Back to the Future Star Says the Movie Matters Even More in Today’s Bully Culture

For 40 years, Back to the Future and its two sequels have thrilled viewers with their playful time travel mechanics, great lead performances, and incredible Alan Silvestri scores. But according to Michael J. Fox, there’s a more political reason that the trilogy resonates with modern viewers.

“We live in a bully culture right now,” Fox told Empire Magazine. “We have bullies everywhere — you don’t need me to point the finger at who, but there are all these bullies.” Fox doesn’t need to point his finger at the specific bullies he has in mind, in part because Back to the Future‘s overarching villain Biff Tannen (portrayed by Tom Wilson) so resembles Donald Trump that many thought that director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale based him on the real estate magnate. Gale has since pointed out that the influence only came in the second film, when Marty goes to the future to find that Biff runs a casino named after him.

However, for Fox, the bullies go beyond just Marty’s tormentor or the current president. “In this movie, Biff is a bully. Time is a bully. For me personally, Parkinson’s is a bully,” he says, pointing to his own declining health.

The comparison makes sense, especially as the film trilogy ages. Back to the Future began life when a teenage Gale found his father’s yearbook, and wondered if he would have liked his dad at that age. At first glance, the movie that he and Zemeckis made together feels like the ultimate Boomer fantasy, in which an ’80s teen goes back to the 1950s where everything was better and a white person invents rock and roll.

But the actual film plays out differently, as Marty discovers that his father (Crispin Glover) was a creep, his mother (Lea Thompson) was more wild than she let on, and Buff’s bullying ranged from giving swirlies to committing sexual assault. Marty’s visit to the past reveals a darkness that’s ever-present in his community, which counters his parents’ talk about how the world is worse than when they were kids.

Or, to put it another way, Back to the Future shows how saying Make America Great Again misunderstands how bad America always was. That’s just one of the lessons that the trilogy teaches modern viewers, living in a bully culture, said Fox. “It’s all about how you stand up to them and the resolve that you take into the fight with them. It’s about your resilience and your courage,” he told Empire. “I think there’s a lot to that right now…I think a lot of people are responding to the movie because it strikes chords they wouldn’t otherwise recognize.”

It will probably take a lot more than watching a movie to get America to channel its inner George McFly and punch out the bullies, but if Fox is right, rewatching Back the Future is a step in the right direction.

Stranger Things Season 5 Already Has an Eddie Munson Problem

With just over a month to go until Stranger Things starts wrapping up on Netflix, excitement is growing for fans who are expecting a wild and action-packed conclusion to the series, and they’re expecting it because that is what has been teased by so many people involved in bringing the show to the screen.

An epic finale awaits, the Duffer Brothers told Variety. “We do every last remaining thing we wanted to do with the Demogorgons and Mind Flayer and Vecna and the Upside Down and Hawkins and these characters. This is a complete story. It’s done.”

Some fans had hoped that this finale would even include a small appearance by Joseph Quinn’s fan-favorite metalhead character, Eddie Munson. After all, Barb’s body will be seen in the Upside Down in season 5, bringing closure to the #JusticeForBarb fan movement. Dacre Montgomery returned as the ghost of Billy back in season 4. Quinn himself teased Eddie’s return during an interview at the FACTS Convention in Belgium back in April! So, is it silly to imagine that a character whose popularity far outstripped Barb and Billy would make a surprising return in Stranger Things’ swansong? Apparently, yes.

“I love that Joe Quinn is toying with people! But no, he’s dead,” Stranger Things co-creator Matt Duffer told Empire. “Joe is so busy anyway, that everyone should know he’s not coming back. He’s shot like five movies since! When the hell has he got time to come and shoot Stranger Things? No, sadly, RIP. He’s fully under that ground.”

But these comments only led to an unexpected problem. When Duffer confirmed that Eddie wouldn’t be back in season 5, people reacted to the news online in different ways. Some took it at face value, accepting that the character was done for good. Others didn’t believe a word of it.

eddie won’t return but we’ll write a book about him two years before with detailed lore + throw his dad into the play + make uncle wayne know everything + use him in every way & hint about him constantly and put his grave everywhere bc cash cow.. ok pic.twitter.com/WQHbxcywXY
— linds🦇🫧 (@munsonsjackie) October 20, 2025

Amongst the “sure Jan” and Agatha Harkness wink gifs, the confirmation was also immediately disregarded in many comments. “They lie”, one posted, while another said “Nah, he’s just headbanging in the Upside Down with his Les Paul, waiting for the Duffer Bros to drop the resurrection plot twist.”

People have come to expect big IP finales to deliver major surprises and that creators will downplay or dismiss their predictions. Multiple scripts are sometimes distributed so that actors are on a “need to know” basis. Various endings are shot so that the actual denouement won’t leak. Creative misdirection means disappointment is always on the horizon. For every Avengers: Endgame high, there’s a Game of Thrones low (the latter’s showrunners even told their cast Jon Snow was dead at the end of season 5!).

Fans’ emotional investment often clashes with the realities of production and editorial decisions. Even when audience surprise is achieved, the path to it can be paved with withheld truths and misleading hints. No matter what the Duffer Brothers or anyone else says, some people will be waiting for Eddie to show up in Stranger Things season 5, and if he doesn’t, they’ll be disappointed. But if we don’t see Eddie again, that’s okay. Twin Peaks fans who live with a final image of Josie in a drawer knob will be there to commiserate. Team Bill and Team Eric fans will be around. Of course, fans of the original Quantum Leap won’t be there because they’re still in therapy.

Ultimately, Eddie Munson had a character arc that was sad but satisfying. If he doesn’t make an appearance in the final episodes of Stranger Things, we can always imagine he’d be just fine with it.

Zack Snyder Ignites DCEU Fan Base With New Deathstroke Image

Some DC fans are in their element this month because Zack Snyder just joined Instagram. The outspoken director almost immediately started posting a behind-the-scenes treasure trove from his career, including images from his time ruling the SnyderVerse. Inevitably, this has had an effect on those who would have loved to see more of Snyder’s work in the DCEU.

This week, Snyder uploaded a striking black-and-white image of Joe Manganiello as Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke, igniting his fan base with the usual calls for his return to the world of DC. Manganiello was originally supposed to star as the beloved villain in a solo Ben Affleck-led Batman movie that never happened, but he did briefly appear in both Justice League’s post-credits scene and Snyder’s notorious director’s cut of the film. However, it’s clear that Manganiello’s Deathstroke made enough of an impact to cause some fans a little pain when he popped up on their feeds.

Among the obligatory “#RestoreTheSnyderVerse” replies, one fan said, “We were robbed! I was so excited when I saw him in the post credit scene of JL 2017,” while another pleaded, “Please don’t give us hope.” Other fans added, “literally speechless” and “Would of (sic) loved to have seen that hypothetical Ben Affleck Batman movie with Deathstroke as the villain, Ben really did the ‘Dark Knight Returns’ version of the bat perfectly.”

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“This I shot with my Leica monochrome and my modified 50mm dream lens by @zerooptik thank you @joemanganiello for being a perfect Deathstroke,” Snyder noted in the image’s caption.

Manganiello has previously spoken about Affleck’s lost Batman movie, which he compared to David Fincher’s The Game. “It was a really dark story in which Deathstroke was like a shark or a horror movie villain that was dismantling Bruce’s life from the inside out,” he told Yahoo. “It was this systemic thing: He killed everyone close to Bruce and destroyed his life to try and make him suffer because he felt that Bruce was responsible for something that happened to him.”

It wasn’t the first time that Manganiello danced with the comic book movie devil in the pale moonlight, as he’d been trying to land a big part in a superhero movie for quite a while before his brief stint as Deathstroke, even joining the cast of Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie back in the day, although not in the role he’d hoped for.

“I did my Peter Parker thing,” he recalled of his audition for the wall-crawler before he ended up with the part of school bully Flash Thompson. “I brought glasses and a button-down shirt, and tried to be nerdy. I knew I was never going to get the role. Who’s going to bully me? I was 6’5” and 220 pounds!”

It’s Time to Escape the Age of Trauma Horror Movies

The trailers for The Woman in the Yard, released this past March, promised a scary movie with a delicious premise. One day a woman clothed in black arrives on the front lawn of a single mother’s home… and she refuses to leave. That’s the sort of premise that has made for many a tight, satisfying thriller, exactly the type of movie that director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax, Orphan) likes to make and that Blumhouse likes to produce.

What does this woman in the yard want? Who could she be?

And yet, as soon as chaotic shots of blurry lights disrupt the opening scene, which largely features a couple sharing their dream and autumnal images of a peaceful farmhouse, we already know the answer. She’s trauma. The monster is trauma. Again. And it’s not nearly so scary as it used to be.

We live in an age of trauma horror, movies and television shows in which the scariest thing has already happened, and the story we are watching is just about the residual effects. And it’s getting tiresome. For every great Mike Flanagan project, there’s a The Woman in the Yard, a Halloween legacy sequel, or the Hellraiser remake, a movie that forgets to be scary while groping after some deeper significance.

A Horrible Horror Trend

It’s hard to find the point where trauma became a mainstay of horror. Certainly scary movies of the past have made monsters out of insurmountable mental and emotional wounds. David Cronenberg‘s The Brood (1979) features people whose psychic damage (or fear of their romantic partner) manifest in little murder-children. 1983’s Psycho II sees a reformed Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) trying to resist the call of his mother while being hounded by Lila Crane (Vera Miles), who cannot get over what happened to her sister Marion (Janet Leigh) in the first film. Rob Zombie‘s Halloween II (2009) devotes a surprising amount of time to Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) dealing with the emotional and physical scars left by her previous encounter with Michael Myers.

Much easier is pinpointing why trauma horror became so popular. One could argue that Millennials and Gen Z prioritize mental health over their predecessors, and show a greater willingness to admit that historical injustices affect the world today. But it probably has much more to do with the release of two great films about inescapable grief, Jordan Peele‘s Get Out from 2017 and Ari Aster‘s Hereditary in 2018.

To be sure, both films are about trauma. Throughout Get Out, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) tries to downplay both his mother’s death by auto accident and the way the white people surrounding him make claims on his body and Blackness. Those feelings stay hidden until he undergoes a hypnosis session with the mother of his white girlfriend (Catherine Keener), who brings to the fore his hidden feelings of helplessness, which the film visualizes via the incredible image of Chris falling into an empty expanse.

In Hereditary the Graham family tries to continue living life as normal after the death of a fairly estranged grandmother. Soon afterward, the woman’s adult daughter (Toni Collette) loses her own child, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), in a shocking demise. In the aftermath, the more Collette’s character and her surviving family members cling to what they think they know about each other, the more twisted their sense of identity becomes, as demonstrated in scenes of son Peter (Alex Wolff) smashing his head into a desk or his mother’s tirade against him at the dinner table.

The characters in Get Out and Hereditary are not your usual horror movie victims. They have far more depth than the average soon-to-be dead person in a slasher, who largely exists just to have sex and do drugs and die. They even stand out from characters in ghost stories, who must suffer because of evils from the past. These characters are scared of what’s in their minds, of their own psychology. But, crucially, they are scared. And that’s what makes them superior to their many imitators.

Feeling Unafraid

The biggest problem with the glut of trauma horror that’s followed Get Out and Hereditary is that much of it is simply not scary. The filmmakers spend so much effort trying to be clever or trying to give their characters depth that they forget the simple appeal of a monster chasing its victim.

Few movies demonstrate this problem better than the 2022 remake of Hellraiser, directed by David Bruckner. The work of writer-turned-filmmaker Clive Barker, the original Hellraiser has plenty of psycho-sexual depth to work with, which it supplemented with stomach-churning visuals. Moreover the Cenobites and their leader Pinhead (Doug Bradley) were not the villains of the movie; that title belongs to the fratricidal Frank Cotton (Andrew Robinson) and his lover Julia (Clare Higgins). Yet even a first-time director like Barker knew how to build scares around Frank and Claire’s doings and the threat posed by the Cenobites’ existence.

Bruckner’s remake, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (who share a “story by” credit with David S. Goyer), returns the Cenobites to their amoral status after too many sequels made them little better than basic slasher monsters. But it does so by focusing on the tensions between recently-clean addict Riley McKendry (Odessa A’zion) and her brother Matt (Brandon Flynn). The hurt feelings between them become the source of tension, making Pinhead (Jamie Clayton) and the Cenobites into mere kinky stand-ins for the existential hangups in a larger, blander domestic drama.

Neither Get Out nor Hereditary suffer from that problem. When Collette unleashes an unholy wail after Annie discovers Charlie’s headless body in the back of the family car, Aster keeps the camera trained on Peter’s emotionless face. Even better, Aster knows to set aside the psychology in the final third of the film and lets Hereditary be a movie about a demon-worshipping cult, giving space for incredible scenes like those with Annie skulking in darkened corners.

Likewise Peele turns Get Out into a straightforward mad scientist movie for its final third. But even when he deals with a character’s psychology, Peele keeps it scary. The signature image from Get Out, that of Chris staring directly at the camera, is emotionally rich. Kaluuya’s tear-filled eyes communicate to the viewer that he’s suddenly confronted with memories and feelings he’s tried to avoid. He is letting the full weight of a world rigged against him come into view. But it’s also very scary, as he’s immobilized, and his body has become part of this evil white family’s larger machinations.

Inescapable Boredom

Get Out and Hereditary are masterpieces. It’s no wonder that so many have failed to live up to the standard of Peele and Aster, who have gone on to establish themselves as two of the greatest filmmakers of our era.

The problem isn’t that The Woman in the Yard, Hellraiser 2022, and Halloween 2018 aren’t as good as Aster and Peele’s movies. It’s that they spend so much time trying to be deep that they forget to be scary. To paraphrase Hank Hill’s famous observation about Christian rock, can’t they see they’re not making the characters any deeper, they’re just making the horror worse?

It’s time for horror movie makers to focus on just being scary. That’s why we come to the genre. We have plenty of dramas to watch if psychological depth is the main draw. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having complicated characters in a scary movie. But if they can’t be deep and scary—and so, so many filmmakers have proven that they can’t be deep and scary—then it’s better to be scary first.

Sadly, the prestige given Oscar winner Get Out and A24 sensation Hereditary is hard to ignore, so we’re not likely to see the age of trauma horror end soon. It’s going to stay on our screen like the Woman in the Yard, just sitting there: not scaring us, not making us think about inner turmoil, just wasting our time.

Pillion Review: Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling’s Sweet, Little BDSM Rom-Com

So it’s kind of a funny story about Ray and Colin. They had the type of meet-cute which is only supposed to occur in Richard Curtis movies. In an English pub on Christmas Eve, Colin (an eternally fresh-faced Harry Melling) is singing Vaudeville-tinged carols in front of locals, plus his parents, brother, and assorted family and friends. Then walks in Ray, this ridiculously good-looking biker chap in all leather and played by once and future Viking god Alexander Skarsgård. It’s postcard perfect.

Yet the thing about Harry Lighton’s first feature is that Pillion is not chasing romance of the postcard variety nor certainly a Richard Curtis flick. This becomes explicit when Ray invites Colin behind an alley on Christmas night so he unzip those oh, so tight leather trousers. And up to this point, he hasn’t even mentioned his name is Raymond. Whatever you call him though, it’s a guy not looking for a friend. He is looking for a sub in the literal BDSM definition of the term, and in Colin he finds someone he succinctly describes as having “a high capacity for obedience.”

This is how Pillion starts, and from those unusual beginnings springs the most unconventional love story of the year. It is also the most surprisingly human and heartfelt we have so far seen, in spite of Raymond’s best efforts.

Beyond first dates, Pillion tracks a tragicomic year in the life of Colin and Ray’s relationship, a dynamic shaded as much by the interpersonal dominations as the physical. The first time Colin is invited to Ray’s house, the guest is offered a tour to see where everything is and then told “you can get started dinner. You’re making pasta.” Dialogue between the two remains rare afterward, however. Skarsgård’s performance is often so circumspect that you not only must read between the lines, but are encouraged to generally forget they’re there.

The situation invites a question of how much more Ray might be willing to give, should Colin ever dare to ask. But the young and hopelessly earnest counterpart is so keen to have a lover—and somewhere to go that doesn’t involve living at home as a twentysomething with his parents—that he never sets any boundaries beyond where Ray places them. As a consequence, Colin finds himself sleeping at the literal foot of Ray’s bed, a development even Ray’s dog would not dignify as the enormous Rotweiler gets prize of place on the leather couch downstairs.

At more than a glance, the dynamic would appear exploitative and definitely unbalanced. It also becomes increasingly discomforting to people in Colin’s life, especially his parents. The pair are depicted as aggressively supportive of their son finding a boyfriend, at least at first, but grow worried after Colin begins buzzing off his hair and wearing a padlock around his neck. Conversely, the relationship between Colin’s Dad (Douglas Hodge) and his mother (Lesley Sharp) is sweet to the point of bitter, given how idealistically loving they are despite Peggy’s battle with cancer visibly entering its final stages (she wears a wig while singing Christmas tunes at the piano with Pete).

The film challenges audiences, and certainly Colin, to contrast their “normal” relationship, with his and Ray’s—whose idea of a birthday present is a surprise trip with fellow biker doms into the wilderness where they have their subs compete. And yet, therein lies the trap that Lighton sets for at least his heteronormative audiences, and from which Colin and the ever enigmatic Raymond must escape. This is a film about a deliberately unorthodox love story, but unlike so many other films that dabble in BDSM imagery for the kink of red leather flashing by in a trailer, Pillion is sincere in its romanticism. This is an earnest character study that is at times deeply funny and at others sweet, in spite of Ray’s best efforts or the occasionally graphic nudity and ruthless mind games.

Pulling from a novel called Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, Lighton took a free-hand in redesigning the film. At the New York Film Festival premiere for the picture, the filmmaker acknowledged he transferred the book from its 1970s setting to today, among other notable shifts, to both modernize the push and pull between Ray and Colin—no one is in the closet here—as well as deny audiences the ability to interpret Skarsgård’s ungiving lover as a product of his time. It is, in fact, quite difficult to track what could produce a figure as withholding and guarded as Ray.

But the most impressive thing about how Skarsgård and Lighton approach the character is that he is neither sensationalized nor some erotic fantasy or nightmare. Lighton and Skarsgård certainly enjoy leaning into the natural physicality of the Scandinavian actor, who towers over Melling in scenes both awkward and charming, at one point lifting the more petite actor over his head like a prized pet. (Meanwhile their actual dogs make for one of the best visual gags since on the characters’ first date, Ray brings his Rottweiler, and Colin a yapping lap dog.) The Swede’s photogenic affability is at least one reason to believe Colin stays long after he’s outgrown what Raymond is able to give him.

However, this character is neither an exact mystery nor a cipher. He offers an unusual path through love for a younger and inexperienced partner, but the movie does not judge either party for being on this road. It just becomes an open question of how far down that street Colin can go until it might lose its carm. In this sense, there is just as much to be said in Melling’s own frequently searching and melancholic eyes. While Colin almost never ceases yapping, he is loudest when desperately basking in Ray’s scraps of light, clinging to his leather figure on the back of a motorcycle or watching jealously as his companion talks to a friend’s own subordinate.

The film’s nonjudgemental and often playful tone crafts, scene by scene, an intimate portrait that marvels in the ironies and complexities of these characters’ slowly evolving and renegotiated connection. But the film only seems to come down decisively when it circles the wagons against any character who might entertain wagging a finger about social expectations—even if that finger belongs to someone as well-meaning and sympathetic as Colin’s dying mother. Even then Sharp is heartbreaking.

This can never be a swooning or idealized romantic comedy; Melling’s eyes are too characteristically sad and preemptively defeated for that. But it can prove a surprisingly healthy one, even for the guy asleep on the floor.

Pillion premiered at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 4 and opens in the UK on Nov. 28 and in the U.S. in February 2026.

How Bruce Springsteen Stole the Title of His Hit Song From Paul Schrader

These days, when maverick director Paul Schrader talks about pop music, he’s usually praising Taylor Swift as “the light that gives meaning to our lives.” But back in the early ’80s, Schrader had the Boss on his mind. And in a new conversation with Deadline, Schrader reveals how an aborted movie project starring Bruce Springsteen led the pride of New Jersey to swipe from him.

According to the story, Schrader wanted to make a movie about blue collar rock and roll bands, something very much in line with his directorial debut Blue Collar, and thought of Springsteen as the lead. “There was a moment there when Bruce was being courted by the studios. Paramount had it, and they would have given anything to star him in a movie,” Schrader recalled. “I met with and gave the script to [Springsteen’s manager Jon] Landau, and he got back about a month later and said, ‘Bruce has been thinking about it and he’s not going to be in movies. He thinks it’s a trap and that he’ll end up like Elvis.'”

Schrader took the response at face value and went on to Japan to make his 1985 movie Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. But when he returned to the States, Schrader heard Springsteen’s new hit record and recognized its title as the same one he used for his bar band script: “Born in the U.S.A.”

While Schrader got a credit in the liner notes of the album, he didn’t get an explanation until later. “We met in Los Angeles and [Springsteen] said, look, I never did read your script,” Schrader told Deadline. “I was working on this song called ‘Vietnam‘ and I thought that was a bit too-on-the-nose. Your script was on the coffee table, and I kept walking past it every day. And finally it caught in my head and, I stole it.”

Like the voice of the working man that he is, Springsteen immediately tried to make things right with the director, offering to let him use the song whenever Schrader got around to making Born in the U.S.A. Instead, Schrader asked Springsteen for a new song for the film, and the Boss obliged, writing the tune “Light of Day.” And, sure enough, when Schrader finally produced the film, it came out under that tile, Light of Day.

Today, Schrader looks back at Light of Day, which finally saw the… movie theaters in 1987, with some disappointment, but not because of the song. Instead, he blames himself for casting Michael J. Fox and rocker Joan Jett as the leads (“Fox and Joan Jett were never meant to be in a movie together,” he admitted).

But he does not regret letting Springsteen have the song title without trouble. “I suppose there could have been some financial advantage for me, but I just didn’t want to be that kind of guy, who would milk Bruce’s head for X amount of dollars. And he didn’t ever forget it. This shows you that there is such a thing as karma, and that if you do the right thing, sometimes people remember,” he stated.

Turns out, some people remember better than others. Because when the upcoming Scott Cooper-directed movie Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere recreates the scene of Bruce (Jeremy Allen White) getting a script from Schrader, it has a map of Ohio drawn on the front. “I’d completely forgotten I’d done that,” he told Deadline. “I talked to Scott Cooper afterwards and asked him, where did you find the actual script? He said Bruce kept it all these years.”

Thus, there’s one more great credit in Schrader’s career, alongside credits for writing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and directing First Reformed. Now we’ll just have to wait for the inevitable Taylor Swift biopic to see if he was also responsible for the title The Life of a Showgirl.

Scott Derrickson Reveals the One Thing He Won’t Do for Black Phone 3

Scott Derrickson has killed a lot of people. And a surprising amount of them have been children. Okay, no, Derrickson hasn’t actually killed people, but he has imagined many deaths and put them on screen, including the three mutilated tykes murdered by the Grabber in his most recent movie Black Phone 2.

Black Phone 2 is off to a pretty great start at the box office, which means that there’s already talk about a third entry in the series. And with it, Derrickson is setting up his boundaries, indicating the lines he won’t cross for his next movie. When asked about Black Phone 3, the director told Variety, “What would be important to me in considering any ideas is that it’s just not a retread.” In particular, Derrickson rules out building the sequel around new lore. “Oh, now we establish this new rule for the Grabber. So let’s just do that again,” he mused, by way of example. “That’s the only thing I couldn’t do.”

Derrickson’s comments might strike some Black Phone 2 viewers as surprising, given the way the sequel reimagines the Grabber, the killer played by Ethan Hawke. In addition to establishing more backstory about the character’s connection to leads Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), Black Phone 2, which Derrickson based on the Joe Hill story and co-wrote with C. Robert Cargill, also brings the Grabber back from the dead and imagines him as a Freddy Krueger-like killer. That’s a pretty different set of rules from the first film, where he just kidnaps and kills children.

However, there is a difference between establishing a new status quo for a character and changing the rules. Examples of the latter include the late Hammer movies featuring Christopher Lee’s Dracula, in which a character randomly declares that the Prince of Darkness cannot pass through woods or cross over running water, and, lo and behold, the movie ends with the Count caught in the woods or stymied by running water. An example of the former includes the Friday the 13th franchise, in which Jason is a (very resilient) flesh and blood human in the first four movies, and an unkillable zombie after his resurrection in the sixth film.

Whatever direction he decides to go in, Derrickson is adamant that he must improve on what’s come before. “My attitude toward a sequel is that there’s really no justification for making a sequel unless you are genuinely attempting to make a movie that’s better than the first movie you’re making a sequel to,” he explained, before pointing to a few, rare examples.

“Very few films do that. Looking back on the history of cinema, I think Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead trilogy are probably the only two trilogies of movies where they’re all three great movies and get progressively better.”

Of course, Romero went on to make three more movies in the Living Dead series, movies that are okay (Land of the Dead) to terrible, which perhaps only proves Derrickson’s point. Because he’s already done enough terrible things on screen. He’s not about to add to it by doing a bad sequel.

Black Phone 2 is now in theaters.

Even Martin Scorsese’s Life-Changing Bad Movie is Pretty Good

The new Apple TV documentary series Mr. Scorsese contains many wonderful anecdotes and insights into the legendary filmmaker’s history. Unsurprisingly but nonetheless refreshingly, we’re reminded that Martin Scorsese didn’t arrive fully-formed, making masterpieces like Taxi Driver and The Age of Innocence right away. Rather, he had to struggle for a bit and experience his share of ups and downs.

As is often the case with biographies about the director, Mr. Scorsese locates one of those downs early in his career. Between his feature debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door and his breakout Mean Streets (his first collaboration with Robert De Niro), Scorsese agreed to make a low-budget picture for Roger Corman, king of the fast and cheap feature, called Boxcar Bertha.

According to Mr. Scorsese and other sources, Boxcar Bertha was a mistake, a deviation on Scorsese’s development. And, like most biographies, Mr. Scorsese overlooks the fact that Boxcar Bertha is actually pretty good.

Boxcar Bertha stars Barbara Hershey as Bertha Thompson, a young woman who travels across Depression-era America after the death of her father, a crop-duster pilot. Along the way, Bertha falls for anarchist labor leader Big Bill Shelly (David Carradine) and, with gambler Rake Brown (Barry Primus) and her father’s former employee Van Morton (Bernie Casey), begins robbing people. The group runs afoul of Pinkertons, the police, and especially, railroad magnate H. Buckram Sartoris (John Carradine, father of David).

Although Boxcar Bertha loosely adapts the 1937 book Sister of the Road by anarchist Ben Reitman, its true inspiration is Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 Arthur Penn movie that kicked off the New Hollywood movement. Corman made his name by making cheap knockoffs of more popular films, and Boxcar Bertha is no exception, trying to capture the spirit of the times and the box office returns it could generate. Of course, Corman was also an incredible judge of talent, giving early shots to not just Scorsese, but also Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, and others.

Thanks to that eye for talent, Corman produced cheap knock-offs could often be very good, as demonstrated by Boxcar Bertha. Scorsese gets incredible performances out of his cast, especially Hershey, whom he would later cast as Mary Magdalene in his passion project The Last Temptation of Christ. Although she’s tasked with playing a teenager (a point that makes the aggressive seduction style of grown man Shelly incredibly upsetting), Hershey gives Bertha an earnestness that never requires her to be naive.

Moreover, Boxcar Bertha includes elements that would become the defining features of Scorsese’s ouvre. No, none of the needle drops in Boxcar Bertha pack the punch of, say, “Layla” in Goodfellas, and Bertha and Big Bill are more righteous protagonists than Travis Bickle or Rupert Pupkin, but this remains a Scorsese picture. The characters live in a world dominated by violence, which can be wielded by men like Sartoris. Scorsese combines that violence with the religious longing always present in his work when Big Bill is killed by Sartoris via crucifixion.

At the end of episode two of Mr. Scorsese, Scorsese recalls what American indie icon John Cassavetes told him after watching Boxcar Bertha. According to Scorsese, Cassavetes came up to him and embraced him in a hug. “You just spent a year of your life making this piece of shit,” Scorsese recalls Cassavetes telling him; “Don’t do it again.”

Scorsese would never make another movie for Corman, nor would he ever take on another for-hire project like that. But he would do what he did in Boxcar Bertha again, making movies that are striking in their violence, sincere in their religious expression, and very, very good.

All five episodes of Mr. Scorsese are now streaming on Apple TV.

Marvel Reportedly Won’t Let Tom Holland Be James Bond

His name is Parker… Peter Parker. And nothing else.

At least, that’s the rumor being reported in The Sun. According to an unnamed source, the paper claims that Tom Holland has been ruled out of consideration as the next James Bond because of his contract with Marvel and Sony to play Spider-Man. It’s not so much that the studios are worried that the actor would be spending too much time ordering shaken martinis and playing baccarat. Rather, they worry that Bond would distract from Spider-Man.

“Tom can’t play two superheroes, it just won’t happen,” said the insider quoted by The Sun.

That’s a compelling statement, but not one that’s too surprising, given the complicated nature of the current state of Spider-rights. Famously, Marvel Comics sold the adaptation rights for many of its signature characters during a period of financial difficulties in the 1990s, well before the establishment of Marvel Studios and the company’s purchase by Disney. While Marvel and Disney have been able to get back many of those rights–sometimes by buying the rival studio outright, as in the case of 20th Century Fox and the rights to X-Men and the Fantastic Four—Sony remains committed to holding onto Spidey. Thus, Marvel had to negotiate with Sony to get Spider-Man into the MCU, which he finally did with 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.

The insider doesn’t reveal which of the two studios have the contract requirement, but whoever it is may not have reason to worry. After all, Spider-Man is not just the most famous superhero in the world, but he’s also one of the most famous characters in the world. Bond may predate Spidey by about a decade, but it’s been a long time since the super-spy has matched the level of popularity enjoyed by the superhero.

Then again, times are clearly changing for James Bond. It may be four years since Daniel Craig ended his run with 2021’s No Time to Die, but he still left the series better than he found it. Moreover, Amazon seems ready to throw its substantial weight behind the property since they purchased adaptation rights from Eon Productions, who had been shepherding the Ian Fleming character since Sean Connery first took on the part for 1962’s Dr. No.

Amazon has hired a big name director in Denis Villeneuve to make the next entry, which he plans to do after finishing Dune 3. Moreover, the casting of a new Bond always garners a lot of attention, which will help the new film debut to lots of buzz. More buzz than a Spider-Man movie? Probably not. But clearly, someone at Marvel or Sony isn’t willing to take that chance.

First Set Pics of Sadie Sink in Spider-Man: Brand New Day Spark Fan Theories

As filming on Spider-Man: Brand New Day continues apace, Marvel fans who have been waiting for Stranger Things star Sadie Sink to appear on set have finally got their wish. But a first glimpse of Sink in the MCU has only led to further fan speculation about the character she’s playing in the wall-crawling fourquel, with Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures yet to reveal any details.

The first set photo to surface shows Sink in costume and chatting to director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) during a break in filming. It reveals that Sink has maintained her usual red hair for the part. She also appears to be dressed in boots and camo pants, but her oversized jacket obscures the rest of her costume.

🚨BREAKING:

Sadie Sink has FINALLY been seen on the set of #SpiderManBrandNewDay!

[@UnBoxPHD] pic.twitter.com/1JGQEro0td
— Spider-Man: Brand New Day Updates (@spideyupdated) October 19, 2025

In the second image, we can see that Sink is dressed in an alternate outfit – baggy blue jeans and a jacket.

“They wanted to subvert expectations so bad through out (sic) the MCU Spider-Man films I can’t even say she’d be playing the actual MJ even though she would’ve been perfect for it visually,” commented one person over on X, while another weighed in with “She is obviously Peter’s daughter, Mayday Parker. She will be taking over the Franchise from Tom.” Meanwhile, other fans still hold out hope that these pictures confirm Sink as the MCU’s Gwen Stacy somehow.

Sadie Sink. #SpiderManBrandNewDay

[@UnBoxPHD] pic.twitter.com/l5hZfrBUsA
— Spider-Man: Brand New Day Updates (@spideyupdated) October 19, 2025

Prior to the leak of these set pics, plenty of rumors have circulated about Sink’s Brand New Day character. Reddit chat has suggested that her character’s codename is Annabelle Adams, an obscure character from the Scarlet Spider comics who becomes romantically involved with a clone of Peter Parker. Fans have also speculated that Sink might play Carlie Cooper, a police officer and romantic interest of Peter Parker in the Brand New Day comic book storyline.

Others are sure that Sink will be playing a multiversal Variant of Mary Jane Watson, Firestar, or that she is even being soft launched as Marvel’s new Jean Grey, though there may be a more realistic option on the table: Rachel Cole, an ally of The Punisher in the pages of Marvel Comics who also happens to have red hair. Since we already know that Jon Bernthal will be reprising his role as Frank Castle in Brand New Day, this would make sense.

Rachel Cole aka Rachel Cole-Alves has been a compelling comic book character since she made her debut in The Punisher Vol. 9 #1. Created by writer Greg Rucka and Marco Checchetto, she’s a former U.S. Marine turned vigilante who shares objectives with Castle and became a solid partner by utilizing her military training and tactical expertise.

For now, Sadie Sink’s exact role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day remains a mystery. Fans will have to wait for an official announcement for confirmation.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is set for release on July 31, 2026.

This Is Why Your Favorite Marvel Disney+ Show Never Got a Season 2

Unless you’re a Loki fan, you may have at some point wondered why your favorite Marvel Disney+ show didn’t get a second season. Thankfully, Marvel Studios’ Head of Streaming, Brad Winderbaum, has the answers.

The studio’s early Disney+ shows, from WandaVision to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, were clearly never intended to continue beyond one season. They existed in part to set up new Marvel movies. That’s why WandaVision directly led into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier set up Captain America: Brave New World, and Ms. Marvel paved the way for The Marvels.

From a business standpoint, that model occasionally worked, but from a fan perspective, it left us wanting more. Since we know Marvel will feed fan appetite wherever possible, there was another factor in play that stopped us from spending more time with some of our favorite superheroes and their inner circles: money. The budgets for those shows were already massive, and they had huge production values. The studio, its producers, and various other stakeholders all have to define how those projects are financed, controlled, and even how profits are shared, which is pretty tricky when you’re trying to extend a pricey project that was never supposed to be extended.

“The original shows were created as limited series with characters that could bounce back and forth between the movies and TV shows.” Winterbaum explains (via EW). “That made it challenging to make season 2s because the deal structure became really expensive, frankly.”

Although most key characters’s stories continued in subsequent movies or other Disney+ shows, Moon Knight’s lack of continuation in particular has often been a sticking point for fans who were left on that series’ cliffhanger, with none of those characters spotted in the MCU since.

The good news is that Winderbaum is aware of the situation. “We started developing shows that could last for multiple seasons. Daredevil, we’ve now greenlit the third season, that’ll come out annually. X-Men ’97, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, they’ll come out annually for a number of years. But there are shows that were caught in the middle.”

This marks a major turning point in Marvel’s streaming strategy. Instead of one-and-done stories, we can expect ongoing character arcs and deeper world-building. Y’know, television! However, the shows still “caught in the middle” between the old and new strategies are Marvel Zombies and the upcoming Wonder Man which Winterbaum calls “one of my favorite things I’ve ever been a part of.” He says both shows could still get a season 2 if people watch them.

So, next time you finish a Marvel show, don’t assume it’s over when the final post-credits scene hits. The new MCU streaming model finally includes second seasons. Only audience numbers stand in the way of them materializing.

Star Wars? “I’ve Got a Life,” Says George Lucas

For Star Wars fans, George Lucas’ name will always be synonymous with galaxies far, far away. But more than a decade after selling Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion, Lucas has officially moved on from the juggernaut space opera media franchise. He’s unbothered. Moisturized. Happy. In his lane. Focused. Flourishing, as the kids might say.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Lucas says he’s fully left Star Wars in Disney’s hands. “[They] took it over and they gave it their vision. That’s what happens.”

It might be bittersweet to hear Lucas describe stepping back from the saga he built, but he hasn’t retired from creating, he’s just shifted focus. “Of course I’ve moved past it. I mean, I’ve got a life. I’m building a museum. A museum is harder than making movies,” Lucas said as he discussed his current passion project, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.

The museum’s 11-acre campus has cost over a billion dollars and is set to open its doors in 2026. Curated by Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, it aims to show how narrative art influences societies by shaping beliefs, communicating values, inspiring imagination, and creating communities.

However, moving past Star Wars doesn’t mean a complete lack of it in this new project. A 33-foot model of the N-1 Starfighter will loom over the museum’s south wing, and there’ll be an exhibit focusing on vehicle designs from the franchise. But Lucas didn’t even want to do that.

“It’s one gallery out of 33. And I did it grudgingly,” Lucas said. “I didn’t want people to come to the museum and say, ‘Where’s the Star Wars?’”

Instead, visitors to the museum can expect to see works by Norman Rockwell, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, and N. C. Wyeth, along with art by comic book legends like Frank Frazetta, Jack Kirby, and Robert Crumb.

It’s kinda comforting to know that Lucas is off building a space where stories, much like the ones he created, can inspire future generations, and he’s clearly found peace in watching the massive project come together. One suspects it is not quite as peaceful over in the halls and offices at Lucasfilm.

The Boys Spinoff Likely Dead at Prime Video

Animated anthology series The Boys Presents: Diabolical may have been a delightful detour into the chaotic, satirical world of Vought International, but Amazon doesn’t seem very keen on exploring it further.

In a recent interview with The Wrap, co-creator Eric Kripke revealed that a second season is unlikely. “I don’t think there’s going to be a season 2 of Diabolical.” Kripke stated. “It’s not for lack of us pushing. I think ultimately the viewer numbers weren’t there to justify a second season, sadly.” He went on to indicate that both he and showrunner Simon Racioppa were eager to make more Diabolical, but a renewal probably won’t happen.

Premiering in March 2022, the series featured eight standalone episodes, each with its own unique animation style and tone. Contributions from creatives like Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Awkwafina, Andy Samberg, and even Garth Ennis, the co-creator of the original The Boys comic, led to a typically irreverent spin on The Boys extended universe.

However, its bevy of talent and a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes didn’t give Diabolical enough of a boost in terms of viewing figures. Amazon was initially hopeful that a second season would materialize, but that hope has faded in the years since its debut.

This is certainly not the end of The Boys’ expanded universe, though. Live action spinoff Gen V continues to push the franchise forward, and The Boys: Mexico is currently in development from Blue Beetle writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer.

“Mexico is just being developed right now,” Kripke confirmed. “The pilot script is being written. Gareth is a wonderful writer and I think it’s hilarious. I hope it gets made, but [it’s] just in that development phase.”

“Same applies to Vought Rising Season 1,” he added. “We have plans for a season 2, if we can. They’ve [Prime Video] been nothing but supportive, and they’re giving us our opportunities. But it’s a business and we also have to deliver. So hopefully the audience shows up.”

Queer Eye Creator on Concluding a TV Institution in the Nation’s Capital

While combing through the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in the ‘90s, Queer Eye co-creator and executive producer David Collins stopped on one word that would ignite a decades-long franchise and redefine what reality TV could look like.

“[The dictionary] said, ‘Queer: a unique perspective, a different point of view,’ and that’s really been the heart of [Queer Eye],’” Collins says. “A unique perspective of each of our stories and each of the individual humanity we share with each other.”

Queer Eye is a reality show where five LGBTQ+ experts, known as the Fab Five, help individuals improve their lives through transformations in fashion, grooming, home design, culture, and food. Now, after two decades of makeovers, lifestyle transformations, and tear-filled moments, the show is coming to an end. Netflix announced that the Emmy-winning series will say farewell following the premiere of its 10th season. Before Scout Productions parts ways with the beloved feel-good reality show, the Fab Five head to Washington, D.C.; a politically contentious setting Collins says was “very much an intentional choice.”

In 2003, when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy premiered on Bravo, a title later shortened to simply Queer Eye because it was too long for TV guides, there was not much queer representation in mainstream pop culture. Most prominent examples were often reduced to stereotypes in shows like Will & Grace and Sex and the City. Queer Eye pushed boundaries by centering the show around five openly gay men in a primetime TV program, but still, audiences knew little about the personal lives of original cast members Carson Kressley, Ted Allen, Kyan Douglas, Thom Filicia, and Jai Rodriguez.

“[The original Fab Five] swooped in, they saved the day, and they swooped out. America didn’t really want to know about their lives,” Collins says. “That’s the main change that happened when we brought [the current Fab Five] to the table. We wanted real life, modern day gay men. Their ability to be much more authentic is what really drove the evolution of this series for Netflix.”

When Netflix revived Queer Eye in 2018, it introduced a new Fab Five: Jonathan Van Ness, Antoni Porowski, Karamo Brown, Tan France, and Bobby Berk; later joined by Jeremiah Brent following Berk’s departure in season 8. Together, they’ve built a reputation for fearless authenticity and compassion, making them the perfect team to tackle the nation’s capital in 2025.

Filming season 10 wasn’t the Fab Five’s first time in D.C. During the summer of 2024, both former and current Queer Eye cast members were invited inside the White House by Vice President Kamala Harris amidst her campaign trail to discuss LGBTQ+ progress in the U.S. Collins considers this experience one of the most “monumental visits” of his life.

“There was this enthusiasm and zeal for what was coming next,” Collins says. “Come November, that hope got dashed. So we went to Netflix and said, ‘Let’s go to the source, baby. Let’s show up and knock on the White House door.”

This time around, when the Fab Five traveled to the White House again they weren’t invited in. Instead, they stood outside the large gate with fellow tourists, sparking interesting conversations with both fans and critics. Collins noted the powerful imagery of the crew standing tall outside of the White House next to people protesting for various causes.

Aside from groaning at the summer heat, the Fab Five worked with heroes from across the District, Maryland, and Virginia. Some subjects to look forward to include one of D.C.’s best tour guides, two sisters living together, a preacher, and a man who lives on a boat. Another interesting bit of information Collins provided ahead of the show’s premiere date was that season 10 will only be five episodes long.

Naturally, when people think of D.C., they associate it with the political atmosphere of its institutions; however, Collins says he wasn’t necessarily interested in making a “political statement.” Instead, Collins was focused on highlighting the area’s cultural and socioeconomic diversity.

“The idea of handing the microphone to marginalized communities is a huge part of the heart of Scout Productions,” Collins says. “[Co-creator and executive producer Michael Williams] and I have dedicated the past 27 years to making sure that this story continues to be told, and that each of these guys has an opportunity to bring real transformation to the heroes’ lives.”

One hero Collins still checks in with now and again is Tammye Hicks, known to fans as “Mama Tammye” from season 2. That season, the Fab Five traveled to Georgia, where they helped Mama Tammye open a community center and reconnect with her son, Myles, who had drifted away from the church because of his sexuality. Collins says she was one of his favorite people the show has encountered, and he felt honored to bring her story to the forefront. Though the themes of sexuality and organized religion were sensitive and sometimes difficult to navigate, he’s proud that the episode sparked important conversations and helped reunite a family.

Though Netflix is parting ways with Queer Eye, Collins and Scout Productions aren’t ready to say goodbye to the franchise entirely. Rather than dwell on the show’s ending, Collins is focused on its future, envisioning ways to reimagine the series with even more diverse queer talent at the center.

“We’re proud of all the recognition from the Television Academy, from our peers, from the other peers in the industry, and we’re proud to have won ‘Best Structured Reality Show’ nine years in a row,” Collins says. “Ultimately, we want the legacy of this to live on as a conversation that needed to happen, and by the way, [it needs to happen] even more so now.”

Doctor Who Producer Confirms What’s Holding the Show Up

The current Doctor Who hiatus is hitting everyone hard. Fans, critics, former cast members, and previous writers have all weighed in on everything from Ncuti Gatwa’s regeneration and who former companion Billie Piper is meant to be playing at the end of the season 15 finale to whether we can expect to see the show back on our screens again at all. (Maybe ever!) It doesn’t help that the flagship series is stuck in a weird limbo where it hasn’t been officially renewed yet, a new Doctor hasn’t been named, and all fans have to look forward to is a spinoff (The War Between the Land and the Sea) that it’s not clear anyone even really wants. Understandably, everyone’s on a hair trigger about it, but the drama of late has been particularly out of control.

Former Doctor Who writer Robert Shearman, who penned the Christopher Eccleston episode “Dalek,” recently declared the show to be “as dead as we’ve ever known it”. To be fair, he was speaking about the fact that the lack of clarity surrounding the identity of Piper’s character and a clearly defined next Doctor has left the show in a strange limbo that the franchise has never really experienced before. But his words were definitely not appreciated by some of the folks behind the scenes at Bad Wolf, the production studio that makes the show.

“‘As dead as we’ve ever known.’ That’s really rude, actually. And really untrue,” executive producer Jane Tranter said during an interview with BBC Radio Wales.

Tranter, who was part of the BBC team that brought the show back in 2005, and who returned along with showrunner Russell T. Davies and friends for the Disney seasons as part of the Bad Wolf team, went on to lay out an explanation of what most Whovians have likely guessed already. Nothing can happen in terms of announcements or news about Doctor Who’s future until the original terms of the BBC’s deal with Disney are met.

“The plans for Doctor Who are really simply this: the BBC and BBC Studios had a partnership with Disney+ for 26 episodes. We are currently 21 episodes down into that 26-episode run. We have got another five episodes of The War Between the Land and the Sea to come. At some point after that, decisions will be made together with all of us about what the future of Doctor Who entails.”

Rumors have been flying for ages that Disney isn’t planning to renew this partnership, but what everyone seems to be forgetting is that the BBC has said, repeatedly, that the corporation is firmly committed to the show. (“Doctor Who is going nowhere” is a direct quote!). And Tranter’s comments reiterate that fact.

“It’s a 60-year-old franchise. It’s been going for 20 years nonstop since we brought it back in 2005 [when I worked at the BBC]. You would expect it to change, wouldn’t you? Nothing continues the same always, or it shouldn’t continue the same always. So it will change in some form or another. But the one thing we can all be really clear of is that the Doctor will be back and everyone, including me, including all of us, just has to wait patiently to see when — and who.”

The plain fact of the matter is: It’s going to take some time to figure out what’s next for the show, and we all need to accept that fact. If decisions can’t be made (or at least announced) until after The War Between the Land and the Sea airs, then endlessly going around the same questions is deeply futile. The BBC and Bad Wolf seem to have been as direct as they can be that the show’s returning, while staying honest about the fact that we have no idea when that might be. And while it’s natural to feel nervous about all the uncertainty surrounding our favorite Time Lord, we’re probably just going to have to get used to dealing with it for some time to come.

Liam Hemsworth’s Geralt Is Actually Going to Smile Now on The Witcher

Big changes are coming in The Witcher season 4, the most obvious of which is the fact that the show is swapping out its lead actor for the show’s final two seasons, with The Hunger Games star Liam Hemsworth officially taking up the mantle of Geralt of Rivia from Henry Cavill. No one knows quite what to expect from Hemsworth’s turn as the White Wolf, nor is anyone entirely sure this show can pull off a stunt like this in a satisfying way.

Luckily for Hemsworth, Geralt’s story within the world of the show is at a point that lends itself very easily to change. Badly wounded and still sporting psychic damage from the battle with the dark sorcerer Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu), Geralt is probably as weak as we’ve ever seen him, which means season 4 is a perfect moment to reevaluate where the character is in his personal journey. The series’s third season concluded with Geralt determined to find Ciri (Freya Allan), though his search will likely take him in the wrong direction, chasing the false version who has been raised up by Emhyr.

The journey to track down his Child of Surprise will see Geralt forge new relationships—with last season’s new addition, Milva (Meng’er Zhang), and the ragtag D&D party-esque group of friends he acquires, known as his hansa. But they will also involve a shift in attitude that (get this) actually allows Geralt to smile sometimes.

“Liam has such a cheeky grin, and it is one of the very first things that we actually talked about when we had our first Zoom ever,” showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich told IGN in a wide-ranging conversation. “One of the things that he talked a lot about was for this dry wit that Geralt has, and that, in all honesty, he didn’t feel like was very present in the show. It was something he asked if I would be open to seeing more of.”

According to Hemsworth, this isn’t just a personal choice for him as an actor, but a reflection of where Geralt is emotionally at this point in the show.

“I wanted it to be able to show these moments of him opening up a little more,” Hemsworth told IGN. “My interpretation of this character is Geralt is a deeply empathetic person. As much as he’s lived a very isolated life, and is reluctant to open up to people or be vulnerable with people, apart from, say, Ciri and Yen and Jaskier… [At] this point in the story, we’re really seeing him go through a lot of changes. So I wanted to earn those moments. Because when we find him, he’s dealing with doubt. He’s struggling. He’s really unsure about himself… He’s injured right now, so he’s unsure whether, even if he does find Ciri, if he’s actually going to be able to save her, if he has the strength and the ability to save her.”

Featuring a Geralt who is more emotionally expressive than the traditional grunts and growls we’ve come to associate with the character isn’t just a stylistic choice either. For Hissrich, depicting joy in the face of despair is an important element of the story the series is telling, no matter how dark it might get.

“There is nothing better than when Geralt finds joy and humor, especially in the people that he’s with,” Hissrich said. “We have a producer, Tomasz Bagínski, who is Polish and who has spoken from the very beginning about how important it is that even in these stories of war and violence and misery, that people continue living their daily lives, and that it’s normal to joke, to deal with trauma, it’s normal to have good conversations, to smile, even when things are going to shit. And so that was really great to see in dailies again, that we were able to bring that flavor back.”

The Witcher season 4 premieres October 30 on Netflix.

Black Phone Star Stakes Her Claim for a Marvel Role

In The Black Phone and its new sequel, Madeleine McGraw plays a young woman whose incredible powers saddle her with great responsibility. And she’s ready to play another.

Talking with The Hollywood Reporter about taking the lead in Black Phone 2, McGraw took her shot at Marvel, launching her request like she’s launching a web. “I would do anything to play Spider-Gwen in a movie or any Spider-Man character,” she declared. “That is literally my dream. That is easily one of my dream roles. I am just such a big Spider-Man fan, and that whole universe draws me in so deeply.”

McGraw’s certainly not alone. Introduced in 2014’s Edge of Spider-Verse #2, by Jason Latour and Robbi Rodriguez, Spider-Gwen (also named Ghost-Spider or Spider-Woman) has become one of the most popular characters in superhero media. Part of that popularity owes to her unique place in Marvel history. Gwen Stacy was Spider-Man’s beloved girlfriend, whose death in the landmark 1973 storyline “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” ushered in a darker and more “mature” age of comic books. The alternate reality version created by Latour and Rodriguez reinvented the character, turning her from Peter Parker’s dead girlfriend into a hero in her own right.

And then, of course, there are the hit movies Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, in which she plays a key part. Hailee Steinfeld does an incredible job voicing Gwen in those films, bringing to life her rebellious spirit and love for her father, the equally often-doomed Captain Stacy. But, of course, Steinfeld cannot play Gwen when she inevitably arrives in the MCU because she’s already playing Kate Bishop, the second Hawkeye.

Thus, there’s room for McGraw to take the part. But the Gwen that McGraw plays in The Black Phone has psychic abilities, visions that allow her to connect with spirits and see the future and past. Will she be able to do the more physically demanding work a Marvel movie requires?

Anyone who sees Black Phone 2 knows the answer is “Yes.” The sequel puts Gwen through many A Nightmare on Elm Street-style attacks, flinging her around the room, which McGraw did herself. “I got to do almost all my own stunts, which was so exciting. I’ve never really gotten the chance to take that much initiative before, but Scott [Derrickson, director] knows how much I love getting to do stunts,” she enthused.” In fact, that’s one of the main things that draws her to Spider-Gwen.” I want to do those stunts,” she admitted.

Of course, given that Spider-Gwen is one of the most popular characters in the Marvel bullpen, taking on the part is a big responsibility. But as her comments indicated, McGraw is ready for that great responsibility. And anyone who has seen her fantastic performance in the Black Phone movies can tell you she has the great power to go with it.

Black Phone 2 is now in theaters.

Next Batman Director Blames Bandwagons for The Flash’s Flop

On June 16, 2023, Barry Allen, the fastest man alive, raced into theaters with The Flash. While he stuck around long enough for the movie to make back its production budget (but not its advertising budget), it soon limped away, putting an official end to the pre-James Gunn DCEU.

According to director Andy Muschietti, it was everyone else’s fault. While on the press tour for his upcoming HBO Max series It: Welcome to Derry, Muschietti told The Playlist that bad word of mouth tripped up The Flash. He continued, acknowledging the reality of the film’s poor box office performance. “A lot of people did not see it. But you know how things are these days — people don’t see things, but they like to talk s*** about it, and they like to jump on bandwagons,” he argued. “They don’t really know. People are angry for reasons that are unrelated to these things.”

In Muschietti’s defense, The Flash faced incredible bad buzz by the time it made it to theaters. Preproduction on the movie began in 2016, and it cycled through treatments, scripts, and directors before finally arriving on screens. In the meantime, star Ezra Miller’s behavior became a regular part of the new cycle, making it harder for people to see them as likable hero Barry Allen. In fact, Miller’s problems were exacerbated by the fact that Grant Gustin was playing the same character on the CW series The Flash, and had garnered far more enthusiasm from viewers.

And then there’s the shared universe issue. Gunn and Peter Safran were named co-heads of DC Studios in October 2022, and had already announced plans to reboot the DCU. While the Flashpoint storyline, in which Barry recreates reality after going back in time to save his mother, gave the film a story reason to reset the universe, fans saw the movie as a lame duck, a remnant of times past—a point only underscored by bringing back Michael Keaton as Batman and Michael Shannon as Zod from Man of Steel, to say nothing of the movie’s many controversial CGI-created cameos.

Thus, Muschietti’s not exactly wrong to say that “sometimes there’s a headwind” challenging a project, and that’s certainly the case with The Flash. Furthermore, many who did see The Flash did like the film. Currently, the movie has a 63% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which means that a majority of the surveyed critics gave it a positive review. Den of Geek‘s own four-star review raved, “The Flash is everything that much of the last 10 years of DC-based movies have not been: It’s fast-paced, character-driven, and, most importantly, in love with the comics and the iconic superheroes themselves.”

Perhaps most importantly of all, current DC Studios bosses Gunn and Safran must have seen The Flash and also liked it, as they have picked Muschietti to helm the highly anticipated Batman film The Brave and the Bold. So Muschietti has reason not just reason to say he’s “very proud” of The Flash and to call it “a good movie,” but also reason to believe that more people will come to his next superhero outing when The Brave and the Bold swoops into theaters.

The Witcher Season 4 Is Going to End In a Dark Place

The following article contains major spoilers for Andrzej Sapkowski’s penultimate The Witcher Saga novel, The Tower of Swallows.

Netflix’s high fantasy series The Witcher has plenty of dark elements: Terrifying monsters, deadly magic, and humans who are often more dangerous than any beast. (And that’s not even counting Witchers themselves, who are essentially born via a horrifying series of alchemical mutations.) But despite the many dangers the series hero, Geralt of Rivia, and his various companions have faced over the course of three seasons to date, the show has tended to wrap up each outing on a fairly positive note.

The series’s main trio of characters may be separated, and they might each have serious challenges ahead of them, but for the most part, there’s a sense of hope that things are moving in the proper direction. Apparently, that’s not going to be the case in season 4, and this penultimate batch of episodes may well end with one of the darkest moments in Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels.

Now that filming has officially wrapped on the show’s fifth and final season, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich sat down for a lengthy chat with IGN to discuss what’s ahead in The Witcher’s final two seasons. And apparently, there’s going to be quite a bit of trouble ahead for our faves — of a sort that can’t be entirely resolved in one season.

“We wrote both seasons back to back, we filmed them both back to back,” Hissrich said. “They’re coming out as two separate entities, but they really are one long story.”

The Witcher’s third season concluded with the series’ primary trio separated across the Continent. Badly wounded, Geralt (Henry Cavill, soon to be Liam Hemsworth) is on the hunt for the missing Princess Cirilla of Cintra (Freya Allan), his beloved Child of Surprise and a young witcher in training. Having done her best to heal Geralt, Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra) is off to rally the sorceresses of Aretuza to face off against the dark sorcerer, Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu). And as for Ciri, she’s once again on the run, hiding under the assumed name Falka among a group of young thieves known as The Rats.

“Organically, this is where the stories were heading, no matter what,” Hissrich said. “We knew that by the end of season three that Ciri, Yennefer, and Geralt were each going to be on their own paths. They had to separate. That is what happens in the books. It just felt like the natural step for our show, too.”

But according to Hissrich, fans shouldn’t expect a family reunion between the three this season. In fact, it sounds like we’d better start preparing ourselves for some significant emotional trauma.

“What was interesting for us is that most seasons end on, seasons one, two three, they end on an up note. You finally have the family reunited. We made a choice at the end of season four to have it end on quite a downbeat, to put people in this position where things have almost never looked worse,” she said. “Because for us, that was the only way to split this journey in half. And then in season five, start Geralt up again. Because really, once you start season four, it’s all about reuniting this family, and it takes 16 episodes to get there.”

Now in the world of The Witcher, the idea of our characters finding themselves in a position that’s somehow worse than anything they’ve ever faced leaves a lot of room for horrors of various stripes, considering this is a show that has included everything from simple torture to mass infanticide. But, if you’re at all familiar with Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher Saga, you might have an idea where at least one of these plot threads is likely going. And, unfortunately, our Lion Cub of Cintra is probably about to go through it once again, in large part because of an evil bounty hunter named Leo Bonhart (Sharlto Copley).

A mercenary who casually sports an assortment of medallions he claims he got from the witchers he’s killed, Bonhart is a straight-up monster. In the penultimate Witcher novel, The Tower of Swallows, he takes Ciri prisoner and traumatizes her even further by forcing her to watch as he tortures and kills several people she cares about. It’s a gruesome sequence and the lowest of low points for our heroine, which means it’s also a perfectly bleak place to leave things ahead of her inevitable rise and triumph in the show’s finale. But while it’ll undoubtedly be great TV just… can this poor girl ever catch a break?

The Witcher season 4 premieres October 30 on Netflix.

We Almost Got Evil Kirk on Star Trek: Enterprise

Given that it’s been on the air for almost 60 years at this point, it’s not a surprise that Star Trek has a large amount of behind-the-scenes lore surrounding it. Whether it’s original casting decisions that might have been, or potential spinoffs that never happened, Trekkies have plenty of options to consider when it comes to the roads not taken. But one of the most famous involves one of the franchise’s most beloved performers.

Over a decade after his last appearance as James T. Kirk in the film Star Trek Generations, William Shatner almost ended up on the spinoff Star Trek: Enterprise. But since Enterprise technically takes place well before Kirk’s era, he wouldn’t have been playing the famous starship captain, but rather his dark Mirror Universe counterpart: Tiberius Kirk. And his return would have not only been a fun bit of fan service, but it also would have answered some lingering questions about the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Mirror, Mirror” along the way.

While the fact that the late showrunner Manny Coto wanted to bring Shatner aboard to help boost the series’ flagging season 4 ratings is fairly known among fans, we now have a few more details about what his return would have involved, thanks to a TrekMovie.com podcast interview with former Enterprise writer/producer Mike Sussman.

“Manny, one of the ideas he put on the board at the beginning of season 4 was that he wanted to do a Mirror Universe episode, preferably a two-parter,” Sussman told Trek Movie’s All Access Star Trek podcast. “There was a long discussion [about] getting Bill Shatner on the show —we were trying [for months] to make it happen, but ultimately the network or the studio wouldn’t meet his quote.”

This is a shame for many reasons, not the least of which being that the story proposed by Shatner and by writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens actually sounded kind of great. The episodes would have seen Shatner play Kirk’s evil doppelganger again, in a story that both introduced him to Enterprise’s Captain Archer and tied into the mysterious Mirror Universe weapon from The Original Series known as the Tantalus Device. Its larger purpose was never explained, but this idea would have rewritten it as a sort of time travel grenade.

“They cooked up a story about Tiberius, whom Shatner would have played. We’d find out he went back in time after being zapped by the Tantalus Device by Mirror Spock,” Sussman said. ”And now he and Archer — who start off initially as adversaries — end up having to work together in order to somehow create the Mirror Universe. I’m sure that would have been a super fun show, but like I said, we couldn’t make the deal.”

That’s not just a timey wimey plot worthy of any episode of Doctor Who, it also sounds heaps better than what we got instead, which was the widely criticized “In a Mirror, Darkly” two-parter, which (messily) served as both a prequel to “Mirror, Mirror” and a sequel to The Original Series installment “The Tholian Web”. And while it’s certainly unlikely that a Shatner guest appearance could have gotten Enterprise a fifth season — Sussman speculates that the decision to cancel the show had already been made by that point — it’s yet another interesting entry in an intriguingly long list of what-ifs. At any rate, it certainly would have been entertaining to watch evil Kirk and Archer face off — and maybe even become friends (frenemies?). This is Star Trek, after all; anything’s possible.

A Missing Doctor Who Episode May Finally See the Light of Day

One of the great tragedies of Doctor Who’s long history is that we can’t actually watch all of it anymore. While nearly 900 episodes of the sci-fi classic have aired since the show first premiered in 1963, the BBC hasn’t always been… let’s just say on top of its archival processes. In fact, it actually used to erase, tape over, or even throw out previous broadcasts in the name of saving money on space and storage costs. This (frankly unbelievable) process means that many classic era Who episodes from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton eras have been lost. A total of 97 episodes from the series’s first six years are still missing, leaving 26 stories incomplete.

Several of these episodes — “The Underwater Menace,” “The Savages,” “The Celestial Toymaker,” “The Web of Fear,” and more — have been recreated as animated specials. (Audio recordings have survived from every episode, so it’s a neat solution to this particular problem.) But fans shouldn’t give up on finding these lost classic episodes just yet. Many are believed to still exist in private collections, and it sounds as though a new discovery is closer than many expect.

According to film collector John Franklin, of the preservation organization Film is Fabulous!, the group has solid leads about the location of some of these lost episodes. Appearing on the Doctor Who: The Missing Episodes podcast, Franklin did his best to clarify some claims made on the group’s Facebook page about the possibility of finding these lost treasures and dropped some hints at big things to come.

“We are aware of several collectors – plural – with several episodes of Doctor Who that are missing from the archive – plural – that are in private collections and with former industry professionals,” Franklin said.

He went on to share details about one particularly large collection that almost certainly contains a missing Who installment.

“Since 2023, I and a couple of other key members of the Film is Fabulous! team have been aware of a large collection of films, thousands of films, that have become vulnerable. That collection contains some very important material, including a missing episode of Doctor Who,” he said, per the Radio Times. “It is a large collection, and there is a possibility that there are other episodes of Doctor Who in that collection, but at this moment in time, we know of one.”

Franklin went on to explain that the original collector had recently passed away, and while they’d previously been permitted to catalogue the collection, the legal situation is now in flux in light of the owner’s death. Film is Fabulous! must reapply to the court in order to continue to do so.

But it certainly sounds as though once the legal situation is sorted, Film is Fabulous! will have some very exciting news to share with fans.

“Give us the space to conclude the things that we’re doing,” he added. “You will be very, very happy with the announcements when they come, but we just need the space to be able to do that now.”

Start placing your bets now on what they’ve found, Whovians. Dare we hope it’s one of the few stories we currently have no surviving clips of? (Fingers crossed for “Marco Polo”, anyone?)

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Will Have the Perfect Episodic Strategy

We already know that HBO’s latest Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, will break from its predecessors in several important ways. The series, which is based on author George R. R. Martin’s trio of “Dunk and Egg” novellas, is set roughly 90 years before the events of Game of Thrones in a Westeros that lacks the dragons, dire wolves, and magic that are so prevalent in the original series and its other spinoff, House of the Dragon.

The story will have a lighter tone and focus on the lives of more average, everyday people rather than those with fancy surnames like Stark or Lannister. It won’t feature an elaborate title sequence or a soundtrack created by Ramin Djawadi. Heck, if the trailer is anything to go by, this show is even going to be well-lit. Miracles are happening all around us!

But the most significant way in which the show is differentiating itself from its predecessors is in its length. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 1 will be comprised of six episodes that will each be only about half an hour long.

The news comes from Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, who sat down with Seven Kingdoms creator Ira Parker following the series’ New York Comic Con panel. Parker shared some interesting insights about his initial expectations when taking on the series and how they stacked up to reality.

“Being, obviously, a huge Game of Thrones fan and a writer on House of the Dragon, I assumed that this was going to be 10 hour-long episodes every season,” he said. “Obviously, these novellas are shorter. They are not the massive tomes that we get to enjoy for the other series, so I thought we were going to combine them, bring it all together, bring in elements of the Blackfyre Rebellion pretty immediately.”

The Blackfyre Rebellion is an important event in Westerosi history involving multiple Targaryen claimants to the Iron Throne following Aegon the Unworthy’s (truly wild) decision to legitimize all his bastards from his deathbed. There’s actually more than one Blackfyre Rebellion, and the events of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms take place in the shadow of the first. However, that doesn’t really become important until the second novella, The Sworn Sword.

But the show’s more limited runtime means that’s quite literally a story for another day. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms won’t have to pull forward material from later installments to pad out its runtime and instead can focus solely on the events of Martin’s first novella.

“When I heard that it was going to be six episodes and they wanted to do shorter half-hour episodes, I was like, ‘Great.’ That means we can do one novella a season,” Parker said. “That means we can start the way that we’re supposed to start and just follow Dunk in his journey into this world. We can be ground up. We can be slow. We can be intimate and just give people a little enjoyment, a little treat inside this world.”

In an entertainment landscape filled to bursting with projects that either try to stretch a six-episode story across 12 installments or try to cram five seasons’ worth of plot into a three-season run, this approach feels like a dream come true. And more series should take a lesson from that.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premieres Sunday, January 18 on HBO Max.

Stranger Things’ Final Episode Should Be in Theaters

This winter, more than three years since the season four finale, the final episodes of Stranger Things will finally release. It would be an understatement to say that the show’s ending is a cultural event, as fan posts are already filling the internet and merchandise is flooding stores. Yet, despite all the excitement building up around the show, Netflix is convinced that you should watch it alone, on a device and an account that is only shared by members of your household.

In a Variety profile about the show’s creators Matt and Ross Duffer, the idea of airing some season five episodes in the theater comes up, only for Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria to dismiss it. “A lot of people — a lot, a lot, a lot of people — have watched Stranger Things on Netflix,” she responded. “It has not suffered from lack of conversation or community or sharing or fandom. I think releasing it on Netflix is giving the fans what they want.”

Bajaria’s comments are just the latest in Netflix’s ongoing efforts to belittle the theatrical experience. Earlier this year, CEO Ted Sarandos told Variety that “for movie theaters, for the communal experience [is] an outmoded idea,” for some reason framing movie theaters as something only available in major metropolises. “If you’re fortunate to live enough in Manhattan, and you can walk to a multiplex and see a movie, that’s fantastic. Most of the country cannot,” Sarandos told the outlet, revealing that he knows as much about theater habits in middle America as Lucille Bluth knows about banana prices.

Yes, the box office has been weird lately. Familiar names like Lilo & Stitch, and Superman do big numbers, while Paul Thomas Anderson‘s electric One Battle After Another will likely lose money, just like Captain America: Brave New World and Mission Impossible—The Final Reckoning before it. And yet, the TikTok inspired “Chicken Jockey” craze that made A Minecraft Movie a big hit and the box office returns for Taylor Swift’s The Official Release Party of a Showgirl shows that fans will come to theaters for events.

Netflix itself knows this to be true. The streamer topped the box office when it released a sing-along version of KPop Demon Hunters to theaters, a venture so successful that it plans to bring it back for Halloween weekend.

There’s absolutely no reason to not do the same for at least part of Stranger Things‘ final season. Fans have waited for years for the story to reach its conclusion, and the Duffer Brothers have been teasing a spectacle, supported by a massive budget from Netflix. Bajaria’s right to say that people have watched Stranger Things on Netflix, but their enjoyment of the show isn’t limited to whatever device they’re using to watch the show. They share their enthusiasm together in social situations, not just those online.

In the Variety profile, Matt Duffer admits that streaming doesn’t give viewers the best version of the show. “People don’t get to experience how much time and effort is spent on sound and picture, and they’re seeing it at reduced quality,” he said, before invoking, yes, the communal experience of watching something together. “[I]t’s about experiencing it at the same time with fans,” Duffer stated.

He’s right, and fans will experience Stranger Things best if only Netflix gets over its nonsense ideas about movie theaters and play the show on the big screen.

Stranger Things season 5 streams its first four episodes on Netflix on November 26, 2025.

Wicked Director Teases Big Name For Cowardly Lion Casting

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande aren’t the actors who originated the parts of Elphaba the Wicked Witch and Glenda the Good Witch, but they’ve certainly made them their own. The 2024 megahit Wicked has made the duo a sensation, supplanting in the minds of some viewers not just The Wizard of Oz stars Margaret Hamilton and Billie Burke, but even Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, who first embodied the parts on stage.

Because of the cultural impact of those performers, Wicked director Jon M. Chu is taking big swings when casting the Cowardly Lion for the upcoming sequel Wicked: For Good. According to a new profile at Deadline, Chu already made a pitch to a major star via Instagram. “I was like, ‘It’s not a ton of lines, but maybe you have a little time. I know you’re busy. I’ll come to you,'” recalled Chu. The director’s boldness paid off with a positive response. “He was like, ‘Why the fuck not, let’s go!’ Chu said. “And then we went ahead and recorded the lines.”

Readers might notice that Chu doesn’t share the identity of the actor, as he prefers to keep a surprise. He teased Deadline, saying, “Man, wait until the red carpet when the actor who gave us the Cowardly Lion’s voice steps foot on it. It’ll be wild.”

But we here at Den of Geek are not so good at waiting. So we’re going to fill our time by speculating at who might provide their voice to the courage-deficient feline.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Before helming Wicked, Chu made In the Heights, a big screen adaptation of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical. Chu may have moved on to other worlds, but he certainly hasn’t forgotten his experience working with the famed songwriter and performer, who had a bit part in In the Heights. Sure, its weird that Chu would have reached out via Instagram instead of texting or calling, but who knows? Broadway’s a weird place, and as Bluey fans know, Miranda’s game to lend his voice to animals.

Channing Tatum

Another blast from Chu’s past who loves to do cameos is Channing Tatum. Tatum briefly appeared in Chu’s 2008 movie Step Up 2: The Streets, and later took a bigger role in another Chu-helmed sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Neither of these projects gave the director and star much time together. But if we’ve learned anything from This is the End, The Hateful Eight, Bullet Train, and more, Tatum’s pretty game to show up in a movie and be weird.

Bradley Cooper

You know who else likes to drop by and be weird for a few minutes? Bradley Cooper, the guy who pops up in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves as Michelle Rodriguez’s diminutive lost love and in Superman as imperialistic Jor-El. Furthermore, Cooper knows how to bring to life an animal character and how to do a silly voice, as anyone who’s seen a Guardians of the Galaxy movie can tell you.

Nathan Lane

A Broadway legend who’s known to hang out with lions, Nathan Lane would be a fun pick for joining the cast of Wicked. He’s a master at playing nervous characters, and would certainly make the most of even the few lines that Chu could give him. Everything’s better with Nathan Lane in it, so why wouldn’t Chu reach out to him.

David Zaslav

Yes, Zaslav runs Warner Bros. and Wicked is a Universal production. But listen, the guy already stuck his face into The Wizard of Oz when it played as an abomination against all things great and powerful at the Las Vegas Sphere. Further, who better to portray a coward than Zaslav? It makes too much sense.

Wicked: For Good comes to theaters on November 21, 2025.