The Weirdest Comic Book Crossovers of All Time

You can do anything in comic books. Unlike other media, which require gigantic budgets, scheduling, and egos, in comic books, you can just draw something and there it is on the page. Nowhere is that more clear than in crossovers that happen in comics, when one set of characters meet another set of characters. 

Because this is comics, great freedom means the opportunity to get weird, mixing and mashing characters that have no business hanging out with one another. Here are 25 times that crossovers went beyond the bounds of logic and good taste, resulting in stories that are bizarre even by comic book standards.

Superman and Don Rickles (1971)

Most comic book fans know the odd bit of trivia that Darkseid, the big bad of the DC Universe, made his first appearance in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen. For a variety of reasons, DC put the legendary Jack Kirby onto the odd-ball Superman spinoff, and he used that comic as part of his introduction to the New Gods. What fans may not know is that infamous Vegas insult comedian Don Rickles gets the spotlight in two issues of those early stories.

While Superman is dealing with the new threat of Apokolips and making sense of the New Gods in Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #139 and #141, Jimmy is hanging around Don Rickles and Don’s friendly superhero alter-ego, Goody Rickles. Offbeat as it sounds, it’s those kids of unexpected leaps that made the Jimmy Olsen book so fun, even as Kirby was creating entire universes.

Shang-Chi and Fu Manchu (1974)

Okay, this is a rough one. When writer Steve Englehart and artist Jim Starlin pitched a kung-fu series to Marvel, Editor-in-Chief Roy Thomas gave the green light with one provision: they had to use Dr. Fu Manchu, the evil genius from the pulp novels by English writer Sax Rohmer, for whom Marvel had the comics rights. Fu Manchu is the exemplar of “yellow peril” racism that infected pop culture throughout the 20th century, so when Englehart and Starlin debuted Shang-Chi as his son in 1974’s Special Marvel Edition #15, they already tainted the Master of Kung Fu. Fortunately, Shang-Chi has only grown in stature while Fu Manchu has faded away, to the point that Marvel reimagined the character as Zheng Zu when the company lost the adaptation license, making Shang-Chi’s father a more three-dimensional figure.

Original Marvel and DC (1976, 1981)

Marvel and DC have had a few major crossovers by this point, including the various team-up books the companies are currently publishing. In most cases, there are huge interdimensional explanations for how these superheroes come to meet one another. But not so in the original crossovers. 

In 1976’s Superman vs the Amazing Spider-Man, written by Gerry Conway and penciled by Ross Andru, and 1981’s DC Special Series #27 featuring Batman and the Incredible Hulk, written by Len Wein and penciled by José Luis García-López, the characters just know one another. Peter Parker introduces himself as an admirer of Lois Lane, Lex Luthor and Doctor Octopus have long despised each other, and Bruce Banner apparently has a job at Wayne Enterprises.

In some ways, it’s nice how the stories skip the world-building to get straight to the good stuff, but it sure is jarring to modern readers.

Godzilla vs. SHIELD (1977)

At first glance, the idea of pitting the King of the Monsters against Earth’s Mightiest Heroes isn’t surprising at all, as Marvel is currently publishing a miniseries called Godzilla vs. Avengers, just a couple of years after DC put out Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong. But the first meetup between Godzilla and Marvel heroes was far less of an event and more just a function of comic book storytelling. Back when Marvel had the Godzilla comic license, they wasted no time putting the kaiju into their mainstream universe. While that meant that the Avengers would eventually go toe-to-toe with him, the main protagonists were the Godzilla Squad, a SHIELD organization created by Nick Fury and led by his right-hand man, Dum Dum Dugan.

Spider-Man on Saturday Night Live (1978)

Don Rickles isn’t the only comedian to hob-nob with the heroes. Media figures often show up in comics, with the Avengers chatting with David Letterman and Neal Conan from NPR reporting on the X-Men. Still, Spider-Man’s appearance onSaturday Night Live in Marvel Team-Up #74, written by Chris Claremont and penciled by Bob Hall. The story finds Peter Parker and Mary Jane attending a taping of SNL being hosted (naturally) by Stan Lee. However, things go awry when John Belushi gets a magic ring to go with the samurai character he would play, accidentally summoning supervillain the Silver Samurai. Garrett Morris doesn’t transform into Ant-Man to join the fight, but thankfully Peter dons his Spidey gear to save Belushi.

Team America/New Mutants (1983)

While Godzilla was big enough to carry his own book as soon as Marvel got the license, others needed a more gradual integration. Such was the case with Team America, a motorcycle riding team who shows up for some reason in the fifth issue of New Mutants. What began as a story about young adolescent students at Xavier’s School for the Gifted soon becomes about mutants who do motorcycle stunts and can meld together to become the Dark Rider. It’s a jarring turn, that only makes sense when we learn that Marvel had acquired the rights to a toy line called Team America, inspired by the Evel Knievel craze. Obviously, the craze has died out and Team America has mostly disappeared, except for the time they hung out with the New Mutants.

Marvel/Transformers/Doctor Who (1987)

Sometimes, Marvel brings the characters it licenses into its mainline universe. And other times, the company creates new characters within the licensed property, who stick around long after the license expires. The most interesting case of the latter involves the robotic bounty hunter (or, in his prefered nomenclature, “freelance peace-keeping agent”) called Death’s Head.

Death’s Head debuted in the Marvel UK comic Transformers #113, written by Simon Furman and penciled by Geoff Senior. A year after his first appearance, Death’s Head popped up in a story by Furman and Senoir did for Doctor Who Magazine #135, joining the Seventh Doctor in the TARDIS. Most of the time, however, Death’s Head hangs around the Marvel Universe, dealing with the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Deathlok, and most recently showing up in an issue of The Ultimates.

Barry Allen in the Marvel Universe (1990)

While the big, official Marvel/DC crossovers are few and far between, creators regularly let their favorites slip unofficially into other universes. One of the most compelling examples occured in the pages of the Marvel Comic book Quasar, written by Mark Gruenwald and illustrated by Mark Manley. Starting in Quasar #17, a blond man appears from a bolt of lightening. He can’t recall much about his past life, only that there was some sort of crisis and that his name was something like “Buried Alien.” Oh yeah, he also has super speed.

Buried Alien is Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash who sacrificed himself fighting the Anti-Monitor a few years earlier in DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. Taking advantage of a loophole that Crisis writer Marv Wolfman built in to bring back the departed Flash, Gruenwald simply wrote that the multiversal event allowed Barry to rematerialize in another universe, continuing his superhero efforts under the code name FastForward.

Pinhead vs. Marshal Law (1993)

Okay, this one is for the deep cut fans, but trust me, it’s weird. Pinhead is, of course, the big bad of the Hellraiser movie franchise. The leader of the Cenobites, who come to visit those who solve the cursed puzzle known as the Lament Configuration, Pinhead became a horror icon—partially to the chagrin of author Clive Barker, who conceived of him as more of a complex amoral figure instead of the generic monster he became. Created by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill, Marshal Law is a bondage-wear-clad, gun toting government superhero hunter who starred in deconstructionist comics from the 1980s (think The Boys before The Boys).

Different as the two characters are, both Marshal Law and Hellraiser were being published by Marvel imprint Epic Comics, and sometimes that’s all you need for a crossover. The two-part Law in Hell doesn’t really offer much in terms of plot, and Pinhead can only class up the joint for a few pages before getting pulled into the testosterone-fueled fights that pass for most Marshal Law stories. But at least you get to see O’Neill draw some truly nightmarish takes on superheroes.

Archie Meets the Punisher (1994)

As we’ll discuss more later, Archie Comics has long since bucked its wholesome Eisenhower-era origins to tell some audacious stories, but that hadn’t happened yet in 1994. So more than a few eyebrows were raised when Archie and Marvel teamed up to send Frank Castle a.k.a. the Punisher to Riverdale. Those eyebrows were raised even further when readers realized that writer Batton Lash and artists Stan Goldberg and John Buscema managed to tell a story that felt true to both Punisher and Archie. The criminal “Red,” who looks just like Archie Andrews, is exactly the type of hood that the Punisher would hunt and the mix-up gags that occur when Betty, Veronica, and Jughead mixup Red for their old pal would fit alongside any Archie’s Double Digest you’d find in the supermarket.

Mars Attacks Image (1996)

In the mid-1990s, card company Topps made a play for the comic book market by launching its own series. In addition to getting the great Jack Kirby, but they also turned their most well-known property Mars Attacks! into a series. To generate buzz, the company joined with Image Comics, for a story about the skull-faced martians invading that company’s superhero universe.

Most of the crossovers on this list are head scratchers, but Mars Attacks Image goes beyond the weird and becomes just plain mean. Writer Keith Giffen indulges in a level of nastiness he usually reserves for Karate Kid of the Legion of Superheroes, penning four issues of the martians slaughtering the one-note extreme heroes of the Image Universe. Instead of his trademark humor, Giffen writes a sanctimonious scene in which a patriotic hero dies protecting the Declaration of Independence and a gut-churning C-plot in which the aliens sexually assault a captured heroine. Unlike most on this list, Mars Attacks Image is a curio best ignored.

Star Trek/X-Men (1996-1998)

Given her mandate to seek out new life and new civilizations, it makes some sense that the USS Enterprise would make its way to the Marvel Universe. But it’s strange that it happened three times, and that the only heroes the Starfleet crewmen encountered were the X-Men. Over the course of two comics— Star Trek/X-Men by Scott Lobdell and a variety of artists and Star Trek/X-Men: 2nd Contact by Dan Abnett, Ian Edginton, and Cary Nord—and the novel Planet X by Michael Jan Friedman, Marvel’s Mighty Mutants board the USS Enterprise, first under command of James T. Kirk and then under Jean-Luc Picard’s command.

No one would count the three stories among their favorite tales of Starfleet of the mutants, but they’re full of fun moments, such as seeing Dr. Henry McCoy pal around with Dr. Leonard McCoy and Storm see a resemblance between Professor X and Picard, a few years before Patrick Stewart portrayed Xavier on screen.

Amalgam Comics (1996, 1997)

If the first official Marvel/DC crossover is strange in its mundanity, the second goes in the total opposite direction. When the two universes collided in the mid-’90s, they created a new universe, one consisting of mash-ups between characters from the two worlds: Superman and Captain America combine to create Super Soldier, Batman and Wolverine are Dark Claw, and Superboy and Spider-Man become Spider-Boy. Sometimes, the combinations were sweaty (Speed Demon mixes the Flash, Ghost Rider, and the Demon Etrigan), but they were often inspired, as with the Hal Jordan/Tony Stark combination Iron Lantern.

Sonic the Hedgehog Meets Spawn (1998)

Ask any Sonic the Hedgehog fan and they’ll tell you about how weird things got when Ken Penders was writing Sonic the Hedgehog for Archie Comics, but the strangest moment might be in Sonic Super Special #7, written by Penders and drawn by Jim Valentino, in which Sonic and his pals met Spawn, the Savage Dragon, Shadowhawk, and other characters from the Image Universe. 

While Image has become a respected publisher of intellectual, creator-owned comics, the company was still in its infancy in the 1990s, and mostly traded in obnoxiously edgy knockoffs of Marvel and DC heroes. No, Shadowhawk doesn’t break the backs of any racists in Mobius and Savage Dragon doesn’t punch through Doctor Robotnik, Sonic and Knuckles do briefly encounter the Hell-born warrior Spawn in a dark alley.

Marvel/Guiding Light (2006)

As much as some fans are loathe to admit it, superhero comics are soap operas. So it’s kind of surprising that superheroes and soap operas only officially crossed over once. On the long-running series Guiding Light, Harley Cooper (Beth Ehlers) briefly gained superpowers after being electrocuted. Putting on a costume, Harley fight evil doers for a little while as the Guiding Light, before losing her abilities. In 2006, however, the Guiding Light returned, this time in the pages of a Marvel Comic by writer Jim McCann and art collective Udon Studios. Here, the Guiding Light helps Spidey and the Avengers battle Venom, Doc Ock, and other baddies. The team-up is short-lived, and all involved go back to their own separate, but equally ridiculous, adventures.

Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash (2007)

Of all the crossovers on this list, this is the most disappointing. The idea of seeing Bruce Campbell’s Ashley J. Williams do battle with Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees is so compelling that New Line Cinema tried to get Campbell and Sam Raimi to bring it to the screen. So a comic book version should be a pretty good substitute, right?

Well, maybe, if it had a different creative team. Published by DC’s Wildstorm imprint and Dynamite Entertainment, written by James Kuhoric, and penciled by Jason Craig, Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash takes the treatment that Jeff Katz wrote for a movie and amps up the nastiness. The basic concept is solid, with Freddy stuck inside Jason’s mind after Freddy vs. Jason and seeking out the Necronomicon to get more power.

But Kuhoric and Craig make every male character an arrogant jerk and every woman a preening sexpot, turning the whole thing from a ridiculous romp to a skeevy mess. Somehow, the 2009 sequel Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash: The Nightmare Warriors is even worse, turning a team-up between all the survivors of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series into an utter drag.

Eminem/The Punisher (2009)

In the second page of Eminem/The Punisher, the rapper walks out into the Detroit streets just in time for Frank Castle to gun down his entire entourage. On the third page, Eminem tries to escape in a vehicle only for the Punisher to produce a rocket launcher and blow the thing up.

In short, Eminem/The Punisher knows that it’s ridiculous and has a good time with it. Set during the time of the acclaimed and incredibly nasty adults-only series Punisher Max, but not part of that book’s official continuity, Enimem/The Punisher sends Frank to Detroit to hunt down a criminal in Marshall Mather’s group. The rapper makes things worse by temporarily aligning with violent criminal Baracuda before joining the side of the angels, such as they are, with Punisher. Made by pros Fred Van Lente and Salvador Larroca, Eminem/The Punisher is big dumb fun in the best way.

Ash Saves Obama (2009)

While Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash may have disappointed, Army of Darkness: Ash Saves Obama does exactly what it promises. Writer Elliott Serrano and artist Ariel Padilla wisely keep things simply, holding to a pretty basic plot about the Necronomicon being sold at a Detroit comic book convention… the same convention that the newly-elected 44th president of the United States happens to be visiting… the same convention where Ash is delivering goods from S-Mart. A kid reads from the Book of the Dead, people start becoming Deadites, and its up to Ash to save POTUS. There aren’t many surprises in Ash Saves Obama, and the feel-good vibes of that era certainly don’t hit as hard today as they did in 2009, but at least the series is straightforward fun.

Star Trek/Transformers/Ghostbusters/GI Joe (2011)

If that headline makes the mind boggle, thinking about how Scotty could soup up Rodimus Prime or how much fun Peter Venkman could have mocking Destro, let me stop you right there. Yes, publsher IDW had the rights to make comic books about Star Trek, GI Joe, the Transformers, and the Ghostbusters. But they did not have the rights to have the characters officially meet one another.

So, IDW found a workaround. In addition to a comic called Infestation, written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning and penciled by David Messina, in which super zombies invade the multiverse, IDW released a series of tie ins for each property. Thus, the Ghostbusters fight zombies in one book and the Enterprise deals with the zombies in another, all facing the same threat while never actually meeting one another. The trick worked so well that Infestation was popular enough to spawn a sequel, which brought the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Dungeons & Dragons into the mix.

Attack on Titan/Avengers (2014)

As Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, the Avengers are tasked with handling gigantic threats. And they don’t get any more gigantic than the Titans from the manga and anime Attack on Titan. As a one-shot bonus story written by Hajime Isayama and C.B. Cebulski (not Akira Yoshida, thankfully) and illustrated by Gerardo Sandoval, Attack on Avengers doesn’t waste time with explaining how the Titans got to New York, nor does it replicate any of the source material’s themes. It’s just a few pages of Marvel heroes punching giant monsters with exposed muscles, which is good enough for most people.

Archie vs. Predator (2015)

If you were disappointed that Archie Meets the Punisher didn’t involve the squeaky clean Riverdale kids getting torn to shreds, then you’re gonna love Archie vs. Predator. Because that’s exactly what happens in this crossover, written by Alex de Campi and illustrated by Fernando Ruiz. When a Yautja overhears Betty and Veronica fighting over who Archie loves best, he interprets the squabble as a challenge and begins ripping spines out of the teens. It may not be completely respectful to the Archie property, but Archie vs. Predator is a gory blast that makes way more sense than it has any right to be.

Batman Meets the Avengers (2016-2017)

“What’s the big deal about an a crossover between Batman and the Avengers?” you might ask. “Marvel and DC characters meet all the time these days.” True as that may be, we’re not talking about Marvel and DC. We’re talking about the other Avengers, the ones known in the U.K. Specifically, this series brings Batman and Robin together with Mr. Steed and Emma Peel, as portrayed by Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg. Furthermore, it wasn’t the usual brooding Dark Knight that we know today, but rather the Adam West Batman, joined by the Burt Young Robin.

Batman ’66 Meets Steed and Mrs. Peel, written by Ian Edginton and illustrated by Matthew Smith is a transatlantic clash of kitsch, but that doesn’t mean it laughs at its subjects. The series plays like an episode of the heroes’ respective shows, satisfying fans in the U.S. and in the U.K.

Green Lantern/Planet of the Apes (2017)

Here’s an indisputable rule of comics: anyone who doesn’t like super-simians can’t like DC Comics. Because of that rule, it kind of makes perfect sense that the characters from Planet of the Apes would get Green Lantern power rings. The really impressive thing about Planet of the Apes/Green Lantern, however, is how writers Justin Jordan and Robbie Thompson, working with artist Barnaby Bagenda, combine the two mythos. In this reality, the Green Lantern’s immortal bosses have created a time loop to protect and study the effect of an Earth that the humans have, as Charlton Heston’s character Taylor famously puts it, blown up. The investigation leads to the discovery of power rings, leading to Cornelius and Zira working with the Green Lanterns to stop Sinestro and Dr. Zaius.

Batman/Elmer Fudd (2017)

In 2017, DC published a series of one-shots teaming up the Looney Tunes (owned by parent company Warner Bros.) and various heroes. Most are pleasant if inconsequential, but the Batman/Elmer Fudd Special by Tom King and Lee Weeks is sublime. King and Weeks reimagine the Looney Tunes as humans straight from hard-boiled detective fiction, gathered at Porky’s bar. To save his life from Elmer, Bugs “the Bunny” sets the hunter on the trail of Bruce Wayne, which gets the attention of the Batman. Obviously, King takes some liberties with the source material (he always does), but the results are one of a kind and worth it.

Colonel Sanders/Green Lantern (2017)

Most of the time, we don’t hold comic book characters responsible for whatever horrible things they have to do in promotional stories that their parent companies put together. Otherwise, we’d still be mad at Superman for shaking hands with Jared from Subway. But the Green Lantern Hal Jordan already has such a poor reputation that teaming up with the Colonel to defend the secret of eleven herbs and spices can only improve things. Of course, it helps that KFC: Across the Universe #1 is made by pros Tony Bedard and Tom Derenick, which somehow makes the story of greedy Orange Lantern stealing the secret recipe work as a believable Green Lantern tale, not just a commercial.

28 Years Later Star Confirms His Character’s Connection to Disgraced UK Icon

The first scene of 28 Years Later plays exactly as expected. The sequel to 2002’s 28 Days Later opens during the first days of the rage virus spreading across Great Britain as a boy named Jimmy goes from watching Teletubbies to running for his life from zombies. Jimmy returns in the last scene of 28 Years Later, which is anything but expected. After a surprisingly soulful, openhearted film about learning to live with death, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) encounters a now-grown Jimmy, who leads a cult of track-suit wearing, jewelry-adorned survivors and goes by the name “Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal.”

The sudden tonal shift at the end of 28 Years Later has been one of the most-talked parts of the film, and has only stoked excitement for the sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, releasing this weekend. Much of the conversation has centered around the inspirations for Sir Jimmy’s name and look, with many connecting it to English entertainer and, as revealed much later, sexual abuser Jimmy Savile. In a recent conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Sir Jimmy’s actor Jack O’Connell confirmed the connection, saying, “I think he sort of models himself on the memory of this figure that was always on TV.”

As O’Connell’s comments indicate, Savile was a constant in British media, presenting on Top of the Pops, hosting a show on Radio 1, and starring in the children’s show Jim’ll Fix It, in which he and celebrity guests granted wishes sent to him via letter. Savile matched his striking but gregarious on-screen personality with a commitment to charity, raising thousands for hospitals, which earned him knighthood. Yet, a documentary released a year after his death in 2011 found that Savile had sexually abused hundreds of people over the course of his life, mostly children.

This combination of horrible darkness behind something that once seemed innocent and good fits neatly within the themes of 28 Years Later. Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, the movie looks back at the zombie hit from two decades ago from a post-Brexit perspective.

Where the first film ended with the promise that the U.K. would reunite with the rest of the world, 28 Years Later finds that Britain remains under quarantine, and thus culturally stalled while the rest of the world goes forward. Clinging to old rituals and superstitions, the British revert to mythologies, which range from the medieval imagery that Boyle intersperses throughout the film to the nomenclature adopted by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal.

Although he allows that he “can’t speak” for Garland, O’Connell has a similar read. “My take was unchecked power. I think it totally exists in the story to unsettle,” he explained. “I love that it’s showing how popular culture just went kaput. And you see these people who were, in some way or another, just trying to latch on to what the messaging was in that era.”

Judging by the positive reviews The Bone Temple has garnered, O’Connell successfully managed to unsettle viewers with Sir Jimmy Crystal, but never as much as the surprising truth behind the person who inspired his character.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now playing in theaters.

The Game of Thrones Finale’s Best Decision Had Nothing to Do with George R.R. Martin

There are plenty of reasons to complain about the Game of Thrones finale, a controversial ending to a massively popular series that had everything from pacing problems to outright character assassination. Long-promised stories fizzled, characters died, seemingly impossible enemies were conquered with almost ridiculous ease, and some of the biggest twists felt unearned. 

But the Thrones finale did get one thing right: The triumph of Sansa Stark. Over the course of the show’s eight seasons, Sansa endured everything from gaslighting and manipulation to sexual assault, physical abuse, and emotional torture. She’s held hostage for years by a revolving series of enemies who want to use her for their own ends, and watches her father die in front of her. Yet, her resilience ultimately pays off, and she ends the series as Queen in the North in her own right, vowing to do right by and care for her people rather than force them to kneel out of fear.

Sansa’s ending is both emotionally rich and narratively satisfying, returning a Stark to the family seat in Winterfell, giving the North back its independence, and finally giving one of the series’ most long-suffering characters her due. It’s the closest thing anyone on the show’s canvas gets to a real happy ending. It also apparently wasn’t author George R.R. Martin’s idea. 

In a wide-ranging interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Martin finally shared some details about the way that the series’ ending differs from the one he’s planned for his books, if and when he ever finishes them. 

According to the author, the conclusion of his “A Song of Ice and Fire” saga won’t align with the version we saw in the HBO show. “[The book’s ending is] going to be significantly different,” he said. “Some characters who are alive in my book are going to be dead in the show, and vice versa.”

And it sounds like Sansa was at least originally intended to be those book-only casualties. But Sophie Turner’s portrayal of the eldest Stark daughter onscreen was apparently so good that she may have bought her character a second chance at life on the page.

“I was going to kill more people,” Martin said. “Not the ones they killed [in the show]. They made it more of a happy ending. I don’t see a happy ending for Tyrion. His whole arc has been tragic from the first. I was going to have Sansa die, but she’s been so appealing in the show, maybe I’ll let her live…”

None of these vague comments will likely make anyone feel better about Martin’s progress on either The Winds of Winter or A Dream of Spring. (And your mileage may and almost certainly will vary on what on earth Martin himself actually considers a happy ending.) But what they do mean is that some of us (read: me) owe Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss at least a partial apology. Sure, they whiffed the whole Daenerys as the Mad Queen arc almost entirely. But, Sansa’s ending is pretty much perfect, and apparently, we (again: me) owe them some serious thanks for that. 

Star Wars Is Now Nostalgia for Millennials Instead of Gen X

It’s finally official. Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down as head of Lucasfilm, to be replaced by Dave Filoni on the creative side and Lynwen Brennan on the financial side. Is this change the beginning of a dark new age, or does it signal a new hope? The answer to that question probably depends on your age and when you first started watching Star Wars.

Kennedy came to the job via Lucasfilm founder George Lucas, whom she met through Steven Spielberg and with whom she first started working on 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Filoni was also hired by Lucas, specifically to create the 2008 Clone Wars movie and the series that followed, running seven seasons between 2008 and 2020. If Kennedy represented the Generation X fans who encountered the franchise through the original trilogy, then Filoni represents the millennials who love the prequel trilogy… but will they repeat the previous generation of fans’ mistakes?

Filoni came to Star Wars at its first moment of major change. Fans longed to see an official continuation of their favorite franchise, only further heightened by the 1997 re-release of the original trilogy. Even if some griped about the messy and unnecessary additions that Lucas made to these special editions, they still looked forward to The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars movie on screen in 16 years.

That excitement lasted until about the point that the final credits rolled. Fans hated the stilted dialogue and acting, the overly artificial sets, and especially everything involving Jar Jar Binks. Whether they disliked his observations about stepping in poo-poo or his uncomfortable similarity to racist tropes, Jar Jar did not feel like he belonged in Star Wars, at least not to these viewers. Attack of the Clones, with its 1950s diner and diatribes about sand, didn’t change any opinions. The dark overtones made Revenge of the Sith a bit more palatable to some, at least until Vader let out an embarrassing “Noooooo!”

A particular phrase repeated throughout the initial backlash to the prequel trilogy: George Lucas ruined my childhood. Longtime fans complained that Lucas had taken everything they’ve loved about the movies since they were kids and made a mockery of it, figuratively mocking their younger selves. Nothing captured this position better than a scene from the series two premier of Spaced, in which Gen X nerd Tim (Simon Pegg), ritualistically burns his Star Wars memorabilia in a scene that director Edgar Wright shoots like Vader’s funeral pyre from Return of the Jedi. To Gen X fans, the prequel trilogy was not their Star Wars.

To the defenders of the prequel trilogy, the old fans were absolutely correct. Star Wars wasn’t for these fans anymore because they are adults. Star Wars is fundamentally a sci-fi fairy tale, a story for children. So who cares if the adults of the late-’90s disliked the prequels? Kids at the time loved them. And they loved the prequel trilogies spinoffs, especially The Clone Wars.

For those young fans, themes involving Anakin Skywalker’s struggle against his fate and the clones’ desire to become individuals, plots involving secret cabals and underground resistances were introductions to more complex storytelling. The show represented their first experience of watching something both thrilling and rich, a science fiction primer. So even though the series escaped cancellation once by moving from Cartoon Network to Netflix for an extra season, they still felt cheated by its end in 2014.

The spinoff Rebels (2014-2018) kept the story alive, and Clone Wars even received one last season on Disney+ in 2020. But none of that felt as vindicating as the second season of The Mandalorian, in which Katee Sackhoff reprised her role as Bo-Katan Kryze, the bounty hunter from The Clone Wars and Rebels. Not only did Bo-Katan serve as a harbinger for more returning characters such as Ahsoka Tano and Ezra Bridger, she soon supplanted Din Djarin, as the de facto lead of The Mandalorian. Joining The Mandalorian was The Bad Batch, Star Wars: Tales, Asohka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Skeleton Crew, shows that put prequel trilogy characters and concepts at the center.

Given this re-alignment from the original trilogy to the prequel trilogy, Filoni makes perfect sense as the new head of Lucasfilm. But it’s hard to miss the irony at work here. The kids who were told that their love of Star Wars is more legitimate than that of the crusty Gen X’ers are now old adults in charge. And, it turns out, they’re clinging to their childhoods with just as much tenacity as the people who never wanted to share Star Wars in the first place.

Which raises a question as Star Wars enters a new era under Filoni and Lynwen Brennan: will Star Wars grow under them as it did under Lucas and Kennedy? Or, more precisely, will the Star Wars fans in charge let new fans come in, even if they don’t like the same things? Will people who didn’t meet Bo-Katan and Ezra Bridger when they were five want to find out what these characters are up to now? Or will they want their own characters, demanding to see Kai Brightstar and Nash Durango from Young Jedi Adventures instead?

More importantly, will the current group of millennial fans let them have what they want? Millennial fans had to take the franchise from Gen X’ers who didn’t want to give it up. Will those millennials do better in the Dave Filoni era? Time will tell.

Robert Downey Jr. and Timothée Chalamet Want to Make Dunesday the Next Barbenheimer

For decades, Hollywood believed in counter programming. When Universal released Mamma Mia! on July 18, 2008, the same weekend that Warner Bros. put out The Dark Knight, they hoped to get moviegoers uninterested in superhero crime epics. Nearly two decades earlier, Disney tried the same maneuver, putting out the more family friendly Honey, I Shrunk the Kids against Tim Burton’s dark reimagining of Batman on June 23, 1989. But that all changed in 2023 with “Barbenheimer,” when the simultaneous release of Barbie and Oppenheimer on July 21 encouraged viewers to watch both movies and not choose one over the other.

Later attempts to replicate Barbenheimer have failed (RIP, Saw Patrol), but Robert Downey Jr. and Timothée Chalamet think they might have the next big thing. When Downey Jr. introduced a screening of Chalemet’s new A24 film Marty Supreme, he observed (via Deadline), “We both have films opening on December 18, and we decided to coin it … We’re thinking Dunesday.'”

Downey refers, of course, to Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three. Slick as the portmanteau certainly is, Dunesday doesn’t completely mirror Barbenheimer simply because the two movies involved are a lot more similar than Barbie and Oppenhiemer were to each other. Barbie was an upbeat but smart comedic look at the famous toy line, while Oppenheimer was a serious biopic about the man who helped create the atomic bomb.

Both Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday are sci-fi franchises that adapt nerdy properties with huge fan bases. Both films continue stories from previous movies, and both films come laden with expectations. Dune: Part Three brings to the screen Frank Herbert‘s Dune Messiah, a tricky novel that’s more about palace intrigue than big space battles, while Avengers: Doomsday seeks to revive the MCU by telling a multiversal story filled with familiar faces, such as Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and the cast of the 2000s X-Men movies.

More importantly, Barbenheimer had higher stakes because it felt like it would reignite moviegoing as a past time. At the worst points of the global pandemic, theaters shut down and studios switched to streaming, making it seem as though going to the cinema was an outdated activity, like planking or stuffing a bunch of people into phone booths in the 1950s. Barbenheimer acted as a celebration of everything great about the cinematic experience, the glory of the big screen, and the joy of watching movies together.

Certainly, some of that will be present in both Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday. The first Denis Villeneuve Dune film debuted on HBO Max the same day it was in theaters and Disney sent its MCU entry Black Widow straight to streaming. Further, the MCU continues to lose its position in the culture, and its unclear if fans will want to see Villeneuve make a dour movie heavy on politics, with Chalamet playing a more morally unsavory version of Paul Atreides.

If the movies do grab the attention of viewers, Dunesday could very well be a Barbenheimer sequel, celebrating the cinema through sci-fi spectacle. But if moviegoers show no interest in either, Dunesday will be the worst type of non-counterprogramming, two movies that appeal to no one.

Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three come to theaters on December 18, 2026.

Robert Picardo Created His Star Trek Character’s Best Quirk By Accident

This article contains spoilers for the two-part premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is, by necessity, a forward-looking sort of property, what with its focus on the students who’ll become the next generation of Federation officers and the politically complex world they’ll inhabit. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plenty of connections to what has come before. It’s set during the aftermath of The Burn, a crippling, galaxy-wide event introduced in Star Trek: Discovery, and features several familiar faces from that series, including Tig Notaro (Jett Reno) and Oded Fehr (Admiral Charles Vance). But the person old school Trek fans are almost certainly most excited to see is Robert Picardo, who reprises his Star Trek: Voyager role as the Emergency Medical Hologram Mark I, or, as he is better known, the Doctor. 

A beloved figure in Trek history, the Doctor fills the traditional role of a not-quite-human (or vaguely human-adjacent) figure who must learn about things like humanity and emotion from his proximity to his inevitably messy colleagues. His journey was a bit different than most in the sense that he is not technically alive in the strictest sense, but the lessons were still very similar. Now in the 32nd century, sentient holograms aren’t nearly as groundbreaking as they were when Picardo and his Doctor were first introduced. (Heck, the Academy just enrolled its first holographic cadet!) But the EMH himself has changed in the eight centuries since the last time we saw him, and part of his Starfleet Academy arc will inevitably involve unraveling the myriad of ways he’s grown and changed in the interim. Such as fully embracing his inner performer.

One of the most delightful callbacks in the first two episodes of Starfleet Academy revisits the Doctor’s longstanding love of opera. During his Voyager days, his singing wasn’t particularly impressive. In fact, it seemed to annoy most people whenever he brought it up. But while Picardo sings his own arias onscreen, his character’s affection for the genre actually came about by accident.

“Well, I sang opera by mistake on Voyager,” Picardo told Den of Geek. “I suggested to the producers that I listened to opera, and they misunderstood me. And then it was too late. They’d already written a show where I was singing.”

Picardo’s voice really is excellent, but what seems to most interest the actor is what the Doctor’s love of music says about who he is, even hundreds of years in the future. 

“I never intended to sing —  the idea of an artificial intelligence, a computer program having a hobby is silly enough,” PIcardo said. “But that an emotionless, humorless program, which I was at the beginning of Voyager, would pick such an emotional form of human art! Cut to hundreds of years in the future, it’s his sustaining passion outside of medicine, and he wants to share it with students who aren’t particularly interested in it.”

But in Starfleet Academy, not only does the Doctor get the chance to teach his students about the art form he’s loved for so long, but he actually gets to take part in it. (And not on a Holodeck.) During the series’ second episode, “Beta Test,” the Doctor gets the chance to perform a gorgeous rendition of Mozart’s “Pa Pa Pa Pa” from The Magic Flute as part of the entertainment during a reception for the visiting Betazoid delegation. And he absolutely smashes it. How far we’ve come, indeed.

“To perform again, and to sing with this wonderful actress from the Canadian Opera Company, [Jamie Groote], was great fun and a challenge and scary because I want to be good enough that I sound passable. I’m singing with a professional opera singer!” PIcardo said. “One of the leading voices in opera right now, Arturo Chacón Cruz, this is a good friend of mine. I have to be decent for these people to sit and watch the show. So I worked my butt off. That’s the answer.”

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.

The Pitt Season 2 Episode 2 Review: Again and Again and Again

This review contains spoilers for The Pitt season 2 episode 2.

The Pitt‘s greatest strengths carry the potential to become its biggest weaknesses one day. The show’s real-time format, spartan sound design, and jargon-heavy dialog have made it one of the most accurate and exciting medical dramas of all time. That dedication to realism, however, comes with some limitations.

There is almost certainly never going to be a Very Special Episode of The Pitt. Unless showrunner R. Scott Gemmill and company well and truly run out of gas by the time season 27 rolls around, we will never see a flashback to Dr. Robby’s pre-Covid days or the characters suddenly breaking into song and dance in a musical installment. The format is the format. But that doesn’t mean the show doesn’t have a trick or two up its white lab coat sleeve. Season 2 episode 2 “8:00 A.M.” reveals how The Pitt can get creative in establishing a theme within an episode despite its inflexible structure.

It turns out that the “Why did Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) freeze while looking at the baby?” cliffhanger wasn’t entirely what it seemed. While many naturally assumed the new attending spotted something troubling about the infant on the vital monitors, in reality she was retreating internally to consider something we are not privy to yet. In fact, Al-Hashimi’s thousand-yard stare acts as a sleight of hand for the real cliffhanger of episode 1: the introduction of elderly woman Evelyn Bostick (Jayne Taini) from a nearby retirement home. Though the confused and disoriented Evelyn arrives in the back of an ambulance, she is not a patient, at least not yet. Instead she’s there to meet her husband, 79-year-old Ethan Bostick.

Unbeknownst to her, however, Ethan died minutes earlier in the season 2 premiere and not for lack of the hospital staff’s trying. Having entered the hospital unconscious and with a POLT (Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment), Ethan is allowed to peacefully drift away into death in accordance with his written wishes. Whitaker (Gerran Howell), bless him, uses Mr. Bostick’s passing as a lesson on the fragility of life and the limitations of healthcare to his interns, Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) and Kwon (Irene Choi).

It’s a touching moment for both the healthcare providers and the audience as Whitaker asserts himself as Dr. Robby’s (Noah Wyle) most attentive and empathetic acolyte. But that’s all it is: a moment. Because the thing about moments is that there’s always another moment after them and then infinite more moments after those until the world ends… or at least until one’s brain loses the capacity to recognize fresh moments. Unfortunately, that’s the reality facing Mrs. Evelyn Bostick.

When Whitaker gently informs Evelyn that her husband has died, she responds with all the ache, revulsion, and denial that one would expect. “He died? Ethan? No. No. Are you sure? No, no, no, no, no. Ethan isn’t sick!” Whitaker leaves her to mourn privately but later returns upon her request only to discover that Mrs. Bostick doesn’t recall their conversation from roughly 15 minutes prior. Upon even hearing the name “Ethan,” Evelyn lights up with a girlish excitement and eagerly asks to see her lifelong love, only for Whitaker to have to deliver the grim news a second time. The poor woman’s subsequent reaction is so similar to her first that it very well could have been re-used from the first scene and no one would be the wiser.

The tragic saga of Evelyn Bostick – which culminates in a third moment featuring her still unable to understand her husband’s death despite being in the presence of his body – is heart shredding stuff. “This has been such a long day,” she sighs less than three hours after sunrise. It’s also fair and unpretentious. There’s no narrative trickery or creative flourish here (beyond a simple “rule of three”) to conjure up pathos. It’s simply another very bad hour in a very long day. And yet, even within The Pitt‘s stylistic limitations, it feels as though the show has constructed a meaningful thematic mood for the whole episode. The mood, of course, being “I can’t believe we have to keep doing this shit over and over again.”

The sterile hallways and restless churn of the Pitt appear to have a time-suspending effect on its occupants. Dr. Robby and friends could go their entire 15-hour shifts encountering the same traumas over and over, and never once knowing the hour unless they have to announce a patient’s time of death. It’s Groundhog Day with stethoscopes, which is fitting given that Pittsburgh counts Punxsutawney Phil as a neighbor.

Season 2 episode 2 is filled with instances of doctors and patients confronting the depressingly familiar for the umpteenth time. “You want to jump on this trauma with me?” Dr. Robby asks Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif). When she asks what the trauma is, he responds hopefully “It’s a surprise!” But it’s not really much of a surprise. It’s a gruesome but treatable open dislocation that Dr. Robby knows a creative way to fix. Dr. Al-Hashimi, new and unfamiliar with the rhythms of the Pitt, suggests they bring in ortho immediately. Robby, McKay, and Dr. King (Taylor Rearden) know better, with Robby saying “We’re gonna get this before ortho even answers the page.” And so they do! It’s Groundhog Day, after all.

Elsewhere in the hospital, regular patient Louie Cloverfield is so familiar with the procedure to drain fluid from his stomach due to his alcohol-related liver disease that he all but walks Ogilvie and Kwon through the motions. “That’s like a gallon and a half…” Kwon remarks in upon learning Louie was drained of six liters during his last visit. “Of high octane premium!” Louie responds. Meanwhile, Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) knows exactly what creepy crawly treats they’ll encounter under Mr. Digby’s moldering cast, even if it takes young nurse Emma (Laëtitia Hollard) by surprise.

Of course, The Pitt isn’t really a Groundhog Day-like purgatory, fun as it would be to see Robby begin each hour with a Sonny & Cher song. But that doesn’t mean that novel events are any more comfortable than the familiar ones. Al-Hashimi introduces the next step of her modern healthcare vision: an AI notes transcribing app that goes over with Robby about as well as an arm cast full of maggots. By the time Robby decides to push only ketamine and not rocuronium as well for a choking patient as Al-Hashimi prefers, the pair are officially Butting Heads.

Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) can’t quite figure out how to un-superglue a teenager’s eyelid. Dr. Javadi (Shabana Azeez) has to contend with a syphilitic nun. Mel is thrown to the ground by the patient who was rizzing her up, immediately entering him into the Doug Driscoll Hall of Shame of monsters who have laid hands on our precious Pitt babies. And then there’s the patient who double dosed an ED injection for his wedding anniversary and is now presenting with eight hours of hard time.

“Do you guys do this like every day?” nurse Emma asks Mel and Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) as they begin to drain a seemingly impossible amount of blood out of the man’s engorged member. “Only if we’re lucky,” Santos deadpans.

Due to its FCC-regulated broadcast origins, televised storytelling has long considered depictions of erect penises as taboo even in the streaming world. HBO appears to have found a couple of work arounds recently: one being presenting a hard-on as a medical case on a hospital show, the other being Tim Robinson. Funny and prurient as it may seem, poor Mr. Randall’s turgid condition represents The Pitt‘s commitment to realism. Plus, it allows Santos to work in the most called-for “that’s what she said” since the heyday of Michael Scott.

In sickness and in health, reality is always the real star on The Pitt. Sometimes it gives you the most breathtakingly tragic intersection of love, death, and memory you’ve ever seen. Other times, it gives you a dick joke. It’s all in an hour’s work, with 13 more to go.

New episodes of The Pitt season 2 premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.

The Best Part of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Isn’t the Teen Drama

This article contains spoilers for the two-part premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

If you only saw the promotional materials for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a teen drama, something that would fit on the WB or the CW—not next to Voyager on UPN. Awkward adolescents like Sam and Jay-Den Kraag fumble through social interactions, brooding hot guy Caleb Mir starts a rivalry with haughty hot guy Darem Reymi, try-hard Genesis Lythe insists she’s going to do it her own way. Those characters pay off the threat made by the infamous “kids under a tree” poster, in which the young cast smiled up at the camera from the Academy lawn.

But alongside those juvenile hijinks, something very different is happening on Starfleet Academy. A captain consults her crew for suggestions while dealing with a surprising threat. A teacher emphasizes the importance of procedure. A scientist uses logic and expertise to approach a new discovery. In short, there’s a lot of classic Star Trek stuff happening alongside the bouncing hormones and personal affirmations that were sold in the Starfleet Academy marketing.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the second episode, “Beta Test.” Even though it’s mostly interested in the romance between Caleb and Betazoid Tarima Sadal, the episode is driven by Admiral Vance and Captain Nahla Ake’s negotiations with Betazed’s President Sedal as they try to bring the planet back into the Federation. A onetime ally so important that its loss in the Dominion War signaled a new low, Betazed had left the Federation during the Burn, the (kinda dumb) event from Discovery that destroyed dilithium supplies and drove apart the planets.

As we see in the back and forth between the leaders, Betazed still believes in the basic ideals of the Federation, but doesn’t trust this incarnation to enforce them. This problem can’t be solved with the same action that resolved the show’s premiere “Kids These Days.” Nor does the problem involve a clear good guy and bad guy, someone who needs to learn the error of their ways and join the right thinking people. Instead, writers Noga Landau and Jane Maggs and director Alex Kurtzman give the characters enough time and space to state their grievances and change their perspectives.

These types of intellectual conflicts are the chief appeal of Star Trek, and something that’s been missing from the show in its latest era. In The Original Series, when Kirk wasn’t urging some ideological enemy to consult their better angels, he was debating with Spock and McCoy about trusting his head or his heart. In The Next Generation, episodes such as “The Measure of a Man” and “The First Duty” gave Patrick Stewart an opportunity to deliver monologues with the passion of a great cinematic lawyer, and debates happened regularly in Picard’s ready room.

The idea that reasoned debate could win the day is as crucial to Star Trek as its fantastic settings and cross-universe adventures. While we still want to see space battles and daring escapes, Star Trek’s optimism demands that we don’t respond to difference with fear and violence. Rather, it insists that we can listen to other perspectives and win them over with a rational and empathetic argument. Or, at the very least, we can reach some kind of compromise, if agreement is impossible.

Nu-Trek hasn’t completely abandoned that principle. Season 3 of Discovery in particular built to a conversation between Admiral Vance and Osyraa of the Emerald Chain, as the former tried to seek a compromise with the criminal syndicate, hoping that an alliance would help him rebuild the Federation. But too often, modern Trek has relied on big explosions and big emotions, turning reasonable disagreements into small issues—nothing that can’t be solved with a good cry and a strong hug.

In “Beta Test,” problems don’t get solved with a hug. They get solved by hearing one another out and offering a compromise. Specifically, the Federation offers to build its new headquarters on Betazed, which gives the President an assurance that the new version of the alliance has no intention of abandoning them. It’s a reasonable and professional solution to a legitimate problem.

Of course, all of this happens in the background of the episode. The A-plot is mostly concerned with Caleb wooing Tarima, which leads to a big emotional bit about his mom and his inability to trust people. And, if you want to get grouchy about it, Caleb’s sob story does provide Captain Ake the inspiration she needs to come to the Betazed conclusion.

But that’s to be expected in a show that sells itself with good-looking teens under a tree. The teen drama is inextricably part of Starfleet Academy, but it’s not the only part. There’s plenty of old school Trek in there for us old cranks to enjoy. Hopefully, these kids will learn from it.

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.

Robert Pattinson Has a Secret Marty Supreme Cameo

This article contains slight spoilers for Marty Supreme.

In one of the most unexpected moments of Marty Supreme, Marty’s benefactor Milton Rockwell declares “I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve been around forever.” Most viewers just interpreted the line as metaphorical speech about the nature of the rich sapping strength from laborers like Marty, but it turns out that the film almost took it quite literally. Yet, even if director Josh Safdie decided against a scene in which an ageless Rockwell sunk his teeth into an elderly Marty Mauser, he did include a guy who got famous for playing a vampire.

Speaking with London’s BFI Southbank (via Variety), Safdie revealed that Robert Pattinson can be heard during a table tennis match in England. “No one knows this, but that voice — the commentator, the umpire — is Pattinson,” Safdie said. “It’s like a little easter egg. Nobody knows about that… He came and watched some stuff and I was like, I don’t know any British people. So he’s the umpire.”

Safdie’s claim that he doesn’t know any British people may be hard to believe, but his decision to reach out to Pattinson makes perfect sense. The two worked together on 2017’s Good Time, co-directed by Josh’s brother Benny. In Good Time, Pattinson plays a small-time hoodlum who goes on an increasingly disastrous odyssey through New York City to get his developmentally disabled brother (played by Benny Safdie) out of prison.

As that short synopsis suggests, Good Time has a lot of in common with the Safdies’ most popular films, including their follow-up Uncut Gems, and Benny’s solo directorial outing The Smashing Machine, which released a few months before Marty Supreme. To match the Safdies’ aesthetic, Pattinson bleached his hair and gave himself an intense, unsettling appearance, fitting within the directors’ love of high-tension in New York scuzz.

Pattinson’s physical change set the model for some of the big names who we do see in Marty Supreme. Most people recognize Shark Tank regular Kevin O’Leary as Rockwell and Gwyneth Paltrow as past her prime film star Kay Stone, but its harder to identify magician and personality Penn Jillette as the farmer Hoff, whose missing dog plays a big part in the movie’s second half, or Fran Drescher as Marty’s beleaguered mother. Even Timothée Chalamet downplayed his good looks to make Marty less lovable.

The voice cameo acted as something of a reunion for Pattinson and Chalamet, who worked together in the forgotten Netflix historical drama The King from 2019. But the duo’s most anticipated collaboration won’t come until later this year, when Pattinson comes to Arrakis in Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune 3. Chalamet will reprise his role as Paul Atreides, now older and given to violence as he embraces his role as an Emperor who will lead humanity into the future. We still don’t know for sure who Pattinson will play in Dune 3—the smart money is on the treacherous shape-shifter Scytale, but some of us are hoping he’ll be future worm god Leto II—but whatever he is, it will surely be weird.

Will Pattinson’s Dune part be as strange as a sparkly vampire? Who knows, but its sure to be more offbeat than the secret umpire he plays in Marty Supreme.

Marty Supreme is now playing in theaters across the U.S.

Holly Hunter Explains Chancellor Ake (Including Why She Sits Like That)

The following contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

The premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has to cover a lot of ground, from introducing over a dozen new characters and establishing what everyday post-Burn society looks like, to reminding viewers of why an organization like this should exist in the first place. But let’s be honest, for a not insignificant number of viewers (*cough cough* me *cough*), the real draw here is the presence of Holly Hunter, the Oscar-winning actress who has joined the franchise to play Nahla Ake, one of the most intriguing new characters that Star Trek has introduced in quite some time. 

To what is the likely surprise of no one, Hunter is great, deftly holding a multitude of tensions simultaneously within her performance. Effortlessly shifting between gravitas, an almost painful sincerity, and a certain kind of playful oddness, she serves multiple roles within the world of Starfleet Academy, much like the ship she captains.

“First of all, we have Holly Hunter,” series creator Alex Kurtzman told Den of Geek when asked about finding a balance between the many tensions at the heart of this character. “And when you have someone like Holly Hunter, you can take extraordinary risks that you might not be able to take with an actor who couldn’t pull that off.” 

Ake quite literally contains multitudes. She’s both an educator and a leader, a captain and a chancellor, and someone who remembers the heyday of the Federation and experienced life after The Burn that changed the galaxy forever. She’s both a touchstone of the past and a guide into the future, and it’s a dichotomy that no other character on the series’ canvas can match. 

“The character is over 415 years old, so she’s lived an enormous amount of life. That affords her a unique perspective on everything,” Kurtzman said. “And because she was a mother and she lost a child, it gives her a unique perspective on what it means to raise the kids of Starfleet Academy, which also qualifies her to be a great chancellor. So, she’s a captain who is happy to walk around the bridge without shoes on, but the minute the chips are down, and something really goes wrong, she takes that chair with real authority.” 

For Kurtzman, however, it’s her quirky irreverence and genuine emotion that make Ake both interesting in her own right and an effective teacher to the kids in her charge.

“As the chancellor of the school, I think [Ake] represents the things that were always my favorite things about the best teachers I had, which were that they were quirky and they thought differently,” Kurtzman said. “They didn’t think like everybody else did. And they would challenge you with interesting questions, and they would give you the tools to answer them yourself, but they would never give you the answer. So her irreverence, I think, was maybe born of that experience. But she’s a very emotional creature. And I think because Holly always grounds her performance in something emotionally real, it gives you freedom to do anything. You can go very broad when you have an actor who’s that anchored.” 

Ake is largely unlike any other character we’ve met in this franchise before, save, perhaps, for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Pellia, a fellow Lanthanite and general weirdo. Surprisingly relaxed and low-key, Ake’s age is perhaps best reflected in the very particular ways she interacts with the world around her. Specifically, the fact that the Academy’s new chancellor seems positively allergic to sitting on chairs correctly, instead choosing to sprawl, lounge, and/or drape herself across virtually any surface she encounters. But, according to the woman who plays her, those choices are very intentional ones.

“Initially, it did come from the image of water, that I wanted her to be a kind of fluid character. I wanted to have a kind of feline thing in the physical world because I’m 420 years old, and what does that mean?” Holly Hunter said when asked about her character’s very specific way of moving about the world. “How could that manifest in a different way that would not just be flouting protocol because oh, I’m a rebel? It’s not as simple as that. It’s more selfish. It’s more interior, but the interior has been made totally not precious. It’s just part of her now. The barefoot thing was something that Alex had put in the script that I just loved, and it kind of snowballed from there. When I got on set, I saw how adventurous the furniture could be for me.”

It turns out that Paul Giamatti, who plays the space pirate Nus Braka, is a big fan of his co-star’s “adventurous” sitting choices and what they reveal about the world their characters inhabit.

“It reminds you that these are real places that you live in, you know what I mean? It does something great,” he said. “The first time I saw her do it, I thought ‘That’s brilliant. That’s so great that the captain is sitting like that in the chair.’ Because then it made it a real place, too. Not only for [her] character, but it suddenly made the whole thing [feel] like, right, these people actually inhabit this place. It’s not some stage or set they walk on to. It’s an actual place they live in, which is cool.” 

While Starfleet Academy is technically the story of the kids who form the first cadet class at the institution in a century, the show also firmly establishes Ake and Braka as fierce adversaries, whose past interactions have not only shaped and molded the people they’ve become but also help reflect some of their own inner insecurities. And for the actors who play them, their face-offs are also just fun.

“When you face off with an adversary, it’s fun to come at it with real appetite rather than holding yourself back from the engagement,” Hunter said. “I really felt this was saying yes, just saying yes to an opponent.”

“And he’s a worthy opponent,” Giamatti chimed in. “It’s fun to go at it, it’s pleasurable [for them both].  

However, when it comes to Braka, his feelings about Ake are much more complicated than they may initially appear.

“What’s very true for my character in the myriad ways that I look at her…is that I look at her and I see and feel all kinds of things: Envy, jealousy, a need for a kind of confidant or a mother or a friend or a teacher,” Giamatti said. “I think [Braka] resents being shut out. You’ll find out at the end of the whole series why he’s so pissed off about everything. And I think he feels very disenfranchised, that there’s an actual real desire for recognition from her underneath all of it. He wishes that he could have a mentor and a mother and a sister and a friend who would guide him the way she’s guiding all these other kids. And he’s a kid, but he’s not getting the attention anymore.” 

The antagonistic relationship between the two also reflects some of the deeper ideological issues at work in the world of the Federation post-Burn. (And perhaps even in the one we’re living in today.)

“I think Nus Braka comes from a place of anger,” co-showrunner Noga Landau said. “He represents a force that is active in the world right now, which is the force that is trying to divide people. And it’s trying to tell people, ‘You can’t trust each other because you’re this and you’re that, and there’s no common ground.’ Nahla represents a very different approach. She represents exploration and reason and science and the things that bring us together, the common ground. There is not a student that Nahla would turn away from Starfleet Academy simply because of who they are or where they come from. She’s a person who brings people together. She represents the best ideals of the Federation in that sense.” 

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.

Star Trek: Voyager’s Doctor is Already Starfleet Academy’s Best Character

This article contains spoilers for the two-part premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

Like all new Star Trek shows, Starfleet Academy adds a host of characters to the franchise. There are the cadets like outsider Caleb Mir and giddy Kasqian Sam, alongside the half-Lanthanite captain Nahla Ake and her half-Klingon/half-Jem’Hadar first mate Lura Thok.

But, two episodes in, the best character in Starfleet Academy is one that we’ve known for a long time. Robert Picardo is back as the Emergency Medical Hologram Mark I, or as he prefers, Doctor, and he’s already established himself as the best part of the show.

Don’t believe me? Take a look his role in the show’s second episode, “The Beta Test.” While Nahla Ake and Admiral Vance (a returning face from Discovery) try to negotiate Betazed’s return to the Federation, the Doctor and a fellow Starfleet officer perform “Pa, Pa, Pa” from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Of course, the scene is helped along by the fact that the Doctor’s duet partner is a) a member of a species we haven’t seen since the best Kelvin movie Star Trek Beyond and b) performed by actual opera singer Jamie Groote. But to see the Doctor actually become the beloved performer he always wanted to be, and to see Picardo play him with such gusto, we can’t help but be charmed.

The Doctor has always been one of the best characters in Star Trek. Even in those first very rocky seasons of Star Trek: Voyager, he stood out for a variety of reasons. First, he filled the requisite part of an almost-human person who tries to learn about humanity, but his status as a hologram let him explore the question in a manner different from Spock, Data, or Odo. Second, he got to play a cantankerous physician similar to McCoy, but with more highfaluting airs. Finally, he was played by Robert Picardo, a veteran actor who deftly navigated some of the Doctor’s more prickly and perhaps off-putting qualities, earning the audience’s trust and sympathies. So great was the Doctor that he continued to get attention after Seven of Nine joined the cast and she and Janeway became the main characters.

As has been directly stated in Starfleet Academy, much centuries have passed since the end of Voyager and the start of this new series, and the Doctor spent some time working with a different set of kids, the crew of the USS Protostar on Prodigy. The way that he freezes when he hears the name “Captain Gwyndala” tells us that something has happened to change the way he thinks about himself and his relationship to Starfleet.

In fact, his pause at Gwyn’s name is only matched by the way that the Doctor smiles when he learns about Sam, the first hologram or photonic to attend Starfleet Academy. For just a second, the Doctor’s usually grumpiness drops and he expresses genuine warmth and perhaps pride—and with good reason. Many Doctor stories in Voyager dealt with his slow development from either a function of the ship or a tool created by Dr. Lewis Zimmerman to a fully-developed person with his own sentience and who fought for the dignity of other holographs. Sam’s presence shows that he succeeded.

These two moments prove that this is the same Doctor who we met on Voyager, except older and more experienced. He’s grown beyond the sometimes annoying and grumpy person he used to be without sacrificing his love of the stage and his impatience with corporeal forms that don’t take care of themselves.

All of which is apparent in the opera scene from “Beta Test.” In Voyager, the Doctor’s singing impressed no one except the Qomar from the episode “Virtuoso,” and even then, their interest wasn’t about his talent. Worse, his insecurities drove him to make everything about his singing, even if Janeway and crew had more pressing matters.

But when the Doctor sings in “Beta Test,” he has a beautiful voice. He doesn’t demand that the cadets drop their romantic pursuits to watch him, nor does he interrupt the negotiations with the Betazoids to fish for a compliment. He just sings because he loves singing. He’s become a person confident himself.

This development and confidence makes the Doctor the ideal legacy character for Starfleet Academy. As we get to know the cadets, they’ll get to know themselves, learning about their foibles and trying to come to terms with their strengths and shortcomings. They have an outstanding model in the Doctor and, if they can follow his lead, maybe Caleb Mir and Kasqian Sam will someday be fan favorites as well.

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy release every Thursday on Paramount+.

Maggie Gyllenhaal Is Determined to Give the Bride of Frankenstein Her Voice

Maggie Gyllenhaal did not set out to make a typical monster movie when the Bride of Frankenstein entered her life. This might seem obvious to those who watched this morning’s fabulous new trailer for a genre mashup fantasia pulled together from various sources of style, influence, and aesthetic. (A bit like the good, undead woman herself, then.) When she’s even called “the Bride of Frankenstein” at one point in the sizzle reel, the resurrected revolutionary with the white-streaked hair simply corrects, “No. Just the Bride.”

This brazen iconoclasm matches Gyllenhaal’s own draw toward the character, which began while she was still doing press for her first film as a director, the Oscar-nominated The Lost Daughter.

“I was at a party and I saw a man with a tattoo on his whole forearm of the Bride of Frankenstein, and I was like ‘huh,’” Gyllenhaal recalls at a Q&A event that Den of Geek participated in. The iconography of the inked image was based on Elsa Lanchester’s memorable look, courtesy of Jack Pierce’s makeup design from The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and is recognizable to almost anyone in the world, whether they’ve seen the nearly 100-year-old movie or not. This included Gyllenhaal at the time, who despite having several IP projects being offered to her, couldn’t shake the Lanchester visage.

“I was like, ‘Have I ever seen that movie?’” Gyllenhaal says. “I know the image, I know the character.’” So when she returned to her hotel room, she immediately pulled up the James Whale classic that night and was struck by an irony that monsters fans have known for generations. 

“Something about her is just formidable,” Gyllenhaal says of the original Bride. “[But when] I watched the movie, which I hadn’t seen, I realized she doesn’t speak. What I thought was really interesting is that this movie called The Bride of Frankenstein is not in any way about the Bride of Frankenstein. And yet, Elsa Lanchester makes this impact, even though she’s in the movie for three minutes and doesn’t speak. Why? Well, because she’s kind of a badass and… she wakes up and says ‘no!’ That’s basically what she does, and that’s unusual.”

For her next movie, Gyllenhaal realized that she could give the revived woman a voice beyond that pained “no.” It would also be a chance to extend a legend that began more than 200 years ago in Mary Shelley’s original book where the literary Frankenstein’s Monster asks his creator to make for him a mate. 

“[It’s] part of the book, part of the mythology, [and] is really understandable,” Gyllenhaal continues, “but at the same time, what about the mate? He’s asking for someone to be brought back from the dead to be his girlfriend, but what about her? And that’s what I think this movie gets into. She comes back and she has her own needs, her own agenda, her own wants, and her own terrors.”

In the new film, which Gyllenhaal wrote as well as directed, current Hamnet star Jessie Buckley plays several roles, including that of a street-wise woman living in 1930s Chicago. But after she is murdered, her body ends up in a classic Frankenstein situation, albeit with a twist. The famed monster of the story, played by Christian Bale and now simply going by “Frank,” has found a new scientist to carry on the mad-ish works of his creator from a hundred years back. But Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) doesn’t just make a mate for Frank, but a new woman and life out of old parts.

Thus enters Buckley’s Bride, who is every bit as extravagantly designed by makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey as the original creature. Embodying the New Woman ethos of Frankenstein’s 19th century roots, Buckley’s Bride enters an early 20th century part Bonnie Parker and part Lady Gaga, ready to remake Chi-Town and beyond in her own image, which includes an elaborate hair design all her own and new flourishes like black-streaked skin around her lips that faintly resemble smeared makeup. According to Gyllenhaal this touch came from Gyllenhaal and Stacey wanting to suggest a mysterious inky substance in Dr. Euphronious’ lab being able to literally stain the Bride’s skin after it’s injected straight into her veins.

“It has to be driven by story, all of it, but I want it to look great,” Gyllenhaal says of her title character’s appearance. “I love the Bride’s look. I love her hair, I love that splat, I love the black lips, I love the makeup, I love the dyed eyebrows, the white eyelashes, which of course the implication is that all of her hair is bleached out white due to this electricity.”

To adorn that countenance, though, Gyllenhaal turned to a performer she felt an intimate kinship with.

“I had worked with Jessie in The Lost Daughter,” Gyllenhaal explains. “She is really brilliant in that movie and I loved her, and I think we both knew when we worked together that we were really kindred spirits. One of my favorite things about being a director is figuring out what language you have to speak to each actor in, and yet with Jessie, I just talked to her how I talked to myself. It is completely pure.”

Initially the filmmaker second-guessed the desire to write the role for Buckley simply because it might “limit what it could be,” but by the time the first draft was done, it was obvious what Gyllenhaal wanted: “Okay, it’s only Jessie.”

The Bride! as a whole, though, marks a grand opportunity for Gyllenhaal to reunite with plenty of familiar friends, collaborators, and even family, not least of which includes Christian Bale whom Gyllenhaal first worked with in The Dark Knight.

“Listen, I just dreamed big,” she chuckles. “I’m just going to ask whoever I want. What’s the worst thing that can happen? They tell you no? Can I tolerate being told no?” And with regard to Bale, she notes, “There are a lot of good actors and a tiny handful of brilliant ones… and part of the skill of being a brilliant actor is being able to walk up to someone and hand them your heart.”

That is core to Bale’s character, whom Gyllenhaal refers to strictly as Frankenstein or Frank, as opposed to creature and/or monster. 

“I pulled from the book in some ways,” she points out. “Frank in the book is so feeling, so vulnerable, so full of need and hunger, and he’s also so smart. In the book, Frankenstein just hangs out in the barn and learns French. That’s hard to do! So I needed someone with all of those characteristics and also tough, because he does some fucked up stuff, this monster. As monsters do, and, I would say, we all do. So I needed someone who could hold all that.”

One bit of casting that might particularly intrigue fans going in is Maggie’s brother Jake Gyllenhaal being tapped to play the director describes to be a matinee idol, a guy who exists only in frivolous 1930s fantasies.

“With my brother, I will say that he is one of the very last people I asked,” Maggie notes. “I asked him at the last minute because I wanted to make sure it was the right thing for our relationship, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I came to ‘no, it absolutely was.’ I haven’t worked with him since Donnie Darko, and I was [22], but it was such a pleasure working with my brother. I found myself laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my face, I loved it. It’s true for all my actors but, of course, there’s a special something with my brother.”

Gyllenhaal’s inclusion as that toe-tapping star is also the key reason The Bride! is set in the 1930s. Because as Gyllenhaal reveals, when she first conceptualized the story, she imagined setting it around the late 1860s, a point in the distant past but also fairly removed from both the movie she made and the original novel’s late 18th-century setting.

“In the 1860s, ‘70s, there was a big thing about people speaking to the dead,” she points out. “There had been the Civil War, lots of women were losing their children in childbirth, so there was a job as common as being a therapist [where mostly] women would speak to the dead for you. And I thought in a movie about people who came back from the dead, maybe that’s an interesting time to set it.”

However, there was an image she had in her head: it featured Frank sitting alone in the dark looking up at a screen and wishing someone was by his side.

“Frankenstein is so lonely… he doesn’t have anybody to talk to, and his primary relationship before we meet him is with a movie star, because a movie star is someone you can imagine you have a relationship with, and they don’t know you at all,” says Gyllenhaal. “Also Frankenstein, whose face is so scary and people run screaming when they see him, he’s safe in the dark. So once I realized I want him to have a relationship with a movie star, I said, ‘Okay, it’s got to be set when there are movies.’”

Which led her to the 1930s, an era where the stars of cinema were defined by feel-good fantasies, musicals, and escapism. And escape is exactly what Frank seeks when he asks for a mate. Yet come March, that mate might prove to have her own ideas about what to make of this world when she breaks from her own 1930s history some 91 years after Lanchester’s eyes first opened in a lab.

The Bride! opens Friday, March 6.

Starfleet Academy Proves Star Trek Still Doesn’t Have the Knack for Swearing

This article contains spoilers for the two-part Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere.

After a particularly tense stand off between cetologist Gillian Taylor and Spock, Kirk offers some friendly correction. “About those colorful metaphors we’ve discussed,” Kirk says, using their term for profanity, “I don’t think you should try using them anymore… for one thing, you haven’t quite got the knack of it.”

It’s hard not to think of that scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home while watching the climax of the premiere episode of the latest Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy. When haughty rich kid Darem Reymi takes on the impossible task of surviving the vacuum of space without a suit, his classmates ask how he’ll pull it off. Reymi answers, “I’m Khionian, bitch.”

The line may have been intended to pump up his peers and get a teen audience excited, and maybe it did. But the line delivery proved that Star Trek still doesn’t have the knack for swearing.

To Bluely Go

“Khionian, bitch,” gets repeated once more in the episode, and it’s not the only instance of profanity in the Starfleet Academy premiere. Holly Hunter’s Captain Nahla Ake and Paul Giamatti’s pirate Nus Braka trade curses at one another with as much gusto as the kids. Which makes a certain amount of sense—Starfleet Academy is a teen drama with a Star Trek backdrop, which requires the show to make certain concessions to the genre.

But Starfleet Academy is hardly alone in embracing what Kirk and Spock called “colorful metaphors.” In fact, it happens fairly often in new Star Trek shows. Admiral Clancy of Picard rebukes the titular captain for his “sheer fucking hubris,” a f-bomb drop proceeded by Tilly and Stamets’ foul-mouthed praise of Starfleet in episode five of Discovery‘s first season. And we can’t even begin to count the times Mariner and her fellow members of the Cerritos delivered bleeped out cuss words in Lower Decks.

Pedants will point out that the entire colorful metaphor conversation in The Voyage Home came up because Spock was shocked to hear Kirk curse so much. Spock’s confusion, Kirk’s explanation that it’s just how people talk in 1984 San Fransisco, and especially Kirk’s awkward usage (“double dumbass on you!”) suggests that when humanity grew out of its infancy, it did away with naughty words at the same time it abandoned racism, sexism, and capitalism.

But even bigger pedants know that swearing has always been part of Star Trek, even on the Original Series, in the final line of “City on the Edge of Forever” (“Let’s get the hell out of here”). And that doesn’t include curses in other languages, such as Picard saying “merde” in the Next Generation episode “The Last Outpost.” It’s not that people stopped cursing before the 24th century. It’s that they used it differently.

Too Familiar Language

Too often, nu-Trek employs cursing as a type of slang, a way to appeal to a modern audience instead of presenting a reality centuries in the future. The phrasing in Starfleet Academy is particularly egregious, as it sounds like something the Juggernaut said in the 2000s, not something a cool kid would say eleven hundred years from now. But the same is true of those early f-bombs. Admiral Clancy uses it to take Picard down a couple of notches, to show that he’s not some beloved, wizened figure, but someone worthy of mockery. Tilly and Stamets swore in order to praise Starfleet, but they did so in the most juvenile way, prescribing awe instead of building it in the viewer.

Taken by itself, these missteps are forgivable. Star Trek has always tried to be of its time (see: TOS miniskirts, TNG’s beige, “Faith of the Heart” in Enterprise) and it hasn’t always worked. We can forgive the pandering if it becomes part of the mythos (miniskirts, beige) or if the cheese finally wins us over (“Faith of the Heart”). But the swearing in nu-Trek is so faux-edgy, so desperate to be taken serious and cool, that we can’t imagine getting used to it.

Of the newest batch of Star Trek shows, Lower Decks is the only one to pull off the swearing. It works there because it fits within the show’s genre. Lower Decks is an adult animation show that functions as much as a parody of Star Trek as it does a series about adventures within the universe. Mariner and Boimler are in Starfleet, yes, but they’re also Star Trek superfans who know as much about the franchise as audience members. For that reason, we allow them to sometimes act like Rick and Morty or Cartman, and to act a little like us viewers than like Kirk and Picard. The cursing belongs there.

Genre Appropriate Cursing

Which is actually good news for Starfleet Academy. The series gets a lot of the Star Trek parts right, including the emphasis on professionals being competent and seeking to understand different cultures. It’s just the Star Trek stuff happens alongside romantic subplots and stories about adolescent insecurities—the sort of things you’d expect from a teen drama.

“I’m Khionian, bitch” will always be a clanger because it sounds like a 50-year-old writing for an 18-year-old. But if Starfleet Academy can keep the cursing within the teen drama realm of the show, and if it can make it sound true to adolescent characters, then Star Trek may yet develop the knack for swearing.

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy stream every Thursday on Paramount+.

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials Review: Chris Chibnall Brings Contemporary Depth

This Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials review contains no spoilers.

When you hear the name Agatha Christie, your mind tends to go in one of two directions: Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple. The author’s most famous fictional sleuths, these two characters solve murders in a combined 45 novels and over 70 short stories, have inspired long-running, culturally beloved television programs, and crossed over into the cultural zeitgeist in ways that few detectives who aren’t named Sherlock Holmes can match.

But the author technically created somewhere around a dozen investigative figures across her vast collection of work, and one of the best of them — Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent — rarely gets the recognition she deserves. Here’s hoping that’s about to change with the arrival of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, a glitzy three-part Netflix adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery that’s clearly hoping to introduce the Queen of Crime to an entirely new generation of viewers. 

No one who’s read Seven Dials — or really any of Christie’s Superintendent Battle books, of which this is one — is likely to expect an on-the-nose retelling of the original text. (Battle mysteries are most often adapted to excise the detective from his own stories entirely, if that’s any hint at how generally unremarkable the character is.) And while series creator Chris Chibnall — of Broadchurch and Doctor Who fame! –- does make some fairly significant changes to the source material, they’re almost always in the service of adding more emotional depth and context to a story that often lacks either. (We can forgive him, Christie purists, is what I’m saying.) Featuring a spunky young heroine, a stellar supporting cast, and a story that’s grounded in both genuine emotion and surprisingly contemporary politics, Seven Dials is not just peak cozy winter entertainment; it’s a hopeful sign that Netflix might actually manage to launch a successful British mystery franchise of its very own. 

Though The Seven Dials Mystery is technically the second of Christie’s books to feature Lady Eileen (Mia McKenna-Bruce), the series has, for all intents and purposes, decided to reimagine the whole affair as an origin story. It’s a smart choice, given that its predecessor, The Secret of Chimneys, is a lot more politically minded and less character-focused. Events begin at the Caterham family’s stately country pile, where a party is in full swing.

Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter), poorer than she likes to let on, has rented out the estate to a self-made industrial magnate (Mark Lewis Jones) seeking to improve his social status, and the event is full of members of the aristocracy and the U.K. government. But things go horribly wrong after a group of Foreign Office employees decides to play a prank on a coworker, setting eight alarm clocks in his room all set to go off at once. This is because their colleague, Gerry Ward (Corey Mylchreest), is infamous for sleeping late, and this is apparently what passes for a good time amongst the well-off young men of post-war Britain. The joke’s on all of them, though, when Ward turns up dead the next day. 

Furious at not being taken seriously when she questions the circumstances of Gerry’s death, Bundle vows to get to the truth. She and Gerry were quite close: he served alongside her late brother in France, was a friend to both her and Lady Caterham following his death, and seemed to be on the verge of proposing. Seven Dials smartly spends a bit of time at the beginning of the series deepening and fleshing out this relationship in a way that the novel does not, giving the duo a bittersweet, doomed lovers vibe that goes a long way toward establishing why Bundle simply can’t let go of this particular mystery. (McKenna-Bruce and Mylchreest have outstanding chemistry; someone needs to cast them together in a rom-com yesterday.) 

As the coincidences and general oddities around Gerry’s death begin to stack up — the seven clocks left on a mantlepiece in his room, an unfinished letter, a seedy nightclub, friends who definitely know more than they’re telling, and another dead body — Bundle eventually finds herself in the orbit of Superintendent Battle (Martin Freeman), who seems to share many of her misgivings about the case. A dogged if generally unremarkable investigator, Battle immediately warns the young woman off the investigation, but seems largely unsurprised when she doesn’t listen. The two make an appealingly oddball detective duo, and both are eventually drawn to the notorious London neighborhood of the series’ title, where they may or may not find answers. 

Seven Dials’s central mystery is, admittedly, not one of Christie’s best, involving everything from a country house murder to elaborate international espionage and a secret cabal of weirdos who (at least in this adaptation) meet wearing face masks shaped like clocks. To Chibnall’s credit, there are more breadcrumbs offered here than in the original text about whodunnit — it’s decent odds you’ll figure out the culprit well before the series tells you — and the entire story is a much more streamlined and easy to follow affair.

It’s also a surprisingly contemporary adaptation, reframed in a way that speaks to all-too-timely issues of empire, expansion, and the long-tail impact of trauma, even blatantly paying homage to Christie herself by setting its climactic final confrontation in the aisles of a moving train. These are all characters who have been irreparably shaped by the events of war and conquest, from displaced Cameroonian scientist Dr Cyril Matip (Nyasha Hatendi) to Gerry’s co-workers from the Foreign Office, who all clearly still live with the ghosts of what happened to them abroad.

But what makes this series worth watching is its star. McKenna-Bruce is luminous throughout, a feisty, thoroughly likable presence with clever one-liners and an admirably determined spirit. It’s difficult not to wonder why Christie only wrote two novels that feature this particular Bright Young Thing, if only because it’s so easy to imagine her starring in all sorts of adventures in her own right. (I suspect Netflix would like to let her do that, for what it’s worth.) Freeman plays Battle as a capable straight man to Lady Eileen’s fizzy effervesence, even if it is more than a bit strange to see him in a lead detective role after so many years watching him play the sidekick in the BBC’s contemporary take on Sherlock. Elsewhere, Bonham-Carter is doing a peak Grey Gardens impersonation as a gender-swapped Lady (formerly Lord) Caterham, and the suddenly everywhere It Guy Edward Bluemel is almost irritatingly charming as playboy Jimmy Thesiger. 

It’s true, Netflix’s Seven Dials is not the most technically accurate translation of Christie’s work to the screen. But it gets the spirit of the affair, exactly right, and that’s surely got to count for something.

All three episodes of Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials are available to stream on Netflix now. 

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Premiere Review – A New Era Begins

This article contains spoilers for the two-part series premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

A new era of Star Trek is upon us. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has officially wrapped filming on its fifth and final season, and although we won’t even see its fourth until later this year, there’s already a distinct sense that this moment marks a sort of passing of the proverbial torch.

Strange New Worlds has been the most critically and culturally successful installment of Paramount+’s larger Trek streaming universe. As it begins to wind down its five-year mission, it’s up to Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, the newest member of the franchise and only series currently guaranteed new episodes for the foreseeable future, to step into its shoes. Whether it will be able to do so successfully remains an open question, and one that’s not immediately answered by its series premiere, a pair of episodes that are full of equal parts genuine potential and deep frustration. 

In many ways, Starfleet Academy’s first episodes suffer from having to serve too many masters. The series must introduce something like a dozen main characters, sketch out the basic structure for the titular organization and the reasons behind its reopening, catch everybody up who doesn’t remember what The Burn is or why it matters, name-check a bunch of franchise history, and set up some initial stakes for several of its primary leads. And in all honesty, it really does succeed on multiple levels.

The show certainly looks great. The teaching vessel U.S.S. Athena is both creatively built and visually stunning, even if its interior atrium does evoke the worst sort of ’90s shopping mall excess. The series’ core group of students is comprised of an intriguingly eclectic mix of species and personal histories. And it’s certainly hard to dislike anything led by heavy hitters like Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti, who are both the sort of actors who automatically lend heft and gravitas to any scene they happen to be in. But it’s also clear that Starfleet Academy hasn’t quite yet figured out what kind of show it wants to be, and has more than a few kinks to work out as its first season progresses.

If you were also hoping that Starfleet Academy might focus more broadly on its titular institution as an organization or perhaps tell an ensemble-focused tale about what it means to be a young person deciding to make boldly go where no one has gone before into a career path, you’re probably going to be disappointed in these initial episodes. “Kids These Days” and “Beta Test” largely follow the story of a cadet named Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), whose traumatic upbringing, extensive mommy issues, and complicated history with Commander Nahla Ake (Hunter) drive much of the premiere’s initial plot.

We first meet Caleb as a young boy whose life is thrown into chaos when his mother is sentenced to prison for helping pirate Nus Braka (Giamatti) steal food to feed her starving family. It’s Ake who sentences her, an event that ultimately leads to her own resignation from Starfleet. When Ake finally finds Caleb again, 15 years later, she essentially bribes him into attending the newly-reconstituted Starfleet Academy as a kind of cosmic payback for her previous sins— she’s been tapped as chancellor and presumably can help him find out what’s become of his mom. 

This is a whole lot of sturm und drang for the first 15 minutes of any pilot, let alone one in which the supposedly rakish lead turns out to be kind of a huge jerk. Caleb is cocky and rude and angry from his first moments onscreen, and while it’s evident that life has not been kind to him since his mother’s arrest, he’s also not exactly what you might call a particularly sympathetic protagonist. Yet, for better or worse, he is also the lens through which we are apparently going to experience the bulk of this story, which means almost every subsequent character we meet is filtered through his perceptions of and reactions to them. 

In these first two episodes, the rest of the students are essentially ciphers who — with the possible exception of Sam (Kerrice Brooks), whose sole personality trait at this moment is simply being a hologram — are largely defined by their relationship to him. Jay-Den Kraag (Karim Diané) is a Klingon who longs to become a healer and Caleb’s first accidental friend. Darem Reymi (George Hawkins), a Khonian, is his biggest rival and unwilling roommate. Both the Dar-Sha Genesis Lythe (Bella Shepard) and Betazoid Tarima Sadal (Zoë Steiner) have influential fathers and carry big familial and cultural expectations on their backs, but are thus far most notable for attracting Caleb’s potential romantic interest. And, of course, there’s Ake, who’s stuck constantly making excuses and bending rules for this boy, seemingly unable to let go of her guilt over her involvement in his separation from his mother and still heartbroken over her own son’s death during The Burn.

It’s hard not to wonder what a more immediately accessible version of this show might have looked like, one with about 60 percent less Caleb and a greater focus on why it matters that these kids have chosen to set themselves on this path in the first place. Starfleet Academy’s first two episodes occasionally manage this — see Ake’s stirring speech about what it means to be relaunching this particular institution at this precise moment in Federation history, Sam’s hilariously effusive reaction to meeting the infamous Doctor (Robert Picardo) from Star Trek: Voyager, or the young Betazoid activists who want to reopen their now-insular world to the larger galaxy. But it’s often derailed by the show’s need to place Caleb at the center of anything that’s happening, in ways that are not always to its benefit. 

However, its larger cast is excellent across the board, which is reason enough to be hopeful for the series’s future. Hunter’s prickly yet strangely ebullient academy chancellor is fascinating, from her clear disregard for things like rules and precedent to the fact that her part-Lanthanite heritage makes her one of the few characters (who didn’t travel to this era on the U.S.S. Discovery) who remembers both life before The Burn and the Federation in its heyday. Giamatti’s clearly having a ball playing Braka as though he’s a Shakespeare villain, and he and Hunter have some very intense Sherlock-and-Moriarty-style eternal enemies chemistry that hints that the pilot isn’t the first time they’ve met since he was sentenced. And the young actors who form the primary group of Academy cadets are incredibly charming, playing characters who certainly have lots of potential, if only they could get a little more focus.

The most exciting part of either episode comes during an unexpected attack on the Athena by Braka and his squad of nameless pirate hooligans, when the barely-admitted students must work together to save the day in ridiculously over-the-top ways, from performing lifesaving surgery on their own to taking unsupervised space walks and hacking alien programmable matter. Should they all be capable of doing these things? Probably not. Is it still super satisfying to watch them join forces in this way? Absolutely. That’s what a lot of us (read: me) probably want to see from a show like this — cadets of different species, backgrounds, and lived experiences, finding that there’s more that unites them than divides them. That’s what Star Trek is all about — or should be, anyway. 

Whether Starfleet Academy will find a way to tell more of those kinds of stories is a question that only the rest of its first season can answer. So we’ll have to wait and see. 

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.

The Perfect Parfait Blends Whipped Cream, Granola, and Comedy

This article is presented in partnership with The Perfect Parfait and appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.

When I arrived to interview host Hunter Cope about his comedy series The Perfect Parfait, I expected a few things: a peek into his disarmingly playful interview style, an explanation for why he built an entire show around a breakfast food people mostly eat at the airport, and a sense of how his “deliciously layered interview show” has already drawn A-list guests like Dave Franco, Nicholas Braun, Tim Heidecker, Armchair Expert’s Monica Padman, and Emmy and Golden Globe winner Paul Walter Hauser.

What I didn’t expect was to make love that day… to myself.

At the center of The Perfect Parfait is Hunter Cope, a writer and performer who’s been hashing it out in Hollywood for 15 years. He’s wearing a burnt-orange suit over a rumpled Hawaiian shirt, exuding the confidence of a man building one of the strangest shows on the internet — one where he serves celebrity guests parfaits inspired by their personas and asks them questions like “What’s your stance on analingus?” and “Do you ever feel guilty for having so much when so many have so little?” 

Across from him sits… me. Also Hunter Cope.

But this Hunter is different. Crisp white button-down. Reporter’s notebook. A serious fucking journalist here to write a serious fucking profile. As we stare at each other, it’s clear there’s something between us: admiration? tension? rivalry? No. Something more primal. The only word for it is “a gooey-ness.” A gooey-ness reminiscent of men’s cum. (Sorry. There was literally no other metaphor available.) Welcome to the only Hollywood profile bold enough to ask: What happens when you look in the mirror… and the mirror winks back?

Hunter Cope interviews Hunter Cope - The Perfect Parfait

HUNTER: Hunter, thank you for taking the time to do this. You look radiant.

HUNTER: Thank you. All the yogurt I eat is an incredible probiotic. My gut is absolutely snatched.

HUNTER: Love that you used the word snatched. You seem very young and cool.

HUNTER: I am! Should we talk about the show or keep going on about how I’m so young and cool and definitely not an almost 40-year-old man who is making his own YouTube show in the narcissistic pursuit of relevance?

HUNTER: Yes! Let’s talk The Perfect Parfait! Why center a whole show around parfaits?

HUNTER: I’ve always loved parfaits. They’re just funny! And they’re layered — like a good interview, which, of course, presents a solid metaphor for the show. 

HUNTER: And how exactly did this show come to be?

HUNTER: During the Writers’ Strike of 2023, I felt frustrated. I wanted to make something! I reached out to my buddies Danny Simmons and Joe Angelo Menconi to shoot a lo-fi digital series. The concept was simple: review parfaits around LA like Anthony Bourdain. Danny and Joe immediately went, “Maybe there’s more here… what if we get celebrity guests? A band leader? Sketches?” We just kept following the fun.

HUNTER: In Season One, you have guests like Dave Franco and Paul Walter Hauser — how did you get talent of that caliber to show up and eat yogurt?

HUNTER: Honestly? Friendship. I’ve been knocking around Hollywood for years and made a lot of friends along the way. Season One was almost entirely buddies.

HUNTER: And Season Two?

HUNTER: Season Two is almost entirely non-buddies. We did a ton of reaching out and landed an incredible lineup: Morgan Jay, Steph Tolev, David Wain, Reggie Watts, Jimmy Tatro, EDM trailblazer Alison Wonderland. We also added musical guests like Valley Boy and Monica Martin. I felt more out of my element this season, but it forced me to up my game. I’m excited for people to see what we’ve been cooking! 

HUNTER: When can we expect Season Two?

HUNTER: Early 2026. My team and I are deep in the edit… which means I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time staring at my own face. It’s intimate.

HUNTER: Speaking of intimacy — and I can’t believe I’m asking myself this — do you think the show works because you make people feel… safe?

HUNTER: Maybe. I’ve been told I have a face that says, “Open up to me.”

HUNTER: I get that. I would describe your face as “cherubically hawt.”

HUNTER: That’s… the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.

A pause. Tension. A spoon clinks to the floor.

HUNTER: It’s journalism. I’m an observer.

HUNTER: You’re staring directly at my mouth.

HUNTER: Journalistically.

Their chairs inch closer. The photographer quietly excuses himself.

HUNTER: (getting da hornies) Should we… take a quick break?

HUNTER: (mouth literally watering) I think that’s a good idea.

What happens during the “break” cannot legally be described, but when we return, both Hunters look calm, satisfied, and lightly glazed with yogurt/sweat.

HUNTER: Alright, Hunter… final question. What do you hope people take away from The Perfect Parfait?

HUNTER: Joy! Silly, stupid, good-time joy. We like to describe it as Hot Ones by way of Between Two Ferns. It’s just dumb, chaotic fun. I think people need that right now.

HUNTER: And where can we watch?

HUNTER: YouTube. The Perfect Parfait.

HUNTER: Thanks for talking to me. You want to get a drink after this?

HUNTER: Thanks, but no. That was a one-time thing for me.

Watch all episodes of The Perfect Parfait on YouTube before Season Two drops in 2026

Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge Defies Canon, Brings Darth Vader to the Sequel Era Theme Park

The galaxy far, far away is now a bit long, longer ago. Galaxy’s Edge, the Star Wars sections of Disneyland and Disney World, originally only featured characters from sequel trilogy era, including Rey, Kylo Ren, and General Hux. The idea was to create an immersive experience for fans visiting the parks, allowing them to step directly into the world established by Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the two movies that followed.

But now, Galaxy’s Edge is going back in time. According to a release on StarWars.com, the attraction’s timeline will “roll back several decades, expanding to span the events of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi and The Mandalorian.” Now, visitors to the attraction “may cross paths with a few familiar faces — from Darth Vader and Imperial stormtroopers strutting through the streets to Han Solo and Chewbacca reuniting at the Millennium Falcon, all while John Williams’ iconic musical themes swirl through the air.”

Taken at face value, the decision represents a desire to freshen up the attraction, which has been running since 2019. The location presents itself as the Black Spire Outpost on the planet Batuu during the period between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. In addition to encountering performers dressed as major characters from the films, visitors can order beverages from Oga’s Cantina, buy souvenirs from members of Watto’s race the Toydarians, board the Millennium Falcon for the ride Smuggler’s Run, or watch heroes battle First Order soldiers in Rise of the Resistance.

The decision to set the story in sequel era makes sense, as the trilogy had just completed when the park opened and Disney was clearly hoping that it would have a lasting legacy. But Rise of Skywalker left fans with such a bad taste in their mouths that the film exists mostly in memes about Palpatine somehow returning, not as a film that anyone really enjoyed.

Given that sour reception, one has to wonder if the change at Galaxy’s Edge signals a new perspective at Disney. The House of Mouse hasn’t completely forgotten the sequel trilogy era, as Star Wars: Starfighter, directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Gosling and Matt Smith, takes place after Rise of Skywalker.

But the most impactful recent Star Wars entries have been closer to the original trilogy. The first season of The Mandalorian took place five years after The Empire Strikes Back, while both seasons of Andor build right to the start of Rogue One, which itself ends where A New Hope begins. Furthermore, the characters from the original trilogy simply have more cultural cache, having lived in the public consciousness longer than anything from the prequels or sequels.

So is Disney sending Galaxy’s Edge back to the original trilogy because the theme park needs a nostalgic boost? Or could we be seeing the franchise refocus on the stories that made Star Wars a concept that people loved? With a regime change at Lucasfilm coming soon, the latter may be likely.

Boots Riley Is Making a Simpsons Movie. Sort of.

Boots Riley refuses to do the normal thing. As front man for The Coup, Riley mixed funk, punk, and rap with stridently leftist lyrics, resulting in a sound unlike any other. Riley’s held to that ethos as he jumps to filmmaking, with his absurdist debut feature Sorry to Bother You and the off-beat superhero series I’m a Virgo. Riley’s latest movie I Love Boosters will certainly continue that tradition, but it’s the project after that is really raising eyebrows.

Riley has confirmed via social media that he plans to make film adaptation of the unauthorized The Simpsons play Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn, with music by Michael Friedman. The confirmation came about in a typically atypical manner, with Twitter user Taylor Hunsherger posting, “theater twitter: i’m here to let you all know that anne washburn dropped the announcement that mr. burns is being developed into a film by boots riley in her playbill bio for burning cauldron of fiery fire.” In his retweet, Riley wrote, “This is a true thing.”

Though both the announcement and Riley himself are somewhat unusual, that’s perfect for Washburn’s play. Mr. Burns follows a post-apocalyptic theater troupe that recreates episodes of The Simpsons. In particular, the group’s rendition of season five’s “Cape Feare” earns them fame, and draws the jealousy of other troupes that also recreate television episodes from before the apocalypse. Mr. Burns shows how “Cape Feare” mutates as the performers misremember and change the story over the years, changes that become particularly pronounced by the play’s final act, which takes place 75 years after the main story.

Washburn’s play seeks to explore the importance of even pop culture and to examine how humans change stories to meet our needs. Which is why she chose “Cape Feare” as the main Simpsons episode to retell, as it itself riffs on the movie Cape Fear (both the 1962 original and the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake) as well as Psycho. As in the movie, “Cape Feare” involves Sideshow Bob terrorizing the Simpsons in revenge for Bart stopping his schemes in the past. Yet, Bob cannot seem to destroy the family, as he’s thwarted by everything from elephants to his own ego.

In the same way that “Cape Feare” turns the psycho-horror of Cape Fear into slapstick comedy, Mr. Burns turns “Cape Feare” into something at once upsetting and deeply human. The musical numbers and production design has an uncanny quality that disturbs some audiences, while others find themselves moved by show’s portrayal of humanity continuing to make art.

In short, it’s exactly the type of project that Riley should make. As anyone who has seen the horse people in Sorry to Bother You can attest, Riley has no problem getting weird and disturbing. But that movie’s explicit anti-capitalist message insists that human beings matter, even if he has to make the point by turning people into animals.

After making a movies like that, a play that poses The Simpsons as the last becon of artistry should be easy for Boots Riley.

How a Surfing Accident Led to a Dramatic Lord of the Rings Shot

Every single person who has ever watched a movie knows the bit about Viggo Mortensen hurting his toe while shooting The Two Towers. The fact that Mortensen broke two toes when he kicked a helmet has become stuff of movie legend, or at least obnoxious boyfriend factoids, alongside Ridley Scott not warning the Alien cast about the chest burster or the storm trooper bonking his head in Star Wars.

But now, another accident story has emerged to further enrich the legend of Viggo in Lord of the Rings. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Peter Jackson revealed how a surfing accident involving Mortensen forced him to change the way he shot the film.

When Jackson gathered the actors to film the Mines of Moria sequence from The Fellowship of the Ring, Mortensen “comes in, and he’s got his eye is bulged out, black eye, shut, like a boxer swollen.” Turns out, Jackson learned, that “Viggo had been out with the Hobbits during the weekend, and he’d been surfing, and he had sustained an injury surfing, like the board had flipped in the air and whacked him in the face,” and so “all I could do is to shoot him from the side. I couldn’t shoot [head on].”

Frustrating as it surely was for Jackson in the moment, his ingenuity in handling the scene is part of the legend of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In addition to crafting a faithful but user-friendly adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s dense, idiosyncratic works, Jackson earned praise for in-camera effects that brought Middle Earth to life. Tricks such as forced perspective to make Ian McKellen as Gandalf tower of the Hobbits helped move DVD copies of the film, filled with behind-the-scenes footage that showed how it was done.

While not directly part of the filmed finished product, the camaraderie that led to Mortensen’s shiner also helped sell the film. The actors who played the members of the Fellowship presented themselves as best buds, given to pranking one another and, famously, each getting the Elvish word for “nine” tattooed on their bodies.

For those reasons, Jackson can’t be too upset about cast revelry forcing him to adapt his shooting style once again. And, as the ever-jovial director makes clear, he wasn’t angry and Mortensen was deeply apologetic. “He says, ‘I’m sorry, Peter. I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘Oh God,'” recalled a laughing Jackson.

He can laugh with good reason. Not only did the shoot work out, but the profile shots make Aragon look more determined, amping up the drama for the film’s standout sequence. And, even better, we now know one more bit of trivia about the making of The Fellowship of the Ring, which means we’ll never again have to hear someone talk about the toe breaking helmet kick.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Deserves a New Life on TV

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is officially heading to TV, with Sky greenlighting an eight-episode series that adapts the iconic Stieg Larsson book. Amazon had been trying to develop a Dragon Tattoo show for a while, but it never got off the ground. Sky’s involvement, along with Left Bank Pictures, now ensures that production on the new series will get underway in Lithuania in the spring, though the show’s cast has not yet been revealed.

Adaptations of Larsson’s book have come and gone over the years, with varying degrees of success. A Swedish version, starring Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist, was well-regarded in 2009, while David Fincher’s 2011 effort starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig was critically praised but is often considered one of the director’s weaker films.

The book, originally titled Men Who Hate Women, follows a journalist and a hacker who begin investigating the disappearance of a girl 40 years ago, only to be drawn into a dangerous web of lies, misogyny, and systematic abuse. The new Dragon Tattoo series promises to bring the story “into the present,” but still “grounded in the characters and investigative DNA of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, with themes that carry heightened relevance today.”

Inevitably, the show will give the story more room to breathe, whereas the movies had to compress everything into a couple of hours, but the mention of “themes that carry heightened relevance today” in the show’s description seems key, and also why a Dragon Tattoo series could finally do Larsson’s book justice. It feels like the right time to explore these themes, as they sadly haven’t dated.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo isn’t just about bad men doing bad things; it investigates how violence against women is perpetuated by institutions and systems, which has only become more relevant. In the book, hacker Lisbeth Salander is highly intelligent and capable, but still placed under a legal guardianship which allows a man the freedom to control her finances and sexually assault her. This isn’t seen as a loophole, but rather as the system working as it’s designed, and the infuriating bureaucracy that surrounds these systems could be explored more thoroughly over eight episodes.

The same goes for the Vanger family storyline, which reveals the violence that lurks behind massive wealth, and the silence that helps disguise it. Crimes committed within elite families are still minimized today, and a long-form series could allow the book’s pattern of misogynistic behavior in wealthy families and institutions to emerge gradually rather than being reframed as quick twists.

A Dragon Tattoo TV series could bring everything in Larsson’s book up to date and show us how little things have changed. Hopefully, the team behind the show – Steve Lightfoot and Angela LaManna from Behind Her Eyes – will choose to adapt the material in a compelling and thoughtful way, rather than sensationally.

SXSW 2026 Film & TV Lineup Announced: Boots Riley’s Next Film, Ready or Not 2, David E. Kelley Series, and More

Austin’s legendary South by Southwest Festival is back for its fourth decade, and it shows no signs of slowing down as it enters middle age. We already knew that SXSW 40 would launch with I Love Boosters, the highly-anticipated new provocation from director Boots Riley. But the festival will keep the good times going with even more excellent film and television offerings.

Among the most anticipated offerings is the premiere of Margo’s Got Money Troubles from producer David E. Kelley, creator of Ally McBeal and The Practice. Based on the novel by Rufi Thorpe, Margo’s Got Money Troubles stars Elle Fanning in the titular role, a college dropout whose stagnant writing career fails to pay the bills she’s accumulating. Margo seeks what help she can get from her equally eccentric parents, a former pro-wrestler played by Nick Offerman and a one-time Hooter’s waitress played by Michelle Pfeiffer.

Festival VP of Film & TV Claudette Godfrey praised Margo’s Got Money Troubles for its “pure SXSW energy” and called it “the perfect match for our Opening Night TV Premiere slot.” She added, “With its killer soundtrack, genuine heart, and sharp attitude and edge, this show captures the exact spirit that makes SXSW special and the bold, distinctive storytelling we love to open with!”

Other television series premiering at SXSW include The Audacity from Succession and Better Call Saul producer Jonathan Glatzer, starring Billy Magnussen and Sarah Goldberg, and Monsters of God from Tiger King producer Jeremy McBride about animal cops battling a group of reptile fanatics.

Those who prefer film will certainly find much to love at this year’s festival.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come makes its world premiere, with directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy presenting the next chapter in their “eat the rich” horror comedy series, along with stars Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton. The blood doesn’t stop there, as director Kirill Sokolov debuts They Will Kill You, a splatter-filled horror comedy starring Zazie Beetz as a woman who fights alone against a demonic cult. Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone adds to the carnage with Over Your Dead Body, which pairs Samara Weaving with Jason Segel, playing a couple who turn a hide away at a rustic cabin into a murder den.

In addition to its narrative features, SXSW will debut several documentary films. Highlights include director Matty Wishnow’s The Last Critic, which takes a deep dive into the life and work of Robert Christgau, the “Dean of American Rock Critics.” In Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Superhero, director Bayan Joonam takes a look at Seattle’s costumed avenger.

These are just a taste of the offerings at SXSW. From international features to short films making their world debuts to future favorites expanding to new audiences, SXSW 2026 will continue bringing audiences the best in movies and television, just like it’s been doing for forty years.

SXSW runs March 12–18, 2026, in Austin, Texas.

Full Festival Line-Up:

FILM PROGRAM

HEADLINER

Big names, big talent featuring red carpet premieres and gala film events with major and rising names in cinema.

I Love Boosters

Director/Screenwriter: Boots Riley, Producers: Aaron Ryder, Andrew Swett, Allison Rose Carter, Jon Read, Boots Riley
A crew of professional shoplifters take aim at a cutthroat fashion maven. It’s like community service. Cast: Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Demi Moore (World Premiere)

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

Director/Screenwriter: BenDavid Grabinski, Producers: Andrew Lazar, Richard Middleton, Vanessa Humphrey
A hilarious, stylized, R-rated action-comedy about two gangsters and the woman they love trying to survive the most dangerous night of their lives. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s one wild ingredient added to the mix: a time machine. Cast: Vince Vaughn, James Marsden, Eiza González, Keith David, Jimmy Tatro, Stephen Root, Lewis Tan, Ben Schwartz, Emily Hampshire, Arturo Castro (World Premiere)

Over Your Dead Body

Director: Jorma Taccone, Producers: Kelly McCormick, David Leitch, Lee Kim, Guy Danella, Nick Spicer, Aram Tertzakian, Screenwriters: Nick Kocher, Brian McElhaney
A dysfunctional couple head to a remote cabin to supposedly reconnect, but each has secret plans to kill the other. Cast: Samara Weaving, Jason Segel, Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, Paul Guilfoyle, Keith Jardine (World Premiere)

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Producers: Tripp Vinson, James Vanderbilt, William Sherak, Bradley J. Fischer, Screenwriters: Guy Busick, R. Christopher Murphy
After surviving the Le Domas attack, Grace faces the next level of the deadly game – now with her estranged sister Faith. With four rival families hunting them, Grace must survive, protect her sister, and claim the High Seat that rules it all. Cast: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Néstor Carbonell, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood (World Premiere)

They Will Kill You

Director: Kirill Sokolov, Producers: Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, Dan Kagan, Screenwriters: Kirill Sokolov, Alex Litvak
A high-octane horror-action-comedy in which a woman must survive the night at the Virgil, a demonic cult’s mysterious, twisted death-trap, before becoming their next offering in a uniquely brazen battle of epic kills and wickedly dark humor.Cast: Zazie Beetz, Myha’La, Paterson Joseph, Tom Felton, Heather Graham, Patricia Arquette. (World Premiere)

NARRATIVE FEATURE COMPETITION Presented by Kickstarter

World premieres showcasing the art of storytelling by emerging voices.

Thank you to our sponsor Kickstarter, the leading crowdfunding and launch platform for creative projects of every size, for supporting the Narrative Feature Competition Film Screening section.

Brian

Director: Will Ropp, Producers: Thomas Mahoney, Casey Hanley, Will Ropp, Screenwriter: Mike Scollins
An acerbic high school student prone to panic attacks runs for class president to get closer to the teacher he’s hopelessly in love with. Cast: Ben Wang, William H. Macy, Edi Patterson, Randall Park, Natalie Morales, Joshua Colley, Sophia Macy, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Thomas Barbusca, Jacob Moskovitz (World Premiere)

Edie Arnold is a Loser

Director/Screenwriter: Megan Rico, Kade Atwood, Producer: Bryson Alejandro
Timid dork Edie accidentally makes waves when she starts a punk band with her fellow “turds,” becoming an icon to the rest of the losers at her Catholic school while pissing off the hot girls, the nuns, and the horniest altar boy you’ve ever seen. Cast: Adi Madden Cabrera, McKenna Tuckett, Cherish Rodriguez, Niki Rahimi, Alexa Paige, Luseane Pasa, Star Herrmann, Alana Mei Kern, Gabe Root, Lucas Van Orden (World Premiere)

Mallory’s Ghost

Director/Screenwriter: Arabella Oz, Producer: Claire Sinofsky
An insecure young woman becomes convinced that she is being haunted by the ghost of her boyfriend’s ex-lover and muse. Cast: Arabella Oz, Nick Canellakis, Anjelica Bosboom, Delphi Harrington, Shahjehan Khan, Evangeline Beasley (World Premiere)

Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film

Director: Robb Boardman, Producers: Mark Ankner, Robb Boardman, Cory Loykasek, Donny Divanian, Frankie Quinones, Jay Patumanoan, Adam Karm, Ben Wagner, Screenwriters: Robb Boardman, Cory Loykasek, Donny Divanian, Frankie Quinones
A lonely man escapes working from home when he meets Plantman…a mysterious man saving the neglected house plants of Los Angeles. Cast: Cory Loykasek, Donny Divanian, Frankie Quinones, Kate Berlant, Blake Anderson, Kirk Fox, Brent Weinbach, Jamar Neighbors, Christian Duguay, Kevin Camia (World Premiere)

Seahorse (Canada)

Director/Screenwriter: Aisha Evelyna, Producer: Natalie Remplakowski
A struggling sous chef’s pursuit of stability is tested by the return of her estranged father, now living on the streets of Toronto. Cast: Aisha Evelyna, Ruth Goodwin, Brett Donahue, Joseph Marcell, Alden Adair (World Premiere)

Sender

Director/Screenwriter: Russell Goldman, Producers: Jamie Lee Curtis, Molly Hallam, Jake Katofsky
After receiving a series of unwanted packages containing unnervingly targeted items, a woman tumbles down a paranoid rabbit hole to find her mysterious sender. Cast: Britt Lower, Rhea Seehorn, Jamie Lee Curtis, Anna Baryshnikov, David Dastmalchian, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Mike Mitchell, Edward Torres, Alyssa Limperis, Inger Stratton (World Premiere)

The Snake (Canada)

Director: Jenna MacMillan, Producers: Sharlene Kelly, Melani Wood, Screenwriter: Susan Kent
When an ungovernable 40 something wild child collides with her venomous mother, her life blows up spectacularly leaving her newly evicted, partially single, and in bed with her best friend’s husband. Cast: Susan Kent, Robin Duke, Jonathan Torrens, Emma Hunter, Daniel Petronijevic, Jimbo, Kim Roberts, Kenny Robinson, Jacqueline Robbins, Joyce Robbins (World Premiere)

Wishful Thinking

Director/Screenwriter: Graham Parkes, Producers: Matt Smith, Dan Gedman, Kara Durrett, Lewis Pullman
When a volatile couple discovers their emotional state has supernatural consequences on the world around them, they must decide whether to fight for their relationship or accept that their powerful connection might be doing more harm than good. Cast: Lewis Pullman, Maya Hawke, Randall Park, Jake Shane, Kate Berlant, Amita Rao, Eric Rahill (World Premiere)

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE COMPETITION

World premieres of captivating, real stories by emerging voices.

The Ascent

Directors: Edward Drake, Scott Veltri, Francis Cronin, Producers: Edward Drake, Scott Veltri
The Ascent is the inspiring true story of Colorado Springs bilateral-amputee climber Mandy Horvath’s record-breaking attempt to crawl to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro and the mysterious circumstances under which she lost her legs at the age of 21. Featuring Mandy Horvath, Julius John White aka ‘Whitey’, Carel Verhoef, Sally Grayson (World Premiere)

The Last Critic

Director: Matty Wishnow, Producers: Paul Lovelace, Ben Wu
Robert Christgau, The Dean of American Rock Critics, whose work has inspired & infuriated readers for sixty years, is still at it in his eighties—grading records, interrogating commas & listening to absolutely everything (except Metal & Prog). Featuring Robert Christgau, Carola Dibbell, Thurston Moore, Boots Riley, Randy Newman, Colson Whitehead, Ann Powers, Joe Levy, Amanda Petrusich, Greil Marcus (World Premiere)

The Life We Leave

Director: JJ Gerber, Producers: Clementine Briand, Ann Rogers, Melanie Miller, JJ Gerber
When Washington legalizes human composting, entrepreneur Micah bets everything on a new vision of deathcare. With funeral directors Brie and Katey, he builds the first large-scale terramation facility, reshaping how we grieve and return to the Earth. (World Premiere)

My NDA

Directors: Juliane Dressner, Miriam Shor, Producers: Elizabeth Woodward, Hanna Gray Organschi, Juliane Dressner, Miriam Shor 
Three people bound by non-disclosure agreements face extreme personal risk to expose how a simple intellectual property contract is weaponized to silence, manipulate and control. (World Premiere)

Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real Life Superhero

Director: Bayan Joonam, Producers: Claire Chubbuck, Marlowe Blue, Duncan Dickerson
Phoenix Jones is a real life superhero who fights crime on the streets of Seattle, but a recent arrest calls his motives into question. Featuring Phoenix Jones, Rainn Wilson, Jon Ronson, Midnight Jack, Freedom Fodor, Caros Fodor, Ryan McNamee, Ghost, Lance Coulter, El Caballero (World Premiere)

Stormbound

Director: Miko Lim, Producers: Trevor Jones, Miko Lim, Adam McKay, Todd Schulman, John Turner
Go inside the eye of the hurricane and the life of one of America’s top stormchasers. Utilizing a 30-year archive and a new storm season set to be deadlier than ever, Jeff Gammons’ search for the ultimate shot could see him chase his final storm. Featuring Jeff Gammons, Sara Gammons (World Premiere)

Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story

Director: Ayden Mayeri, Producers/Screenwriters: Ayden Mayeri, Barry Rothbart
Four friends reunite when the album they made as pre-teens becomes a cult hit on the internet and scores a record deal twenty years later. Together, they revisit their friendship and early 2000s girlhood. Featuring Ayden Mayeri, Jessica Hall, Janet Kariuki, Mary Washburn, Robin O’Brien (World Premiere)

#WhileBlack

Directors: Sidney Fussell, Jennifer Holness, Producers: Ann Shin, Mariam Bastani, Screenwriters: Ann Shin, Jennifer Holness, Sidney Fussell
Darnella Frazier, who filmed George Floyd’s death, steps forward in this powerful documentary on viral videos that ignited global movements revealing the cost of going viral while Black: trolls, surveillance, and platforms that profit from pain. Featuring Darnella Frazier, Diamond Reynolds, Matthew Cagle, Matthew Mitchell, Safiya Noble, Allissa Richardson (World Premiere)

NARRATIVE SPOTLIGHT

Unforgettable features receiving their World, North American, or U.S. premieres.

Campeón Gabacho (Mexico)

Director: Jonás Cuarón, Producers: Gabriela Rodríguez, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonás Cuarón, Nicolás Celis, Screenwriters: Jonás Cuarón, Aura Xilonen
Campeón Gabacho tells the story of Liborio, a spirited Mexican migrant who fights, literally and figuratively, for a better life in the United States, punching through prejudice with heart, humor, and hope to become an unlikely hero. Cast: Juan Daniel García Treviño, Leslie Grace, Rubén Blades, Eddie Marsan, Rosario Dawson, Cheech Marin, Marvin Jones III, Carlos Carrasco, Dolores Heredia (World Premiere)

Downbeat

Director: Danny Madden, Producer: Benjamin Wiessner, Screenwriters: Danny Madden, Daniel Rashid, Addie Weyrich, Arkira Chantaratananond
Fleeing mistakes in Atlanta, Mauro crashes on his sister’s couch in Boston. He takes to bucket drumming on the streets for a way out, but can’t stop screwing things up and drawing everyone else into his own feral shortcomings. Cast: Daniel Rashid, Addie Weyrich, Arkira Chantaratananond (World Premiere)

Family Movie

Directors: Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin Bacon, Producers: Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Sosie Bacon, Travis Bacon, Vince Jolivette, Casey Durant, Greg Lauritano, Russell Wayne Groves, Screenwriter: Dan Beers
A filmmaking family’s low-budget horror movie turns into a real-life slasher when a dead body shows up on set. Chaos ensues as the Smiths fight to keep the production on track. After all – the show must go on! Cast: Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Sosie Bacon, Travis Bacon, Liza Koshy, John Carroll Lynch, Jackie Earle Haley, Andrea Savage, Austin Amelio, Scoot McNairy (World Premiere)

Forbidden Fruits

Director: Meredith Alloway, Producers: Mason Novick, Mary Anne Waterhouse, Diablo Cody, Trent Hubbard, Screenwriters: Meredith Alloway, Lily Houghton
Free Eden employee Apple leads a secret witch cult with coworkers Cherry and Fig. New hire Pumpkin questions their sisterhood, forcing them to confront inner darkness or meet violent ends. Cast: Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, Lili Reinhart, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Chamberlain, Gabrielle Union(World Premiere)

Mam (France)

Director: Nan Feix, Producer: Marine Garnier, Screenwriters: Nan Feix, Marine Garnier
A self-taught chef from Texas arrives in New York to open a Vietnamese restaurant. Broke but relentless, he teams up with a witty waitress, and together they cook up an unlikely journey of passion, resilience, and friendship in the city’s underbelly. Cast: Jerald Head, Nhung Dao Head, Tuan Bui, Henry Wong, Linh Phan, Lang A Nguyen, Maxence Victor, Kim Hoang, Naoto Ono, An Nguyen Xuan (U.S. Premiere)

Pizza Movie

Directors/Screenwriters: Brian McElhaney, Nick Kocher, Producers: Jeremy Garelick, Will Phelps, Billy Rosenberg, Jason Zaro, Molle DeBartolo, Max A. Butler
A group of college students go downstairs to their dorm lobby to get a delivery pizza. There’s only one issue: They’re insanely high on a home-made drug, turning their simple journey down two sets of stairs into a mind-bendingly transformative quest. Cast: Gaten Matarazzo, Sean Giambrone, Lulu Wilson, Jack Martin, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Marcus Scribner, Caleb Hearon, Sarah Sherman, Miguel-Andres Garcia, Justin Cooley (World Premiere)

Power Ballad

Director: John Carney, Producers: Anthony Bregman, John Carney, Peter Cron, Rebecca O’Flanagan, Robert Walpole, Screenwriters: John Carney, Peter McDonald
Power Ballad follows a talented but past-his-prime wedding singer and a young rockstar who uses the wedding singer’s songwriting prowess to revitalize his own career. Cast: Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Peter McDonald, Marcella Plunkett, Havana Rose Liu, Jack Reynor (North American Premiere)

Seekers of Infinite Love

Director/Screenwriter: Victoria Strouse, Producers: Dylan Sellers, Chris Parker, Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey
After learning their youngest sister has joined a traveling cult, three estranged siblings must come together to find and bring her back. Cast: Hannah Einbinder, Justin Theroux, John Paul Reynolds, Griffin Gluck, Justine Lupe, Greg Kinnear (World Premiere)

The Sun Never Sets

Director/Screenwriter: Joe Swanberg, Producers: Jake Johnson, Ashleigh Snead, Joe Swanberg, Dakota Fanning, Cory Michael Smith
Wendy’s life is thrown into chaos when her boyfriend, Jack, who is older and divorced with children, insists they take space to evaluate the relationship. During their break, Wendy runs into her ex, Chuck, forcing them into a volatile triangle. Cast: Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson, Cory Michael Smith, Debby Ryan, Anna Konkle, Lamorne Morris, Karley Sciortino (World Premiere)

Their Town

Director: Katie Aselton, Producer: Mary Budd, Screenwriter: Mark Duplass
When Abby’s boyfriend drops out of the high school play, she finds herself helping a school outlier step into the role opposite her. They spend a long night wandering around their town, examining their futures and unearthing surprises from their past. Cast: Ora Duplass, Chosen Jacobs, Will Parker, Kim Shaw, Jeffery Self, Daveed Diggs, Leonardo Nam, Annie Henk, Brad LaBree (World Premiere)

DOCUMENTARY SPOTLIGHT

Incredible features receiving their World, North American, or U.S. premieres.

Adam’s Apple

Director: Amy Jenkins, Producers: Brit Fryer, Amy Jenkins, Screenwriter: Adam Sieswerda
A transgender teen and his mother chronicle their lives, artistically weaving a rare and intimate portrait of a family in transition. Two decades of footage trace a boy’s path to manhood and his parents’ vulnerability as they reckon with change. (World Premiere)

Amazing Live Sea Monkeys

Directors/Producers: Mark Becker, Aaron Schock
From her crumbling estate on the Potomac, Yolanda Signorelli battles to wrest control of her late husband Harold’s iconic toy Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys from the corporate men who stole them from her and from the stain of her husband’s dark legacy. (World Premiere)

Black Zombie (Canada)

Director/Screenwriter: Maya Annik Bedward, Producers: Maya Annik Bedward, Hannah Donegan, Kate Fraser
From the flickering screens of Hollywood horror, to the haunted cane fields of colonial Haiti, Black Zombie unearths the buried origins of the zombie, reclaiming it as a symbol of survival and spiritual resistance. Featuring Yves-Grégory Francois, Anderson Mojica, Erol Josué, Mambo Labelle Déese Botanica, Slash, Tom Savini, Tananarive Due, Zandashé Brown (World Premiere)

Capturing Bigfoot

Director: Marq Evans, Producers: Tamir Ardon, Marq Evans, Nick Spicer 
A reel of 16mm film locked away for over 50 years turns the Bigfoot debate on its head. Featuring Clint Patterson, Bob Gimlin, Bob Heironimus, Larry Lund, Greg Long, Vaile Thompson, Sandy Collier, Bill Munns, Teresa Brooks, Jeff Meldrum (World Premiere)

Ceremony (Canada)

Director/Producer: Banchi Hanuse
At ramshackled Nuxalk Radio in Bella Coola, an inquiry into the vanished ooligan run unravels a buried history of erasure and ignites the quiet revolution of a Nation that refuses to disappear. Featuring Megan F. Moody, Qwaxw Siwallace, Snuxyaltwa Deric Snow, Nuskmata Jacinda Mack, Q’umulha Schooner, Sunhwrna Schooner, Jason E. Moody, Snxakila Clyde Tallio, Kmalsuuncw Orden Mack, Tom Swanky (World Premiere)

Drift

Director: Deon Taylor, Producers: Roxanne Avent Taylor, Deon Taylor, Inbal Lessner, Kaitlin McLaughlin, Screenwriters: Kaitlin McLaughlin, Martine Biehn, Kevin Hibbard
Isaac “Drift” Wright, a self-taught photographer and Army veteran haunted by trauma, finds healing through breathtaking, illegal climbs of the world’s tallest structures. But his pursuit of art sparks a high-stakes battle with law enforcement in this intimate portrait of risk, resilience, and freedom in modern America. Featuring Isaac Wright (World Premiere)

My Brother’s Killer

Director: Rachel Mason, Producer: Dion Labriola
Impassioned members of the LGBTQ community band together to try to solve one of the most gruesome and mysterious murders in Los Angeles history. Featuring Christopher Rice, Eric Shaw Quinn, Clark Williams, ChiChi LaRue, Kevin Clarke, Krystal DeLight, Phil St. John, Sabin Grey, John Lamberti, Wendi Berndt (World Premiere)

#Skyking

Director: Patricia Gillespie, Producer: Chris Cowen
#Skyking tells the story of Richard “Beebo” Russell, a ground service agent who stole an airplane belonging to his employer, and took off on a flight that would come to embody the hopes, dreams, and despair of the American working class. (World Premiere)

The Way We Move

Directors/Screenwriters: Vanessa Dumont, Nicolas Davenel, Producers: Hubert Cornet, Mathieu Belghiti, Arnaud Le Guilcher, Eleonore Dailly, Edouard de Lachomette
Amber Galloway, a trailblazer in ASL interpretation, takes us on a journey into the deep bond between the Deaf world and music. We follow her as she teaches struggling recruits who she hopes will have what it takes to join her at ACL music festival. Featuring Amber Galloway, Julian Ortiz, Angela “AV” Villavong, Joshua Goertz (World Premiere)

MIDNIGHTER

Exciting after-dark features for genre lovers and the terminally curious.

“The 2026 SXSW Film & TV Midnighters represent so many different things of what we love about genre filmmaking,” said Peter Hall, SXSW Senior Film & TV Festival Programmer. “They’re scary, but still wildly entertaining. They’ve got dark senses of humor without sacrificing heart. They’re creative, unexpected and usher in a new round of filmmakers we are going to be proud to call alums.”

American Dollhouse

Director/Screenwriter: John Valley, Producers: David Axe, Samuel Butler, Shane Greb
Caught between a grotesque Christmas fantasy and her own childhood trauma, a woman’s search for a fresh start in her home town is violently interrupted by a psychopathic neighbor. Cast: Hailley Lauren, Kelsey Pribilski, Tinus Seaux, Danielle Evon Ploeger, Richard C. Jones (World Premiere)

Drag

Directors/Screenwriters: Raviv Ullman, Greg Yagolnitzer, Producers: Jake DeVito, Lucy DeVito, Danny DeVito
A routine robbery at a rural house turns into a nightmare for two amateur burglars when one of them throws out her back. Things spiral out of control as they try to escape before the homeowner returns. Cast: Lizzy Caplan, Lucy DeVito, John Stamos, Christine Ko (World Premiere)

Fifteen(Argentina, Mexico)

Directors: Jack Zagha, Yossy Zagha, Producers: Jack Zagha, Yossy Zagha, Elsa Reyes, Valentín Javier Diment, Vanesa Pagani, Screenwriters: Andrzej Rattinger, Ricardo Álvarez Canales
A Mexican girl’s quinceañera spirals into chaos when supernatural rumors and small-town gossip collide, forcing her to face adulthood sooner than expected. Cast: Greta Marti, Macarena Oz, Aminta Ireta, Martha Claudia Moreno, Enrique Arreola, Mercedes Hernández, Malena Sandy, Cloe Juresa Furgan, Andre Fajardo, Silvia Villazur (World Premiere)

Grind

Directors: Brea Grant, Ed Dougherty, Chelsea Stardust, Producer: Chelsea Stardust, Screenwriters: Brea Grant, Ed Dougherty
Four interconnected tales of workplace horror tackle the most terrifying aspect of modern life: making a living! With a wild tone as darkly comic as it is relevant, Grind is the most fun you’ll have in a late stage capitalistic hellscape. Cast: Rob Huebel, Barbara Crampton, Vinny Thomas, Jessika Van, Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette, James Urbaniak, Courtney Pauroso, Jon Gabrus, Ify Nwadiwe, Aubrey Shea (World Premiere)

Imposters

Director/Screenwriter: Caleb J Phillips, Producers: Thomas Bond, Sara Seligman, Joe Bandelli
After a couple’s baby boy is taken, the desperate mother learns of a way to bring him back. However, her husband begins to suspect that what she returned with isn’t their son. Cast: Jessica Rothe, Charlie Barnett, Yul Vazquez, Bates Wilder, Luisina Quarleri, Thomas Parobek, Ian Lyons, Taylor Karin, Lee Bennett, Declan Bennett (World Premiere)

Monitor

Directors/Screenwriters: Matt Black, Ryan Polly, Producers: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, John Fischer, Adrian Guerra
A social media moderator unleashes a deadly terror when she refuses to publish a cryptic video. Cast: Brittany O’Grady, Taz Skylar, Viveik Karla, Ines Høysæter Asserson, Gunner Willis, Sara Alexander, Camila Wahlgren (World Premiere)

Never After Dark (Japan)

Director/Screenwriter: Dave Boyle, Producers: Dave Boyle, Kento Kaku, Kosuke Tsutsumi
A medium travels deep into the Japanese countryside to perform a routine exorcism, where she is forced to confront the most terrifying enemy of all: the living. Cast: Moeka Hoshi, Kento Kaku, Kurumi Inagaki, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Bokuzo Masana, Tae Kimura (World Premiere)

FESTIVAL FAVORITE

Acclaimed standouts from festivals around the world.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

Directors: Daniel Roher, Charlie Tyrell, Producers: Jonathan Wang, Daniel Kwan, Shane Boris, Diane Becker, Ted Tremper
A father-to-be tries to figure out what is happening with the AI insanity, exploring the existential dangers and stunning promise of this technology that humanity has created. (Texas Premiere)

Erupcja

Director: Pete Ohs, Producers: Pete Ohs, Charli xcx, Luke Arreguin, Jeremy O. Harris, Josh Godfrey, Screenwriters: Pete Ohs, Charli xcx, Lena Góra, Jeremy O. Harris, Will Madden
Set in Poland, Erupcja follows two women as they complicate their romantic lives. Nel lives in Warsaw where she works at a flower shop. When her childhood friend Bethany comes to visit with a new boyfriend, a volcano erupts. Cast: Charli xcx, Lena Góra, Jeremy O. Harris, Will Madden (U.S. Premiere)

Obsession

Director/Screenwriter: Curry Barker, Producers: James Harris, Haley Nicole Johnson, Christian Mercuri, Roman Viaris
After breaking the mysterious “One Wish Willow” to win his crush’s heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price. Cast: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter

See You When I See You

Director: Jay Duplass, Producers: Fred Bernstein, Jay Duplass, Kumail Nanjiani, Emily V. Gordon, Adam Cayton-Holland, Screenwriter: Adam Cayton-Holland
With the help of his family, a comedy writer battles PTSD after the tragic death of his sister. Cast: Cooper Raiff, David Duchovny, Kaitlyn Dever, Hope Davis, Lucy Boynton, Ariela Barer (Texas Premiere)

VISIONS

Audacious, risk-taking artists who demonstrate innovation and creativity.

And Her Body Was Never Found

Director: Polaris Banks, Producers: Polaris Banks, Mor Cohen, Hilarion Banks, Screenwriters: Polaris Banks, Mor Cohen
A couple treks deep into the wilderness to make a movie about their troubled relationship, but takes the opportunity to kill each other instead. Cast: Mor Cohen, Polaris Banks, Grae Drake (World Premiere)

Daughters of the Forest: Mycelium Chronicles (Mexico)

Director/Screenwriter: Otilia Portillo Padua, Producers: Paula Arroio, Elena Fortes, Otilia Portillo Padua
Deep in Mexico’s forests, this immersive sci-fi doc follows the unusual, fungi-driven paths of two indigenous mycologists as they seek to reconcile the past and present while reimagining the future for themselves and the changing world they inhabit. Featuring Eliseete Ramirez Carbajal, Julieta Serafina Amaya, Julia Dolores Raimundo, Zenaida Perez, Magdalena Martínez, Olivia Ayala (North American Premiere)

24 BEATS PER SECOND

Vibrant films showcasing the sounds, culture and influence of music and musicians.

Los Lobos Native Sons

Directors/Screenwriters: Doug Blush, Piero F. Giunti, Producers: Robert Corsini, Doug Blush, Piero F. Giunti, Flavio Morales, Rafael Augustin, Patricia Harris DiLeva
Los Lobos Native Sons is the definitive chronicle of the global Latin rock ’n’ roll legends Los Lobos, offering an unparalleled 50-year musical journey through exclusive access to the band’s personal archives and extraordinary legacy. Featuring Cesar Rosas, Louie Perez, David Hidalgo, Conrad Lozano, Steve Berlin, Linda Ronstadt, Tom Waits, George Lopez, Cheech Marin, Danny Elfman (World Premiere)

We Are The Shaggs

Director/Screenwriter: Ken Kwapis, Producers: Reynolds Anderson, Jeremy Seifert
We Are The Shaggs is a music documentary about The Shaggs, an all-girl band that created some of the most provocative and polarizing music in rock-and-roll history. Featuring Dorothy Wiggin, Betty Wiggin (World Premiere)

GLOBAL Presented by MUBI

Artful international films, featuring premieres, festival favorites, and more.

Thank you to our sponsor, MUBI: the global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs.

“The SXSW Global program has always showcased audacious, fearless creativity from an international perspective and this year is no exception. These first three features include a world premiere from Mexico by a Global alum and debuts from France/Lebanon/Germany/Qatar and the Dominican Republic, said Jim Kolmar, SXSW Consulting Film Programmer. “Each of these documentaries paint well outside conventional lines, taking bold artistic risks to convey deeply personal stories with vibrant conviction. It’s a privilege to introduce this first wave of international titles.”

Do You Love Me (Lebanon)

Director: Lana Daher, Producers: Jean-Laurent Csinidis, Lana Daher, Screenwriter: Lana Daher, Qutaiba Barhamji
Welcome to Beirut. Disorientation is part of the journey. (U.S. Premiere)

Mickey (Mexico)

Director: Dano García, Producers: Dano García, Indira Cato, Joceline Hernandez, Alejandra Guevara Castillo, Christian Giraud, Screenwriters: Dano García, Tonatiuh Israel
A journey through self-perception and the anti-punitive confrontation of the past. Featuring Mis$ Mickey, Jesse Sakeri López, Arturo Cundapí Bustamante, Angélica María Bustamante Andrews, Loreto Pozos Trejo, Javier Lizárraga Contreras, David Allegre (World Premiere)

Scarlet Girls (Dominican Republic, Germany, Mexico)

Director: Paula Cury, Producers: Paula Cury, Samuel Didonato, Screenwriters: Claudia Galeano, Paula Cury
What does it mean to be a woman in a country where abortion is banned in all circumstances? (North American Premiere)

TV PROGRAM

TV PREMIERE

World premieres of prestige TV series premieres from acclaimed showrunners and directors.

The Audacity

Showrunner/Screenwriter: Jonathan Glatzer, Director: Lucy Forbes, Producer: Gina Mingacci
A would-be tech titan and his therapist play dangerous games with privacy while trying to find happiness. Cast: Billy Magnussen, Sarah Goldberg, Zach Galifianakis, Lucy Punch, Simon Helberg, Rob Corddry, Meaghan Rath, Paul Adelstein (World Premiere)

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Showrunner/Screenwriter: David E. Kelley, Directors: Dearbhla Walsh, Kate Herron, Producers: David E. Kelley, Elle Fanning, Dakota Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Matt Tinker, Brittany Kahan Ward, Per Saari, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rufi Thorpe, Eva Anderson, Boo Killebrew
Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a bold, heartwarming, and comedic family drama following recent college dropout and aspiring writer Margo as she’s forced to make her way with a new baby, a mounting pile of bills, and a dwindling amount of ways to pay them. Cast: Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, Thaddea Graham, Nicole Kidman, Greg Kinnear, Marcia Gay Harden, Michael Angarano, Rico Nasty, Lindsey Normington (World Premiere)

Monsters of God

Showrunner: Jeremy McBride, Director: Eric Goode, Producers: Tom Petersen, James Liu, Callie Barlow, Lissa Rivera, Charles Divak, Adrienne Gits, Daniel Johnson, Screenwriters: Jeremy McBride, Eric Goode, Tom Petersen
A group of reptile fanatics builds a global smuggling empire, while a scrappy team of animal cops risks everything to stop them. (World Premiere)

INDEPENDENT TV PILOT COMPETITION

Discover new pilots from indie talent. 

Are We Still Married?

Showrunner/Director/Screenwriter: Kit Steinkellner, Producer: Barry Galperin
Over the course of one night Laura must decide if she will invite her husband Jack, who has recently been turned into a vampire, back into their house. Cast: Taylor Misiak, Dustin Milligan (World Premiere)

Birth is For P*ssies

Showrunner/Screenwriter: Hannah Shealy, Directors: Hannah Shealy, Celine Sutter, Producer: Celine Sutter
A rookie doula is thrust into her first birth with a mother she’s never met. After a rocky start, she quickly learns supporting women through labor is messier, funnier, and more profound than any training could have prepared her for. Cast: Hannah Shealy, Madeline Wise, Danny Deferrari, Evelyn Howe, Peter Jay Fernandez, Sohina Sidhu, Katherine George, LA Head 

(World Premiere)

Codependent

Showrunners/Screenwriters: Wade McElhaney, Weston McElhaney, Director: Caitlyn Phu, Producers: Emily Ince, Rosie Cummings, Emily Partida
After getting fired, dysfunctional twin brothers secretly apply for the same position and fly to New York to compete against each other, only to have their crippling codependency sabotage their chances. Cast: Wade McElhaney, Weston McElhaney, Riley Sigler, Rhoda Bell, Josie Totah, Lola Berry, Payson Mitchell, Alex Tobias, Eliot, Edgar Garcia (World Premiere)

Cold Call

Showrunner/Director: Elise Kibler, Producer: Manon Blackman, Screenwriter: Emma Lenderman
Cold Call is a twisted dark comedy about a cult of office workers attempting to return to their home planet by scamming strangers out of credit card information, and Penny, the office superstar, on the day a caller threatens to force her off script. Cast: Emma Lenderman, Gabriel Ebert, Daniel Pearce, Amelia Workman (World Premiere)

In My Blood

Showrunner/Director/Screenwriter: Alex Bendo, Producers: Alex Bendo, Yumeng Han, Elias Putnam, Max Wilson, Jorge Sistos Moreno
Desperate to live up to his father’s expectations, a talented but inconsistent minor league baseball player turns to steroids, igniting a dangerous transformation of body and mind. Cast: Daniel Diemer, Will Chase, Ian Blackman, William Hill (World Premiere)

Son of a Bikram

Showrunners/Screenwriters: Ash T, Johnny Rey Diaz, Director: Johnny Rey Diaz, Producers: Johnny Rey Diaz, Christian Rose, Ash T
After discovering he’s the illegitimate son of yoga guru Bikram Choudhury, an office worker is thrust into a heated identity crisis, desperate to connect with the father he never knew. Cast: Ash T, Carlos Santos, Jeffrey Nicholas Brown, Vee Kumari, Anwar Molani, Zhaleh, David Chernyavsky, Melanie Johnson, Max Cutler, Matthew Peschio (World Premiere)

SHORT PROGRAM Presented by Vimeo

Thank you to our Shorts Program Presenting sponsor, Vimeo: the premier home for video professionals and the best short films on the internet.

“This year’s shorts program reflects how absurdity has become our shared language for making sense of the world,” said Francis Román, SXSW Senior Film & TV Festival Programming Manager and Gabe Van Amburgh, SXSW Senior Manager Film & TV Programming. “When reality seems stranger than fiction, these filmmakers turn to the surreal to capture what it truly feels like to be human right now. We’re incredibly proud to champion these storytellers as they lean into the unusual, and sometimes uncomfortable, taking you on a wild ride where bodies revolt, identities fracture, and intimacy gets redefined. Through it all, these films dig at deeper truths and help us find connection in the chaos.”

NARRATIVE SHORT COMPETITION

Exceptional storytelling that captivates, surprises, and excites.

Achiever

Director: Charlie Traisman, Producers: Katherine Romans, Sarah Whelden, Elizabeth Valenti, Chelsea Pace, Screenwriter: Claire McFadden
When Alexa finds she can no longer orgasm due to her new Lexapro prescription, she embarks on a desperate journey to get off by any means possible, only to find herself “getting close” through an unexpected connection. (World Premiere)

Best Friends with the Devil

Director/Screenwriter: Hugo De Sousa, Producers: April S. Chang, Vicki Syal, Sarah Whelden, Kelly Wilcox
Lola’s looking for her best friend. A stranger offers to help. One lie changes everything. (World Premiere)

Buah (Singapore)

Director/Screenwriter: Jen Nee Lim, Producer: Ke Ning Lee
In a time and place where abortion is illegal, a pregnant woman’s repeated attempts to end her pregnancy fail until she crosses paths with a strange bus driver. (Texas Premiere)

Can I Put You On Hold

Director: James Cutler, Producer: Jack Hessler, Screenwriter: James Cutler, Matthew Cutler
A man struggles with the crushing bureaucracy of immigration as he waits on hold with his immigration lawyer, trying to keep hope alive for his future with his fiancée, only to face a devastating setback that forces him to reconsider everything. (World Premiere)

Copy, Save

Director/Screenwriter: Alyssa Loh, Producers: Katherine Romans, Charlie Traisman, Jessica Li
When two teen sisters discover each other’s secret internet cash schemes, they’re forced to confront the murky morals of their digital lives. (World Premiere)

Dua Ji

Director/Screenwriter: YuHan Tsai, Producers: CheKuei Chang, YuHan Tsai
At her mother’s funeral, the eldest daughter challenges the patriarchal traditions of her rural Taiwanese family, confronting loss and the quiet burden of duty. (World Premiere)

Gamberra (Spain)

Director: Marine Auclair March, Producers: Cristina Bas, Sergi Casamitjana, Screenwriters: Marine Auclair March, Lucía G Romero, Dante Schmitz
Marta lives in a religious student residence affiliated with the far-right. Sexual misinformation leads her to seek the morning-after pill, while her colleagues prepare an unforgettable hazing. (World Premiere)

Gender Studies

Director/Screenwriter: Jamie Kiernan O’Brien, Producer: Kirsten Pasewaldt
When a trans college student learns the girl she idolizes is sleeping with their teaching assistant, she takes drastic steps to emulate her. (Texas Premiere)

I Saw You In The Flood

Director/Screenwriter: Kevin Xian Ming Yu, Producers: Shayan Ajmal Farooq, Camila Grimaldi, Kevin Xian Ming Yu
As their grandfather’s health worsens in Northeast China, Kai, a genderqueer Chinese-American in Queens, is visited by a familiar ghost while helping their mother, Li, deal with a heavy storm. (World Premiere)

Imago

Director/Screenwriter: Ariel Zengotita, Producers: Juan J. Arroyo, Colt Kozal, Sonia Rivera
When Ana’s mom starts transforming into a bug, their codependent relationship reaches its boiling point. (U.S. Premiere)

Marga en el DF

Director/Screenwriter: Gabriela Ortega, Producers: Karla Luna Cantu, Carlos Lopez Estrada, Natalia Gonzalez, Eugenio Valero, Glenn Kiser, Amanda Schneider
A Dominican woman’s life unravels at 21 weeks pregnant during a surprise visit to Mexico City in the aftermath of Selena Quintanilla’s murder. (Texas Premiere)

A Shot at Art (Netherlands)

Director/Screenwriter: Ilke Paddenburg, Producers: Layla Meijman, Maarten van der Ven, Marcelle Bartels
When two seasoned volunteers at an international art festival start participating in a highly controversial art installation, the situation spirals completely out of control… but who was actually crossing the line here? (North American Premiere)

Souvenir (Australia)

Director/Screenwriter: Renée Marie Petropoulos, Producer: Yingna Lu
While stuck on a family vacation, a young closeted teen must confront the unnerving hold her girlfriend has over her after she takes unwarranted photos of her during sex. (North American Premiere)

Stairs

Director/Screenwriter: Riley Donigan, Producers: Anton Vicente Kliot, Sam Callahan
A woman’s life unravels after she becomes addicted to throwing herself down flights of stairs. (Texas Premiere)

Supper

Director/Screenwriter: Savannah Braswell, Producers: Mariah Christian, Savannah Braswell
A lonely man’s obsession with an online mukbang livestreamer leads to a tense confrontation with an unsuspecting dinner guest. (World Premiere)

Talk Me (Spain)

Director/Screenwriter: Joecar Hanna, Producers: Joecar Hanna, María Belén Poncio, Patricia Picazo, Mai Batalla, Lina Badenes, Ana Camacho
In a world where words replace intimacy, a local outsider in a Spanish village must choose between a loveless marriage and the promise of true connection with a kindred stranger. 

(U.S. Premiere)

Them That’s Not

Director/Screenwriter: Mekhai Lee, Producers: Charles Hopkins, Redd Coltrane
A sudden prison furlough unexpectedly bonds an estranged father with his emotionally avoidant daughter at their matriarch’s repass. (Texas Premiere)

Visitors

Director/Screenwriter: Minnie Schedeen, Producers: Zola Elgart Glassman, Sabina Friedman-Seitz, Gilana Lobel, Sarah Yarkin
A young woman in the throes of early pregnancy starts to question her own reality when strange things begin to happen to the people closest to her. (World Premiere)

Vomit

Director/Screenwriter: Roi Cydulkin, Producers: EJ Argenio, Roi Cydulkin, Miles Skinner
Wildcard addict on the run from trouble shows up bloodied and battered at the door of his home health aide ex-girlfriend, turning both their lives upside down in this super dark comedy about love, death, drugs, and ferrets. (World Premiere)

We Were Here (India)

Director/Screenwriter: Pranav Bhasin, Producer: Yash Gonsai
In a crumbling Indian town, three retired men stage a protest against machines taking over human jobs, by pretending to be household appliances. (North American Premiere)

DOCUMENTARY SHORT COMPETITION

Authentic storytelling that captivates, surprises, and excites.

Air Horse One (Belgium, Switzerland)

Director/Screenwriter: Lasse Linder, Producers: Philipp Ritler, Valentin Leblanc, Delphine Duez
Training, Take-Off, Grand Prix. Legacy is one of the most valuable and celebrated horses in show jumping. In pursuit of victories, she is flown between competition venues across the globe. (North American Premiere)

Divorce Resort

Director: Coby Becker, Producers: Marco Meily, Alana Saad, Coby Becker
Married in a country where divorce is prohibited, a 72-year-old lovelorn man finds a legal loophole requiring a seven-day stay on the island of Guam. As he wanders through this tropical limbo, he reckons with his loss and newfound freedom. (World Premiere)

Eructation

Director: Victoria Trow, Producer: Jeremy Schneier
The world record for loudest female burp is 107.3 decibels. Kaylee wants to beat it. (World Premiere)

Glacier’s Requiem (United Kingdom)

Director: Saddiq Abubakar, Producers: India Lee, Tarquin Ramsay, Screenwriters: Saddiq Abubakar, Collins “Colloboh” Oboh
Amid Iceland’s melting glaciers, modular synthesis artist Colloboh records the dying rhythms of ice and sea, uncovering a living language within nature itself – a requiem for the planet and for us. (World Premiere)

He’s Out There

Directors/Producers: Kurt Andrew Schneider, Sam Davis
An Autistic Bigfoot hunter meets his heroes. (World Premiere)

How To Catch A Butterfly(Netherlands)

Director/Screenwriter: Kiriko Mechanicus, Producer: Ilja Roomans
Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus writes letters to a young mass shooter to find the root of their mutual obsession for one another. (World Premiere)

I Got My Brother

Director: Victor K. Gabriel, Producer: Rachel Earnest
Two brothers reflect on their candid and often humorous memories of surviving the foster care system and prison, realizing along the way that their path to healing has always been each other. (World Premiere)

In the Morning Sun (Canada, Philippines)

Director: Serville Poblete, Producers: Nicole Dane, Serville Poblete
A Filipino mother finds comfort in her Alexa — weather updates, love songs, and the time back home become a magical link to the Philippines, gently reflecting the quiet struggles of immigration and the comforts that sustain us. (World Premiere)

A New Inferno

Directors/Producers: Nita Blum-Reddick, Jonathan Pickett
Filmed during the hottest days of Phoenix, Arizona’s summer heatwave, A New Inferno follows paramedics as they race to save the lives of heatstroke victims using a radical new treatment: ice immersion therapy. (World Premiere)

Not Scared, Just Sad (Bulgaria, Lebanon)

Director: Isabelle Mecattaf, Producers: Kamen Velkovsky, Atilla Yücer, Diane Daccache
November 2024, as the war escalates in a nearby suburb, a family in Beirut tries to live as normally as possible. (U.S. Premiere)

A Wolf in the Suburbs (Canada)

Director/Screenwriter: Amélie Hardy, Producer: Rosalie Chicoine Perreault
Welcome to Mississauga where lawns are clipped, neighbors are watchful and no blade of grass dares misbehave. Except at Wolf Ruck’s place. His lawn grows wild, and so does the trouble. (World Premiere)

Yiyíistsʼą́ą́ʼ (Listen)

Director/Screenwriter: Malakye Zaayin Tsosie, Producer: Kaitlyn Sanchez
The Navajo language is spoken less often across generations. However, its resilience continues through a small Navajo radio station, the director’s family members, and the people of the Navajo Nation. (Texas Premiere)

ANIMATED SHORT COMPETITION

A whirlwind tour of hand drawn, stop-motion, and digital revelries.

Hag (United Kingdom)

Director: Anna Ginsburg, Producer: Becky Perryman, Screenwriters: Anna Ginsburg, Miranda Latimer
One woman’s search for love and meaning in a hellscape of waning fertility, dating apps and the rotten stench of the patriarchy. In a world where being yourself makes you monstrous, what is the cost of compromise and repressing your authentic self? (World Premiere)

Im Auto Tapes und Butterbrot (Germany)

Director/Screenwriter: Kiana Naghshineh, Producers: Henrik von Müller, Antoine Liétout, Ivan Zuber, Kiana Naghshineh
In the face of her body fading into stardust, Shari realizes what truly matters to her. (North American Premiere)

In The Beginning (Poland, Portugal, Spain)

Director: Ala Nunu, Producers: Bruno Caetano, Bruno Simões, Carlota Pou, Marcin Podolec, Screenwriters: Ala Nunu, Sophie Colfer
A spaceprobe called Beresheet, legless birds of paradise, hamster cull and humanity trying to make the world make sense. (World Premiere)

Paper Trail

Director/Producer/Screenwriter: Don Hertzfeldt
A life, seen through paper. (Texas Premiere)

Praying Mantis (Taiwan)

Director: Joe Hsieh, Producer: Yonfan, Screenwriters: Joe Hsieh, Jie Zhan
A praying mantis mutant seduces and preys on men out of desperation to save her child. A failed mission led to revelations of her past and dark secrets as the story unfolds. 

(U.S. Premiere)

Tell Me When You Get Home

Director/Screenwriter: Tshay, Producers: Sydney Rodriguez, Jackie Payton, Patrice Worthy
During a reggae house party, 15-year-old Honest Cardamom encounters the spirit of a lost loved one. (World Premiere)

What We Leave Behind (Canada)

Directors/Producers/Screenwriters: Jean-Sébastien Hamel, Alexandra Myotte
Dan has a gaping hole in his neck that won’t heal. Why? He can’t remember, nor talk about it. Back in the sinister arena of his childhood, he must find the part of himself he once left behind that prevents him, now an adult, from being whole. (U.S. Premiere)

MIDNIGHT SHORT COMPETITION

Indulge your cravings for horror, gore, and dark comedy.

Jealous People Are Ugly People (United Kingdom)

Director/Screenwriter: Theo James Krekis, Producer: Isabel Pritchard-Smith
Consumed by his jealousy of his best friend’s sudden career success, Vasilly’s resentment festers, feeding a dark, supernatural force within him. (International Premiere)

Man Eating Pussy

Director/Screenwriter: Emily Lawson, Producers: Emily Lawson, Lucy Belgum
A dying man seeks the ultimate release: birth in reverse. (World Premiere)

Mantis Stream! Like & Subscribe

Directors/Screenwriters: Lincoln Robisch, Sarah Maerten, Producer: Mark Neil
A livestreamer’s boyfriend chokes to death on an egg. His friends, family, paramedics and the police performatively profit off of his suffering as his life fades away. (Texas Premiere)

The Seeing Eye Dog Who Saw Too Much

Director/Screenwriter: Eric Jackowitz, Producer: Colton Mastro
A blind violinist ascends to first chair at the Rome Symphony, just as a black-gloved killer begins stalking the orchestra. The only witness to the murders is her loyal seeing-eye dog. (World Premiere)

A Stable Marriage

Director: Josephine Decker, Producers: Kristin Slaysman, Josephine Decker, Sean Drummond, Screenwriters: Kristin Slaysman, Josephine Decker
A woman’s sexual fantasy is fulfilled – with surprising ramifications. (World Premiere)

Tongue (Korea, Republic of)

Director/Producer/Screenwriter: Lim Da Seul
After enduring her husband’s incessant chatter, a wife finally decides to cut out his tongue. (North American Premiere)

Wax (Canada)

Director/Screenwriter: Alexandre Forgues, Producer: Hanna Donato
With finals approaching, a university student ignores a growing ear infection, spiraling into psychological distress as the pressure mounts. (World Premiere)

TEXAS SHORT COMPETITION

Vibrant work filmed in, inspired by, or connected to the Lone Star State.

Forcefield of Love

Directors: Liz Moskowitz, Riley Engemoen, Producer: Liz Moskowitz
Doris and Dan’s lives are full of dancing, sex, and other intimate pleasures as they defy traditional expectations of how we can embrace life, death, and aging. (World Premiere)

Freedom At Stake

Directors: Raeshem Nijhon, Stacey Young, Producers: Karlie Kloss, Phoebe Gates, Nicole Galovski, Carri Twigg, Lauren Cynamon
Activists in Texas fight back against Prop A, a measure targeting those who help others seek abortions across state lines. As legal risks grow, so does their determination to protect access and bodily autonomy. (World Premiere)

Una Nave Fragil / A Fragile Vessel

Director: Samuel Díaz Fernández, Producer: Ái Vuong, Screenwriters: Samuel Díaz Fernández, Ái Vuong, Rafa V Fernando
As the world around them scorches under record heat, a family walks into the woods, asking what the future holds in this thermal dystopia. Their conversations map survival in a world reshaped by heat. (World Premiere)

Shut The Fuck Up When We Speak

Director: Ryan Darbonne
Five Black musicians reflect on art, identity, and the radical act of making noise in a world that wants them silent. (Texas Premiere)

Stalin Boys

Directors: Ora DeKornfeld, Bianca Giaever, Producers: Alejandra Vasquez, Ora DeKornfeld, Bianca Giaever
Four middle-school boys in a Texas border town have developed an unusual obsession: Joseph Stalin. When they hear about the Texas State History Fair, they write a play about the Soviet dictator and his efforts to destroy all who opposed him. (Texas Premiere)

Winter Ceremony

Director/Screenwriter: Sidi Wang, Producers: Santiago Pacheco, Erik Skattum
In a Texas winter, a long-divorced Chinese couple comes together for their daughter’s college graduation. (World Premiere)

MUSIC VIDEO COMPETITION 

A dynamic mix of creativity and stylish visuals where music and storytelling collide.

Bricknasty – ‘Vinland’ / Director: Hugh Mulhern

Chappell Roan – ‘The Subway’/ Director: Amber Grace Johnson

Confidence Man & Jade – ‘Gossip’ (United Kingdom) / Director: India Rose Harris

Doechii – ‘Anxiety’ / Director: James Mackel

Dzsúdló – ‘Presso’ (Hungary) / Director/Screenwriter: Viktor Horvath

Ed Sheeran – ‘Azizam’ / Director: Saman Kesh

FKA twigs – ‘Eusexua’ / Director: Jordan Hemingway

Funny Weather – ‘Time Bandit’ (Sweden) / Director/Screenwriter: Unlimited Time Only

Great Grandpa – ‘Doom’ / Director: Chamberlain Staub

Hot Chip – ‘Devotion’ (United Kingdom) / Director/Screenwriter: Will Kindrick

Kendrick Lamar & SZA – ‘Luther’ / Director: Karena Evans

This Lonesome Paradise – ‘Blue For You’ (Canada, Mexico) / Director/Screenwriter: Sebastian Ortiz Wilkins

Lowswimmer – ‘IRL’ (United Kingdom) / Directors/Screenwriters: Victor Nauwynck, Leo Villares

Model/Actriz – ‘Cinderella’ / Director/Screenwriter: Nathan Castiel

OK Go – ‘”Love”‘ / Directors: Aaron Duffy, Miguel Espada, Damian Kulash

People R Ugly – ‘Wake Up’ / Directors: Joseph Larkin, Tristan Kevitch, Zak Dossi, Screenwriters: Zak Dossi, Tristan Kevitch, Nick Furlong, Bill Biers, Julian Del grosso

Rawayana, Bomba Estereo – ‘Fogata’ (Colombia) / Director/Screenwriter: Paola Ossa

Tyler, The Creator – ‘Sugar On My Tongue’ / Director: Tyler Okonma

Woodz – ‘I’ll Never Love Again’ (Korea, Republic of) / Director/Screenwriter: Lafic

Xinobi – ‘Strides’ / Director: Ben Callner, Screenwriters: Ben Callner, Adam Callner

XR EXPERIENCE

The immersive arts enhance and redefine how we experience the world. These projects emphasize ingenuity and storytelling across diverse industries. 

XR Experience Competition

World premieres of mind bending immersive art.

Ascended Intelligence (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom)

Director/Screenwriter: Karen Palmer, Producer: Diane Knarr
Ascended Intelligence is an emotionally responsive XR experience set in a 2030 Smart City, where your voice becomes the interface—translating tone into branching cinema and shifting AI from a system of control into a mirror for human agency. (World Premiere)

The Baby Factory is Closed (United Kingdom)

Director/Screenwriter: Deepa Mann-Kler, Producer: Eva Robinson 
You fall inside a body that refuses to behave. The system wants obedience. Zoraan wants a riot. (World Premiere)

Body Proxy

Directors/Screenwriters: Danny Cannizzaro, Samantha Gorman, Producers: Yuxin Gao, J Noland
Human-as-a-Service: The AI does the thinking, you do the heavy lifting. (World Premiere)

Crafting Crimes: The Mona Lisa Heist (France)

Director: Chloé Rochereuil, Producer: Victor Agulhon 
This immersive podcast lets you reconstruct legendary crime scenes as miniatures in mixed reality. Relive the theft of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and uncover how her disappearance turned absence into legend. (World Premiere)

Cycle (Netherlands)

Directors/Screenwriters: Matunda Groenendijk, Amit Palgi, Producer: Amit Palgi 
Cycle starts with three words: Endlessly, we repeat, alone. Depending on how you order them, you craft a personalised vr poem composed of music, recorded movement and interactive moments. (World Premiere)

A Deception of Senses (Italy)

Directors/Screenwriters: John Volpato, Valentina Temporin, Producers: Ultra, Ferryman Collective 
A Deception of Senses is a narrative experience exploring humanity’s enduring fascination with the deception of perception as a gateway to alternate understandings of reality. (World Premiere)

Escape The Internet (Part 1)

Director/Screenwriter Lucas Rizzotto, Producers: Carolina Rizzotto, Esme Robinson 
Imagine you enter a movie theater, but instead of watching a movie you & the entire audience play a game using your phones. A game about escaping the internet and discovering who the people in the room really are. Yeah, it’s going to be crazy. (World Premiere)

Fabula Rasa: Dead Man Talking (Brazil)

Directors: Luiza Justus, Marcelo Marcati, Producer: Erika Nakayama, Screenwriters: Eduardo Nicolau, Pedro Penna
An interactive VR experience where the story unfolds through real-time conversations with AI-powered characters. Each character listens and talks back with a unique personality, creating an improvised storyline that unfolds differently every time. (World Premiere)

The Forgotten War (France)

Director: Hayoun Kwon Producer: Jang Hyunhee 
In June 1950, the United Nations sent military forces under American command to support the South Korean army, attacked by North Korea and China. The Forgotten War is based on the testimonies of the various protagonists of this major war event. (World Premiere)

Frustrain: Trainman (Estonia, France)

Director: Pavel Pavlyukov, Producers: Georgy Molodtsov, Pavel Pavlyukov, Screenwriters: Pavel Pavlyukov, Anna Pimen, Kirill Komarov
A first-person anti-utopian narrative blending puzzles and psychological horror, set in a surreal Eastern European world where a train becomes a gateway to fragmented memories and distorted realities. (World Premiere)

The Great Dictator: A participatory AI installation about power, rhetoric, and memory

Director: Gabo Arora, Producers: Prashast Thapan, Nishant Mohanchandra, John Clendenen, Yuval Shapira, Wilson Brown, Gabo Arora 
Like Chaplin’s masterpiece, we use performance and cinema to examine the power—and danger—of rhetoric. (World Premiere)

Inter(mediate) Spaces (Germany)

Director/Producer: Chloé Lee 
Inter(mediate) Spaces is a poetic mixed-reality encounter where two strangers reshape a shared world through dialogue and proximity, moving through collective memories to ask whether AI can support deeper connection in an age of disconnection. (World Premiere)

Lionia Is Leaving (Slovakia)

Director/Producer: Volodymyr Kolbasa, Screenwriter: Lucas Abrahao
In war-torn Ukraine, an elderly man must decide whether to abandon his lifelong home or face destruction — an immersive mixed-reality drama based on the true story of Lionia and his account of the war’s beginning in the small town of Okhtyrka. (World Premiere)

loss·y

Director: Lisa Jamhoury 
Situated at the physical-virtual threshold, loss·y memorializes corporeal passing and digital rebirth. The work intertwines animated sculptural “dances” with interactive spatial audio, inviting audiences to navigate invisible thresholds as they move. (World Premiere)

Love Bird

Director: Cameron Kostopoulos 
Welcome to Love Bird, the reality dating show where YOU are the star. Win hearts, stir drama, charm the nation—or crash and burn while trying. (World Premiere)

Watsonville

Director: Cory McKague 
In this immersive VR horror set in 1990s Watsonville, navigate a surreal childhood haunted by generational trauma, vanishing identity, and monsters both real and imagined—where memory itself becomes a maze. (World Premiere)

Winterover (Canada)

Directors/Screenwriters: Nir Saar, Ido Mizrahy, Producers: Nimrod Shanit, Francois Le Gall, Marion Guth, Ido Mizrahy, Nir Saar 
A groundbreaking discovery on Mars delays your return to Earth, sending your daughter into a tailspin. Caught between saving her and completing your mission, you must navigate these clashing paths in a gripping VR thriller. (World Premiere)

XR Experience Spotlight

Masterful immersive art from around the world. 

The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up (Taiwan)

Director: Singing Chen, Producers: Singing CHEN, SUNG Chin-Hsuan, Screenwriters: Singing CHEN, LOU Yi-An
Guided by fragments of a lost voice, a man journeys through memory and myth to find what was left unsaid. (North American Premiere)

The Dollhouse (Canada, Luxembourg)

Directors/Screenwriters: Charlotte Bruneau, Dominic Desjardins, Producers: Rayne Zukerman, Hélène Walland, Christian Newman
In the unfolding paper world of The Dollhouse, a little girl uses the power of play to untangle her troubled memories. (U.S. Premiere)

Fillos do Vento: A Rapa (Spain)

Directors: Brais Revalderia, Maria Fernanda Ordonez Morla, Producers: Maria Fernanda Ordonez Morla, Alberto Jose Rey Basteiro 
In the hills of Galicia, the ancient Rapa das Bestas festival becomes a modern-day Quixote story, as villagers battle to preserve their wild horses and cultural heritage against the looming “giants” of industrial wind farms. (North American Premiere)

The Great Orator (Netherlands)

Director: Daniël Ernst 
Visitors join the Great Orator, once a famous TV preacher and now an AI, in a nonlinear VR Story World. Her followers join her in a shared consciousness, where a live news feed and their memories feed her stories. The Great Orator is never the same. (North American Premiere)

Insider Outsider (France)

Director: Philippe Cohen Solal, Producers: Lucid Realities (Alessandra Bogi), Science & Mélodie (Philippe Cohen Solal), Grand Palais RMN, Centre Pompidou, CDA Enghiens Les Bains 
INSIDER-OUTSIDER is an interactive virtual reality musical experience inspired by the life of Henry Darger, a world-renowned “outsider artist” whose work remained unknown until his death. (North American Premiere)

Lacuna (Netherlands)

Directors: Maartje Wegdam, Nienke Huitenga Broeren, Producer: Corine Meijers and Ilja Kok, Screenwriter: Maartje Wegdam
Sonja has no memory of the crucial moment in her childhood that saved her life. The discovery of three long-lost rings spark a riveting journey into imagination. Wander through a deeply personal VR documentary between what is left and what is lost. (North American Premiere)

Lesbian Simulator (Netherlands)

Director: Iris van der Meule, Producer: Corine Meijers, Screenwriter: Iris van der Meule
‘Lesbian Simulator’ is an interactive virtual reality artwork and videogame that immerses the user in the experiences of a lesbian. It’s an ode to sexual orientation and love with a serious issue: the discrimination that lesbians still face today. (International Premiere)

A Long Goodbye (Belgium)

Directors: Kate Voet, Victor Maes, Producers: An Oost, Emmy Oost, Donato Rotunno, Richard Valk, Screenwriters: Kate Voet, Victor Maes
The heart remembers. (North American Premiere)

Lost Love Hotline (United Kingdom)

Directors: Niki Harman, Producer: Lee Nicholls, Niki Harman, Screenwriter: Niki Harman
An immersive XR experience transforming personal heartbreak into a reverent, evolving audio archive, where participants leave a message for their heartbreak, lost, forgotten or imagined. Together, they form a collective mythology of longing. (International Premiere)

Out of Nowhere (Austria, Germany)

Directors: Kris Hofmann, Andreas Wuthe, Producers: Kris Hofmann, Richard Pusch, Screenwriter: Ira Wedel
Our weather is getting angrier. Everywhere. By protecting nature, we can protect ourselves. What happens if we fail to do that?(North American Premiere)

Spectacular: The Art of Jonathan Yeo in Augmented Reality (France, United Kingdom)

Director: Jonathan Yeo
A unique artistic experience conceived by British artist Jonathan Yeo in collaboration with Snap AR Studio Paris. It offers a playful, futuristic vision of museum visitation and a personalized journey into the heart of Yeo’s pictorial universe. (International Premiere)

XR Experience Special Event

Celebrating exciting, out-of-the-box ways artists are using technology to bring their art to life.

Layers of Place: Austin (U.S.)

Producers: MIT Open Documentary Lab, Sarah Wolozin, Akmyrat Tuyliyev, Courtney B. Cook, Rashin Fahandej, Halsey Burgund
Layers of Place encourages exploration of often unseen dimensions of Austin’s public spaces—changing our relationship to place and each other through a co-created collection of six location-based AR experiences. (World Premiere)

Projects include:

The Founders Pillars

Directors: Meghna Singh, Lesiba Mabitsela, Simon Wood
Transform neoclassical pillars into memorials confronting histories of slavery through futurist AR

Humble Monuments

Directors: Nadav Assor, Rashin Fahandej, Joanna Wright
Reimagine overlooked urban ecology as living monuments to coexistence, resilience & climate futures

Moving Memory

Director: Lori Landay
An AR experience bridging memory, nature, and technology through layered public art ft. Kempelen’s Owls

Open Access Memorial

Director: Yucef Merhi
AR memorial honoring Aaron Swartz, internet pioneer, activist, and advocate for open access

Oryza: Healing Ground

Director: Tamara Shogaolu
AR installation using Afrocentric AI to reimagine colonial archives, centering Black land stewards

Paper Boat

Directors: Mathieu Pradat, Sahar Sajadieh
Playable AR artwork confronting sea level rise through floods, melting glaciers & plastic waste

Zoe Saldaña Just Made Box Office History

After a few years of trailing behind Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson, Zoe Saldaña just leapfrogged them to become the highest-grossing actor of all time, thanks to the success of Avatar: Fire and Ash. Congrats, Zoe!

According to The Numbers, Saldaña’s movies have now made $15.47 billion at the global box office. The Avatar movies, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movies, and the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy have all contributed to the actress’s staggering box office total, which she acknowledged by thanking the directors of those movies in a social media video marking the milestone.

“I just want to express my sincerest gratitude for the extraordinary journey that has led me to become the highest-grossing film actor of all time today,” she said. “An achievement made possible entirely, entirely by the incredible franchises and the collaborators that I have been fortunate enough to be a part of, to every director who placed their trust in me.”

“Your unwavering support, passion and loyalty are the true foundation of this milestone,” Saldaña added. “None of this exists without you showing up time and time again with open hearts and enthusiasm. This accomplishment belongs to all of us, and I’m deeply grateful and profoundly humbled. And may the next record breaker be another woman!”

Saldaña seems happy to be the reigning queen of the global box office, with Johansson and Jackson now at numbers two and three, respectively. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Pratt, and Tom Cruise are fourth, fifth, and sixth, while Chris Hemsworth, Vin Diesel, Chris Evans, and Dwayne Johnson fill out the rest of the top ten. There are only three other women in the top 30: Emma Watson, Karen Gillan, and Elizabeth Olsen.

From a quick glance, you can see that a big chunk of these box office dollars is Marvel dollars, with Watson ranking higher due to her involvement in the Harry Potter franchise, Vin Diesel grabbing some Fast & Furious success, and Tom Cruise dishing out regular installments of Mission: Impossible.

Now that the Potter and Mission: Impossible movies are done, and the Fast & Furious franchise is struggling, we should see some fresh faces start to make waves at the box office soon. However, Saldaña will still give them a run for their money – she still has two more Avatar movies on the way.

Avengers: Doomsday Directors Confirm the Trailers Are Clues

A fourth teaser for Avengers: Doomsday has hit the web this week, and this one features Shuri, M’Baku, and Ben Grimm meeting in the desert. Elsewhere, in a similar desolate plain with embedded stone structures, Namor and his crew are also dealing with an unseen event. Why would the Wakandans, the Fantastic Four, and Namor be out in a desert? It certainly seems far from home.

Well, we’ll come back to that because we need to talk about the Russo brothers’ comment on this new trailer first: “What you’ve been watching for the last four weeks… are not teasers. Or trailers. They are stories. They are clues… Pay attention,” was their caption on social media.

Let’s get the cynical take out of the way. The directing duo could absolutely be trying to drum up hype here and nothing more. There could be nothing more we could glean from these trailers (and they are technically trailers, yes). The Russos’ caption could just be nonsense designed to keep us interested in the upcoming Marvel movie, which is still 11 months away. That’s a fair take.

But this is Den of Geek, chums, so we’re not going to spend any more time on the cynical take! We’re going to have a proper think about what the Russo Bros. meant by this.

There are (surprisingly) quite a few notions to mull over. One idea that’s been floating around is that Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars will both be split into two movies, and these four trailers represent the four movies coming our way. This seems very unlikely. It is quite hard to keep two additional whole-ass movies a secret, especially when planning releases around exhibitors. Is it possible, though? Mmmmaybe, but a stretch.

More intriguing is the idea that the footage we’ve seen in these trailers won’t even appear in Avengers: Doomsday. What we’ve witnessed to date are simply stories from the multiverse. Cap raises a family in one timeline. Thor wishes for a return to his daughter in another. The X-Men face a Sentinel threat in the third. And now, our mix of Shuri, Namor, M’Baku, and Ben is far from home. Some have even pondered whether these events could be taking place in different areas of Battleworld, the fictional patchwork planet that serves as a setting for various Secret Wars comic events. Both of these theories are interesting.

But another theory is also compelling, and rooted in what little we know about MCU Doctor Doom so far. We have only seen him in a post-credits scene at the end of Fantastic Four: First Steps, where he was ingratiating himself with little Franklin Richards. Could these “stories” be clues to Doom’s master plan? After all, the first trailer shows Steve Rogers and his baby, a baby that isn’t supposed to exist, a baby that he created with Peggy Carter after using time travel. In the second trailer, Thor is focused on his daughter, Love, recreated from Gorr’s Eternity wish. In the third trailer, the X-Men are located in the ruins of Xavier’s School. What’s missing? The children.

This theory also applies to the new fourth trailer. Shuri says she’s lost everyone that matters to her. We know that certainly wasn’t true before Avengers: Doomsday because she discovered she had a nephew at the end of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – T’Challa’s and Nakia’s child, Toussaint. Franklin Richards is also nowhere to be seen here. So, has Doom taken the children? If he has, what does he want with them?

Not to go full Columbo, but just one more thing: both Marvel and Robert Downey Jr., who plays Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, posted a brief shot of the empty desert instead of the full teaser in their social media stories, which has led us to believe that this fourth trailer might have visually scrubbed someone important from that meeting. There’s quite a big space next to Ben Grimm – it could very well be Victor von Doom standing there.

Things may or may not become clearer as we get closer to Avengers: Doomsday. We’re expecting at least a couple more trailers before then, but whether they will help us unravel the mystery of Doctor Doom (and why he looks exactly like Tony Stark) remains to be seen.

The Most Anticipated Books of 2026: Fantasy, Romantasy, Horror Sci-Fi, Sequels, and More

Less than two weeks into 2026, and many of us are already questioning whether anyone checked out the terms and conditions before starting on this particular adventure. But when the real world is…well, less than great, you can always count on books to come through. And that’s what appears to be happening this year, as buzzy new releases, highly anticipated sequels, and exciting new work from established favorites will all be hitting shelves this year.

Romance and romantasy continue to power the publishing industry, offering plenty of swoon-worthy escapism from the horrors of the real world, but don’t count out genres like horror and science fiction, both of which continue to wrestle with timely, meaningful questions about our current moment and the kinds of people who have helped create it. Whether you’re looking for a cozy respite, smart social commentary, queer retellings, or just a straight-up bonkers good time, there’s truly something for everyone hitting shelves this year.

Here are 20 of the biggest books everyone should be looking forward to reading in 2026.

All the Little Houses by May Cobb

Release Date: January 20 from Sourcebooks Landmark

The latest decadent twisty thriller from the author of The Hunting Wives, All the Little Houses is possibly May Cobb’s wildest book yet. Which, you know, is kind of saying a lot. Set in a small town in East Texas during the 1980s and featuring everything from trad wives to new money elite trying to hide their poverty-stricken roots, the story follows a codependent mother-daughter duo who don’t quite fit in and whose toxic relationship is like watching a car crash. But when a religious, extremely traditional family — modest dress, wholesome hobbies, and all — arrives in town, things take a dramatic (and dangerous) turn. 

A story with everything from infidelity and social climbing to love potions and murder, All the Little Houses is one of those books that feels like the guiltiest of summer pleasures in an otherwise depressing time of year.

The Wolf and the Crown of Blood by Elizabeth May

Release Date: January 27 from Aria

A steamy dark romantasy from the author of the underrated The Falconer trilogy, Elizabeth May’s The Wolf and the Crown of Blood is not a story for the weak of heart. Mixing dark fairytale vibes, gothic romance, and a series of trigger warnings, you absolutely must make sure you read before you dive in, this story of a princess who must die as a sacrifice to a storm god every 14 days so that her blood can be used to keep the world of gods and the human realm separate. But when rebellion stirs and Bryony loses Alexios’ protection, he sends an immortal assassin to take her life. If you haven’t guessed by now, that’s the furthest thing from what happens between them, you’ve clearly never read a romantasy before.

Featuring lush world-building, a heroine full of rage, a deftly executed enemies-to-lovers romance, and lots of spice, this is a fantasy romance that more than stands out from the pack. 

Superfan: A Novel by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Release Date: February 3 from Flatiron Books

A story of obsession, fandom, and how the two can intersect in both heartwarming and horrifying ways, Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s Superfan feels rather perfect for the moment we’re finding ourselves in, pop culturally speaking. 

The story follows Minnie, a young woman who becomes a fan of the boy band HOURglass and becomes a regular in the forums that love them. She’s particularly attached to the group’s bad boy, Halo, and steps up to defend him when he’s enveloped in a scandal that threatens to cancel him. A story about tragedy, redemption, and the performance of self — whether we’re famous in real life or just online — its a must-read for anyone whose ever found themselves part of fandom spaces.

Queen of Faces by Petra Lord

Release Date: February 3 from Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

A thoughtfully written YA fantasy that explores identity and self-actualization in a world where the wealthy can buy and swap bodies at will, Queen of Faces is both incredibly timely and incredibly compelling. 

In the nation of Caimor, it’s possible to transfer one’s consciousness into a fabricated form known as a chassis. Most citizens find even the most basic models prohibitively expensive, while the poor are stuck if their original bodies happen to contract a deadly illness. This is what happened to Annabelle Gage, a young student and aspiring mage who’s spent the better part of the last decade trapped in a deteriorating male body because it’s all her family could afford when she became terminally ill as a child. But when she’s caught trying to steal a replacement, she’s faced with an impossible choice: become an assassin for the head of an elite magical academy or face death in her decaying body. Sophisticated characters, intersectional storytelling, and plenty of twists keep the pages flying. 

Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett 

Release Date: February 17 from Del Ray

For those who are already aching to escape the…well, everything, of 2026, look no further than the year’s ultimate cozy fantasy from the author of the (also excellent) Emily Wilde series. Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, an endlessly warm and charming story about a woman who runs a cat rescue in an alternate version of 1920s Montreal and must seek out the help of a grouchy magician who almost ended the world to help save her shelter.

Yes, you can absolutely guess what happens next simply by reading the synopsis, but its cozy predictability is a big part of the fun. A love letter to the complicated relationship between humans and cats, as well as a gentle and super satisfying slow burn love story, this is the book to chase away your winter blues. 

The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan

Release Date: February 24 from Tor Books

Cameron Sullivan’s debut is one part alternate historical fiction, one part horror story, and one part dark fantasy. An ambitious retelling of the legend of the Beast of Gévaudan, The Red Winter is set in the 18h century, just before the French Revolution. It follows the story of an immortal monster slayer, the demon who shares his body, and the ex-lover he has a devastating history with as they’re drawn back into the hunt for a legendary (and deadly) creature. And it includes everything from demons and sorcery to a brewing revolution, ancient gods, and a surprisingly nifty twist on Joan of Arc.

A sprawling epic that boasts deft plotting, a complex grasp of both history and mythology, and a sly, biting sense of humor, The Red Winter is gruesome, fascinating, and darkly romantic by turns. 

Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward

Release Date: February 24 from Tor Nightfire

A Gothic horror novel that’s basically Peter Pan meets Lord of the Flies, Nowhere Burning is the latest tale from the always excellent Catriona Ward, author of such bangers as The Last House on Needless Street and Looking Glass Sound. A horror writer whose stories are usually more about psychological fears and atmospheric vibes than outright gore, Ward’s Nowhere Burning follows a pair of siblings who flee an abusive home only to discover something much darker during their escape.

In the unforgiving landscape of the Rocky Mountains, they discover an abandoned ranch known as Nowhere, now a hideout for runaways and populated by a feral pack of disturbing (and deeply disturbed) teens. (Shades of Yellowjackets, anyone?) But as a chain of secrets and consequences unravel, they’ll discover ghosts of many sorts haunt this alleged safe haven. 

Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall

Release Date: March 10 from Tor Books

The science fiction debut from romance author Alexis Hall — best known for titles like Boyfriend Material and Roasline Palmer Takes the Cake — Hell’s Heart is a retelling of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick like you’ve never seen before. Set in a retro-futuristic solar system where humanity hunts giant space monsters known as Leviathans to harvest a hallucinogenic substance that is now its only source of fuel, the story follows a female narrator as she boards the Pequod and becomes enmeshed in the story of a genderbent Ahab and Ishmael. 

Steampunk and dark fantasy elements mark a real swerve for Hall as a storyteller, and Hell’s Heart’s grim, dystopian worldbuilding is fascinating to watch unfold. One of the year’s weirdest and wildest titles.

Innamorata by Ava Reid

Release Date: March 17 from Del Ray

Author Ava Reid’s works — The Wolf and the Woodsman, Lady Macbeth, Juniper and Thorn — have long wrestled with dark themes and adult subject matter, but it sounds as though her next offering will take things to the next level. The first installment in her House of Teeth duology, Innamorata is described as a grimdark gothic fantasy about necromancy, vengeance, and soul-consuming love. 

It follows the story of Lady Agnes, heir to a fallen house of eldritch magic, who must betroth her beloved cousin to a conqueror’s son for a chance at reclaiming her family’s lost power. But when she herself is unexpectedly drawn into a forbidden passion with the prince, she must decide between duty and desire.

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher

Release Date: March 24 from Tor Nightfire

Alongside her popular fantasy offerings like Swordheart, A Sorceress Comes to Call, and Hemlock & Silver, T. Kingfisher is also quite a prolific horror writer. Her Fall of the House of Usher-tinged Sworn Soldier series is a masterpiece of literary body horror, while her recent Snake-Eater told the story of a vengeful god in a remote U.S. desert. With Wolf Worm, Kingfisher takes us to the dark North Carolina woods of 1885 for her most visceral effort yet. 

Full of immaculate Southern Gothic vibes and lush atmosphere, the story follows a talented scientific illustrator who is left without work following her father’s death. (Let’s face it, the late 19th century wasn’t exactly welcoming to the idea of women in the sciences.) So when a reclusive doctor offers her a position painting his collection of insects, she leaps at the chance. What she doesn’t realize is thre are creepier and darker things than bugs in the Carolina forest, where the devil is rumored to walk at night, and a rash of disturbing killings lurks in its history.

The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson

Release Date: March 31 from Erewhon Books

A haunted house story with a real-world twist, The Curse of Hester Gardens is as much about the horrors we face every day as it is the terrors of the supernatural. The ghosts that haunt the titular public housing project are uncanny and frightening, but equally as terrifying is the specter of gun violence that haunts its residents, by the seemingly unending cycle of poverty that keeps them trapped within a system that they can’t escape. 

The story follows single mother Nona, who has already lost a husband to prison and a son to violence and is determined to keep her other children safe. But when strange and otherworldly occurrences start happening all around the community, she’s left wondering not only whether she can keep her kids safe, but whether they’re being forced to pay for the sins of her own past. 

The Fourth Wife by Linda Hamilton

Release Date: March 31 from Kensington Books

Described as The Hacienda meets Sister Wives, this feminist Gothic horror story mixes little-known Mormon folklore with stories from author Linda Hamilton’s own polygamous ancestors. Set during the late 19nth century in the Utah territory, The Fourth Wife follows the story of young Hazel, who dreams of a life of the sort of monogamy and freedom she’s forbidden by the Mormon church. She knows such things are sinful, so when she’s ordered to become the fourth wife of a man she’s never met, she submits to her calling as a sister wife in the name of saving her immortal soul.

Life in her new husband’s decrepit Salt Lake City mansion — where all his wives and children live under one roof —  is not precisely what she expected. Her fellow sister wives resent her and keep secrets, she’s having terrible nightmares, and suddenly sees strange apparitions that fill the halls with music and make the walls run blood. Defly blending paranormal and psychological horror with religious trauma, it’s a story that makes you wonder who the real monsters are throughout.

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Release Date: May 5 from Tor Books

The eighth installment of Martha Wells’s wildly popular Murderbot Diaries series arrives this spring — and if you haven’t sampled the Apple TV+ adaptation, please consider this a plea to fix your life immediately — and dives further into the emotional evolution of everyone’s favorite SecUnit, with plenty of snide commentary and awkward interactions on top. 

When things go badly awry on a rescue mission involving several of Dr. Mensah’s family members, Murderbot finds itself in unforeseen circumstances, responsible for a bunch of humans it doesn’t know, including multiple human children. Regular readers of the series know this is brand new territory for it, and with the addition of a new mental health module complicating everything, we’re primed to see just how far SecUnit has really come since its first adventure.

Broken Dove by Dani Francis

Release Date: May 12 from Del Ray

The sequel to one of last year’s buzziest romantasy releases, this follow-up to Silver Elite promises even more dystopian world-building, complicated plot twists, buried secrets, and steamy romance.

 Having blown her cover as a double agent in the Silver Elite squad, Wren Darlington has fled the Prime-controlled capital to resistance-controlled territory, leaving her lover and former commander, Cross, to keep up his own double life under the thumb of his father’s rule. But as the war between the Mods and the Primes escalates further, she’ll have to decide what she’s truly fighting for — and what she’s willing to lose to win. 

The Tapestry of Fate by Shannon Chakraborty

Release Date: May 19 from Harper Voyager

The highly anticipated sequel to Shannon Chakraborty’s The  Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, this follow-up returns us to the world of semi-retired pirate legend Amina al-Sirafi, a middle-aged woman who thought her days of sailing the high seas were behind her. (Narrator voice: They were very much not.) This second set of adventures sees Amina charged with a seemingly impossible task: Steal a spindle capable of rewriting fate from a mysterious sorceress who lives on an island no one can escape. 

Chakraborty’s first installment in this series was refreshingly unlike almost anything else in the fantasy space, featuring immersively detailed world-building, an assortment of intriguingly oddball side characters with complex relationships that predate the interactions we saw on the page, and a heroine whose lived experiences include plenty of mistakes, flaws, and choices she’d do over if she could. Wherever this adventure takes us next will surely be worth it. 

The Midnight Train by Matt Haig

Release Date: May 24 from Viking

Matt Haig returns to the world of his bestselling The Midnight Library for this time-traveling love story about a train that allows you to relive the past after you die. The Midnight Train follows Wilbur, an eighty-year-old who climbs aboard to revisit the junctures in his life that made him who he is — particularly his honeymoon with his beloved Maggie, before their relationship fell apart — and forces him to face the choices and regrets he accumulated along the way.

When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop? And if you had the chance to make different choices, would you take the risk to do so?

Land: A Novel By Maggie O’Farrell

Release Date: June 2 from Knopf

As the debate rages about how well Hamnet will fare during this year’s awards season, book lovers are already gearing up for author Maggie O’Farrell’s next novel, a sweeping historical story of Irish history and resilience. Titled Land, it is set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. 

The immersive and poignant story follows Tomás, charged with making a map of Ireland around the time of the country’s Great Famine in the mid-19th century, whose life is changed forever following an unsettling encounter in a mysterious copse. Infused with history and brimming with folklore and magic, Land spans multiple POVs and generations, the story of both a family and the place they eventually come to call their own. Bring tissues. 

Foundling Fathers by Meg Elison

Release Date: June 23 from Tachyon Publications

We’re living through a moment where some of the craziest science fiction ideas suddenly don’t seem so far fetched anymore, thanks to things like AI, surveillance tech, and the ubiquity of smartphones. (Plus, a billionaire class that keeps launching products with names like Palantir and Sauron. Read the room, guys!) That’s the basic idea behind Meg Elison’s Foundling Fathers, a scathing takedown of billionaire culture that sees a shadow right wing cabal clone the Founding Fathers in the name of returning America to its original glory. 

But when the cloned teenage version of Benjamin Franklin accidentally discovers a smartphone on the isolated island where they’re all being raised like it’s 1750, history and the future collide in unforeseen ways.

Reliquary by Hannah Whitten

Release Date: August 11 from Orbit

Author Hannah Whitten is best known for her lush fantasy books like For the Wolf and The Foxglove King, but she’s set to make her horror debut with the creepy (and equally sumptuous-looking) Reliquary. 

The story follows a woman grieving the sudden death of her fiancé, who had more than his fair share of secrets, not to mention a truly bizarre aversion to the ocean. But when she’s lured to his family’s remote island estate to attend his wake, she’ll find much more than she bargained for, from eerie family secrets to a monstrous hunger stirring beneath the sea.

The Knave and the Moon by Rachel Gillig

Release Date: September 1 from Orbit

The follow-up to last year’s outstanding Gothic fantasy, The Knight and the Moth, The Knave and the Moon, promises higher stakes, darker mysteries, and deeper longings. The story essentially picks up where its predecessor left off, with ex-Diviner Sybill forced into a marriage not of her choosing and Rory Myndacious, Maude Bauer, and Bartholomew the gargoyle missing and rumored to be dead. 

But when the new King of Traum, Benji, decides to throw a series of tournaments to display his newfound power over the kingdom, the arrival of a mysterious knave with no memory who rises to the top of the list may be the key to his undoing — and Sybil’s chance to vanquish him.