A24 Tries to Make Elevated Action With Bloodsport Remake

It’s hard to think of two movie companies more dissimilar than A24 and Cannon Films. The latter became famous in the 1980s as the home for direct-to-video action trash starring the likes of Chuck Norris and Michael Dudikoff. The former is synonymous with moody, arty films, particularly in the sub-genre known as “elevated horror.” With films such as The Witch and Hereditary, A24 replaced base genre scares with creeping dread and a suffocating tone.

Yet, the two worlds are colliding in perhaps the most unlikely A24 project yet. The distributor has teamed up with BAFTA-award winner Michaela Coel to remake Bloodsport, the 1988 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle. “I have long been in awe of fighters, and astounded by the discipline, intensity and isolation the sport demands of them,” Coel said in a statement. “I am excited to explore this world, especially so with A24 as my collaborators. LET’S FUCKING GO.” Coel’s clearly excited, but the rest of us have a question: can A24 make elevated action as compelling as elevated horror?

Believe it or not, Bloodsport may be the perfect film to attempt such a genre reinvention, as it is both incredibly odd and surprisingly influential. Directed by Newt Arnold, Bloodsport stars the Belgian Van Damme as the American Frank Dux, a captain in the U.S. Army. A practitioner of ninjutsu, Dux is invited to participate in a secret illegal fighting tournament called Kumite. Dux immediately abandons his post and travels to Hong Kong, where he fights and befriends fighters from a range of disciplines, and eventually faces off against champion Chong-Li (Bolo Yeung), who possesses the most amazing pair of pectoral muscles ever captured on screen. Also, future Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker is there, for some reason.

Even more absurd is the backstory behind Bloodsport. The movie has its origins in a 1980 article from Black Belt magazine, in which the real-life Frank Dux described his experiences in Kumite. After reading the article, writer Sheldon Lettich turned it into a story treatment, and eventually co-wrote the final screenplay with Christopher Cosby and Mel Friedman. However, since then, many of Dux’s claims, including everything about Kumite, have been debunked. Even weirder, Bloodsport is apparently Donald Trump’s favorite movie… as long as you fast-forward through the “boring” parts of this 93-minute film mostly about punching and kicking.

To be clear, all of this weirdness is a feature and none of it is a bug. The strange nature of the story and everything surrounding it only gives Bloodsport more propulsion, infusing an already lean and effective action structure with an almost mythic quality. Bloodsport helped advance a new martial arts craze in the U.S., and was a direct inspiration for the Mortal Kombat video games.

In short, it’s exactly the type of oddball movie that could lend itself to wild interpretations, even artsy-fartsy interpretations. And, as seen in I May Destroy You and Chewing Gum, Coel certainly knows how to play with genre. If she and A24 can use Bloodsport to inaugurate an era of elevated action, then the legacy of Cannon Films just got that much stranger.

Bloodsport is now streaming on Tubi.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day Looks to Directly Tie into Daredevil: Born Again

The first trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day assures us that Peter Parker is finally a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. No more going to space with the Avengers, no more alternate realities, no more trips to Europe. Now that everyone’s forgotten who Peter Parker used to be, Spidey copes with his loneliness by crawling walls in New York City. Then again, New York City isn’t exactly the loneliest place in the world, especially in the Marvel Universe. Superheroes are bound to run into one another in the Big Apple.

More specifically, the Brand New Day trailer has a lot of stuff from the Netflix Daredevil show and from the Disney+ continuation, Daredevil: Born Again. Although Ol’ Hornhead doesn’t appear in the trailer, we do see Spidey getting the key to the city from Sheila Rivera (Zabryna Guevara), chief of staff to Mayor Wilson Fisk, and he teams up with the Punisher Frank Castle, as played by Jon Bernthal since season two of the Netflix show. Most surprisingly, the trailer shows Spider-Man fighting a band of ninjas dressed in red, which viewers of Daredevil season two and of The Defenders recognize as members of the Hand Clan.

Does this mean that Spider-Man and Daredevil will team up in Brand New Day? Peter had already met Matt Murdock in No Way Home, and got a look at his amazing reflexes. More importantly, Daredevil and Spidey have been linked since Marvel Comics promoted Daredevil #1 back in 1964 by slapping Spider-Man on the cover. As both street level heroes, the two have crossed paths and worked together time and again. When Matt Murdock gets a little too committed to his causes, as is his wont, and, oh, sets himself up as the new Kingpin or makes a deal with the Devil, Peter is usually there to beat talk some sense into DD.

Moreover, the two share some villains, including one big one hinted at in the trailer. Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime, first appeared in 1967’s Amazing Spider-Man #50, and still is a Spider-Man villain as much as he is an antagonist of Daredevil or the Punisher. Vincent D’Onofrio‘s take on Fisk as a wounded baby in a giant man’s body seems particularly well-suited to face off with Tom Holland‘s more boyish Spidey, and it’s bound to happen eventually.

Will Spider-Man get to meet Daredevil and/or Kingpin in Brand New Day? Probably not, because as the trailer shows, he seems to be meeting everybody else. In just this two-and-a-half minute teaser, we see Michael Mando back as Mac Gargan (now in his Scorpion gear!), Frank Castle in his Punisher Battle Van ™, and Boomerang against Spidey. On the less cape and cowl side of things, there’s a non-Hulked Bruce Banner, the new Director of Damage Control (Tramell Tillman of Severance and calling Tom Cruise “Mister” in Mission: Impossible fame), and Peter’s old friends MJ and Ned.

That makes for a pretty stuffed trailer, and it promises a pretty stuffed movie—especially when you consider that the film also has Sadie Sink, who is most likely playing Jean Grey of the X-Men.

How will Spider-Man handle a bunch of Daredevil cameos, tons of villains, and also the X-Men? Not easily, but that’s just life in New York City for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters on July 31, 2026.

Andy Weir Gives Update on Artemis Movie and Why He Wants Jenna Ortega to Play Jazz

If critics are to be believed (including this one), then both films adapted from sci-fi author Andy Weir’s bestselling books have been absolute winners. A decade later, Ridley Scott’s interpretation of Weir’s first novel, The Martian, is considered a modern classic of grounded science fiction storytelling. Meanwhile this week’s Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling is receiving a near rapturous reception among critics and the earliest audiences.

Yet there is another book, one that Weir wrote between those two stories which hasn’t been adapted. Although it isn’t from a lack of trying. In some ways the most pulpy of Weir’s star-gazing stories, Artemis debuted on the New York Times bestseller list in 2017 where it introduced the world to Jasmine Bashara (“Jazz” to her friends), a young woman who despite being born in Saudi Arabia during the 2070s grew up since childhood on Artemis, the first and only city on the Moon.

Imagining the Moon as the ultimate tourist destination for the elite and starstruck, Artemis painstakingly speculates on what it would take to set up a permanent colony on our natural satellite, as well as how quickly an underworld of smuggling, vice, and otherwise ill-gotten criminality could spring up there. Or as Jazz might call it… a living.

The movie made a splash in Hollywood before it was published, with 20th Century Fox snatching up the movie rights on the heels of The Martian being a success for the studio. Furthermore, future Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were tapped to helm the picture, with screenwriter Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Tomb Raider, Amazon’s Fallout) hired to write. However, a lot quickly changed afterward, including Disney buying Fox, and Lord and Miller parting ways with the Mouse House on Solo. In the aftermath, there hasn’t been much public movement on Artemis, which author Weir points to when updating us on the project earlier this month.

“I guess it’s probably on the backburner somewhere. I wouldn’t hold my breath for it,” Weir all but sighs. Yet in the same beat, he suggests he hasn’t given up hope for Artemis. “I know Lord and Miller have some really good ideas for it. I think it comes down more to, can we get someone to give us a big pile of money to make it?”

Project Hail Mary might very well be a good launchpad for the appeal since, like The Martian in the 2010s, it’s an original story steeped in relatively serious, “hard” sci-fi. And as Weir confides, he likes the contrast between Jazz and The Martian’s Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon in the movie) and Gosling’s Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary.

“They’re all different,” Weir explains. “Like you can almost not call Mark a hero. He just is a guy who didn’t want to die. He didn’t save anyone… and Jasmine chose heroism kind of toward the end to undo a problem that she herself had created. And then Ryland is actually going out there and trying to save the entire human race, but would rather not be doing it. So they each have their own little way of backing into heroism.”

With that said, Weir seems intrigued when imagining who might play Jazz in a potential Artemis movie.

“That’s a tough call,” Weir muses. “I mean, it’d be pretty cool—and I have no say in any of this—but if someone like Jenna Ortega would do it. It would be pretty cool. Something like that.”

Jenna Ortega would definitely seem to continue the trend of Weir protagonists making juicy vehicles for modern stars, with Ortega coming off the continued success of Wednesday last year. Granted, Jazz is half-Saudi in the book. Still, Amazon’s audio book production of Artemis gained a lot of fanfare from listeners when it cast Rosario Dawson as the narrator of Artemis (and thus the voice of Jazz).

Whether Ortega or another star books a trip to Weir’s Artemis anytime soon remains to be seen, but if Project Hail Mary works for audiences, Lord, Miller, and Weir will now have a track record with getting original sci-fi off the ground in this decade.

Project Hail Mary opens on Friday, March 20.

How Dinosaurus Sets Up the Rest of Mark Grayson’s Journey on Invincible

This article contains spoilers for Invincible season 4 episodes 1-3.

Only in the world of Invincible can a red dinosaur monster trigger a crisis of conscience. But that’s exactly what happens when Invincible, the superhero alter-ego of teen Mark Grayson, meets Dinosaurus. A scalier, more crimson take on Marvel‘s Incredible Hulk, Dinosaurus may go to extreme ends in his pursuit of environmentalism, but he makes points that give Invincible pause on his superhero’s journey.

Voiced in both his human and raging lizard form by Matthew Rhys, Dinosaurus has a utilitarian approach to saving the world, as he’s willingness to let cities stay destroyed if it helps the environment and he’ll even let many people die if it leads to a greater good later on. For Robert Kirkman, who created the comic with artists Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley, co-showrunner Simon Racioppa, and Mark’s voice actor Steven Yeun, Dinosaurus offers more than a physical challenge to Invincible.

“I think what we’re trying to do is show that Mark is impressionable,” Kirkman tells Den of Geek. He’s young. He’s trying to find his way. He’s open to everything, for good or bad. You know those ideas are going to be rattling around in his head.”

“Hopefully, people understand that Mark is a different character each season,” agrees Racioppa. “I mean, he’s the same person, but he evolves. He’s changing. He takes the wrong path, he has a thought that turns out to be incorrect. He pulls himself back, but he’s not a perfect hero—he’s a kid, he’s 21 years old.

“Mark suddenly has all these powers, all these responsibilities. He’s going to make mistakes, and he’s going to be influenced by the things that happened to him. He should feel like a changeable character who’s just trying to put one foot in front of the other and figure out how to handle himself in this universe. And Dinosaurus affects that.”

To say that Mark has changed over the first three seasons of Invincible is an understatement. When we first met him, he was a mostly normal teenager who just so happened to be the son of Omni-Man, a benevolent hero in the tradition of Superman. But after his own powers began to manifest, and he took on the moniker Invincible, Mark learned that Omni-Man came not to protect Earth but to conquer it in the name of the Viltrum Empire. Since then, Mark’s had to battle not just his father, but a whole legions of Viltrumite invaders.

And yet, for Steven Yeun, the ideological confusion Mark experiences when listening to Dinosaurus is one of the more relatable parts about the Prime Video series.

“You come to an age where you find out things aren’t as they said, and you deal with it. And I think we’re going to want to watch Mark deal with it,” he says with a laugh. “He grew up being shielded from the complexities of the world. He has all of these ideals and traditions. And then, all of a sudden, it’s ripped from him.

“That can leave you pretty cynical, so I think all that is working through Mark at the moment.”

Yeun’s phrasing suggests that the confusion will be short-lived, but Kirkman knows better. “Anyone who is familiar with the comic book knows that Dinosaurus comes back in a big way, so there’s some pretty interesting consequences for Mark,” he teases. Because a big, red, philosophizing dinosaur will always leave an impression, in our world or in the world of Invincible.

New episodes of Invincible season 4 stream every Wednesday on Prime Video.




Dune 3: Is Robert Pattinson’s New Character Hero or Villain?

As with any sequel, part of the appeal of the first trailer for Dune: Part Three is seeing all the familiar faces. The teaser gives us new looks at Paul and Chani, now older and weathered from the former’s role as Emperor. We see Lady Jessica’s face, covered in tattoos, and what appears to be the face of Duncan Idaho, somehow alive after his death in the first Dune. But the most interesting face is that of Robert Pattinson, who plays a suspicious new character.

Pattinson plays Scytale, a Face-Dancer who serves a key role in a conspiracy formed against House Atreides. Scytale is a mysterious character, one whose true nature and purpose are opaque to everyone. Yet, the trailer forces us to ask, “Is Scytale a hero or villain?”

Directed once again by Denis Villeneuve, who co-writes the script with comic scribe Brian K. Vaughn, Dune: Part Three adapts Dune Messiah, the second book in Frank Herbert‘s series. Set approximately twelve years after the first book, Messiah finds Paul seemingly all powerful because of Muad’Dib’s Jihad, and able to enact his vision for the future of humanity. However, a conspiracy rises against Paul, with roots that extend even into his inner circle.

One of the main players in that conspiracy is Pattinson’s character, Scytale. Scytale is a Face-Dancer, the term for shapeshifters within Herbert’s world. Shapeshifters are certainly nothing new to genre fiction, the unique history of Dune‘s reality requires a bit more explanation. Because Dune takes place several millennia after the Butlerian Jihad that destroyed all advanced computers, technology evolved differently.

Where the Bene Gesseret, the order that includes Paul’s mother Jessica, cultivated religious practices that gave them abilities such as the Voice and finger-talking, the Bene Tleilax practiced genetic modification. Eventually, the Bene Tleilax developed complete control over their bodies, allowing themselves to change their makeup on a cellular level, essentially shapeshifting.

Face-dancers aren’t completely new to those who only watch the Dune movies and haven’t read the books. Sister Theodosia, the Bene Gesserit acolyte played by Jade Anouka in Dune: Prophecy was a Face Dancer, who used her abilities to advance Valya Harkonnen’s (Emily Watson) plans. As seen in that show, Face Dancers are a pariah among the larger society, an issue that only grows worse in the 10,000 years between that show and the events of the first Dune movie.

Thus, when Scytale enters the story, he has good reason to doubt Paul’s empire. As such, Scytale serves an important thematic role for Dune: Part Three. Herbert wrote Messiah, in part, as a rejoinder to those who saw Paul as a more or less straightforward hero. In Messiah, the critique of charismatic leaders is more obvious, making Paul feel more morally ambiguous.

It’s hard to make your readers mistrust your main character. It’s all the harder for movie audiences watching glamorous Hollywood stars to criticize the actions of the protagonist, especially when he’s played by Timothée Chalamet. Fortunately, Pattinson is the ideal counter to Chalamet. A magnetic and handsome performer in his own right, Pattinson has built his career around his ability to play against type. From Tenet to The Batman to Mickey 17, Pattinson knows how to embody people who are weirder than they seem, who shouldn’t be fully trusted.

Does that ability mean that Scytale will be a villain in Dune: Part Three? The answer depends in part on how we view Paul, but it depends just as much as on what we see when we look at the face of Scytale, a face that’s always changing.

Dune 3 arrives in theaters on December 18, 2026.

How Robert Pattinson’s Zendaya Connection on The Drama Might Have Led to Dune 3

The Dune movies hold a singular place in Zendaya’s memory. She has, after all, starred in three of them. And as she admits to a wide assembly of press during a special event revealing the Dune: Part Three trailer, they mark a crucial part of her life.

“These movies have meant so much to me over the years,” Zendaya considers. “I literally have been able to grow up in my entire 20s doing them, so they have a special place in my heart, and all these people do as well.” The Emmy-winning star is referring to familiar faces around her on the day, including director Denis Villeneuve and co-star Javier Bardem, as well as perhaps some new ones like Anya Taylor-Joy and Robert Pattinson. Then again, as Pattinson reveals, their history between Dune movies might have been the competitive edge he needed to join the cast on Arrakis.

“I absolutely adored these movies, I saw them multiple times in the theater,” Pattinson reveals. “And I think I was talking to you [Zendaya] on the set of The Drama, and I was like, ‘How do I get into one of those Dune movies?’”

Pattinson is referring to his and Zendaya’s new peculiar, and most likely surrealist, dramedy from A24 and writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario). An intimate character piece, it wouldn’t necessarily cause many to immediately think “Dune,” however Zendaya half-jokes that when Pattinson asked about the and movies, she said, “I know a guy.”

“It was a very unexpected call a few months later,” Pattinson adds about when the offer came from director Villeneuve. “And I kind of do think you had something to do with it.” 

Zendaya is quick to point to Villeneuve as deserving the real credit, however the truth is it probably never hurts to have a good reference, which Zendaya and Pattinson probably qualify as for each other since the duo has three movies coming out this year, starting with The Drama, continuing in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and culminating in Dune: Part Three.

The third Dune film comes out on Dec. 18, 2026.

Dune 3: Denis Villeneuve Promises More ‘Muscular, Action-Packed Thriller’ for Finale

Denis Villeneuve was not supposed to make Dune: Part Three so soon after the last film. As a story that’s “inspired” by Frank Hebert’s Dune Messiah—a curious word choice that the director uses repeatedly instead of “adaptation”—the film was always destined to feature a massive time-jump of about 17 years. While Villeneuve never intended to take quite so long a break off-screen, he did have other projects lined up after 2024’s Dune: Part Two, including a new cinematic portrait of Cleopatra and an adaptation of another sci-fi book by Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Yet on Monday evening in sunny Los Angeles, he sat in an auditorium revealing alongside actors Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Robert Pattinson the first trailer for Dune: Part Three to a roomful of press, including Den of Geek.

“When we got back, I said to my crew I’m taking a break, that’s it. Bye-bye,” the French-Canadian helmer chuckles about the around-the-world press tour of the second Dune movie. During those festivities, he traveled from Abu Dhabi to Montreal, and saw 14,000 fans line up outside a Mexico City theater that only seats 5,000. The grandiosity of the reception impressed him, particularly after the day-and-date HBO Max release of the first Dune at the tail-end of the pandemic in 2021.

“And when I went back home, I kept waking in the middle of the night with those images,” Villeneuve explains. “I was supposed to do another movie in the meantime, but the image of Dune: Part Three, inspired by Dune Messiah, kept coming back, kept coming back. And I said ‘alright, let’s do it.’”

We now have an idea of what those images in his waking eye look like, too, thanks to a spectacular new trailer which reveals a galaxy at war with itself, and an Arrakis infected with a fanaticism that borders on hysteria.  The chanting wails of Hans Zimmer’s now iconic score from the last two movies likewise return, but they’re more frenzied, feverish even, while the scale of the throne room dominated by Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his extended family evokes the Pyramids of old on the Earth that was.

It’s striking since the second Dune novel on which this is based, Messiah, has long been both celebrated and criticized for its more intimate scale. One could even call it a chamber piece about courtier intrigue and betrayals in a royal palace. Yet while Villeneuve promises a very different movie from the previous two entries, he also claimed it to be the biggest Dune, as well as his most personal.

“I said to myself that it’s a good idea to come back to this world not [with a sense of] nostalgia but of urgency,” Villeneuve emphasizes. “To go there with a critical eye and not to be self-indulgent. I said to my team that it will be a very different film, a very different Dune movie, have a different tone with a different rhythm, a different pace. If the first movie was more of a contemplation about a boy discovering a new world, and the second one is a war, then this one is a thriller. It’s more action-packed and more dense, more muscular than the other two films.”

That is demonstrated by the emphasis on the entire Atreides line being on the frontline of what Herbert described on the page as Muad’Dib’s jihad and genocides (which Paul never is revealed as participating in first-hand). In the sizzle reel footage, we see both Paul and his younger sister Alia (Taylor-Joy) lead Fremen into battle on distant worlds which evoke feudal East Asian societies.

While Zimmer has returned, noticeably cinematographer Greig Fraser has not, with the DP being replaced by Linus Sandgren, the Oscar-winning lenser on La La Land, Wuthering Heights, and No Time to Die. Villeneuve talked about how the two specifically sought out the grainy texture of celluloid, intending to utilize it in both ultra-wide 70mm presentations and IMAX… at least when they aren’t in the Arraki wastes.

“We decided, both of us, to shoot most of the movie in film,” Villeneuve explains. “I haven’t shot in film in years, and we shot the film in the 65mm, most of it, a big part of it is also shot in IMAX film, a first-time for me.” However, he adds, there is one glaring exception: “I kept the desert in digital because I love the brutality of the digital IMAX. So the movie is really meant to be an IMAX experience.”

Another noticeable change is the appearance of returning actors, including Chalamet and Zendaya. The director reveals he likes using some imagination and not utilizing too many prosthetic effects when instituting a time jump. “Aging actors is more tricky,” he admits with some understatement. However, he and makeup designer Heike Merker worked to achieve “subtler ways” to suggest aging in front of the camera.

Villeneuve might be aging some familiar faces, but he’s also relying on fresh ones as well, as indicated by newcomers Pattinson and Taylor-Joy joining old Dune veterans Zendaya and Bardem at the trailer event (not counting Taylor-Joy’s cameo in Dune: Part Two). Indeed, Taylor-Joy’s character might be among the most enigmatic of Herbert’s creations, as indicated by an ethereal iconography in the trailer juxtaposed with a manic anger on the character’s face.

“Alia has a very intense blessing/curse situation,” Anya Taylor-Joy says of the younger Atreides sibling. “She carries the weight and the wisdom of generations and generations in her head. She’s never in a singular conversation, she’s kind of everything everywhere all at once. And the one thing she really feels most strongly about is her love and devotion to her brother, because that is the only person who has ever made her feel like she makes sense. He’s understood her from before she was even born, and she would do anything for him to various degrees of insanity.”

Insanity might also be another word to describe Dune as well: a world in which the idiosyncrasies and indulgences of its leaders can result in tragic consequences, no matter how well-intentioned the choices might have once been. It’s a narrative world full of ambition, sand, and a dream of greatness. Funnily enough, Villeneuve’s trilogy features all three in spades.

Dune: Part Three opens in theaters on Dec. 18, 2026.

Green Lantern: The Damon Lindelof and Grant Morrison Dispute Reveals the Problem With Comic Book Adaptations

Damon Lindelof has done it again. He’s made the nerds mad. This time, it’s not because Lost ended in purgatory or because he remixed Watchmen or because of, well, everything in Prometheus. It’s because he said that Green Lantern was a stupid name. Those comments would have irritated Green Lantern fans regardless, but it especially stung because Lindelof is co-creator, along with Chris Mundy and fellow controversy-magnet Tom King, of the HBO Max series Lanterns. The comments drew the ire of many, not least of which was Grant Morrison, who took to their Substack to decry this “jockish dismissal of superhero conventions.”

Lindelof has already issued a mea culpa on his Instagram, admitting his comments were a joke on a comedy podcast and assuring everyone that he’s a huge fan of Hal Jordan. But here’s the thing: he was right. And here’s the other thing: Morrison’s right, too. Superheroes are inherently silly, and that silliness will only be magnified when trying to appeal to larger audiences.

In Comic Book Day…

Here’s the Green Lantern concept in a nutshell:

Millenia ago, an alien from the planet Maltus introduced evil into reality by witnessing the dawn of creation. To right this wrong, a subset of Maltusians designated themselves the Guardians of the Universe, tried and failed various ways of doing good before finally establishing the Green Lantern Corps. Members of the Green Lantern Corps, chosen for their honesty and bravery, are equipped with a lantern-shaped power battery and a ring, which they must recharge on the battery every solar cycle (read: 24 hours). The rings allow them to create whatever they can will, but initially and sometimes still do not work on anything yellow.

Of the 3600 space sectors patrolled by the Corps, Earth is in Sector 2814, where it is primarily guarded by Hal Jordan, but also by Guy Gardner, John Stewart, and a whole lot of other humans. The main bad guy looks like the Devil and/or David Niven and is called Sinestro. Other Lanterns include a squirrel, a mathematical equation, and a cannibal. Also, Hal Jordan went crazy one time and committed cosmic genocide, he dated a 13-year-old for a while, and, worst of all, was once played by Ryan Reynolds in a movie.

That’s a lot to swallow, at least for anyone not all the way bought in. But comic book fans are mostly bought in (Garth Ennis, who came up with the character “Dogwelder” as a bet to make a name dumber than Green Lantern, doesn’t count because he hates all superheroes who aren’t Superman). While the Green Lantern series struggled in sales from the 60s through the 80s, becoming a backup in The Flash for a while and later becoming a book co-led by Green Arrow, it has been a consistent favorite with multiple spin-offs since 1990. Green Lantern is a foundational concept in the DC Universe, something no respectable adaptation of the universe can go without.

In Mainstream Light…

But for everyone else, Green Lantern is a bit of a tough sell. Sure, mass audiences can accept that getting exposed to radiation gives you spider-powers or the ability to turn into a green monster instead of cancer, and sure, we can accept that an alien with nearly unlimited power would care for other people because he was raised in Kansas, but all of those properties have long existed in the wider imagination. They’re baked into our pop culture. Outside of the hippy song “Sunshine Superman” and Justice League cartoons, Green Lantern can’t say the same.

Thus, the team behind Lanterns is faced with an unenviable dilemma. How can they take a concept that has resonated with so many comic book fans for so long and make it appeal to mass audiences, audiences who don’t want to pour through dense lore in order to understand the main story?

Lanterns appears to be borrowing a page from other adaptations, hiring good-looking and well-known stars to play the part, and—as the MCU taught us—keeping those handsome mugs as unobscured as possible. But it also appears to be going even further, stripping all things green from the costumes, settings, and even the title.

No Weirdness Will Be in Sight

Whether or not it will work remains to be seen, but the whole Lanterns debacle underscores a truth that comic book fans must face. Our favorite hobby is weird. Our favorite characters are weird. And in many cases, that weirdness is exactly what we love about them.

However, weirdness is, by definition, outside of the mainstream. So we’re left with two options. We can take a lot of the weirdness out to make the concept appeal to larger audiences, which is what Lanterns appears to be doing. But what are we left with? Green Lantern fans are clearly irritated that, besides the cocky twinkle in Kyle Chandler’s eye and the seriousness brought by Aaron Pierre, the show seems to have nothing to do with the Hal Jordan and John Stewart they love.

The other option is to do what most people running DC adaptations have done: ignore Green Lantern. Stick to concepts that better match established tropes, and don’t even try to mess with the space police.

We cannot say if either option is better than the other. But if the James Gunn DCU, which just gave us a Superman who says “What the hey?” after being healed by his robots and which made an A-lister out of Peacemaker, cannot do it, then maybe no one can. And no amount of jokes or apologies from Damon Lindelof will change that.

Lanterns comes to HBO Max in 2026.

Sarah Michele Gellar Reveals the Real Reason Behind the Buffy Reboot’s Cancellation

Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar says she fought an “uphill battle” since “day one” to get Hulu reboot series New Sunnydale made.

In a new interview with People, Gellar broke down the decision to cancel the show after the pilot and how she heard the news. The timing sounds absolutely diabolical; she was attending the world premiere of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, while New Sunnydale director Chloé Zhao was about to attend the Academy Awards, where her film Hamnet had been nominated for eight Oscars.

New Sunnydale and Ready or Not 2 are both Searchlight productions, and Gellar says they didn’t see the cancellation coming either.

“I got the call as we were stepping onto the stage for the premiere of [Searchlight’s] own movie,” she explained. “And it’s also the weekend of Chloé going to the Oscars as a best director nominee for Hamnet. For them to call us on the Friday of what should have been Chloé’s victory lap for an incredible film, and my world premiere of something that I worked very hard for is …that says something.”

Gellar alleges that the cancellation decision was ultimately made by one guy who just wasn’t a fan. “We had an executive on our show who was not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn’t for him.”

She added, “That’s very hard when you’re taking a property that is as beloved as Buffy, not just to the world, but to me and Chloé. So that tells you the uphill battle that we had been fighting since day one, when your executive is literally proud to tell you that he didn’t watch it.”

Gellar says Buffy’s fans were “the only reason we were doing this show in the first place. We were doing it because everybody loves it. How do you do a show that’s beloved with someone that doesn’t love it?”

Deadline’s sources have reported that the exec in question is Disney Television Group President Craig Erwich. They also report that the pilot was even rewritten to address Hulu’s concerns that it “played too young” and lacked enough Buffy Summers. The new pilot script had been well received but didn’t seem good enough for Erwich, who has been leading development and strategy for Hulu’s original series since 2014. He has overseen the success of shows like The Handmaid’s Tale and Only Murders in the Building, and was previously involved in developing hits like 24, House, and Prison Break during his time at FOX.

New Sunnydale will not have the opportunity to be shopped elsewhere, as 20th Television, where Erwich has recently been given oversight, now owns the Buffy IP.

What Really Happens Inside the Love Island USA Villa?

For years, the U.S. version of Love Island felt like the franchise’s overlooked sibling. While the original U.K. series dominated global conversation, Love Island USA struggled to capture the same cultural impact. That changed dramatically with season 6, when the show suddenly became impossible to ignore—especially for those on social media. 

Over the past two summers, Love Island USA has firmly planted itself at the center of the cultural zeitgeist. Now, beginning June 2, the show looks poised to do it again. 

In the spirit of innovation and tapping into fans’ curiosity, showrunner and executive producer Ben Thursby-Palmer and host Ariana Madix took longtime fans behind-the-scenes at SXSW during a panel titled, “Inside the Villa: How Love Island USA Really Gets Made,” on the third day of the festival. 

Speaking to Den of Geek following the panel, Thursby-Palmer said the team wanted to pull back the curtain on what became the most-streamed episodic series of 2025. “People ask a lot of questions, and there are a lot of myths and rumors about it,” Thursby-Palmer says. “When actually, it’s really not that deep.”

What the panel actually proved, however, is that it is in fact that deep. With approximately 108 cameras rolling throughout the villa, production rotating in the control room 24 hours a day, and an entire team dedicated to crafting challenges that relate to blindfolded makeouts and baby-bird-esque food transfers—there’s a lot that goes into a single season of Love Island USA. 

Beyond how the sausage, or, perhaps more appropriately, how the avocado toast gets made in the villa, the revered host of the last two seasons, Madix, says the hardest part about her six-week stay in Fiji is having to be the bearer of bad news. 

During the panel, Madix shared that she was glued to her seat while getting glam and watching season 8 contestants Charlie and Hannah reaffirm their connection, knowing that she would soon have to walk into the villa and tell them that America wanted them broken up. 

Madix’s empathy for the contestants was a consistent theme throughout the discussion. She told the SXSW crowd that she frequently visits the newly eliminated cast members to talk through how they feel. She’s especially empathetic toward those who receive intense hate online after going through this whirlwind of an experience. 

“I’ve been in that position before,” Madix tells Den of Geek following the panel. “I feel like there’s a difference between feeling passionately about the show and about who your favorites are and whatever—there’s a line that gets crossed sometimes where it steers into very inappropriate and wrong territory. Every islander that goes in there is doing their best, whether that’s something you connect with as a viewer or not.” 

As unscripted television goes, there’s no way to predict how cast members will navigate challenges and relationships. One aspect of the show Thursby-Palmer can rely on is Iain Stirling’s hilarious narration, which he does from his bedroom in the U.K.

“He makes the U.K. one at the same time, so I don’t know how he sleeps,” Thursby-Palmer told the crowd. “He was always there as the kind of boyfriend on the couch. You know, when you’re watching a show, and then they just give some smug comments? That was sort of his role. He’s never mean to the islanders. He’s mean to us, and we’re here for it.” 

A feature of the series Madix looks forward to every season is seeing how the couples act apart from each other at Casa Amor. Thursby-Palmer switched the rule book this season by having all contestants enter Casa Amor single, which Madix loved. 

“There’s always somebody that’s like, ‘If I just stay good through Casa, it’s going to be OK,” Madix told the audience. “I just feel like it’s nice to really shake it up and be like, ‘No, you’re gonna participate.’”

The “challenge team,” as Thursby-Palmer called them, are about to embark on building challenges for the new islanders more than two months ahead of the new season, and Madix is beginning to plan out her outfits, which she says will involve a lot of crochet and shells. 

Will season 8 of Love Island USA consume the cultural conversation again this summer? Thursby-Palmer says he never knows what’s going to be popular, but one thing is for sure: he’s grateful for the series’ recent skyrocketing success. 

“I’m really proud of the islanders, and I’m really proud of the team,” Thursby-Palmer told Den of Geek after the panel. “It’s not like an overnight thing. We’ve been working at this for a long time. So, it feels really good for everyone’s hard work on-screen and off-screen to actually get some love.”

Love Island USA season 8 premieres June 2 on Peacock.

V for Vendetta Director Has Some Advice for Adapting Alan Moore

It’s too early to call James Gunn‘s new DCU an unqualified success, but things have been going very well so far. Creature Commandos and Peacemaker have been hits among critics despite modest streaming numbers, Superman was one of the biggest movies of 2025, and anticipation for Supergirl and Lanterns couldn’t be higher. Gunn is already trading on that success by announcing new and surprising projects, including a miniseries adapting the classic Alan Moore and David Lloyd comic V for Vendetta.

No creative team has been announced yet, but the last guy to tackle V for Vendetta has some advice for whoever will be following in his footsteps. “Don’t be slavish to the graphic novel,” James McTeigue shared with Den of Geek. “There’s some crazy stuff in that graphic novel, which won’t translate well to the screen,” he observes, knowing that changes will draw the ire of the story’s famously cantankerous writer. “I think in Alan Moore’s brain, you would put the graphic novel on a pedestal and you just put the pages up on the screen.”

McTeigue offers his thoughts with a wink and a smile, but there’s some truth to his characterization. Moore has recently suggested that adults who love superhero movies are a “precursor to fascism,” but he has long taken issue with adaptations. Sometimes, the frustration comes from the way that movies diminish the formal qualities unique to the medium of comics; other times, his complaints stem from a long history of unfair dealings from DC Comics and its parent company, Warner Bros.

With V for Vendetta, the concerns were thematic. Moore called the script written by Lana and Lilly Wachowski “imbecilic,” and took issue with the way the movie dealt with the contrast between anarchism and fascism. “There wasn’t a mention of anarchy as far as I could see,” he said in 2005. “The fascism had been completely defanged. I mean, I think that any references to racial purity had been excised, whereas actually, fascists are quite big on racial purity.” However, V for Vendetta artist David Lloyd has always been supportive of the film, calling it “terrific” and describing watching it as “seeing a painting you’ve done come to life.”

The contrast between the two original creators’ reaction to the movie underscores a key element of adaptation, even when talking about McTeigue’s own take on V for Vendetta. “People have many different interpretations to the movie, which I love,” he says. “And in that way, it strikes me that it’s like a piece of music. You bring something to it, and then you take something away depending on what you bring to it. I think the film does that successfully.”

Throughout his conversation with Den of Geek, McTeigue notes the “cycles” of authoritarianism in the real world, how they existed when the first issues of the comic book series released in 1981, how they existed when the movie hit theaters in 2006, and how they exist now. These events “speak to when I made it, when Alan Moore made it, when you watch the movie now.”

That said, McTeigue also allows that whoever makes the next incarnation of V for Vendetta can better adapt the series just by virtue of the fact that it will be a miniseries instead of a movie. “From what I believe, it’s a more classic retelling of the graphic novel, which they’ll be able to do with eight or 10 hours.”

But as demonstrated by McTeigue’s success with V for Vendetta, or even by the excellent HBO miniseries of Moore’s Watchmen, it’s not so much the amount of time a creator has, but what they do with it. As long as those who Gunn has picked to make the next V for Vendetta are making something they consider true and vital, then the series will be at least worthwhile—even if Alan Moore disagrees.

Invincible Showrunners on Why Lee Pace Was Perfect for the Story’s Big Bad Thragg

By the end of Invincible‘s third season, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) seemed to have defeated the strongest Viltrumite out there. It nearly cost him his life and his principles, but Mark managed to stop the powerful Conquest, giving him and his friends hope that the Viltrum Empire could be nearing its end. But he has no idea what’s coming, Grand Regent Thragg.

Thragg has been a long-running character in the pages of Invincible comics, by writer Robert Kirkman and artists Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley, but he’ll be new to viewers of the Prime Video series. Well, his look will be new. His voice will be very familiar to fans of genre cinema and television, as it’s that of Lee Pace, he of Pushing Daisies, Halt and Catch Fire, and Guardians of the Galaxy. For Kirkman and Simon Racioppa, showrunners of the animated series, that experience made Pace the perfect choice to lend his voice to the dominating Thragg.

“I’ve always wanted to work with Lee Pace,” Kirkman admits to Den of Geek, recalling their shared orbit when The Walking Dead and Halt and Catch Fire were both in production at AMC. “I would run into him at events and things and admire him from afar. He just has this quiet power that he exudes with his voice that we thought would be absolutely perfect for that character. So the casting process was basically asking if Lee was available.”

“Will he please do the role?” Racioppa adds to the memory, before expounding on what makes Pace so perfect for Thragg.

“In the sessions with him, he just delivers over and over again. He has the best questions about the character, and he knows where the character is coming from, where he’s going. Like Robert says, he can sell power without volume and deliver intensity in a way that is difficult to find. A lot of other people sometimes think intensity means volume or means screaming loud.

“Lee’s able to give you intensity at a regular level, which is who Thragg is. Thragg doesn’t need to flex, Thragg is most powerful withdrawn.”

Thragg’s quiet intensity comes directly from the comics, where he serves as one of the book’s most important antagonists. Technically, Thragg first appeared in Invincible #11 (2004), when Nolan Grayson (J. K. Simmons) first told Mark about the Viltrum Empire. Thragg failed to stand out because, well, he looked like most other Viltrumite men, mustachioed and muscled, wearing a red suit.

When Thragg made his first proper appearance amidst the Viltrumite War arc from 2010, he was immediately more noticeable. Conquest boasted and flexed, up until the moment of his death. But Thragg just watched, waited, and seethed.

What does that power mean for Mark and his brother Oliver, aka Kid Omni-Man (Christian Convery)? Comic readers know the answer, but those watching the show will have to wait to find out. Besides, saying too much about what Thragg can do runs contrary to who he is. Thragg is all about showing his power instead of telling people about it, even if that showing is just in the tone of his voice.

“Lee can sell that power with his voice,” Racioppa says. “It was delightful working with him in that way.”

The first three episodes of Invincible season 4 premiere on Prime Video on March 18, 2026.

Jamie Lee Curtis Defends Timothée Chalamet from Online Backlash

The path to an Oscar isn’t all glamor and parties. It’s also a lot of politicking and watching your words, which is something Timothée Chalamet learned the hard way after he said that “no one cares” about ballet or opera.

The comments bothered a lot of people, but so has the way they have been interpreted by an always ravenous social media machine. Jamie Lee Curtis has intimate understanding of both.

“He’s a talented kid and he made a stupid comment that he’s going to regret,” Curtis told Den of Geek at SXSW on the eve of both the Oscar ceremony and the premiere of her own new film about eerie online culture. “And that’s okay. In today’s marketplace, where every single word we say is recorded, it’s going to happen to all of us. It certainly happened to me, and I’ve been raked over the coals for things I said on a podcast about something once—when in fact, it wasn’t what I said, but I got reamed for it, and that’s okay. We’re all grown-ups. He’s growing up, and I’m sure he regrets his comments. And if he doesn’t, that’s okay too, but it was a silly comment that obviously denigrated a beautiful art form.”

Curtis shared those thoughts with Den of Geek while promoting Sender, which she produced through her company Comet Pictures and in which she plays a supporting role. The issue was close to her mind, and not just because Sender also features Anna Baryshnikov, daughter of ballet dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lisa Rinehart. Curtis was thinking about the awards season discourse because Sender debuted at SXSW, the same festival that premiered the movie that led to her Best Supporting Actress win, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

According to Curtis, her journey with Everything Everywhere All at Once began with a recommendation from a young filmmaker working at Comet Pictures named Russell Goldman. “When I told Russell that I had been offered a movie by the Daniels, he said, ‘Do it,’ not a second after the word ‘Daniels,'” she reveals. “I didn’t know they were geniuses because I had not seen their work. Russell was really one of the loudest voices that convinced me to do it.”

Now Curtis is back with Goldman as her director via Sender, which stars Britt Lower of Severance fame as Julia, a recovering alcoholic who gets caught in a “brushing scam,” which Goldman describes as a particularly modern racket.

“They send you cheap objects that are most likely related to your search history online, and they send it to your home so that they can write five-star reviews in your name,” Goldman explains. “Then those products can then get boosted on the algorithms on Amazon or any site like that. It sounds very complicated, but it’s how some people feel like they can make money. And it makes you feel insane.”

After her sister was caught in a brushing scam, Curtis discussed the phenomenon with Goldman. “We talked about how creepy that is for a woman who is basically trapped in her house to receive packages she did not ask for. What she gets and why she gets it is very personal, and paranoia and psychological torture occur,” says Curtis.

According to Lower, Julia is already in a vulnerable mental state before she begins receiving unwanted packages at the start of Sender. “Julia’s world has gotten much quieter in her journey to sobriety, and so she’s hyper focused on every detail of new things coming into this space she’s created for herself. There’s a mystery to them.

“Julia is getting a quick fix from ordering things, but then other things come in. She’s been addicted to alcohol, and all of a sudden she transitions to trying to quickly fix her life by ordering a bunch of stuff, and it just gets way out of hand.”

Mail getting out of hand isn’t something that Baryshnikov has experienced. “I loved getting packages as a kid!” she enthuses; “The idea of things arriving is so delightful to me, especially when I don’t know what it means yet.”

But for her co-star David Dastmalchian, things are a little different, especially since he was mailed a pair of dirty underwear. “I have a fan mail post office box, and it’s happened a couple of times, from the same person I don’t know,” Dastmalchian shares. “My dear stepfather, who I love so much, he’s my first line of defense. So anything that is scary or weird or inappropriate, luckily, never gets to me, because he goes through everything, and then I get all the nice stuff. But I got them when I was picking it up myself one time, and they were accompanied by a really bizarre letter.”

Unlike the people in their movie, the makers of Sender can laugh about their mail experiences. And hopefully Curtis’s kind words mean that Chalamet doesn’t have to worry about unpleasant things arriving in his mailbox.

Sender premiered at the SXSW Film Festival on March 14.

One Battle After Another Is Political But It Isn’t About Politics

This post contains spoilers for One Battle After Another.

Like anyone who wins a major Oscar, Paul Thomas Anderson was given a platform. And he used that platform to urge people to treat one another better, providing few specifics in any speech he gave after One Battle After Another earned another award. For some, that lack of detail stems from the movie, which gestures at revolutionary politics but doesn’t offer much detail. But Anderson himself isn’t interested in details, at least outside of the movie.

“Our film obviously has a certain amount of parallels to what’s happening in the news everyday, so it obviously reflects what’s happening in the world,” he admitted to Deadline. “In terms of where it’s going – I don’t know… But I know that the end of our movie is our hero, Willa, heading off to continue to fight against evil forces, and I think like I said in my speech, at least put common decency back into fashion.”

While his imprecision may annoy some, Anderson’s comments remind us that One Battle After Another is less a strident political work and more a picture of people who live political lives.

Nothing illustrates this point better than the final exchange between Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). The two had just spent the past two hours of screentime running from Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and the U.S. military, as well as an assassin from a secret White Supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club. Moreover, Bob used to be Ghetto Pat Calhoun, who served alongside Willa’s mother Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) in the revolutionary group the French 75.

But as Willa leaves, Bob just shouts, “Be careful,” to which she answers, “I won’t.” It’s the type of exchange any parent would have with their kid, no matter how dull their lives may be, a point underscored by the fact that we then watch as Bob fumbles his way around an iPhone. The scene feels so relatable because that’s what it’s trying to be, just a picture of a parent with a teenage kid. Nothing more.

Yet, it’s easy to understand why some viewers would want One Battle After Another to be more strident in its politics. The film features many elements that resonate with anyone angry at the state of the world in general, and America in particular. The movie begins with a thrilling mini-film in which Bob, Perfidia, and the French 75 liberate immigrants from a detention center. Later in the film, Lockjaw leads a group that blurs the line between military and police, and which look an awful lot like the ICE agents who kill and kidnap civilians. Anderson even cast former Homeland Security agent James Raterman as Lockjaw’s right-hand man, Colonel Danvers.

Yet, as much as the Christmas Adventurer’s Club may bring to mind the shadowy forces who work to shore up power among a small group of elites, it also reminds us of the true source material of One Battle After Another. Anderson drew inspiration for his movie from Vineland, the 1990 novel by high-postmodernist Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon’s work certainly responds to the fall-out of the ’60s and the reactionary turn American politics took in the 1980s, but it exists in its own, absurd world, one of secret societies and pop-culture mysteries. If it’s a reflection of the real world, then it’s a reflection in a fun house mirror.

Instead, One Battle After Another talks about the need for revolutionary politics only broadly, which is part of the movie’s point. The way that the French 75 fought against oppression must be different from what Willa and her generation does. The threat mutates, the specifics change, and resistance must be as nimble as the regimes they hope to undo. Bob—and, it is implied, Perfidia—must learn how to let the next generation fight in the way that speaks to their times.

The same is true of the audience. Movies can and do paint specific pictures of oppression and ways to fight back; see classics such as The Battle of Algiers and Medium Cool, or, more recently, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. But there’s value to a sort of fill-in-the-blank type movie too, such as 2024’s Civil War. These films gesture toward evils that exist, but they don’t do the audience’s resisting for them. Instead, it simply reminds the viewer that there are forces in the world that would destroy good things in their pursuit of power.

What are those good things? Again, the film doesn’t get specific. The “common decency” that Anderson mentions is certainly one of them, but so is the imperfect love between a dad and daughter, which is, after all, the real subject of One Battle After Another.

One Battle After Another is now streaming on HBO Max.

The Wire: Remembering Michael B. Jordan’s First Great Role

Last night, Michael B. Jordan won the Oscar for Best Actor, beating out estimable competition including long-established greats Leonardo DiCaprio and Ethan Hawke, as well as up-and-comers Timothée Chalamet and Wagner Moura. Certainly, Jordan deserved the victory for his work in the juggernaut Sinners, which pulled in a record-breaking 16 nominations and 4 wins.

At only 39, Michael B. Jordan seems to belong more with the 30-year-old Chalamet and with Wagner, who only started making American films in 2013. But Jordan’s been doing excellent work for twenty-five years, starting with his role as Wallace on The Wire. Even as a kid, Jordan demonstrated the charisma and dramatic chops that would win him an Academy Award.

Way Down in the Hole

Created by David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who spent a year embedded with homicide detectives in the city police department, The Wire still has a reputation for being one of the greatest shows of all time. It earned such praise thanks to its realistic depiction of life in Baltimore, showing the political, social, and economic forces that drive the cops and criminals. That extends to the show’s portrayal of the drug trade, in which kids who live in project housing have little choice but to sell.

The first season of The Wire illustrated this point with three young teens, Wallace, Poot (Tray Chaney), and Bodie (J. D. Williams), all of whom work under D’Angelo Barksdale, a lieutenant in the organization run by his cousin Avon (Wood Harris). The three kids sell drugs in the common area outside of their homes in an inner-city Baltimore housing project, and the first season often blurs the line between work and play.

The trio have to adhere to the rules that allow Barksdale’s operation to run outside of police observation, observations that only become effective when the Baltimore police begin using the titular ware. If a kid makes a mistake, such as taking counterfeit bills or allowing an addict to draw attention to their drop-off spot, they are reprimanded. At the same time, the show takes time for the kids to actually act like kids, teasing one another or praising the virtues of Chicken McNuggets.

The last point is where Jordan shined as Wallace. Where Bodie presents himself as a hard man willing to do what it takes to climb the ranks and Poot is simply willing to go along with others, Wallace is a genuinely good kid suffering from a lack of options. Jordan plays him as a sweet person, a guy who loves his friends and takes responsibility for those younger than him. We see him helping younger kids with their homework, packing their lunches, and making sure that they get to school, not out of some large philosophical conviction, but just because he wants the kids to be safe.

Through Wallace, The Wire shows the tragedy of kids stuck in a system that forces them into the drug trade. Wallace works in the Barksdale organization alongside Bodie and Poot, but only because that’s what his friends and role models do. However, when Wallace identifies the boyfriend of Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), the burglar who has been robbing Barksdale drug houses, he’s sickened by the violence that flows. That disgust leaves him open to the detectives searching for Barksdale, who convince him to identify Avon’s right-hand man Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) and relocate him upstate.

But Wallace feels out-of-place and lonely in the country, and he eventually returns home to the projects, a decision that drives Stringer to order his death.

Not The Way It Should Be

Jordan plays all of Wallace’s contradictions in the character’s final scene from the episode “Cleaning Up,” in which Poot and Bodie enact Stringer’s orders to kill their friend. The scene begins with the trio heading back to the apartment where Wallace lives with the younger kids. Wallace immediately decides to check in on the kids, at first playfully calling for them and bounding up the stairs as if they’re involved in a game of hide and seek and then turning his voice stern as he becomes worried.

The tension turns when Wallace finds a walkman left by one of the kids, and picks it up to show Poot. When Wallace turns around to see Bodie pointing a pistol at him, Jordan has to embody surprise, betrayal, and fear. Wallace had been less overtaken by the fatalism that consumes many of the others in the projects, but it’s less the onset of death that shocks him and more the fact that his best friends are threatening to kill him.

Jordan has to maintain the reality of the situation, expressing that Wallace is a child who is about to be murdered by the people he trusted most. But he must also bring to life the high-concept, often poetic writing that Simon and co-creator Ed Burns brought to the series. Jordan pulls that off with the mixture of terror and defiance he puts into his readings of the lines, “Why it gotta be like this?” and “You my boys.”

By delivering those words as a scared but clear-minded boy, Jordan captures the central moral of The Wire: it doesn’t have to be like this.

Way Beyond Baltimore

Wallace is hardly the only striking death in the series, but D’Angelo’s confrontation with Stringer over the murder remains one of the most memorable moments in television history.

For his part, Jordan went on to do more excellent and varied work, even before playing twins Smoke and Stack in Sinners. With director Ryan Coogler, Jordan portrayed the real-life victim of systemic racism, Oscar Grant III, in Fruitvale Station, as well as Adonis Creed, son of doomed fighter Apollo Creed, and the fiery and principled supervillain Killmonger in Black Panther. He also had memorable turns in other TV series, as a troubled teen named Reggie Montgomery in the soap All My Children c(a role he took over from his future co-star Chadwick Boseman) and as hot-headed quarterback Vince Howard in Friday Night Lights.

Across these and other roles, Jordan showed he had the dramatic chops and magnetism to be a star. The Oscar win may have cemented his status, but Jordan had already proved he was capable, way back when he was a teen, way back on The Wire.

The Wire is now streaming on HBO Max.

Vince Gilligan Recalls Brutal Reaction to His Breaking Bad Pitch

Breaking Bad is now considered by many to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time, but when creator Vince Gilligan first started pitching it, not everyone warmed to the idea of seeing a chemistry teacher decide to start cooking meth after getting a stage-three lung cancer diagnosis.

During a South by Southwest Film & TV Festival panel last week (via THR,) Gilligan recalled finding a notebook where he cooked up his first basic thoughts on Breaking Bad. All he’d written down was “Good guy does something bad to save his family,” but this seed soon blossomed, and he took an expanded pitch to Sony, where an executive told him, “‘That’s the single worst idea I’ve ever heard.’”

Gilligan noted that the executive in question was no longer at Sony, saying, “To his credit, he’s a good man, and he acknowledged [his mistake later].”

It wasn’t the only bad reaction Gilligan faced as he tried to make Breaking Bad a reality. He previously told Emmy TV Legends about a meeting with TNT that went downhill after he unveiled the meth element of the show’s story. “[The two executives] look at each other and they say, ‘Oh god, I wish we could buy this.’ Then they said, ‘If we bought this, we’d be fired … We cannot put this on TNT, it’s meth, it can’t be meth, it’s reprehensible.’”

HBO was also ice cold on Breaking Bad, emitting “a toxic gamma radiation of disinterest,” while Showtime didn’t want to greenlight another Weeds-like show about a parent dealing drugs. Eventually, FX bought the script but passed it to AMC. “God bless them, that…when AMC came calling, [FX was] big enough to allow AMC to purchase the script for Breaking Bad…that behavior’s kind of rare in the business.”

Suffice it to say, everyone who turned down Breaking Bad must have felt a bit silly after the series finally got made and was met with universal acclaim, enviable viewing figures, and awards aplenty. That’s show business, folks.

New Firefly Series in the Works, But No Guarantees Yet

Ever since Fox canceled Firefly in 2002 after airing just eleven of its episodes, fans of the space Western series have longed for the show’s return. They would get a conclusion to the story just a few years later in the form of Serenity, a movie that marked Firefly creator Joss Whedon’s directorial debut, but the premature loss of the show remained an itchy wound that never healed for some.

Now, it finally looks like a new animated Firefly series is in the works that will fill in the gaps between the show and the movie, but Deadline says the reboot is still in “advanced development” and therefore not a done deal, with no network or streamer attached.

The good news is that this new spin on Firefly has already come a long way. Original stars Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres, Jewel Staite, Morena Baccarin, Sean Maher, Summer Glau, and Adam Baldwin are all set to lend their voices to the animated revival, with Fillion producing. Some concept art and a script have also been completed, and Marc Guggenheim (Arrow) and Tara Butters (Agent Carter) have stepped up as showrunners. Fillion has said that Whedon has given the new Firefly series his “blessing,” but he will not be involved.

“The dedication of Firefly fans has kept this 25-year-old show relevant,” Fillion said. “Clearly, the return of Firefly is something the fans want. More importantly, it’s something they deserve.”

While this news has been met with a tentative “hell yeah,” the fact that it came along in the same week that Hulu canceled its Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot makes the announcement bittersweet for some fans of Whedon’s old TV universe. But although Buffy stayed on the air for seven seasons and even produced a successful spinoff show, the world of Firefly still remains largely unexplored. That makes it a good candidate for any streamer looking to give the cult IP a home.

Hopefully, this animated series will soar into production soon. Keep everything crossed.

V for Vendetta Director on the Movie’s Hope and Relevance 20 Years Later

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November.” So goes the English poem commemorating the arrest of Guy Fawkes on November 5, 1605, for trying to destroy Parliament with explosives. These days, the image of Guy Fawkes is as prevalent as ever, but few remember the Gunpowder Plot at all. Instead, they associate the face with the mask worn by V, the protagonist of the 1982 comic book V for Vendetta and the 2006 movie adaptation.

And that’s just fine with James McTeigue, director of V for Vendetta. “I think people really got what the movie was about,” McTeigue told Den of Geek. “And people get what the mask is about, too. It has cultural legs beyond the film. It’s about your right in a free society to protest, that there’s more strength in ‘we’ than there is in ‘I.’ The mask affords you the ability to protest without vilification or being arrested.”

Written by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, V for Vendetta stars Hugo Weaving as a masked vigilante known only as V, who recruits/forces young woman Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) into his crusade against a fascist English government. Set in the near future, the film shows how the Norsefire party, under the control of leader Adam Sutler (John Hurt), uses media and censorship to create a compliant populace. In addition to recovering works of art and pop culture that the government tries to destroy, V seeks to inspire the people to fight back, while waging his own personal war against those who ran the concentration camp that transformed him into the man he is today.

“What jumps out to me is how timeless it actually is to tell the truth,” McTeigue says of revisiting the film after 20 years. “The political environment hasn’t really changed that much from when I made the movie 20 years ago. And I’d guess Alan Moore and David Lloyd would tell you that the political environment that they made it hasn’t changed that much from when they made the book in the ’80s. I think we’re in another cycle of that, and I’m really appreciative of people who watch the film and recognize that.”

The continuing rise of reactionary politics in the West certainly has helped the film remain relevant. But V for Vendetta also remains a favorite because of the incredible performance by Weaving, who came in late in production to replace James Purefoy and did his entire part behind an unmoving, unchanging Guy Fawkes mask.

“I called him up and said, ‘Hey, Hugo, I’m in a bit of trouble with the actor I got in the mask at the moment. I think I’m gonna have to make a change.’ Then I said, ‘But don’t come over if you’re gonna have a problem being in a mask. And he’s like, ‘I won’t have a problem being in a mask. I want to be in a mask.’

“It was a challenge he’d never had. He did mask work at drama school, working through the Greek theater and Norwegian theater. So he came over and was amazing. He knew exactly what to do. He saved me.”

While he is quick to credit Weaving for making V come to life without the use of his face, McTeigue also deserves credit for finding ways of shooting the mask and making it look interesting. 

“I wanted to get the different facets of what made his character, so I would light it differently. I did a bunch of tests to make him look benevolent, to make him look crazy, to look sinister. The secret of it was just to treat it like a face, as I normally would. In a dramatic moment, I would push the camera in, even though the face wasn’t doing anything. It showed that if you watched closely enough, V’s telling you everything about himself.

“Even in the moment on the sofa, where V and Evey just watched a movie, and the news breaks in about the death of Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam), the Voice of London. Evey turns around asks if V killed him. We’re in this wide shot when he just answers, ‘Nope.’

“Other times, though, I wanted them to have a connection. So I’d cut from a close-up of V to a close-up of Evey, just to get the juxtaposition. Part of it was playing off the character with him in the scene, whether it was the crazy priest Lilliman (John Standing) or Evey. I thought it was important that you saw them as equals.”

The movie’s depiction of Evey Hammond differs quite a bit from the version that Moore and Lloyd created in the comic. Where the original Evey was a timid 16-year-old who gets forced into joining V’s crusade, the version in the film is older and has more agency.

“Don’t be slavish to the graphic novel,” McTeigue says as advice to anyone adapting comics to the screen, even when working with a writer as lauded as Alan Moore. “I think in Alan Moore’s brain, he would have just put the graphic novel on a pedestal or just put the pages on screen.”

Joking aside, McTeigue did translate some images directly from the comics. In particular, he recreates a shot from a flashback sequence, showing a naked and unmasked V in silhouette standing in front of the flaming concentration camp.

“It was a crazily graphic image, so I had to do it in the movie. And in the same way it’s important to the graphic novel, it’s important to the film. You need to see who he is and what formed him. That’s the point when V’s being reborn. He’s filled with rage, but he’s filled with hope too.

“By the way, the guy that I used in the burn suit in the movie was Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick movies,” McTeigue adds. “It was raining that night, and I told him what I wanted to do. He was game, came out and did it, and we got it all in one take.”

While Lloyd’s art provided some guidance, McTeigue had to make stronger decisions to bring the comic into live action.

“For the other visuals, we had to make a distinction between the state-run media and the rest of the film. Everything that was run by the state had this very video-esque quality to it, like a surveillance camera. And then we had John Hurt as the Leader, which is a callback to Big Brother and the 1984 movie [in which Hurt played protagonist Winston Smith], with a big pixilated head.

“In contrast, I wanted V’s headquarters, the Shadow Gallery, to feel warm. It was a repository of great art, music, and film, and a lot of my tastes got in there, the books and movies that I thought were important. I took inspiration from Gordon Willis, who shot all the Godfather movies, or Gregg Toland, who shot Citizen Kane. I borrowed from the paranoid thrillers of the ’70s like The Parallax View, some of which Willis shot, as well as Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, The Battle of Algiers… A lot of things influenced me.”

Classic as the influences may be, the real power of V for Vendetta retains its revolutionary spirit, a spirit not diminished by the unfortunate real-world situations that keep the movie relevant. The final moments of the movie see Evey leading a revolution against the Norsefire government after V’s death, with a crowd of people donning Guy Fawkes masks, including people who died earlier in the film.

“The ending still holds true, because there’s hope, right?” McTeigue contends. “That was the idea of including people who were killed in the movie, that the cost of their lives wasn’t for nothing. The power of the people would carry forward.

“The way that protests work now, in this country and other countries around the world, the things that were happening then are happening now: fear to justify stronger state power, the detention of groups that are seen as threats, controversies around state surveillance, struggle over political narrative, constant conflict with press and comedians, crises that increase executive authority—all of those things are in the film.”

In short, V for Vendetta remains just as pressing as it was 20 years ago. Hopefully, 20 years from now, we can just enjoy it as a great film.

V for Vendetta is now streaming on HBO Max.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Reboot Gets Staked Through the Heart

When news hit in early 2025 that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was to be revived at Hulu, there were mixed reactions. The supernatural drama series, which ran for seven seasons from 1997 to 2003, remains beloved by its fans. Could an updated look at the world of Buffy Summers ever live up to the original show?

Unfortunately, we may never find out. According to returning star Sarah Michelle Gellar, Hulu has decided not to move forward with the proposed series after completing a pilot last year that was helmed by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao.

Gellar revealed the decision on Instagram this past weekend. “I am really sad to have to share this, but I wanted you all to hear it from me,” she said. “Unfortunately, Hulu has decided not to move forward with Buffy New Sunnydale. I want to thank Chloé Zhao because I never thought I would find myself back in Buffy’s stylish, yet affordable boots, and thanks to Chloe, I was reminded how much I love her and how much she means not only to me, but to all of you. And this doesn’t change any of that.”

Gellar wrapped up by adding, “I promise, if the apocalypse actually comes, you could still beep me.”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale was reportedly set 25 years after the events of the season 7 finale, with Gellar reprising the role of the titular Slayer. Ryan Kiera Armstrong had been cast as the lead in the pilot, and writers Lilla and Nora Zuckerman had described the Star Wars: Skeleton Crew actress as “the chosen one.”

“I’m really proud of what we did,” Armstrong said after the cancellation news broke. “I’m sad that you guys won’t be able to see it, but that doesn’t take away from the amazing experience that I had.”

The decision on New Sunnydale’s future finally came after fans noted there had been no production news about the show since the pilot was filmed last year. Sources told Deadline that the pilot was “not perfect” and that Zhao “may not have been the perfect match for the reboot.” The trade also noted that there had been recent discussions about reworking the pilot, but that Hulu plans to “regroup and mull a possible new incarnation” instead.

Project Hail Mary: Andy Weir Talks About Giving Away Book’s Biggest Secret in the Trailer

The way author Andy Weir sees it, he doesn’t set out to write books that can make good movies. Yet two of his first three novels, The Martian and Project Hail Mary, have turned into exactly that—and the third, Artemis, is still in development. Furthermore, if you are reading the near universal praise for Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of Project Hail Mary, you might understand why the sci-fi bestseller seems pretty confident when we sit down to discuss the new flick.

Project Hail Mary is indeed a bold gamble both for Lord and Miller—who have not made a finished live-action movie since 22 Jump Street in 2014—and Amazon MGM Studios, which is releasing the sci-fi epic in theaters. The film imagines a future where due to an intergalactic microbe dubbed “astrophage,” our sun is dimming by the minute. It’s a bold premise, but one which gives turn to an even grander one when substitute-astronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is tasked with traveling across the cosmos to find a solution for Earth… and ends up meeting a fellow traveler: a sentient alien he nicknames “Rocky.”

Unlike in the novel, where the existence of Rocky and his budding friendship with Grace was kept a secret in the book’s marketing, the Project Hail Mary movie has been upfront about its unlikely buddy comedy premise. We talk to Weir about giving away the novel’s biggest secret in the trailer, as well as where the terrifying idea of astrophage came from, and finally what Gosling, Lord, and Miller bring to his out-of-this-world material.

So what came first? The idea of the astrophage or doing a meet-cute with an alien named Rocky?

[Laughs] Astrophage came first. It actually came from an unrelated book idea that I was working on and then abandoned because it sucked. But I wanted to think about what would happen if we, in the modern day—not a thousand years from now—had access to a mass conversion fuel. 

So how did Rocky come into that narrative? 

Well after a while, I decided I wanted it to be a first contact story where they’re both trying to save their planets, so I needed an alien. I don’t like the science fiction tropes where the alien is comfortable in our atmosphere and looks kind of like a human with forehead bumps and stuff. I wanted my alien to be truly alien. So I started with the homeworld that I’d chosen, the exoplanet that I picked for them, and then I built up a biosphere that would work there. Rocky’s species is what I came up with for the intelligent life on the exoplanet. 

It sounds like you based the science of the species on what we know about this type of exoplanet planet. So how do you decide that such a species could master interstellar travel but not know about radiation?

Well, they were desperate, right? They barely had any sort of space travel or anything at all going before they ended up acquiring astrophage too. So they were just desperate to figure out a solution to the problem. They didn’t understand relativity or radiation, even in their own world. So their planet, in order to maintain a thick atmosphere and be that close to a star, would have to have a tremendous magnetic field. So that means it has to spin very fast.

And with a magnetic field like that, even during their early experiments into low orbit, they wouldn’t have encountered radiation. And of course being at the bottom of a 29 atmosphere thick layer of ammonia between them and space, they didn’t get any radiation on the surface either. They just never discovered the concept. 

When I read the book, I did not know it was a first contact story. That was a very pleasant surprise when I got to that point in the novel. Do you like that the film’s marketing is a little more upfront about what the story is about?

Well, books and movies are different media, and they’re different methods of storytelling, and they’re very much different methods of marketing and publicity. There is just absolutely no way that we would have been able to keep the first contact aspect of this a secret. I mean, there’s already been millions of people who have read the book. Nobody’s going to walk into that theater not knowing about Rocky, even if we’d hidden it from the previews. 

Also while it is a twist that caught the readers off guard, it’s not like some huge twist at the end of a story. The meat of the story is the relationship between Ryland and Rocky, and we wanted to make sure that the potential film viewers would know that this is what this movie is about. 

At the same time, you said the story started originally with the astrophage, and I’m curious is the idea of something like that theoretically possible, or is that something you came up with? 

So you get down to the quantum level, I invented the idea of super cross-sectionality of the astrophage cell membrane that can actually reflect neutrinos. Normally with neutrinos, you have 100 trillion neutrinos passing through you every second. They pass clean through Earth without hitting a single atom, but somehow, astrophage cell membranes can just completely contain them like a balloon. And then also astrophage has the ability to turn heat into neutrinos and turn neutrinos back into infrared light. 

So that’s s all the stuff going on down there, but having accepted those MacGuffins, everything else flows from that with real physics. 

Obviously when you wrote The Martian, you had a story to tell and you were just writing it. But given the success of the movie that came afterward, when you were developing this did you think at all in the back of your head how Project Hail Mary could work as a movie? 

No. Or I definitely tried not to. Advice that I give to every writer and advice that I try to take for myself is if you want to write a movie, write a movie. Write a screenplay, go for it. But if you’re gonna write a novel, you need to write a novel. Your consumer is a person who’s gonna read the novel. If somebody wants to make a movie out of it later, great, but it’s their problem to adapt it. 

In a novel, you want to take advantage of all the tools you have, and when you’re writing a novel, you have a much larger canvas to paint your story with. You can go off and have side plots, you can have exposition that you can explain things in greater detail than you ever could in a film. So you should be taking advantage of all the tools that novel writing gives you when you’re writing a novel and not thinking about any sort of adaptation. 

What are the key differences between Ryland Grace and The Martian’s Mark Watney? 

Well, Mark was an astronaut, right? He beat out probably tens of thousands of other really qualified candidates for a seat on a mission to Mars. So he really has the right stuff.  He is absolutely qualified for the job that he finds himself in. He ended up with a really tough time, but he is a guy who was chosen for this mission. Whereas Ryland was just kind of chucked into it at the last minute, and he’s not at all anyone’s first choice for this mission, especially his. So these are very different people.

Do you appreciate that you made them both, and for that matter Artemis’ Jasmine, single people who are still worthy of being heroes?

Yeah. They’re all different. Like you can almost not call Mark a hero. He just is a guy who didn’t want to die. He didn’t save anyone. He just didn’t wanna die. 

Jasmine chose heroism kind of toward the end to undo a problem that she herself had created. And then Ryland is actually going out there and trying to save the entire human race, but would rather not be doing it. So they each have their own little way of backing into heroism. 

But you seem to be playing with perceptions. In the case of Ryland Grace, everyone looks at him as expendable. ‘You don’t have a family, you’d be perfect for this!’

[Laughs] Yeah, but he certainly doesn’t think of himself as expendable. 

What was it like working with Lord and Miller on this one? 

Oh, it’s fantastic. So we knew that the story was going to live and die on the representation of Rocky. We had to get Rocky right. And Lord and Miller have a long and extensive history of animation, so they know how to take seemingly inanimate objects and make them awesome, and make you empathize with them and make you love them. They were the right team for this job. I can’t imagine it being done by anyone else.

They figured out how ‘so Rocky doesn’t have a face and talks in whale song’ but he’s still got a body. He’s got body language, and you can tell from moving him around this way, moving him around that way. Oh, he’s sad; he’s happy. They figured out how to make this work, and they absolutely nailed it, so I couldn’t be happier with the result. 

Was there anything they did with Rocky that surprised you? 

Not really. I was involved in every step of the way, of course, so there weren’t any huge surprises. But I thought it was cool they came up with a bunch of stuff. Within the book, Rocky just has vents, just kind of like holes in the top of his carapace for air transfer, but the Rocky in the movie, the vents are actually kind of these little rocks that move up and down to let air in and out. And that helps give him some kinetic motion while he’s doing things. So there’s more going on than just his body moving around. 

Tell me a little bit about what Ryan brought to his character, and did he find dimensions or something that surprised you or intrigued you about Grace? 

Oh, absolutely. So I’ve always considered one of my biggest weaknesses as a writer is my character’s depth and complexity. I feel like I’m always trying to get better, and I’m a very plot-driven author. So with Ryland, I tried to give him some complexity and depth, but he’s still kind of a little bit more shallow than I’d like. But then in comes Ryan, and he adds all these layers that I never envisioned before. He’s just really good at riffing and ad-libbing and stuff like that, and oftentimes he’ll come up with much better ways of doing something than the screenplay even had. 

So what’s awesome is people are gonna watch this movie, they’re going to see this well-rounded character of Ryland Grace, and that’s largely because of Ryan’s performance, and then I’m gonna get credit for having come up with such a well-rounded character. So thanks to all of Ryan’s hard work, I’m going to get all the credit, and that just absolutely works for me. [Laughs]

Given the names Rocky and Adrian in this story, how happy were you that this ended up at MGM? 

I know! That was a really sweet coincidence. That was really nice. We liked that. That felt good. [Laughs]

We didn’t need to show any clips if we weren’t able to [get the rights]. We still needed to secure rights from Stallone specifically to be able to show even him on screen at all. So we did.

You could’ve just had Ryan do his Stallone impression.

Right! Like we didn’t need to actually show clips from Rocky, but it was nice to be MGM so we get it for free.

Project Hail Mary opens in theaters on March 20.

Hokum Review: Adam Scott’s Irish Holiday Is Like a (Grim) Fairy Tale

There might be something in the air in Ireland. It’s in the water and the soil too. Despite being surrounded by an endless, rugged sea of green, or perhaps because of that emerald desolation, it is a land marked in the popular imagination by centuries of hardship and sorrow. Some would even claim it’s haunted.

The Gaelic wellspring of fairies and changelings, and from whose shores authors like Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde emerged, alongside the banshee and Dullahan, is a source of elegiac fiction. Here the magical and bitterly real mingle, often with a despairing wail. And early in Damian McCarthy’s Hokum, the misanthropic, lonely scribe Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) seems likewise drawn to these dreary charms. After all, he is an author himself, albeit of a yankee disposition; the grandson of the Irish diaspora, Ohm has returned to his forefathers’ country to mirthlessly toast “bleak endings” while finishing his next book at a hotel at the end of the world. So imagine the delight when he’s teased by his bartender that this inn also is said to have a witch. No, really. The owner keeps her locked in the abandoned honeymoon suite upstairs. And it’s been locked off since time immemorial. 

As a sucker myself for tales of the doomed and damned, this is where I too leaned forward—and never had a reason to sit back again in what amounts to a pleasantly macabre bit of campfire hokum from an Irish filmmaker in his element.

As the director of the cult darling Oddity, McCarthy has developed a sizable following ahead of only his third feature. Yet while Hokum certainly picks at heightened (or “elevated”) themes of guilt and regret in its portrait of a man given to loving the miserable company of one—and a writer who in turn is even more pitiless to his fictional creations than McCarthy might be to his own—Hokum is very much a late night ghost story that a few hundred years ago would’ve been shared on Christmas Eve beside candlelight. Indeed, the film is bathed in shadows and mystery, as well as the recognition that there really is a witch upstairs, and what it wants is nothing that can be mistaken for liberation or empowerment.

Owing perhaps more debt to Stephen King’s The Shining than Kubrick’s, Hokum fixates on a deeply troubled novelist who imbibes too much Scotch and bourbon. So rude is Scott’s Bauman when he is in his cups that it is a wonder the hotel staff can put up with him for a day—luckily Florence Odesh’s Fiona shows enough kindness to him that she saves him from a particularly bad night before All Hallow’s Eve (or Samhain as the Celts would’ve called it in pagan times).

So when Fiona goes missing from the hotel—and after confiding in Bauman that she always was curious to poke around the allegedly witched honeymoon suite—sympathy gets the better of wisdom as the yank likewise finds himself going into the private chamber. Even when lit with what might be hundred-year-old electric light, the gloom of the place is nothing short of oppressive. It’s a space filled with bad dreams and worse waking hours.

The pleasures in Hokum emanate from its pulp. There are moments of superbly atmospheric dread wherein a soaked and abandoned Scott hides behind a Victorian bed curtain while the countenance of a creature hovers outside. Similar to Oddity’s use of the creepiest mannequin to ever crawl out of Hell’s department store, it is the belabored shots of eerily smiling cherubic statues on the the bridal suite’s clock, or of Edwardian figurines the hotel owner uses to frighten small children in the lobby, wherein Hokum earns its bite.

Less successful are the ubiquitous jump scares, which while sometimes effective, are often telegraphed and used liberally to a fault. The subtextual thesis of the film also about how even an artist’s pain can be destructive to the art feels at times a wee contrived; a fig-leaf to the modern expectations for “serious” horror cinema.

To be sure, Hokum is seriously good, but mostly when it embraces its fairy tale qualities about dark forgotten corners of the woods where spirits seek to still carry off the un-careful child of God to heathen ends. The film seeks to find a light outside of the misanthropic bleakness which can bedevil even rolling hills of beatific green. But, really, we are all here to enjoy the dark, which in McCarthy and cinematographer Colm Hogan’s compositions, is invitingly nihilistic.

Hokum premiered at SXSW on March 14. NEON releases Hokum in wide release on May 1.

Ready or Not 2 Review: The Devil Is in the Bloody Good Details

How does one cheat the Devil? With a lot of style and grace if you’re Samara Weaving and Radio Silence, the charmers who gave us the perversely delightful Ready or Not seven years ago. Close to a decade later, the same creative team, which also includes scribes Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, are back and doubling-or-nothing their wager with Mr. Le Bail (Lucifer by a fancier, blue-blooded name). And incredulously, they’re coming out ahead.

To be clear, the blood that pulsed and poured throughout their 2019 horror satire was indeed blue, aristocratic, privileged and, before the end, combustible. Which on a certain level made a sequel a tricky proposition. The first film is essentially a great gag wherein a working class gal named Grace (Weaving) marries into one of the rich and powerful families of ancient wealth, only to discover they’re, um, Devil-worshipping satanists who gained their success by selling their souls to Old Nick in exchange for obscene wealth and power. They also need to sacrifice a bride to Beelzebub every generation or two in order keep the pact alive. If they fail to do so by the first dawn after the wedding night, they go poof into a warm red mist. That’s what the regal Le Dormas clan believed, anyway, and the first Ready or Not got a lot of mileage out of Grace and the audience second-guessing whether the pact was real or these were just the indulgences of rich eccentrics.

When that film ended with the Le Domas’ going boom-boom, and Grace standing alone as the delirious winner of the best hide-and-seek game ever, it was nothing short of euphoric—a giddiness that transcends the simple favors of horror or comedy. What is there left to say, really?

In terms of Grace’s journey from wide-eyed believer in fairy tale happily-ever-afters to a burned out bride fed up with the in-laws, not really a whole lot. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come introduces us to Grace’s younger estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton)—and a decent gag of a new patrician sneering “fucking Irish-Catholics” at their names—but the heartwarming story of Grace and Faith finding each other again is ultimately a nice bit of frosting on an already crimson-dotted wedding cake. It gives new dimensions for Weaving to play, but only until we get to see her go full bridezilla on the latest Masters of the Universe. And in truth, we are just waiting for those absolutely gonzo bloodletting set-pieces in Ready or Not 2, of which there are many.

Weaving and Newton have a nice chemistry, especially in the sequences where they side-eye each other with guarded annoyance stemming from the fact that Grace left the younger Faith behind at their foster home when she moved to New York at 18 alone. But the real pleasure of the movie is how mirthful directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett—two-thirds of the Radio Silence creative collective—can be while building out the draconian lore and devilish details in their ever expanding world of the evil elite.

As it turns out, the Le Dormas were just one of many rich billionaire broods who made a deal with Mr. Le Bail. In fact, it seems to be pretty much all of the globe’s top one percent who are in on the action, who betwixt one another run the world’s governments and social orders from behind-the-scenes. This is demonstrated when we are introduced to Mr. Danforth (David Cronenberg) watching an international crisis on television. He picks up his phone and orders a “ceasefire.” Seconds later a breathless cable news anchor announces “a ceasefire has been reached” in the televised quagmire.

It would seem the Danforths were the greatest rival the Le Dormas’ knew on a council of the world’s Devil-worshipping families, albeit with the Le Dormas’ in the highest seat. But now that the Le Dormas dynasty is extinguished, the big chair is vacant. Alas, that is where poor Grace comes in. As revealed to her by a smirking, well-groomed retainer simply known as the Lawyer (Elijah Wood), the only way for another family to fill the empty high seat is to succeed where the Le Dormas’ failed and hunt Grace down in another lethal game of hide and seek before dawn. This makes her prey to Cronenberg’s nasty twin heirs Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), as well as a whole ensemble of kooky character actors and genre favorites like Kevin Durand.

If Grace, and a conscripted Faith—who is used as leverage against the older sister—can survive the night, the pair might just end up with the power of the Devil on Earth (read: a real-life tech mogul). But to do that they are going to have to fight their way across 18 holes, various ballrooms outfitted for fancy weddings, and every other stereotype you might expect from the film’s country club setting that looks suspiciously like Mar-a-Lago.

Ready or Not was never subtle in its eat-the-rich social satire. It was, however, early in tackling that in the new zeitgeist since the first movie came out a handful of months before Parasite and Knives Out, never mind the growing trend of class schadenfreude in the 2020s that’s coincided with the growing consolidation of wealth at the top. So if the first movie was tangibly angry in its social satire, Here I Come seems much more at peace with its punch-drunk gallows humor. Indeed, after a bravado opening sequence that marries the final scene of the 2019 film seamlessly with the 2026 picture’s kick-off—scored, appropriately, to “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”—Grace’s rescue by the authorities quickly descends into her willingly throwing back on the blood-soaked bridal gown from the first movie.

“It gives mobility,” she insists to her sister as they duck around a deserted hospital gurney while being hunted. It also is emblematic of both Grace and the film’s nonchalant and chipper nihilism. There’s no way out, so we might as well get comfy while making a night of it.

For Radio Silence and their scribes, that coziness arises from basking in the neuroses of its moneyed antagonists. The big bads of the Danforth country club is like a retinue of SNL characters gathering at the Bohemian Grove (a real-life meet-up for the elite in Northern California, which for decades has gained whispers of pagan rituals). Given the direction of the world in the last seven years, and specifically with regard to the drip, drip, drip of the Jeffrey Epstein files, the concept of satanic elites no longer seems as sinister as it does mundane.

Hence various scenes of the privileged and bored who’ve come to partake in a new game of hide and seek being more concerned with the hors d’oeuvres being served during the hunt than the actual kill—or sequences of another thwarted bride in their ranks being obsessed with challenging Grace to a duel on a dance floor where they got Bonnie Tyler queued up. As the most reasonable seeming of the hunters, Sarah Michelle Gellar gets a little monologue about how there are no good guys or bad guys anymore. Everything is gray.

Of course, she is saying this to a woman she intends to ritualistically murder in an offer to Satan in order to attain yet greater power. In this way, Ready or Not 2 is a rejection both of the times it is made in and the actual nihilistic despair of so many other, bitter horror movies these days.

As with the first film and every chilly laugher Radio Silence has made since —including the two best Scream movies made in this century, plus Abigail—Ready or Not 2 is buoyant in its optimism and good vibes, even while staring into the abyss. If the world is doomed, we can at least take catharsis in a fantasy where Grace relaxes in her murder-gown while eviscerating the ruling class with (eventually) a smile on her face.

As with the original film, the sequel transcends during its climax, this time with Grace, Faith, and everyone left alive vanishing into the country club’s most hallowed of unholy sites for a ritual involving goats, a pit with spikes, and a whole lot of blood. It’s moments like this where Weaving shines brightest while delivering one-liners, coup de’graces, and sweet, sweet wish fulfillment that turns the devilish into the divine, and a second round of a bad wedding-match into a damn good party. Mazel tov.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come opened at SXSW on March 13 and releases wide on March 20.

Rolling Stone’s Future of Music Festival Night One Electrifies ACL Live

Since 2023, Rolling Stone has brought the music industry’s biggest up and comers to South by Southwest. This year’s Future of Music festival spans three nights and dozens of artists, with nights two and three anticipating names like Fuerza Regida and BigXThaPlug. Thursday night kicked off the festivities at Austin City Limits Live with a trio of captivating supporting acts and Rolling Stone’s most recent covergirl. 

Susannah Joffe was the first to take the stage in a triumphant homecoming. The Austin native engaged the audience with her hometown charm and full, resonant vocals. Her baby blue ball gown adorned with black lace was a visual metaphor for her lyrics – sparkling, lively, and shrouded with darker meaning. Amongst country references of cows, Dolly Parton-esque hair, and prize ribbons in her imagery, the opener has built an image of hometown pride. Joffe kept great rapport with the audience as it continued to grow.

Following Joffe, Saint Harison mellowed out the venue with his incomparable crooning. The Southamptoner’s soaring tenor was matched with delicate piano accompaniment, echoing backdrops, and cheeky anecdotes. Harison tossed emotionally ripping songs detailing past relationship woes with occasional vengeful bursts in songs like bad. A natural stage presence, Harison was quick to thank the audience after each song. Harison’s own future of music looks like an EP titled Ghosted set to release May 29.

The final supporting act was Sofia and the Antoinettes, a four-piece band whose coquettish style, both in fashion and musicality, did their name justice. As with the first two performers, Sofia’s lyrics are characterized by gutting emotional depth and equally matched vocal prowess. 

“Name dropping, it’s good for the soul,” Sofia announced, owning up to her blunt writing in songs like Matthew. A balance of leg-kicking drums and powerhouse backup vocals kept audiences pulsing with excitement for what was to come.

The evening ended with an explosive performance from headliner Lola Young, whose recent return to performing has been highly anticipated and was expertly delivered. Young graced the stage in a pink, eyeleted jumpsuit to juxtapose the dark dress of her supporting band, all in matching cowboy hats. As the most recent Rolling Stone covergirl, Young took a moment to thank everyone involved.

 “That’s something that you only dream of,” Young gushed. 

Audience members – spanning pre-teen and beyond – sang along word for word, matching Young’s bouncing energy. After the first few tracks, the Londoner interrupted her setlist to read a poem she had recently written about the circumstances of the world, titled “Art is Rebellion.” 

“And as we smell the sloppy, disgustingly stinky s–t they dish out, we must s–t on them back,” Young extolled. 

Rolling Stone’s signature festival has barely begun. With previous lineups endorsing standout artists such as Peso Pluma, Remi Wolf, Flo Milli, and Teezo Touchdown, the festival’s crystal ball has been quite transparent. Only time will tell if Rolling Stone will continue to predict the future of music.

The Vampire Lestat’s Tour Will Hit AMC This Summer

After two years and a title change, the third season of Interview with the Vampire, now rebranded as The Vampire Lestat in honor of the second novel in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, will finally hit our screens. And AMC is leaning hard into the rock star agenda, dropping a new song, some extremely campy opening credits, and a date for when we can expect the tour, er….the new season to officially begin.

The series will follow Lestat de Lioncourt as he takes center stage in his own narrative, an attempt to set the record straight after the release of Daniel Molly’s infamous book, Interview with the Vampire. That he does this by deciding to embark on a multi-city tour with his new rock band is perhaps the most Lestat-coded choice ever, but it’s also pretty much guaranteed to be a good time. Billing the titular character as the “world’s first immortal rockstar” in the press materials promoting the show’s return, the network is promising “a sexy pilgrimage across space, time, and trauma” as Lestat tours the nation and is haunted by various “muses” from his past.

Anne Rice readers already know that this adventure won’t be for the faint of heart. While it recounts Lestat’s life as a mortal and his early years as a vampire, the novel also introduces key figures from his past, including Gabrielle, Magnus, Marius, Nicolas, and Those Who Must Be Kept, who all have a major role to play in the franchise’s future.

In addition to confirming that The Vampire Lestat would officially premiere in June, AMC also dropped the series’ new opening titles, which feature another would-be banger from Lestat’s musical catalog. The slightly shortened track, called “All Fall Down,” is composed by Daniel Hart and performed by series star Sam Reid. Like Lestat’s previous single, “Long Face,” the track is now available on all major streaming platforms, with the promise of even more songs from everyone’s favorite immortal rocker to come.

In the new credits, “All Fall Down” plays over a montage of various character images and possible Easter eggs from the forthcoming season. (No idea what’s up with the ice cream scoop, but those random road signs are definitely going to be song titles. Bet.) 

Everything we’ve seen about this season thus far is dripping with glam rock, full-on brat prince vibes, right down to the supposed quotes from the man (vampire) himself slagging off his production partner (“Predictable”) as the show blurs the line between fictional character and real-life celebrity. How much crazier will this get in the lead-up to the premiere? Your guess is as good as ours, but it’s bound to be a wild ride.

The Vampire Lestat will premiere June 7 on AMC and AMC+.