Oscars 2026 Frontrunners and Contenders

Happy New Year. As hard as it might be to believe, 2026 is really here and we are all forced to slowly return to life after what was hopefully a long holiday. However, if you are in the trenches of awards season coverage—or, worse still, participating in the races(!)—there has been nary a moment to catch your breath.

Already we’ve had the Gotham Awards, the announcement of the New York Film Critics Circle’s winners, the same for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, plus many, many more. And come Sunday night, the first major televised ceremony of the new year kicks off with the Critics Choice Awards, which will be shortly followed a week later by the Golden Globes, and eventually SAG, the other guilds, and one day long in the distance, the Academy Awards.

Tired yet? Or perhaps you’re just curious about what is in contention and what will have to be content simply with buzz that goes nowhere? If so, you’re in luck. We’ve rounded up below a list of the biggest players, as well as the most eye-catching also-rans. We’ve ranked them in order of those most likely to win (or be nominated) for Best Picture to the least, but in each film’s section we’ll note other major awards the movie is likely in the running for or might win. So sip one more glass of bubbly, kick back, and enjoy!

One Battle After Another

A bit like the year of Oppenheimer, it is almost unfair to rank these by likelihood of winning Best Picture since the top prize is close to a foregone conclusion. One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s subversive epic in the era of Trump and the darling of every major critics group to date, appears destined to carry on winning Best Picture at each ceremony between now and Oscar night.

Admittedly most years we tend to draw a distinction between the films that critics fall behind and those chosen by folks who actually work in the film industry. For example last year we were confident The Brutalist hype would fade, albeit we wrongfully leaned toward Conclave instead of Anora picking up steam as the dark horse alternative. However, the perceived frontrunner this year isn’t a nihilistic indie indictment of American capitalism; it is a film produced by that very market as a commercial spectacle with breakneck action and Hollywood royalty in the cast bill, even if the film is fairly dissident in its own politics.

Industry watchers will continue to debate for years to come whether WB in the long run made money on this pricy gamble (the pic cost a reported $135 million to make, sans marketing or Oscar campaigning, and grossed $205 million worldwide), but it still played in front of a healthy general audience and will likely continue doing so in the streaming era. It also is a throwback to the type of movies that won Best Picture in the ‘90s: splashy, star-led spectacles intended for adult audiences who like car chases and entertainment in their introspective character studies lamenting the racist oligarchical hegemony secretly oppressing American life.

OBAA also has significant awards season narrative hype that you can bet is already being pursued/exploited by talented PR machines. The first is that writer-director PTA is due after never winning a single statue for Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, or Phantom Thread. Additionally, the movie can be viewed as a possible last hurrah for Warner Bros., the auteur studio of yore, basking in a golden year before it is probably swallowed whole by Netflix.

All of which makes it a shoo-in for Best Picture and likely Best Director. We’d also say Leonardo DiCaprio is the frontrunner for Best Actor, though that is less than a done deal, as is Benicio del Toro for Best Supporting Actor where one of his biggest competitors might just be fellow Oscar-darling Sean Penn for the same movie. Meanwhile Teyana Taylor is the likely frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress. We expect it to likewise be competitive in, if not win, Oscars for Cinematography, Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Also kudos to Chase Infiniti for sticking to her guns and campaigning rightfully as Lead Actress. She’ll get an Oscar nomination in the correct category for it.

Hamnet

If one must select a plausible possible dark horse narrative to unseat OBAA, then Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is probably a decent bet. Certainly more reserved and elegiac than PTA’s highbrow actioner, Hamnet also checks a lot of boxes for Oscar voters. After all, the same body also in the ‘90s famously snubbed the populist choice of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for another movie about William Shakespeare in Love. Granted, that was a different time and and different Academy, as indicated by the fact Spielberg produced Hamnet.

The reason we think this theoretically could get some greater industry love, however, is Zhao is already a rightful favorite within the business, and we truthfully think that despite the critics throwing all their flowers toward Rose Byrne (including myself as a CCA member), Jessie Buckley still is going to walk home with the Best Actress Oscar come March. It is a tremendous, career-defining essay of a mother in grief learning to live again through the power of art, and it’s so good that it won Hamnet the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the best indicators of Oscars’ taste on the festival circuit. Previous TIFF audience winners include The King’s Speech, 12 Years a Slave, Green Book, and La La Land. And the last time a TIFF darling won the Oscar for Best Picture? Another Zhao picture: Nomadland.

Also expect nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay (which it could win), Score, Costumes, Production Design, and probably Paul Mescal for Best Supporting Actor, although that’s less locked. Zhao might likewise be the most likely to upset Anderson in Best Director.

Sentimental Value

Perhaps the most noticeable thing about the modern Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the 2020s is how much more international its voting body and tastes have become—at least when it comes to favoring European cinema. Parasite becoming the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture in February 2020 is the most striking example of this, but look also to other Best Picture nominees that 10 years ago would’ve seemed unthinkable: Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, and even French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s horror Cannes darling, The Substance.

Joachim Trier’s exquisite Cannes Grand Prix winner, Sentimental Value, is poised to continue that tradition, and we suppose if there is a counter-narrative of something unseating OBAA, Sentimental Value might have the second most persuasive one. The international quarters of the Academy’s acting branches could rally behind this film for Best Picture, although another international Cannes favorite complicates that narrative (scroll further down for more). But this really is an actor’s and writer’s film, and the former is the largest branch in the AMPAS.

For evidence, expect Sentimental to pick up nominations for every major performance in the film: Renate Reinsve for Best Actress (which she can win, although the competition of Byrne and Buckley is fierce), Stellan Skarsgård for Best Supporting Actor (ditto), Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas for Best Supporting Actress (trippo?), and Elle Fanning for the same category (it will be an honor just to be nominated). The film will also certainly be nominated for Best Director, Original Screenplay (which I suspect it might win), and Best International Film (which it will definitely win). On paper it’s a long-shot for the top prize given both its Scandinavian nature and languages, as well its subtlety. But in a decade where Anora can be a Best Picture winner, we’d argue there is something about this material and its subject matter of artists and families that appeals innately to general Academy interests.

Marty Supreme

If we might allow for one more dark horse with a shot at gaining steam for a late-arrival upset, folks should not sleep on Marty Supreme. Easily one of the best movies of the year, it is also now the one with a feel-good Cinderella story in the holiday season box office. While no Avatar, this Timothée Chalamet-led indie still grossed an impressive $27 million over the long Christmas weekend based purely on the strength of Chalamet’s popularity, its word-of-mouth, and an inventive marketing campaign rolled out by A24 and the star.

Oscar voters love a winner, and here’s one that is also incredibly satisfying. So maybe an irrepressible winner’s narrative about an irrepressible ping-pong player could lead to it gathering momentum in the Best Picture race? But, truthfully, we suspect that narrative will mostly help it in securing Chalamet his first Oscar over his mentor DiCaprio, and perhaps get director Josh Safdie his first Oscar nomination, as Safdie is currently on the bubble according to odds-makers. The film also should gain nominations for Original Screenplay, Editing, Casting, and if there’s any justice, Best Original Score.

Sinners

We admit putting Sinners this far down on a Best Picture-probability ranking is risky. Not only will Sinners possibly be the most popular and widely seen movie nominated for Best Picture this year—at least barring a debatable nod for Avatar 3—but it’s also one that has everything going for it that we ascribe to One Battle After Another: a splashy ensemble led by a bonafide movie star in Michael B. Jordan; a mixture of serious themes (in this case America’s eternal history with violence and race, particularly in the South) with audience friendly genre storytelling; and it’s even from that same storied studio about to be subsumed by a streaming service.

However, its genre trappings are horror, and no matter how much the voting pool changes at the AMPAS, they seem to be permanently overpopulated by stuffed shirts who never give horror its due. Look to last year at the many Oscar voters who anonymously admitted to not watching or being repulsed by The Substance—in the same year that the Academy failed to nominate the equally exquisite vampire film Nosferatu for anything beyond Cinematography. The first and last horror movie to win Best Picture was Silence of the Lambs more than 30 years ago, and that movie didn’t touch the third rail of American racism told from a genuinely Black perspective.

Still, Sinners will and should be nominated for Best Picture, it better see Ryan Coogler nominated for Best Director, and it should lead Jordan to his first Oscar nod. We also think it might very well win for Best Original Screenplay (though we might give the edge to Sentimental Value), Cinematography, Score, Casting, and possibly Editing. This possibility of winning for scripting operates on the curious tradition of Oscar voters giving Screenplay wins to the movies deemed too strange for Best Picture. Hmph.

It Was Just an Accident

Here we have the other international film likely to find its way floating up to the Best Picture race: It Was Just an Accident. The film is an act of literal bravery since Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi made this on the streets of Tehran under the nose of an authoritarian and theocratic regime that presumably would detest the picture’s portrait of everyday citizens haunted by their wrongful imprisonment and torture by the Revolutionary Guard. It is that experience which leads the film’s central characters to kidnap a man who might have been their torturer—although it’s unclear since they were all blindfolded and are basing their suspicions on what they think is the sound of his voice.

While the film makes for a potent thriller, we suspect the real-life act of bravado filmmaking has more than a little to do with it being this year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes. And in the 2020s a Palme win increasingly means an invitation to the Oscars Best Picture dance. Nonetheless, we also suspect the movie’s heavy-handed resolution and the fact Sentimental Value will be getting the lion’s share of international cinema votes means this movie’s invite will be of the token variety.

Frankenstein

Another movie we are fairly confident will be nominated for Best Picture, even if it has little chance of winning, is Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Admittedly the Academy has a problem with horror movies, as indicated when only one got in last year and the similarly Victorian era-set Nosferatu got snubbed. But then, del Toro’s Frankenstein is not a horror movie; it’s a tragic drama from one of the masters who’s already in the Academy’s club after winning Best Picture and Director for The Shape of Water, and seeing major nominations in the past for Pan’s Labyrinth and the divisive (and terrific) Nightmare Alley.

Best Picture should be a lock, and if there’s any justice in the world Jacob Elordi’s sensitive portrayal of the Creature will also land him in the Best Supporting Actor race, although that is more on the bubble. The film might pick up a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination too, but honestly we have our doubts. Where the movie should clean up is in technical, below-the-line categories where we place Frankenstein as the frontrunner to beat in Best Production Design, Best Costumes, and Best Production Design.

Train Dreams

Another Netflix release we suspect will probably get into the Best Picture race is Clint Bentley’s sensitive ode to the working men who built this country, Train Dreams. A quiet and introspective film, Train Dreams features lovely paeans to the wilderness of North America and the industrial revolution technology which conquered it. That beatific framing is also why we suspect it’s a lock for a nomination in Best Cinematography, although it will never win when contrasted with the flashy IMAX and VistaVision work of Sinners and OBAA. There is also a narrative where Joel Edgerton gets into the fifth slot of the Best Actor race, but we have our doubts.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Now we come to the movies on bubble of getting into the Best Picture race. In fact, there is an argument to be made that it is tone deaf to include Avatar: Fire and Ash in our ninth slot since the film has been largely snubbed and ignored by most critics groups so far this awards season, even the fairly populist and star-friendly Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes.

But while the Academy might be most populated by actors, it is still dominated by producers, as indicated by the fact that the Producers Guild award remains the best bellwether for determining what will win Best Picture on Oscar night. And the producers are going to celebrate a darling of their branch, James Cameron, producing and directing four films in a row that will have crossed $1.5 billion in theaters. At least. In a time when moviegoing feels increasingly endangered, Cameron’s apparent financial invulnerability will continue to make him an industry fave, including on Oscar night. Otherwise don’t expect too much for this film beyond the obvious win for Best Visual Effects and probably a nomination for Best Sound.

Bugonia

Another film on the bubble that we think is likely the one to squeak into that 10th nomination slot is Bugonia. While the movie is mean, weird, and kind of like if a Twilight Zone episode was made by, say, Yorgos Lanthimos, it is still nonetheless a Lanthimos joint that stars Emma Stone. And when you ignore their weird little side project last year, Kinds of Kindness, the Academy has been fully onboard with their previous collaborations: both The Favourite and Poor Things scored Best Picture nominations, as well as nods for Stone, who won for Poor Things (whilst her co-star Olivia Colman won for Favourite).

Bugonia is an odder, crueler movie than either of those, so we don’t think it will mark Stone’s third Oscar win so soon after Poor Things and La La Land inside of a decade. But we have a hunch Stone will beat the doubters and pick up the fourth or fifth nomination for Best Actress, making her the most nominated Millennial performer to date with five acting nominations before she’s 40. The film also will likely get a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay for Will Tracy.

Wicked: For Good

A bit like predicting Avatar: Fire and Ash getting in, suggesting that Wicked: For Good is even on the bubble as a movie that might displace either Avatar or Bugonia for one of the bottom two slots is a risk because, frankly, Wicked: For Good isn’t very good. It’s in fact so “mid” that its quality has lowered what a year ago looked like frontrunner status for Ariana Grande in Best Supporting Actress.

Well, Grande is still definitely getting in for Best Supporting Actress (where she won’t win), and there is an argument that this still quite popular musical blockbuster sneaks into the Best Picture race based purely on the success of its box office and goodwill to the last movie. If we were putting down money, we’d obviously give the nudge to the above two films, but recognize that Wicked will still benefit from Ari’s nomination, as well as a slew of technical nods that include Best Costume Design, Production Design, Hair and Makeup, and Best Original Song.

The Secret Agent

Another international favorite of Cannes, there are plenty of prognosticators who will tell you Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Brazilian period piece thriller is getting into the Best Picture race. I don’t see it since the top race already has two foreign-language films all but locked in. With that said, the element that keeps winning The Secret Agent awards, from Cannes to the New York Film Critics Circle, is Wagner Moura’s lead performance and that will be where the film probably gets recognized by the Academy, though even that could be challenged. I’d place him in the fifth (vulnerable) slot, with Edgerton in the wings and on the bubble. Do absolutely count on a Best International Film nomination though.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Now we’re getting into films that will not be nominated for Best Picture but could dominate in other categories. In the instance of Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, that is represented by a stunning tour de force by Rose Byrne as a mother dealing with everything terrible about being a parent happening all at once… if only in her own mind. It’s a high-wire act of a turn that has impressively won nearly every major critics group prize thus far and is hence the de facto frontrunner going into the industry awards. My instincts suggest this movie is too peculiar and mean for general Academy tastes, however, which is why I’d give the edge to Buckley in Hamnet. Nevertheless, I’d be happy to be wrong since Byrne gives the performance of the year.

Blue Moon

Another film that will get a lot of attention for a specific performance is Richard Linklater’s wistful and lovely Blue Moon, a tragicomic toast of Scotch to underrated musical wordsmith Lorenz Hart. It features arguably the best performance of Ethan Hawke’s career, and one which I’m a little surprised hasn’t gained more traction with awards voters. It will probably be nominated in the “fourth” slot for Best Actor though.

Weapons

One more film that will likely get a lonely Oscar nomination is the supremely entertaining horror-ish mystery film, Weapons. While the movie is marketed around Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, it’s a surprise and unrecognizable appearance by Amy Madigan that has left audiences speechless. She’s so good that she absolutely will get a Best Supporting Actress nomination, although given the movie’s horror status, I do not buy the fan theories about her winning. The film might also earn a Best Original Screenplay nomination, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

KPop Demon Hunters

Sorry BLINK and Huntr/x nation, KPop Demon Hunters will not be nominated for Best Picture. However, the Sony Pictures Animation project, and Netflix release, will probably win Best Animated Feature as well as Best Original Song, courtesy of “Golden.”

No Other Choice

While No Other Choice is one of my personal favorites of the year, it pains me to admit the Academy is unlikely to agree about Park Chan-wook’s dark comedy/thriller. This parable about an upper-middle class paper executive in Korea, who discovers he will literally kill to escape unemployment and the loss of his family’s creature comforts, has more than a touch of Hitchcock about it. But that means it’s just genre enough to not appeal to traditional AMPAS tastes, at least when it comes to above the line categories. Still expect it to be nominated for Best International Film and (hopefully) Best Adapted Screenplay.

The Smashing Machine

Benny Safdie is a great filmmaker. He co-directed one of the best movies of this century with his brother Josh when they made Uncut Gems together. So it’s a bit tough to admit that Marty Supreme has wholly overshadowed Benny’s own solo act in The Smashing Machine, an introspective (and at times unfortunately inert) character study about an MMA fighter named Mark Kerr. Dwayne Johnson is campaigning hard for a Best Actor nomination and he is good in the movie. Meanwhile Emily Blunt is even better as Kerr’s volcanic girlfriend Dawn Staples. It’s unlikely either will be nominated though after Smashing’s muted reception with both critics and ticket-buyers. With that said, it should earn a Best Hair and Makeup nod for Johnson’s physical transformation.

Jay Kelly

Marriage Story’s Noah Bamubach made a movie about Hollywood royalty George Clooney playing what seems like a version of himself (and maybe a few of his fellow movie star pals) in Jay Kelly. On paper this should be an Oscar darling. In practice it most definitely is not.

A House of Dynamite

Another Netflix release from one of Oscars’ favorite filmmakers, Kathryn Bigelow, A House of Dynamite premiered on the streaming service with maximum fanfare. Alas, this heavy-handed and hammy PSA will quite possibly get no nominations.

Die, My Love

Jennifer Lawrence is a favorite of the Academy. But Rose Byrne and Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You tackled similar material to Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love and, we’d argue, did it better. It seems many agree since Byrne’s ascent means Die, My Love is getting snubbed.

After the Hunt

Julia Roberts reportedly turned down Marty Supreme and instead made After the Hunt, an anti-cancel culture movie from regular awards darling Luca Guadagnino. Unfortunately for them, Tár did the same thing much better three years ago. Whoops.

The Marvel Characters We Most Want to Spend New Year’s With

When it comes to year-end celebrations, holidays like Christmas provide a fairly clear script. One is supposed to gather together with family, sip egg nog, and watch Christmas Vacation and/or It’s a Wonderful Life for the 67th time. New Year’s, bless it, is a bit more anarchic.

We’re all welcome to celebrate the twin billing of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in whichever manner that we see fit. For some of us that means hitting the bars. For others, it’s all about cuddling up on the couch and watching football before the ball drops. Here at Den of Geek, however, we’ve decided to consign 2025 to hell the only know we know how: by tying it all back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Since we know how we’ll be spending the end of next year thanks to Avengers: Doomsday‘s Dec. 18 release, let’s take a moment at the end of this one to fantasize about which Marvel characters present the best New Year’s hang.

Doctor Strange

I’m not really into New Year’s Eve as a concept, and I’m pretty confident that Stephen Strange feels the same way. The man’s grumpy about a whole lot of things, so I can’t imagine New Year’s Eve is any different. Still, I reckon he’d be a good person to spend it with, despite the sarcastic eye rolls he’d give any celebratory countdowns or “new year, new me!” speeches. He’d at least be honest about the year’s triumphs and mistakes.

Location-wise, the Sanctum Sanctorum also has some nice party vibes, with its open foyer, roaring fireplace, and fascinating ancient trinkets to explore. But even if it sucked, Strange could just open a portal to anywhere, and we could head off there quicker than you can say “the whirling winds of Watoomb.” Plus, time would be on his side. If we got bored with one place, he could just rewind things with the Time Stone so we could experience New Year’s somewhere new. Imagine jumping through endless sparkle circles to different parties in different dimensions where midnight never comes. – Kirsten Howard

Steve Rogers

Let’s face it, if the past year hasn’t been so great for you— and, if we’re honest, that’s most of us lately — New Year’s Eve can be kind of a downer. Yay, let’s celebrate the end of 12 months that have punched us all repeatedly in the face! Cheers! We’re definitely looking forward to a chance to do that all over again with a new date on the calendar. (Narrator voice: We’re so not.) But you know who probably is? Steve Rogers. And, maybe, given… well, everything, it really is time to call in the big guns for some help this year. (He’s back for Avengers: Doomsday after all.)

Need a reminder that you are still a good person, no matter how many times you failed last year? Steve’s got you. A heartfelt ode to believing in yourself? He’s on it. A motivational speech about picking yourself back up after a failure? He can do this all day. Plus, you just know his ideal New Year’s Eve plans are super cozy and traditional — and if you’ve got to watch the zombified corpse of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with anybody, it might as well be someone who looks like Chris Evans. — Lacy Baugher

Darcy Lewis

Don’t let her astrophysics expertise fool you, Dr. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) knows how to party. While the MCU movies establish Darcy as a valued friend to Jane Foster and a steadfast ally to Thor Odinson, Marvel TV offering What If…? reveals her rager bona fides. Thanks to the aptly named Party Thor, Darcy Lewis parties so hard, in fact, that she gets hitched to Howard the Duck, eventually giving birth to (or hatching??) their son Byrdie.

But where does New Year’s Eve factor into all of this? Look, Kat Dennings is very attractive and I want what she and that duck have. Is that what you wanted to hear? Are you satisfied that you made me admit it? I, Alec George Bojalad, am jealous of a fictional water fowl and I want to elbow in on his New Year’s Eve plans with his beautiful human bride. Happy now??? – Alec Bojalad

Luis

New Year’s is a time to look forward to the future, but it’s also a time to look back and celebrate the past year. And when it comes to recapping past events, no one in the MCU does it better than Scott Lang’s best pal, Luis. Played with delightful energy by Michael Peña in Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, Luis has an eye for detail and a gift for storytelling, which managed to turn conversations between random people into the stuff of legend.

Just imagine what Luis could do recapping even the mundane parts of my life? He would make my frustration while watching Star Trek: Section 31 sound like an epic struggle. According to Luis’ narration, reading issues of Absolute Wonder Woman would be akin to pouring through some ancient tome. Even my New Year’s Eve celebrations—which usually consists of watching a hockey game and going to bed at 10 p.m. —would sound like the stuff of legend when Luis describes it. – Joe George

Rocket Raccoon

New Year’s Eve and Day are about many things: the past, the future, and if we’re being completely honest… the party. And we cannot imagine a better critter in the multiverse to throw down with than Bradley Cooper’s wisecracking Rocket. Tony Stark has got the money and toys for a swanky shindig, and Peter Parker the coolest off-the-wall parlor tricks this side of Fred Astaire, but Rocket is rocking the heart. Well that, plus a spaceship to go across the cosmos to the funner hives of scum and villainy this side of Tatooine.

Admittedly a bit moody at times, in a post-Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 context where Rocket is contented with leading the titular ragtag gang of multiple Han Solos (that now includes a cute talking Golden Retriever), we’re willing to bet the racoon is a lot mellower while still liking a good den of inequity to play cards, drink bubbly, and play an entirely safe and non-lethal prank at. He promises. Plus, he’s got all the best jams now courtesy of that Microsoft Zoom in his pocket. So make room, Nebula and Adam Warlock, we’re coming aboard! – David Crow

M’Baku

Do you know how hard it is to stand out as a performer in any given movie? Now think of how hard it is to pop off the screen in a film that also contains Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, and Angela-Freaking-Bassett. And yet, Winston Duke as M’Baku somehow doesn’t get swallowed up in all the star power in 2018’s Black Panther. In fact, he enhances it.

New Year’s Eve is a celebrity’s holiday. It’s the time of year to be seen out on the town, handing your expensive winter coat to a valet as you enter into an exclusive party. And when it’s time to shrug the $75 blue Eddie Bauer Men’s XXL off my shoulders, I want the Jabari tribe leader by my side. M’Baku is quite simply an elite hang. The man has humor, the man has swag, and most importantly: the man has stories. There’s a whole unheard history of Wakanda waiting to be told. Who better to tell it as we sip champagne and wait for the ball to drop than the current king of Wakanda? – AB

Heated Rivalry Stars Are Doing a New Project Together

Heated Rivalry fans have something to keep them busy until season two finally arrives!

Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, best known as hockey players Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander on the hit Crave streaming series, have reunited for a brand-new project called Ember & Ice on the Quinn audio erotica platform, and you can listen to the first two episodes today.

Storrie and Williams voice two fae princes from the legendary Solari and Lunare kingdoms who start as rivals but soon discover that sparks can turn into passion. The audio romance is set to revive the Heated Rivalry stars’ chemistry between your ears before they’re back in action onscreen.

“Hudson and Connor have a really special chemistry, and we feel incredibly lucky to work with them,” Quinn CEO Caroline Spiegel remarked in a statement. “The way they connect with audiences and show up in the cultural conversation is exciting to watch.”

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In Heated Rivalry, Storrie and Williams’ characters are pro hockey players who’ve spent years hating each other on the ice while secretly falling for one another off it. Part of the queer romance show’s appeal comes from its hockey backdrop, which evokes the real-world NHL rivalries of generational talents like Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins and Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals, but gives them a classic enemies-to-lovers arc.

The show is based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers books and has become a real cultural moment, with fans making various “Stranger what…?” jokes online as the series gained popularity amid Netflix’s final Stranger Things rollout.

Williams also credits social media users with whipping up the show’s success during its early episodes.

“I heard a statistic that between week one and week two, there was, I think, a 600 per cent increase in viewers,” he told Harper’s Bazaar. “And I really think the TikTok editors, especially, were on one. I don’t know how old those people are, or who taught them how to edit that well, but it’s so impressive. They’re free trailer editors and doing it on their own dime. I am very grateful, because a lot of times I’ll see an edit or, like a Tweet, and it’ll make me fall in love with a different part of the show that I overlooked.”

Terry Gilliam Slams Time Bandits TV Show Failures

Time Bandits was a rare “one and done” series for Apple. The show, based on the 1981 fantasy-adventure film by Terry Gilliam, was abruptly cancelled last year despite fairly decent reviews.

Gilliam thinks he knows why. In a typically outspoken interview with la Repubblica (via World of Reel), the often controversial director says that the show’s failure was down to its lack of little people in the cast, many of whom were featured in the original film. Gilliam also claims execs said that casting actors of short stature wouldn’t work for a teenage audience.

“They kept it from me for months that there were no dwarves in the series – something I consider structural to that story,” Gilliam explained. “When I found out, it was too late, and that’s why the series failed.”

It seems Gilliam was also unhappy with the direction the new series was taking after finally reading some scripts, explicitly calling out the show’s co-creator and star, Taika Waititi, as someone he was initially glad to see take the reins of a new reimagining of his film, but who he suggests ultimately let him down.

“They brought me in as a non-writing executive producer, and I thought I had a bit of control, but when I read the scripts, I didn’t like them,” he said. “Taika Waititi, the director whose Jojo Rabbit I loved and to whom I thought I was handing the project, wasn’t really involved; his subsequent films were disappointing.”

Waititi, who shot the new version of Time Bandits over in New Zealand with longtime collaborator Jemaine Clement and star Lisa Kudrow, told Entertainment Weekly last year that the show never got a second season simply because it was “too expensive” to make.

Time Bandits was the first installment in Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination,” followed by Brazil in 1985 and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1988. The film was a critical and commercial success, and is often cited as one of the best family movies ever made. A sequel was planned in the 1990s but shelved after several cast members passed away.

Ryan Coogler Reveals the Story He Wrote for Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther 2

Ryan Coogler has opened up about the original script he wrote for Black Panther 2 before its star, Chadwick Boseman, died from cancer in the summer of 2020.

During a new installment of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Coogler explained that Boseman was too sick to read the script by the time he’d finished writing it, but that he’d put a lot into that version of the Marvel sequel because he’d gotten to know Boseman better as a performer.

Coogler, who went on to make an updated MCU entry that explored the grief following Boseman’s passing through the eyes of its characters, also discussed the plot of the scrapped script, which he “loved” but featured a different version of Namor than the one we got in his completed film, Wakanda Forever.

“The big thing about the script was that it was this thing called the Ritual of Eight,” Coogler told host Josh Horowitz. “When a prince is eight years old, he has to go spend eight days in the bush with his father. Amongst those eight days, they have to go into the bush without any tools. And the prince has to listen and do everything that’s asked of him by his father, but the rule is, for those eight days, the prince can ask the father any question. And the father has to answer.”

“So during the course of those eight days, Namor launches an attack,” Coogler added. “So that was what the movie was. He had to deal with somebody, and it was a different version of Namor in that script, but he had to deal with someone who was, like, insanely dangerous. But, because of this ritual, his son had to be joined at his hip the whole time. So while he was engaging in negotiations and fights, his son had to be right there, or else they’d have to violate this ritual, which had never been broken.”

The director also spoke about making his 2025 hit horror movie Sinners and his return to Marvel for Black Panther 3, which is eyeing a June 2026 production start.

“I’m in it for my heart. I got this movie on my heart,” he said, while acknowledging that some people might be surprised by the move. “Yeah, from the outside looking in, you might say, ‘Man, why this fucking dude making another one of those?’ But that’s totally fine, that question makes sense. And it’s my job as a filmmaker to show why.”

Black Panther 3 is expected to be released in 2028, following Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.

Marty Supreme Is the Quintessential American Story for Its Creators

For screenwriter Ronald Bronstein, the scenes where Timothée Chalamet picks up a ping-pong paddle are among the most moving and pure in all of Marty Supreme. That is saying something since by his own admission, Bronstein was never an athlete. In fact, the filmmaker—who also co-edited and produced the table tennis epic—concedes he was that “obnoxious kid” growing up, the kind who “made not being interested in sports into a part of my identity.”

Even so, when he witnesses Chalamet become ping-pong prodigy Marty Mauser, and his co-writer/editor Josh Safdie step fully into the director’s chair, Bronstein is awed by what he describes as an Olympian elevation of a sport. “I find the actual table tennis playing in the movie itself to be, for me, the most beautiful passages of the film.”

Compared to Bronstein and Safdie’s previous collaborations, which include the grim and cynical Uncut Gems and Good Time among their ranks, there is indeed something euphoric and faintly giddy to Chalamet finally facing his rival (at least in his own mind) in war-torn Tokyo circa 1952. Yet in the minds of the men who made the 150-minute ping-pong portrait that’s become the indie blockbuster of the holiday season, the film is about more than just a sport or the athlete winning.

Marty Supreme can, quite literally, be surmised by that climactic silhouette: the lone American, standing loud and proud on a stage in the ruined lands of a former rival, proving something to his own sense of self-worth, even when the rest of the world stares in apprehension or insists he should sit down.

“To me, it’s [about] the America that emerges as victors after World War II,” Bronstein considers, “and all of this political rhetoric from that era which just insists on the greatness of the country, and that greatness is predicated on individual initiative and personal freedom. I was like, ‘Wow, I see Marty as a sort of inflamed, Kabuki Theater version of that rhetoric.’ Like how you can take the myth of rugged individualism, and the myth of the individual, and the myth of personal freedom, and turn it into its most extreme, dangerous version of itself?”

The climactic table-tennis match of the film is even only a slight artistic liberty. While the character Chalamet plays is ultimately a fictionalized epitome of the American dreamer who refuses to stop striving and trying, despite it damaging every meaningful relationship and opportunity in his life, he is heavily inspired by the real-life Marty Reisman, a mid-20th century hustler from the Lower East Side’s ping-pong halls of yore. Similarly, the antithesis of Chalamet’s Marty, Japanese champion Koto Endo (played by real table tennis champ Koto Kawaguchi) is a fictional character who represents the polar opposite of Mauser: he’s quiet, shy, literally deaf, and humble enough to keep his day job as a factory worker helping rebuild his country. However, he is also based on 1952’s men’s singles champion, Hiroji Satoh.

“What is true is that Japan came out of the war and came out of the occupation—meaning the first time that the travel ban was lifted, and the Japanese culturally re-entered the world stage—through table tennis,” Bronstein explains. “That happened in India, where the world championships were that year. So we’re again not being historically accurate. But that idea is very attractive to me in a kind of Adam Curtis-ian way where you find these footnotes in history, or footnotes of footnotes, and you zoom in on them and take a sort of worm’s eye view on how these individuals either represented the flow of history or changed history in some way.”

Penning a Legend

Zooming in has, of course, been a crucial part of Bronstein’s creative approach with Josh Safdie over the years. The way Bronstein tells it, Josh is more of the historical and research junkie of the two, whereas Bronstein sees himself as “a brooder by nature” that’s better drawn to the virtues and vices of human nature. So while Marty Supreme is the pair’s first outright period piece film with a setting of more than a few years in the past, the scribe is quick to point out “human beings, in terms of our emotional capacity for feeling and our intellectual capacity, stopped evolving [about] 60,000 years ago.” The crucial thing, then, is the micro-scaled chaos and ecstasy of being alive, whether that is as a middle-aged gambling addict in Manhattan’s 2010s Diamond District, or as the world’s best (and most overlooked) table tennis player of 75 years ago.

The latter nonetheless marked something of a surprise for Bronstein when it became the subject matter of his next movie. The shock began when Safdie dropped a copy of Marty Reisman’s obscure 1974 memoir, The Money Player, The Confessions of America’s Greatest Table Tennis Player and Hustler, on Bronstein’s desk in 2019.

“When Josh sort of burst into the room and said we have to make a movie about the world’s greatest table tennis player, I was just like [huh?!],” Bronstein recalls with a slight smile. At the time, he obviously knew about ping-pong, but only insofar of it being a “basement activity.” Meanwhile the years-long process of making Uncut Gems alongside Josh and Benny Safdie, the latter of whom also co-directed and co-wrote that picture, left Bronstein spent.

“When we finish a movie in general, we treat these projects like existential receptacles, like body bags that you can just throw any life experience into. And when we’re done with them, we don’t even have two ideas to rub together. So I just go into a completely dormant state, and I kind of rely on Josh and his sort of natural exuberance to kind of body-check me out of it.”

Still, for the non-athlete, and non-research-fixated Bronstein, the access point into Marty’s story was the widespread indifference for what many consider to be a frivolity; a child’s game; a basement activity.

“I thought I could just lean into the lack of seriousness of even the word ping-pong,” Bronstein remembers. “Ping-pong just as a name seems like it was designed to humiliate somebody who would be enthusiastic about it. It’s almost like if you think of the word ‘movie.’ That’s been grandfathered into our consciousness, so we don’t think about just how stupid and silly any kind of onomatopoeia is. But I could just lean in and double down on how frivolous and trivial sounding it is, at least in the popular imagination.”

They would make a movie about a guy who won the lottery of genetics for being the best in the world at a sport that no one around him respects, and that the greater international community of said sport might likewise not respect his arrival in. Says Bronstein, “What a great conduit to explore all of the costs that would be associated with any pursuit where one’s identity is fused with the pursuit.”

The writer cannot estimate how many drafts he and Josh ended up tackling for Marty Supreme. The process was iterative and continuous, even after it was almost scrapped in the early 2020s.

“We started writing right after Gems and we wrote for a few months, and we knew what the story should be—like you could squint at it and you could see it—but it wasn’t coming out right. It was actually coming out way too close to Gems in very specific ways. So we put it aside and we wrote something else, a massive script [that was] like a three-part, 700-page story that we ended up not making, partly due to the writers’ strike. At some point, we just looked at each other and were like, ‘Marty is the one to return to.’”

One of the keys to why Safdie and Bronstein appear to work so well together as both screenwriters and editors is an appreciation for capturing a mania and chaos that feels as spontaneous as it is scripted.

“We’re trying to create work that feels like it’s being written while it unspools in the projector while it’s playing,” Bronstein explains. “So when you’re writing dialogue down, I’m trying to capture the way people speak. It’s a completely artificial thing. But I want it to feel like the universe is giving those ideas to me so I can take them for granted, and not as something I mandated and stamped onto the universe. Anytime a performer brings a piece of themselves to the dialogue, changes the syntax and grammar just enough to heat it up, it feels like it didn’t come from my brain or Josh’s brain, but it came from them and came from the universe.”

The process continues all the way into the editing suite where Bronstein and Safdie get one more go at essentially revising their own work. Says the former, “The beauty of being both a writer and an editor is that when you get into the edit, you don’t have to have any respect for the writer or the writing, and you can just really use it as an opportunity to completely rewrite the material as if you were trying to impose intentionality onto found footage.”

The Uncut Gems Comparison

The result is a movie that, similar to Good Time and particularly Uncut Gems, has a pressure-cooker sense of tension placed on its protagonist. But Bronstein is wary to dwell too heavily on comparisons or similarities within the works.

“Out of all the things that I respect or look for in an artist, probably range is pretty low on my list,” says Bronstein. “You look for range in the full gamut of human beings out there, but each individual has a narrow set of preoccupations that defines them. So when I think of my favorite artists, whether it’s a Lynch or Robert Crumb, I’m not really looking for range. I assume that there’s going to be overlap from work to work that’s going to connect them. In a sense, each work is just them narrowing in on those preoccupations like a shark circling its prey. So how this movie connects to Gems, and how it doesn’t connect to Gems, is a negotiation that I’m trying in my life to avoid thinking about.”

With that said, the filmmaker does allow himself to note one crucial distinction: “The main difference between Howard and Marty is, Howard is more [suffering from] a disease. He’s a gambling addict, right? That’s pathology. While there are obviously pathological components to Marty that are fueling him to make the decisions he’s made… he feels this obligation to see this god-given talent through. I think there’s something much more positive at the core of Marty, because he has that talent.”

The core is to be able to again zoom in on that person, in all their talent and pathology, and as the scribe puts it, “Get enough of a sense of what their circumstances are and how those circumstances are affixing them into a position, so that it’s hard not to just sob your heart out.”

Marty Supreme is in theaters now.

The Terrible X-Men Costumes We Dare Avengers: Doomsday to Adapt

The latest teaser for Avengers: Doomsday doesn’t tell us anything about Doctor Doom’s evil plan to deal with the incursions destroying the multiverse. Nor does it even involve the Avengers at all. Instead, the minute-long teaser just catches up with three of the X-Men, bringing back Patrick Stewart as Professor Charles Xavier, Ian McKellen as Magneto, and James Marsden as Cyclops.

The sight of these old favorites is enough to appease those hoping for more Doomsday details, especially because of their costumes. Instead of the black leather the actors wore in their first appearances throughout the 2000s, Stewart, McKellen, and Marsden are outfitted in comic book accurate uniforms. Leaked images of their co-stars Alan Cumming (Nightcrawler), Rebecca Romijn (Mystique), Channing Tatum (Gambit), and Kelsey Grammer (Beast) also show the characters in comic book suits.

But, of course, a true comic book fan knows that these costumes are just one of many sartorial choices the characters have worn over the year. If Avengers: Doomsday really wants to impress us, then they’d give their stars one of these get-ups straight from the pages of Marvel Comics.

Professor X in Action Gear

In the public imagination, Professor Charles Xavier is a kindly paraplegic who wears a smart suit while delivering advice and instruction to his young charges. One doesn’t have to read too far in the comics to find that Xavier doesn’t always have those qualities. Not only is Professor X famously a jerk, but he often takes a more active role with the X-Men. If he’s still bound to his wheelchair, then Xavier tends to wear the jumpsuit that Stewart has in the teaser. But when he regains the use of his legs, which happens on a regular basis, then Xavier makes some stronger choices.

Easily the worst of the bunch is the costume he wears when he first decides to be a field member of the X-Men. With his ability to walk returned by his girlfriend’s alien people, Xavier chooses a hideous yellow get-up with blue gloves and boots, and a pair of belts making an “X” across his chest. Xavier already feels out of place going on adventures with his students, but putting him in that costume makes Professor X seem like the teacher who goes to his student’s parties and gets a look to friendly with some of the girls.

Magneto as Erik the Red

To be clear, Magneto hasn’t really ever had a bad costume. The sleeveless, long-gloved get-up he wore during his trial isn’t for everyone, and some may take exception to the flowing blouse he donned while serving as headmaster of Xaver’s school, but for the most part, Erik Lehnsherr knows how to make purple work for him.

So to ding the Master of Magnetism, we need to look at an identity he briefly donned when everyone thought he had been de-aged turned into a hot, young good guy called Joseph (spoiler: Joseph was a clone). Happy to let Joseph divert attention, Magneto took the identity of Erik the Red, which also was an identity that Cyclops used while outside the X-Men and that an alien named Davan Shakari once used.

None of that convoluted backstory explains why the Erik the Red costume is so hideous. It looks like a slightly more armored version of Sean Connery‘s Zardoz get-up with a horned helmet. Ugly as it is, I bet the always game McKellen would make it look amazing.

Cyclops the Mutant Buster

As mentioned above, Cyclops also wore the Erik the Red costume, but we had to give that one to Magneto, so we’re actually talking about the second worst outfit Scott Summers wore. And because this is the X-Men, a convoluted story comes with it. Well, actually, Scott’s worst costume is his original X-Factor getup.

X-Factor was the name of the team that the original five X-Men formed in 1986, when they reunited after Jean Grey’s resurrection. Not only did Marvel editorial want the original five on their own team, but the publisher wanted to ride the wave of Ghostbusters mania sweeping the nation. So instead of making X-Factor just another superhero team, Marvel decided that the team would pose as mutant hunters. When they found a mutant, X-Factor would actually help the poor kid they found.

Fortunately, Marvel dropped the conceit, but not before forcing us to see Scott in his mutant buster gear, a horrible blue sweat suit that seems designed for a light aerobic workout or doing nice breakdancing moves.

The Amazing Nightcrawler

The legendary artist Dave Cockrum originally designed Nighcrawler for a Legion of Superheroes spinoff comic. When Cockrum jumped from DC to Marvel to help relaunch the X-Men, he and writer Len Wien remade Nightcrawler into Kurt Wagner, the German swashbuckler we know and love. For that reason, few of Nightcrawler’s redesigns stray too far from what Cockrum did.

That said, the one time that Nightcrawler had a very different costume, it also had a fantastic design… because it’s Spider-Man’s. Yes, in the mini-series Uncanny Spider-Man, Nightcrawler took Peter Parker’s place for a while. Crazy as it sounds, Uncanny Spider-Man is pretty fun and it only lasted a few issues, so we can’t be too mad at it. Still, it would be bold for Marvel to make Nightcrawler into Spider-Man in Doomsday.

Mystique Embraces the ’90s

In the comics, shapeshifter Mystique has an incredible design, a cool sleek white dress to match her blue skin and red hair. For some reason, the movies decided she should be just naked and scaly, a design they kept when Jennifer Lawrence stepped in to replace Romjin in the role. The comics did sometimes adapt the naked scaley version of Mystique, but most of her looks stick to the white and blue look.

Strangely, the worst variation isn’t black sports bra that she briefly wore in the 2000s. Rather, it’s the ’90s nonsense that Mystique had while serving in X-Factor. The costume has the usual white base, but it’s covered with extraneous red belts and pouches. Now, to be clear, lots of superheroes had extra belts and pouches in the ’90s. But it really makes no sense of Mystique, a shapeshifting spy. The belts and buckles make the otherwise lithe character seem clunky and clumsy.

Gambit Goes Yellow

Unlike the other characters on this list, Gambit has rarely had a good costume. He’s so defined by his famous pink head sock and leather coat look that even attempts to update him retained those ’90s qualities.

But even by those standards, the yellow and red duds he wore as part of a later incarnation of, you guessed it, X-Factor. This incarnation of X-Factor was a corporate espionage outfit, and Gambit needed a fashionable new costume to match. Yet, for some reason Gambit’s corporate overlords put him in the most hideous yellow and red suit, made all the worse for the dumb red lenses over his eyes.

The outfit works a bit better when paired with his signature duster, but Gambit’s X-Factor look has us longing for the headsock.

Beast Clashes Colors

Honestly, the boldest thing for the MCU to do would be putting 70-year-old Kelsey Grammer in Beast’s usual costume, which is just underwear. If The Marvels is any indication, however, Grammer will just be a vocal performance for a CGI Beast. And that means if we want to find a weird costume for Beast’s next MCU appearance, we’ll have to turn, of course, to X-Factor.

Even movie fans probably know that Hank McCoy has two looks as the Beast. In one, he’s mostly humanoid, albeit with large hands and feet. In that mode, Beast wears superhero tights, including a brown and yellow suit that he can’t quite work as well as Wolverine. Hank’s other mode came after he performed experiments on himself, which first gave him grey fur and later blue fur. He sometimes gets a stylish coat when he’s blue and furry, which Grammer had in X-Men: The Last Stand.

But then, there was that one time in X-Factor that Hank decided to combine the two. Still blue and furry, Beast put on a variation of his brown and yellow duds. The clash of colors did not work, reminding us that Dr. McCoy is a great scientist, but not a great fashion designer.

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

Avengers: Doomsday Can Finally Give X-Men’s Leader the Respect He Deserves

In 2005’s Astonishing X-Men #8, Marvel’s Mighty Mutants discover one of their age-old enemies on the lawn of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, a giant mutant hunting robot called a Sentinel. While Wolverine, Colossus, and other heroes try to evacuate the school and beat the Sentinel in the usual way, Cyclops a.k.a. Scott Summers chooses a more extreme method. He pulls the visor off his face, unleashes his full optic blasts, and obliterates the foe.

“Every now and then, Summers…” says Wolverine, his look of shock and admiration clear in artist John Cassaday’s illustration. “I remember why you’re still in charge.”

That scene gets recreated in the third teaser for Avengers: Doomsday, which focuses on the X-Men. Set to the piano version of Alan Silvestri’s Avengers theme, also used in the Captain America and Thor teasers for Doomsday, the camera moves through the dusty Xavier mansion to find Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) sitting together. The scene then cuts to James Mardsen as Cyclops, pulling off his visor and letting loose his optic blasts.

Although it brings back actors from 2000’s X-Men, the Doomsday teaser shows that much has changed since that movie released. In X-Men, Cyclops was at best a footnote, a milquetoast wet blanket to get in the way of the romance between Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey and Hugh Jackman‘s Wolverine. By the time Mardsen’s Cyclops died in X-Men: The Last Stand, even the character’s fans were happy to see this bland rendition of the team leader put to rest.

In many ways, the 2000 movie’s treatment of Cyclops matched the status quo at the time. Introduced as the team leader in 1963’s X-Men #1, Scott Summers developed into a complex, mature character under writer Chris Claremont’s decade-plus run. Claremont intended for Summers to retire after the death of Jean Grey in the Dark Phoenix Saga, giving him a wife and a son. But when Marvel editorial decided to bring Jean back from the dead, against Claremont’s wishes, Cyclops was written as abandoning his family to return to his old girlfriend.

The decision ruined Cyclops as a character for decades, so much so that few complained when the animated X-Men series portrayed him as a dull block of wood. However, Cyclops was finally rehabilitated over the 2000s, starting with the aforementioned Astonishing X-Men series by Joss Whedon and Cassaday. Through that series, and especially the runs that followed by Warren Ellis, Mike Carey, and Brian Michael Bendis, Cyclops became a radical, a former child soldier so devoted to the cause of mutant liberation that he could accomplish what neither Professor X nor Magneto ever could.

These days, fans recognize Cyclops as a complex character, a highly competent strategist and morally principled hero, whose convictions sometimes make him clash with humans and mutants alike. In short, he’s a far cry from the guy that Marsden had to play in the Fox X-Men movies. If the X-Men scenes from Doomsday are borrowing from those moments from the comics, then the viewers will finally learn what even fan favorites like Wolverine always knew, that Cyclops deserves to lead this team.

Avengers: Doomsday arrives on December 18, 2026.

Who Will Die in the Stranger Things Finale?

The Duffer brothers have been preparing us for the Stranger Things finale for a while. The show’s creators have promised a concluding episode that “doesn’t feel painful but feels satisfying” and said they’re not trying to shock or upset anyone by pulling a “Red Wedding”-style Game of Thrones scenario that kills off a lot of the cast.

Still, it seems unlikely that all of our faves will survive a final battle with Vecna, so we’ve been looking at the current state of their journeys and trying to decide if any are more likely to bite the bullet than others.

There’s certainly a long list of characters who are less likely to die because they just simply haven’t had much to do this season and aren’t being set up as key players in the finale. Lucas has spent quite a while just trying to get Max back, and now he has. Joyce has largely been fretting about Will, as usual. Jonathan and Nancy finally broke up after realizing their relationship wasn’t working. Max has been a big focus of this season, but now that she’s back in the real world, her story is pretty much done. Other characters, like Dustin and Robin, have been keeping the plot rolling with their quick thinking, but it doesn’t seem like there’d be any narrative weight to gain by killing them off.

However, some characters may still be at risk in the final episode…

STRANGER THINGS: SEASON 5. David Harbour as Jim Hopper in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025

5. Hopper

Hopper has already tried to sacrifice himself once this season in an effort to save Eleven, and he’s had one fake-out death in the past. Is it time for him to hit the old dusty trail once and for all? Well, we’d suspect not, because Joyce has had to deal with one boyfriend dying and to put her through another seems like overkill for a woman who’s really been going through the wringer since the show began!

That said, Hopper could now be in further danger if Kali sees him as standing between Eleven and doing the “right thing” by eliminating their bloodline. Could Kali end up removing Hopper from the equation? Or is it more likely that Hopper will take out Kali to save Eleven? Eleven’s fate seems to be up in the air, but Hopper is definitely spoiling for a fight, one way or another.

STRANGER THINGS: SEASON 5. Joe Keery as Steve Harrington in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025

4. Steve

Steve was supposed to be killed off all the way back in season one, but will the Duffers finally make good on their abandoned plan to get rid of him? The pair have played coy over Steve’s fate recently, but have said, “It would be the next logical step. He keeps getting beaten up more and more. The only way we could take it further is death.”

It’s true that Steve has taken plenty of hits and kept on ticking, but a heroic sacrifice from Steve feels like it could be earned at this stage, especially if it means saving Dustin. The duo have both promised that “you die, I die” going into the series finale, but when push comes to shove, Steve will do anything to save his friends, no matter how reckless.

STRANGER THINGS: SEASON Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025

3. Mike

Mike really hasn’t had much of anything to do in Stranger Things for a while, but killing him off to shift both Will and Eleven into vengeance mode is undoubtedly a path the show could take.

Mike’s senseless death at Vecna’s hands could act as the ultimate emotional trigger for Eleven, because her abilities have always been closely tied to her feelings. Losing someone she loves so dearly could amplify her powers to unprecedented levels, giving her the edge needed to destory someone like Vecna. Meanwhile, Will losing his best friend and former crush could enable him to tap more deeply into his hive mind connection to either fight back or guide Eleven strategically.

STRANGER THINGS: SEASON 5. Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025

2. Eleven

Killing off Eleven in the finale would carry narrative and emotional weight, which is why fans have been speculating about it for a while.

The character has been pivotal in the fight against the Upside Down since the beginning. A final confrontation with Vecna may require a sacrifice only she can make, and it could bring her story full circle to save Hawkins, even at the cost of her own life.

Though Eleven’s death would surely make the finale unforgettable and cement her arc of courage and selflessness, it also might be sad and painful, something the Duffers have said they want to avoid at the end of the series.

STRANGER THINGS: SEASON 5. Jamie Campbell Bower as Vecna in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025

1. Vecna

Vecna is the big bad that the Hawkins gang have been chasing for two seasons, blending icky body horror with psychological torment and using the kids of Hawkins as his personal playthings. Chief amongst them has been Will Byers, who has now opened up to his family and friends and seems ready to fight Vecna from the inside out.

Although it’s not clear how much of Henry Creel’s business has been puppeteered by the Mind Flayer over the years, Vecna is almost guaranteed to be killed or neutralized forever in the final battle, whether that’s by Will, Eleven, or anyone else who could stop him.

Hey, if Vecna won, the series would have quite a downbeat ending, wouldn’t it?! No, he’s toast!

5 Things the Stranger Things Finale Needs to Avoid

We have no idea what the Stranger Things finale has in store for us. We know that the Hawkins gang are heading towards a final battle with Vecna, but we don’t really know what that will entail, and there are plenty of mysteries still surrounding the villain and his Lovecraftian plan to merge dimensions. We also know that with Kali back in the mix, Eleven may have to make a choice between living an idealistic life with Hopper and Mike, or making sure that the bloodline (and the military threat) is gone for good.

While there are plenty of things that we would like to see play out in the series finale, there are also things that we would prefer not to see. Here are the main pitfalls that the show should probably avoid…

A Significant Time Jump

It feels like it would be nice to see what happens to these characters in the future. Perhaps Steve and Nancy eventually end up married with six little nuggets. Perhaps Eleven and Hopper start their own secret squad to right the world’s wrongs in the shadows. Perhaps Dustin becomes super famous in the gaming world. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But should the finale make a significant time jump and show us where all our faves end up, it may fall into several traps.

On the business side, if Stranger Things were to ever be resurrected (in a legacy sequel series or movie, for example) the writers would be tied to those surprising future glimpses rather than left with the ability to deploy or alter them. However, there’s also the believability of aging the cast so that they look 30 or 40 to reflect a significant time jump, which always looks dodgy no matter how good the makeup is. The series has been struggling with its child actors aging out of their characters already, but aging them into future versions of those characters is just as tricky.

If you think we’re wrong on this one, think back to how you felt seeing the kids of the Harry Potter franchise play late-30s adults in Deathly Hallows – Part 2…

Setting Up a Spinoff

Stranger Things is a golden goose – an extremely popular IP that could keep laying golden eggs for years. Make no mistake, nothing is ever really over when there’s money to be made! As such, there’s an animated Stranger Things spinoff on the way, and a live-action spinoff series is already in development that apparently won’t involve Hawkins or any characters from the main series.

As there are currently no plans to continue this particular story, the finale has two hours and change to wrap everything up and say goodbye to Hawkins, along with all the people we’ve come to know and love. Although we’re used to seeing franchises get busy with reeling audiences in for future installments, it would be a bit of a shame to spend a portion of our remaining time in Hawkins setting up a spinoff after we’ve committed to five seasons of this story.

Characters in Heaven

We do hope the show doesn’t opt to bring any dead characters back using mystical or religious means in the finale. We don’t need to see Eddie smiling down at us like Mufasa from the clouds, or see everyone reuniting in a heavenly dimension where they can play Dungeons & Dragons for infinity.

When Supernatural finally ended after 15 seasons, we had to see brothers Sam and Dean reuniting in heaven. The main cast of Lost embraced in a collective afterlife when their times came. On the movie side, Jane Foster’s death from cancer in Thor: Love and Thunder was very sad, but Marvel tacked on a post-credits scene to show that everything was alright really, because she made it to Valhalla.

Showing us characters in the afterlife often undermines their lives and sacrifices, and it’s just super cheesy. No more, please!

Cringy Fan Service

There are many things people want from a series finale, but a rehash of what’s come before is almost certainly not it. We don’t need to see the characters saying any of their iconic lines again (“friends don’t lie!”), we don’t need needle drops from any of the songs that have become permanently linked to their journey like Dustin and NeverEnding Story, and we definitely don’t need any surprise celebrity cameos.

To be fair, the chances of Kate Bush popping up to help slay a Demogorgon are slim, but Stranger Things is well known for bringing in actors who were popular in the 1980s for supporting roles (Winona Ryder, Sean Astin, Matthew Modine, Linda Hamilton, etc.) and we wouldn’t put it past the Duffer brothers to throw in one more surprise for the road.

A Cliffhanger

Fans have waited nine long years to see the conclusion of Stranger Things, so it feels important to give the story a proper ending that doesn’t have an “aha!” moment. One of the series’ strengths has always been its balance of suspense and heartfelt resolution. Ending on a cliffhanger risks turning any carefully built satisfaction into frustration.

We’ve all been looking forward to seeing the fates of Hawkins, the Upside Down, and the central characters, but there’s also that final confrontation with Vecna/Henry Creel that the last two seasons have been setting up. He can’t keep running back to his weird dimension and licking his wounds, the guy has gotta be stopped once and for all!

The Upside Down might exist forever (and so might the Mind Flayer) but Henry’s final run for glory needs to play out in full. No Tony Soprano ambiguity for that blonde rapscallion!

Event Horizon’s Scariest Scene Has No Blood, Guts, or Gore

Critically-panned box office flop Event Horizon is now considered a space-horror classic, with many of its gruesome scenes becoming iconic since its 1997 release.

Interestingly, the cut of the film we got was much less violent than its director intended. Around 30 minutes of footage was trimmed after the studio and test audiences found the first version simply too horrific, but there are still enough disturbing moments to pack a punch.

If you close your eyes (you won’t need them to see), you might be able to pick out a few of those moments from your own mysterious core right now. Sam Neill’s Dr. Weir, his face all torn up. Chief Engineer Justin, clutching desperately as blood pours from his eyes in the depressurized airlock. D.J. vivisected on the operating table. Then there’s the video retrieved from the log of the Event Horizon’s original crew, which includes the captain holding his own eyeballs in his hands and all manner of other nasty crap.

Good stuff! But the scariest scene in Paul Anderson’s cult sci-fi gem doesn’t need any of that to shit you up. No blood, gore, or guts. It’s what we don’t see that’s terrifying.

Anderson sets up the scene by gathering the crew of his reluctant rescue ship, the Lewis and Clark, to hear some lengthy exposition from Dr. Weir, who originally designed the Event Horizon and wants to explain how she travels in space. The crew jokes around and trades friendly barbs in their brightly lit quarters. We’re told that the Lewis and Clark is running perfectly before being introduced to them one by one, culminating with “gloomy Gus” D.J. (Jason Isaacs), who seems more downbeat than the rest.

The Event Horizon has been missing since its maiden voyage to Proxima Centauri seven years ago, and uses an experimental gravity drive to fold spacetime and travel vast distances, Weir tells them. It has now mysteriously popped up in orbit around Neptune, so the Lewis and Clark has been sent to investigate its distress signal.

Now that we understand who these people are and what they’re all doing here, Anderson cuts to a scene where Weir is ready to play the Event Horizon’s distress signal to the crew. This transpires in a deeper, darker part of the ship’s bridge. The bright lights of the previous scene are gone, replaced by blinking computer screens, glowing buttons, and shafts of light streaming from overhead fans.

With his back to the camera, Neill’s troubled Dr. Weir quickly leans forward and plays the transmission received from the Event Horizon. If it’s not a collection of the worst sounds you’ve ever heard in your life, it could at least make the top ten. Howls, screams, and a low voice uttering some desperate words.

“What the fucking hell is that?” asks Sean Pertwee’s pilot, Smitty, who speaks for all of us. Weir responds by isolating the human voice in the recording, and D.J. translates it from Latin as “Save me.”

There’s no ominous score accompanying this short scene. Just the hum of the ship’s engine and the terrifying audio from the Event Horizon being played repeatedly. After D.J. translates it, a loud alarm interrupts the conversation, and the crew scramble to their stations. They’re about to get a taste of the journey that the Event Horizon has been on. Only a few will save themselves from Hell.

Anderson doesn’t need to show us any visual nastiness to provoke the kind of dread that the distress signal effortlessly evokes. Our imaginations do most of the work, conjuring up explanations for why the crew of the Event Horizon would scream like that. None of the Lovecraftian horrors that we see later can match the sheer terror of the unknown, however gross.

We are wired to fear uncertainty because unpredictability makes it harder to plan and prepare for what might happen next. Plenty of scientific studies show that people experience more stress in situations where the outcome is unknown than in ones where they know they’re going to face something bad. This uncertainty triggers alarm responses in the body and mind because we prioritize safety and quick reactions to potential threats, so the unknown feels like a risk even when the actual danger is low.

It’s likely just an evolutionary development to keep us out of harm’s way, but the horror genre is very good at using it against us. It’s why we never see the witch in The Blair Witch Project, and why Alien and Jaws try to keep their monsters hidden or confined to the shadows for as long as possible.

The Event Horizon’s distress call puts us in a stressful holding pattern within the first 20 minutes of the film. What follows is upsetting and often disgusting, but our fear never reaches the same heights as it does in this scene, which uses its genius sound design to set the stage and scare us into submission.

Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.

How Simu Liu and Melissa Barrera Crafted Their Spy Duo in The Copenhagen Test

On most film or television sets, walking only a few paces can snap you back into reality. Beautifully detailed sets adorn fake walls and wooden frames, yet tucked around the corner are skilled craftspeople and production personnel resetting for the next shot or moving on to their next task. Inside the set of Peacock’s new espionage thriller, The Copenhagen Test, the set tour took us to fully built out sound stages that gave off an immersive, disorienting sneak peak into the high concept original series.

The spy-fi series follows intelligence analyst Alexander Hale, played by Simu Liu, whose position at a clandestine government intelligence agency called The Orphanage is compromised when he suspects his own brain has been hacked by unknown enemies. The loyalty of Hale, a first-generation American, is called into question and only further complicated when he realizes both the enemy and The Orphanage having complete view into his vision and hearing. In a deal cut with The Orphanage, Hale needs to put on a performance around the clock to uncover the threat to U.S. intelligence and save his own life in the process.

It’s inside the striking Orphanage set where Den of Geek, along with several other press outlets, is seated for a press day. We’re on a raised platform hovering above the high-tech computers meant to track Hale and other agents. Liu, who also produces the series, sits down below us in a director’s chair, and we fire questions from above, almost like an interrogation. The room is dim and completely enclosed, making it easy for lose ourselves in the world of The Copenhagen Test. Later, we were joined by Liu’s co-star, Melissa Barrera who helped us piece together more details on her tightly wrapped character, Michelle. Below are the transcripts of both interviews.

Simu Liu as Alexander in Peacock espionage thriller The Copenhagen Test. (Photo by: Amanda Matlovich/PEACOCK)

Simu Liu Interview

Where is Alexander when we enter the story? Where is he emotionally and physically?

Simu Liu: Alexander begins the story from a place of extreme competency, but also very unfulfilled about where he’s at in his career. He’s someone who’s proven himself on multiple occasions but just doesn’t seem to be put up for advancement in the same way as some of his peers. We really wanted to start things off with a bang and open with a really strong sequence that shows the audience and the viewer exactly what the character is capable of.

You’re playing Alexander Hale, but you’re playing multiple versions of him. What’s it been like to find the many faces of Alexander in this while he’s still trying to have his own agenda?

SL: It’s easy to get caught in the different layers of how Alexander would act if nobody was watching versus if he knew someone was watching. It’s an endless spiral, and that’s what makes the show so juicy. We want the first watch to be compelling and propulsive, then once you understand how everything unfolds, you’ll go back and re-watch moments that tell you different things. A lot of my conversations with [showrunners] Jennifer [Yale] and Thomas [Brandon] are about how to be the right amount of confusing and get the audience to ask the right questions at the right time.

With such a high‑concept story where perspective is key, how are you, [and showrunners] Jennifer [Yale], and Thomas [Brandon] working together to keep that perspective clear for the audience?

SL: There’s a reason Hollywood adapts so much. It’s a little easier working with existing IPs because the creatives know what they’re looking for. The Copenhagen Test is an original idea Thomas came up with, and it’s been a privilege seeing it come to fruition. It’s been a long process of figuring out the lore and tone, with many iterations along the way. Seeing the evolution since I came on board has been really eye opening. Thomas has such a treasure trove of ideas, and it’s been incredible getting to work with him and Jen to bring those ideas to life.

When you were learning the special forces-style choreography for this show, what was the biggest adjustment for you as a performer?

SL: The most exciting thing about this role was getting to work with firearms. It’s not something growing up as a Canadian we have a whole lot of exposure to, so I was fascinated by it and wanted to go head first into that training. The other part was crafting how Alexander moves as a hand-to-hand fighter, which is very different from something like a Shang-Chi. Working with [fight choreographers] Chris and James [Mark], we’d go through choreography and stop because we’d be like, “That feels like a Shang-Chi move.” We would think about what someone would have to do in special forces training. It’s a lot of elbows, very close and guarded, and all about maximum impact. There’s something very brutalist and utilitarian about the way Alexander moves.

There’s an interesting dynamic to navigate with Melissa Barrera’s character because you have to build chemistry with your co-star, but as characters, you also have to build chemistry in this world. What was that experience like?

SL: The best on-screen partnerships come very easily and effortlessly. It was something we knew we were going to have to work on from the beginning, but it just started with lunch and coffee. We talked about what motivated us and what drew us to the roles, then had conversations about life so we understood each other’s entry points as artists. Once we learned that, it became very easy. Barrera is very generous on set. She’s just the best kind of co-star.

Your character is the son of immigrants, which makes him a first-generation American. What cultural elements were important to keep in mind while playing Alexander?

SL: It’s always a balance playing a role like this. You want to balance cultural specificity. There are moments where Alexander and his parents speak Mandarin and Hakka, but we didn’t want that to become the overarching theme. It’s more about this universal feeling that you’re capable of more. We wanted Alexander to feel relatable in a very universal sense. His background is always a part of him, and it’s an element of the show I’m very proud of. We’re excited to introduce the world to their next great spy, even if that spy looks different than you might imagine.

Melissa Barrera Interview

Your character Michelle is a secret agent called in to play a fake girlfriend. What is her background, and has she done this work before?

Melissa Barrera: She’s been an agent in different organizations and is new to this one. Her background is so bad I don’t even know it. There are hints toward the bad stuff that happened to her. We know there’s a reason she’s stuck in this position and has to continue this lifestyle because she did something really bad in the past. The character is a mystery, and in every episode you learn something new about her. I was reading each episode trying to construct her out of the crumbs because she’s such a mystery.

How do you balance not knowing your character’s past completely, and also this pragmatic nature that she has?

MB: A lot of people have experienced trauma. Michelle is very good at compartmentalizing, and part of her has been desensitized, which really informs how I play her on the job. She’s almost like a robot. You don’t get to see much of the real her. It’s been fascinating playing a character like that.

What is [Michelle’s] fighting style? How does she approach a situation where she’s turning on her partner?

MB: She’s a little ruthless and highly trained, but not in the military. I worked with Chris [Mark] on the stunts to make her style different. Maybe trained in Asia, not in a military setting, and less like how a man would train. She’s an elbow girl. We developed a style where she uses her elbows to win fights against bigger opponents. Punching could hurt her hands, but elbows let her go for it.

It sounds like Michelle has a life that she’s trying to get back to. Did you create a backstory for yourself? Did that help you add a layer of sadness to your character’s motivations?

MB: I created a backstory for her, but we never know if it’ll match up. There’s a lot of pain behind her motivations, but she doesn’t allow herself to dwell. She’s very practical. You rarely see what’s going on inside her. A few moments may seem like a glimpse, but they’re not. Everything has to feel genuine, though. I have to play Alexander and the audience. You have to believe her and that she likes Alexander.

I’m wondering if there was anything that pushed you to a limit that you didn’t know you had in you?

MB: I’ve never done so much hand-to-hand combat, so that was the challenge. I wanted it to look good, like a woman who’s highly skilled. I like doing all the stunts, though my stunt double is amazing and takes the big hits. Training was a real physical challenge, as well as the emotional challenge of not knowing my character’s background.

The Copenhagen Test is now streaming on Peacock.

Avengers: Doomsday – Who is Thor’s Love?

The latest teaser for Avengers: Doomsday turns its attention from Steve Rogers to Thor, the God of Thunder. While Captain America‘s teaser is all warm nostalgia, desperation marks Thor’s moment. In particular, the teaser is built around a prayer that Thor makes to his father Odin, begging for a chance to see his love once more.

For those who haven’t followed the MCU closely since Avengers: Endgame (i.e., the audience that Marvel is trying to get back for the Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans-led Doomsday), that prayer might seem a bit odd. Who, exactly, is Thor’s love? The answer may be obvious to those who watched Thor: Love and Thunder, but there may be even more to Thor’s prayer than one would think.

One might assume that Thor’s love is Jane Foster, the romantic interest played by Natalie Portman in the first two movies, or perhaps the Lady Sif, a fellow Asgardian warrior, portrayed by Jaimie Alexander. Heck, certain corners of the internet are convinced that Thor loves no one as much as he does his adopted brother Loki, and I’ll leave it up to you to search out those very detailed stories and illustrations.

But Thor’s ultimate love is, well, Love, the girl he adopted at the end of Thor: Love and Thunder. For those who skipped that divisive movie, Love and Thunder finds Thor abandoning his brief tenure with the Guardians of the Galaxy to do battle with the Gorr the God-Butcher, the big bad portrayed by a wonderfully unhinged Christian Bale.

Driven by his deity’s failure to save his daughter Love, Gorr seeks to destroy all gods by entering the realm of the cosmic being Eternity, which will grant him one wish. By the climax of the film, Thor and the Mighty Thor Jane Foster have convinced Gorr to use his wish to resurrect his daughter. But he dies shortly thereafter, leaving Thor to care for her.

If Thor is praying to see Love once again, we might assume that something happens to her in Doomsday, which actually tracks with what we’ve seen from the film so far. The end credit scene to The Fantastic Four: First Steps, taken directly from Doomsday, shows Doctor Doom with Franklin Richards, son of Sue and Reed. The Captain America teaser shows Steve cradling a child, who might also be a target for Doom.

Perhaps Doom’s plan involves kidnapping heroes’ children, and if so, he’s getting quite more than he bargained for with Love. In the pages of Marvel Comics, Eternity chooses a protector of reality and grants them Uni-Power. With that power, the user becomes Captain Universe, an incredibly formidable hero identified by their starfield costume.

Captain Universe has not yet officially entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, close watchers noted that when Love was resurrected, her shadow had the starfield pattern associated with Captain Universe, complete with the constellation that is the Captain Universe logo.

That fact puts Thor’s prayer to Odin into a different context. Of course, he wants help to defeat Doom in order to see his child again, just as any other father would. And if Doom has kidnapped Love like he may be doing with Franklin Richards and the son of Steve Rogers, then that desire would only multiply.

But if Love is Captain Universe, then Thor’s prayer may also be key to defeating Doctor Doom. Maybe by seeing his Love once more, Thor can save reality and prevent Doomsday—certainly a goal worth praying for.

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

The Best Fantasy Books of 2025

While 2025 failed to meet the customer satisfaction standards of many (most?) of us, at least we can say with confidence: Man, the books were good.

It’s been a year full of outstanding titles across genres, no matter whether you tend to gravitate toward contemporary fiction, horror, mysteries, thrillers, young adult titles, or romance. But fantasy fans in particular were absolutely spoiled for choice in 2025, with established authors and exciting new voices dropping a seemingly endless stream of highly-anticipated sequels, new series openers, and buzzy debuts. It’s been a year full of dragon riders and vampires, along with talking animals, burned-out witches, fated lovers, oddball healers, and magical oracles. (And that’s just the books that made this list.)

Here are 12 of the best fantasy books of 2025.

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

The most delightful surprise of the year, historical mystery writer Antonia Hodgson’s epic fantasy debut is the fantasy genre at its absolute, most addictive best. One part murder mystery and one part tournament competition, The Raven Scholar is a 600-plus-page doorstopper with a massive cast of morally complex and richly drawn characters, where every chapter feels not only relevant but utterly necessary.

The story follows titular scholar Neema Kraa, a prickly, socially awkward, and frequently unlikable heroine who finds herself embroiled in a fight for the throne — and the prime suspect at the center of a mysterious death. Hodgson’s sprawling tale delights in upending reader expectations about what kind of story they’re following, wrestling with everything from complex politics to religious history, all while building the sort of fully lived-in universe that exists well beyond the page. It’s an absolute triumph, whose multiple, jaw-dropping twists will leave everyone gagging for the sequel that’s reportedly coming in 2026.

The Dark Mirror by Samantha Shannon

The fifth installment in Samantha Shannon’s sprawling Bone Season series, The Dark Mirror, is simultaneously a road map for resistance, an ode to perseverance, and a bright shining ball of hope in a bleak time. It is both a fantastic next step in the larger story of this fictional universe and a necessary reminder that everyone has a role to play in saving the world — or, at the very least, making it a less overtly dark and frightening place than it is at the present moment.

The story picks up six months from the shocking cliffhanger that closed the series’ fourth book as The Dark Mirror determinedly pivots its story outward, taking dreamwalker Paige Mahoney into the wider (free) world beyond the authoritarian Republic of Scion. As the larger story digs into the global political threats represented by the creeping shadow of the Anchor and the rising threat of authoritarianism, the world of the Bone Season expands in new and intriguing ways, all of which go beyond Paige’s story as Shannon pivots the series toward its endgame. Bonus: The slow-as-molasses burn between Paige and her otherworldly ally-turned-lover Arcturus Mesarthim has never been better or more satisfying.

Holy Terrors by Margaret Owen

The rare final chapter in a YA fantasy trilogy that not only sticks the landing but whose ending elevates the entire series into something greater than the sum of its parts, Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors is emotional, chaotic, and utterly unhinged in all the best ways. It’s also the perfect ending to the story of morally gray, emotionally challenged heroine Vanja Schmidt, a lushly written exploration of power, forgiveness, and self-acceptance that brings almost every aspect of this story full circle.

The sort of finale that not only acknowledges you having read the earlier books in the series, but relies on it, Holy Terrors is full of familiar faces and emotional beats, literally retracing many of Vanja’s steps as Owen questions what might have been had her heroine made different choices at key crossroads of her life. And its emotional core relies on the deep interiority that has been established across the rest of the series – Vanja’s growth feels earned and the story’s ending so satisfying precisely because we’ve been right beside her through every mistake and step forward she’s made. It’s hard to overstate how evident Owen’s care and craft are throughout this tale or how utterly satisfying its conclusion turns out to be.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab

At this point, what can’t V.E. Schwab do? She’s written books for almost every kind of audience, penned both standalones and multi-book series, and dabbled in genres that include fantasy, young adult, and literary fiction. Basically, all that most of us needed to be completely sold on her latest novel, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, was to learn that she wrote it. Luckily, the book itself is fantastic, a story of toxic lesbian vampires that feels like the darker cousin of Schwab’s time-bending blockbuster The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. But where Addie was a story of memory and immortality, Bury Our Bones is about rage and desire, a tale that’s haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying by turns.

Told across multiple timelines across 16th-century Spain, 19th-century England, and 21st-century America, Schwab weaves a story of three very different women who share a similar frustration with the lives they’re living. Featuring lush historical details, richly drawn characters, and a slow-burn narrative that deftly explores queer identity, female resilience, and the infuriating ways that women have long been asked to make themselves smaller in order to be accepted by society. Its story often feels like Interview with the Vampire for a new era, but also something refreshingly brand new.

Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros

If, for whatever reason, you haven’t dipped your toe into publishing’s megapopular romantasy trend, now’s the time to fix your life. And there’s nowhere better to start than with the Fourth Wing saga — a fantasy romance set at a military college for dragon riders — which helped to launch the sub-genre into the stratosphere this year. (As of early 2025, the three books in the series have sold over 12 million copies to date, and a Prime Video TV adaptation is currently in the works.)

Onyx Storm, the third installment of Rebeca Yarros’ bestselling Empyrean series, is as addictive and propulsive as anyone could ask for, offering fans everything from complex political intrigue, magic, and betrayal to swoon-worthy romance and plenty of spicy sex scenes. (And that’s before you get to all the dragons and their drama.) And its action-packed ending, which featured big twists like a surprise marriage, lost memories, missing dragon eggs, and a hero who may have turned to the dark side, has kept everyone talking since the book hit shelves back in January. Since Yarros has publicly announced she’s taking a bit of a break before continuing the series (she penned the first three books in just under 20 months), the wait for book four seems especially endless. But there’s enough thrills here to power

A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna

One of the other big trends in fantasy this year is the cozy read, which, given… well, everything happening in the real world right now, makes a ton of sense. A product of the COVID-19 pandemic, these charming, low-stakes stories tend to focus on relationships, romance, and emotional character beats rather than, say, battles for the future of a kingdom with a hard-to-pronounce name. In lots of ways, they’re like a hug given book form, and they offer peak escapism for readers who want something sunny and fun without all the stress and death that can so frequently feature in epic fantasy titles.

This year saw a lot of great books released in this space, from buzzy sequels like Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett to new arrivals like The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst and Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz. But, no other title represents the absolute best of this particular sub-genre like A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, a peak cozy fantasy tale about a witch who lost her powers after resurrecting her great-aunt. Cast aside by the magical communities, she helps said aunt run an enchanted inn in Lancashire, where she must deal with its bevy of quirky guests, manage the escapades of a semi-villainous talking fox, and maybe, just maybe, find a way to get her life (and her power back on track… with some help from a handsome historian, of course.)

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

Katabasis is not a fantasy story for the faint of heart. A dense, fantastical, deeply academic tome about a pair of rival PhD students who must descend into Hell, Dante Alighieri-style, in an attempt to locate a recently deceased advisor, it’s a novel that wrestles with philosophical concepts and literary theory as much as it does with individual character traits or the specific rules of the complicated magical system at work in its world. A story that makes academia into a literal hellscape — which, those who’ve ever been part of it can tell you, really does kind of track — Katabasis mixes institutional satire, dark humor, fascinating world building, and thorny moral questions about purpose and progress.

Like Kuang’s previous doorstopper fantasy, Babel, Katabasis has its share of flaws, which those who are regular readers of the author’s work are probably already well aware of. (There’a certain level of preachiness, a resistance to trusting her audience to make big thematic connections without having the ideas spelled out for them, and character development definitely comes second to exploring larger intersections of various literary theories, works, and authors.) But — and again, much like Babel — this book is also precisely the kind of story the fantasy genre needs more of: Big, audacious, ambitious swings that remind us that this is a genre that’s capable of pushing boundaries in a way that most people only ever give literary fiction credit for.

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig

Many fantasy fans have likely heard of author Rachel Gillig thanks to her (excellent) Shepherd King duology blowing up on BookTok, but her latest release, the Gothic-tinged fantasy The Knight and the Moth, is even better. Set in a medieval-esque world where magic is real, gargoyles are sentient, and isolated villages are connected almost solely through the power of belief in their six gods known as the Omens. It follows the story of one of the six mystical diviners at Aisling Cathedral, who are all repeatedly drowned to bring forth mystical visions that foretell the future. But when the Diviners begin to go missing one by one, it’s up to Six — who has sacrificed her name and her identity in service to the cathedral — to find them, with the help of a nonbeliever knight named Rodrick.

A lyrically written exploration of faith, self-discovery, and the power of storytelling, The Knight and the Moth is romantic in almost every sense of the word, from its atmospheric worldbuilding and lush imagery to the slow burn relationship that develops between the story’s protagonists. As Six starches for her missing sisters, she’s forced to confront not only her preconceived notions about who she is and the work she’s spent her life devoted to doing, but also the very idea of belief itself and how the stories we choose to tell about the things we believe can literally shape the world.

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

A delightfully old-school fantasy epic that feels like a throwback in all the best ways, Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils is for the readers who haven’t wanted to dive into any of the genre’s popular sub-tiers this year. A good old-fashioned adventure romp that follows a team of misfit criminals assigned to escort a street thief turned long-lost princess back to the kingdom she’s never known, the story is bonkers from start to finish, full of political maneuvering, team infighting, betrayals, and surprise twists. But it’s the relationships between and among the characters that will catch and keep your attention throughout the story

The titular Devils — technically known as the servants of the Church of the Holy Expediency — are all working off the various ecclesiastical convictions handed down to them from Her Holiness Pope Benedicta, who believes that even the worst evil can be repurposed in the service of good. Her theory is certainly tested with this group, which includes (but is not limited to) a cursed knight who cannot die, a Scandinavian werewolf, a vampire, and a necromancer. Though their quest faces many challenges throughout the book’s 500-some pages, it stays completely unhinged (complimentary) and hilariously unpredictable from start to finish.

Shield of Sparrows by Devney Perry

Lots of big-name authors took the plunge into new genres this year, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that romantasy was one of the most popular subgenres when it comes to new debuts. Shield of Sparrows marks bestselling romance author Devney Perry’s first foray into the world of fantasy, and it’s an action-packed, swoony enemies-to-lovers ride.

The story follows a princess whose predictably dull world is turned upside down when she’s pledged in a treaty marriage to a rival kingdom in place of the younger sister who’d been preparing all her life for the job. As she journeys to her new home in the monster-infested kingdom of Turah, Odessa must not only endure a crash course in politics, spy for her father without getting caught, navigate an arranged marriage to a husband who barely speaks to her, and deal with his ever-present, constantly lurking magical bodyguard known simply as the Guardian. A refreshingly average heroine who tries her best, a delightfully banter-y slow burn romance, and a fast-paced, twisty plot help Shield of Sparrows stand out in the year’s crowded romantasy pack.

The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri

If you read Tasha Suri’s (fantastic) Burning Kingdoms trilogy, you already know she’s an author skilled at building lavish fictional worlds and compelling queer romances. But she truly outdoes herself with The Isle in the Silver Sea, a fairytale-tinged fantasy set in an alternate version of the British Isles that is literally fueled by the power of stories, as human avatars of various fictional archetypes are forced to live out their fated destinies across multiple lifetimes.

Simran and Vina are the latest incarnations of the Knight and the Witch, a pair of doomed lovers destined to enchant, betray, and die for one another over and over again. Their story is fated to end with the Knight slaying the Witch and themselves, but this time, they’re determined to break the cycle and find a happy ending. Meanwhile, a mysterious assassin begins methodically killing other incarnates and threatening the very future of the Isle itself. Steeped in medieval folklore and snippets from familiar fairytales, Suri’s ambitious tale is not only a compelling, tragic romance in its own right, but an interesting meditation on storytelling itself, particularly concerning ideas of propaganda, power, and who gets to control the shape of their own narrative. A rare fantasy standalone that probably should have been a duology, it’s a rich and immersive read.

Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher

T. Kingfisher (the adult pen name of the children’s author Ursula Vernon) is one of the best fantasy writers that far too few people have heard of. (Consider this an exhortation to fix your life, is what I’m saying.) A writer with a unique gift for using classic tropes and themes from fairytales and folklore to subvert and expand the idea of what fantasy can be and do, her books mix humor, heart, and an occasional dash of horror to create something that feels both timeless and somehow brand new.

Such is the case with her latest novel, Hemlock & Silver, a unique spin on the story of Snow White that transfers the story to an arid New Mexico-esque kingdom of deserts and snakes to follow the story of an oddball healer named Anja and her feline sidekick who are charged with solving the mystery of Princess Snow’s strange illness, which everyone presumes to be poison. Anja makes for a fantastic offbeat heroine, a middle-aged, socially anxious, plus-sized, analytical type, precisely the sort we almost never see in stories like this. The shift to a diagnostic medical mystery makes for a refreshingly novel approach to a tale we’ve heard a million times before, and, as is usually for a Kingfisher joint, the supporting characters are top-notch. Weird, surprisingly creepy in places, and altogether wonderful.

Avengers: Doomsday Is the Perfect Place to Bring Thor to an End

By the time the credits rolled on Avengers: Endgame, Thor was the only founding Avenger in a good place. Iron Man and Black Widow had died. Captain America was an old man. Hakweye had a terrible haircut. Sure, Thor had lost his brother Loki, his pal Heimdall, and many fellow Asgardians, but he at least got to go on and star in a fourth movie, the only MCU hero to do so.

Judging by the second teaser for Avengers: Doomsday, things may get much worse for the God of Thunder. In voiceover, we hear Thor praying to his father Odin to live just a little longer, long enough to see his Love. While his end will certainly be dramatic and heartbreaking, Thor’s MCU story needs to come to an end, and Doomsday will be the perfect place to do it.

Few characters have evolved as much as Chris Hemsworth’s Thor. In both 2011’s Thor and the 2013 sequel Thor: The Dark World, he’s a serious and arrogant powerhouse, who speaks in an elevated English accent, befitting his origins as a comic book take on Norse mythology for whom Stan Lee wrote pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue. While the quippy nature of Joss Whedon‘s writing gave him a few jokes in The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron, Thor really transformed in Thor: Ragnarok. Driven by the comic timing that Hemsworth demonstrated in the Ghostbusters reboot and by director Taika Waititi’s sensibilities, Ragnarok transformed Thor into a big lovable goofball, far from the stoic man we first met.

But that’s less a character arc and more of a shift in how Marvel uses the character. Emotionally, Thor’s maturation has been much more subtle, especially compared to his comedic turn. As in the Jack Kirby story that introduced the character in 1962’s Journey into Mystery #83, Thor began as an arrogant, reckless youth, cast to Midgard (a.k.a. Earth) by Odin to learn some humility. To be sure, he learns aspects of that humility in each of the movies, as when he sacrifices himself to save Earth in the first film and comes to terms with the loss of Mjolnir in Ragnarok.

However, the most profound close to Thor’s story came in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. Infinity War begins with Thor, who had just learned in Ragnarok that his thunder powers were independent from the destroyed Mjolnir, failing to stop Thanos from destroying the Asgardians. He then goes on a mission to build Stormbreaker and channel his powers, only to fail to kill Thanos, aiming for the chest instead of the head. He gets his revenge in Endgame, finally lopping off the Mad Titan’s head, but it’s not enough. Throughout Endgame, Thor’s depressed and refuses to acknolwedge it.

Thor’s character arc comes to an end when he visits the events of The Dark World during the time heist portion of Endgame. When he reunites with his mother Freya, Thor learns a lesson he never could have accepted before, not even during The Dark World. He learns that even when he uses his power for good, his value does not come from power. When he reaches out and receives Mjolnir again, Thor realizes that he’s worthy, even after failing, even as an emotional and physical wreck.

To be sure, Love and Thunder builds off of that point, sending Thor to find something new instead of simply recreating the Avengers with the Guardians of the Galaxy or trying to replace Asgard. Furthermore, it is possible to give a character a second, satisfying arc; just look at Tony Stark, who had ceased being the selfish person he first was by the end of Iron Man 3, and yet found a new arc when he started worrying about a “suit of armor around the world” in Age of Ultron.

But it seems unlikely that Hemsworth will commit to two more Thor movies, especially given the lackluster response to Love and Thunder and the extreme change in tone that will come with Waititi’s departure. So rather than letting a founding Avenger twiddle his thumbs in the background, it’s time to let Thor go to Valhalla. His story is done.

Avengers: Doomsday arrives on December 18, 2026.

Will’s Big Stranger Things Moment Involved Too Many People

Stranger Things has had to serve a lot of masters in its final season, balancing what often feels like a dozen competing plot threads and steadily expanding mysteries. But its most satisfying decision has been to finally put Will Byers back at the center of the action. The boy whose original disappearance started this whole adventure seems poised to help bring it to an end, as he and his friends prepare to face off against Vecna and confront the next stage of their lives. And, for Will, part of that journey has necessarily involved accepting who he is.

The show has been teasing out Will’s exploration of his sexuality for several seasons now, primarily by way of his obvious crush on his best friend Mike. The show has smartly never mocked him for his feelings or made them into some sort of joke that the character’s not in on, an uncomfortable joke for his friends or the audience watching at home to laugh at. Instead, Stranger Things gave Will a much-needed queer mentor in Robin, who offered him a real-world example that he could be both true to himself and happy. And now, in its penultimate episode, Stranger Things finally addresses the issue directly, allowing Will to finally claim the identity he’s so long been afraid to name. “I don’t like girls,” he says. “I mean…I do. Just…just not like you guys do.”

To be fair, it almost feels cruel to criticize Will’s big moment here. Noah Schnapp sells the heck out of a genuinely moving monologue that doesn’t pull its punches about what a big, earthshattering deal it would have been for a kid to come out in the 1980s. This isn’t to say coming out isn’t an equally important experience for LGBTQ youth in 2025, merely that we’re — thankfully — a long way from an Indiana in the early days of the AIDS crisis when Will would have had precious few public role models for how to decide who he wanted to be. This is, truly, a big deal. It matters. And that’s why the way Stranger Things chose to handle it feels so clunky and unfortunate.

Will doesn’t come out in a one-on-one conversation with the mother who’s always adored him, the brother who’s protected him, or any of the core group of friends who’ve been by his side for most of his life. Instead, he’s forced to bare his soul in front of what feels like half the town, including several people he’s barely shared any screentime with. What is Kali doing as part of this moment? Or Murray? What value does Vickie’s presence add, beyond her being queer herself? Has she ever even met Will? At this point, they might as well just go on and wheel Karen in here from the hospital so she can take part as well!

Don’t get me wrong, it was really nice to see Will finally get a big group hug of support – that boy is going to need so much therapy when this show is over, presuming he’s still alive — but the sheer volume of people involved means that we didn’t really get much focus on the moments that mattered the most. (Even though Will’s confession indirectly references his feelings for him, we get almost no reaction from Mike — he’s technically the last of the main group to stand and hug him — even though they’re ostensibly the show’s closest besties.) It’s frustrating because this is such a big, important scene that the show’s been building toward for years, and outside of Joyce’s immediate and unequivocal support and Jonathan’s heartfelt tears, almost nothing about it went the way that most of us likely wanted it to.

It’s also unfortunate that his coming out occurs several episodes after the events of “Sorcerer,” in which Will had a much more powerful moment of self-acceptance and self-actualization that directly led to his development of superpowers. He freaking possessed Vecna! That Stranger Things almost immediately decided they’d made Will too powerful and had to re-weaken and sideline him (again!) to make the final run of episodes work is frustrating in and of itself, even more so when you realize they did so by having Vecna prey on his (very natural) fear of homophobia and hatred from those closest to him. Hasn’t this poor kid been through enough?

But, hey, at least Will’s now confident enough in his truth to face the final battle, which seems to be all the Stranger Things cares about as its story hurtles toward its end. We’ll have to wait and see whether he’ll get the space to actually talk to Mike on his own before everything inevitably (and potentially literally) goes to hell.

Stranger Things season 5 episodes one through seven are now streaming on Netflix. The series finale premieres on December 31, 2025 at 8 p.m. ET.

Stranger Things Season 5 Is Failing Its Best Characters

This post contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5.

Why do people like Stranger Things? Even the biggest superfan may find themselves asking that question somewhere around the 140 minute mark of season 5 volume 2, when very little has happened on a plot level and another couple starts monologuing about their feelings. As the stakes get higher and the runtimes get longer, Stranger Things feels like its lost the magic of that first season, when three foul-mouthed kids in the Midwest went looking for their missing friend.

That sense of bewilderment is even more frustrating because it didn’t need to happen. Yes, Mike, Will, Lucas, and Dustin had to grow up, especially as their adolescent actors aged over the nine years of between seasons 1 and 5. But the series has done a great job of introducing a next generation of kids, especially in season 5. Well, it had been doing a great job of introducing them… until volume 2 decided to largely ignore them.

Let the Children Lead Them

In season 5, Mike and Nancy’s younger sister Holly comes into focus, one of several kids targeted by Vecna. Holly has been around since season 1, but this is the first time that she’s established as full character, and it all works perfectly. She’s a normal Midwestern kid who becomes the target of Vecna and gets drawn into a supernatural/sci-fi plot, just like the original Stranger Things heroes. Also like them, she has her own nerdy obsession, which becomes a tool for understanding the oddities occurring around her. For Mike and his friends, it was Dungeons & Dragons. For Holly, it’s A Wrinkle in Time.

Holly isn’t alone. She’s one of many kids targeted by Vecna, including the season 5 standout Derek. Derek has all of the smart-mouth attitude that made Mike in particular so popular, and he’s played with aplomb by Jake Connelly. He’s joined by his older sister Tina, who has a connection to Erica Sinclair, the original Stranger Things: The Next Generation star.

All of the best parts of season 5 have been about these younger characters. Holly’s encounters with Mr. Whatsit have been weird and frightening, while the pie-eating sequence and the school escape sequence combined humor with scares. In short, Stranger Things season 5 actually found a way to recreate its prime appeal while continuing to move toward a final showdown with Vecna.

Well, volume 1 of season 5 found a way to keep moving forward. The same can’t be said of the three episodes in volume 2. These episodes push the new kids to the back, forcing them to stand around while the series deals with dangling plot points involving older characters, most of which the audience stopped caring about long ago.

Was there anyone really worried about the romance between Jonathan and Nancy, a relationship that stopped being interesting when they were reporters in season 3? Dustin and Steve used to be one of the best parts of the show, and the two performers still have chemistry. But season 5 has turned Dustin into a sad kid who can’t stop mourning Eddie Munson, a character change that leads him to fight with Steve instead of buddying up with him. And why do we need Hopper, the best adult character of the show, to once again complain that Eleven has outgrown him, a complaint he’s been making since the end of season 2?

These older characters have had their time and that time has passed. Now, it’s the kids’ turn.

Trapped With the Big Kids

Nothing illustrates the problem more than the decision to pair Holly with Max in Camazotz. Volume 1 of season 5 established Holly as a great Stranger Things hero. She used her nerd knowledge ofA Wrinkle in Time to navigate the world with Mr. Whatsit, making her brave and competent without sacrificing any of the series’ scares.

But as soon as she found Max, Holly became a sidekick. Now, it was Max who understood the world of Henry’s memories, and it’s Max who knows what to do. Holly’s just along for the ride.

Worst of all is the moment that Max abandons Holly to reenter the real world. Leaving aside the ridiculous moment in which Max, who heretofore had been telling Holly that they would escape Camazotz together, now tells Holly that she must go alone, the entire scene subordinates Holly to Max while acting like its the younger girl’s big moment. Max tells Holly that she cannot follow, that the escape signaled by “Running Up That Hill” is for Max alone. To encourage the younger child, Max explains that Holly has to find her own point of connection to the real world, and that she can do it no matter what anyone else says.

Although Max’s words make it sound like the moment is all about Holly, the filmmaking is all about Max. She’s the one on the camera, her performer Sadie Sink gets all of the lines, and, ultimately, Max is the only one with agency. After Holly leaves, supposedly to find her own way as her own person, the show effectively ignores her focus entirely on Lucas protecting Max’s body, Max returning to her body, and then a tearful reunion between Max and whichever character she meets. Holly is just is a footnote.

The Kids Aren’t Alright

In the final moments of episode seven, the last part of volume 2, Holly and the other kidnapped children sit around a table and join hands. Despite her attempts to resist, Mr. Whatsit has overcome them and now, he allows a sinister smile as the children’s eyes go white and they throwback their heads.

This scene will go directly into the Stranger Things finale, which is good news for fans of Holly and Derek. Even though Dustin talks a big game about blowing up the Upside Down, and even though Erica’s stuck with Mr. Clarke for some reason, at least some of the younger kids have something to do in the two-hour-plus last episode. If the finale has some good moments featuring the next generation, then Stranger Things might end on a high note, in the same way it began. But if it doesn’t and if the older characters get the spotlight again, then it will be just one more disappointment in a series that has lost its way.

Stranger Things season 5 volumes one and two are now streaming on Netflix. The series finale premieres December 31 at 8 p.m. ET

Yes That Stranger Things Breakup Actually Happened

The following contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5.

Stranger Things season 5 has dealt with everything from Henry Creel’s past to the truth about the Upside Down and Vecna’s larger plans for multiversal domination. But as the episodes tick down to the grand finale, fans are likely just as interested in the fate of the various relationships at the series’ center, and how the show plans to provide some closure to the stories of the kids we’ve been watching for the better part of a decade. Max is (finally) back in her own body. Will confronts his fears about his own sexuality. Dustin and Steve patch up their bromance. Mike is… there! And Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers have decided to call it quits.

What… what?

Yes, if you too were wondering what exactly happened during Nancy and Jonathan’s latest near-death experience, allow us to explain. Trapped in a room full of steadily rising exotic matter goo with no obvious plan to escape, the pair genuinely believe they’re going to die, which is apparently what it takes for the two of them to have an honest conversation at long last. In this chat that’s well over a season overdue, they both admit that they want different things from life and their relationship, and maybe don’t have all that much in common besides a boatload of shared trauma.

Jonathan admits he never applied to Emerson. Nancy says she’s always hated The Clash. He doesn’t actually like reading her articles. She hates it when he gets stoned. They air a whole laundry list of all the reasons they don’t really work together, despite how much they genuinely love one another, and it’s a strangely liberating moment for them both. To be clear, it makes a certain amount of sense that each has been clinging to this relationship despite the obvious red flags flying all over the place. Who else could possibly understand either them now, or the things that they’ve been through? What potential future partner(s) could hope to live up to the memory of the ex they faced down demogorgons and military occupation alongside?

But then Jonathan follows up this moment of clarity with an “unproposal”, in which he pulls out a ring and asks Nancy to not marry him, an offer she giddily accepts. It’s a strange, confusing, and fairly unnecessary moment that muddies the waters about what exactly is happening between them. In theory, the ring that Jonthan’s been carrying around like a bomb in his pocket has become an unexpected symbol of how much he doesn’t want the life it promises. Yet he decides to give it to Nancy anyway? So she can reject it? As they tearfully reaffirm their love for each other? Sure, why not!

Unsurprisingly, after all of that… it’s not especially clear whether or not that heart-to-heart marks the technical end of their relationship. The pair certainly never says so onscreen, either when they’re expecting to die or after they’re rescued.. But, according to the folks behind the scenes, “Jancy” is officially over.

“That’s a breakup,” Matt Duffer confirms to People. “They are broken up.”

Your mileage may vary on whether or not a break-up that viewers aren’t even really sure happened is the best way to honor the multi-season journey of one of the series’ marquee couples. But, hey, that’s at least one mystery we know the actual answer to heading into the series finale. Of course, that still leaves the question of where things stand with Nancy and her ex, Steve.

During her conversation with Jonathan, Nancy certainly implies that she’s pulling something of a Kelly Taylor, choosing independence and a chance to figure out what she really wants her life to look like over the promise of romance of any kind. (Steve wants six kids; she’s not so sure.) But given that the show almost immediately follows this admission with an extreme close-up of Steve and Nancy’s hands clasping as he helps her out of the goo room, Stranger Things clearly still has some interest in this connection and whatever it means for both of them.

After all, the pair have grown closer in recent seasons, and Steve’s evolution from zero to hero is both well-documented and satisfying. Does that mean he’s done the work to earn another shot with Nancy, or will the entire series end with everyone opting for a chance to find out for themselves what life outside of the shadow of Vecna and Hawkins looks like? Only one more episode until we find out.

Stranger Things season 5 episodes one through seven are now streaming on Netflix. The series finale premieres on December 31, 2025 at 8 p.m. ET.

Did Stranger Things Just Do Avengers: Doomsday Before Marvel?

This post contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5 and also maybe Avengers: Doomsday?

In the penultimate episode of Stranger Things, we finally learn the truth about Vecna and the Upside Down. The Upside Down, it turns out, is not a hellish alternate reality. Rather, it is a conduit to such a world, a wormhole that connects our world to a place of suffering that Dustin and his fellow Dungeons & Dragons players dub “The Abyss.” Sent to the Abyss after attacking Eleven, Henry Creel transformed into Vecna, and now plans to meld his world with ours. But Vecna can only do that by amplifying his powers, which he plans to do by kidnapping children around Hawkins.

If you’ve been paying attention to the many, many leaks and speculation about the upcoming Marvel movie Avengers: Doomsday, that plot sounds quite familiar. Between the teaser trailers focusing on children, hints dropped in previous movies, and Doom’s actions in the Marvel Comics Secret Wars storyline, it sure seems like Avengers: Doomsday plans to travel a plot path that Stranger Things is covering now.

Here’s what we know so far about what’s coming in the Marvel Universe. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Strange meets the Illuminati of Earth-838, who tell him about incursions, events where two Earths from different realities collide. If they meet, the two destroy one another, which has led some to save their world by destroying the other. The post-credits scene in Multiverse of Madness sees the sorceress Clea arriving to recruit Strange in a battle against incursions. Later, in the post-credits scene of Captain America: Brave New World, Sterns warns Sam Wilson that these other realities have their own heroes, who will do anything to save their world, implying that some will try to stop an incursion by destroying Earth 616.

Thus far, we’ve only had one shot of Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, and even that was only from behind. But it’s what he was doing that matters, as we see him standing next to young Franklin Richards in a post-credits scene in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Turns out, that scene comes directly from Avengers: Doomsday, and the two teasers for Doomsday released thus far also feature children, first the son of Steve Rogers and then Thor’s adopted daughter Love. Thus, whatever Doom is doing in Doomsday, it will involve children.

Finally, we can look at the comics for hints about what might be happening in Doomsday. The concept of Incursions comes from Time Runs Out, the lead-up to the 2015 Secret Wars storyline. Time Runs Out saw the various heroes and villains growing more desperate and compromised as they tried to prevent an incursion from destroying their Earth, finally ending when Doom stole enough power from various sources to recreate an Earth made up of fragments from different realities. Also, he also happens to rule as God Emperor.

Using those comic book hints to fill in the gaps, Avengers: Doomsday seems to be about Doom dealing with incursions by stealing power from kidnapped children and using it to meld realities into one in which he can control. Which also seems to be Vecna’s plan in Stranger Things.

If that’s true, then the final season of Stranger Things could be something of a bellwether for the MCU’s Phase Six closer. Both properties won fans by creating likable characters and letting them bounce of one another in high stakes situations. But both have been criticized for putting sloppy emotional moments over proper characterizations, for nonsensical plotting, and for treating ugly CGI gloop as compelling spectacle. If Stranger Things ends its last season on a down note, that could spell trouble for Avengers: Doomsday… especially if the two have the same story.

Stranger Things season 5 episodes one through seven are now streaming on Netflix. Avengers: Doomsday releases on December 18, 2026.

The Best Horror Movie of the Year Is Now Streaming on Prime Video

If you’re looking for something different to watch this holiday season, Amazon is now streaming the best horror movie of the year for anyone with a Prime Video subscription.

The hit movie, which holds a 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes, has been celebrated for blending period drama with Southern Gothic horror, and its rich atmosphere and strong performances have won over many critics and audiences. It’s received plenty of Golden Globe Award and Critics Choice Award nominations, so you’ll certainly find it in many “Best of” lists this year. If you’ve been waiting for a streaming opportunity to check this one out, here’s your chance!

Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, Sinners follows twin brothers Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore, both played by Michael B. Jordan, as they return to their hometown after years away. Hoping for a fresh start, the brothers plan to open a juke joint that can serve as a social and cultural hub for their community, but when they’re visited by a group of vampires on opening night, the blood is soon flowing. The brothers have to reckon with a dangerous enemy infiltrating their group and turning their celebrations – and customers – into more than they bargained for.

Sinners is directed by Ryan Coogler, who helmed Creed and the Black Panther movies. It’s risen above other horror efforts released in 2025 thanks to its ambitious approach. Coogler uses the movie as a lens to explore America’s Depression-era history and the moral struggle between the twins and those close to them during opening night at the juke joint. The film certainly has its scares, but Coogler gives them meaning by using its villains as symbols that resonate with American culture in a way that anyone can understand.

Alongside Jordan, Sinners also stars Wunmi Mosaku (Loki), Jack O’Connell (Eden Lake), and Hailee Steinfeld (Hawkeye), and features a score by one of the best composers of our time, Ludwig Göransson, who collaborated with Coogler to draw inspiration from the classic blues music of Robert and Tommy Johnson.

We’d recommend giving Sinners a chance, even if you don’t usually embrace the horror genre. It definitely goes deeper than your average fare, and also features one (non-scary!) sequence that has to be seen to be believed.

The Best Games of 2025

At the start of the year, Grand Theft Auto VI looked to be a shoe-in for Game of the Year. Publishers jostled around their release calendars to ensure titles wouldn’t be completely ignored in the wake of what could possibly be the biggest gaming release of all time. Then GTA VI got delayed into 2026. Twice.

That made the 2025 GOTY race a wide open one, especially with some hotly anticipated sequels like Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Borderlands 4 meeting with particularly muted responses from critics and fans alike. So in a year of games where the frontrunner bowed out early and other contenders turned out to be pretenders, which titles reigned supreme? Read on to find out the best games of 2025.

15. Blue Prince

There’s never been a game quite like Blue Prince before. Part roguelike, part puzzler, you play the role of a man who’s inherited a constantly shifting estate from his recently deceased uncle. The late relation has also tasked you with the goal of finding a hidden 46th room on the grounds by drafting new rooms in the mansion every day.

Blue Prince will put even the most experienced gamer through their paces. The game doesn’t give up its many secrets easily, and even after several hours, it can be tricky to figure out just how to place each room. Even then some bad luck can end a run early. This definitely isn’t a game for everyone, but it’s worth checking out for anyone looking for something truly innovative.

14. Doom: The Dark Ages

The remarkable thing about id Software’s most recent Doom trilogy, which began with 2016’s Doom and was capped off this year with The Dark Ages, is how each game took a very different approach to combat. The Dark Ages slows things down dramatically, basically turning the Doom Slayer into a walking tank with a shield.

This opens up a whole new way to play an FPS, focusing more on blocking and parrying. And the addition of some really cool new weapons like a flail and a gun that fires bone fragments made The Dark Ages a stand out title in a very crowded genre.

13. Elden Ring: Nightreign

On paper the idea of adding battle royale and roguelike elements to Elden Ring sounds highly questionable. It’s a testament to the abilities of the team at FromSoftware that it actually works really well. Elden Ring: Nightreign never quite reaches the heights of its 2022 single player predecessor but it’s damn addicting, particularly if you team up with two other players who know what they’re doing.

The core gameplay of the first game is still present, but now you’re much more reliant on lucky drops each run, adding a whole new layer of strategy. But even with good equipment and an experienced team, defeating the eight Nightlords is no simple feat.

12. Mario Kart World

Mario Kart 8 was always going to be a tough act to follow. After all, it’s one of the best selling video games of all time for good reason. But launching aside the hotly anticipated Switch 2, Mario Kart World quickly proved up to the task.

No, Mario Kart World doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Its new features like an open-world, Grand Prix races that link four tracks together, and a Knockout Tour are more iterative than revolutionary. But at the end of the day, it’s just a really fun racing game that most of us who picked up a Switch 2 at launch are still playing six months later.

11. South of Midnight

Between multiple canceled projects and flagging console sales, it’s no secret that 2025 was a rough year for the Xbox brand. In fact, you wouldn’t be blamed for not even knowing about South of Midnight, one of Microsoft’s best releases in years.

Admittedly South of Midnight’s gameplay isn’t particularly novel. You’ve likely played games with similar platforming and combat, but it’s a game that wholeheartedly embraces the culture and folklore of the American South in ways that few other titles have, with a stop-motion aesthetic that sets it apart. South of Midnight is proof that even during these troubled times, Xbox is capable of putting out surprisingly great artistic games.

10. Ball x Pit

You’d think that after the past few years, roguelikes would have run their course. This is even the third roguelike on this list, and there were dozens of others released this year. And yet, Ball x Pit proves that there’s still plenty of untapped potential in the crowded genre. This time Ball x Pit added the randomization of roguelikes to the timeless block breaking gameplay of titles like Arkanoid.

And holy hell is it addicting. Ball x Pit features more than a dozen playable characters, each with their own unique abilities. Additionally during runs, there are numerous combinations and evolutions, plus a whole village building gameplay loop to round things out. Ball x Pit creator Kenny Sun told Bloomberg earlier this year that he felt the response to the game was “a bit too positive,” but it absolutely deserves all the praise it’s received for its addictive gameplay.

9. Split Fiction

Hazelight Studios has spent the better part of the last decade redefining what’s possible in co-op gaming. If you liked their previous titles A Way Out and It Takes Two, you’re going to absolutely love Split Fiction, the culmination of everything the studio has been working toward.

While a lot of similar games get stale fairly quickly, Split Fiction never wears out its welcome, regularly adding new gameplay styles in its tale about a sci-fi and fantasy author, then moving on to the next one almost as quickly. It’s an absolute blast to play. The only downside, of course, is that you have to have someone else around to play with.

8. Ninja Gaiden 4

In modern gaming, it’s common for supposedly single player games from major publishers to be burdened with annoying online or multiplayer functions, or expensive DLC tokens and costumes just so companies can make just a few extra bucks. Ninja Gaiden 4 is one of the rare titles that thankfully bucks that trend, and it’s the better for it.

In many ways, this is a throwback to action games of the PS2 era when the original 3D Ninja Gaiden was released, focusing more on linear levels and smooth combat that requires quick reflexes. Replacing Ryu Hayabusa with newcomer Yakumo for most of the game was a daring choice, but by the end of the game, Yakumo proves himself as a worthy successor to the Ninja Gaiden throne. Hopefully, this is a new beginning for the storied series and not just a one off.

7. Donkey Kong Bananza

While Donkey Kong was one of Nintendo’s first gaming characters, he’s mostly played in recent years the part of a cameo character in Mario games, with the occasional side scroller throwback. Nintendo just hasn’t really seemed to know what to do with the big ape until Donkey Kong Bananza came around.

Far from just a retread of the team’s prior effort, Super Mario Odyssey, Bananza reinvents Donkey Kong with the simple premise of letting a gorilla wreck everything around him. Sure, the platforming challenges to collect Banandium Gems are great, but it’s just as easy to get distracted smashing up a level and collecting whatever you dig up. Bananza is not only the first must-have for the Switch 2, but it also provides a solid blueprint for where future Donkey Kong titles could go from here.

6. ARC Raiders

ARC Raiders wasn’t on many gamers’ radars at the start of the year, but since its release at the end of October, it’s quickly gained traction as one of the biggest sleeper hits of the year. At its core, ARC Raiders is an extraction shooter similar to Helldivers II, but with more open-endedness and a focus on PvPvE encounters.

And to be fair, that can make ARC Raiders a frustrating experience, as running afoul of the wrong enemies can mean losing quite a bit of progress. But that less linear gameplay also allows for endless possibilities in its world. And the polished gunplay makes it an absolute joy to play, regardless of how successful each run is. If you’ve been waiting to check out an extraction shooter, ARC Raiders is the perfect jumping on point.

5. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

The response to the original Death Stranding in 2019 was largely positive, although many gamers who grew up on Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid titles were a little confused by a game both praised and derided as an advanced walking simulator set in a sci-fi world radically different from anything else seen before. It was a good game, just a little muddled. Then again, that’s always been a criticism of Kojima’s direction.

With Death Stranding 2, at least we had a better idea of what we were getting into, and On the Beach definitely took the criticism to heart with more refined gameplay and a story that’s a little less convoluted, though still very much classic Kojima. On the Beach isn’t going to win any converts who disliked the first game but for the faithful, this is another Kojima masterpiece.

4. Hades II

Yes, it’s another roguelike on the list, but Hades II isn’t just any roguelike. It’s the sequel to one of the very best in the genre and it actually improves on the first game in every conceivable way. Hades II puts you in the role of Melinoë, the sister of Zagreus, the protagonist of the original game. This time there are two different paths to take as you face the Titan Chronos. You’re free to either head downward into Tartarus to go after Chronos or go upward to break a siege on Mount Olympus.

There’s more variety, more weapons too, and more characters from Greek mythology, again expertly written by Supergiant Games. Hades II is quite simply everything you could want in a sequel, and the new undisputed king of roguelikes.

3. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance was an incredibly ambitious RPG that aimed for a realistic depiction of 15th century Bohemia. It fell a little short due to jankiness, but for those who got into it, clearly the foundation of something great was there. And thankfully, the sequel delivers on all of that potential.

You still play as Henry, a simple man caught in a much wider conflict, and eating and sleeping are still just as important as sword fighting (if not more so). There’s no magic or dragons in this world, just harsh medieval reality. It may not sound like much fun, but if you’ve ever wanted to play something along the lines of The Elder Scrolls without the fantasy elements, it’s an amazing RPG.

2. Hollow Knight: Silksong

When games take more than half a decade to develop and start making major changes, fans understandably get nervous. Historically, it’s much more likely that games stuck in development hell end up as legendary disappointments, like Duke Nukem Forever, rather than all time classics. Thankfully, after six years of development that saw it expand from DLC to a standalone sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong is more than worth the wait.

This is an expertly crafted Metroidvania with a bigger map, much more to do, and faster, smoother combat, yet it still retains the excellent moody sound design and art style of the original. The only downside (for some) is the difficulty. The first Hollow Knight was tough, but some of the enemies in Silksong will push you to the absolute limits.

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

If you had said at the beginning of the year that the undisputed game of the year would be an unapologetically French turn-based RPG by a small development team making their first game together, not many people would have taken you seriously. There were just too many impressive looking triple A games on the calendar. But no one is laughing at Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 at the end of 2025. It’s already won a pile of GOTY awards, and it absolutely deserves another.

This is a game that takes all of the best parts of RPGs like Persona, Final Fantasy, and Paper Mario to craft a brand new fantasy world unlike anything else in gaming. The sound and visuals are leagues above anything else that came out this year. Already the soundtrack is being praised as one of the best to ever grace a video game. And the story, about the quest to defeat an entity called the Paintress that wipes out more and more people every year as she paints a new age on a rock, is one of the most fascinating to come along in years. This is the type of game that will inspire RPGs for years to come, and that is an absolute must play for any gamer.

The Weirdest Comic Characters We Dare James Gunn to Bring to the DCU

In the fourth episode ofPeacemaker‘s first season, the titular hero Chris Smith rants about other super-people and observes, “I once saw Matter-Eater Lad eat a whole Wendy’s restaurant.” Even within a show that stars a big name like John Cena as perrinial Z-lister Peacemaker, that’s a deep pull. Not only is Matter-Eater Lad one of the teen members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, a group whose convoluted history and 31st century setting makes them impenetrable to most, but his weird power to consume anything renders him unfit for mainstream appeal. And yet, there was Matter-Eater Lad, getting attention from Peacemaker.

Such reverence for the under-explored corners of comics has become one of James Gunn‘s trademarks. Even before becoming the co-head of DC Studios, Gunn somehow brought (a version) of Taserface to screen. At DC, Gunn has made Polka-Dot Man, Weasel, and, yes, Peacemaker, complex and three-dimensional figures worthy of empathy.

But there are some characters in the DC stable that seem too tough for even someone of Gunn’s abilities. Here are the deepest cuts, the most unlikely weirdos, the characters that we don’t think Gunn would put in the DCU… though we’d love to see him try!

Snowflame and Hemo-Goblin

The late ’80s series New Guardians had some great creators working on it—Steve Englehart, Joe Staton, and Cary Bates—and it had admirable intentions. But New Guardians also had some of the most tone def social commentary in comics history. Case in point: Snowflame, a Colombian villain powered by super cocaine, and Hemo-Goblin, a vampire who spreads AIDS. Both characters died in their first appearances, but manage to show up again every once in a while, including in (unsurprisingly) the Harley Quinn animated series. But does Gunn have the audacity to put them in live action?

Space Cabbie

Few characters seem better suited for the James Gunn treatment than Space Cabbie. First introduced in a 1954 issue of the sci-fi anthology series Mystery in Space, Space Cabbie sounds like a joke because of his obvious simplicity: he lives in space and drives a cab. But the character soon proved to be both a reliable launching point for other intergalactic tales and a compelling figure to include among DC’s cosmic characters. And if Gunn can get Patton Oswalt, who voiced the Space Cabbie on Justice League Action, to play him in live action, all the better.

The Heckler

The obvious pick for lists like these is Ambush Bug a.k.a. Irwin Schwab, the fourth-wall breaking superhero who basically exists to annoy other people (why yes, he did do Deadpool‘s schtick before Deadpool). But given that Gunn has talked about Ambush Bug, we’ll have to go a bit deeper, to another oddity created by the same guy who gave us Irwin: the Heckler. Like Ambush Bug, the Heckler’s real (and, in this case, only) power is to annoy his enemies, but at least he uses his irritability for good, aggravating baddies until justice is achieved.

The Human Flame

Before anyone objects, this does not refer to Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four. Where the Human Torch has youthful vigor and incredible good looks, the Human Flame looks like your average 48-year-old schlub, even when wearing armor that shoots fire—the one weakness of his arch-enemy the Martian Manhunter. The Human Flame may not be the terrifying of DC’s villains, but his blue-collar enguiniety and general relatability make him a character worth adapting.

Tomorrow Woman

Gunn has made his love of Grant Morrison‘s work well-known, yet there’s still little chance of seeing a live-action version of one of the best stories from the Scottish scribe’s Justice League run. JLA #5, written by Morrison and penciled by Howard Porter, introduces Tomorrow Woman as a powerful telekinetic who immediately proves herself a worthy addition. When she realizes that she’s an android created by mad scientists Professor Ivo and T.O. Morrow to infiltrate and then destroy the Justice League, Tomorrow Woman sacrifices herself. It’s a powerful story that no one has been able to match in any of the character’s subsequent appearances, but maybe Gunn can match that incredible introduction.

Tattooed Man

Much to the consternation of some, the Green Lantern series Lanterns will keep its space cops grounded in an Earth-bound mystery. Even then, we’d be surprised to see one of GL’s least cosmic antagonists show up on the HBO Max show. The first version of the Tattooed Man was a salty sailor with magical tattoos that would come to life and help him do crimes. Later versions replaced him with more morally ambiguous people and pit him against heroes less overpowered than Green Lantern, so there’s a chance that Gunn will revise the baddie. But if he’s not making the dragon on his chest fight Hal Jordan, then is he really the Tattooed Man?

Power Girl

By no means is Power Girl an obscure character. A frequent member of the Justice Society of America, Power Girl has been a mainstay in comics since the Crisis on Infinit Earths event in the mid-1980s, and often headlines her own comic. However, her success comes despite of her convoluted backstory, as she began as an alternate reality version of Kara Zor-El aka Supergirl. Power Girl survived multiple retcons and reimaginings to earn her place in DC Comics, but it’s hard to imagine the movie going public is going to put up with that many explanations, especially when Milly Alcock is already bringing the main Supergirl to the DCU.

Warlord

Even most comic book readers who have heard of Warlord assume he’s from some time travel story where Green Arrow goes back to sword and sandals days. But to those who know the Mike Grell comics about Travis Morgan, Warlord is one of the universe’s hidden gems. An Air Force pilot who crashes his plane in the North Pole, Morgan discovers a warp that takes him to the magical world of Skartaris. Stripping down to furry undies but keeping his pistol, Morgan dons a winged helmet and a sword to become the Warlord, fighting to free the inhabitants of Skartaris from the evil wizard Diemos. The alternate reality keeps Morgan away from most heroes, but every once in a while, the Justice League finds their way to Skartaris, melding superheroes with swords and sorcery.

Shining Knight

Like Warlord, Shining Knight is a compelling character hobbled by genre constraints. Creig Flessel introduced the character in 1941’s Adventure Comics #66, for a series of tales about Sir Justin of King Arthur’s court. Unlike most of the non-cape and cowl characters from era, Sir Justin managed to maintain some popularity even after DC revitalized its superheroes in the Silver Age, and even got to join some as a member of the Seven Soldiers of Victory and, later, the All-Star Squadron. But as many times as some ambitious writer tries to fully integrate Sir Justin into superhero stories, it never quite works, leaving the Shining Knight a perpetual outlier in the DC Universe.

The Challengers of the Unknown

The Challengers of the Unknown made sense for exactly four years, between Jack Kirby (working with either Joe Simon or David Wood) introducing them in 1957 and Kirby and Stan Lee introducing the Fantastic Four in 1961. A quartet of adventurers who respond to a near-death experience by devoting themselves to solving the world’s toughest problems, the Challengers worked great in the sci-fi influenced superheroes of DC in the 1950s, so much so that creators keep bringing them back. No one’s been able to make the Challengers relevant since then (the really good joke at their expense in Teen Titans Go! to the Movies doesn’t count), but maybe they’ll be just the challenge for Gunn to solve.

Red Tornado/Ma Hunkel

It might be tempting to lump Ma Hunkel in with ‘Mazing Man and Sugar and Spike, characters who belong to comedic or kid’s comics more than superheroes. But since she has been acknowledged as the Golden Age Red Tornado, a precursor to the android member of the Justice League, Ma Hunkel belongs on this list. Of course, Ma Hunkel started out as a humor character in 1939, an older woman who interacted with plucky kid Scribbly the Boy Cartoonist, but soon donned long underwear and a kitchen pot to fight crime as the Red Tornado. If Ma does get the DCU treatment, it will probably be in her current comics form as the Justice Society’s cook or grandmother to the hero Cyclone, but it would be great to see her in her Red Tornado getup.

Charma

By this point, we’ve loved to embrace instead of reject the writer’s barely disguised fetish in superhero comics, which means that Legion of Superheroes baddie Grimbor the Chainsman can appear in movies without too much trouble. The same cannot be said of Grimbor’s associate Charma, precisely because of her icky powers. Created by Mike Grell, Charma has the ability to make men lust after her and make women furious at the sight of her. While Grimbor has continued to appear every now and a gain, Charma’s gender essentialist powers have consigned her to history.

The Inferior Five

On paper, the Inferior Five sound like the exact type of superheroes that Gunn would love. Introduced by E. Nelson Bridwell and artist Joe Orlando as an attempt to embrace ’60s absurdist humor, the Inferior Five are, as their name suggests, a bunch of idiots who try and fail to walk in the footsteps of their more famous parents, the Freedom Brigade. With members like Awkwardman (the ability to trip over his feet) and Dumb Bunny (a beautiful blond idiot), the Inferior Five would fit into any Gunn project. And yet, he hasn’t put them in anything yet, which suggests that he never will. Then again, an evil version of the Inferior Five called the Superior Five does show up in Salvation Run, the comic that inspired Man of Tomorrow, so maybe there’s hope yet.

KGBeast

The Inferior Five feel like they would belong on The Tick, in a good way. KGBeast feels like he would belong on The Tick in a bad way. Introduced by Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo in 1988’s Batman #417, KGBeast was a Soviet supersoldier who debuted the year before the Berlin Wall fell, stripping him of his purpose. Over the years, people have tried to revive the character in some form or another, but none of them has worked. Today, the character exists as little more than a sadly serious version of the Tick villain the Red Scare.

Ten-Eyed Man

As his name suggests, the Ten-Eyed Man has ten eyes. All ten of those eyes appear not on his face—in fact, he has zero eyes on his face—but on his fingers. Somehow, that unusual anatomy made him an antagonist for both Batman and Man-Bat, but he’s worked best as a more mystical figure, as reimagined by Grant Morrison during the 52 maxiseries in the mid-2000s. Still, even as a cooky magic user, the Ten-Eyed Man is hopelessly silly, a point underscored in a recent story in which Batman ally Azrael takes away half of the villain’s powers… but cutting off one hand.

Prez

Even though it began amidst the Watergate scandal in 1973, the short-lived series Prez was built on the aspirational idea that anyone can be president in America. So when teenager Prez Rickard finds a way to solve basic infastructure problems and turns against the corrupt political machine, he wins hearts and minds as the country’s youngest president. Creators Joe Simon, who also-made Captain America with Jack Kirby, and Jerry Grandenetti infuse the original character with charming optimism, but its the absurdity of the premise that has allowed Prez to keep returning to mainline comics. Is optimism that enough to make Prez the next star of Gunn’s DCU, especially when the fact that anyone can be president is having such disastrous results?

Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew

While superheroes continue to be the dominant genre in comic books, funny animal books remain relevant. DC combined the two with Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, an odd-ball feature first introduced in a Superman-focused backup story published in 1982’s New Teen Titans #16. Led by Captain Carrot, the alter-ego of mild-mannered Roger Rabbit (now called Rodney Rabbit, for obvious reasons), the Zoo Crew includes super-speeding turtle Fastback, the mystical Alley-Kat-Abra, the armored Pig-Iron, and more. Even when interacting with mainline heroes, the Zoo Crew (usually) keeps a sense of humor, which helps remind everyone that superheroes are silly, even when they’re not funny animals.

Karate Kid

Even though James Gunn told Den of Geek directly that he’s had conversations about bringing the team to the DCU, some Legion of Super-Hero members still don’t seem likely to be in the movies. None more so than Karate Kid, whose bad luck extends beyond the fact that a popular franchise stole his name, even though he appeared nearly 20 years before Daniel LaRusso. Karate Kid has the power of all martial arts (but is generally depicted as a white guy, a DC editorial mandate that overrode creator Jim Shooter’s plans to model him after Bruce Lee). He’s had some great stories, but because Keith Giffen kind of hates him, Karate Kid ends up getting killed with some regularity, making him even more unlikely to move to live action.

Manga Khan

One more Keith Giffen character before we go. A reoccurring villain during the legendary Justice League International run by Giffen and co-writer J.M. DeMatteis, Manga Khan certainly poses a physical threat. He’s a gaseous being wears golden armor, and has the power to overcome heavy hitters like Big Barda and Despero. But where most baddies cover their love of capitalism with rhetoric about superior men or the greater good, Rama Khan just likes bartering and shopping, so he uses his great might to get people to embrace the free market. Such combinations of low-stakes evil and high-stakes powers make for refreshing reading, but don’t often show up in the movies.

The Weird

No list of weird DC characters is complete without a character so weird that he’s called the Weird. Before gaining his catchy name, the Weird was a Zarolatt, an inter-dimensional energy being who rebelled against his captors and escaped to Earth. Possessing the body of a dead man, the Weird managed to escape to deep space with the help of the Justice League, but has found his way back to Earth time and again. Most recently, the Weird served as a member of the superhero containment team StormWatch. And given that Superman featured a team called PlanetWatch, surely inspired by StormWatch, maybe the Weird isn’t too weird to show up in James Gunn’s DCU after all.

How Nativity! Became a UK Christmas Classic

In some ways, Debbie Isitt’s 2009 musical-comedy Nativity! is an unlikely Christmas classic. Its partially improvised dialogue and use of local, untrained child actors could have turned it into an unwatchable nightmare. Instead, these factors helped to create one of the most rewatchable Christmas movies of all time.

Since its release, Nativity! has become a U.K. holiday staple embraced by kids and adults alike. Every year, social media is awash with Nativity! edits on the run-up to Christmas, easily rivaling the popularity of Home Alone or Elf in the U.K. But how did a low-budget movie about a school play starring Martin Freeman and a little-known comedian become the kind of success that has spawned three sequels and a stage musical?

Let’s unpack all the ways Nativity! continues to resonate with U.K. audiences…

It’s Painfully British

You won’t find any magical elves or billionaire generosity arcs in Nativity!. The movie focuses on a completely down-to-earth scenario: Freeman’s grumpy, jaded teacher Paul Maddens is once again picked to run the annual nativity play at an underfunded primary school, and while trying to cover up for his own perceived failures in life, he tells a lie that spins out of control, leaving him with no other options than to either admit the truth or put on possibly the most impressive nativity play of all time with little in the way of resources.

The atmosphere at the state-funded school is instantly recognizable to most people who attended one in the U.K. The buildings are drab and drenched in fluorescent lighting, the teachers are overextended and on the brink, the kids are pure chaos and need to be constantly herded like overexcited sheep, and the end-of-year nativity play is set to be another gruelling experience for everyone involved. You can almost smell the combination of cheap bleach and tinsel in the air.

The Kids Are Just Regular Kids

Filmed in Coventry, Nativity! sourced its child actors through open casting calls in the Midlands. None of them had any prior acting experience, which makes their kinetic performances totally authentic.

The kids are natural and funny in a way that isn’t contrived. We don’t see anyone putting on their best stage-school voice or overacting for the cheap seats. Some kids mumble or yell, some are painfully shy. The “skills” they show off are also precisely what you’d expect from a bunch of everyday schoolchildren, from armpit farts to the kind of inspired breakdancing that almost matches Raygun’s cringeworthy Olympics efforts in 2024. They’re allowed to be weird, loud, and brutally honest with the adults who are dealing with them. None of them are perfect angels until they’re literally dressed like one, and even then, you never know what they’ll do next.

In Nativity!, the kids are desperate to be noticed, whether that’s by their neglectful parents or by their own metric, but their aspirations are also completely standard. If you’ve ever starred as the third donkey or a bale of hay in a U.K. school nativity play, you can recall the hope you had that maybe you’d score a better role next time around. Maybe, just maybe, you’d be cast as Mary or Joseph. Everyone remembers the more popular or talented kids getting a plum part, that’s why Mr Maddens’ decision to cast multiple kids as Mary and Joseph in the final show strikes such a chord, showing us that there are always opportunities to spotlight the kids who are so often ignored or left behind.

Mr. Maddens vs Mr. Poppy

The film nails a particular shared experience in the U.K. when we see the costumes fall apart, the kids keep forgetting their lines, and the teachers slowly lose the will to live. Meanwhile, their parents pray they’ll witness anything other than a poorly-produced mess. If they’re lucky, they won’t have to see one kid projectile vomit on the baby Jesus as they sit there on an uncomfortable plastic chair, hoping it’s all over soon.

Nativity! turns that shared trauma into comedy gold, largely thanks to the addition of Mr. Poppy (Marc Wootton), a man-child teaching assistant who won’t take no for an answer and who keeps Mr. Maddens’ lies alive in the hope that everything will turn out fine on the night. As Deadpool might say, he makes an educated wish, except it’s not so educated.

Mr. Poppy’s earnest, excitable nature isn’t just contagious for the kids; it also breaks down Mr. Madden’s walls, allowing him to throw himself into the play in a way that he never would before, leaving him utterly vulnerable to consequences, both good and bad. While Freeman’s bitter, pathetic teacher is entirely relatable for most adults, Mr. Poppy represents the childlike optimism we’ve let slip away and need to claw back into our lives to avoid becoming total husks.

Low-Stakes Comfort Viewing

The plot of Nativity! is intentionally small. It’s not about saving Christmas, and there are no global consequences. It’s just about one school trying not to embarrass itself. Mr. Maddens has lied and promised that Hollywood is coming to see the play and the sky’s the limit for everyone involved, but whether he makes good on this promise is much less important than the play actually being worth the effort after all the work they’ve put into it.

Though the film’s nature is fundamentally kind and there’s no real villain, some moments still hit hard. As Mr. Maddens spirals into crisis and the lies stack up, he decides to read the kids’ letters to Santa and learns about their troubled home lives, along with the hopes and dreams riding on his efforts. When he becomes furious at Mr. Poppy for perpetuating said lies, it’s a genuinely distressing part of the movie because he’s only really angry at himself for letting them down.

We want to see Mr. Maddens’ happiness restored just as much as we want to see him pull off the play, but those are the only things we need to worry about. Nativity! taps into the part of us that knows what it’s like to have everyone counting on us when we’ve stopped believing in ourselves, so to see Mr. Maddens slowly embrace the possibility that he can make the play happen against all odds feels overwhelming.

The Final Show Is Worth the Wait

When Mr. Maddens and Mr. Poppy finally take the nativity play to the stage after their lies are exposed and everything is called off, it’s an utter delight. The catchy songs – written by Islitt and composer Nicky Ager – are all revealed as instant bangers. You might be surprised by how many regular people in the U.K. can now deftly break out into “Sparkle and Shine” at a moment’s notice, and the kids’ riffs during certain songs are endlessly joyful (“extra spicy!”).

In the end, the nativity performances turn out to be genuinely heartwarming. It’s not like the kids have become Hugh Jackman or Barbra Streisand overnight, but after working so hard to up their game, they’re giving it their very best, and the play is choreographed perfectly to highlight their strengths.

The nighttime cathedral setting, fun costumes, and everything that goes wrong during the play are also grounded and realistic. The most fantastical moment of the film, when Clarke Peters’ American studio boss flies into town on a chopper, almost seems like an afterthought. The ending has already earned its sentiment: it doesn’t matter if Hollywood notices these kids; they’ve done everything they can to make this moment matter.

The Marvel Post-Credits Scenes, Ranked

The end is never the end in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Post-credits sequences have become supremely important to the MCU, convincing the masses to sit through several minutes listing the names of underpaid and overworked VFX artists to get just a little more time with our favorite heroes.

Beloved as they are, not every post-credits scene is equally compelling or entertaining. Sometimes, they’re outright annoying. So let’s go ahead and sort them out.

Of course, there are a lot of post-credits scenes in the MCU. So, to keep this list from being too unwieldy, we’re putting in some limitations. This list won’t include post-credits scenes that are just pulled from later movies, such as Nick Fury giving Steve Rogers a new mission, which first played in Captain America: The First Avenger but was part of The Avengers. The list also won’t include anything from the One-Shots, Special Presentations, or TV series, as most of those set up something resolved in a later episode or, as in the case of Bruno telling Kamala that she’s a mutant in Ms. Marvel, get ignored altogether.

Even with those qualifications, we still have a lot of scenes to discuss, so no more waiting! Here are the MCU post-credits scenes ranked!

54. Still Not Ready (Eternals)

The second post-credits scene from Eternals was bad when it first played, and has now become embarrassing. It makes perfect sense to add a scene in which Dane Whitman (Kit Harington) takes the Ebony Blade, getting one step closer to becoming the Avenger Black Knight. But the decision to have him stopped by the voice of Blade (Mahershala Ali), completely off-screen and completely unidentified, is baffling. The fact that this is still, and may likely always be, the only bit of Ali’s Blade that the MCU ever gets makes the scene ten times worse.

53. Ant Rocks (Ant-Man and the Wasp)

By the time Ant-Man and the Wasp rolled around late in Phase Three, everyone had come to expect post-credits scenes. But the last bit in Ant-Man and the Wasp feels perfunctory, just a couple seconds of giant-sized Antony playing the drums. More than any of the others, the movie’s post-credits feel like an insult to the audience, even more so than the scene that actually teases the viewers for waiting around through the credits.

52. Tony Stark Walks Into a Bar (The Incredible Hulk)

Up until recently, The Incredible Hulk was the black sheep of the MCU, and not just because it featured Edward Norton’s one turn as Bruce Banner. The movie began life as a pseudo-sequel to And Lee’s Hulk, not as the second entry in a shared universe. Ironically, the one scene that ties Incredible Hulk to the MCU most underscores that difference, a clearly tacked-on moment in which Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) meets with Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt) to say something vaguely Avenger-y.

51. Leading Nowhere (Captain America: Brave New World)

Den of Geek gave Captain America: Brave New World a relatively positive review, but even we can’t justify the way the film squanders Tim Blake Nelson’s return as Samuel Sterns. They don’t even bother calling him the Leader, and obvious reshoots make him feel disconnected from the rest of the movie. Those problems only compound in the final scene, in which Sterns warns Cap (Anthony Mackie) about other heroes from across the Multiverse, which leads into Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars, but isn’t exactly new information.

50. A Happy Embrace (Thor: The Dark World)

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the last post-credits scene in Thor: The Dark World. We like Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), we like seeing them hug, and the bit with the rampaging frost monster is humorous. But all of that should have been in the actual movie. Saving it for the post-credits adds nothing.

49. A Gathering of Losers (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania)

Behold, the most cursed post-credits sequence in Marvel history! When Immortus, Rama-Tut, and the Centurion gather their fellow Variants in the Council of Cross-Time Kangs, it was supposed to set up the next major arc across Phases Five and Six. Instead, the off-screen actions of Kang actor Jonathan Majors forced Marvel to scuttle the idea, making the scene feel like a clip from another franchise in another reality.

48. Not Nick Fury (Spider-Man: Far From Home)

After Spider-Man: Far From Home, we learn that Nick Fury and Maria Hill are not in fact the human leaders of SHIELD, but rather the Skrulls Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and Soren (Sharon Blynn), filling in for their friends off-planet. The reveal is kind of cute, until you realize that it absolutely doesn’t jibe with what we have just been watching—even Samuel L. Jackson and Cobie Smulders had no idea, and so they played Fury and Hill straight. Worse, the scene leads directly into Secret Invasion, and nobody wants Secret Invasion.

47. Bucky Belongs in a Museum (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

Look, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has established himself as one of the bedrocks of the MCU. And that turn began in Winter Soldier, in which he changed from Steve’s (Chris Evans) old war buddy to a conflicted hero doing his best. But the bit of him visiting the Captain America museum to learn about himself adds no pathos or plot, and feels just like a scene cut from the main part of the movie and just shoved into the end.

46. Harry Styles, What a Pip (Eternals)

Eternals has the sad distinction of being the movie with not one, but two post-credits scenes teasing things that have never come to pass. Getting Harry Styles to play Starfox, an Avenger with questionable emotion-manipulating powers, made teens in the audience squeal—as did getting Patton Oswalt to voice Pip the Troll, just for cynical Gen Xers. But whatever excitement they generated has long since dissipated.

45. Too Many Sorcerers (Doctor Strange)

Doctor Strange gives us another end credit that sets up an immediately ignored plot point. The scene finds Baron Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) continuing the heel turn hinted by the film’s climax by stripping away the magic from a paraplegic man played by Benjamin Bratt. Had Mordo actually become the villain he is in the comics, then this scene would be fine, perhaps even good. But when Ejiofor returns for Mutliverse of Madness, he’s playing a good Mordo from another reality, so what was the point?

44. It’s Wasp’s Damn Time (Ant-Man)

Film critic Tasha Robinson may have coined the term Trinity Syndrome in 2014, but the best example came a few years later in Ant-Man. Trinity Syndrome refers to a female character who already has all the skills to be a hero, but must train a doofy male instead… which is exactly what Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lily) does for Scott Lang (Paul Rudd). The fact Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) teases her becoming Wasp at the end only makes things worse, a sting somewhat lessened by the fact that she’s a co-headliner from there on out.

43. The Spider-Signal Activates (Captain America: Civil War)

Tom Holland makes for a delightful Spider-Man, and we only get a bit of him in Civil War, so more is good right? Well, mostly. It is nice to see Peter activate the Spider-Signal, a weird gadget from the comics that hasn’t shown up in any film adaptation. But at the same time, the scene only underscores how much Tony Stark becomes Peter’s rich benefactor, totally supplanting ol’ blue collar Uncle Ben.

42. Asgard Gone for Good (Thor: Ragnarok)

The first of Thor: Ragnarok‘s two post-credits scenes is a joke, and not a great one. After watching their home get destroyed, Thor and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) stand on the bridge of their ship, talk about how Asgard is a place and not a people, and say everything is going to be okay. And then Thanos’ massive ship arrives. Look, most of the jokes in Ragnarok land, so we can’t get too mad at a misfire. But it is a misfire that undercuts whatever thematic elements Ragnarok may have had going for it, especially when we see what Thanos has wrought in Infinity War.

41. Goose Coughs Up Continuity (Captain Marvel)

By the time we get to the post-credits scene in Captain Marvel, we already know the joke about Nick Fury’s scars. He didn’t get them by doing something cool. He got them when Goose the ~~cat~~flerkin scratched him. But even if that reveal annoyed you, you can’t get too mad at the bit in which Goose coughs up the Tessaract like a hairball. Did we need the continuity patch that the scene provided, tracking the Tesseract from the First Avenger to The Avengers? No. Was it irritating? Not if you’re a cat person.

40. Jane Foster’s Just Reward (Thor: Love and Thunder)

In a better movie, Jane Foster meeting Heimdall (Idris Elba) in the afterlife and being welcomed to the land of the gods would be sweet and cathartic. Jane’s return as the Mighty Thor carried weight, and it would allow us to see her one last time without undercutting her sacrifice. But because it occurs in Love and Thunder, the scene feels like an Old Spice commercial, from the shoddy special effects to Portman’s awkward and “cute” take on Jane going to Valhalla.

39. Bucky’s Back (Black Panther)

When Shuri (Letitia Wright) comes to roust Bucky back into action, she’s setting up Infinity War, in which the Winter Soldier will reunite with the heroes who had a huge fight with him in Civil War. That’s exciting, but the execution of the scene fails to live up to its potential. Instead, the scene feels more like a reminder to audiences that Cap left his pal in Wakanda, before Bucky (literally) rearms to fight Thanos.

38. Selvig Comes to SHIELD (Thor)

Now we’re firmly in the part of the list that consists of just fine teases for future projects. Is there anything bad about seeing Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) already mind-controlled by Loki and inside SHIELD headquarters? No. Is there anything compelling about it? Not really. It’s just a tease for what’s coming next, nothing more or less.

37. It’s Just Jeff Goldblum (Thor: Ragnarok)

Thor: Ragnarok gives us just one more taste of Jeff Goldblum doing his thing. Even though you can hardly turn on your TV without seeing Goldbum doing his thing on commercials for Wicked and apartments, it’s still funny, so we can’t get too upset about one more minute of Goldblum as the Grandmaster faces Sakaar’s rabble after his deposal.

36. He’s Here, He’s There… (Thor: Love and Thunder)

For a C-list hero, the Mighty Hercules has a surprising amount of great stories and he absolutely belongs in the MCU. And even though most of us only know Brett Goldstein from Ted Lasso, his hairy chest certainly means that he looks the part. But there’s been absolutely no word of Goldstein or Hercules appearing again in the MCU, making this post-credits scene feel more like a lark than a sign of things to come.

35. T’Challa Junior (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever)

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever begins as a celebration of late star Chadwick Boseman and the world that Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole created. And then it gets overtaken by Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman), and Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), all setting up future Marvel stuff. However, the post-credits sequence briefly establishes that former tone by introducing Toussaint (Divine Love Konadu-Sun), the son of T’Challa and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o).

34. Here Comes Clea (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness)

As with Love and Thunder, the post-credits scene from Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness brings a long-established character into the MCU, where they’re promptly ignored. In this case, it’s Charlize Theron as Strange’s main squeeze, and sometime Sorcerer Supreme, Clea. The only reason that Clea edges out Hercules is that she talks about Incursions, events that will actually be part of the upcoming Avengers movies Doomsday and Secret Wars.

33. The Coming of the Beast (The Marvels)

If Marvel just let the post-credits scene of The Marvels play out, then it would have been a fun surprise. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) wakes up in an alternate reality, where she’s greeted by a Variant of her mother Maria (Lashana Lynch) as Binary and Beast of the X-Men (Kelsey Grammer). But because Marvel really hyped up the scene as the dawn of a new era in the MCU, specifically the coming of the X-Men, the scene gained way too much weight and cannot help but disappoint.

32. The Fantastic Four Power Hour (The Fantastic Four: First Steps)

The opening of a cheap ’60s cartoon about a Fantastic Four cartoon is fun and harmless, and it is. But one cannot help but wonder why in the world it comes at the end, instead of part of the world-building in the first 30 minutes. It’s a fun extra, but totally unnecessary.

31. Quill’s Breakfast (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3)

The cynical among us might say that the second post-credits scene in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 rips off a much better and much more famous scene. And they aren’t completely wrong, as it only consists of Quill eating breakfast at his grandfather’s house and talking about lawn mowing. But you know what? Guardians 3 was an intense watch, so we’ll gladly take a bit of downtime with our favorite legendary outlaw.

30. White Guy Deposit (Captain America: Civil War)

The scene in which Steve takes his pal Bucky to Wakanda is one of the rare (non-Thanos-related) teases for the future that actually pays off. Directed by Ryan Coogler instead of Civil War helmers the Russo Brothers, the scene gives us our first taste of Wakanda proper, whetting our appetite for the world we’ll fully meet in Black Panther. Plus, it cements the relationship between Steve and T’Challa, something that pays off in Infinity War.

29. Arrow Practice (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2)

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has five post-credits scenes and all of them are fine. They play like gangbusters when watched after the film, as fans just want to keep the good times going. To that end, the bit with Kraglin (Sean Gunn) accidentally sticking Drax (Dave Bautista) while using the arrow he inherited from Yondu (Michael Rooker) is just good harmless fun. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and it pays off with a goofy gag.

28. Adding to the Collection (Thor: The Dark World)

On the surface, the scene in which Volstagg (Ray Stevenson) and Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander) bring the Aether to the Collector (Benicio Del Toro) works just as a taste for the next movie, Guardians of the Galaxy. To that end, it’s great, showing the viewers that the MCU is about to get much weirder. But the scene also is the first time someone says the words “Infinity Stones” (not, crucially, Infinity Gems, as they were called in Marvel Comics), thus tying the scene into the franchise’s first grand narrative.

27. The Sinister Two (Spider-Man: Homecoming)

Given that the next time we see Michael Keaton’s Vulture after this scene, he’s trying to recruit Jared Leto in Morbius, the post-credits scene of Spider-Man: Homecoming probably deserves to be a lot lower. That’s especially true since we’ve still never seen Michael Mando as the actual Scorpion. Still, we love Keaton and we love Mando, so we can’t completely hate this (still somewhat squandered) moment.

26. Ten Rings Reformed (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings)

One of the better post-Endgame Marvel movies, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Not only does it need to introduce new hero Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), but it must also reestablish the Mandarin, leader of the terrorist group the Ten Rings from Iron Man, in the form of Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung). Obviously, there’s still work to be done, as we learn in the post-credits scene that sees Wenwu’s other child Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) ascend the throne as the new leader of the Ten Rings. We haven’t seen what she’ll do in that role yet, but that hasn’t become disappointment… yet.

25. Groot Goes Bad (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2)

Really, the confrontation between Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and adolescent Groot at the end of Guardians 2 is just another example of the tree-like alien doing something silly. However, this one gets a little more weight for the way it ties into the themes of the movie that proceeded it, as Quill—forced to walk a bit in his adoptive father Yondu’s shoes—has to be the scolding adult.

24. When Howard Met Cosmo (Guardians of the Galaxy)

Howard the Duck belongs in the MCU, but only a little. Before Blade in 1997, Howard was the one Marvel character to actually get his own movie, and an awful one at that. So it’s only fitting that Howard (voiced by Seth Green) get a little screentime at the end of Guardians, in the ruins of the Collector’s home. Even better, the scene lets him interact with fan-favorite Cosmo, long before Maria Bakalova started voicing the Russian space dog.

23. Wong Rocks Out (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings)

Half of the other Shang-Chi post-credits scene is irritating, as it teases a team-up we may never get. Via holographic Zoom, Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and a no-longer green Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) promise to investigate Shang-Chi’s bands and seem to hint that he’ll be joining the Avengers. But nothing can take away from the pleasure of watching Shang-Chi and Katy (Awkwafina) sing karaoke with Wong (Benedict Wong). Team-ups are temporary, but Wong is eternal.

22. The Creation of Adam (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2)

Ever since viewers noticed a cocoon in the Collector’s museum, fans have awaited the coming of Adam Warlock. Turns out, they’d have to wait a bit longer, as Guardians director James Gunn decided to do away with that cocoon and give us another one, this time in one of the post-credits of the second movie. Sitting in her golden palace, a defeated Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) looks at her own cocoon and pronounces her creation, “Adam.”

21. Dr. Banner Psych Out (Iron Man 3)

As the bottom of this list demonstrates, some of the worst post-credits scenes are the simple gags, jokes that aren’t funny enough to justify making audiences sit through the credits. Some may lump the post-credits scene of Iron Man 3 (certainly a divisive film) in with those, as it simply reveals that the voiceover throughout the movie comes from Tony Stark treating Bruce Banner as his unwilling psychiatrist. But as the joke provides genuine catharsis for the high stakes of the movie that precedes it, we kinda like the Iron Man 3 post-credits scene.

20. Thunderbolts, Assemble (Black Widow)

In one of the few examples of a TV post-credits scene actually mattering, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier actually introduced CIA head Val before she showed up on the big screen. And when she appears in Black Widow, visiting Yelena Balova (Florence Pugh) at Natasha Romanoff’s grave, she’s there to set up a plot beat in Hawkeye. But even more than her conversation with John Walker (Wyatt Russell) in Winter Soldier, Val’s Black Widow appearance shows that she’s got something devious up her sleeve, which eventually come to fruition with the Thunderbolts.

19. Spilled Venom (Spider-Man: No Way Home)

The Venom-focused post-credits scene from Spider-Man: No Way Home probably doesn’t belong on this list, as it’s a scene that gets used (in some form) in Venom: The Last Dance, nor does it belong this high, as it teases something that probably won’t happen when a bit of the Symbiote gets left on a Mexican bar. But we can’t help but love watching Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy), transported to the MCU by the magical nonsense in the main movie, try to make sense of this new world he’s (briefly) in.

18. The New Guardians (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3)

By the time Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 hit theaters, fans knew that James Gunn was leaving Marvel to be co-Head of DC Studios, leaving many to assume that most of the Guardians would die in his final outing. Instead, Gunn not only kept most of the team alive, but he also introduced a new team called the Annihilators of the Galaxy, which adds Adam Strange (Will Poulter) and Phyla-Vell (Kai Zen) alongside Kraglin, Rocket, Cosmo, and Groot. We haven’t seen much of this new incarnation yet, but it’s good to know they’re still out there.

17. Watchers, Not Listeners (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2)

Stan Lee cameos are just as much a part of the MCU as post-credits scenes, so it’s surprising that the two elements came together only once. In one of Guardians 2‘s post-credits scenes, we see that the astronaut played by Lee has finally bored members of an ancient race known as the Watchers, who quietly shuffle off. It’s a good joke that doesn’t take too long and leaves room for Jeffrey Wright’s more conventional take on the Watcher in the animated show What If….

16. Wade Knows He’s in a Movie (Deadpool & Wolverine)

People come to Deadpool movies to hear the Merc’ With a Mouth make jokes about superhero movie tropes. But it’s a very welcome relief to find that he doesn’t spend the post-credits scene of Deadpool & Wolverine commenting upon post-credit scenes. Instead, Wade breaks into the TVA to assuage (some) of his guilt for getting Johnny Storm (Chris Evans, of course) killed by editing footage from earlier in the film, now showing the Human Torch unleash a string of vile insults about Cassandra Nova, thus justifying the hero’s horrible death.

15. Meet the Maximoffs (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

The three characters introduced during the end credits scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier have changed a lot from that first meeting. Baron Strucker, a great villain wasted by the movies, dies off-screen at Ultron’s hand. Pietro Maximoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is annoying for a while and then dies in that same movie. But Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) goes on to become one of the franchise’s best characters, a story that starts with this weird scene.

14. Breakfast of Champions (Thunderbolts*)

Who can hate Alexei Shostakov, the lovable Russian supersoldier played by David Harbour? Sure, he may be an enemy of America as the Red Guardian, and he may let his desire for fame and acceptance lead him into entanglements with Val. But he has a good heart, even when he looks stupid, which is exactly what happens at his highest moment. Alexei may have made it onto a Wheaties box in Thunderbolts*, but he’s still big nobody.

13. Ant-Man Lost (Ant-Man and the Wasp)

It’s hard to replicate the power of Infinity War‘s ending. The good guys lose to Thanos, and we have to watch as Spider-Man, Black Panther, and other beloved heroes waste away to nothing. Somehow, Ant-Man and the Wasp admirably repeats that moment in its (good) post-credits scene, showing Scott get stranded in the Quantum Zone after Hope, Hank, and Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) get turned to dust in the Blip. Even better, the scene sets up an incredibly emotional beat for Scott in Endgame.

12. Pizza Poppa Pops Off (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness)

With the exception of James Gunn, Sam Raimi is the greatest director of superhero movies. And there’s nothing Sam Raimi loves more than making his childhood pal Bruce Campbell look stupid. He, of course, gets to do that in the main part of Multiverse of Madness, when Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) curses Campbell’s Pizza Poppa to punch himself in the face. But it’s even better when we revisit the Pizza Poppa in the post-credits scene, to see his suffering end long enough for Campbell to do a take to the camera.

11. The Original Guardians Unite (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2)

James Gunn is a comic book nerd, and comic book nerds that Star-Lord actually leads the second incarnation of the Guardians. The first incarnation is a group of alien freedom fighters in the 30th century, who carried their own book for a while in the 1990s. That team shows up during Yondu’s funeral in Guardians 2, but they really come together in a post-credit scene. That’s where Stakar Ogord (Sylvester Stallone), Charlie-27 (Ving Rhames), Martinex (Michael Rosenbaum), Aleta Ogord (Michelle Yeoh), Krugarr, and Mainframe (voiced by Miley Cyrus) band together once again.

10. Carol Calls Upon the Avengers (Captain Marvel)

As a movie, Captain Marvel belongs firmly toward the bottom half of rankings, hampered by its 1990s setting and a confusing flashback-heavy structure. But when the post-credit sscene gives us a fully-powered Carol Danvers meeting up with the Avengers in a post-Infinity War present, it doesn’t disappoint. While the rag-tag Avengers try to figure out what to do in the wake of the Blip, Captain Marvel flies in and demands answers. She may initially rub her soon-to-be teammates the wrong way, but Carol immediately establishes that she has incredible power, something the Avengers will need to fight Thanos.

9. T’Challa Shows Them Who He Is (Black Panther)

Most of the entries on this list are either jokes or plot points. Black Panther features one of the few post-credits scenes built around the movie’s theme. The film has followed the newly-installed king T’Challa as he moves Wakanda from isolationism to embracing its responsibility to the world. So when T’Challa, joined by Nakia and Okoye (Danai Gurira), is challenged by a UN delegate about what his country can offer the world, we know that his response will be the fruit of his character development.

8. Paging Captain Marvel (Avengers: Infinity War)

While her first solo movie may have fumbled her introduction in the 1990s, Captain Marvel had one of the best overall introductions in the entire franchise. At the end of Infinity War, after the heroes have lost, just as he fades to dust, Nick Fury produces a pager and contacts Captain Marvel. Most MCU fans have no idea who Captain Marvel is or what she can do. But when her logo shows up on the pager, one thing is certain: help, very powerful help, is on the way.

7. Mad Titans Doin’ It For Themselves (Avengers: Age of Ultron)

Revisionists complaining about Marvel’s last few phases seem to think that Thanos had a much bigger presence in the movies before Infinity War. The truth is, he really didn’t appear outside of the first Guardians film, and even then in just one scene. Yet, the moment in which Thanos, finally voiced by Josh Brolin, grabs the Infinity Gauntlet and declares that he’ll find the Stones himself feels so notable that we believe he’s been there all along, a constant—if unseen—presence.

6. J. J.J. is Back (Spider-Man: Far From Home)

One of the MCU’s greatest strengths is its casting, finding pitch-perfect actors to portray Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and other comic book faves. But even Kevin Feige’s people couldn’t outdo Sam Raimi’s casting team from the first Spider-Man films. So when J.K. Simmons reprised his role as J. Jonah Jameson for Spider-Man: Far From Home, we all let out a cheer—a cheer so loud that we almost missed that he was revealing Spidey’s secret identity to everyone.

5. Groot Grooves (Guardians of the Galaxy)

Groot first appeared in comics as an alien invader from Planet X, one of the many sci-fi monsters that Stan Lee, his brother Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby came up with before the Marvel Age of Comics. But it was the Guardians of the Galaxy movies that made Groot into an A-list character, specifically the post-credits scene from the first film. Watch Groot, now as a sprout after his sacrifice, dance to “I Want You Back” forever won over everyone… well, everyone except for Drax.

4. So, You Want to Watch a Post-Credits Scene (Spider-Man: Homecoming)

Throughout this list, we’ve bemoaned the post-credits scenes that seem to insult the viewer for sitting through the credits. But Captain America is so wholesome that he can make an insult feel like a compliment, which is what happens in his post-credits scene from Spider-Man: Homecoming. An extension of the video that Peter watches while in detention, the scene finds Cap extolling the virtues of patience, even if that patience doesn’t pay off with anything more than a jokey post-credits scene.

3. The Avengers Initiative (Iron Man)

The first MCU post-credits scene is still one of the most important. For most of its running time, Iron Man is just a better done version of any superhero movie we’ve seen up to that point, laying out the origin of the hero. But when Samuel L. Jackson appears on screen, looking exactly like the Nick Fury from Marvel’s Ultimate Universe (whom artist Bryan Hitch did base on Jackson), and name drops the Avengers, we realize we’re seeing something more than just a superhero movie. We’re seeing the birth of a cinematic universe.

2. Courting Death (The Avengers)

As stated earlier, people remember Thanos being a much more consistent presence in the first three phases than he actually was. Part of the reason he feels so omnipresent is, of course, the “I’ll do it myself” scene and especially his first appearance at the end of The Avengers, when he’s revealed to be the big bad behind the attack on New York. The simple image of Thanos smiling to the camera, the in-joke pun about courting death (in the comics, Thanos is in love with the physical embodiment of Death); all of it works like a victory lap for the already triumphant film that somehow brought together several solo heroes.

1. Schwarma Dinner (The Avengers)

Some may say that MCU movies are sci-fi films, others call them action films, and still others see them as fantasies of a sort. While the franchise has all of those elements, Marvel movies are first and foremost light comedies about likable characters hanging out together. For that reason, the finale scene in The Avengers is not just the best post-credits scene, but it’s also the most important moment in the MCU. In that moment, we realize that even more than watching heroes fight supervillains, we like watching these particular characters hang out together, even if it’s just to eat schwarma.