The Muppet Show: Classic Bits That Should Return in a Revival
The Muppet Show turns 50 this year, and a special event is coming to ABC and Disney+ that, if the first trailer is to believed, could precede a series pickup for a whole new incarnation of the puppet variety show. During its five-year run from 1976 to 1981, Jim Henson’s creation featured guest stars, musical numbers, sketch comedy, and plenty of backstage chaos. But at its core, the show slyly poked fun at television itself.
Already timeless, The Muppet Show’s short, flexible bits brilliantly parodied pop culture, celebrity, and the entertainment business in a way that seems perfect for a modern, streaming-era revival. If the upcoming special on February 4, 2026 with Sabrina Carpenter and Seth Rogen plays its cards right, it’ll update the routines that already worked rather than reinvent the wheel altogether. Here are some of the bits we think deserve a second life.
Statler and Waldorf
This is a no-brainer, right up there with making sure Gonzo hits a gong of some sort at the end of the iconic opening number. The two balcony hecklers’ relentless, self-aware cynicism throughout each episode (and in the end credits) feels even more relevant in an age of social media snark; never mind that these old fogies wouldn’t know a smartphone if it landed on their heads. A modern take could play with the idea of toxic fandom culture or over-sensitivity to “offensive” humor, which these guys love.
Pigs in Space
This campy sci-fi parody led by Captain Link Hogthrob is a perfect candidate for revival, perhaps even more relevant today than it was during The Muppet Show’s original run. Now that Star Trek has parodied itself with Lower Decks (not to mention the comedic homage that was The Orville), “Pigs in Space” should feel even more at home and could even add satirical elements about multiverses and AI. Bring on the melodrama!
Veterinarian’s Hospital
Speaking of melodrama, who can forget this soap opera set inside a medical drama? It’s already a parody layered on a parody! The original Muppet Show never had a chance to poke fun at the more soap-like aspects of reality TV, and with remixed TV genres now the norm, Dr. Bob, Nurse Janice, and the others could really have fun with the format. Plus who wouldn’t enjoy seeing Noah Wyle as a guest star lampooning his stints on The Pitt and ER?
Muppet Labs with Bunsen and Beaker
One of the smartest recurring sketches. “Muppet Labs” mocked the blind faith in progress and innovation, with poor Beaker always paying the price for Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s lack of safeguards for his inventions. I mean, c’mon! The bits practically write themselves here, from fun with self-driving cars to the resurrection of extinct animals with genetic editing. Cue the woolly mammoth puppet stampede!
The Swedish Chef
While the “funny foreign accent” comedy of the Swedish chef might not be politically correct these days, this cooking show parody has some classic physical comedy that would be great in today’s world of food bloggers and competition shows. Besides the joy of the chef singing “Bork! Bork! Bork!” during his opening theme song, it was always fun to decode what was happening (and what was going hilariously wrong) with whatever dish was being created.
That being said, we now reach the line of slapstick comedy between bits that will appeal to those with nostalgia for The Muppet Show and those that were questionable to begin with and probably fewer people remember anyway. For example, there’s Wayne and Wanda, a recurring pair of Muppets who performed overly earnest romantic songs that inevitably ended with something falling on their heads or other disastrous high note cut short. The singers never really had individual personalities anyway, and the physical comedy was pretty repetitive and needlessly cruel.
And then there was Marvin Suggs with his brash and egotistical personality and a percussion instrument called the Muppetphone. The gag of playing a musical instrument by hitting cute little puffballs with a hammer may be a bit too absurdist for a modern take, especially since Marvin wasn’t really all that likable to begin with. Part of what would make a new Muppet Show work is the willingness to let some sketches remain artifacts of their era while finding new routines that capture the same spirit of satire, chaos, and self-awareness.
After all, the fun of The Muppet Show is that Kermit, Scooter, and the sketch comedy troupe are trying to provide entertainment in a stage environment where nothing goes as planned, and reprised routines and new sketches alike should reflect that spirit. The goal isn’t to recreate the past beat for beat, but to prove that the Muppets can still be just as sharp when they’re poking fun at today’s version of showbiz. Just make sure the end credits finish with a honking low note on the saxophone, please!
The Muppet Show special premieres on ABC and Disney+ on Wednesday, February 4.
Upcoming Movies in 2026: The Most Anticipated Films of the New Year
Hollywood had a saying in 2024: it was survive until ’25. Now on the other side of that promise, some might wonder if the whole industry will be content to persist through ’26?
Things are definitely in a state of flux right now, with various streaming services and investors vying for different legacy studios and their coveted libraries, as well as a fixation on what the future of cinema itself is when studies show young people are actually going to the movies more than they used to. But even then, the only reliable genre for “original” hits remains horror. Beyond box office trends and expectations, though, is the hope for a clean slate of movies to anticipate, indulge, and debate. As William Goldman famously said, nobody knows anything, so each of the movies in our survey holds the potential for massive success or catastrophic failure. Whatever happens, we hope to be there for each one, alongside yourselves.
Sony Pictures
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
January 16
After taking (ahem) 23 years off between installments, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are continuing 28 Years Later‘s sordid legacy in faster succession, albeit this time with fresh blood. Candyman and Hedda helmer Nia DaCosta picks up the directorial reins in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie which filmed simultaneously with last June’s zombie showdown. The new movie continues the story of Ralph Fiennes’ enigmatic good(ish?) doctor obsessed with memento mori and what happens to young Spike (Alfie Williams) when he falls into a band of “Jimmies,” led by Jack O’Connell’s eerily chipper and self-christened St. Jimmy.
In an exclusive preview with Den of Geek, DaCosta hinted, “You have these two trains on a track, essentially, that are going to collide. They’re going to end up with these two worlds in a clash, because you kind of feel that Spike and Kelson are going to interact again.”
20th Century Studios
Send Help
January 30
Sam Raimi is back and, from the looks of the trailer, he’s as nasty as ever. After gleefully killing off famous guest stars in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the madman behind Evil Dead returns to his full horror roots for the Send Help. Rachel McAdams stars as meek office drone Linda Liddle, who spends her work days under the thumb of her bro-tastic boss, played here by Dylan O’Brien. When the two crash land on a deserted island, Liddle has the chance to reverse the corporate dynamics.
With its exotic location and revenge premise, Send Help feels more like a mid-2000s torture film in the vein of Hostel or Turistas. As demonstrated by 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, Raimi can certainly match that era’s mean spirit, but he’s always had a playfulness that better recalls Wile E. Coyote than, say, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. So really, we aren’t worried about the fun we’ll have watching Send Help. Instead our only question is how Raimi will manage to work in a Delta 88, the car that appears in all of his films, into a movie mostly set on an island.
A24
The Moment
January 30
Pop stars have been ubiquitous in cinemas lately, sometimes successfully (see: Tyler the Creator in Marty Supreme or Taylor Swift’s Eras film) and sometimes a bland disaster (see: Opus or Hurry Up Tomorrow). Not content to simply do music for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, Charli XCX takes the screen as, well, Charli XCX. Or rather she plays a fictionalized version of herself for the mockumentary The Moment, directed by music video pro Aidan Zamiri.
Shot during the singer’s brat tour, The Moment presents a heightened look at the demands of a 21st century arena tour. The movie’s trailer features the requisite freak outs about rehearsal schedules, promotional products, and clingy fans, but it also has moments of humor suggesting more self-awareness than some of the other big music movies. The addition of stars such as Rosanna Arquette and Alexander Skarsgård certainly helps The Moment feel more like an actual movie and less of a pop star’s indulgence.
Warner Bros. Pictures
Wuthering Heights
February 13
The always-provocative filmmaker Emerald Fennell is following up her Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman and divisive Saltburn with a splashy adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 Gothic romance, and it stars no less than Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. The castings are already raising eyebrows, with the latter earning accusations of whitewashing a literary character of famously ambiguous origin. But by working from source material that was considered scandalously edgy in its time, we can expect Fennell to welcome it all while amping up the tale’s eroticism and psychological melodrama—and with lots of heaving chests and Charli XCX songs if the trailer is anything to go by. In other words, don’t expect your high school teacher’s Wuthering Heights.
Amazon MGM Studios
Crime 101
February 13
You don’t have to wait until next December to see a bunch of Marvel faves reunite. First there’s Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, and Barry Keoghan join together for the caper film Crime 101. Based on the novel by Don Winslow, the film follows a disciplined jewel thief (Hemsworth) who teams with an insurance broker (Halle Berry) to pull off an audacious score.
That premise may seem a bit rote, but the man behind the camera is certainly unique. Writer and director Bart Layton made his name with the documentary The Imposter and the docudrama American Animals. Crime 101 represents Layton’s first foray into fully fictional filmmaking, and the glossy Hollywood cast he’s assembled suggests that he’s jumping in with both feet. However, if Layton can follow in the footsteps of William Friedkin, who kept an eye for realism when he moved from documentaries to make The French Connection, then Crime 101 could be something special.
Paramount Pictures
Scream 7
February 27
If Scream is your favorite scary movie, then the last few years have been interesting to say the least. What began as a promising reboot for the franchise with 2022’s Scream ended after the new cast took fully revitalized the franchise with some Big Apple swagger in Scream 6. Unfortunately that momentum was derailed after Spyglass Media Group’s decision to fire star Melissa Barrera for her political opinions.
What we’re left with is a movie that decidedly looks to the past instead of the future. Co-creator Kevin Williamson returns to the franchise to write and direct, and he brings along Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox as Sidney Prescott and Gale Weathers. It’s not all just playing the hits for Scream 7, though, since not only are Jasmin Savoy Brown and Mason Gooding reprising their roles as Randy Meeks’ relatives but also Sidney has a daughter (Isabel May). Will the familiar faces be enough to overcome the bad press caused by Barrera’s firing? We’ll find out soon.
Hulu
In the Blink of an Eye
February 27
As a member of the studio’s braintrust, Andrew Stanton has given Pixar some of its greatest films, directing Wall-E and Finding Nemo and co-writing the Toy Story franchise. Stanton’s live-action resume is a bit more spotty, which includes episodes of Better Call Saul and Stranger Things, but also the infamous flop John Carter. Stanton hopes to improve that batting average with In the Blink of an Eye, a high-concept sci-film about the history of the Earth. He’s brought along a solid cast that includes Kate McKinnon, Rashida Jones, and Daveed Diggs, but our confidence is shaken somewhat by the fact that Disney’s sending In the Blink of an Eye straight to Hulu.
Warner Bros. Pictures
The Bride!
March 6
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second outing as a director is a wild pivot from 2021’s The Lost Daughter: it’s been described as a thriller, a satire, and an homage to The Bride of Frankenstein. Set in 1930s Chicago, the film finds Frankenstein’s Monster (Christian Bale) asking Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) to create a companion for him, which arrives in the form of the Bride (Jessie Buckley). What happens from there involves murder, mayhem, and, er, social change. It seems a gamble by Warners, but a bold one given the amount of talent involved, as well as the fact that Mary Shelley reworkings seem to be in season if Poor Thingsand Guillermo del Toro’s Frankensteinare anything to go by.
Disney Pixar
Hoppers
March 6
Hoppers might be an animated sci-fi movie about a human who accidentally sparks a nature rebellion after turning into a beaver, but no one will have trouble understanding the premise. As seen in the trailer that runs in front of Avatar: Fire and Ash, protagonist Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) explicitly describes the process of letting human minds “hop” into animal bodies “just like Avatar.” Although this is his first time helming a film since doing We Bare Bears: The Movie for Cartoon Network, director Daniel Chong, working off a script by Luca screenwriter Jesse Andrews, has been a longtime member of Pixar’s Senior Creative Team, which might mean that Hoppers will match the quality of the studio’s recent output.
Amazon MGM
Project Hail Mary
March 20
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are at last in the director’s chairs again for a live-action film after they were dismissed from Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. (Their last completed live-action effort, 22 Jump Street, came out in 2014.) This time, though, the newly Spider-Verse emboldened duo is adapting Andy Weir’s sci-fi bestseller. The movie stars Ryan Gosling as a man who wakes up on an interstellar ship with no recollection of how he got there. And soon he learns that he is the last hope for humanity. The marketing promises a high-concept adventure with plenty of thrills, humor, and that ol’ Gosling charm. The Weir connection also suggests this is particularly well-suited to the screen. See Ridley Scott’s adaptation of The Martian for more.
Searchlight Pictures
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
March 27
With the first Ready or Not, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, alongside writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, turned frustration over economic inequality into a rip-roaring slasher. The world hasn’t gotten any better in the six years since that movie released, which makes Ready or Not 2 one of the most anticipated horror movies of 2026. The creative quartet is back again along with Samara Weaving as Grace, who learns that surviving her wedding night with the murderous Le Domas family was just the start of the game. Now Grace must face a new family of players and her sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) has to do it with her.
Universal Pictures
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
April 3
After 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie became the most successful video game-based movie of all time (nearly $1.4 billion worldwide), there was no doubt that Illumination and Nintendo would immediately greenlight a sequel. And while the plot remains under wraps, any gamer with passing familiarity with the Nintendo Wii’s beloved Super Mario Galaxy is already expecting gravity-bending visuals and out-of-this-world shenanigans for the plumber brothers. Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Jack Black, Charlie Day, and Keegan-Michael Key are all returning to their signature roles from the first film, while Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic are again directing.
A24
The Drama
April 3
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are set to become the 2026 onscreen power couple, as they’ll be appearing in no fewer than three films together. But where The Odyssey and Dune: Part 3 puts them on mythic auteur game tables, The Drama keeps things focused on the personal. Directed by Kristoffer Borgli, The Drama follows the two stars as a betrothed pair who run into some sort of trouble on their way to the big day. What sort of trouble? We don’t know yet, but if Borgli’s previous movie Dream Scenario is any indication, it’s gonna get weird.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
April 17
Poor Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a throwback horror movie that originally began as a Blumhouse reimagining of the 1932 classic starring Boris Karloff over at Universal PIctures. But it seems that after Universal was able to lure Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz back for another sequel to the far more beloved 1999 iteration of the concept, Cronin’s reportedly true, blue horror flick somehow ended up at Warners. None of this makes it unwelcome though. It is, after all, helmed by the guy who gave us the absolutely sadistic Evil Dead Rise. So seeing him go ham on Egyptian mythology is intriguing even before you add in Midsommar’s Jack Reynor. Ra, Ra, Amun-Ra, eh?
Magnolia Pictures
Normal
April 17
Outside of Kill List and A Field in England, English filmmaker Ben Wheatley always seems to fall just slightly short of making an incredible movie. Normal might be Wheatley’s best chance yet, as he’s working off a script by John Wick co-creator Derek Kolstad and has a great cast that includes Bob Odenkirk as a stand-in sheriff for a quiet Minnesota town and Henry Winkler as the mayor. With that much talent involved, Normal’s sure to be a good time, even if it doesn’t become a cinematic classic.
Lionsgate
Michael
April 24
Most musical biopics sanitize their subjects beyond the point of recognition, in part because fans want to believe the people who made these hit songs were genius saints, and in part because the filmmakers need the artist’s permission to use the songs. That’s posed a particular problem for Lionsgate, who has been trying to get a Michael Jackson movie into theaters since 2019.
It’s not that Jackson doesn’t deserve a biopic; he’s one of the biggest artists of all time. Nor does Michael lack talent, with Antoine Fuqua directing and John Logan writing. Rather the problem is that abuse allegations are just as much a part of the singer’s legacy as his singing and dancing, meaning that Lionsgate and the Jackson estate have spent seven years trying to figure out how to make the film at least somewhat believable and an entertaining blockbuster. We don’t know if they pulled it off, but either way, Michael might be a mess worth noticing.
Netflix
Apex
April 24
Thrillers around rock climbing may be a small genre—Cliffhanger, Vertical Limit, uh… the start of Mission: Impossible II?—but they’re often satisfying. And this Netflix movie Apex adds an extra layer by giving their climbing thriller a survival element, as a sportsperson played by Charlize Theron must escape from a hunter (Taron Egerton) who has crossed her path. Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur directs from a script by Jeremy Robbins. We’re ready to grab a foothold.
20th Century Studios / Disney
The Devil Wears Prada 2
May 1
It’s time to get the devil her due, because Miranda Priestly is back in the long-rumored and hoped-for The Devil Wears Prada 2. Story details remain relatively tight-lipped, but we do know that despite having very different lanes of journalism in their purviews, Meryl Streep’s ice queen and Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs wind up in the same room again. The Dave Frankel-directed film also features the return of fan-favorite characters played by Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci.
Angel Studios
Animal Farm
May 1
Like his longer work Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell’s Animal Farm remains even more urgent and misunderstood today. Orwell wrote the novella as a Trotskyist warning against leaders like Stalin, using a fable about a barnyard revolution as a way to critique the young Soviet Union.
Judging by the first trailer, the latest adaptation of Animal Farm might do little to clear things up. The dream project of Andy Serkis, who directs a script by Nicholas Stoller, Animal Farm goes heavy on celebrity voices (Seth Rogen! Gaten Matarazzo! Glenn Close!) and fart jokes. Given its middle school take on Orwell, one hopes viewers won’t come away from this version of Animal Farm thinking that the book praises free market individualism.
Neon
Hokum
May 1
The average moviegoer still associates so-called elevated horror with A24, but with outings like Longlegs and Infinity Pool, Neon has been making a name for itself. The distributor will continue that development in 2026 with the release of Hokum, the latest from Irish director Damian McCarthy. Hokum follows a writer played by Adam Scott, who goes to Ireland to fulfill a family obligation only to find himself in a haunted house. If McCarthy’s previous films Caveat and Oddity are any indication, the hauntings will involve creeping dread and a dose of the uncanny.
Warner Bros. Pictures
Mortal Kombat II
May 8
Mortal Kombat II has certainly risen in the ranks of expectations. A sequel to the pretty-looking but somewhat divisively-received 2021 reboot of the franchise, Mortal Kombat, this sequel was originally pegged to be an October release date. But after enthusiastic test screenings and buzzy word-of-mouth, WB apparently got bullish about the Simon McQuoid-directed joint and moved the fighter to May of next year. It probably helps that the intended R-rated spectacle is bringing in a lot of fan-favorite characters and setups, including Karl Urban as an over-the-hill Johnny Cage who gets recruited into the titular tournament after his career as a movie star falls on hard times.
“The point where we find Johnny in this movie is very relatable to everybody, because he’s on the back foot in life,” Urban tells us in an exclusive cover story interview. “His career is in the tank, the world’s forgotten him, and he’s at a real low point. His confidence has been knocked, and it is at this very juncture that he is called upon to be at his best and to use his skillset to defend Earthrealm.” That leads to stunt work which the star teases has both humor and dexterity. “You also see specifically Van Damme, who in my opinion, was phenomenal, and Jackie Chan, who I drew huge inspiration from for the tone of some of Johnny Cage’s fights.”
Lucasfilm / Disney
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
May 22
It will be nearly seven years since a Star Wars movie blasted across the big screen by the time this comes out, which is hopefully long enough for the bad taste left by The Rise of Skywalker to have disappeared. Either way, director Jon Favreau and co-writer Dave Filoni’s new film is set to answer a hard question for the franchise: will vast amounts of people come out for a story that requires viewing at least one, if not two, shows that aired on Disney+? A little Pedro Pascal charisma, even in a mask, can’t hurt. Meanwhile, the Lucasfilm braintrust appears to be betting that there’s enough good faith—and enough fans still in love with Baby Yoda—to restore this aging franchise to cinematic glory.
NEON
I Love Boosters
May 22
Even though he only has one feature film (Sorry to Bother You) and an Amazon series (I’m a Virgo) under his belt, Boots Riley has already established a unique style. The frontman for the Leftist rap outfit the Coup, Riley combines in-your-face politics with insane plot scenarios, resulting in stories that provoke laughter and anger. He’s sure to do the same with I Love Boosters, the story of a shoplifting collective that takes up arms against a fashion icon. Demi Moore stars alongside Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige.
Masters of the Universe
June 5
Transformers and G.I. Joe have both enjoyed successful film franchises, and the My Little Pony television series was a genuine phenomenon. But despite a well-received Netflix revival, Masters of the Universe has lagged behind its fellow ‘80s toy properties, unable to escape the shadow of the infamous Cannon movie starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella. Laika co-founder Travis Knight is going to try to change that reputation with his take on Masters of the Universe. The 2026 take on He-Man stars Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam, who returns from Earth to claim his throne on Eternia. Compelling as that might be, Masters of the Universe does co-star Jared Leto as Skelator, which doesn’t bode well for its box office chances.
Power Ballad
June 5
As established by his debut movie Once, Irish musician turned director John Carney puts music on the screen better than almost anyone else. His latest movie Power Ballad seems to eschew the earnestness of Once, Sing Street, and Begin Again for something more openly comedic, as Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas play a rock star and a wedding singer who get locked in a battle of oneupmanship. That might sound like the plot of a Judd Apatow comedy from the 2010s, but Carney will certainly find some way to make the proceedings heartfelt.
Disclosure Day
June 12
After realizing two long-anticipated projects with the musical West Side Story and the semi-autobiographical The Fablemans, Steven Spielberg returns to more familiar ground for Disclosure Day. After a cryptic marketing campaign, we now have a trailer for the film, which features Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, and others responding to an alien presence, but we still don’t know much more than that. But we really don’t need to. Spielberg and aliens always go well together, and the War of the Worlds vibes of the Disclosure Day trailer only get us more excited.
Pixar / Disney
Toy Story 5
June 19
What do you do when you make a near-perfect trilogy of animated films? Why, you keep going, of course! And if you thought that Toy Story 4 was a risky add-on, then you’re probably even more fretful over Toy Story 5. But Pixar, in a bit of a slump these days, is going back to its original franchise one more time with Woody, Buzz, Jessie, Forky, and all the rest returning. This time, the gang must fight for Bonnie’s attention with a tablet named Lilypad (Anna Faris)—setting up a clash between toys and tech that has no doubt gripped many households in recent years.
Warner Bros. Pictures
Supergirl
June 26
In some sense, Supergirl might be more of a test of James Gunn’s DC Studios than even 2025’s Superman. While that DCU kickoff had a lot to prove, Supergirl is the first follow-up to gauge how much audiences bought in, including to a cliffhanger of Milly Alcock’s party gal Kryptonian. Luckily, this spinoff is based on one of the best superhero stories of the decade, Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which finds a far more haunted Kara Zor-El than CW fans might remember. It also comes from director Craig Gillespie, who’s had success in left-of-center genre-benders like I, Tonya, Cruella, and Lars and the Real Girl. Together with Alcock and Jason Momoa (as… Lobo?!), this one could have a whole different vibe.
Moana
July 10
Look, what can we say about Moana, the latest live-action remake of a Disney animated movie? As indicated by every one of the previous live-action remakes (besides Pete’s Dragon), Moana will be ugly, redundant, and completely forgotten before it even hits Disney+. And it will make a ton of money at the box office, which is why Disney keeps greenlighting these things.
The Odyssey
July 17
How do you follow up a three-hour, billion-dollar-grossing, Best Picture-winning historical drama about the invention of the atomic bomb? With an epic film based on an ancient Greek myth, naturally. Fantasy and mythology movies tend to sink at the box office unless the name Tolkien is attached to them, but if anyone can turn Homer’s landmark of Greek literature into box office gold, it’s Christopher Nolan, who did the same for a tormented nuclear physicist in Oppenheimer. As usual, the cast—led by Matt Damon as Odysseus—is stacked, and Nolan is perhaps the only director aside from James Cameron whose name alone puts butts in seats. Whatever The Odyssey ends up being, we don’t expect to call it modest.
Evil Dead Burn
July 24
The Evil Dead franchise seems like a series of movies inextricable from their principal creators Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell. Yet starting with the 2013 remake Evil Dead and continuing through Evil Dead Rise, the franchise has shown the ability to go beyond the slapstick stylings of its original creators. French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček, co-writing with Florent Bernard, hopes to continue that trend with Evil Dead Burn. Although we don’t yet know anything about the plot, it will probably involve terrible things happening someone reads from the Necronomicon, which is good enough for us.
Sony Pictures
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
July 31
Following up the $1.9 billion-grossing Spider-Man: No Way Home is no easy feat, but the MCU’s Tom Holland-led iteration of your friendly neighborhood webslinger seems to be one of the few bright spots of Marvel’s post-Infinity Saga daze. The usual rumors persist about villains, storylines, multiverse variants, and the like, but all we really know is that Spidey will once again be supported by other MCU favorites like Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk and Jon Bernthal’s Punisher, while the identity and exact nature of the main antagonist remain unknown. Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) replaces Jon Watts behind the camera for this one, and Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink joins returning cast members Zendaya and Jacob Batalon. Perhaps most interestingly, it’s speculated that this is Holland’s last non-Avengers stint in the red and blue suit.
Flowervale Street
August 14
Director David Robert Mitchell became a name to watch after his sensational sophomore film It Follows. And then his follow-up Under the Silver Lake either cemented that reputation or alienated moviegoers forever with its audacious, Thomas Pynchon-like mystery. What little we know about Flowervale Street—it follows a family who notices strange things in their neighborhood, and also dinosaurs are involved—suggests that this fourth film could go either way. But even if Mitchell decides to get weird again, a cast that includes Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway can only help Flowervale Street be more palatable to general audiences.
Insidious: The Bleeding World
August 21
It may not get as much attention as Saw or The Conjuring, but James Wan’s other horror franchise Insidious remains a reliable source of scares, especially after 2023’s surprisingly good Insidious: The Red Door. That film worked in part because it refocused attention on the central Lambert family after two prequels about demonologist Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye).
The Bleeding World will try to expand things again, bringing back Shaye as Rainer but putting her with new protagonists, played by Nope standout Brandon Perea and Amelia Eve from The Hauntingof Bly Manor. Newcomer Jacob Chase will direct and co-write, but he is working with Conjuring vet David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick.
The Dog Stars
August 28
No, Ridley Scott hasn’t decided to make a biopic about Keanu Reeves band from the ‘90s. Rather, The Dog Stars tells a post-apocalyptic tale about a pilot and an ex-marine navigating the world after a flu virus killed off most of humanity. Adapting a novel by Peter Heller, Scott directs from a script by Mark L. Smith and Christopher Wilkinson, with Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, and Margaret Qualley starring.
Coyote vs. Acme
August 28
Despite what some millennials might say about Space Jam, the Looney Toons have never really worked on the big screen. Yet, we can’t help but cheer for Coyote vs. Acme simply because Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav almost gave it the Batgirl treatment and buried it for a tax write-off before anyone could see it.
Based on a story by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater, and Samy Burch and directed by Dave Green, Coyote vs. Acme finally gives Wile E. Coyote his day in court. Will Forte and John Cena play opposing attorneys as the Coyote sues his infamously unreliable supplier. Will Coyote vs. Acme be as good as the Chuck Jones shorts that made the characters household names? Who knows, but people worked hard on it and deserves to be seen.
Clayface
September 11
Ever since he and Peter Safran became co-heads of DC Studios, James Gunn has said that he puts the story and script first. Nothing proves that better than the fact that B-list baddie Clayface gets his own movie before Batman. Gunn has insisted that he had no interest in making a movie about the shapeshifting Gotham City villain until writer Mike Flanagan came in with a pitch he couldn’t ignore. Directed by James Watkins and co-written by Hossein Amini, Clayface stars Tom Rhys Harries as actor Matt Hagan, who becomes titular monster.
Sense and Sensibility
September 11
Even though it came out more than 30 years ago, Ang Lee’s quiet take on Sense and Sensibility has dissuaded other directors from trying their hands at the Jane Austen classic. However, director Georgia Oakley and screenwriter Diana Reid are ready to give it a shot. Their version stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor Dashwood, who must navigate difficult economic waters after the death of her father. Esmé Creed-Miles and Bodhi Rae Breathnach co-star as Elinor’s sisters, Frank Dillane plays half-brother John, while Herbert Nordrum and George MacKay play love interests Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars, respectively.
Resident Evil
September 18
Zach Cregger’s career has been nothing but surprise after surprise. First, he worked with the sketch troupe The Whitest Kids U Know and co-directed the panned Miss March alongside late castmate Trevor Moore. Then, after appearing in a few sitcoms, Cregger directed two incredible and shocking horror films with Barbarian and Weapons.
All of which to say is that who shouldn’t be too shocked by Cregger’s pivot to helm a relaunch of Resident Evil, a video game adaptation that has already spawned several cult direct-to-video movies. Fittingly, we don’t know much about Resident Evil, other than it stars Weapons stand out Austin Abrams, Paul Walter Hauser, and Zach Cherry. Which is fine by us. We’re ready for another surprise.
Kevin Winter / Getty Images
Digger
October 2
Even though we now have a trailer and a title for the first collaboration between Birdman and The Revenant director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise, we still don’t know anything about their movie Digger. All we see are shots of Cruise, dressed in shorts and boots, dancing to a Gorillaz track while holding a shovel, before getting the title card, which looks a lot like the Saul Bass poster for 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder. What does this mean? We don’t know, but we’re just happy to see Cruise working on an original film again, especially when he’s joining a cast that includes Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg.
The Social Reckoning
October 9
In these dark days, it’s easy to mock the self-satisfied and whip-smart dialogue that Aaron Sorkin wrote for The West Wing and The Newsroom. But even the angriest Sorkin hater has to admit that he created something special when he teamed with David Fincher for The Social Network. Which is why we’re more than a bit worried about Sorkin’s decision to write and direct his sequel to the 2010 biopic about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. As its title suggests, The Social Reckoning plans to wrestle with Facebook’s role in modern elections, with Jeremy Strong stepping in for Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg and Mikey Madison as whistleblower Frances Haugen.
Paramount.
Street Fighter
October 16
Look, we freaks here at Den of Geek love the 1994 Street Fighter and we won’t apologize for it. But we do understand that gamers may resent that movie’s, we’ll say, inattentive approach to the source material. So we share their excitement for the upcoming installment by director Kitao Sakurai and writer Dalan Musson.
Judging by the first looks, Street Fighter 2026 plans to stick to the games with its accurate costumes and tournament structure. But it also seems to be following in the 1994 movie’s crazy footsteps, with a cast that includes not just Noah Centineo and Andrew Koji as heroes Ken and Ryu, but also David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, wrestlers Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes, comedian Eric André, and musicians 50 Cent and Orville Peck.
Remain
October 23
Since 2014’s The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan has been pulling a giant twist on moviegoers, bouncing back from stinkers like The Last Airbender and After Earth with a series of satisfying and surprisingly heartfelt B-movies. His latest film Remain may be his greatest shock yet, as he’s adapting a story by Nicolas Sparks, the author of audacious romance novels like The Notebook. The premise sure sounds like a Sparks story, as Jake Gyllenhaal plays an architect who returns to his beachside hometown and meets a compelling young woman. Here’s hoping M. Night will work in some of that horror movie magic to make Remain into something truly weird.
Lionsgate
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping
November 20
With the success of 2023’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Lionsgate and director Francis Lawrence adapting Suzanne Collins’ next prequel novel, Sunrise on the Reaping, is a smart bet. Set some four decades after Songbirds & Snakes, and just 24 years before the events of The Hunger Games (2012), this film stars Joseph Zada as a young Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson in the original movies) as he competes and (no spoiler) wins in the 50th Hunger Games. Yet the trials and tragedies he faces along the way have made this novel a fan favorite since its publication. Once again, the story’s young tributes will be supported by all-star veterans, including Jesse Plemons, Ralph Fiennes, Kieran Culkin, Elle Fanning, and Glenn Close. Meanwhile, Mckenna Grace plays Maysilee Donner, a young tribute who has captured the minds of millions of readers.
Walt Disney Animation
Hexed
November 25
The latest Disney animation project sure sounds like the makings of House of Mouse classic. Hexed focuses on a teenage boy who discovers his odd-ball behavior is actually proof that he has magic abilities, which stresses out his high-strung mother. Whether Hexed can deliver on that premise remains to be seen, but it has a pair of Disney veterans at the helm in Josie Trinidad and Jason Hand.
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew
November 26
In the 2010s, Walden Media tried to adapt three movies from C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and, despite their excellent casts and massive budgets, failed to match the charm of the novels or of the BBC movies from the late 1980s. Enter Greta Gerwig, hot off her massive success with Barbie, who takes a crack at the series for Netflix. Instead of starting with the first book The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Gerwig’s adapting the prequel The Magician’s Nephew, which details the creation of Narnia by the Godlike lion Aslan. David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell play the two children who arrive in the new land, while Emma Mackey portrays Jadis, the evil White Witch.
This could be the franchise-starter Netflix has been searching for.
Amazon MGM Studios
Madden
November 26
Madden is a biopic about the famous football coach, TV commentator, and video game icon, directed by David O. Russell and starring Nicolas Cage and Christian Bale. That sentence pretty much sums up the entire appeal—and potential for disaster—that Madden poses. Russell always goes big, sometimes resulting in a glossy, overstuffed crowd-pleaser like Silver LiningsPlaybook and sometimes resulting in the nightmare that is Amsterdam.
Avengers: Doomsday
December 18
This is it: high noon for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is the one that features the return of Infinity War/Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo, Robert Downey Jr. coming back not as Iron Man but Doctor Doom, the inclusion of the OG Fox X-Men cast, the rumored appearance of everyone from Chris Evans to Ryan Reynolds… and it all adds up to either a Hail Mary pass of titanic proportions or a glorious relaunch to box office dominance. Don’t let the reports of an unfinished script or extended reshoots fool you; Marvel can pull this off—they’ve done so in the past—but the question is whether the Avengers brand still has the power to bring the MCU back from its recent decline.
WB
Dune: Part Three
December 18
Denis Villeneuve’s first two Dune movies were arguably the most epic, visionary genre releases since Peter Jackson bestowed The Lord of the Rings on us 20 years earlier. But concluding a trilogy has been the downfall of many a filmmaker, and Villeneuve faces a formidable task here. The movie will ostensibly be based on Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah, a very different story from the original and in many ways a more difficult one to imagine as a film. But if Villeneuve keeps the core of the novel—the willful self-destruction of Paul Atreides—intact, he can stick this landing like a breaking Shai-Hulud. We’re rooting for him all the way.
Focus Features
Werwulf
December 25
With his four previous movies, writer/director Robert Eggers has proven himself as the master of grim, atmospheric period horror (yes, even The Northman was a horror story in its own way). He immerses us in barbaric worlds of the past like no other filmmaker currently working. Having conquered the most seminal of vampire tales with Nosferatu, he’s now turning his attention to lycanthropy with what he himself calls “the darkest thing I have ever written,” an original werewolf story set in 13th-century England. Blood, gore, mud, and disease? Sounds like Eggers is going to have us howling in terror when this thing crawls toward holiday theaters.
The Death of Robin Hood
TBD
If you’re going to give Robin Hood the Old Man Logan treatment, then you might as well get Hugh Jackman to do it, and that’s exactly what writer/director Michael Sarnoski has done with The Death of Robin Hood. Jackman plays a Robin Hood at the end of his life, coming to terms with the legend that’s built up around him, a legend that he considers at odds with his actual works. Jodie Comer co-stars as a woman who watches over the critically injured Robin as he thinks about his whole life, while Bill Skarsgård plays Little John, presumably in flashbacks. Whatever one feels about The Death of Robin Hood‘s treatment of the legend, or its running over ground already trod by Robin and Marian, we’re most excited to see what Sarnoski will do after winning our hearts forever with his excellent debut Pig.
Can Avengers: Doomsday Fix the Problems of Black Panther 2?
“A king has his duties, to prepare our people for the afterlife,” declares Shuri, the current Black Panther, in the latest trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Presumably, Shuri delivers these lines to either King M’Baku of Wakanda or King Namor of Talokan, or perhaps both. Like Steve Rogers, Thor, and the X-Men, the stars of the other Doomsday trailers previously released, Black Panther will face a world-ending threat in the form of Doctor Doom. To face that threat, she’s gathered not just her fellow Wakandans and her one-time enemy Namor, but also Ben Grimm a.k.a. the Thing of the Fantastic Four.
Exciting as it is to see all these beloved characters again, Shuri’s heavy narration and the presence of Namor only underscores the disappointment we felt the last time we saw them. After the cultural event that was the first Black Panther from 2018, the sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was a disappointment in a number of ways. The sight of Namor and the Wakandans isn’t just another familiar face in a movie filled with our favorites. Instead, it gives us hope that the characters can rebound from their lackluster last adventure.
A New Struggle
Before we go further, we need to make two things clear. First, Wakanda Forever director Ryan Coogler is clearly one of the best blockbuster filmmakers working today. The Russo Brothers… are not. If you need proof, just contrast the two most recent movies made by the directors. You will find Sinners in most critics top ten lists of 2026. The Electric State will only show up on any worst of the year lists that some outlets run.
Second, Coogler faced an impossible challenge when it came time for a sequel to Black Panther. Not only did he need to try to replicate the excitement and artistry of the first film, but he unexpectedly lost his lead actor when Chadwick Boseman died at the age of 43. Beyond the immense personal grief he must have endured, Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole had to completely revamp their film, now including a change in regime along with the original plan to have Black Panther face off against Namor, his nemesis from the comics.
In light of that fact, Wakanda Forever is far better than it has any right to be. Coogler and his co-creators created incredible spectacle, including the initial attack of the Talokans and every single line delivered by Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda. Furthermore, Wakanda Forever has more thematic weight than nearly any other MCU film, delivering not just superhero action but also a story about the Western world’s refusal to stop plundering African and Latin American nations.
Yet, for all it does right, there’s no question that Wakanda Forever disappoints. Letitia Wright may have thrived when Shuri was a snotty teen who knew she was smarter than everyone else, but she struggled to play the character’s internal complications and ability to lead when she became the new Black Panther. Coogler and Cole created an incredible cast of characters for the first film, but most of them get pushed aside for the sequel. Instead, much of Wakanda Forever is given over to Everett K. Ross, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, and Riri Williams, all plot points that seem more interested in setting up Secret Invasion, Thunderbolts*, and Ironheart instead of advancing Wakanda’s story.
In short, instead of being a remembrance of times past and a celebration of the future, Wakanda Forever was a dour, overstuffed, mess. Which brings us to Avengers: Doomsday.
Doom For Wakanda?
Outside of the loss of its star, any problems that faced Wakanda Forever are 10 times worse for Doomsday. Not only is the film going to bring back nearly every major character from the MCU and from at least the X-Men movies, if not Spider-Man and other non-Marvel entries as well, but it will revisit the first three phases while closing the second three phases and, presumably, setting up the next three. Even though this work will be split across both Doomsday and its immediate sequel Secret Wars, that’s a lot of plot ground to cover and a ton of characters to check in on.
Fortunately, the problems of Wakanda Forever aren’t so great that they can’t be at least addressed even with limited screen time in Doomsday. All of Shuri’s talk about preparing her people for the afterlife suggests that she’s coming to the end of her time as Black Panther, which supports rumors that either T’Challa will be recast in the multiversal adventure of Doomsday or that his son Toussaint, introduced at the end of Wakanda Forever, will be aged up to take the mantle.
Whatever they choose, it would be better to let Wright play to her strengths as a carefree genius, not the haunted leader she was forced to become. Also, the new teaser features M’Baku, suggesting that he’ll be further elevated to a place of prominence, at least within Wakanda, something only gestured at in Wakanda Forever.
Finally, if Doomsday simply acknowledges that Wakanda matter, more than the battleground it was in Avengers: Infinity War, then the movie will have gone a long way to correct the problems of Wakanda Forever. Instead of being a place where characters like Ross, De Fontaine, and Williams play out their own plans, Wakanda can be its own nation, just as important as Namor’s Talokan or, of course, Doom’s Latveria.
At the very least, Doomsday has to avoid making things worse for Wakandans, at least until Coogler comes back for Black Panther 3... and hopefully gets to fully create his vision, unimpeded by personal tragedy or franchise building mandates.
Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters on December 18, 2026.
Breaking Down the Big Changes in A Thousand Blows Season 2
The following contains spoilers for A Thousand Blows season 2.
Hulu series A Thousand Blows was one of last year’s most intriguing offerings, a Victorian-set period drama about bare-knuckle boxing and the vaguely criminal underworld at the heart of London’s gritty East End. From the mind of Steven Knight, the man behind such shows like Peaky Blinders and House of Guinness, it featured a sprawling cast richly drawn characters and plenty of contemporary themes, with plots that wrestled with racism, misogyny, tradition, and the class conflict at the center of an ever-industrializing London.
It’s almost immediately apparent, however, that the second season of A Thousand Blows is an outing that’s markedly different than its first. The subject matter is grimmer, the characters find themselves in darker and more dangerous positions, and the overall vibe is generally a lot more depressing. Most major players are kept siloed in their own stories this season, and almost everyone is in mourning for a life they once had (or thought they could attain). With so much change and separation — and a reframing of the central boxing rivalry that drive the bulk of season 1 – almost everyone, but most especially Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby), Mary Carr (Erin Doherty) and Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham) find their mettle tested in new and unforeseen ways.
Here’s a rundown of some of the big changes and reveals from A Thousand Blows season 2 and what they might mean for the show’s future, with a little help from the series’ creators and cast.
There’s a Lot Less Boxing, But There’s a Reason for That
For a show that’s ostensibly about Victorian-era boxing, there’s surprisingly little fighting in A Thousand Blows season 2. Sure, there’s still lots of other kinds of drama, including a violent revenge plot, an elaborate art heist, some gang drama, crippling alcoholism, and grief. But the number of punches thrown has decreased by an order of magnitude, particularly when compared to last season. And that, at least according to Knight, is on purpose.
“We’ve established we’re a show about boxing. But in the second season, unless boxing is telling us something about the relationships of the characters, it’s just a given. Do you know what I mean?” Knight told Den of Geek. “Season 1 is doing the work of getting the characters established and hopefully getting them into the hearts of the audience. Then, in season 2, I wanted to gradually delve deeper. I wanted to take the characters on their own paths, and then have the gravity of their relationships bring them back together, slowly throughout the season.”
Sugar, the infamous boxer whose fists played such a central role in the show’s first outing, has spent the year between seasons living on the street, estranged from his family, absent from the sport he loved, and generally in a state that can only be described as perpetually drunk and borderline ill. His journey to find his feet again is one that’s both literal and figurative, as he fights for both sobriety and the reunion of the family he helped fracture last season.
“The journey that Sugar goes on, obviously, we find him at a very low point,” Knight said. “What I really wanted was to replicate that moment from the start of season 1, that shock when we see Stephen Graham as Sugar Goodson, but this time I wanted the audience to wonder, can that be him? Really? He’s this now. And then over the course of the season, he becomes himself again. But is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing?”
While Sugar’s lingering anger toward Hezekiah is a major plot point in season 2, the character’s primary arc this season is about his relationships and the mess he’s made of them. After beating Treacle (James Nelson-Joyce) to pulp in last year’s finale, Sugar is reunited with his younger brother when they’re both at their lowest points, and how both men find a way to move forward.
“I mean, I’ve always been in love with Stephen,” Nelson-Joyce said. “So for me it was always really easy to do that little brother thing of looking up at him and going, yeah, you’re the coolest person in the world. Obviously, their relationship is fractured at the start of season 2 and Treacle, but you see in season 1 how important his family is to [Treacle], including his brother in that. And to see that it’s all just disappearing from him now, it’s slipping through his fingers. So when he sees Sugar turn up in that first scene… obviously, we’ve got to help him, to try and save his life and get him back on track.”
Getting What You Want Doesn’t Guarantee Happiness
One of the big thematic lessons of A Thousand Blows’ second season is about what happens when you finally get what you want. For almost everyone on the canvas, achieving a major goal — a successful heist, a win in the ring, etc. — isn’t the panacea they once dreamed it could be.
“Hezekiah and Mary, they have their own ambitions and trajectories. They think they know what they want to achieve and they achieve it,” Knight said. “But once they do, it completely changes the way they look at the world.”
Hezekiah successfully returns to the ring, manages to earn the respect and friendship of a future King of England, and even reclaims the land that once belonged to him in Jamaica. But these accomplishments don’t come with the satisfaction he hoped for.
“I guess Hezekiah does want those things, but it’s in response to not actually being able to get the things he actually wants. You know what I mean? I think he’d love to have his best friend back. I think he’d love to be boxing. I think he’d even love to be in a relationship with this one,” Kirby said, laughingly pointing at Doherty. “A relationship that feels safe and loving, and something that it’s not right now. So he’s having to have different wants, which I think is a survival tactic in and of itself. Because I think, if you don’t have any hopes for anything, then it’s like, how do you even get up the next day? I think he settled for those kinds of things once. But what I really think he ultimately wants at this point is community and a space to thrive in.”
For Mary, what she wants is to fix the mistakes of last season. She wants her girls back, she wants her gang’s power back, she wants to be Queen of the Forty Elephants once more.
“I think Mary wants to have everyone in her life back in her life,” Doherty said. “I think where we’ve left her after season 1 is, it’s all fallen apart for her really. And so she could go down the route that Hez goes down, which is just complete absolute emptiness: “What do I do now? I’m just obliterated as a being.” But I think she can’t let that affect her because if she does, then everything truly will be gone. So I think she’s forced to be the one who picks up the pieces. So I think what she’s learning is that to achieve her wants, she has to go about things in a different way. She has to switch her perception from herself, admittedly, onto other people.”
The death of her mother is a particularly life-altering event for Mary, one that forces her to confront the possibility that the very goal she’s spent so long chasing after (being the leader of the Forty Elephants) will ultimately be a much emptier victory than she realized.
“Whether we like it or not, our parental figures are so informative to who we are and the way we choose to live our lives,” Doherty says. “And really, Mary is forced to face in that moment everything that her mother wasn’t. There’s a lot of sadness there, the realization that not only has this person left her life, but her mother doesn’t have anything to show for all the things she’s done. They don’t have anything to show for it. And it’s a real emptiness that is so upsetting.”
The Series’s Best Relationship Spends Most of the Season Apart
Knight’s plan to set each of its three leads on their own personal journeys in season 2 means that this outing gives the story’s primary characters fewer reasons than ever to interact. It’s not a shock that Hezekiah and Mary start the season on difficult terms, given that she kept damaging secrets about his best friend’s murder, and he accidentally beat a guy to death. But viewers will likely be surprised at just how little time the two spend together onscreen. Yet, A Thousand Blows still manages to keep their relationship front and center thematically, as both search for a meaning they can ultimately only find in one another.
“Honestly, I think it’s just there,” Doherty said when asked about maintaining her onscreen bond with her co-star across a season where they don’t share the screen that often. “I think we felt it in the first chemistry read, and I think we’ve been building it throughout the season. Like anyone, say, any of my greatest friends or family, I can be away from them for years and then see them, and it’s like we’ve barely been apart for a day. Do you know what I mean? So I think we can spend scenes and scenes apart — even though that’s not my ideal! — and still have that connection there, because it’s a true one.”
For Doherty, the pair’s separation is an “active” one, something that allows them both to follow their own paths, but still acknowledge the connection between them.
“I love that scene when we are at the bar, and we’ve just had the big explosive moment, but then we’re just sitting quite pleasantly in each other’s company for the first time since it’s all happened,” she said “That’s the first moment that you really see, ‘Oh, these two people do want to make it work. They just don’t have the tools yet.’ And so that was a little glimpse for me about the active [nature of their] separation. And rather than going, “Oh, we don’t have much time [together].” It’s going, “Oh, okay, but how can I use that? How can I use that gap to really show their desire for each other?” Because I think they’re supposed to be together, whether they like it or not. They’re just supposed to be with each other, but they’re both learning how to meet in the middle.”
Knight, for his part, leans into the “gravity” and “inevitability” of the pair’s relationship, which he says remains evident even when they aren’t necessarily sharing the screen.
“I think that the relationship between Mary and Hezekiah has a feeling of inevitability about it, and that’s exactly what it should have,” Knight said. “There’s a gravity to [that relationship]. And I think that’s a testament to the quality of our actors. When you’ve got actors of this quality, you can have a situation where no words about a topic are said, but you, the audience, know exactly what’s going on and where everyone stands. You can see that, despite everything, actually what they really want is each other.”
A New Queen of the Forty Elephants Is Crowned
Season 2’s story largely revolves around a complicated heist plot in which the Forty Elephants scheme to steal a valuable Caravaggio from a wealthy collector. In the process, Mary’s young protegee, Alice Diamond (Darci Shaw), takes center stage, serving a key role in both the painting’s theft and the group’s larger scheme to trick the American mesmerist (Catherine McCormack) planning to double-cross them.
“Alice Diamond was a real-life person, and she was amazing,” Shaw told Den of Geek. “When I read about her and some of the things she’d done and the background she came from, I quickly understood how truly ballsy, for lack of a better word, she was. She was so confident and so business-minded, she knew how to get away with all kinds of crime, and she evaded the police constantly. She was pretty epic.”
Though there are moments throughout the season where viewers are made to question Alice’s loyalty to Mary, in the end, the Forty Elephants triumph. And Alice herself is crowned as the group’s new leader, taking over its London operations while Mary heads to America and kicking off a new era for the series’s girl gang.
“Alice is Mary’s girl because she’s the one who put the trust in her initially, to take her into the Forty Elephants in the first place,” Shaw said. “She’s got Mary’s back, they’ve got each other, really. But I do think she’s gonna like being in charge. I don’t think the girls are going to like it, and she’s definitely going to get some pushback. The thing with Alice is that she lacks a little in empathy, and I feel like she’d be quite regimented and not have any sympathy for people who don’t like [her orders]. It’d be interesting to see, but I think she’d be pretty good.”
What A Thousand Blows Season 3 Might Involve
Though A Thousand Blows season 2 concludes in a fairly satisfying fashion — most characters have relatively stable if not entirely happy endings — it still feels like there’s plenty of story left to tell about Knight’s version of Victorian London. The Forty Elephants have now gone international. Mary and Hezekiah are finally together romantically, though they now have to figure out how to make a real relationship work. The Goodson family is reunited, facing an uncertain future. And Alice now sits in Mary’s place as the head (princess?) of the Elephants’ London branch. There are still endless possibilities for where the show could take these characters next.
“It’s difficult because we are embargoed from talking about season 3, so I can’t really speculate unless I’m officially speculating,” Knight said with a smile when asked about the series’s future. “So it’s tricky… but let me put it this way. The Forty Elephants, in reality, was still in existence in the 1950s. They were still a force in London in the ’50s, which means there’s a lot of story to be told. And I would love to tell more of that story.”
When it comes to the Goodsons, Knight also offers viewers a bit of hope that Sugar and Mary might find a way to patch up their badly damaged friendship, even after his betrayal and her ostensible move to America.
“Funny you should ask that,” Knight said when asked about the former friends’ bond. “If we get a season 3, we’ll find out. Can they move past this? But they’ve known each other since they were young. I think what I like to explore in general is the idea that relationships are very robust. Like a leg, you can break it, and it’ll mend. And so I think that I have every faith in that relationship.”
Knight’s not the only one with thoughts about what a third season should include.
“I feel like the story’s not finished,” Nelson-Joyce said. “And we don’t know where it goes next. It would be nice, I think, if we did get a season 3 to see the brothers come back together, maybe try to build The Blue Coat Boy back up again. Or try and get back into boxing, something like that.”
Out of everyone, Hezekiah and Mary probably get the closest thing to a happily ever after that exists in this universe: A fresh start (at least for the moment) in America and a chance for the two to navigate their relationship on their own terms. And both of the actors who play them are eager to see what their future holds together.
“Up to this point, I think they’ve been trying to do life apart, Kirby said. “And even when they were coming together, it wasn’t about them being together. It was about what they could achieve individually together. And so I think what’s next for them, possibly what I’d like to see anyway, is what they can achieve by actually collaborating. Not working for selfish gain, but trusting each other’s space and going, ‘Actually, with my dreamlike qualities and your know-how to get things done, and combining the two, let’s just see what that can create.'”
Doherty is quick to agree. “There’s something really genuinely, as Erin, exciting about the idea of what that authentic meeting in the middle could look like,” she said. “And I don’t think either of them knows because neither of them has committed to what that could be with anyone else before.”
All six episodes of A Thousand Blows season 2 are now available to stream on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ in the U.K.
Why The Traitors Season 4 Secret Twist Didn’t Work
This article contains spoilers for The Traitors season 4 episodes 1-3.
The Traitors is back with another season packed with stars, lies, and strategy. And this time, it has introduced a secret traitor twist. It’s a clever idea in theory, but one that immediately fell apart thanks to one fatal flaw.
For those uninitiated, The Traitors is a reality competition series that first aired in 2023, which was based on the Netherlands’ De Verraders. The success of the show’s concept spread to the U.K. in 2022 and gained immense popularity in the U.S. soon after. The premise is essentially an extended game of Mafia, minus the doctors and cops, with host Alan Cumming prowling around a castle and savoring every syllable he delivers. The cast is typically made up of reality stars and notable figures, divided into Traitors and Faithfuls. Each round, the Traitors secretly “murder” a player while the Faithfuls attempt to identify and vote them out.
If the Faithfuls eliminate all the Traitors by the end of the game, they split the prize money. If even one Traitor survives undetected, that person walks away with the entire pot; this happened in season 1, when former Survivor star Cirie Fields managed to make it all the way to the finale. The following two seasons saw Faithful victories, making this season’s twist feel like an effort to swing the balance back in the Traitors’ favor.
The secret Traitor is hidden not only from the Faithfuls, but from the other Traitors and the audience as well. Each week, the secret Traitor would submit a short list of potential murder victims, from which the known Traitors, Rob Rausch (Love Island USA), Candiace Dillard-Bassett (The Real Housewives of Potomac), and Lisa Rinna (The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), would choose.
The twist was clearly designed to delay suspicion and eventually unite all four Traitors. Instead, by the beginning of episode three, the Faithfuls successfully identified and eliminated the secret traitor: Donna Kelce.
The famous mother of NFL stars Jason and Travis Kelce, Donna was simply a poor choice for this role. Although she didn’t play badly, her name recognition and not-quite-made-for-reality-TV demeanor made her stand out immediately. Tiffany Mitchell (Big Brother) was the first to clock her, interpreting Donna’s quietness and lack of alliance-building as the behavior of someone who knew they couldn’t be murdered. Candiace echoed the suspicion because she “just felt” it was Donna, which unfortunately for Mama Kelce, was enough.
Targeting quieter houseguests, or someone the Faithfuls believe would be an easy vote, becomes a convenient way to thin out the herd. As Donna said herself at the round table, going after her felt like “low-hanging fruit.”
Still, she didn’t go down without a fight. After surviving episode two’s banishment, Donna attempted to lead conversations and connect more intentionally with the group. But the narrative was already locked in. When the votes came down, nearly everyone wrote her name.
Upon her elimination, Donna revealed that her strategy was to lay low as a sweet mom fangirling over the celebrities. However, I don’t quite believe her game plan would have changed if she was a Faithful. She’s genuinely a mild-mannered Midwesterner who was thrilled to be in the same room as Lisa Rinna and felt a little shy in such a large group. The irony, of course, is that she’s probably the most famous person in the cast right now.
However, Donna may have helped the Traitors more than she knows. Her short lists targeted players she felt were flying under the radar. Those players also happened to be the Traitors’ biggest threats. Ian Terry (Big Brother) was known as an elite deceiver and competition expert; eliminating him early was a massive win. Rob Cesternino (Survivor) was the only player to figure out that there was a murder-in-plain-sight in episode two. Whether intentional or not, Donna set the traitors up beautifully from behind the scenes.
She also wisely excluded Michael Rapaport (actor) from her lists. From episode one, it was clear that he was a loose cannon and anything but a team player. By keeping his name off the table, Donna denied the Traitors the chance to eliminate one of their most valuable assets, even if he was insufferable. Michael’s loudness and round table monologues serve as a perfect distraction, and the Traitors can hide behind his larger-than-life presence and remain unsuspected.
As a result, the twist unraveled almost immediately, and viewers never got to see all the Traitors unite. Perhaps, if they wouldn’t have picked the cast member that stuck out like a sore thumb among the rest, it wouldn’t have gone this way. Still, the season is far from doomed. Rob R. has emerged as the Traitors’ strongest asset. He’s someone the Faithfuls would want to keep around: he’s athletic, highly motivated in group challenges, and therefore a lucrative asset to the Faithfuls looking to build the prize pot.
To me, picking Lisa as a traitor is a little too obvious (I wouldn’t be surprised if she only signed the contract because she was promised this role). This actually works out in her favor though because now the houseguests almost think she’s too obvious of a pick, so Lisa’s gone relatively unsuspected. Plus, any unnatural or heightened behavior from her can be explained away by her outsized personality. Candiace, however, remains the group’s biggest liability as someone who indulges in a little too much table talk and finger pointing.
If this season proves anything, it’s that poor strategy doesn’t always lose the game—poor casting does. The secret traitor twist may be dead, but this season is just getting started.
New episodes of The Traitors premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on Peacock, culminating with the finale on February 26.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Captain Wears Glasses and That Matters
Even before the first episode has released, the promotional material for Star Trek: Starfleet Academyhas been generating a lot of buzz. There’s been talk about Paul Giamatti getting to indulge his inner-Trekkie while chewing scenery, whether CW-style teen drama belongs in Star Trek, and about still not giving us Star Trek: Legacy. But there’s one part of the early Starfleet Academy footage we’ve seen that deserves more attention: the fact that Captain Nahla Ake of the USS Athena, chancellor of Starfleet Academy, wears glasses.
In the first scene released from the show, Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) deals with a sudden threat in classic Star Trek fashion, getting information from her bridge crew. To take a better look at a monitor, Ake pulls on a pair of peepers. That’s a surprising choice, one that tells us everything we need to know about this new leader.
Seeing the Future
Eyeglasses may be common in our world, but they rarely show up in Trek. There are two famous examples of people with eyewear in the Star Trek franchise. One, of course, is Geordi LaForge, who wore a VISOR (Visual Instrument and Sensory Organ Replacement) across all seven seasons ofStar Trek: The Next Generation.
But those weren’t glasses. They fed Geordi’s brain different types of sensory impulses, which were similar to those of eyesight, but functioned differently. Not only did they pick up things that human eyes could not, such as UV light, but the signals produced images that made no sense to sighted people. When Picard looks through Geordi’s VISOR in season 1’s “The Heart of Glory,” the images make no sense to them because he’s interpreting them through different processes. Thus, when Geordi starts wearing ocular implants in Star Trek: First Contact, effectively gaining a new set of eyes, he stops wearing the VISOR.
The technological advancements of Geordi’s VISOR and implants underscore a point made by the second most pronounced use of glasses in Star Trek, the pair that Bones gives Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
The glasses are McCoy’s way of ribbing Jim about his advancing age (a topic they’ll revisit in each of the next four movies). It’s not just that Kirk is old and his eyesight is failing; it’s also that they are an antique, a relic of the past, just like the Captain-turned-Admiral himself. In fact, Bones even states that he usually prescribes something called Retinax V for vision loss.
Between the reference to Retinax V and the gift, McCoy highlights a fact about the 24th Century and beyond: people don’t need glasses. Of course, Trek has always tried to be forward-looking, finding a balance between celebrating scientific achievements and not erasing different abilities or modes of expression. As Stephanie Roehler wrote for StarTrek.com, Geordi keeps his VISOR and implants (and Picard stays bald) because “accommodations, function, and acceptance are prized over being more ‘normal.'”
An Intentional Look
Which brings us back to Nahla Ake’s decision to strap on a pair of spectacles. She obviously puts them on to serve a purpose, getting a better look at the screen. And she seems to treat them like any other piece of ship’s equipment, as demonstrated by the way she hands them to her XO Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) before dispensing orders.
Thus, her decision to wear glasses isn’t a mere fashion choice. Rather, it’s a strategic choice, part of the mentality that makes her a captain and a teacher. Nahla Ake is part Lanthanite, a new species introduced with Pelia in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. While we still don’t know much about Lanthanites, we do know this: they live for a very long time and they develop attachments to the chotchkes they collect. Sometimes, these collections can help out in a jam, as when Pelia had to run landline phones throughout the Enterprise in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” from season 3. But usually, Lanthanites collect things to remember the past, to keep record of the connections they make to people who have come in gone in their long lifetimes.
When Nahla Ake puts on a pair of glasses, she’s making a connection to the past. She’s grounding herself in some long gone moment before making a decision like the orders she gives. That connection to the past is particularly important when one remembers that Starfleet Academy takes place after the final seasons of Discovery, in the 32nd century. The connection she made may very well go all the way back to before The Original Series, possibly even Enterprise.
We can read two things from Nahla Ake’s decision to wear glasses. One, that she cares about people. Presumably, she keeps the glasses because they remind her of someone from the past, someone now long since expired. The fact that she, a person who lives so long and forms so many relationships would prioritize a single person, tells us that she’s not going to be one who too quickly puts the needs of the many before the needs of the few.
Second, the decision tells us that she trusts what she knows. She’s certainly not a luddite and will make use of modern technology. She’s the captain of a 32nd century starship, after all. But she clearly has faith in a simple pair of eyeglasses that she doesn’t extend to a VISOR or ocular implants. This tells us that she’s not the type of captain who will go chasing after the latest fad. She makes her decisions slowly and thoughtfully.
The Captain’s Style
These two qualities of Nahla Ake matter precisely because there are so many questions around Starfleet Academy. Trek has never done teen drama before and there are legitimate concerns about melding a genre known for big emotions and bad decisions with a franchise that prioritizes reason and professionalism.
It’s still too early to say if Starfleet Academy will work as a Star Trek show, but when Nahla Ake puts on her glasses, we can plainly see she’s the right type of captain.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.
X-Men: The On-Screen Deaths of Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ranked
Professor Charles Xavier is back! The third teaser for Avengers: Doomsday shows Patrick Stewart in his Professor X digs once again, sitting in the Xavier Mansion alongside his old frenemy Magneto, once again portrayed by Ian McKellan. While the teaser boasts the return of the cast of the 2000s X-Menmovies, including James Marsden as Cyclops in blue and yellow spandex, that return comes in a movie about the end of the Marvel Multiverse. Which means that Professor X is likely not long for this world.
Xavier’s demise won’t come as a surprise, and not just because of Doomsday‘s apocalyptic stakes. After all, not only have we seen Professor X die on screen multiple times before, but we’ve seen Professor X as played by Patrick Stewart come to an end in three different movies. (Yes, just three movies; the past changes right before he gets cooked by a Sentinel inX-Men: Days of Future Past, so that doesn’t count). So before we get to watch Stewart’s latest take on Xavier’s final moments, let’s rank his previous three death rattles.
3. Explosive Retribution in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Although he started out as a completely benevolent figure in the 1960s, by the comics of the early 1980s, Charles Xavier had become a more morally ambiguous character. Most of the time, he’s a kindhearted teacher who dreams of peace between humans and mutants. But he’s not above manipulation, threats, and outright villainy (see: X-Men: Deadly Genesis).
During the production of the third movie X-Men: The Last Stand, the franchise was dealing with its own bad guys, going from Bryan Singer for Brett Ratner as director. Whether its due to a change of person in charge or a bad script or the inability of a movie to properly adapt the Dark Phoenix Saga, The Last Stand failed at everything, including exploring Xavier’s feet of clay. The movie reveals that Xavier knew about Jean Grey’s incredible potential and, fearing that she couldn’t control it, put a mental block on her. When her death and resurrection removes the block, Jean proves Xavier right immediately by killing both Cyclops and Professor X.
On paper, it makes tragic sense to have Xavier die by the very threat he hoped to avoid. In execution, Xavier’s execution falls flat. Jean’s Phoenix powers mostly manifest in lots of wind, which lift Xavier into the air. And then there’s the utterly absurd decision to have Xavier flash a happy smile at Logan right before he dies, because this is an X-Men movie from the 2000s and everything has to be about Wolverine.
Anyway, Xavier explodes and dies. At least until the post-credit scene, in which Charles apparently has taken over the body of a coma patient to visit his old squeeze Moria MacTaggert, which is pretty villainous behavior.
2. A Head-Turner in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Speaking of heroes who become villains: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness! Instead of the Dark Phoenix Saga, the Doctor Strange sequel adapts a different Marvel Comic co-created by John Byrne in which a woman gets too much power and therefore is evil. This time, it’s Wanda Maximoff, who apparently disregarded everything Monica Rambeau told her about not being evil at the end of WandaVision and embraced the Darkhold. Using the Darkhold to travel the Multiverse and find her kids, Wanda poses a threat to all realities, which gets the attention of not just Doctor Stephen Strange, but also the Illuminati of Earth-838, including Charles Xavier.
While the Illuminati’s powerhouses such as Black Bolt and Captain Marvel threaten force if Wanda doesn’t stand down, Xavier tries a more sympathetic approach. He enters Wanda’s mind to find her true self inside, the decent mother that is Wanda of Earth-838 and who is held hostage by the corrupted Wanda of Earth-616. His method proves unsuccessful. While still trying to contact 838 Wanda, the corporeal 616 Wanda jumps out of red smoke and snaps the neck of Charles.
There are a lot of reasons to hate this scene, especially if you loved WandaVision and resent the way Multiverse of Madness through that development out the window. But there’s one really, really good reason to love the scene, and that’s Sam Raimi. Raimi shoots Wanda’s Illuminati rampage like one of his Evil Dead films, complete the same gleeful, Three Stooges-inspired horror that make those movies so wonderful.
Xavier’s death in Doctor Strange 2 plays like a slapstick gag, utterly devoid of dignity but full of irreverent fun.
1. Death With Dignity in Logan (2017)
Nothing can diminish the power of Stewart’s work in Logan, not Sam Raimi’s irreverence, not Deadpool desecrating Logan’s literal corpse, not even the constraints of the superhero genre. For that reason, Xavier’s slow and moving decline in that movie remains his best death, in any medium.
Director James Mangold and his co-writers Scott Frank and Michael Green strip out most of the edgelord nonsense that marred Mark Millar and Steve McNiven’s Old Man Logan comic book to emphasize the pathos within. While Wolverine has it bad, with his adamantium skeleton poisoning him as his healing factor fades, Xavier has it worse. The professor is in the throes of dementia like any other person, but he still has his incredible psychic abilities, making him effectively a walking psy-bomb.
Patrick Stewart gives one of his best performances as the dying Xavier, believably playing not just the anger and resentment he feels when his dying brain leaves him confused, but also the sadness of his actions and the hope he has in Logan, his one surviving pupil.
Stewart conveys all the complexity of his character in Xavier’s final scene, a long confession and declaration of peace after he wakes from one last good night’s sleep. It’s so moving that we almost forgive for Mangold for ending the monologue with a superhero twist, as it’s revealed that the man to whom he’s been confessing is not Logan but an evil clone.
The clone kills Xavier, X-23 attacks and we get a big fight scene because this is, after all, a superhero movie. But the actual confession and death is so moving that nothing can ruin it—not a clone fight, not a Deadpool 3, and certainly not Avengers: Doomsday.
Avengers: Doomsday will kill Professor X again on December 18, 2026.
Avengers: Doomsday Teaser Sets Up Marvel’s Most Infamous Love Triangle
Where the first three teasers for Avengers: Doomsday have been about returning favorites from the start of the MCU and before, the fourth release goes no further back than 2018’s Black Panther. As the current Black Panther Shuri monologues about the duties of a king, we see not just her fellow Wakandan M’Baku but also Namor of the undersea kingdom of Talokan and, surprisingly, Benjamin J. Grimm, better known as the Thing from the Fantastic Four.
Namor and the Fantastic Four maybe relatively new to MCU viewers, the former debuting in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and the latter in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but the characters go back to the very first issue of Marvel Comics. Moreover, ever since Marvel’s first family encountered Namor way back in 1961’s Fantastic Four #4, the quintet has had a rocky relationship. Most infamously, Namor is constantly trying to lure the Invisible Woman Sue Storm away from Mister Fantastic Reed Richards, creating a love triangle that some fans want to see in Doomsday.
First Steps not only begins with Reed and Sue already married, but expecting their first child Franklin. So while the couple does have a spat, it never rises above a brief misunderstanding. The two are as rock solid as any duo we’ve ever seen on screen.
The Reed and Sue of the comics are a bit more complicated. They were not married when Fantastic Four #1 released in 1961 and, thanks to Stan Lee‘s poor handling of female characters, Reed often treated Sue more like a child or student than he did a partner. Moreover, the entire team was far more contentious in those early days, with Ben threatening to murder the Human Torch Johnny Storm in almost every issue. So when Namor immediately demands that she become his bride in Fantastic Four #4, it’s not entirely unbelievable that Sue would consider it, at least for a minute.
Over the years, the Fantastic Four has mellowed out (give or take the occasional story about Reed creating an off-reality black site prison) and their squabbles now play more like familial bickering, problems that they always resolve by the end of a story arc. Of course, it helps that writers who followed Lee developed Sue into a three-dimensional and capable character. In most modern Fantastic Four stories, including First Steps, Sue is not just an equal partner to Reed, but she’s often the leader of the team.
That’s not quite as true of Namor. Namor first properly appeared in Marvel Comics #1 from 1939, and his Golden Age adventures often found him destroying ships in the Navies of the Axis forces. He was haughty and violent, but no more than most Golden Age heroes, and like other heroes of the era, Namor disappeared from comics shortly after World War II. However, when Lee and Jack Kirby revived Namor in Fantastic Four #1, they kept both his arrogance and his propensity for violence. That story established Namor as an antihero, someone just as likely to attack surface dwelling heroes as he was villains, if he considered them a threat to his undersea kingdom.
Over the years, writers have added to Namor’s arrogance by making him not just powerful, but also extremely attractive. Between his physical appearance and his status as a monarch, Namor believes that he is irresistible to any woman he desires… and most of the time he’s right!
Thanks to these developments, Namor’s pursuit of Sue Richards has become a key feature of the character’s interactions with the Fantastic Four. So prevelant is the trope, in fact, that it appears in almost every alternate reality takes on the characters. In Grant Morrison and Jae Lee’s 1234, the false reality created by Doctor Doom involves Sue leaving Reed for Namor. The cover of UltimateFantastic Four #25 from 2005 features a sultry Sue posing next to a grinning Namor. More recently, the miniseries Fantastic Four: Life Story by Mark Russell and Sean Izaakse sees an obsessed Reed ignoring Sue so badly that she abandons him to live with Namor.
Yet, as prevalent as the love triangle is in alternate realities, it’s incredibly rare in mainline continuity. Sure, men and women will make passes at Sue (and Reed, for that matter), and, yes, Reed or Sue will sometimes entertain the idea. But it never goes past brief entertaining. For all of his charm and power and good looks, Namor never really convinces Sue to leave Reed.
Which brings us back to Avengers: Doomsday. Most often, troubles in the Richards’ marriage occur when Reed gets too obsessed with a particular problem or project, and Dr. Doom’s machinations will certainly demand his attention. But for all that actor Tenoch Huerta did right when portraying Namor in Wakanda Forever, his version of the character isn’t nearly as amorous as his comic book counterpart. Between the MCU Namor’s general seriousness and the demands of the problem at hand, it’s hard to believe that Doomsday will devote that much time to the Fantastic Love Triangle.
Which is for the better. The Fantastic Four may be late to the MCU, but they are still Marvel’s First Family and no one wants to see that family broken up.
Avengers: Doomsday arrives December 18, 2026.
The Pitt Season 2 Episode 1 Review: The Hilum Flip
This article contains spoilers for The Pitt season 2 episode 1.
“A miracle what a little soap, water, and human decency can do sometimes,” says Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center ER charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) near the end of The Pitt season 2 premiere.
The “miracle” she’s referring to is the freshly clean condition of Mr. Digby (Charles Baker). Previously an unhoused man caked in grime and smelling so foul that his fellow ER waiting room visitors stage a mutiny at the front desk to get him away, Mr. Digby is now happily scrubbing away at his filth in an outdoor shower as Dana and rookie nurse Emma Nolan (Laëtitia Hollard) help spray him down.
Of course, The Pitt itself is a bit of a miracle. As a longtime television partisan, it’s hard for me (and many of my TV-phile peers) to talk about HBO Max’s timely medical drama without drifting into outright evangelism. The R. Scott Gemmill-created series shot out of a pop cultural canon early last year, with its humble hospital setting and weekly episodic release model reminding old heads of what television once was and teaching young nephews what it could be again. The premise is as simple as they come. The fine doctors, nurses, administrators, and custodians of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center clock in save some lives, lose some others, and then go home at the end of their real-time shift.
Unless one’s brain has fully transitioned over into binge mode, there’s nothing truly revelatory about The Pitt. In fact, its star, creator, and format are all so similar to previous medical drama ER that the estate of that show’s creator, Michael Crichton, is involved in a lawsuit against Warner Bros. TV. But despite that similarity (or because of it in some distances), The Pitt is good… like really, really, really good. Mostly because it still believes in the miracle that is episodic television.
Like season 1 before it, The Pitt season 2 premiere “7:00 A.M.” picks up at the title hour as our hero Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) rides his motorcycle through one of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s many scenic bridges. He arrives to a busy waiting room that visually seeds 15 hours worth of storytelling to come. It’s the Fourth of July and a hell of a lot of folks already seem to be injured or infirm even before the fireworks start to go off. One sign on a wall promises that aggressive behavior will not be tolerated, a reminder of the aggressive behavior we already witnessed in season 1. Another plaque commemorates the brave healthcare workers of Pittsburgh for their service during the Covid-19 pandemic. Robby glances at it and moves on into the fray. After all, the “rush” will be starting soon as local nursing homes perform their morning bed checks.
Mechanically, The Pitt remains a very impressive beast. The show’s attention to detail extends not only to its mastery of medical jargon and procedures (frequently claimed to be among the most accurate in TV history) but also in its narrative structure. Dr. Robby and friends have gone through many Very Busy Days since the audience last witnessed a Very Busy Day in September of the show’s timeline. It’s up to the this episode to communicate why this incoming Very Busy Day is both more of the same but distinct enough to watch. “7:00 A.M.” swiftly accomplishes that by establishing that this is Dr. Robby’s last shift at the ER before heading off on sabbatical to some sweat lodge in Alberta.
The Pitt understands precisely that correct amount of context clues to introduce to indicate that its characters are really going through it without belaboring the point. Dr. Robby talks about his pending sabbatical. Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden) opines over an incoming legal deposition as a result of a procedure in season 1. Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif) announces that she really needs to get laid. Sometimes these character moments arrive with great pomp and circumstance, like when a newly-clean Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball) is greeted as a prodigal son returned by Dana while a skeptical Robby insists on him sticking with waiting room triage duties. Others are more subtle, like the reveal that Dr. Yolanda Garcia (Alexandra Metz) and Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) are dating when the former complains about Santos’ roommate Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) using her toothbrush.
While we all care about the lives of the Pitt’s employees, it’s watching them save lives in a professional, competent, and humane manner that remains the show’s true appeal. And those lives come through the double doors of the ER in abundance, setting up many compelling season-long stories to come. There’s 79-year-old nursing home occupant Mr. Bostick, whose “do-not-resuscitate” orders provide a quick and brutal lesson on the limits of healthcare to Whitaker’s new med students James Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson) and Joy Kwon (Irene Choi). There’s Mr. Williams (Derek Cecil), whose simple wrist injury from a fall slowly morphs into a horror movie as he begins to display signs of memory loss.
And then there’s Mr. John Doe, whose body becomes nothing less than a thrilling action setpiece. Despite taking place entirely within the walls of one Earthbound building, The Pitt frequently presents some of the best “action” on television, and it’s realistically gory in a way that its network/streaming peers like Game of Thrones and The Last of Us can only dream of. Brought in with a stab wound from a kitchen knife, the anonymous dishwasher’s chest cavity is cracked open by our heroes as they quickly get to work massaging his heart.
John Doe’s bloody procedure is everything great about The Pitt writ large. The characters’ various personalities are all there: Dr. Garcia refers to Dr. Robby by the pet name “Rabbit Bitch,” Dr. Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) reacts to each ping from her un-silenced phone as if they’re jabs from John Doe’s kitchen knife, Dr. Robby noticeably bristles at new attending Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi’s (Sepideh Moafi) reluctance to let the newbies learn. Yet all those neuroses take a back seat as the professionals operate with ruthless efficiency to save a man’s life. By the time Dr. Robby suggests twisting off half a lung like a garden hose to stem the bleeding, the watcher feels like they themselves are capable of pulling off a perfect hilum flip.
Even without a mass casualty event like last season’s PittFest massacre (or whatever disaster is surely to come later this year), “7:00 A.M.” is relentlessly kinetic all the way through. And through it all, the only character who receives a short shrift is aforementioned new attending Dr. Al-Hashimi. Given the show’s track record, there’s no doubt that Al-Hashimi will become a fully lived-in human being in her own right. For now, however, she’s a simple Dr. Robby foil and the series’ unlucky selection to serve as the requisite “the times are-a-changing” algorithm enthusiast. Her getting lost in thought staring at a baby abandoned in the hospital bathroom adds some resonance to her recently-divorced, single mother backstory. But it’s also an unusually weak cliffhanger for a show that intends to draw in viewers weekly.
And yet, I will be tuning in again next week. As will you, and everyone else invested in Real Television. This show remains the kind of TV miracle that only a little soap, water, human decency, and deftly-executed hilum flips can provide.
New episodes of The Pitt season 2 premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO Max.
Peter Capaldi Says Doctor Who Has Become a Victim of Its Own Success
It’s not exactly a secret that Doctor Whoisn’t doing so hot right now. On the plus side, the show will officially return for a Christmas special later this year. But the franchise’s much-vaunted production deal with Disney has collapsed, the show doesn’t actually have a current Doctor at the moment, and pretty much everyone hated the season 15 finale that saw Billie Piper return to the TARDIS in an undisclosed role that no one understands. It’s hard out here for a Whovian, and it’s unclear what the best path forward is for the show as it heads into its next era. But a former Doctor has some suggestions.
Peter Capaldi starred as the franchise’s Twelfth Doctor from 2013 to 2017 and is no stranger to the endless debate surrounding the show’s quality. (Just compare the reviews of his first season in the TARDIS to his final one.) But he’s also a lifelong Who fan, and seems convinced that the series’ current woes are related to the fact that the show’s international success has changed both its scope and the expectations surrounding its performance.
“The show became very, very big. And it was never like that when I loved it. So it became a different thing,” Capaldi said during an appearance on the Half the Picture podcast. “I think the responsibilities of playing the part became more. There were more of them.”
The actor pointed out that in the modern reboot era, the show has transitioned from a more niche U.K. sci-fi property into a global brand, which has shifted expectations for everyone involved with the show.
“There were more things that you had to do rather than just, I mean, I think in the old days, if you were John Pertwee or Tom Baker or something like that, you probably, you know, you spend most of your year making it and then a bit of your year promoting it,” he said. “But it wasn’t this in-your-face kind of thing that suddenly was really important to the BBC, or suddenly really important to a brand that had to be maintained.”
Before Capaldi’s first season as the Doctor, the show embarked on a global world tour that spanned seven cities across five continents and featured exclusive previews and fan meet-and-greets. He’s not wrong that it’s hard to imagine anything of that scope or scale occurring during the show’s classic era.
The actor also rightly points out that Doctor Who used to be more overtly targeted towards a children’s audience than the adults of today, who are increasingly likely to buy merchandise, but also much more prone to writing long screeds complaining about some aspect of the show online.
“It was just a show that some kids really loved, and other kids didn’t care about, but wanted to watch football, or you grew out of, you know,” Capaldi said. “It became this sort of very important thing. I think less in a cultural way and more in an economic way.”
While the former Doctor doesn’t specifically reference any storylines from recent seasons or the behind-the-scenes woes the show is currently facing, he certainly seems to feel that the show’s global success has perhaps become more of a hindrance than a help.
“I think the show is a little bit of a victim of its success. You know, the show that I loved was a tiny thing, a little small thing that survived. It just survived, but nobody knew that it was warming its way into the culture in such a deep way. And I think that’s what I have an affinity with.”
Tom Cruise Shot a Lightsaber Scene for Star Wars: Starfighter
Let’s be honest, Star Wars could use a break right now. The franchise has struggled since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, and the involvement of a big name star could only help restore some prestige to the brand. Sure, the upcoming film Star Wars: Starfighter does have a marquee name in star Ryan Gosling, and director Shawn Levy has credits on hits like Stranger Things and Deadpool & Wolverine, but even they pale in comparison to Tom Cruise. So it’s a good thing that Tom Cruise decided to get involved in the shooting of Starfighter… it’s too bad he’s just behind the camera.
In a profile for the New York Times, Levy revealed that Cruise came to visit the Starfighter set and, in typical Tom Cruise fashion, decided to shoot a scene. “Last week Steven Spielberg was here. And now Tom Cruise is wielding a camera, ruining his very nice shoes,” Levy said of the many visitors who came to his production. The profile then goes on to describe Cruise wanting to watch Levy shoot a scene involving a lightsaber fight in a small body of water. Levy “suggested the star jump on one of the cameras. He’d meant it as a joke,” the profile explains; “But there was Cruise, wading into the muddy pond, holding the camera like a pro.”
So while Tom Cruise won’t actually appear in Starfighter, the buzz can only help the production. Where the next Star Wars movie The Mandalorian and Grogu, and many of the shows for Disney+, tend to take place around safer material such as the original trilogy and the (now-reclaimed) prequel trilogy, Starfighter will follow the events of the disastrous Rise of Skywalker. Set five years after that film’s ending, the movie follows Gosling’s pilot on a dangerous mission crucial for the rebuilding of society after the fall of the First Order. Along the way, he’ll cross paths with a new villain played by Matt Smith.
That sparse plot description gives us just enough to be hopeful but not enough to be confident. One of the major problems with The Rise of Skywalker was its refusal to let the franchise grow past the Skywalker family, explicitly reversing The Last Jedi‘s attempts to make Rey a normal person. Starfighter sounded like it might harken back to the World War II fighter pilot movies that were such a huge inspiration for George Lucas when making the first Star Wars in 1977. Further, it would focus on a normal guy on a mission, not a Skywalker scion or a member of the Jedi Order.
With rumors that Daisy Ridley would reprise her role as Rey, we already figured that Starfighter wasn’t going to stray too far from the Skywalkers. And the news that there’s going to be a lightsaber battle only solidifies the fact that Starfighter won’t go entirely into new territory with dog fights and skyjinks.
Will that be enough to get people excited about Star Wars again? It’s too soon to tell, but Tom Cruise lending some of his star power—even if just to shoot a scene—can only help.
Star Wars: Starfighter arrives in theaters on May 28, 2027.
Before The Batman: Part II, Sebastian Stan Almost Played a DC Hero
Even though he does incredible work in indie films such as A Different Man and I, Tonya, Sebastian Stan is most associated with superhero movies. Stan has been playing Bucky Barnes a.k.a. the Winter Soldier since 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger, and will continue to reprise the role in this year’s Avengers: Doomsday. And now there are rumors that Stan will join the cast of The Batman: Part II, making the jump from Marvel to DC.
However, Stan tried to join the Distinguished Competition the same year that he became James Buchanan Barnes. Stan told the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast in 2024 that he had auditioned to play Hal Jordan in the infamous 2011 flop Green Lantern. “I remember getting there, and it was like, me, Justin Timberlake, Jared Leto, Ryan Reynolds, and maybe one other person,” Stan recalled. “And I’m looking at these guys, going, ‘I’m fucked. There’s no way this is happening for me.'”
Obviously, it didn’t happen for Stan, as Reynolds got to play Jordan, a reckless test pilot who gets picked to join the intergalactic police force known as the Green Lantern Corps. Directed by Martin Campbell and co-written by Arrow-verse architects Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim, Green Lantern brought to the screen one of DC’s most popular superheroes and boasted a cast that included Blake Lively, Tim Robbins, and Mark Strong. Yet, the film bombed, barely making back its budget and getting roundly mocked by critics.
There’s no one thing to blame for Green Lantern‘s failure. The concept, and especially the name “Green Lantern,” is a hard sell to general audiences, and no one involved in the project was doing their best work. Moreover, Hal Jordan can be a tricky character to pull off, even in the comics (the hero’s shortcomings range from dating a 13-year-old to going nuts and killing all of his friends to being a cop in general).
But Reynolds’s glib, self-satisfied take certainly didn’t help things. We first meet the character dashing out on a one night stand and joking about how he forgot her name. At work, Jordan participates in a flight exercise against a drone that his employer hopes to use to secure a much-needed government contract. Instead, Jordan chooses to show off his pilot skills, making the drone look bad, destroying his jet, and losing the company the contract. When Jordan gets the power ring that gives him his Green Lantern abilities, he first uses it against a couple of guys who are mad at him… because he got them all laid off when he decided to show off against the drone.
Again, all of these story problems come from the writers and the director. But Reynolds delivers all of his lines with maximum snark, because that’s the tone he does best. Stan, however, can certainly play a stoic hero. But as his indie work shows, he’s great at playing weird losers and frustrated sad boys. In other words, he could have taken that same material, scenes that ask us to cheer when Hal Jordan is a selfish jerk, and made them interesting.
Alas, it didn’t happen, so Green Lantern flopped and the concept disappeared from live action until Nathan Fillion popped up as Guy Gardner, a different Green Lantern jerk, in last year’s Superman. Later this year, Kyle Chandler will try his hand playing an older and hopefully wiser Hal Jordan alongside Aaron Pierre as John Stewart in the HBO series Lanterns.
As for Stan, things worked out pretty well, by his own admission. “Looking back, I’m almost glad it didn’t [work], because I don’t know if I could have handled that level of attention like some of those guys,” he conceded. Clearly, he can handle it now, whether in indies, the MCU, or the DC Universe.
Stranger Things: A Cut Line Would Have Added Needed Depth to the Finale
This post contains spoilers for the finale to Stranger Things.
Over the course of five seasons of Stranger Things, we saw how Vecna destroyed the lives of the people of Hawkins, Indiana. With his spindly, vine-covered body and his skull-like face, Vecna was the embodiment of evil, willing to use children as tools to bring the hellish Abyss to Earth. But those who saw the play Stranger Things: The First Shadow know that before Vecna was Vecna, he was Henry Creel, a little boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If Vecna actor Jamie Campbell Bower had his way, Henry’s humanity would have shown through in the character’s final moments. Appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Bower revealed that he had wanted to add an extra line to Vecna’s final scene, right before Joyce Byers hacks him apart with an axe. “I wanted to try and convey the words ‘please don’t’,” said Bower of shooting the scene. “I’m like gurgling, and I’m like I remember all I wanted to say was ‘please don’t’, and we try it, and it just didn’t work.”
Vecna’s last scene has been a bit controversial, as reflected by our duelingtakes here at Den of Geek. Yet, there’s no question that letting Creel beg for his life would have added some complexity to the character, making him more than an ultimate evil that needed to die.
And as Bower pointed out, the line would have called back to The First Shadow by acknowledging the connection between Creel and Joyce. Although the stage play focuses on the life of young Henry Creel, it also lets us spend time with several Hawkins adults back when they were teens, including Hopper, Bob Newby, and, of course, the future Joyce Byers. Joyce was among the teens who showed kindness to the troubled Henry, at least before he was corrupted by exposure to the Mind Flayer and endless tests at the hands of government scientists, led by Dr. Martin Brenner.
To its credit, season five of the Netflix hit did include several glimpses into the life of young Henry. Max and Holly see his high school life while going through his memories and when Will calls up the fateful moment when the boy Henry met a government scientist. However, by the time of the finale, the show had no interest in humanizing Vecna. Vecna rejects Will’s attempts to blame the Mind Flayer by insisting that he did everything willingly. The series wanted Vecna to be a monster, nothing more.
And that might be why the addition of “please don’t,” in Bower’s words, “didn’t work.” Bower reminded TheTonight Show audience of Creel and Joyce’s connection in The First Shadow, and said that, “when she kind of walks up to him, I felt like in that moment, that the humanity could come through a little bit more, and that we could just reintroduce that level of sort of potential maybe he could be saved at that point.”
While that would have made the character’s final scene more complex, that’s not what Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers had in mind. For better or worse, Vecna was a monster who needed to die.
All of Stranger Things is now streaming on Netflix.
SAG Nominee Snubs Reveal Continued Bias Against Non-English Movies in Oscar Race
The Screen Actors Guild nominations for the best of 2025 are in. And for awards prognosticators speculating on what the Oscars will do next, this is a big one. After all, the acting branch remains the largest bloc of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and there is plenty of crossover between Oscar voters and SAG membership. So while the two bodies aren’t identical, when it comes to selecting what are deemed the most worthy performances of the year, SAG is a crucial bellwether.
… And according to that bellwether, none of the best performances of the year occurred in a foreign language.
The eyebrow-raising omission comes with plenty of splashy news about who made the cut. The most-anticipated frontrunners are all accounted for in the lead categories: Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael B. Jordan, and Ethan Hawke will all be vying for Best Actor; and Jessie Buckley, Rose Byrne, Chase Infiniti, and Emma Stone for Best Actress. Meanwhile most of whatwe predicted last week to be the Best Picture frontrunners accounted for SAG’s short-list of five nominees in the Outstanding Performance By a Cast in a Motion Picture (the guild’s version of Best Picture): One Battle After Another, Hamnet, Sinners, and Marty Supreme.
In fact, the only film we considered a likely frontrunner to not round out SAG’s top five is also the one entirely shut out of SAG nominations altogether, Joachim Trier’s exquisitely beautiful Sentimental Value. While the Norwegian film has recently earned Best Picture nods from the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes, as have all four of its core performances—Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning—none of the above were nominated by the Screen Actors Guild. Similarly, Wagner Moura, who also earned CCA and Golden Globe nominations for his work in the Brazilian film, The Secret Agent, plus a win for Best Actor at the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle, was likewise snubbed by SAG.
In their absence, a few surprises slipped through the cracks, including Kate Hudson being nominated for Best Actress for her musical turn in Song Sung Blue, Jesse Plemons getting a nod for his unnerving lead work in Bugonia, and fan favorite turns by Odessa A’zion in Marty Supreme and Wunmi Mosaku in Sinners earning surprise nominations in Best Supporting Actress. Additionally Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein slipped into the Best Cast (picture) race for the fifth slot.
The complete shutout of foreign-language films is somewhat surprising, particularly in the case of Sentimental Value which features a respected American performer in Fanning, who has received two Best Actress nominations from SAG for her work on the TV series The Great. Furthermore, Skarsgård is no anomaly to the guild either and his film sees large portions of its story shot in English (hence Fanning’s participation). The movie has in fact been a perceived awards frontrunner ever since Trier picked up the Grand Prix prize earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival.
But here’s the thing: while the Academy’s tastes have increasingly broadened over the last decade to include international cinema, particularly if it becomes the toast of Cannes, SAG remains noticeably insular with its focus on American film production.
The most striking example of the Academy broadening its voting pool in this decade is Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite winning Best Picture in early 2020, yet the shift has been going strong for almost 10 years now. Since the beginning of this decade alone, we’ve seen four of the previous five Palme d’Or winners out of Cannes wind up nominated for Best Picture (Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, and Anora, the last of which was admittedly the rare American film to win Cannes’ top prize). Moreover, Sandra Hüller was nominated for Best Actress for searing work in Anatomy of a Fall, as was Penelope Cruz for the Spanish Parallel Mothers. Best Director has also long proven a fruitful category for international perspective, with the likes of Alfonso Cuarón’s work in Roma and Paweł Pawlikowski’s in Cold War being nominated in the same year.
In a nutshell, the Academy’s tastes are broadening by virtue of having a larger share of members from outside the U.S. be invited into the fold. But SAG has remained slower to adapt. Consider, for instance, Anatomy of a Fall being snubbed by the guild for Best Cast and Best Actress in 2024 (in their place was likely the cast of The Color Purple and, perhaps more happily for pop culture enthusiasts, Margot Robbie via Barbie). Similarly, Cruz was snubbed for Parallel Mothers in the year that Lady Gaga and Jennifer Hudson were nominated for House of Gucci and Respect, respectively, while films like Drive My Car, Triangle of Sadness, and Roma were completely ignored. We will point out that SAG did, however, select Parasite for Outstanding Cast in 2020.
All of which might be to say that while SAG snubbed Moura and the actors of Sentimental Value, their chances for Oscar nominations did not end today. Viewing any of them as a potential dark horse candidate capable of winning their category just became a lot harder though.
Full film nominees below.
Cast Ensemble in a Motion Picture
Frankenstein (Netflix)
Hamnet (Focus Features)
Marty Supreme (A24)
One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Male Actor in a Leading Role
Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme (A24)
Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon (Sony Pictures Classics)
Michael B. Jordan, Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Jesse Plemons, Bugonia (Focus Features)
Female Actor in a Leading Role
Jessie Buckley, Hamnet (Focus Features)
Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (A24)
Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue (Focus Features)
Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Emma Stone, Bugonia (Focus Features)
Male Actor in a Supporting Role
Miles Caton, Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Benicio Del Toro, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein (Netflix)
Paul Mescal, Hamnet (Focus Features)
Sean Penn, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Female Actor in a Supporting Role
Odessa A’zion, Marty Supreme (A24)
Ariana Grande, Wicked: For Good (Universal Pictures)
Amy Madigan, Weapons (Warner Bros.)
Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture
F1 (Apple Original Films/Warner Bros.)
Frankenstein (Netflix)
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (Paramount Pictures)
One Battle After Another (Warner Bros.)
Sinners (Warner Bros.)
The 32nd SAG Awards are on March 1 while the 98th Academy will air on March 15.
MrBeast Reveals Biggest Changes to BEAST GAMES [video]
The massive reality competition series BEAST GAMES is back on Prime Video! Setting records at every turn, the series continues to be quite the undertaking, in line with the @MrBeast brand. MrBeast himself, Jimmy Donaldson, spoke with Matthew Shuchman of Den of Geek about what it took to pull it off, and what to look forward to in this season of Strong v Smart.
Upcoming British TV Series for 2026: BBC, Netflix, ITV, Channel 4, Prime Video, Sky
With second seasons of The Night Manager and Red Eye already heating up U.K. telly, there’s still so much more to come in 2026. Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall all have new shows lined up this year. There are some big adaptations on the way, too, including a Kit Harington-led version of A Tale of Two Cities.
Meanwhile, Richard Gadd will follow up his smash hit awards-grabber Baby Reindeer with a new show that is bound to be absolutely devastating, and Lisa McGee will follow up Derry Girls with her new Netflix series, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast.
The year also has some big returning shows in store! Line of Duty and Unforgotten are both coming back to the small screen with their seventh series.
Let’s take a look at some of the big shows heading our way in 2026…
Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials
January 15 on Netflix
We love a new Agatha Christie adaptation, and this one has a stacked cast (Mia McKenna-Bruce, Helena Bonham Carter, Martin Freeman, and more!) and a classic 1929 mystery to unravel, courtesy of Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall. This story follows a group of young, well-off Londoners who stumble into a strange puzzle involving time, coded messages, and a shadowy organization known as “Seven Dials,” after a seemingly harmless prank goes wrong.
How to Get to Heaven From Belfast
February on Netflix
Originally envisioned as a Channel 4 series, How to Get to Heaven From Belfast has now moved to Netflix due to rising costs. It’s the new show from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, and it follows three childhood friends from Belfast – Saoirse, Robyn and Dara – who are now in their late thirties and living very different lives when they receive word that a fourth member of their school-friend group has died. Roísín Gallagher, Sinéad Keenan and Caoilfhionn Dunne lead the cast.
Young Sherlock
March 4 on Prime Video
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes is back, but he is definitely looking a bit younger than Robert Downey Jr. here as the director plans to explore the famous detective’s early years in Oxford for this Prime Video series, which adapts Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes books. Hero Fiennes Tiffin (nephew of Ralph and young Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) stars as the titular deerstalker-botherer.
Betrayal
TBD on ITV
From the mind of playwright David Eldridge, slick new spy show Betrayal will take us into the complex new reality of MI5, as veteran agent John Hughes (Endeavour’s Shaun Evans) navigates an evolving security landscape and a progressive workplace. When an assassination links him to a conspiracy, Hughes will have to figure out how to protect not only his marriage and career, but also Britain itself.
Lord of the Flies
TBD on BBC
The Beeb has never attempted a TV adaptation of William Golding’s famous novel… until now! With Adolescence writer Jack Thorne behind the upcoming series, we could be in for a very special version of the classic book this year. If you’re not familiar with the story Golding wrote in 1954, it focuses on a group of schoolboys who are stranded on a tropical island. With no adults to tell them what to do, the boys soon try to organize. But hope is a fragile thing…
The Lady
TBD on ITV
The gang behind The Crown have a new royal drama series for you in 2026! This one comes with its own true-life crime twist, as The Lady follows Sarah Ferguson’s royal dresser Jane Andrews (Mia McKenna-Bruce), who falls from grace after being convicted of murdering her stockbroker boyfriend Thomas Cressman. Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) and Ed Speelers (Star Trek: Picard) co-star.
Maya
TBD on Channel 4
In the midst of filming HBO’s hit series The Last of Us, Bella Ramsey has also hopped onto Channel 4’s Maya, a psychological thriller about a mum (Breeders star Daisy Haggard, also on co-writing duties) and daughter who get put in a witness protection program in a remote Scottish village. So, are they then safe from the danger that pursues them and left to their own devices? Are they heck! Not with Tobias “Black Jack Randall” Menzies after them.
Secret Service
TBD on ITVX
This 5-episode ITVX series stars Gemma Arterton as an MI6 officer who seems to have an ordinary but happy life. Still, she’s got a rather important job as the head of the Russia Desk of the Secret Intelligence Service to deal with behind the scenes, which is very much not ordinary. After she learns that a senior British politician could be a potential Russian asset, she finds herself in a political game of cat and mouse.
Out of the Dust
TBD on Netflix
From the director of Oranges and Sunshine and the writer of Cuffs comes a new Netflix streaming series that follows a woman named Rosie, who ends up on a dangerous path after she starts questioning her conservative Christian sect. Asa Butterfield, Molly Windsor, Fra Fee, Siobhan Finneran and Christopher Eccleston make up the cast of this one.
The Blame
TBD on ITV
Michelle Keegan and Douglas Booth play Emma Crane and Tom Radley in this ITV adaptation of Charlotte Langley’s debut novel. The pair are two detectives who have to investigate the murder of a teenage figure skater in a small town, while also falling in love. But when one of them becomes a suspect, things get a bit more complicated.
Line of Duty Series 7
TBD on BBC One
We knew it wouldn’t be gone forever! Martin Compston, Vicky McClure, and Adrian Dunbar are back, as is writer Jed Mercurio, for a brand-new six-episode series of the Beeb’s hit cop series. Expect a slightly different setup in series 7, as AC-12 has been disbanded and rebranded as the Inspectorate of Police Standards. The team will be taking a deeper look into a sensitive case involving a celebrated detective inspector accused of abusing his position of trust.
Legends
TBD on Netflix
Two ordinary men (Tom Burke and Steve Coogan) are sent undercover in Britain’s biggest drug networks during the early 1990s in this new show from The Gold creator Neil Forsyth. Based on a true story, the series will dramatize what happened when people who’d only gone through a basic training regime had to build new identities in the criminal underworld. These will be our titular “Legends.”
Army of Shadows
TBD on Channel 4
The 1969 war movie Army of Shadows will be reimagined this year for C4, moving the film’s (and book’s) story of a resistance cell from WWII to a near-future authoritarian Britain under American occupation. The Day of the Jackal showrunner Ronan Bennett is behind this one, and more details should arrive soon, but it already sounds very intriguing indeed.
Dear England
TBD on BBC One
This four-part BBC One and BBC iPlayer drama series is adapted from James Graham’s Olivier Award-winning stage play of the same name. It stars Joseph Fiennes, who is reprising his stage role as England football manager Gareth Southgate, and features a cast that includes Jodie Whittaker and Jason Watkins. The show will chronicle Southgate’s tenure as the team’s manager and draw on the play’s exploration of leadership, national identity, and, of course, footie.
Number 10
TBD on Channel 4
Rafe Spall, Jenna Coleman, and Katherine Kelly lead the cast of Steven Moffat’s upcoming comedy drama, which explores life at Britain’s most famous address. Spall (Trying) will play the Prime Minister, Coleman (The Serpent) will be the Deputy Chief of Staff, and Kelly (Mr Bates vs The Post Office) will be the Chief of Staff. It’s a fictional government at Number 10, but they will be dealing with some all-too-familiar problems.
Kill Jackie
TBD on Prime Video
Adapted from the Nick Harkaway novel The Price You Pay, this forthcoming series has gender-swapped its main character for the show. It will follow Jackie Price (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a wealthy art dealer who becomes the target of a hitman squad called The Seven Demons. Filming has been taking place in Bilbao, Lisbon, London and Swansea, but the show is still eyeing a 2026 release.
Unforgotten Series 7
TBD on ITVX
Details on the seventh series of Unforgotten are being kept under wraps for now, but we can expect Sanjeev Bhaskar (DI Sunny Khan) and Sinéad Keenan (DCI Jess James) to be heading into a new cold case, following the success and strong ratings of series six.
Tip Toe
TBD on Channel 4
Fellow Doctor Who showrunner vets Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall have both got new shows for us this year, but what about Russell T Davies? Yes, indeed, Davies has a new drama called Tip Toe on the way, starring David Morrissey and Alan Cumming, where the Queer as Folk creator will revisit Manchester’s Canal Street to explore the current LGBTQ+ community and the dangers they face.
A Tale of Two Cities
TBD on BBC One
There have been a few adaptations of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, but none of them starred Kit Harington, have they? Well, that’s all set to change this year as the Beeb will be rolling out four episodes to tell the tale of Charles Darnay (Harington), a French aristocrat who is tried for treason in England but manages to get acquitted thanks to a lookalike lawyer called Sydney Carton (François Civil). When he’s arrested again in France during the Revolution and sentenced to death, Carton has to make a difficult choice because he’s now very much in love with Darnay’s beautiful wife, Lucie (Mirren Mack).
Under Salt Marsh
TBD on Sky Atlantic
As a massive storm gathers offshore, Jackie Ellis (Kelly Reilly), a teacher and former detective, discovers the body of her eight-year-old student, Cefin, who appears to have drowned. The shocking find forces the town to confront memories of a case left unresolved three years earlier, the disappearance of Jackie’s niece, Nessa, which destroyed her career. Cefin’s death also draws Jackie’s former partner, Detective Eric Bull (Rafe Spall), back to lead the investigation. Convinced the two cases are linked, Jackie and Bull work together to uncover buried secrets before the approaching storm erases key evidence.
Rivals Series 2
TBD on Disney+
Rivals will return to our screens in 2026 with an expanded twelve-episode run. It continues the story of competing TV executives and social climbers in the glamorous, high-stakes world of 1980s British telly, picking up where the first season’s dramatic cliffhanger left off. Most of the main cast, including David Tennant as Lord Tony Baddingham, Alex Hassell as Rupert Campbell-Black, and Aidan Turner as Declan O’Hara, are set to return, with new additions Hayley Atwell and Rupert Everett also joining in the fun.
Half Man
TBD on BBC One
Formerly known as Lions, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer is now called Half Man. It stars Gadd and Jamie Bell (All of Us Strangers) as estranged “brothers” Ruben and Niall, and tracks what happens when Ruben shows up at Niall’s wedding after a long absence from his life. The show will untangle 40 years of their relationship, from their teenage stretch to some violent encounters in their adult lives.
War
TBD on Sky
George Kay is on a hot streak after creating Lupin and Criminal for Netflix and Hijack for Apple TV. Is this new series for Sky and HBO also worth your attention? Probably, because they’ve ordered not one but two series of it right off the bat. The first one (it’s in an anthology format) stars Dominic West and Sienna Miller, and centers on two of London’s most prestigious rival law firms as they battle over “the divorce case of the century” between tech titan Morgan Henderson (West) and his estranged wife, international film star Carla Duval (Miller).
The Other Bennet Sister
TBD on BBC One
The Other Bennet Sister is adapted from Janice Hadlow’s novel of the same name. It reimagines Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of Mary Bennet, the often-overlooked middle sister. The 10‑episode series, written chiefly by Sarah Quintrell, follows Mary as she leaves Longbourn for London and the Lake District in Regency England. Ella Bruccoleri stars as Mary Bennett, with Richard E. Grant and Ruth Jones as Mr and Mrs Bennett.
Walton Goggins Reveals His Hardest Fallout Acting Challenge Yet
This article contains spoilers for Fallout season 2 episode 4.
Playing the wrinkled, irradiated Ghoul on Prime Video’s game adaptation Fallout is not a walk in the post-apocalyptic park for Walton Goggins. Not only does the actor have to access the emotional interiority of a centuries-old cowboy wandering the wasteland, he has to undergo a grueling physical transformation as well. Per Goggins, getting into the Ghoul’s noseless skin can take up to three hours.
Thankfully, Fallout provides a second character for Goggins to play as well: the Ghoul’s pre-apocalypse identity of soldier-turned-actor-turned-corporate-pitchman Cooper Howard. Armed with only a suit, some finger guns, and a smile; Cooper Howard is usually a cozier experience for Goggins. That wasn’t the case, however, with the opening scene of season 2 episode 4.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve done here,” Goggins tells Den of Geek. “It was the most claustrophobic experience I’ve ever hard. I thought that was The Ghoul, but it wasn’t. It was donning that suit.”
“The suit” in question is the T-45 power armor developed by defense contractor West Tek in the Fallout canon. Now the preferred kit of the Brotherhood of Steel in the Wasteland, the bulky T-45 suit previously protected America’s soldiers in the battle against communism before the nukes dropped. Or at least it was supposed to protect them. As the Ghoul revealed to Maximus (Aaron Moten) in season 1, the T-45 has some weak points and a tendency to glitch in the worst possible moments. We see that play out in the opening minutes of season 2 episode 4 as Cooper’s T-45 is rendered completely inoperable right before a critical encounter with Chinese soldiers on the Alaskan battle front.
“The way in which that particular story dovetails into the larger narrative was so exciting to me,” Goggins says. “It’s hinted at in season one that Cooper Howard was in the military. He speaks about the power armor – this piece of technology and the problems that it has. And then you get to experience that in a flashback, which is even earlier than the world before the bombs drooped. It’s the furthest we have gone back in history.”
The episode opener isn’t just the furthest that the Fallout TV series has ventured into the past, it also serves as the proper introduction to one of the games’ most popular cryptids: the hulking Deathclaw that becomes the fallen Howard’s unlikely salvation. But what exactly is a seemingly mutated giant lizard doing in distant past long before the bombs dropped and Godzilla-fied the environment? It’s a question that Goggins himself is eager to the get to the bottom to. As long as it doesn’t involve donning that armor once again.
“I’m happy that we did it. If we don’t do it again, that’ll be OK,” he says.
New episodes of Fallout season 2 premiere Wednesdays on Prime Video, culminating with the finale on February 4.
Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Raises an Important Question: What X-Men Theme Will Be Used?
The X-Men will return again in Avengers: Doomsday. To put a finer point on it, 20th Century Fox’s version of the X-Men are having what must be their umpteenth swan song in the next Avengers movie (or two). For some fans, this is mixed news since we’ve been waving goodbye to the Fox-verse since the conclusion of 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand20 years ago, and certainly after 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, which also used timey-wimey sci-fi logic to present a story where major characters died but then got better. Come to think of it, that made it also a dry run for Avengers: Infinity War too…
All of which has left some frustrated that this version of the X-Men is central again in next December’s Doomsday. For proof, look no further than the latest teaser trailer, which is now online nearly a full year before the movie’s release. In the bit of sizzle footage, the forever-welcomed Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart give events their familiar gravitas, and James Marsden is seen at last rocking Cyclops’ iconic costume design by Jim Lee from the early 1990s—although to most, it is synonymous with X-Men: The Animated Series from the same era and its sublime sequel series now on Disney+, X-Men ’97.
The shameless but superb fan service of seeing Marsden’s Scott Summers get promised his long overlooked due, complete with costume and pride of place in marketing, signals a few things: first there is at least one more X-Man who didn’t get his proper send off between Days of Future Past, Logan (2017), and even the Marvel Studios-produced Deadpool & Wolverine from 2023. And secondly, we deep down cannot help but enjoy saying goodbye to these prized pieces of 2000s geek culture, no matter how many encores they get.
And for that same reason, we have one tiny, infinitesimal, but (we’d argue) significant suggestion to make for this year’s Avengers movie: send them off using the John Ottman’s X-Men themes from X2 (2003) and Days of Future Past instead of The Animated Series theme song.
Obviously given Marsden’s glorious costuming, Avengers: Doomsday will be melding nostalgia for the 2000s and 2010s X-films with that of The Animated Series, and if we are speaking purely X-Men music, nothing is quite as iconic as the opening credits suite written by Ron Wasserman. To children of the ‘90s, that piece of music was more epic than all of the prose and tales of Homer put together. And Disney/Marvel Studios has been shrewd to tap into this vintage of member berries, as proven when a few bars of the theme were played during the first crossover between the Disney and Fox eras in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). There we saw Patrick Stewart briefly reprise the role of Charles Xavier for a cameo that felt more like a wink than a sign-off.
Given how Marvel Studios still taps into the even older 1960s cartoon theme song for Spider-Man after all these decades, there is no doubt that the Mouse House will be using ‘90s nostalgia when adapting X-Men for many, many years to come. But the Fox era of X-Men seems like it must be coming to an end for realsies this time. And if so, this is the perfect time to send them off with their own sound and vibe.
Plus, for whatever else you can say about the uneven and checkered history of the Fox-verse era, they had plenty of highs, including in the music department. The perennially underrated Michael Kamen provided a pounding, almost terrifying soundscape to the original X-Men movie more than a quarter century ago, and Henry Jackman’s theme for Magneto in X-Men: First Class (2011) remains sadly forgotten despite its intensity.
But the sound that defines the Fox era, warts and all, is the undeniably thrilling and lush compositions Ottman offered three X-Men pictures between 2003 and 2016. And wouldn’t you know it, two of them remain among the better superhero movies ever made. So if this must be the end of the Fox-verse—and it really should be at this point—let them take a bow to the beat of their own drum.
Avengers: Doomsday opens in theaters on Dec. 18.
The Batman 2 – Who Will Sebastian Stan Play?
Gotham City is about to get even more interesting. According to Deadline, Sebastian Stan is in talks to join the cast of The Batman: Part II. If Stan makes the leap to DC, he’ll join his fellow Avengers co-star Scarlett Johansson in exchanging the MCU for director Matt Reeves‘ grounded take on the Caped Crusader.
Like Johansson, Stan has a resume far stranger and more varied than his MCU work might suggest. Between Stan’s abilities and Reeve’s willingness to reinterpret even classic characters like the Penguin, the actor could play nearly anyone from Batman comics. Nonetheless, here are the six most likely candidates from Gotham who could next face off with Robert Pattinson‘s Batman.
DC Comics
Harvey Dent
Stan may be a couple years older than Pattinson, but both are high-profile leading men who can do Hollywood blockbusters and weird indie flicks, sometimes in the same year. So it would make sense for Stan to play an analogue to Bruce Wayne, and no character fits that description better than Harvey Dent. In every incarnation, Harvey is a handsome crusader who becomes Gotham City’s district attorney before a criminal attack (often by the Maroni crime family) leaves half of his face scarred. Given Stan’s ability to play intense leading men and weirdos, the switch from Harvey to Two-Face could take advantage of all of Stan’s strength’s as a performer.
Reeves has said that the villain in The Batman: Part II has “never really been done in a movie before,” which would obviously rule out Two-Face, a baddie in Batman Forever and most famously in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. But Reeves has also been drawing heavily from The Long Halloween, the classic 1996-1997 story by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Two-Face does appear in that story, but most of the time he’s just Harvey Dent. Furthermore, Harvey’s wife Gilda is the major killer in The Long Halloween.
In other words, Stan could play Harvey, but not necessarily Two-Face, and the villain of The Batman II is Gilda Dent instead of Two-Face. And with Johansson certain to be a major character, it would make sense for the two Marvel stars to become Gotham’s most notorious power couple.
DC Comics
Tommy Elliot/Hush
Speaking of Jeph Loeb, the writer also created another high-profile double for Bruce Wayne when he and Jim Lee gave the world Hush. Before he became the bandaged titular baddie of the series, Tommy Elliot was Bruce Wayne’s best friend. But where Thomas and Martha Wayne loved and cared for their son, the Elliots abused Tommy. Young Tom thus sought escape by killing his parents, ending their abuse and inheriting their fortune. But after Thomas Wayne saved Mrs. Elliot, the child develops a grudge that leads him to not only become a brilliant surgeon (like Thomas Wayne) but also the villain Hush. And Elliot furthermore schemes to ruin Bruce Wayne’s life.
Look, Hush isn’t the most interesting character (outside of the excellent Paul Dini story The Heart of Hush), but he is relatively well-known and he hasn’t appeared in a live-action Batman film yet. Moreover, The Batman set up a lot of breadcrumbs about Thomas and Martha Wayne’s imperfect past, including Thomas performing surgery on Carmine Falcone. It would be relatively easy to slot Hush into that world, and maybe Stan and Reeves could find something compelling to do with the baddie. At the very least he has a cool design.
DC Comics
Umberto or Pini Maroni
As much fun as the costumed baddies are, The Batman and its sequel still draw prime inspiration from The Long Halloween, which is mostly about Batman battling the Falcone and Maroni crime families. Between The Batman and The Penguin, the Falcones are mostly wiped out. However, The Penguin did introduce Clancy Brown as Sal Maroni, the head of the rival family. In that show, Cristin Milioti played Sofia Gigante (née Falcone), who manipulated them to get back at her own family. The time is right for the Maronis to menace Gotham once more.
Twin brothers Umberto and Pini Maroni are prominent characters in Batman: Dark Victory, Loeb and Sale’s sequel to The Long Halloween. After the death of their father Sal, Umberto and Pini become the heads of the family and enter into an alliance with Sofia Gigante to kill Two-Face, who murdered her father Carmine. Obviously, Reeves would have to change the characters to make them fit in the world of The Batman, but it would be fun to see Stan play a composite of the two, or to see him pull a Michael B. Jordan in Sinners and portray both Maroni twins.
DC Comics
Catman or Prometheus
To those who know him from the MCU, Stan excels at playing tortured but handsome heroes. In indie films such as I, Tonya, A Different Man, and The Apprentice, however, Stan tends to play pathetic losers and sad weirdos. Fortunately, DC Comics does have several characters who work as both Batman analogues and pathetic weirdos.
Both Prometheus and Catman were conceived as anti-Batmen, people who reached the pinnacle of humanity but put those skills to use for evil. Catman was a rich, bored guy who took to committing cat-themed crimes after getting tired of going on safaris. Gail Simone‘s Secret Six reimagined him as a highly capable fighter and decent human, but never lost sight of him being a kind of pathetic guy called Catman. Created by Grant Morrison, Prometheus was the son of two Manson-style hippie murderers killed by police. He subsequently devotes himself to waging war against the law. He achieves that goal by wearing a convoluted dumb helmet and regularly getting beat up by Batman, Huntress, and Green Arrow.
In short, both Catman and Prometheus are sad losers who would make for interesting counters to Pattinson’s Batman.
DC Comics
Victor Fries/Mr. Freeze
One of the most compelling rumors around Scarlet Johansson’s casting is that she will play Andrea Beaumont, Bruce Wayne’s lost love from Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm. That movie doesn’t really have a good analogue for Stan to play, but he would do a great job portraying the best villain from Batman: The Animated Series, Mr. Freeze. Before the great two-part episode “Heart of Ice,” Mr. Freeze was a corny gimmick villain. “Heart of Ice” made him a tragic character, someone whose outrageous plans stemmed from his love for doomed wife Nora.
Still, as soulful as Mr. Freeze can be, he remains a dude in a form-fitting refrigerator. Stan could certainly hit both the dramatic beats of the character while retaining his fundamental silliness. And if Stan brings any depth to Mr. Freeze, then his take would fit Reeves’ “not really done before” rule for the Batman II villain, as even a modicum of humanity would distinguish him from the goofy character that Arnold Schwarzenegger played in Batman & Robin.
DC Comics
Jervis Tetch/Mad Hatter
Fundamentally most Batman villains are guys with undiagnosed mental or behavioral issues. Nowhere is that more apparent than Gotham’s ultimate creepy weirdo, Jervis Tetch, aka the Mad Hatter. An awkward scientist with a love for Lewis Carroll, Mad Hatter uses the headwear he creates to read or control the minds of his enemies. Throughout the Bronze and Modern Ages of comics, Tetch has become even more unsavory, playing up the ickier parts of Carroll’s portrayal of the young girl in Alice in Wonderland.
While Reeves doesn’t have to go that far, even in a presumably hard PG-13 movie like The Batman: Part II, he can key into the character’s essential ickiness. But Stan could bring a different energy to the character, often portrayed as slight and odd-looking. In fact, Stan already gave us a unique take on the Hatter for the Disney series Once Upon a Time, so he’ll be well-practiced for this weirdo.
The Batman: Part II releases on Oct. 1, 2027.
Report: Star Wars Will Make the Obvious Choice to Replace Kathleen Kennedy
The Sith’s Rule of Two states that there must always be a master and an apprentice. One embodies the power while the other craves it. Turns out studio executives operate in a manner not too different from the Sith, as the current head of Lucasfilm is about to step down and be replaced by the most obvious possible choice. An heir apparent rises to rule the galaxy’s worth of IP.
According to insider newsletter Puck News, Kathleen Kennedy will step down from her position atop Lucasfilm and will be replaced by the team of Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, the latter of whom will hold the role of co-president and oversee the business side of Lucasfilm. A longtime Star Wars creative, Filoni is best known for The Clone Wars animated series that ran between 2013 and 2020, as well as his more recent work on The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and Star Wars: The Bad Batch. Filoni is also co-writing the upcoming movie The Mandalorian and Grogu, along with the film’s director Jon Favreau.
Although the change in leadership has not yet been confirmed by Disney, replacing Kennedy with Filoni is not a surprise. Reports that Kennedy planned to retire at the end of 2025 have been circling since 2024, shortly after Filoni was promoted to chief creative officer at Lucasfilm. A successful producer who co-founded Amblin Entertainment with Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall, Kennedy has been serving as president of Lucasfilm since Disney acquired the company from George Lucas in 2012.
Under Kennedy’s stewardship, Star Wars saw some high points, such as the financially and (initially) critically successful sequel trilogy and TV shows such as The Mandalorian and Andor. However, between a glut of mediocre streaming series, the mess that was The Rise of Skywalker, and a reevaluation of the prequel trilogy, fans have grown generally dissatisfied with Kennedy’s approach to the brand.
As the creator of a beloved show set within the prequel era, Filoni appears on paper to be the ideal choice for winning back those dissatisfied fans. Filoni has been building on his characters from The Clone Wars, not only giving Ahsoka her own live-action series on Disney+, but making Bo-Katan the lead of The Mandalorian.
In place of one person running Lucasfilm then, there will now be two people in Filoni and Brennan. So maybe that’s not like the Sith at all. But will it be good for Star Wars? We’ll have to wait and see if Filoni and Brennan can please both the hardcore fans who loved The Clone Wars and everyone else who might be interested in other stories set in a galaxy far, far away. When Kennedy came in, the apparent marching orders were about winning back fans of the original trilogy dissatisfied with the prequels. Interesting how the tables have turned…
Sophie Turner Was One of the Only Actors Happy with Her Game of Thrones Ending
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones was… let’s just call it controversial. From Daenerys Targaryen’s death and the ascension of King Bran the Broken to Jon Snow’s self-imposed exile north of the Wall, almost everyone was left in a place that felt, if not outright unhappy, at least disappointing in terms of the character arcs we’d all spent the better part of a decade watching play out.
But with the success of House of the Dragon and the imminent launch of Dunk and Egg adventure A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, it’s no surprise that more Westeros-based spinoffs appear to be in development. Nor that one of them may well be looking to follow up on the original story that started it all. What such a sequel series would focus on is, of course, still up in the air, but there are certainly plenty of options, from that rumored Jon Snow series to a potential adventure following everyone’s favorite assassin, Arya Stark, as she searches for what’s west of Westeros. But no matter what such a sequel might turn out to be, one former cast member isn’t so sure she’d take part.
Speaking to The Direct, Sophie Turner, who played eldest Stark daughter Sansa, is ambivalent on the subject. “Show me the money,” she laughingly said when asked about whether she’d reprise her breakout role. “I don’t know, I think it would be hard but also amazing to come back to it.”
For Turner, part of the reason for her hesitance is that her character is one of the few who got what could reasonably be called a happy ending in the world of Westeros. Sansa, having survived abuse, assault, and emotional torture of all kinds throughout the show’s run, ultimately emerges triumphant, reclaiming the North’s independence from the rest of the Seven Kingdoms and becoming a queen in her own right. And Turner, long the captain of the Sansa Stark Defense Squad, seems pretty satisfied with where we left her, noting that none of her fellow castmates could really say the same.
“I was very happy with the way Sansa ended her story in Game of Thrones, and no one else was really happy with their ending,” Turner said. “I feel like I got a good one, and so I don’t know if I could revisit it.”
To be fair, it does seem wildly unlikely that the folks in charge would be able to resist the prospect of torturing Sansa some more if given the opportunity, so perhaps Turner is right that we should just leave well enough alone, no matter how much some of us (re: me) would love to see the kind of leader the new Queen in the North turns out to be. Still, the actress is clear that one should never say never.
“Maybe it would be an utter joy, or maybe it would be trying to cling on to something that was magic back in the day that can’t be recreated. I would have to see a script,” she said.
Stranger Things Finale Remembered to Give Winona Ryder One Great Easter Egg Moment
This article contains Stranger Things spoilers.Like all of it.
Winona Ryder was not in the final season of Stranger Thingsnearly enough. Once the marquee name around whom the first season was built and marketed, the actor responsible for giving Joyce Byers a ferocious mama bear energy that bordered on delirium has spent the last few episode-churns largely relegated to background status; and in the case of Stranger Things 5‘s finale, an appendage to the growth of her son Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) in much the same way that old Jim Hopper (David Harbour) eventually became a vital, but supporting, facilitator for Eleven’s journey into quasi-martyrdom.
The underuse of Joyce and Hop marks one of several major issues you can pick at when it comes to discussing Stranger Things’ last dance. But the thing about showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer is that at the end of the day, they usually know how to craft an emotionally effective ending, and in the case of closing the book on their landmark Netflix series, that included having the good grace to tip the hat to a performer who first gave their show its sense of urgency. Which might be a long way to say: when you give a star enough oxygen, they will always pack a punch—or swing an ax, in Ms. Ryder’s case.
Hence one of the best and frankly subtler easter eggs of Stranger Things’ series finale, which occurred when Joyce Byers cut off the head of big bad Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) like he’s a goddamn 19th century vampire.
No Redemption for Vecna
While much of the final showdown between the Hawkins Scooby Gang and the combined power of the Mind Flayer and Vecna plays a bit like a superhero movie—or a Dungeons & Dragons campaign cover, complete with Jeff Easley artwork—the final, fatal moments between Vecna and Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven, plus the rest of the heroes, amounts to a different sensibility entirely. Up until this coup de grace, the Hawkins crew have only been killing faceless monsters whose heads open up into countless rows of teeth. But even in his transmuted shape, Venca is still just a once-painfully-human soul on a power trip. He might carry himself like Freddy Krueger or a demon made flesh, but Henry Creel remains just a guy who’s willfully turned himself into a monster.
For a moment Stranger Things even uses this setup to briefly flirt with what’s become a tired cliché when it comes to villainy in modern pop culture. The show contemplates offering Henry a helping hand and endless empathy. And poor Will Buyers of all people gets to be the one to offer the fiend a now familiar fig leaf. It wasn’t your fault, he promises. You can be saved, he suggests. Wouldst thou like the taste of an unearned redemption arc? When Darth Vader received one in 1983, it was kind of novel within nerd fiction, but on the other side of Kylo Ren, Loki, Draco Malfoy, and hell even MODOK, this beat has gotten pretty staid.
Some fictional baddies are just too evil, and that definitely includes a serial killers with a god complex and penchant for kidnapping children. So fortunately, no, Vecna rejects a strained chance for forgiveness and instead reveals he is as big and bad as Count Dracula. And fortuitously, one member of the Stranger Things ensemble has experience when it comes to dealing this that sort of thing.
Joyes Goes Medieval Mina on His Neck
Thus the most satisfying and subtle easter egg in a series renowned for its deafening, neon-lit callbacks: Joyce Byers gets to cut off the vampire’s head just like she did in Bram Stoker’s Draculamore than 30 years ago in 1992.
The moment comes after the battle appears to have been won, and the other monster hunters led most spectacularly by El have managed to seemingly slay the beast. In fact, El won the fight when she impaled Vecna on what appears to be a pony-sized fang growing inside the Mind Flayer’s throat (we won’t try to determine the biomechanics of that). The moment is not unlike Jonathan Harker and Quincy P. Morris running hunting knives into the vampire in Bram Stoker’s original 1897 novel, or the climactic schadenfreude that occurs when a Bowie knife emerges in Francis Ford Coppola’s far more sympathetic requiem for a vampire in the 1992 film. That was a film, by the by, which also cast Gary Oldman as Dracula and Winona Ryder as his prized prey, Mina Harker.
On page and screen, Dracula is impaled by vampire hunters who have chased the dark prince across land and sea. But the deed is not done, at least in Coppola’s film, until the full ritual is complete; until Mina Harker chops his head off.
So it is with Vecna, who after being defeated has just enough life left in him to still scare the heroes and audiences alike by drawing one last breath. In his final moments, Venca reverts to Henry, the introverted lad who succumbed to the Mind Flayer’s offers of dark powers perhaps out of loneliness and self-loathing. If you’ve seen Stranger Things: The First Shadowon Broadway or the West End, yo even know that Joyce Byers would remember that scared boy in her high school who walked with a sense of foreboding behind his step.
But Joyce has no sympathy for the boy he once was or the creature he’s since become. She remembers only her own child; a little boy this cruelly kidnapped and tortured when he was but 12 years old, and whom Vecna and the Upside Down has targeted ever since.
“You fucked with the wrong family,” Joyce intones before dropping the blade, again. And again. And again.
There is something old-school primal about Joyce executing Vecna in this way, something of the old world; in effect it echoes the Victorian era’s self-styled learned men and women, represented by Stoker’s fellowship of heroes, reverting to medieval rites of superstitious annihilation. It is also purely satisfying in a way that even seems to outdo Coppola’s Dracula movie, which showed the vampire with a great deal of sympathy—but no real sense of redemption. When Ryder beheaded a monster in that movie, it was an act of mercy for a person she pitied but was beyond literal and (perhaps) spiritual salvation. When she does so here, it’s far more medieval.
Some might take issue with that, but we consider it just one more ode to pop culture influences of yore, not unlike when other ‘80s movie heroes like William Ragsdale and Roddy McDowall in Fright Nightor Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead swung axes first and asked questions later. This fact seems to be confirmed and underscored when Mike uses D&D’s proxy of Dracula, Count Strahd von Zarovich, to stand-in for Vecna during the final fateful campaign in his childhood basement on the night high school ends.
The monsters who scare us most growing up are those that cannot be reasoned with or rationalized. But they can be quelled by a mother’s love, or in the case of Winona Ryder, her mean, lean, chopping swing.
See Hugh Jackman as Old Man Robin Hood in New A24 Trailer
“Give me my bent bow in hand, and my broad arrows I’ll let flee; and where the arrow is taken up, there shall my grave digged be.” So sayeth Robin Hood with his near dying breath—or at least that is what is passed down to us by one version of his end in a folktale recorded in 1786. It appears that Hugh Jackman, and perhaps more intriguingly writer-director Michael Sarnoski and indie trendsetting studio A24, are about to give us another. And as befits those tastes, it looks like it’s going to get dark.
In our first teaser trailer, an aged and extremelybearded Jackman provides a hero even more wisened and wearied than the riff on Old Man Logan he led in what is still the finest X-Men movie ever made, Logan. And like that James Mangold picture, The Death of Robin Hood appears keen on deconstructing the mythology that goes into tales of heroes and villains, outlaws and freedom fighters. “People speak of Robin Hood, tell his stories,” Jackman forewarns at the top of the trailer. “They’re all lies.”
In some ways this is obviously familiar territory for Jackman, who has lately sought to subvert and contradict many of the heroic roles that began his Hollywood career. What once was defined by a more idolized portrait of Wolverine in movies like the original X-Men trilogy, or for that matter the sparkling theatrics of Van Helsingand Duke Leopold of Albany, has since given way to the aforementioned Logan and the tragically flawed father of Prisoners.
So this positively medieval interpretation of Robin Hood appears very much in the same vein. Here we see Jackman caked in mud and misery as he describes himself as a monstrous brigand more comfortable swinging an ax in blood-soaked battle than a bow at a frolicking tourney.
Admittedly this will be yet another Robin Hood movie that seeks to counteract the popular image of the character passed down by most early modern folktales or, for that matter, Errol Flynn and an animated fox. In fact, the last time we had a swashbuckling Robin Hood on the big screen was probably Kevin Costner more than 30 years ago. And yet, lest you think this is another sacrilegious destruction of a myth, the fact that The Death of Robin Hood also includes Jodie Comer as a kindly nun eager to nurse the old man back to health should intrigue anyone familiar with the myths.
Aye, well before Costner, or Flynn and the fox, and even before Sir Walter Scott turned Robin of the Hood into a displaced Anglo-Saxon lord hailing from Locksley in 1819, the original tales spoke of Robin as a brigand and trickster who offered a form of justice, or at least satisfaction, recognizable to medieval bards and tale-spinners. And one of the most poignantly memorable Robin Hood stories involves an old archer and a prioress he meets along the way.
Furthermore, the fact the film is the next feature from Sarnoski after he wrote and directed one of the best movies in Nicolas Cage’s career via Pigis incredibly exciting. And as still proud boosters of David Lowery’s own revisionist riff on medieval English legends in the underrated The Green Knight, seeing what Sarnoski gets up to with the same amount of creative freedom intrigues.
The Death of Robin Hood also stars Bill Skarsgård, Murray Bartlett, and Noah Jupe and releases later this year.
The Dark Promise of Marty Supreme’s Last Scene
This article contains spoilers for Marty Supreme.
In the final moments of Marty Supreme, Marty Mauser thinks that he has it all. Not only has he defeated his nemesis Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) and made his way home from Japan, despite angering benefactor Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), but Marty arrives in NYC to find that his maybe-girlfriend Rachel (Odessa A’zion) has given birth to his son.
The last shots of the film thus depict Marty at his most emotionally raw. While Marty (Timothée Chalomet) has certainly been vulnerable in earlier parts of the movie, most notably when he drops his pants to allow Rockwell to spank him in public, all of that was in pursuit of a goal: to prove he’s the greatest ping pong player the world. Here, as Marty looks at his son, he breaks down in honest tears, true vulnerability that has nothing to do with winning or proving his greatness. And that’s exactly why the scene signals Marty’s ultimate defeat.
Marty Supremacy
With its kinetic scenes of table tennis matches and huge ’80s pop soundtrack, which mixes needle drops such as “I Have the Touch” by Peter Gabriel and a synth score by Daniel Lopatin, Marty Supreme can at times play more like a Rocky movie than the standard A24 fare. Director Josh Safdie, who shares a co-writing credit with Ronald Bronstein, borrows so openly from sports movie tropes that one could be forgiven for reading Marty Supreme as a triumphant story about an incredible talent who stops at nothing to achieve his dreams.
Indeed, Marty is a world-class tennis table player. The film takes time to establish his ability to best everyone, whether its former champion Béla Kletzki (Géza Röhrig) or the yokels he and his buddy Wally (Tyler, the Creator) hustle for cash. Moreover, Chalamet imbues Marty with such charisma that we understand how he and business partner Dion (Luke Manley) could get the latter’s father to invest in an orange ping pong ball promotion. We, like Marty, have near infinite confidence in his abilities to win.
However, many viewers do not share Marty’s sense of greatness. He may be a unique ping-pong talent, but the movie never forgets that it’s just ping-pong. His achievements all come in a game that few, particularly in 1952, hold in highly prestigious esteem Furthermore, the film presents Marty as a mewling, conniving jerk, thanks in part to Chalamet’s egoless commitment to the role. Marty will deceive, cajole, and betray anyone in pursuit of his goal, whether it be friend, family, or benefactor. The film’s acknowledgment of Marty’s terrible behavior informs the entire pivot of the final scene, in which he breaks down in tears while staring at his son.
Even Babies Want to Rule the World
The last scene of Marty Supreme takes place after his victory over Endo in Japan. Having forced an exhibition showcase into a real rematch between the Japanese champion that redeems his loss at the start of the film, Marty makes his way back to the U.S. where he goes to the hospital to find that Rachel has given birth. After checking in with the dazed mother, Marty goes to see his newborn son. As the nurse holds the infant up to the glass, Marty finally loses his cool. His driven facade shatters and holds his hands to his mouth, the only gesture toward maintaining composure as he allows the tears to fall from his face.
In between Marty’s breakdown, Safdie turns the camera toward the child, who goes on the inverse of Marty’s emotional journey. Where the baby cries as the nurse picks him up, another emotion takes over upon meeting the old man. In close-up, the baby gives his father what can only be described as a look of disgust. Against Marty’s warm display, the child sneers at his dad, as if already losing respect for the weakness his father shows. The scene closes as the thundering sounds of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears plays.
The combination of music and expressions completely undercuts whatever epiphany Marty thinks he may have achieved. It’s true that his tears reveal a type of humanity that Marty has kept closed off to himself and others throughout the film; however, its that humanity in others which allowed Marty to use them in order to achieve his own ends.
Whether it’s the loyalty that Dion, Rachel, and Wally extend, the desire to avoid further conflict with a disdaining table tennis head (Pico Iyer), or the adoration that a gangster (Abel Ferrara) has for his dog, Marty sees the slightest hint of authentic connection as just another advantage to exploit. Just look at the way he treats his mother (Fran Drescher), who he consistently treats as, at best, the provider of shelter and, most often, as an imposition. Even the one act of kindness he shows is in fact a testament to his own greatness, chipping off a piece of the pyramid at an event and giving to his mother to bond over their Jewish identities, proclaiming “we built this.”
If Marty runs over everyone, including family, in pursuit of his goals, who is to say his child won’t do the same? Certainly the movie doesn’t suggest that such a turn around will happen. As the soundtrack tells us, everybody wants to rule the world, Marty Jr. included. And if this child sees any advantage that he can get by mistreating his pops, then he absolutely will.
Like Father, Like Son
According to Variety, the original ending of Marty Supreme involved “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” but it occurred in a very different setting. This ending found Marty at a Tears for Fears concert in the 1980s where the sight of his granddaughter singing along with the hit prompts him to recall his past.
Even without that time shift in place, the film’s ending retains the theme. Marty Supreme is a movie about people who want to rule the world, including movie stars, fountain pen moguls, and ping-pong champions. The closer these people get to power, the more craven, thoughtless, and empty they become, including our hero Marty Mauser.
The film doesn’t need to go 30 years into the future to show us that the quest for power, no matter how insignificant, will continue. The same things he did will be done unto him because everyone, father and child, wants to rule the world.
