Avengers: Doomsday Is Way Too Late for Shang-Chi’s Return

No one was really too worried when Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings broke from the usual MCU model by following its final post-credits scene not with “Shang-Chi will return,” but rather “The Ten Rings will return.” After all, the second post-credits scene showed Shang-Chi’s sister Xialing taking her father’s place as the new head of the terrorist organization, so it made thematic sense. And Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was an enormously entertaining film, so surely Simu Liu would be back soon as the title character, right?

Turns out, the answer is, “Wrong.” Shang-Chi has been missing from our screens since 2021, and will finally return in Avengers: Doomsday. According to Liu, the wait was worth it. “I was so stunned by the fan response to the first film … [and it] definitely set off some sort of expectation in my mind that the character journey would be paid off somehow,” he told Empire. “When Doomsday came around, I was like, ‘This feels right.'” Happy though we may be for Liu’s feelings about his character, we respectfully disagree. We should have had at least one Shang-Chi sequel before Doomsday.

For those who have been following the steady onset of superhero fatigue, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a pleasing outlier. For most, fan interest peaked with Avengers: Endgame, which put a nice button on the shared universe experiment that we’ve all been enjoying. No, COVID did not help, nor did the decision to follow Spider-Man: Far From Home, the first MCU movie released after Endgame and proper hit, with the lackluster prequel Black Widow. But generally, MCU movies have felt more shoddy since 2019.

Along with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and the cameo-laden mega-hits Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine, Shang-Chi is a rare, under-appreciated bright spot. Liu puts in a star-making performance as a West Coast slacker who reveals himself to be the Master of Kung Fu, forced back into action to confront his warlord father Wenwu, played by the legendary Tony Leung. While the movie does devolve into sludgy, stock MCU visuals in its final act, director Destin Daniel Cretton manages to bring enough Wuxia influences to make the film feel distinctive, giving the MCU its best action sequences.

By the time Liu stood toe-to-toe with Ryan Gosling as a rival Ken in Barbie, it was clear that we should have had multiple Shang-Chi sequels in production. But that never happened.

On one hand, we can see why. After Shang-Chi, Marvel moved Cretton to the big leagues, tasking him with directing the next two Avengers movies, The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars. Presumably, Cretton would have taken Liu with him, making Shang-Chi a centerpiece of the latest incarnation of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.

But between the tepid response to Kang’s proper debut in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Kang actor Jonathan Majors’ off-screen behavior getting him fired, Marvel decided to radically refocus. Gone was The Kang Dynasty from the schedule, replaced by Doomsday. Now, Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo would return to helm the film, moving Cretton to Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Between Brand New Day‘s huge box office numbers and the excitement around Doomsday, it’s hard to argue that Marvel made the wrong choice. But still, we can’t help but be annoyed by the lack of Shang-Chi.

The MCU has long tried to do multiple genres within its franchise (remember people saying Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a paranoid thriller?), but rarely had it done so as well as Shang-Chi. The character’s kung fu fighting style feels distinct from the choppy brawling and CG laser-blasting common to other entries. Furthermore, Shang-Chi as a character puts an interesting twist on the core MCU hero archetype. Like Tony Stark, Shang-Chi has to atone for past mistakes, albeit those of his destructive father instead of himself. When he wears the ten rings, he too feels the temptation of corruption. Finally, there’s Liu himself, a winning screen presence who has all the charisma we want from an MCU hero.

That last point may be the most salient, given that Shang-Chi has rarely carried a solo book long since his first appearance in 1973’s Special Marvel Edition #15, by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin. Shang-Chi absolutely has his fans, and he’s recently benefited from an excellent run by Gene Luen Yang, one of the best writers working today. But he’s hardly been an A-lister on the level of the other Avengers.

With Liu in the lead, Marvel could have used Shang-Chi to give the franchise a new direction and properly expand the line. We’re certainly happy he’s back in Doomsday, especially given a prominent set piece against Channing Tatum‘s breakout Gambit. But this should have been the latest in a string of adventures for Shang-Chi, not a long-awaited return.

Avengers: Doomsday arrives December 18, 2026.

James Bond: Robert Pattinson Rumors Could Open the Way for a New Status Quo

Ever since Daniel Craig left the role in 2021’s No Time to Die, we’ve all been wondering who will be the next James Bond. Turns out, we may not have been asking the right question. The real question may be: how will the next James Bond story be told? Will it be a series of stand-alone adventures, as has been the case before the Craig era? Or will modern blockbuster standards demand that Bond continue the ongoing continuity established by Craig’s movies?

We may be getting an answer to both questions at once. According to the latest newsletter from insider Matthew Belloni, Amazon/MGM are making a strong play to secure Robert Pattinson as the next Bond. That play includes a shorter franchise commitment than offered to rivals Josh O’Connor and Jack Lowden, who “were required to sign up for four Bonds, if chosen,” Belloni wrote. He continued, “Pattinson, on the other hand, was able to lower that commitment to three (plus a whole lot more money than the others), given his stardom.” In other words, we might be seeing a trilogy from director Denis Villeneuve and Pattinson, setting a new standard in the world of 007.

Continuity has never been important to Bond, as demonstrated by the opening of 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, when Roger Moore‘s Bond visits the grave of his wife, Tracy. In most cases, it would make perfect sense for a man to think about his late wife. But Tracy only appeared in the sole George Lazenby outing On Her Majesty’s Secret Service from 1969, and the murder rampage that opens Sean Connery‘s return in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever isn’t explicitly his revenge for her death. In fact, the beginning of For Your Eyes Only is the one time that any Bond film directly references Tracy.

As powerful as Diana Rigg’s performance as Tracy was, audiences accepted Bond’s apparent lack of attention toward his late wife. They understood the franchise as a series of stand-alone adventures, so loosely connected that Charles Gray could play British intelligence agent Dikko Henderson in 1967’s You Only Live Twice and then become the third person to portray arch-villain Blofeld onscreen for Diamonds Are Forever, both of which feature Connery.

But the nature of blockbuster cinema has changed. Audiences only understand stakes in terms of ongoing stories, as demonstrated by the way they talk about superhero franchises. The X-Men movies suddenly matter again because they’re being integrated into Avengers: Doomsday, while The Marvels doesn’t really count because it hardly continued the tale of the MCU. The firing of James Gunn isn’t just throwing the entire DCU into turmoil, but it’s making audiences wonder if they should even catch up with an acclaimed series like Lanterns, because the events of that show may no longer count toward future stories.

When Casino Royale rebooted Bond in 2006, it fully embraced modern blockbusters, starting a story that would be told over the next four movies. In fact, the 2008 follow-up A Quantum of Solace picks up directly after Casino Royale, with Bond taking action for the death of Vesper Lynd in a way that makes his avenging Tracy seem downright glacial.

But the Craig era also felt like a major swing away from the established Bond model, perhaps too far afield. Do we want to see the first adventures of a new 007 each and every time? And didn’t that approach run into trouble when Craig grew tired of the role, to say nothing of strikes and COVID, meaning that it took 16 years to tell the full story? Why run that risk in the future?

Focusing on trilogies allows the franchise to split the difference, giving audiences a bit of an ongoing story without overburdening the character. Moreover, as Belloni indicates, a trilogy would also allow more big-name talent to do their take on Bond. Even though notables such as Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Danny Boyle, and Quentin Tarantino have all expressed interest to varying degrees in making a Bond movie, thus far, the franchise’s only auteur was Sam Mendes, then best known for American Beauty. And while every Bond actor has gone on to make a name for themselves, only Pierce Brosnan was fully established when he got the part, and then on the TV show Remington Steele.

A limited, three-picture deal would better draw the attention of people like Villeneuve and Pattinson, offering them the irresistible opportunity to play in such a fabled playground, but not shackling them for forever. And if longtime Bond fans don’t like what the creative team does with the character, they don’t have to give up the franchise forever. They can just wait until the trilogy is done and see if they like the next tenure better.

And even if the whole trilogy thing doesn’t pan out, well, that’s hardly the end of the world. If there’s one thing the Bond franchise has proven, it’s that it can weather all manner of audience shifts and changes in the culture, keeping the adventure going, in one way or another, for more than 60 years.

Sword Art Online’s Creator Just Dropped A New Anime Worth Watching

In the early 2000s, Reki Kawahara unknowingly changed the anime landscape by creating the manga Sword Art Online. Its premise, which saw a teenager trapped in a video game and having to fight for his life, captured audiences’ attention; that audience only increased when the anime adaptation made its debut in 2012. As a result, Sword Art Online became one of the biggest anime franchises of the modern era…and it looks like Kawahara is about to catch lightning in a bottle again with Devil’s Crest.

Devil’s Crest recently dropped its first two episodes on Prime Video, and from the start, it bears a striking resemblance to Sword Art Online. Protagonist Yuuma Ashihara is play-testing a virtual reality game called Actual Magic, and when he can’t log out, it seems like he is about to face the same trials Sword Art Online’s hero, Kirito, did. However, Devil’s Crest takes a major turn when Yuuma escapes the world of Actual Magic…and learns that the game’s monsters are roaming free in the real world, and that he can use the magic abilities from the game.

This effectively makes Devil’s Crest a reverse isekai. For those who aren’t familiar with their anime terms, isekai is short for “another world,” and usually features a character being pulled into a fantasy realm to help save it from a certain threat. Isekai is arguably one of the most popular genres of anime, and Sword Art Online helped pave the way for a wave of these stories, including Re:Zero and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

But the rise of isekai anime also led to a formula that quickly grew well-worn. An event sends a high school student – usually male, usually from Japan – into another world. Said student, who often retreated into video games, learns that he has a special skill or that his time playing video games gives him an advantage. The student fights a horde of monsters, usually under the command of a demon king. Most of the female characters he meets are impossibly beautiful, attracted to him, or both. Rinse and repeat.

Devil’s Crest seems determined to break this formula, as Kawahara introduces a few plot points that set it apart from the usual isekai tropes. First, Yuuma is in middle school instead of high school, meaning he’s dealing with the twin terrors of adolescence and a world being invaded by monsters. Second, most of his classmates are transforming into monsters, so Yuuma has a personal stake in rescuing them rather than assembling a harem of interchangeable female characters. Thirdly, Devil’s Crest grows immensely dark in its premiere: characters die, lose their humanity, and struggle to survive – and the darkness only increases when you remember that these are pre-teens.

In a way, Devil’s Crest seems to be Kawahara’s attempts to fix some of the problems that popped up in Sword Art Online. Most of that series’ critics pointed out that Kirito becoming immensely overpowered, and his love interest Asuna being reduced from a capable fighter to a damsel in distress in later story arcs dampened the series’ promise and led to some of the issues that still plague isekai stories. Kawahara’s work on Devil’s Crest shows that he’s taken those concerns into consideration – and that he’s still capable of delivering stories that reshape the way fans interact with anime.

Clayface Is Already Creating Trouble for DC’s New Status Quo

Clayface is the premier shapeshifter in the DC Universe, a mercurial figure who uses his ability to take any form to wreak havoc on the innocent and the guilty alike. So it’s fitting that the Batman villain’s solo movie would make trouble for the bosses at Skydance. In this case, though, it’s hard to say that Matt Hagen’s the bad guy.

A new report from The Wrap indicates that since James Gunn and Peter Safran were fired from their positions as the heads of DC Studios and replaced by Jeremy Latcham, Clayface is now categorized as an “Elseworlds” film. As other reports about the firing have made clear, Skydance owner David Ellison fired Gunn and Safran in part because their nerd-first approach to superhero movies wasn’t reaching a wide enough audience and, more importantly, wasn’t bringing in enough money. But putting the financially-successful Clayface into the Elseworlds category seems contrary to that goal, precisely because most people have no idea what “Elseworlds” means.

The specific term Elseworlds comes from DC Comics, as the title of an imprint that publishes alternate-reality and out-of-continuity stories about established characters. The first Elseworld’s comic set the tone: 1989’s Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola. Set in 1889 Gotham City, the story pits a Victorian Batman against Jack the Ripper, taking the usual Dark Knight tropes and giving them a unique twist. Other stories under the imprint ranged from 2003’s Superman: Red Son, about a world in which Kal-El crashed in Soviet Russia instead of Kansas, to crossovers with pulp figures like Tarzan and the Martians from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

The concept of Elseworlds goes back even further than 1989, back when DC would label a certain tale an “Imaginary Story,” giving creators license to put heroes in strange situations. Marvel would have its alternate reality stories, long before they gave them a permanent home in the series What If…?, in which Uatu the Watcher would show the reader strange worlds where Spider-Man‘s Uncle Ben survived the fateful burglary attempt and Doctor Doom became a force for good.

In short, Elseworlds give audiences and creators a break from the demands of a shared universe. And that’s a problem for a company that really wants to create a shared universe. Marvel has sequestered its What If…? stories to an easily-skippable animated series, and even then, used the Watcher (voiced by Jeffrey Wright) to painfully explain the episodes’ relationship to the rest of the world.

When DC Studios had James Gunn, he used his large social media presence and nerdy enthusiasm to sell the idea to the public, making it clear that The Batman and Dynamic Duo were not part of the DCU. Case in point: Gunn went online to explain that Clayface would be in the mainline DCU, confirming that the Matt Hagen we meet in that movie was the same guy who fought Frankenstein and Rick Flag in Creature Commandos.

But now Gunn is out as DC Studios co-head, and his persona and social media presence are gone with him. In his place is Latcham, who doesn’t have quite the same following or persona. Thus far, Latcham’s most visible an a frequently reposted interview from June of this year, in which he talked to the conservative Christian Broadcasting Network about making superhero movies that his grandmother would approve of.

That’s hardly a good position for explaining the nitpicks of continuity, even if we weren’t talking about changing the status of a largely well-liked movie. But that’s the position that Skydance has put itself in, firing a guy who was really good at explaining the nerdy stuff to general audiences and replacing him with someone who hasn’t explained anything to anyone yet, all while creating further confusion about the shared universe in the public mind.

The Skydance bosses probably wish they could dismiss such blunders as the work of a malevolent shapeshifter. But Clayface doesn’t exist in real life, so they only have themselves to blame.

Avengers: Doomsday Is Shaping Up To Be A Story About Fatherhood

Most of Avengers: Doomsday’s plot has been shrouded in secrecy. Apart from the fact that this will be the first feature film to bring together the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men, and that Robert Downey Jr. will menace the heroes as Doctor Doom, we won’t really know what goes down until the movie hits theaters on December 18. However, co-director Joe Russo recently shared information that adds a much-needed emotional layer to Doomsday.

During an interview with Empire, Russo discussed Downey’s performance as Doom and how the lord of Latveria is a “Gothic villain” driven by an unspeakable loss: “He’s a father who’s a victim of trauma. He has lost a child. When people see the film they say it’s a very scary movie. It’s scary because he’s so profoundly damaged.” Some (including us) might feel that this is the wrong step to take, especially given that in comics canon Doom already suffered a boatload of trauma when his mother’s soul was stolen by Mephisto. Yet the Russo brothers have drawn a link to Doom and the Avengers via the shared mantle of fatherhood.

Most teasers for Avengers: Doomsday have shown the biggest names in the Marvel Cinematic Universe settling into fatherhood. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is shown hanging up his Captain America suit and holding his newborn son. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is shown praying to his late father, Odin, begging for a peaceful life with his daughter Love – and showing that the Russos are following up on one of the few good parts of Thor: Love and Thunder. Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is shown tearfully embracing his daughter, Cassie (Kathryn Newton). This raises the stakes exponentially: instead of fighting to save all of reality from crumbling, the Avengers now fight for a world in which their children can live in.

Perhaps the biggest example, though, lies with the Fantastic Four. A “special look” for Doomsday revealed that Doom hails from the First Family’s world of Earth-828, while the mid-credits scene for The Fantastic Four: First Steps also shows the metal-clad monarch approaching a young Franklin Richards. This feels extremely in line with Doom’s hatred of Reed Richards in the comics, and what better way to hurt Reed than by taking his child? It also explains Reed’s sheer anger at Doom in the teasers, and an ominous line Doom says: “All of you have lived stolen lives. And now you must give them back.”

Many fans have speculated that this refers to the Avengers’ actions in Avengers: Endgame, which saw them travel through time to collect the Infinity Stones and undo Thanos’s wipeout of half the universe. This more than likely is going to be the reason for the incursions in Doomsday, but it also hints at the possibility that Doom lost his child in one of those incursions – backing up Joe Russo’s words about him being profoundly damaged. It also makes sense why he took Franklin, since in his warped mind he might believe that securing his lifelong enemy’s child makes up for losing his. 

Avengers: Doomsday centering on the theme of fatherhood is rather fitting, given that a lot of fans who’ve been with the MCU since its beginning are probably now fathers themselves. And if Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars do wind up serving as the end of another chapter for the MCU, those fathers are probably going to wind up introducing their children to a big piece of pop culture in the same way my dad introduced me to Star Wars and Star Trek.

Tom and Jerry Have The Weirdest Crossovers

When you think of Tom and Jerry, you probably think of the titular cat and mouse duo causing all kinds of chaos as they chase each other… and Tom subsequently suffering grievous bodily harm. You also probably consider them to be icons in the same way that Scooby-Doo and the Looney Tunes are, given that the duo has been entertaining audiences for over 80 years. What you probably don’t think of when you think of Tom and Jerry is about Kamen Rider…but that’s about to change.

A new collaboration between Kamen Rider MY-TH and Tom and Jerry was recently announced, centered on specialized X-Eggs – the devices that new Kamen Riders MY-TH and Rid – utilize to transform into their armored forms. Promo art also features Tom as MY-TH, Jerry as Rid, and baby mouse Tuffy in his own mini MY-TH suit, which is admittedly adorable. Some fans of both franchises might be scratching their heads at the collaboration, while others feel vindicated that their comparisons of MY-TH and Rid’s color and dynamic to Tom and Jerry is now officially being recognized.

Believe it or not, Kamen Rider MY-TH is far from the biggest franchise that Tom and Jerry have been involved with. Looking across their history, specifically more modern direct-to-video films, it turns out that the destructive duo have been part of some extremely strange crossovers.

For starters, there’s Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes. As you’d expect, the movie has Tom and Jerry crossing paths with the legendary detective and his archnemesis, Professor Moriarty. What’s weird about it is that they serve as assistants to Holmes, rather than getting into their usual antics. In fact, that’s a trend that seems to continue throughout these crossovers: while most of the fun of watching Tom and Jerry is in seeing how Jerry outsmarts Tom, Jerry is just…here while Tom constantly falls into injury after injury.

The problem is only compounded in Tom and Jerry & the Wizard of Oz and Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. As you might have guessed, both of these movies retell the events of The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, respectively, but with Tom and Jerry tagging along for the ride. It begs the question, “why can’t I just watch the original movies?” Watching Tom and Jerry trapped in the tornado that brings Dorothy to Oz or falling into the same chocolate river as Augustus Gloop adds nothing to the story; neither does making Tuffy one of the Munchkins or an Oompa-Loompa. Their presence should disrupt the story thanks to their slapsticks, which would be genuinely interesting.

In fact, the most interesting crossover that Tom and Jerry has ever done is arguably in the Tom and Jerry: Spy Quest movie, where the duo joins forces with none other than Jonny Quest! Not only does it make sense, given that all of the characters involved are from Hanna-Barbera, but the chaos that comes with Tom and Jerry is intact as Tom’s blunder leads to Jonny’s father, Dr. Quest, being kidnapped…and Tom and Jerry having an actual reason to set aside their rivalry since the world’s at stake. It begs the question of why more of these crossovers haven’t been produced – Tom and Jerry Meet Scooby-Doo is a layup, especially given that Scooby’s a dog and Tom’s a cat.

The Tom and Jerry crossovers won’t stop anytime soon, as the duo are slated to appear in a Fortnite update (proving that the first-person shooter is determined to swallow every intellectual property under the sun.) But in the future, here’s hoping that creators stop and think before throwing Tom and Jerry into random stories.

Saluting Enterprise’s Trip Tucker, the Best Character on the Worst Star Trek Show

As time goes on, the golden era of ’90s Star Trek looks better and better. But no matter how much you get annoyed by the teenage antics on Starfleet Academy, and no matter how much you miss 24-episode seasons, you have to admit that Star Trek: Enterprise stinks. The otherwise likable Scott Bakula plays Captain Jonathan Archer as a man both baffled and irritated by new life and new civilizations, he’s saddled with a crew of nobodies like Malcolm Reed and Travis Mayweather, and the time-travel nonsense of the first season gets worse with the post-9/11 bravado of the Xindi War that takes up the second and third seasons.

Still, the show wasn’t a total loss. The series becomes pretty darn good when Manny Coto gets appointed showrunner, and eventually everyone comes to admit that the theme song is a genuine earworm. Moreover, the show does have some great characters, including Jeffrey Combs’ Shran, Jolene Blalock’s T’Pol, and John Billingsley’s Dr. Phlox. Best of all was the guy who shouldn’t have worked at all, a guy whose George W. Bush-style accent and turns genocidal in the Xindi War should have made him age just as badly as the rest of the show. Yet, somehow, Connor Trinneer made Commander Charles “Trip” Tucker III the best character in the worst show, and one of the best Star Trek characters of all time.

Ugly Americans in the Stars

Even though it tried to set itself so apart from the franchise that it even avoided putting “Star Trek” in its title credits for season one, Enterprise wanted to get back to Trek basics. Set 100 before The Original Series, the series had a swaggering captain in Archer, who butted heads against his Vulcan XO and bonded with a folksy human, replicating the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triumvirate from TOS. As Archer guided his ship, the NX-01, into deep space, the duo would help him make sense of the aliens he would encounter in Starfleet’s early, pre-Federation days.

Trip Tucker may not have been a physician like McCoy, but he did take the role of a good ol’ Southerner, slightly annoyed to be in space. In a disastrous plotting decision, Enterprise‘s creators didn’t make Trip the only guy who didn’t immediately like aliens. Archer carried a massive chip on his shoulder for the way Vulcans mistreated his father, Reed (Dominic Keating) resented the fact that he couldn’t carry the family tradition of serving at sea, and even T’Pol initially carried her people’s condescension toward aliens. In fact, only the space-born Mayweather (Anthony Montgomery), the linguist Hoshi Sato (Linda Park), and the open-minded Denobulan Phlox seemed to like trekking through the stars.

However, unlike the other characters, Trip had a certain politeness and Southern charm that allowed him to go willingly into strange situations.

The Unexpected Charm of Trip Tucker

Nothing demonstrates that better than the first Trip-focused episode, “Unexpected” from season 1. Written by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga and directed by Mike Vejar, “Unexpected” sees Trip visit a Xyrillian ship to help with their engine troubles. He quickly bonds with the Xyrillian engineer Ah’Len (Julianne Christie), who tells him about her culture and performs a ritual in which they touch hands and share minds.

Turns out, the ritual was in fact a mating ritual for Xyrillians, a society in which the males carry the pregnancy. Moreover, the physiological treatment Phlox gave Trip before visiting the ship allowed him to be receptive to Ah’Len, which means that he is now pregnant with her child.

“Unexpected” certainly has elements of the space sexiness that Berman and Braga injected into the first half of Enterprise, and the whole concept of a man getting pregnant could play like the Schwarzenegger movie Junior or some other bland boomer joke. But Trinneer keeps things grounded, staying in the mode of a regular guy scared by the surprise changes to his body. He retains a sweetness all the way through, where we find ourselves not laughing (much) at the fact that a man is carrying a child.

Those qualities particularly shine through in perhaps the best Trip Tucker episode, “Similitude” from season 3. Written by Coto and directed by LeVar Burton, “Similitude” introduces a classic Trek dilemma. When Trip gets grievously injured in the show’s open, Phlox recommends creating a rapidly-aging clone to replace the damaged organs. However, the clone quickly shows signs of sentience and agency, forcing Archer and crew to realize that they’re killing one life form to save another.

Trip remains camotose for much of the episode, while Trinneer plays the clone, named “Sim.” The dual performance not only allows Trinneer to play a more openly sweet and innocent character, but also serves as a referendum on Trip as a character, showing us just what a good person he is. As Archer, T’Pol, and others respond to Sim as a mirror for Trip, they realize his importance to not just the ship, but also his importance as a person. In fact, the episode desperately needs us to see that Trip matters as a person so that we accept Sim’s sacrifice and avoid the ongoing debate launched by the spiritually-similar Voyager episode “Tuvix.”

Trip Tucker Must Die

Audacious as “Similitude” is, the gambit works. Thanks to Trinneer’s work in previous episodes, thanks to the strong Trip stories up until this point, we also understand that he must live, even if we lose the innocent Sim in the process. Even more impressive, “Similitude” comes around the same time that Tucker has become more reactionary after the death of his sister in the Xindi War. The scripts may call for him to push Archer toward war crimes, but we treat his actions as an out-of-character response to tragedy. We’re still on Trip’s side.

Of course, the audience’s love for Trip makes the end of Enterprise that much more painful. Not only does the show finally start to find its feet in its fourth and final season, and not only is the finale presented as a holodeck simulation watched by The Next Generation‘s Commander Riker, but Trip suddenly gets killed. Even with the knowledge that non-canonical novels retconned Trip’s death to make him a spy for Section 31 (ugh), the plot point feels every bit like a desperate move to give weight to the episode.

Which it is, and that’s why Trip Tucker had to die. It couldn’t have been one of the other likable characters, T’Pol or Phlox, because they’re both aliens, and it couldn’t have been any of the humans, because audiences don’t care about them. We had to lose Trip for the finale to have any weight, because he’s the best character on the show, the one consistently great part of the otherwise unexceptional Enterprise.

We’re Entering A Golden Age of Actor-Driven Comics

Most people know Giancarlo Esposito from his roles as magnetic, yet sinister figures in shows like Breaking Bad and The Boys. Yesterday, however, Esposito added a new layer to his career, announcing he’d co-write the graphic novel The Venetian. Featuring contributions from co-writer Matt Wheeler (Hawaii Five-O) and storyboard artist Jay Martin, who’s drawn storyboards for movies including Ad Astra, The Venetian centers on retired assassin Matteo Moro returning to his bloody ways after his estranged son is kidnapped. It sounds like the pitch for a killer movie, but Esposito’s been clear that working in comics is truly a passion project.

When speaking to People about The Venetian, Esposito described it as “a noir graphic novel that is incredibly close to my heart” and that it was a chance to “make a lifelong dream a reality.” This approach is a far cry from the old days when an A-list star would simply slap their name on a comic and collect a paycheck. In a day and age where comic books are the foundation for some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, it only makes sense for some stars who are truly passionate about the medium to work within it.

What makes this new age of actor-created comics stand out is that it involves some of the medium’s biggest names. Take BRZRKR, for example. This is a comic that could have simply sailed on the fact that it was co-created by Keanu Reeves, yet Reeves sought out a talented pair of co-creators in the form of Matt Kindt and Ron Garney. Reeves and Kindt wound up penning a compelling tale about the weight of immortality, and Garney’s art is bold, bloody, and uncompromising. It also didn’t hurt that Reeves is a genuine comic book fan, telling Entertainment Weekly when the series was first released: “I have loved comics since I was a young kid and they have been a significant influence on me artistically.”

Another actor who followed in similar footsteps is Iman Vellani. Best known for playing Kamala Khan in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Vellani recently got to write Kamala’s adventures in Marvel Comics proper with Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant and Ms. Marvel: Mutant Menace, which features the size-changing teenage superhero dealing with the reveal that she’s now a mutant. 

But it’s her recent project, Chachu, that’s even more intriguing. Set in the thick of the 1970s, Chachu deals with a Pakistani-Canadian teenager named Leila tracking down her uncle, or chachu, who happens to be a private eye. In the process, she gets swept up in a web of murder and mystery while bonding with the family she never knew. Vellani’s scripting feels in line with noir hits like Chinatown, and Marianna Ignazzi’s artwork depicts Leila as bearing more than a passing resemblance to her co-creator. It’s also proof that Vellani has a bright future ahead of her in the medium if she wants to continue writing comics.

One of the biggest success stories in the acting-to-comics pipeline is Hannah Rose May, who’s becoming a major icon in the horror comics space. The Exorcism at 1600 Penn, which she co-created with Vanessa Del Rey, centers on the brilliant pitch of “What if the White House was haunted?” It’s been so successful that May and artist Kelsey Ramsay delivered a sequel this year titled The Exorcism at Buckingham Palace. 

May’s crowning achievement, though, remains her debut series Rogues’ Gallery, which she co-created with Declan Shalvey (Moon Knight, Time After Time) and Justin Mason (Spider-Punk). Rogues’ Gallery takes an unflinching look at what happens when fandom goes off the rails, as a group of fans dissatisfied with the TV adaptation of one of their favorite comics plans to rob the lead of said show. Things quickly turn gruesome, as May writes a story that shows the lowest lows of Hollywood and feels extremely pointed given how much abuse female actors tend to weather online.

The days of actors writing comics doesn’t seem to be dying down any time soon, but comic book fans can rest assured that there are people in Hollywood who see comics as a passion, rather than part of a spreadsheet.

Avengers: Doomsday is Getting One Thing Right About Doctor Doom (But Maybe Only One Thing)

How do you solve a problem like Victor Von Doom? Don’t ask the producers of the previous two live-action outings of Doctor Doom. The 2005 Fantastic Four movie and its 2007 sequel asked the late Julian McMahon to stay in Nip/Tuck mode, playing Doom as a petulant rich kid running a Fortune 500 company. The 2015 film was even worse, casting Toby Kebbell as Doom a pouty computer nerd who later developed the power to make people’s heads explode. This is a guy who speaks in the third person and wears a green tunic over his metallic armor, a master of the scientific and mystic arts. So why is everyone trying to make him realistic?

Thankfully, Joe and Anthony Russo don’t seem to be taking that direction for Robert Downey Jr.‘s version of Doom in Avengers: Doomsday. “Doom is a Gothic character,” Joe Russo told Empire Magazine, describing him as someone who’s “not above selling his soul to get what he wants.” But as much as it sounds like the Russos are finally doing right by Doom, they then go onto self report a fundamental mistake about the character.

First, let’s talk about what they get right: Doctor Doom is absolutely a Gothic character. Since his first appearance in 1962’s Fantastic Four #5, by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, Doom has gone over-the-top. In that first story, Doom’s plot involved sending the FF back to the 18th century, where the Thing becomes the new Blackbeard the Pirate.

Modern incarnations of the character have fleshed him out, but never backed away from his over-the-top audacity. In the 2003 Fantastic Four arc, Unthinkable, by Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo, Doom sells the soul of his beloved Valeria to the devil, so he can gain the power to destroy the FF for good. In 2015’s Secret Wars, by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribić, Doom makes himself into the God Emperor of a Marvel Universe that he rebuilt in his image. He conquered the planet in last year’s One World Under Doom, by Ryan North and R. B. Silva, and he became the King of Hell in the recent Captain America comics by Chip Zdarsky and Valerio Schiti.

Simply put, Doom is imperious and ambitious, to a degree that would be absurd if he didn’t take it all so deadly seriously, resulting in a character who is thrillingly operatic. According to most versions of his origin, Doom was the son of Romani peasants living in Latveria. Made arrogant by his scientific genius, Doom went to America, where he studied alongside Reed Richards. So bold was Doom that he refused to listen when Reed pointed out an error in the calculations used for a device he built, and when the machine exploded, he blamed Reed and not himself for the failure.

That explosion did something to Doom’s face. It may have completely disfigured him, or it may have left a small scar. But that was enough for Doom to hide his face forever behind steel when he returned to Latveria and began studying magic. Having mastered both magic and science, Doom overthrew the Latverian government and established himself as a benevolent dictator, loved by his people and overseeing a functioning country. So successful is Latveria, and so prideful is Doom, that he has tried to conquer the world time and again, not because of a mere lust for power, but because he believes that the would genuinely benefit from his rule.

Obviously, Doom is not a snarky CEO or a snotty computer genius as he’s been portrayed before. Thus, Anthony Russo was correct when he told Empire, “Doom is much more ego-driven than Thanos, [because] Thanos believed he was serving a greater good.” Doom serves only himself, which he believes is better for everyone else.

But in that same interview, the Russos reveal something about their version of Doom that clangs with depictions we’ve seen elsewhere. As Sue Storm explains in the most recent trailer for Doomsday, the MCU Doom used to be a good, kind man, but he has been driven mad by the loss of his family. Joe Russo doubles down on that interpretation while talking to Empire, calling Doom “a father who’s a victim of trauma. He has lost a child.”

In reality, we understand that the loss of a child could drive one to make terrible decisions. That’s a grounded, believable motivation, one that we regular people can understand. But Doom isn’t regular people and his motivations shouldn’t be understandable. In the comics, Doom’s entire turn toward villainy came because he was too arrogant to accept that Reed Richards did math better than him one time in college. Since then, he’s become a dictator and a god and the rule of Hell all because he can’t get over that fact.

So as much as the Russos correctly identify the scariness of Doom, one can’t help but fear that they’re still not quite getting what makes him the best villain in all of fiction. One cannot help but worry that they’re repeating the mistake they already made with Baron Zemo in Captain America: Civil War, taking a flamboyant and cartoonish baddie and making him into another sad family man.

Doom is not a sad family man, and Doom is certainly not Zemo. Doctor Doom is the type of person who challenges both God and the Devil to conquer the world, and remains confident that he deserves the position. If Doomsday wants to succeed where previous depictions have failed, it must embrace the nonsensical extremes of Doom’s backstory.

Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on December 18, 2026.

Ebenezer Review: A Christmas Carol for Capitalists

It’s been said that Charles Dickens is the Father of Christmas. There’s always been a touch of hyperbole to that statement about a man born some 1800 years after the first Christmas—and several countries away from where Weihnachtsbaum trees had been happily flourishing for generations. When Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, however, he did invent the Victorian Christmas.

By modern standards it looks quite similar to our own today, but with key differences. For starters, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge inspired a renewed public tradition with ghost stories at Christmastime—and not just the story of a miser and three spirits of his past, present, and future. We’re talking ghoulish, depraved tales of macabre suspense with escaped lunatics climbing into your bed on Christmas Eve or ghostly children tapping at the window pane. What became the stuff of Halloween a continent and century over was as Yuletide as mistletoe to the Victorians. Dickens also put the fear of God, not to mention the starving poor, into the wealthy. “Beware them both,” the Spirit of Christmas Present warns Ebenezer about the Children of Man, Ignorance and Want. “But most of all beware [of Ignorance], for on his brow I see written the word which is Doom!”

All of which is a bit of preamble to note that Ti West’s new take in the movie Ebenezer is a kind of fascinating paradox of adaptation. On the one hand, the helmer of such horror cult classics as Pearl and House of the Devil has dialed up the spookiness to its breaking point, landing closer to the grisly short stories Dickens would later publish in the Household Words periodical than the scribe’s own Christmas story. West tells me he wanted this to be a “hard PG,” and if so he landed closer to where they might’ve been in the days of Spielberg standing over a pit of human sacrifice in Temple of Doom. His Ebenezer is so dark, so relentlessly dreary, that it’s frankly hard to imagine any child will find much festive cheer in the thing.

On the other hand, whether by pressure from untold studio execs or chasing his own muses, West has excised or otherwise softened the scathing indictment of the wealthy that defines Dickens’ tale. He wouldn’t be the first. Plenty of Hollywood adaptations downplay the social foreboding in the name of family-friendly entertainment (and perhaps holiday commercialism). But as far as I’m aware, this is the first Scrooge movie that feels like it was designed by the Heritage Foundation, an overeager “both sides” bit of sophistry that suggests Scrooge on the whole is right to be suspicious of the poor, lazy, and two-faced do-gooders who line their pockets with your virtue-signaling donations to charity. It’s A Christmas Carol for folks who think Ebenezer deserves more credit for being a job creator, and perhaps should just let it trickle down a little more fairly to Bob Cratchit, instead of being raked over the coals for his good business acumen.

So it is with Johnny Depp’s introduction as Ebenezer, a wily and acerbic old-timer who no one appreciates except for the even more wily and acerbic Jacob Marley (Ian McKellen), his senior partner at a business where ol’ Marley croaks on Christmas Eve. Seven years later, Scrooge still hasn’t taken down the “Marley and Scrooge” sign, and continues to pay junior clerk Bob Cratchit (Rupert Grint) a pittance for all the work he does. 

That’s not good for Bob’s young boy Tiny Tim (a barely present Freddie Lee-Grey), but Bob accepts this because he insists his family doesn’t need charity like those other moochers presumably in the work houses. Fortunately, his employer will be forced to reevaluate his ways when the ghost of Marley comes on another Christmas Eve to warn Ebenezer he will be visited by three spirits this night in what will be his lone chance for atonement. You probably know the rest, but not the details of how it’s executed. And on a certain aesthetic level, there is plenty to admire about West’s approach to the material.

A definite genre auteur with a distinct visual flavor, often couched in a romantic nostalgia for previous eras of moviemaking, West infuses Ebenezer with a mid-20th century aesthetic better reminiscent of Hammer Studios’ Spooky England of 1960s and ‘70s cinema. While the entire film has a chilly wintry gray overcast to it, the colors of the costumes and set design pop like water balloons on a gloomy day.

Also the visual design of the various Christmas ghosts, most particularly the Spirit of Christmas Past (Andrea Riseborough), provides the film a surprising menace, complete with spectral visions of this wraith stalking Ebenezer’s neglected hearth and halls. It’s definitely Victorian, but as mentioned, it feels more akin to Halloween than Christmas by at least modern standards, and on the whole underplays the festiveness of the material.

It is worth noting that in such an oft-told tale, fresh perspectives and canted angles should be welcome, and West definitely introduces bold flavors to the recipe. Still, the resulting taste is often so sour, and the emphasis so oblique—such as the choice to have the Ghost of Christmas Present (Tramell Tillman) only visit homes on Christmas Eve and never bask in the joys of Christmas morning—that it proves ultimately misjudged.

That might include the elephant in the room of Johnny Depp’s Ebenezer Scrooge. Rascally, capricious, and a bit more mirthful on his misanthropic path to pre-redemption than you might be used to, the performance is full of counterintuitive choices, albeit still a bit drenched in the “argh, avast” variety for a well-known movie pirate. Yet the tics are so mannered, and in a silhouette so encumbered with horror movie regalia (squint and that top hat looks a lot like it belongs in the cabinet of Dr. Caligari), that he seems less a miser in need of redemption than another eccentric character in Depp’s own cabinet of curiosities. Once upon a time, Depp knew how to imbue the most hideous of movie monsters with a soul, including the similarly Victorian-draped Sweeney Todd, but this feels less like a fully realized reclamation arc than it does a bit of whimsical mugging.

Then again it might just be hard to invest in the character’s reclamation when the movie itself seems so cautious about stating what needs to be redeemed. His suspicions of the poor are repeatedly justified by way of Scrooge spotting con artists pretending to be disabled (unlike the truly afflicted young Tim Cratchit), the poor’s advocates among the rich being corrupt fraudsters themselves, and an addition to the fate of ol’ Mr. Fezziwig, Dickens’ literal antithesis to Scrooge’s stinginess, being outright horrific.

Meanwhile subtler implications in the back half, such as just exactly who receives a lavish goose on Christmas Day, and what social-economic class has the right to criticize Ebenezer to his face, whether he’s there as a spirit or not, suggests a quietly more insidious undercurrent about the less-fortunate needing to be kept in their place. Ironically, that is a very Victorian notion as well, but it’s anathema to Dickens and the story he wrote.

Ebenezer is out in theaters on Friday, Nov. 13.

Michael B. Jordan’s Thomas Crown Affair Will Test the Public’s Appetite for Gentlemen Thieves

After his Oscar win for last year’s triumphant Sinners, no one questions Michael B. Jordan‘s star power. And anyone who saw his striking directoral debut Creed III knows that Jordan has an incredible eye. And yet, we can’t help but come away from the trailer for his latest movie, The Thomas Crown Affair, with a few questions.

The trailer looks incredible, splitting between Jordan’s debonair Thomas Crown flirting with an insurance investigator played by Adria Arjona and shots of him scaling buildings and racing through the streets. Like the (somewhat sleepy) 1968 original, starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and the steamier 1999 version with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, this 2027 take on The Thomas Crown Affair promises a spectacular, sexy time. However, this latest take on a gentleman thief comes at a time when the public may be sick of rich people’s adventures altogether, even when they target other members of the 1%.

Based on this trailer and early reports, Jordan’s update on The Thomas Crown Affair will follow the same basic model set by the 1968 movie, directed by Norman Jewison and written by Alan R. Trustman. Thomas Crown is a bored billionaire who passes the time by committing high-profile heists. His actions eventually draw the attention of a seductive investigator, who plays a game of cat and mouse with Crown. The sexual chemistry between the two ups the stakes of their adventures, with Crown trying to pull off his next job and the investigator attempting to thwart him.

Even more so than the 1999 movie, which had an actual James Bond in it, the 2027 update appears to inject some superspy energy. Jordan’s Crown spends plenty of time in a black tux, and he and Arjona visit some exotic locales. Furthermore, he butts heads with a fellow-rich man played by Kenneth Branagh, who certainly knows how to give a Bond-villain level performance.

Pleasurable as all of these qualities are, one has to wonder how much audiences want to see a rich guy steal things, given how much of our culture has been harmed by bad behavior from rich guys. Just take a look at any of our articles about David Ellison firing James Gunn, a relatively low-stakes action, and you’ll see that our patience with the upper classes has waned. Sure, satires and critiques of the rich still have traction—just see the buzz around HBO series such as The Gilded Age, The White Lotus, and Succession. But all of these works present the upper classes as objects of derision, not as fantasy surrogates.

That said, the trailer for Jordan’s Thomas Crown Affair does suggest something of a twist, as does the film’s tagline: “Revenge is a work of art.” The brief image of Crown staring at a building house, and his clear personal grudge against Branagh’s character suggests that he may come from more humble origins. Perhaps his opulence is a persona adopted to strike back against the actually rich Branagh character, injecting some class consciousness into the thriller.

Will that critique work, especially when the trailer indicates that we viewers are supposed to swoon at Crown’s playboy lifestyle? We’ll find out when The Thomas Crown Affair begins next spring.

The Thomas Crown Affair comes to theaters on March 5, 2027

The Wild History of James Bond in Comics

For more than 60 years, James Bond has thrilled movie audiences with his globetrotting exploits – battling a collection of iconic villains, romancing a plethora of beautiful women, and tinkering with various gadgets. 

What Bond observers sometimes forget, however, is that the super spy’s adventures actually began on the page in a series of novels by writer Ian Fleming, who based Bond on a variety of figures he met during World War II. Those same observers also might not realize that Bond has highlighted more than his fair share of comics, and they range from movie retreads to wholly original stories.

Here is a very brief history of 007 in the pages of comic books. 

First up are the movie adaptations, with DC Comics publishing an adaptation of Dr. No in 1962 and Marvel Comics following with adaptations of For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy. It wasn’t until 1989 that fans got an original Bond adventure with Permission to Die, an Acme Press series that was written and illustrated by Mike Grell. Grell brought the same sense of gritty action and character dynamics that drove his iconic run on Green Arrow to Bond, resulting in a story that proved the super spy could outlive his movie counterparts. 

The next publisher to create original Bond comics would be Dark Horse, who acquired the rights from Acme in 1992. Even then, Dark Horse faced issues; the miniseries A Silent Armageddon only saw two of four planned issues released, while the story Minute of Midnight set the stage for a planned James Bond ongoing series that never came to pass. Given that Dark Horse at the time was known for its licensed comics, including Terminator and Star Wars, having a Bond ongoing would have been a great way to expand on the character in between movies.

The longest and most successful run of James Bond comics would come when Dynamite Entertainment acquired the rights to the character. Dynamite was willing to take Bond in a variety of different directions: a modern day series saw writers like Warren Ellis (Planetary) and Benjamin Percy (Wolverine) tackling the super spy, while miniseries were dedicated to Bond’s boss M, his CIA ally Felix Leiter, and M’s secretary Moneypenny. The standout is James Bond Origin by Jeff Parker (Agents of Atlas) and Bob Quinn (Kill Your Darlings). Per its title, Origin follows a young Bond as he fights his way through World War II and eventually joins MI6; astute readers will notice that this mirrors the experiences that led Ian Fleming to create Bond.

2026 marks another major shift for James Bond in comics, as IDW Publishing recently announced that it had acquired the Bond license during New York Comic Con. That’s an exciting development as IDW’s published incredible licensed comics including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sonic the Hedgehog, but the publisher is going all out by getting Grant Morrison to write the opening arc. Considering Morrison’s penchant for writing genre-bending comics that define the medium, like All-Star Superman and New X-Men, they’ll definitely deliver a Bond adventure to remember.

Ian Fleming once famously said, “There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.” After years of the license shifting hands and creative directions, Grant Morrison and IDW might be the ones to finally get more people to keep turning the pages on James Bond comics. 

James Gunn’s Superman Did Have Cultural Impact, Thank You Very Much

The news that James Gunn and Peter Safran were out as heads of DC Studios came as a shock to many fans. Apart from the stumble of Supergirl, a majority of the projects under Gunn and Safran’s tenure were well-received in terms of critical acclaim and box office hauls. Apparently that wasn’t enough for Skydance heads David Ellison and Ynon Kreiz, as a new report from The Hollywood Reporter claims that part of the reason Gunn and Safran were ousted is due to the fact that the Gunn-directed Superman apparently “did not net out, or have the kind of pop culture impact, in the way that kind of movie should” per Skydance’s thinking.

Anyone who’s seen Superman or been on the internet during and after its release knows that this is patently untrue. For starters, let’s look at the competition. 2025’s Superman arrived in what was a packed year for superhero movies, as Marvel Studios dropped Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first two of those Marvel films fell short at the box office, despite the latter receiving rave reviews; First Steps managed to make its budget back, perhaps owing to the fact that it premiered shortly after Superman and had similar vibes. Yet David Corenswet’s Man of Steel soared to the top of the pack, earning over $600 million worldwide.

There’s also Gunn’s previous pedigree. Most fans know him from his work on the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, which took a lesser-known group of Marvel’s spacefaring heroes and turned them into household names. The conventional wisdom at the time was that a movie about a talking tree and a gun-toting raccoon in space would be a massive failure, and yet Gunn’s unique vision proved the opposite – namely, that if you put in the work with characters, they’ll resonate with audiences. Superman’s rehabilitation was no different, as after nearly a decade of movies, comics, and video games trying to stuff him in the same “grim and gritty” box as Batman, Gunn’s movie brought Clark Kent back to wholesome basics…and viewers undeniably responded to that. 

Perhaps the best example of this is the ending of Superman (2025). Following the thwarting of Lex Luthor’s plot to invade Jarhanpur and stopping Metropolis from being ripped apart by a black hole, Superman sits in the Fortress of Solitude as the band Teddybears’ song “Punkrocker” featuring Iggy Pop’s vocals blasts at full volume. It’s a moment that pays off a key line where Superman tells Lois Lane that kindness is “the real punk rock,” and it’s a moment that resonated deeply with fans. “Punkrocker” remixes quickly found their way across social media, with fans even drawing comparisons to Spider-Man in the wake of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (it also didn’t hurt that two Spider-Man/Superman crossover comics were released earlier this year.)

Another prime example of Superman’s cultural impact lies in the presence of Krypto the Superdog. While the canine was a point of contention for fandom – some believing that a dog with Superman’s powers was a bridge too far while others loved that Gunn embraced the more comic booky aspects of Superman’s mythos – Krypto’s appearance led to a noticableincrease in people wanting to adopt a dog. Not only is this fitting, given that Gunn partially based Krypto’s appearance on his own adopted dog Ozu, but it shows that Superman made an impact. That’s truly a mark of success, no matter how much Skydance tries to spin things.

Revisiting Catwoman, DC’s First and Worst Villain Solo Movie

Midway through Clayface, our antihero protagonist Matt Hagen celebrates his renewed celebrity status by engaging in a rousing game of pick-up basketball. The scene sends a shiver down the spines of moviegoers, and not just because it ends with Hagen discovering his regeneration powers, which will eventually lead him down the path of evil. It scares us because we’ve already watched a Batman villain use their powers to play basketball in a movie. And that movie was terrible.

The movie, of course, was 2004’s Catwoman. The scene, of course, found artist Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) encountering Detective Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) playing street ball shortly after her cat powers kicked in, which allow her to… bounce the ball rapidly between her hands? The basketball scene is just one of many inexplicably terrible scenes in Catwoman, and its connection to Clayface is a welcome reminder of just how far the superhero genre has come.

Development Hell Here

These days, when Joker, Clayface, and even Kraven the Hunter get feature films, a movie about Catwoman makes perfect sense. She may have debuted as a burglar called the Cat in 1940’s Batman #1, but she was still a supporting character in someone else’s story. Even in the ‘90s, when she got her first solo ongoing series, she was still seen as a niche character, one who could interest devoted comic book readers, but not a wider audience. Still, Michelle Pfeiffer’s searing take in 1992’s Batman Returns was enough to get Warner Bros. to consider a Catwoman film, spinning out of the enormously successful mainline Batman franchise.

The first version of the movie went into production almost immediately after Batman Returns, with Tim Burton signing on to direct and Pfeiffer planning to reprise her role, alongside screenwriter Daniel Waters. Waters conceived something off-beat and very much in Burton’s wheelhouse, a story in which Selina Kyle leaves Gotham to recuperate in a resort town called Oasisburg, which is run by male superheroes. But when the heroes indulge in their toxic masculinity, Kyle must become Catwoman again to fight back.

Compelling as the idea sounds, Warner Bros. wasn’t interested in an off-beat tale, especially after the mixed reception to Batman Forever. And so, the project remained in limbo while the studio tinkered. First, they lost Pfeiffer, who dropped out to pursue other opportunities. Then Ashley Judd signed on for a while before falling away. Finally, the studio landed on Halle Berry, who wanted a franchise picture after her James Bond spinoff Jinx went south. 

As much as Berry took the blame for the many problems in the movie, her casting wasn’t where Catwoman went wrong. Some of the blame definitely falls on the various screenwriters, including the trio who finally end up with the final credit—John Brancato, Michael Ferris, and John Rogers. But the ultimate blame falls on the man hired to hold the thing together, the mononymic French special effects artist turned director, Pitof.

Nine Lives Lost

To be fair, Catwoman has a terrible story. Gone is all the set-up from Batman Returns, in which mousy secretary Selina Kyle learns to roar after being revived by her cats, who bring her back to life when her evil boss Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) pushes her out of a window. Gone is her flirtation with Batman (Michael Keaton), a fellow weirdo who loves to wear black leather and hang out on rooftops.

Instead, Berry plays Patience Phillips, a nondescript artsy-type who works in the advertising department of cosmetics company Hedare Beauty, owned by George Hedare (Lambert Wilson) and his wife Laurel (Sharon Stone). Laurel is pushing a new skin rejuvenation product, certain to make her rich, as long as the public never hears about its horrible side-effects. When Laurel catches Patience overhearing a particularly damning conversation with one of her scientists, she drowns our hero, leaving her body to wash out to sea. However, when she washes back on shore, Patience is visited by the mystic cat Midnight, who not only revives her, but gives her cat powers of being very agile and wearing skimpy outfits.

As Catwoman, Patience seeks revenge on Laurel, who is killing anyone who stands in the way of her new product. Catwoman finds an ally in Detective Lone, who helps her escalate her crusade against Laurel, and in Ophelia Powers (Frances Conroy), who explains that the Egyptian god Bast has chosen Catwomen throughout history (giving the movie its one nod to Pfeiffer).

The film climaxes with Catwoman confronting Laurel in the cosmetic company offices, where she learns the truth about the side-effects: using the treatment for too long creates unbreakable, diamond-hard skin, not unlike Emma Frost of the X-Men. Reveling in her invincibility, Laurel attacks Catwoman, nearly defeating her. However, Catwoman’s Bast-powered claws does allow her to scratch at Laurel’s face. So when the two tumble out of a window and dangle above the ground, Laurel chooses death after seeing her face in the reflection, unable to think about life as an ugly person.

It’s a silly story, to be sure, and there’s more than a whiff of sexism in the “girls like make-up” nature of the plot. But in the right hands, Catwoman could be good campy fun, a movie that truly embraces its comic book roots. Instead, Catwoman is in the hands of a French director with art film aspirations.

A Catspaw Creation

Every single comic book movie from the 2000s suffers from terrible special effects: Wolverine whipping around Magneto in X-Men, Spider-Man turning into rubber to swing through New York, the Hulk as Shrek in Hulk. But even by that standard, Catwoman looks terrible, precisely because of the way Pitof and his team choose to shoot the movie.

Nothing demonstrates that better than Catwoman’s requisite coming out scene, when Patience realizes that she has powers, puts on an early version of her suit, and takes to the night. She first hops on a motorcycle to buzz through the streets, which Pitof chooses to convey via a grab bag of frenetic cuts, blur effects, and extreme close-ups, all jumbled together to form an illegible blob.

She arrives at a jewelry store to stare lustily at a necklace. But upon realizing that a group of thugs have already broken in to burgle the place, Catwoman leaps into action, slinking along the walls and flipping around the baddies. Pitof moves his camera around the action to get every angle of the gangly CG model standing in for the hero, but cuts fast and frequently when real actors are in the shot, never giving us a sense of how she and the villains share the space.

The visual approach doesn’t just render the action impossible to follow. It makes Berry and Stone, who gets fight scenes at the end of the movie, look utterly ridiculous. Of course, both actresses were heavily mocked at the time for their work on the film. But upon closer inspection, it’s clear that they, and most of the cast, know exactly what they’re doing. Berry vamps her way through every scene, giving a knowing wink to the camera and utterly committing herself to the role of an over-the-top sexy superheroine. Stone delivers her lines in the tradition of Terrance Stamp’s Zod or Jack Nicholson’s Joker, theatrical and imperious.

They know what kind of movie they’re in and they give themselves to it. Pitof, his cinematographer and editors, do not, and they undermine the film with their incompetent pretensions. After all, this is a group who couldn’t even shoot a simple pick up basketball game without endless cuts and ostentatious camera movements, no matter how much Berry and Bratt tried to make the moment work.

No one would argue that supervillain movies have been great since Catwoman; Clayface is a blast, and the Venom films have their defenders. But supervillain movies have never been worse than Catwoman, a film that turned a lay-up of an IP into the most embarrassing airball.

Holiday Gift Guide: 7 Purrfect Presents For Feline Fanatics and Card Collectors This Gift Giving Season

This article is presented in partnership with Upper Deck.

Don’t pawcrastinate and wait until the last minute to get your cat-loving friends and family meowmbers their gifts this year. No one wants to be running around at the eleventh hour like a cat being chased by the dreaded vacuum cleaner! Save yourself the stress and purrchase these meowrvelous, I Can Has Cheezburger-approved gifts with plenty of time to spare so you can enjoy a cat nap or two as the hectic holiday season approaches.

Some people are really good at giving gifts, but I am not one of those people.

That’s why I Can Has Cheezburger is purrtnering up with Upper Deck to give you the most cat-tastic holiday gift guide. If you’re wondering what you’re supposed to give your cat-obsessed family member (don’t get them another cat toy, their cats never play with them), then let us introduce the All-Mew Feline Collection! These cute collectible cards feature all your favorite felines, from amber Abyssinians, to sultry Siamese cats, to meowjestic Maine Coons. 

Each one has the pawtential to be the purrfect gift for anyone who grew up loving trading cards and collecting the things they love most. Frame them, sleep with them under your pillow, do whatever you want with them, just don’t let your cats see them. They might get jealous that you’re looking at other (beautiful) cats. And nobody wants a cranky cat during the holidays.

Give the gift of kindness this holiday season by donating to our Giving Tuesday fundraiser to help homeless pets and animals in need! It’s time to pay your cat tax!

Upper Deck Feline Collection

Upper Deck has transformed your favorite cat breeds into pawsitively beautiful collectibles! Whether you’re a trading card collector who loves our feline friends or simply a cat lover, Upper Deck Feline Collection is a must-have set! Like cats themselves, this set is full of playfulness, attitude, hilarity and… cuteness to stunning beauty. It is also loaded with information and fun facts. These cute kitties are certainly the ultimate gift for any feline fanatic!

BUY NOW

Maine Coon Card Pack

Each pack comes with 6 meowgnificent cards inside. With multiple parallels & variations of each Base Set card and an insert lineup that really taps into what makes cats special, the options for feline fun are as endless as your cat’s love for Churus.

BUY NOW

Base Set 

The 100-card Base Set features 10 different cats from 10 different breeds: Abyssinian, Bengal, Exotic Shorthair, Maine Coon, Munchkin, Ragdoll, Russian Blue, Scottish Fold, Siamese, and Snowshoe.

Each card front boasts meowjestic images of the cats, while the card back features fun facts and information about each breed. Through this set, you can learn about the hisstoric origins of the breed, the name, and purrsonality traits. Each 10-card subset delivers a pawsome amount of information about the breed.

A Hobby Box comes with 12 packs, so this is truly the ultimate gift you could give this meowliday season!

BUY NOW

Insert Sets – Cat Beams!

You know what cats need? Moar lazers! Bring yourself back to the good old days of the early internet with some good old-fashioned cat craziness with these funny felines featuring amazing digital art, printed on lenticular stock. Once you see one, you’ll want all of them! 

BUY NOW

Insert Sets – Know Your Breed!

Want to take a deep dive into the feline species? These sets cover 40 different cat breeds – the same 10 from the Base Set and 30 new ones! What could they be, you ask? Well, you’ll have to purrchase them to find out! Expect more pawsome images and all the fun facts your cat-loving brain could pawssibly ask for.

BUY NOW

Insert Sets – Pop Cats

Pawp extravaganza! This 30-card Quad Pop Art set includes cards with four images of a cat, each in a different color, and each card back provides more information about the breed. 

As Andy Warhol once said, “Every cat is a work of pawp art,” or something like that.

BUY NOW

Insert Sets – Now Trending

Do you consider yourself an internet cat culture expurrt? If so, you may recognize some of these kitties! This “Now Trending” set features several of your most beloved internet-famous cats. Between the images and the information on the back, you’ll learn what helped get these special felines their social media following. 

BUY NOW







Avengers: Doomsday – Who Are Doctor Doom’s Latverian Witches?

This article contains spoilers for VisionQuest episode 8.

In a surprise to even those who had advanced screeners and wrote all of their reviews in good faith that they were being shown the entire show and are not at all grouchy about finding out that their articles are now wrong, VisionQuest ended with an unexpected post-credits scene. The scene picks up shortly after the end of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where Scarlet Witch gets crushed on Mount Wundagore. In the new material, we look through Wanda’s point of view as the rubble lifts, courtesy of Doctor Doom’s magic. “Scarlet Witch, awaken… your power will be mine,” commands Doom, causing Wanda’s eyes to open suddenly.

The post-credits scene all but confirms a theory that has been bandied about on the internet since promotional materials for Avengers: Doomsday revealed Doom’s Latverian Witches, a trio of women whose faces are hidden under masks, each of which wearing uniquely color-coded robes. We can now assume that the one in scarlet is, indeed, the Scarlet Witch. But who are the witches in purple and green?

The Purple Witch

The purple-hued witch is most likely Clea, who we met back in Multiverse of Madness. If you only know Marvel from the movies, then you probably don’t remember Clea, since she has approximately one minute of screen time. But this will help: she’s the person Charlize Theron played in the post-credits scene, recruiting Strange to help deal with the problem of Incursions.

Clea is one of the most important magical characters in the Marvel Universe. The daughter of Prince Orini of the Dark Dimension and niece to the Dread Dormammu, Clea became the love interest of Doctor Strange shortly after her first appearance in 1964’s Strange Tales #126, by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee. And, like most female characters in Marvel Comics, she sometimes gets corrupted when she gains too much power. However, Clea has more recently been given a steady place in the Marvel Universe, becoming the Sorcerer Supreme in Strange’s place and helping to bring balance to several dimensions.

Of course, a big blockbuster like Doomsday would benefit from a surprise appearance by an A-lister like Theron. But Clea also makes sense on a narrative and adaptation level. In the 2015 Secret Wars storyline by Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribić, Doctor Doom steals the powers of the godlike Beyonders to save the universe from destruction through Incursions. In the process, he remakes the world in his image, setting himself up as God Emperor and making the family of the despised Reed Richards—wife Sue Storm and children Franklin and Valeria—into his own family.

Although a handful of survivors escape Doom’s recreation and eventually arrive to fight against it, only one person within Doom’s world remembers what used to be: Stephen Strange, who sought the Beyonders alongside Doom, but hesitated to take the power. For that reason, Strange plays the role of the Sheriff of Agamotto in this world, a guilt-riddled collaborator who enforces the lie that Doom has always been God Emperor because doing so will keep the peace.

Although Benedict Cumberbatch was not one of the actors named in the infamous chair reveal video, it’s impossible to think that Strange won’t be involved in Doomsday in some capacity. And there has been a male figure dressed in brown and green alongside the Latverian Witches, also masked, who some have theorized is Doctor Strange. But why would Strange collaborate with this version of Doom, given that there are no Beyonders? The answer may be that Doom has captured Clea and turned her into one of his witches.

The Green Witch

Which brings us to the other witch, dressed in green. Initial theories suggested that the green Witch is Sylvie, a variant of Loki from his TV show. Sylvie has always had a reckless streak, and given the multversal nature of Doomsday, it would follow that someone who hops between realities would be of interest to Doom. And, of course, Sylvie wears green and gold, just like that of the Witch.

But green is also Doom’s preferred color scheme, which means that the Green Witch may be someone close to Doom, and here’s where things get interesting. In the comics, Doom learns magic from his mother Cynthia, and even teams with Doctor Strange to rescue her soul from Hell in the excellent 1989 graphic novel Triumph and Torment.

Perhaps, he has Cynthia alongside him in Doomsday. If that sounds harsh, you have to remember that Doom in the comics traded the soul of his beloved to the Devil in order to gain the power to destroy the Fantastic Four. That beloved was named Valeria, and she’s recently become a key character in Captain America comics about Steve Rogers fighting Doom, a plot point created to hype Doomsday. Could the Green Witch be Valeria, then?

Valeria is also the name of the third, and most compelling, possibility of the Green Witch’s identity. In the comics, Reed and Sue have two children. In addition to Franklin, who we met in Fantastic Four: First Steps, they have Valeria, a girl whose delivery almost killed Sue. Upon learning that only magic could save both Sue and the child, Doom offered his help, happy to succeed where Richards failed. He only had one requirement, that he name the child, who he christened after his lost love. Since then, Doom has been Valeria’s loving godfather.

Loving, that is, by Doom’s standards. We already have already seen Doom interacting with Franklin Richards in the post-credits scene of First Steps, and Doomsday seems to involve him kidnapping heroes’ children, including the son of Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter, as well as Thor’s daughter Love. Even though Valeria Richards favors science over magic, and does not have her brother Franklin’s vast mutant abilities, Doom may age her up and make her one of his witches, if only to hold sway over Reed.

The Season of the Witches

Perhaps the biggest question of all is why Doom has these Witches in the first place. Given all the talk about Incursions and heroes from other realities in films from the past three MCU phases, we can tell that Doomsday draws in part from the Secret Wars comic arc.

Are the Witches the replacement for the abilities of the Beyonder and the all-powerful Molecule Man, who help Doom remake reality in the comics? Or do they serve a more sinister, personal purpose? Recent trailers for Doomsday have suggested that this version of Doom turns evil after losing his family. That family connection tracks not just with his interacting with Franklin in First Steps, but also with his decision to resurrect Wanda—a mother willing to destroy the world for her children—to be one of his Witches.

And that brings us to the most terrifying possibility, that the Green Witch is Sue Storm. Like Valeria, Sue doesn’t have magical powers, but she is quite formidable. Moreover, Sue represents for Doom everything that Reed has and he does not, which is why he made Sue his wife in the Secret Wars storyline. Finally, making Sue the Green Witch would fit within the familial theme we’ve seen, with Doom getting his own stolen life to make up for the one he lost.

We can’t say for sure, but we’ll learn the truth soon. Because Doomsday is almost here.

Avengers: Doomsday releases in theaters on December 18, 2026.

In The Rings of Power Season 3, Gandalf Investigates a Longstanding Tolkien Mystery

The following contains spoilers for the first four episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 3 episodes 1-4.

It took The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power two seasons to finally confirm the worst-kept secret in fantasy television: The mysterious man known as The Stranger—who had an affinity for elemental magic, halflings, and quotes made famous onscreen by Sir Ian McKellen—was, in fact, Gandalf the Grey. But, finally freed from the multi-season deception required to mask his identity, the character gets the chance to come into his own this season, and, in doing so, his story ventures into some heretofore unexplored corners of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional universe.

Gandalf’s journey takes him into the eastern kingdom of Rhûn, a land that Tolkien’s writings left largely unexplored and mysterious. (The idea of “The East” in Middle-earth is normally used as code for something that’s very far away.) The human race there, known as the Easterlings, fell under the dominion of Morgoth and later Sauron, but outside of Khamûl the Easterling, one of Tolkien’s two named Nazgûl, we know very little about them or their culture. The Rings of Power set about changing that last season, and takes it even further, offering a possible explanation for one of the most longstanding mysteries of Tolkien’s world: The fate of the Blue Wizards. 

“The idea of the Blue Wizards who went East is such a tantalizing, deep corner of the lore,” showrunner Patrick McKay tells Den of Geek. ”We always wanted to go out to Rhûn, and we always wanted to explore that story, but we also wanted to [do it] through a familiar face. The idea of Gandalf going there on that journey was always appealing to us, and we always knew that it was going to go this way, and then hook back into the main narrative. We trusted the audience would go with us for really three seasons for that to happen. And we hope the payoff is worth it to them.”

One of the few things we do know about Rhûn is that at some point Saruman the White and two of the other Istari—the Maiar spirits sent to Middle-earth to aid in the fight against Sauron—journeyed east, ostensibly to convince the Easterlings to resist the machinations of the Dark Lord. They’re known only as the Blue Wizards, though Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales confirms their names as Alatar and Pallando. In The Rings of Power’s third episode, “The Secret Fire,” it is revealed that Ciarán Hinds’ initially unnamed Dark Wizard is one of them; a surprising narrative swerve from the direction many viewers likely assumed the story was going. (Look, we all thought Hinds’ general Christopher Lee impression was because he was Saruman. Sometimes, it’s nice to be wrong!)

The Dark Wizard’s true name is Pallando, and he is not only one of the Blue Wizards, but it turns out that he betrayed and murdered his partner in the name of claiming power for himself. Gandalf learns this shocking fact courtesy of a casual conversation with the Secret Fire, a divine manifestation of Eru Ilúvatar, the Tolkien universe’s stand-in for God. (There’s a reason its depiction has real “Moses and the burning bush” vibes.) We’ll leave the questions about the wild convenience of Gandalf’s sudden celestial communication for another day, but the gist of it is that not only has Pallando broken a sacred rule of his order and fallen into Shadow, but his actions were so evil that they “laid all of Rhûn to waste.”

But although Gandalf immediately wants to know how he is meant to defeat him, that is not his mission. Instead, he is charged with saving Pallando and, in doing so, saving Middle-earth. It’s a surprising twist, but one that feels perfectly in tune with the Gandalf we know from much later in his story. He is, after all, the one who will praise Bilbo’s pity in sparing Gollum’s life, and remind us that we should never be too quick to deal out death in judgment because even the very wise cannot see all ends. It’s perhaps the most Gandalf-coded plot twist possible. But, according to the man who plays the famous wizard, Gandalf’s journey this season isn’t about him magically saving the day, but offering folks a chance to do it themselves. 

“Maybe it’s not saving him, which feels very much like [an] “I’m going to save somebody” [attitude]. Maybe it’s just reflecting to him that there was still goodness in [him],” Daniel Weyman says. “Maybe all Gandalf does is show people what they have inside that they’ve forgotten about. Maybe Gandalf shows them that their hearts are still warm, [when] they had thought that they were irredeemable. I even like to go a step further to say that it’s not about Gandalf saving somebody; it’s about the Dark Wizard saving himself. It just so happens that he’s got a friend on the journey, and that’s Gandalf.”

For McKay, this sidequest in Rhûn is an important piece of Gandalf’s evolution as a character, and something that the character needed to do before (one presumes, eventually) joining up with the series’ main action. 

“The idea that Gandalf’s story in season 3 would be [a question] of how does he supersize his magic powers or [how does he] defeat the magic whatever, no, no, no,” McKay says. “His story’s about learning what his real mission is, and his real mission is to inspire hearts. That’s a Tolkien thing. It couldn’t be a bigger Tolkien idea. The question is, has he picked the wrong one or not? Is Ciarán Hinds’ Dark Wizard redeemable? You have to see the finale to find out.”

The first four episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are available to stream on Prime Video now. Two new episodes premiere on November 18 and November 25.

15 Men Share Their Hardest Part of Being a Husband

Marriage comes with plenty of wonderful moments, but nobody really prepares you for the parts that can test your patience, energy, and emotional strength. Being a husband means navigating countless little responsibilities, difficult conversations, unexpected challenges, and compromises that aren’t always easy to explain. Some men struggle with communication, others feel overwhelmed by family life, and a few have discovered that even deciding what to eat for dinner can become a surprisingly exhausting task. When married men were asked about the hardest part of being a husband, their answers revealed some pretty honest, funny, and occasionally heartbreaking experiences.

Learning to Listen Without Trying to Fix Everything

“I have to remind myself that sometimes she just wants me to listen, not come up with a solution to whatever went wrong that day.”

Supporting Her When You’re Struggling Too

“The hardest part is putting my own problems aside when we’re both having a rough time, because sometimes I need support just as much as she does.”

Having the Same Conversation Over and Over

“I can discuss a problem, figure out what we’re going to do, and move on, but sometimes we end up talking about the exact same thing several times a week, and it gets emotionally exhausting.”

Deciding What to Eat Every Single Day

“Figuring out what we’re having for dinner is a never ending responsibility, and somehow I have to make that decision over and over for the rest of my life.”

Feeling Like You Always Have to Be Funny

“My wife is so far out of my league that I feel like I have to be hilarious all the time just to keep up.”

Making Sure You Never Stop Dating Your Wife

“You have to keep communicating and dating each other through every stage of life, because it’s easy to let kids, work, and responsibilities take over your marriage.”

Knowing That One Day You’ll Lose Her

“I’m 62 and have been with my wife for 39 years, and the hardest part is knowing that eventually one of us will have to finish this journey without the other.”

Watching Your Wife Do Things You Can No Longer Do

“Since becoming disabled, watching my wife take care of everything I used to do myself is incredibly difficult, and I miss even the simplest things, like walking the dogs or cutting the lawn.”

Feeling Completely Unappreciated

“Sometimes the hardest part is feeling like everything I do goes unnoticed and nobody really appreciates the effort.”

Never Knowing What the Expectations Are Anymore

“The goalposts are always moving, and just when I think I’ve figured out what I’m supposed to do, the expectations seem to change again.”

Feeling Like You’re Never Allowed to Be Tired

“No matter how exhausted I am, I feel like I’ll never be as tired as my wife, so I shouldn’t even bother complaining about it.”

Finding Time for Your Wife After Having Kids

“Between working and raising children, finding time for my wife takes actual planning, because if we’re not intentional about it, we eventually risk becoming strangers.”

Having Your Entire Life Revolve Around Everyone Else

“Sometimes it feels like my entire life is based around everybody else’s needs and wants, and there’s very little time left for myself.”

Putting More Effort Into Her Hobbies Than She Does Into Yours

“I’ve trained for a half marathon with her and made an effort to enjoy the things she loves, but I still wish she’d show some interest in the hobbies that make me happy.”

Trying to Be Good at Every Role You Have to Play

“You’re constantly wearing ten different hats as a husband and father, and somehow you’re expected to be good at every single one of them.”

Victorian Psycho: How Maika Monroe Drew on Ted Bundy and Nicolas Cage for That Scary Smile

Director Zachary Wigon was already in Ireland scouting locations when Maika Monroe was cast in the role of Winifred Notty, the eponymous (and positively deranged) protagonist of Victorian Psycho. As befits her film’s title, Winifred is doleful in that way distinct to 19th century literary heroines; she has a penchant for walking along English moors and woodlands; and she’s absolutely, deliriously batshit unhinged when she gets her hands on axes, knives, or just an earnest young charge who she warns should call her Fred.

“Fred is not a lady’s name!” the child incredulously replies to his governess. “But Fred is the name of the demon that lives inside me,” she sweetly answers back before snuffing out the lad’s lonely, flickering candle.

For Monroe it’s one of the most daring high-wire acts of her career thus far, a character she describes as miles away from many of her traditional protagonists and real-life inclinations, perhaps better represented by the resolute and haunted FBI Agent Lee Harker in Longlegs, or the seemingly doomed, sensitive soul who contracts a supernatural disease in It Follows. And as she tells us on the eve of Victorian Psycho’s release, “A lot of the roles that I have done in the past are a bit more internal, and this was really having to go for it in a very external physical performance. So that was nerve-wracking, for sure, because it was absolutely out of my comfort zone.”

Hence the Zoom calls with her director, which led to the pair workshopping facial tics, frenzied movements, and the type of bold choices that harken back to an almost silent, expressionistic era of acting. “We had so much fun because we would be doing different crazy faces and body [contortions],” Monroe adds. “And then there was the one look I had where my eyes are rolled back, and I just remember, Zach went, ‘That’s it! That was it!’”

If you’ve seen the Victorian Psycho trailer, you already know the countenance: a slanted posture, a lowered brow, and a crooked smile portending ill intent.

“She was cycling through,” says Wigon with a wry smirk of his own, “She was like a slot machine, and Maika’s face would suddenly be like this and then that, and I’m watching [before saying] That one! Stop!”

It’s a big swing and one that pays off in the way certain movie maniacs of yore have entered the public consciousness. Victorian Psycho is not shy about its influences either, with a title echoing Anthony Perkins in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or Christian Bale in Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000). It was one of the initial appeals for Wigon when author Virginia Feito sent a first draft of her Victorian Psycho manuscript to Wigon to read. He agreed to give notes on it as a favor for a friend, but he proved so captivated by the novel that he encouraged Feito to also turn it into a screenplay, not least of all because it offered a female performance the fun of cinematic madness.

“One of the pleasures of the movie is being able to see a character who is typically in a caretaker role,” says Wigon. “You think about the governess role and obviously you think about The Innocents. It’s this woman’s role to take care of these children—one of the pleasures of the movie is the kind of intense, unnerving quality you get from recognizing that this character, who is serving that function, is actually the threat this time.”

Even the outre nature of Monroe’s choices echo the type of real-world horrors that are usually associated with men.

Wigon notes, “There was this video I sent Maika where this forensic psychologist is breaking down an interview that Ted Bundy gave, and basically the forensic psychologist will pause the video every minute or a couple of minutes, and they’ll talk about what he’s doing with his facial tics and expressions and gestures, how these things are cutting against what he’s actually saying in the course of the interview. We had these kinds of conversations that maybe was the germination of what Maika was then able to embody in all these wonderful, physical ideas that she brought to the table.”

It’s a choice that has earned Monroe raves out of genre-leaning festivals like Fantastic Fest, and comparisons to another actor who draws heavily on silent and expressionistic cinema, her Longlegs co-star Nicolas Cage.

Says Monroe, “He’s one of my favorite actors because I think all his choices are so interesting. You even see him in a rom-com, and I can’t take my eyes off of him because he’s so intriguing, and that was a definite influence for this character.” The star even seems to take special pleasure in comparisons to her performance and what Cage did in Vampire’s Kiss nearly 40 years ago.

Still, it’s a film designed to reflect the era it is set in, and the tension between expectation and being true to thine own (dark) self.

“So many of the beliefs of that era are so wild to think about now and were widely accepted at the time,” Wigon considers. “The first thing I always think about is that the Victorians believed that women couldn’t exercise too much because if they did, their uterus might fall out. That was one of the beliefs that they held at this time.” It’s a notion his leading lady mirthlessly chuckles “really sticks with ya.”

But in that context, the movie’s dark comedy becomes about a friction, or as the director says, “a dance between two aspects that’s essential to every moment of violence: you feel her trying to hold back the tide before it unleashes.” That delayed release, and the gratification that comes afterward, is its own kind of psychotherapy.

Victorian Psycho goes berserk in cinemas beginning on Friday, Nov. 13.

VisionQuest Finale: Episode 8 Post-Credits Scene Sets Up A Major Return in Avengers: Doomsday

This article contains spoilers for VisionQuest episode 8… and Avengers: Doomsday, believe it or not.

The VisionQuest has completed. Let the Children’s Crusade begin. Although billed as the third entry in a trilogy that includes WandaVision and Agatha All Along, VisionQuest has mostly felt pretty distinct from those two shows, which put Wanda Maximoff in the center. However, with its finale, Vision and Wanda’s two sons finally reunite, albeit in different bodies, when Billy Kaplan a.k.a. Wiccan and Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Speed connect via magic.

Seeing the two together is obviously good news for fans of the Young Avengers, as the two mainstays on Marvel’s teen team will certainly soon be recruited by Kamala Khan, who began her membership drive at the end of The Marvels. But it’s even better news for fans of Wanda Maximoff, as the duo’s connection, and a potential plot point in Avengers: Doomsday, mirrors the comic book story that finally brought the Scarlet Witch back to the side of the angels, Avengers: The Children’s Crusade.

And in fact, an unexpected post-credits scene in the VisionQuest finale confirms that Wanda will return in Avengers: Doomsday! [Ed Note: Said post-credits scene was not included in the advanced screener of the episode for the press… which we hope explains some of the breathless “Marvel did what??? OK let me fire up my laptop” tone of portions of this article].

The post-credits moment replays a critical scene from the climax of 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in which Wanda brings down the walls of Mount Wundagore, destroying all copies of the Darkhold throughout the Multiverse but also sacrificing herself in the process. The scene then continues with new footage as Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom approaches Wanda’s corpse in the rubble. “Scarlet Witch, awaken,” he rumbles in his thick Latverian accent. “Your powers will be mine.”

Sure enough the Scarlet Witch does awaken and we have every reason to believe that her powers will be Doom’s.

So what can we make of this wild footage? Will the Scarlet Witch be in thrall to Victor Von Doom in Avengers: Doomsday? Thankfully, the pages of Marvel comics provide plenty of clues.

Written by Allan Heinberg and penciled by Jim Cheung, the creators of the Young Avengers, Avengers: The Children’s Crusade was published in nine issues released between 2010 and 2012, and had major ramifications for the rest of the Marvel Universe. In order to understand those ramifications, we have to look back at the Scarlet Witch’s status in the Marvel Universe at the time. Initially introduced as a relatively sheepish character with the power to give people bad luck, the Scarlet Witch had grown in strength over the years, especially under the tutelage of Agatha Harkness—a mysterious but benevolent old woman in the comics, unlike the spunky trouble-maker in the MCU.

With the greater power came bouts of madness, first when Tommy and Billy were taken from her and their souls reabsorbed into the evil Mephisto. To prevent Wanda from becoming overwhelmed by grief and turning evil, her memories of the twins were wiped away. But many years later, the memories returned, and she broke down again. Worse, this break came with a full understanding that the “Chaos Magic” she seemed to be using was, in fact, the ability to change reality.

Now both incredibly powerful and mad with grief, Wanda first destroys the Avengers, killing Ant-Man Scott Lang and the Jack of Hearts in the process. Then, she depowers nearly every mutant in the Universe, this after creating an alternate reality that wreaks havoc on several heroes.

In short, Wanda was persona non-grata in the eyes of even her closest friends when Billy Kaplan a.k.a. Wiccan reveals the ability to change reality during a Young Avengers mission. At this point, no one was certain that Billy Kaplan was the reformed Billy Maximoff, but such an incredible feat raised suspicions, not only in Billy, Tommy a.k.a. Speed, and the other Young Avengers, but in the mainline Avengers as well, who did not want to see Wanda’s history repeat itself.

What initially happens is what happened a lot in crossovers involving the Avengers: Captain America becomes an authoritarian cop and he and the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes clamp down on anything that seems like a threat, even when good guys are involved. But for our purposes, the important thing is what Wiccan and Speed decide to do, now that they realize that they’re the reincarnated children of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch: they’re going to find their mother and rescue her.

With the conflicted help of Stature a.k.a. Cassie Lang, who had to work through her resentment at Wanda for killing her father, the twins discover that Wanda is being held by Doctor Doom, who is channeling her magical abilities. Against the wishes of the Avengers, the Young Avengers launch an attack on Doom’s country Latveria, where they manage to find and free Wanda—but at the cost of Stature’s life.

The Children’s Crusade was certainly convoluted, something not helped by its delayed release schedule. But it did manage to begin the rehabilitation of Wanda Maximoff, moving her from the villain she had become in the 2000s back into being a hero. By showing her to be victimized by Doctor Doom, by letting readers see her through the eyes of her sons, and, to be frank, by making the Avengers seem like a bunch of uncharitable jerks, The Children’s Crusade reminded us that Wanda had much good in her, and had done much good. It opened the possibility that she could do good again.

Now that VisionQuest has finished, it’s not hard to see the parallels between the comic book Wanda and the MCU Wanda. The MCU Wanda also went mad because of her children, turning into a full villain in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Yet, as seen throughout Agatha All Along and VisionQuest, Vision, and especially Billy and Tommy see that there’s good in her, that her incredibly difficult life has forced her to make terrible choices. Now that the rest of the family has come together again, it would make sense for them to find her Wanda and free her from whatever suffering she’s enduring.

Where might that place of suffering be? In the comics, that was the court of Doctor Doom in his country, Latveria. The same might be true of the MCU. Not only will Doctor Doom and Latveria figure heavily into the next MCU entry Avengers: Doomsday, but some promotional material has raised our interest. In stills and posters, we’ve seen that Doom has a trio of Latverian witches, all masked but each wearing robes of a different color. One witch wheres purple, another blue, and the last red. Or should we say scarlet?

Could Avengers: Doomsday be following the lead of The Children’s Crusade and having Doom capture Wanda, using her power for his own ends? Dark as such a fate may be for Wanda Maximoff, it may be the way that Vision, Wiccan, and Speed can bring the Scarlet Witch back, making into the hero we’ve always wanted her to be.

Every episode of VisionQuest is now streaming on Disney+.

VisionQuest Episode 8 Finale Review: Worthwhile Revival Television

This article contains spoilers for VisionQuest season 1 episode 8.

Early in the VisionQuest finale “Forever,” our big bad Virgil Horton, points out that his grandfather Phineas’ error in creating a flaming robot called the Human Torch is so infamous, that “You Horton’d it” has become a colloquialism for making a mistake. It’s a broad, goofy line, one that recalls the bit in Community about “pulling a Britta,” and it’s just one of many instances of “Forever” embracing TV tropes. This is the climax of a Marvel TV show, so of course, we’ll have a showdown between Vision and Ultron, of course, Paladin will get a new status quo, and of course, we’ll get a set-up for future stories, namely the Young Avengers.

But VisionQuest isn’t just a Marvel series. It’s also the close of a trilogy that includes WandaVision and Agatha All Along, two shows deeply indebted to the medium of television. As such, “Forever” embraces television tropes not just because it is itself a television show, but because it’s part of a metaconversation about the nature of television. Through this metaconversation, “Forever” actually reverses the greatest weakness of WandaVision and establishes VisionQuest as one of the best Marvel TV shows ever made.

Let’s get the plot stuff out of the way first: the client who hired Paladin to find Vision is also the mysterious sixth member of Jo Carrington’s research group, Virgil Horton (played by James Spader, of course, but looking a lot like John Hodgman). Horton used the code left to him by his grandfather Phineas to create artificial intelligence, finally redeeming his family name. And before her physical death, Virgil transferred the consciousness of his wife Josephine Carrington into a metallic body, the body that would be Jocasta.

Now that he has Jo back and now that he has Vision’s body, Virgil plans to upload his consciousness into Vision so that he and Jo can rule over a humanity made docile by the nanonbots in the Nest. Together, then, they can enjoy, in Ultron’s words, “peace in our time.” Speaking of Ultron, Virgil has trapped the evil AI in a tiny little box (a nice nod to Ultron’s original, smaller forms in the pages of Avengers comics). But when Thomas—now calling himself Tommy and dressed similar to his superhero character Speed—uses his super speed to free Vision and Jocasta. Jocasta dies in the ensuring fracas, but not before Ultron gets free, takes control of the nanobots to return to his robot form, and squeezes Virgil to death.

Mad with grief over Jocasta’s death, Ultron decides to end humanity once and for all, forcing Vision to stop him. Vision has on his side not just his team of AIs, but also a reformed Paladin, Lisa, and Tommy, the last one having been re-energized by his meeting with Billy (Joe Locke, reprising his role from Agatha All Along). In other words, we’ve got all the characters we met along the way, getting together to fight a big bad who has always been pulling the strings.

The same thing happened in Agatha All Along and especially WandaVision, to the latter’s enormous detriment. For as much as WandaVision broke all expectations for superhero television by becoming a commentary on the history of TV, it famously ended with Wanda and Agatha shooting multi-colored lights at each other while Vision and White Vision fly around in the sky. The climax left a huge, unsightly asterisk on an otherwise fantastic season of TV.

So it’s refreshing and exhilarating that Ultron and Vision only trade a few punches before “Forever” changes approach. Vision traps Ultron on a sitcom called UltraVision, about a grouchy old dad (Ultron, of course) forced to move back in with his son (Vision) and his wacky friend (E.D.I.T.H.) after the death of his wife (Jocasta). Director Terry Matalas, who also scripts the final episode, perfectly captures sitcom stylization, from the muted sound design and laugh track, to the TGIF font and jaunty theme song (“Don’t kill the world!”). The gags are deliciously lame, and Bettany slips easily back into doofy dad mode, as does Spader (who really should do more sitcoms; it’s been too long since The Office).

However, the sitcom stylings are only a mode, set-up for the true nature of the conflict: a philosophical conversation between Vision and Ultron. On the surface, Vision does little more than urge Ultron to show mercy and to call off the nanobots he’s unleashing on the world. Vision designed the entire sitcom premise to force Ultron to process his grief over the loss of Jocasta, one more reminder that humanity is a self-destructive plague, before he could send out the nanobots. So the two spend time discussing the loss that always comes with love, the impossibility of shielding one’s self from hurt, and the fact that our identifies are always tied up with others, even people who hurt us—an observation signaled by the name of the fictional show, UltraVision.

Occasionally, the episode does cut to the big, high-stakes images you’d expect from a superhero show, a CGI nanoswarm covering a CGI city. And it does end with nods toward future stories, with Paladin taking on a new, more heroic mission, while Tommy and Billy make plans to search for Wanda.

But none of that takes away from the episode’s greatest special effect, which is also the greatest special effect in VisionQuest as a series: Paul Bettany and James Spader. Earlier in the season, the two great actors sometimes overwhelmed the weak dramatic material with their larger-than-life screen presences. But here, with the emotional stakes in focus, they lend their prowess to their characters, and make these artificial beings believably sad, believably human.

And so, VisionQuest finally redeems the mistakes of WandaVision. It stays true to what it has been all season long, not abandoning its core principles to satisfy genre demands at the end. Its highs are never as great as those of WandaVision (though it does outdo Agatha All Along). But VisionQuest ends on such a strong note that it establishes itself as a worthy follow-up to WandaVision, and a great superhero series in its own right.

All of VisionQuest is now streaming on Disney+.

The Future of Mass Effect Is Bigger Than Just Games

On October 21 of this year, Mass Effect fans were sent reeling by the news that EA decided to shutter studio BioWare, meaning that the beloved sci-fi gaming franchise – alongside DragonAge and who knows how many future projects – were brought to an end. In the weeks since the announcement, fans and actors associated with Mass Effect have launched an online campaign to try and make sure the series lives on. Those fans are in luck, as Prime Video is still slated to bring a Mass Effect TV project to life. A recent report from IGN confirmed that the series is still in development at Prime Video, despite BioWare’s closure. 

Those fans will also be happy to learn that a wealth of creative talent is helping bring Mass Effect to a medium that it’s always been a great fit for. The writing team includes Doug Jung and Dan Casey, who are no stranger to blockbuster franchises; Jung co-wrote Star Trek Beyond a.k.a. the height of Star Trek’s “Kelvin Timeline” trilogy, and Casey is involved with the Fast and Furious franchise. This all hints that Mass Effect will bring the same sense of character development and galaxy spanning action to television that made the games so beloved.

Perhaps the most promising creative avenue the series is taking is the decision to set its story after the events of the original Mass Effect trilogy, which opens up so many storytelling possibilities. Some fans feared that a Mass Effect movie or television show would try to recapture the story of the original games, which would take away the element of choice that makes Mass Effect so great.

Former BioWare exec Mike Gamble put it best on his personal blog in 2025: “The writers room is going strong, and we’ve got a lot figured out about how it fits within the Mass Effect canon, and where it sits in respect to the new game. The show will explore a brand-new story within the universe’s timeline, and will be set after the original trilogy. It won’t be a retread of Commander Shepard’s story – because after all … that’s YOUR story, isn’t it?”

That makes sense, especially given how Mass Effect 3 ended. No matter what choice Commander Shepard makes concerning the Crucible, the fallout will destroy the “mass relays” that allow interstellar travel, effectively altering the state of the universe. Jung, Casey, and the creative team have a new story to explore, and a way to bring in new characters that have been positively or negatively affected by Shepard’s decision.

By keeping Mass Effect in development, Prime Video is hoping to capture the same magic that made Fallout a huge hit (ditto for the upcoming God of War series). But it’s also carrying the future of an entire franchise on its shoulders. If Prime Video plays its cards right, the legacy of Mass Effect will live on and give fans a new story that builds upon their beloved games.

What Marvel Television Can Learn from the ‘WandaVision’ Trilogy

Tonight marks the finale of VisionQuest, and the end of an era for Marvel Television. VisionQuest isn’t just wrapping up a trilogy that began with WandaVision and Agatha All Along; it also marks a shift in Marvel Television’s storytelling strategy. Next year will mark the end of Daredevil: Born Again, while 2028 will debut an entirely new series, Zodiac (which some fans believe will be the long-awaited resurrection of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). Now that Marvel Television is shifting gears, it should look to the WandaVision trilogy for inspiration with its future efforts.

For starters, don’t forget that some of the lesser-known characters in Marvel’s stable can anchor some truly compelling stories. WandaVision works because it centers on Wanda Maximoff’s grief over losing Vision, and the actions she takes to recover her loved ones – and how the fallout of those actions affect others’ lives. Agatha All Along follows in those footsteps, using the Witches’ Road as a way for Agatha Harkness to come to terms with the wicked actions she’s committed over her many years. VisionQuest has been a “quest” for identity, showcasing Paul Bettany’s Vision recovering his memories, his emotions, and most importantly, his family.

These moments prove that Marvel doesn’t always have to lean on explosive fight scenes to deliver great stories. Part of the reason why Marvel Studios became a pop culture juggernaut, and led to the development of WandaVision and other television series, is because it put in the work to make these lesser known characters resonate with the audiences. Considering television is a weekly investment, it’s a lesson that the higher ups – particularly Marvel’s television/animation/comics head Brad Winderbaum – should keep in mind.

WandaVision, Agatha All Along, and VisionQuest also haven’t been shy about wearing their comic book inspirations on their sleeves. Whether it’s the Darkhold, the cursed book of spells that warps people’s souls, in WandaVision; the appearance of ‘J.I.M.” – or as comics fans better known him, Jim Hammond (a.k.a. the original Human Torch) in VisionQuest; or Lady Death herself in Agatha All Along, these elements make for a richer story and remind viewers that they’re traveling into a world of monsters, mutants, and marvels. If Zodiac is really bringing back elements from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., it should definitely bring back some of the superpowered characters – particularly Chloe Bennet as Daisy Johnson/Quake.

Perhaps the strongest element that’s made the WandaVision trilogy stand out is that most of its installments are building upon previous MCU events, rather than setting the stage for future movies. While Wanda and Vision’s children Tommy and Billy eventually evolve into their comic book counterparts Speed and Wiccan, the focus is less on whether they’ll join the Young Avengers and more about rediscovering their identities. 

VisionQuest shows Vision dealing with the fallout of WandaVision, and the messiness of human emotion, not to mention his own homicidal “father figure” in Ultron. WandaVision came close to hitting those same heights, until Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness decided to have Wanda go full villain and cast aside the more complex character traits that made her series so compelling.

Ironically, Marvel might have hit upon a formula for success in its animated shows. X-Men ‘97, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, What If…?, Eyes of Wakanda, and Marvel Zombies have managed to be standalone stories that embrace the sheer comic booky goodness that makes Marvel’s characters worth watching. It doesn’t take tapping into chaos magic or a collection of artificial intelligences to see that Zodiac and future Marvel shows should tap into that energy. And the so-called “WandaVision trilogy” leaves behind a compelling blueprint for how to do so in live action.

DC’s Dismantling Could Be the End of Shared Universes

It’s been an interesting 24 hours in the world of superhero movies, with not just the news that James Gunn and Peter Safran have been removed as co-heads of DC Studios, but also with information about their dismissal coming clear. Initially, Gunn’s post to social media made it sound like he and Safran willingly stepped down from their position, certainly (but not explicitly) in response to Warner Bros.‘ new ownership under Paramount boss David Ellison, who will combine the two studios into a new company called Skydance. However, a more in-depth article from The Hollywood Reporter reveals that Gunn and Safran were pushed out, in part because they had autonomy over DC Studios projects.

Further complicating things is a report from Hollywood insider Matthew Belloni, who stated in his “What I’m Hearing” newsletter that he has been told “plans are already afoot to dismantle much of what Gunn and Safran had plotted out.” In other words, the DCU is rebooting… again. This at the same time the MCU is offering ‘memberberries in Avengers: Doomsday before what also might be a reboot in Avengers: Secret Wars. This could very well spell the end of shared universes.

Hard as it might be to believe now, The Avengers seemed like a risky gamble back in 2012. Sure, Universal Monsters and characters from Godzilla had crossed over before, but the idea of several characters introduced in different moves coming together in a single film seemed like a huge risk. Observers couldn’t believe that moviegoers would go to The Avengers if they hadn’t already seen Thor or Captain America: The First Avenger, both hits but hardly cultural phenomena. They couldn’t understand how a traditional story could be told with three different characters who had previously been leads in their own films. And how could a movie generate enough box office revenue to pay for such a thing?

Turns out, they were wrong. For a while, anyway. The Avengers was a smash hit, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe reigned supreme for the next decade. Not only did moviegoers turn out for big, tent pole Avengers films. But they also signed up to watch B-listers like Ant-Man and Doctor Strange, all with the hopes of catching up for the next big movie.

Yet, observers were right at the same time. For as much as the MCU succeeded, every other shared universe that studios tried to create fell flat. There was Universal‘s pitiful Dark Universe, which consisted officially only of the Tom Cruise picture The Mummy. There were Sony’s multiple attempts to create a universe around Spider-Man, often without Spider-Man’s involvement. There were Paramount‘s attempts to create a Transformers and G.I. Joe universe. And there was, of course, the DCEU.

Yes, the DCEU made money, partially because of devotees of architect Zack Snyder‘s style, partially because of the big names of characters involved, and partially because superheroes were in. But by the time Snyder’s tenure ended and Gunn and Safran took over, enthusiasm had waned, as demonstrated by the lackluster response to the return of Henry Cavill‘s Superman in Black Adam.

Gunn and Safran’s regime didn’t entirely restore that enthusiasm. Yes, Superman did well at the box office and Lanterns had great streaming numbers, but Supergirl was a flop and Creature Commandos and Peacemaker had limited appeal.

Of course, all of this comes at the same time that no one seems terribly interested in superheroes. Even quite good MCU outings like Thunderbolts* failed to break the box office, and Disney+ series such as Daredevil: Born Again are met largely with shrugs. But that only proves the larger point that the dominance of the MCU in the 2010s and the public thirst for all things weird and wacky in superhero movies has passed.

At this point, we still don’t know what the DCU under new head Jeremy Latcham will look like. However, it seems likely that he’ll focus on A-listers instead of the C- and D-listers that Gunn and Safran prioritized, movies about Batman and Superman instead of Clayface and Supergirl. Those big names will certainly pull in more viewers than the niche offerings.

But will moviegoers be interested in a third iteration of Superman and the Justice League, right after they got used to David Corenswet instead of Cavill? Will MCU fans return after the reunion tour that is Doomsday has ended, and Secret Wars introduces a new Black Panther, if not also new Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, as some have posited?

Probably not. Even in the age of superhero hype, reboots are a hard sell for the general public. In this period of superhero fatigue, it’s unthinkable. And so, shared universes will fade away from the public consciousness and go back to the world of comic books, which is probably where they’ve always belonged.