual practices, occult traditions, or ceremonial magic. They often view energy feeding as part of a broader spiritual or magical framework.

Adaptive Vampires

Adaptive vampires do not limit themselves to a single feeding method. Depending on circumstances, they may claim to draw energy from emotions, environments, spiritual practices, or other available sources.

15 Fun Pop Culture Facts You Didn’t Learn in School

What is pop culture? Some might say it is simply ‘culture’ the way we understand it today, but it’s more than that. Its history of the recent decades, shaped by technology and commercial trends; It’s everything that defines our personalities. And, as you know, it isn’t something we’re taught about growing up.

Yet it is an intrinsic part of our lives. Exploring pop culture is exploring our past, present and future. But mostly past, as we delve in a few facts you likely didn’t know about: from gaming icons to music superstars, these are just a few tidbits of information you might not have known before.

Pac-Man Was Inspired by Pizza

According to creator Toru Iwatani, the idea for Pac-Man came from looking at a pizza with a slice removed. That simple shape became one of the most recognizable video game characters in history.

Super Mario Was Originally a Landlord

Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong as a carpenter called Jumpman. Nintendo later renamed him after Mario Segale, a real estate developer whose appearance reportedly reminded employees of the character.

The Beatles Turned Down The Lord of the Rings

The Beatles once explored starring in a film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. The project never happened, partly because Tolkien himself reportedly disliked the idea.

The Hollywood Sign Wasn’t Meant to Last

The famous Hollywood Sign originally read “Hollywoodland” and was built as a temporary real estate advertisement in 1923. It was only supposed to stand for about a year and a half.

Scooby-Doo Was Almost Named Too Much

Before becoming Scooby-Doo, the famous cartoon dog went through several proposed names, including “Too Much.” Executives eventually settled on Scooby-Doo after inspiration from Frank Sinatra’s rendition of “Strangers in the Night.”

The Simpsons Predicted Their Own Network Purchase

Years before it happened, The Simpsons joked that Disney would one day own Fox. When Disney acquired major Fox assets in 2019, the gag became one of the show’s most famous accidental predictions.

Mickey Mouse Wasn’t Disney’s First Star

Before Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney’s studio found success with a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Disney lost the rights to Oswald, a setback that directly led to Mickey’s creation.

The First MTV Video Was Fittingly About Video

When MTV launched on August 1, 1981, the first music video it aired was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles, a choice that perfectly matched the channel’s mission.

Sherlock Holmes Appeared in More Films Than Dracula

While Dracula is often considered cinema’s most adapted character, Sherlock Holmes has appeared in hundreds of film and television productions, making him one of the most portrayed fictional characters ever created.

Nintendo Started Long Before Video Games

Many people associate Nintendo exclusively with gaming, but Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a company that produced handmade playing cards decades before electronic entertainment existed.

The Moon Landing Was Watched by a Huge Audience

When Apollo 11 Moon Landing put humans on the Moon, an estimated 600 million people watched the event on television, making it one of the largest shared media moments ever.

Batman Didn’t Always Refuse to Kill

Modern audiences often think of Batman’s no-kill rule as essential. However, some of his earliest comic appearances in the late 1930s and early 1940s showed him using lethal force against criminals.

The Wizard of Oz Changed Movie History

Released in 1939, The Wizard of Oz helped popularize Technicolor through its famous transition from sepia-toned Kansas to the vibrant world of Oz, creating one of cinema’s most iconic visual moments.

The First Comic-Con Was Tiny

Today, San Diego Comic-Con attracts massive crowds and major studios. The first event in 1970 drew only a few hundred attendees interested primarily in comic books and science fiction.

The Rubik’s Cube Wasn’t Designed as a Toy

Inventor Ernő Rubik originally created the Rubik’s Cube in 1974 as a teaching tool to help students understand three-dimensional movement. It only later became a worldwide puzzle phenomenon.

10 Reasons Why Hollywood Isn’t Getting Better Any Time Soon

Is the golden age of Hollywood really behind us, or is it just a perspective we have due to lack of distance? As more and more remakes, sequels, and unoriginal ideas arrive at cinemas, it feels more like the former than the latter. There are still good films to be found, yes, but most of them aren’t produced in Hollywood.

There are changes in the industry that both casual viewers and experts have noticed, and these trends aren’t going away any time soon. You’d think that an industry that makes so much money wouldn’t be so afraid of making original content, but the more cash you have, the more risk adverse you get. These are the reasons why, according to us, Hollywood is still in decline.

The Death of the Mid-Budget Movie

For decades, some of Hollywood’s best films came from the middle ground between indie productions and giant blockbusters. Thrillers, comedies, dramas, and crime films often thrived on modest budgets. Today, studios increasingly favor safe, massive franchise films, leaving fewer opportunities for the kinds of movies that once filled theaters year-round.

Everything Has to Be a Franchise

Many studios now treat every successful movie as the beginning of a potential universe. Instead of telling complete stories, films are often designed to launch sequels, spin-offs, and interconnected franchises. Audiences regularly complain that Hollywood seems more interested in building brands than creating memorable standalone experiences.

Original Ideas Struggle to Get Greenlit

Hollywood has always adapted books and existing properties, but many fans feel original screenplays face steeper odds than ever. Known intellectual property offers built-in marketing advantages, making executives more comfortable investing in familiar names than taking chances on entirely new concepts, even when the things being adapted aren’t a guaranteed success.

Movies Are Increasingly Treated Like Content

Streaming platforms changed how studios think about movies. Instead of focusing exclusively on theatrical events, companies now need a constant flow of material to keep subscribers engaged. On online platforms in particular, this has encouraged quantity over quality, with many releases quickly disappearing from public conversation.

Blockbuster Budgets Have Become Unsustainable

When a film costs hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and market, studios become less willing to take creative risks. Safer stories, familiar formulas, and recognizable brands often feel like the only way to justify the enormous financial investment involved.

Hollywood Can’t Quit Nostalgia

Reboots, remakes, revivals, and legacy sequels dominate release calendars. While nostalgia can be effective when used thoughtfully, many viewers feel Hollywood relies on familiar properties because they are easier to sell than entirely new ideas. The result is a constant return to the same franchises.

Too Much Dependence on CGI

Visual effects are valuable tools, but audiences frequently complain that modern films rely on them excessively. Practical effects, real sets, and location shooting often create a sense of realism that computer-generated environments struggle to match. Many moviegoers miss that tangible quality.

Nepotism Isn’t Going Anywhere

The “nepo baby” debate continues because Hollywood remains an industry heavily influenced by family connections. While many second-generation performers are genuinely talented, critics argue that access and opportunity are not distributed evenly, making it harder for outsiders to break through.

Test Screenings Encourage Safe Choices

Studios often use audience testing to refine films before release. While feedback can improve a movie, excessive reliance on test screenings encourages safer, less distinctive storytelling. Unusual ideas, ambiguous endings, and creative risks are often the first things removed.

Streaming Changed Audience Habits

Many viewers now expect movies to arrive at home quickly. That shift has made theatrical attendance less reliable and pushed studios toward event films that feel worth leaving the house for. Smaller projects face an increasingly difficult challenge attracting attention in this environment.