28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Director Explains What That Ending Means for the Franchise’s Future

This article contains full spoilers for 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple.

Twenty-eight years later, the rage virus still ravages the United Kingdom. But 28 years and 110 minutes later, or whenever the events of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple finish, the tide begins to turn. Dr. Ian Kelson seems to have discovered a cure for the virus and administered it on his most dangerous patient, the hulking Alpha Infected he refers to as “Samson.” As Kelson succumbs to the wounds he received from the maniacal Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, Samson arrives to thank the doctor—which he does by speaking words, recovering the language the virus seemed to strip away.

Does that mean the story is finished? The zombie threat has been solved and the good guys will live happily ever after? Not so, says Bone Temple director Nia DaCosta. In a debrief with The Hollywood Reporter, DaCosta points out that Samson is “not fully cured, and the level that he is healed is permanent. He’s not what he was, but is he one of us? I don’t know. But he’s not what he was.”

DaCosta visualizes that difference throughout the film. Even before Keslon (Ralph Fiennes) muses that the Infected must see things differently than uninfected people, we see through the perspective of Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) in which other people become raging zombies from which he must defend himself. In one of the movie’s most poignant moments, Kelson’s treatments allow Samson to relive an experience on a commuter train, recalling the humanity that he once had. As Kelson puts it, the rage virus seems to cover over the person who was once there.

While some might object that Kelson’s field medicine would be able to find a cure went undiscovered by neither the U.S. military in 28 Weeks Later nor the Scandinavian officials seen in 28 Years Later, the discovery matches the movie’s theme. Writer Alex Garland continues the humanitarian worldview that he established in the previous film, suggesting here that some like Sir Jimmy (Jack O’Connell) use their pain to create a dogma that harms others in the name of charity, while others such as Kelson respond to hurt and threat by seeking the humanity in others. Kelson’s cure does exactly that, finding what remains in the Infected instead of destroying it.

The movie’s closing scene with Jim (Cillian Murphy) choosing to help Spike (Alfie Williams) and Kelli (Erin Kellyman)—after lecturing his daughter on the importance of helping rebuild an enemy instead of annihilating them, no less—suggests that the next movie will show how Kelson’s cure can spread across the Infected.

Then again, the future is uncertain, even for DaCosta. The same level of latitude that allowed her to make the movie her way means that she doesn’t necessarily have full insight in the next installment, which will be directed once again by Danny Boyle. She couched her answer in the admission that, although she recently spoke with Garland about it, she had “strong opinions about how I approached [the cure] for this movie” and didn’t want “to say anything that might need to be retconned.”

In other words, we won’t know for sure until 28 Years Later 3 comes out. But after two and a half decades, what’s another couple of months?

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is now playing worldwide.

How Tom Hiddleston Channeled the Joker to Play Loki

Before the Joker, there was Loki. The Clown Prince of Crime may take on different personas and attitudes to befuddle Batman and the citizens of Gotham, whether it be Heath Ledger constantly changing his story about his scars or the prank-filled capers he pulled off in early comic book stories by Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson. But even on his best days, the Joker is borrowing moves from the Norse trickster god Loki, a shapeshifter known for his ability to not just change his form, but also his motivations and backstory.

Yet, in a surprising reversal. The man most associated with Loki these days looked to the Joker, not Norse mythology, for inspiration. Specifically, Tom Hiddleston drew ideas from Jack Nicholson‘s take on in the 1989 movie Batman. “Truthfully, I don’t think I would’ve played Loki without that film,” Hiddleston told host Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

“I think the way Jack Nicholson played the Joker… at the time in my life when I saw it, it made such an impact on my imagination.” In particular, Hiddleston was drawn to joy that Nicholson brought to the character. “I understood he was the villain, but he was having such a good time — that could describe somebody else I know — and he was so charismatic and so inventive and so free.”

That description may help us understand why Hiddleston returns to the character so often, even planning to reprise the role for this year’s Avengers: Doomsday, despite having brought him to a satisfying conclusion at the end of Loki‘s second season. In Hiddleston’s hands, Loki has indeed been inventive and free, moving from the clear baddie of Thor and The Avengers to something of an antihero and even sacrificing himself at the hands of Thanos to allow Banner to escape to Earth at the start of Avengers: Infinity War. Each time he appears on screen, Hiddelston’s Loki is a little different: sometimes threatening, sometimes noble, always charming.

That mercurial element tracks with Nicholson’s performance in Batman. Although the film gives Joker a definitive origin as a high-level gangster who gets set up by his boss—an origin absent from the comics—Nicholson seems to be playing a different person in every scene. Sometimes, he’s a mastermind who seeks the forceful takeover of Carl Grissom’s (Jack Palance) gang. Other times, he’s an art lover who simply wants to express himself. Sometimes he’s a populist revolutionary, sometimes he wants to kill them all.

For Hiddleston, the appeal of the Nicholson Joker isn’t all that a complicated. “I guess it’s in my make up as a fan, as someone who loved movies as a child. I loved villains who enjoyed themselves,” he admitted, adding to the list Alan Rickman in Die Hard and James Mason in North by Northwest. “I mean, Alan Rickman, particularly in that film, was having such a good time and was so likeable.”

Obviously, Hiddleston has succeeded in making Loki likable for fans and enjoyable to play. But if he ever gets tired of playing the god of stories, then there is an opening for a certain grinning villain in James Gunn’s new DCU…

Luke Cage: Mike Colter Won’t Confirm or Deny an MCU Return

Luke Cage has some unfinished business. At least, that’s what Cage’s actor Mike Colter said about the character he played in the Netflix series Luke Cage. Across two seasons, Cage established himself as the superman of Harlem, a wrongfully-convicted man who gained super strength and invulnerability due to prison experiments. He was last seen alongside not just the Iron Fist Danny Rand, Cage’s partner in the comics, but also with Jessica Jones and Matt Murdock a.k.a. Daredevil. Now Murdock has come to the MCU with Daredevil: Born Again, which will welcome back Jessica Jones in its second season.

Is Cage far behind? Colter isn’t saying for sure. “I’ve had conversations and I’ll leave it at that,” he slyly admitted while visiting Shawn Stockman’s On That Note. “Daredevil’s back. Jessica’s back. We’re in a better position to see this come into fruition faster than we think.” Which isn’t a strong “yes.” But that isn’t a “no” either.

While much of the conversation with Stockman focuses on music—which is, after all, the topic of his show—he and Colter cannot help but express their love of Luke Cage a.k.a. Powerman, one of the most prominent Black superheroes in comics. Created by Archie Goodwin, George Tuska, Roy Thomas, and John Romita Sr., Cage first appeared in 1972’s Luke Cage, Hero for Hire #1.

In the same way that Iron Fist and Shang-Chi sought to jump on the martial arts craze and Blade and Werewolf By Night wanted to capture some of the horror buzz, Cage was created to take advantage of a larger interest in Blaxploitation films, and his earliest appearances matched the tone of Shaft and Superfly, albeit in an all-ages comic book tone. However, Cage truly found his footing when being paired with Iron Fist for genre heavy adventures, which continued to define the character even when he was elevated to Avengers status in the mid-2000s by writer Brian Michael Bendis.

It was Bendis’ work on the character that caught the attention of Netflix, who based their Marvel shows on his street-level comics. But while Colter’s performance was rightly praised, as was the show itself—especially the first two thirds of season one, which co-starred an electric Mahershala Ali as the villain Cottonmouth—he has not yet been revived for the current MCU.

Which isn’t to say that Colter has been missing from screens. In addition to a main role in the cult favorite series Evil, Colter stole the screen from Gerard Butler in the pulpy actioner Plane, and in fact will be the star of a sequel, now in production.

Yet, it’s hard to imagine a better time to bring in Colter as Cage than Daredevil: Born Again‘s second season. The season borrows heavily from the Devil’s Reign storyline from the comics, in which Mayor Wilson Fisk outlaws all masked vigilantes from New York City, waging a war against the heroes. Of course, Fisk loses in the end and is expelled from office. And who takes his place as mayor? Why, none other than the Power Man, Luke Cage.

Will Born Again‘s second season include that plot beat and give us Mike Colter as Luke Cage again? Colter isn’t saying, but that sure sounds like some business we’d like to see him finish.

Daredevil: Born Again season 2 premieres to Disney+ on March 4.

Marty Supreme’s Box Office Success Proves that Audiences Want Complex Films

Marty Supreme rules the world. Josh Safdie’s ping-pong drama has officially made over $100 million world-wide, becoming the fourth A24 film to reach that milestone. It follows fellow 2025 release Materialists, the divisive 2024 thriller Civil War, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2022 gonzo multiversal tale that won best picture.

Clearly, no one can dispute Marty Supreme‘s success. But the success of protagonist Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, remains in question. The movie ends on an ambiguous note, leaving fans to continue to debate its meaning. In this age of superhero blockbusters and Disney live-action remakes, such complexity seems like box office poison. But audience’s embrace of Marty Supreme proves that viewers want something more than easy-to-understand good guys and bad guys.

Like Safdie’s previous collaborations with brother Benny, Marty Supreme follows a mess of the protagonist’s own making, as arrogant and reckless ping-pong phenom Mauser shamelessly seeks a rematch against Japanese champion Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi), exploiting anyone who has the misfortune to enter his orbit. Chalamet gives a virtuoso performance, at once charismatic and repellent, inviting viewers to hold him in contempt as much as they watch him with awe.

Safdie, who co-wrote the script with Ronald Bronstein, matches Chalamet’s layered performance with his filmmaking. The movie follows the beats of a traditional underdog sports story, its spectacle heightened by incredibly-shot table-tennis matches and a powerful synth score by Daniel Lopatin. Yet, it doesn’t shy away from Mauser’s despicable behavior, nor from unpleasant moments, such as a subplot involving a low-level hood (Abel Ferrara, director of NY scuzz classics such as Driller Killer) and an injured dog.

At no point does Marty Supreme tell the viewer how to feel about the character or the events, which seems like the kiss of death at the box office. In a year when Zootopia 2 and Avatar: Fire and Ash topped the box office, both films that end with heroes saving the day and obvious bad guys given their just rewards, Marty Supreme seems like the sort of thing that would garner a following among the same weirdos who love Ari Aster and Oz Perkins flicks and be ignored by everything else. But Marty Supreme‘s returns show that there’s a desire for messy works with no clear moral message.

The same could be said of A24’s other $100 million dollar grossing movie. While Everything Everywhere All at Once‘s ecstatic message of contentment and empathy resonated with many moviegoers, it also sparked a backlash in which film fans dismissed it as glib and cloying. Worse charges were hurled at Civil War, which came under fire for refusing to map its characters onto our current political climate, and at Materialists, who some found as either too kind or or too critical of its doomed romantics. Yet, these varied controversies did not keep moviegoers from seeking the films out.

As these numbers show, audiences certainly want spectacle with clean narratives and simple morality. But they can also handle some nastiness and ambiguity along with their popcorn fare.

Marty Supreme is now playing in theaters worldwide.

Woody Harrelson Admits He Wanted to Punch Matthew McConaughey on True Detective

Most True Detective fans still consider the first season the best, but it turns out that making the celebrated debut season of the HBO show wasn’t always sunshine and roses for best friends and co-stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey.

In the latest episode of Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, Harrelson recalled that he wanted to “punch” McConaughey after he went the method route for his disillusioned detective Rust Cohle, a philosophically pessimistic character heavily inspired by Thomas Ligotti’s non-fiction book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

“When we were shooting, he was Rust Cohle,” Harrelson said. “There [were] so many times I wanted to punch this motherfucker in the face. I’m so pissed at him ’cause he’s in his character.”

The conflict between the EDtv duo didn’t stop at McConaughey’s method approach to playing Cohle, though, as Harrelson also felt that audiences expected their onscreen partnership to bring in the laughs. In that respect, McConaughey simply wasn’t playing ball, and Harrelson finally made his thoughts clear during one particular rehearsal session.

“I’m just kind of being stoic Rust Cohle,” McConaughey explained. “Woody goes, like, ‘Hey man, I need to talk to you about something.’ He goes, ‘The way you and I work, McConaughey, I hit you the ball [and] you hit back, I hit it back to you. We volley [and] we play. … Man, that’s us. It’s dramatic, but it’s also comedy.'”

After trying to convince McConaughey that their True Detective dialogue needed more back-and-forth jokey banter, Harrelson was surprised when McConaughey didn’t agree, which only infuriated him further. “It’s fucking not funny, and I hate it,'” Harrelson reportedly said, but McConaughey had “a hunch” that Cohle’s complete lack of engagement in Detective Marty Hart’s comedic jibes might actually end up being funny after all.

Harrelson admitted that McConaughey was “totally right” about the situation, with Hart’s frustrated nagging against Cohle’s consistently listless demeanor being one of the funniest elements of that onscreen partnership.

Meet the Archaeologist Changing What We Know About Ancient Egypt

Archaeologist, lecturer, and a former Minister of Antiquities in Egypt, Dr. Zahi Hawass has spent a lifetime digging through the sands of his native homeland and traveling the world to explain what treasures remain hidden within. He is a scholar, yes, but also a recognizable, oft-hatted silhouette to anyone with a passing interest in the land of pharaohs and pyramids. Whether in the pages of National Geographic, on the Discovery Channel, or along Oxford’s hallowed halls, Hawass has been a fixture, outspoken and still animated more than 50 years since his career began, ready to debate the glories and ruins of a distant past.

Yet when we meet him on a brisk January morning in Manhattan, he admits he’s in town and experiencing something altogether new—winter in New York—to discuss a history that’s a little more recent: his own.

In The Man with the Hat, which premieres later this week on PVOD around the world, filmmaker Jeffrey Roth turns the camera on Hawass to discuss an Egypt of the Old and New Kingdoms, definitely, but also a lifetime in an archaeological field that’s changed dramatically since Hawass first became an associate director of excavation at the ruins of Hermopolis in 1968.

In the intervening years, the Egyptologist was on the ground when secrets of the Pyramids of Giza’s construction were unearthed; present as new computed-tomography (CT) and DNA-scanning tech answered a century-old mystery about the mummified remains of Hatshepsut, the Woman King; and even there, holding a very large stick by his own account, outside of the Cairo Museum after looters were repelled away from broken glass during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

The Man with a Hat gives an intimate portrait of those events from Hawass’ perspective, as well as insights down to that titular hat he’s worn in enough documentaries across enough decades that some have incorrectly mused it was an inspiration for Indiana Jones.

“When I started in archaeology, I used to wear a white hat that the farmers in Egypt wear, but this hat never protected me from the sun,” Hawass confides between sips of a cappuccino. “So as I was visiting Los Angeles, I entered a hat store and I found this hat, put it on my head, and a friend of mine beside me said it looks good. I said, ‘Okay, this can protect me from the sun.’ But this is why this hat began to be connected with every discovery that I made.”

While Hawass does not suggest it informed an iconic archaeologist of the screen, he does tell us George Lucas once asked him over dinner why he doesn’t wear a fedora like Indy. “I told him that my hat is a real archaeology hat, and the Harrison Ford hat is the fake one.”

If that’s so, the real thing seems more than ready for its close-up.

New Discoveries Reshaping Old Heresies

When filmmaker Jeffrey Roth first approached Hawass, the archaeologist was not pursuing a documentary about his life. In recent years, Hawass has taken to the habit of traveling frequently—to as many as two countries a month, he tells us—while lecturing about breakthroughs and discoveries still being made in Egypt, as well as debate the occasional conspiracy theorist convinced about aliens or power conductors beneath the sands of Giza. Yet the archaeologist wasn’t necessarily looking for a starring role of his own. He was, however, eager to speak on-camera about new details archaeologists are unearthing with his support and guidance.

“For the last three years, we made major, important discoveries in Egypt: in the Valley of the Kings, in the West Bank of Luxor, and in Saqqara and the pyramids,” Hawass says. “So I thought maybe it’s time to make a film so that the people could really see all of these major discoveries.”

Without taking a moment’s pause, Hawass asserts the most significant of these lies along Luxor’s West Bank and what has been described to the press as a “lost golden city.” Dated to about 3,400 years ago, during the reign of New Kingdom Pharaoh Amenhotep III, this golden city made waves when it was first revealed to the world in 2021. After all, it was constructed by what many Egyptologists, including Hawass, argue might be Egypt’s greatest pharaoh (with all due respect to Ramses II, the self-styled “Ramses the Great”).

And what might really intrigue Egyptian scholars are the latest revelations from the site, which Hawass suggests could rewrite what we think we know about Amenhotep III’s infamous and much debated son and heir, Amenhotep IV, aka Akhenaten. The Heretic Pharaoh.

“I was searching for the funeral temple of Tutankhamun to the north of Medinet Habu, and by accident we found the city,” Hawass explains. While he believes they have only excavated maybe a third of the city in the last four years, already teams have discovered fascinating insights into the daily lives of workers and servants from the 18th Dynasty.

“This city contains the living areas for the artisans, about nine royal workshops to make children’s toys, textiles, and clothing for the palace,” Hawass says. “And what’s really amazing is we found a lake to provide the city with water.” Curiously though, in an administrative building belonging to a high-ranking priest and official working under Amenhotep III, Hawass asserts that scientists have found evidence that “Amenhotep III called his palace the dazzling Aten and also this city the dazzling Aten, and he called himself the dazzling Aten.”

For a little historical context, “Aten” is the name of a sun disk and its corresponding deity that became the epicenter of a religious upheaval which informs much of what we know about Ancient Egypt today. Aten, or Atenism, grew into what some believe to be a monotheistic religion developed and spread by Amenhotep III’s son (hence Amenhotep IV changing his name to Akhenaten). Akhenaten eventually turned his back on the old gods and built a new capital along the Nile called Akhetaten (modern day Amarna). There he and his wife Nefertiti, as well their royal family, worshipped the single deity without interruption, triggering a religious and artistic revolution that ended in catastrophe, and with Akhenaten’s orphaned, boy-king heir pressured by the priests of old to abandon his father’s city and reopen the temples of the old gods. The boy’s name was Tutankhamun. King Tut.

“When Akhenaten, the son, went to Amarna, he said, ‘I built this city for my father Aten,’” Hawass says. “We now think that Amenhotep III could be the god Aten himself. And that’s why the city itself has changed a lot about history, about religion, and about Amenhotep III.”

There is still much left to unearth in this golden city, but its secrets could rewrite what we know about the origins of what some claim to be the world’s first monotheistic religion, changing its worship possibly from that of a sun disk to a deceased father and king. Although Hawass seems wary to make that claim just yet, either about Amenhotep III being fully the Heretic Pharaoh’s Aten or the world’s first monotheistic deity.

“There is some evidence [of monotheism] before that, but this is the time, the clear time, that the people began to announce the one god, and no other gods,” Hawass says. “Amenhotep III, I think, respected the other gods, but Akhenaten did not. He built a temple for Aten in the temples of Amun, and that’s why he was the enemy of the priests of Amun.”

Fictional Undead Mummies vs. Real-Life ‘Nonsense’

Interspersed throughout The Man with the Hat are clips of Universal Pictures’ 1932 classic The Mummy horror movie starring Boris Karloff, plus a few of its lesser sequels from the 1940s. This cycle of films began a century of cinematic superstitions that runs the length from Christopher Lee to Brendan Fraser. And, as one might imagine, none are particularly accurate to history or even mythology. Nonetheless, Hawass does not mind their inclusion in his documentary. In fact, he confesses to being something of a fan.

“I loved them, of course,” Hawass says of seeing old Mummy movies growing up. “These movies really give awareness about Egyptology to the public. The Curse of the Pharaohs [news stories], the movies about the Great Pyramid, mummies, all of this really was good in my opinion.”

What the archaeologist has less patience for is the proliferation of conspiracy theories, or often unsubstantiated speculations about Ancient Egypt that tend to revolve around either alien visitors or the myth of Atlantis being real.

It is true that our understanding of Ancient Egypt shifts frequently. If Amenhotep III is proven to be his son’s “one god,” it could certainly rewrite a few books about the 18th Dynasty. And far more significantly, Hawass was there as Director General of Giza in 1988 when American archaeologist Mark Lehner first discovered what is now called the workers’ village in Giza Plateau. These were the homes of the men who built one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

“The pyramid builders were a really very important discovery because you can answer the questions the public are asking all the time,” Hawass says, “and it can kind of stop all the talk about aliens and lost civilizations, and all of this nonsense.” The nonsense Hawass refers to ranges from recent claims that the Great Pyramid and Sphinx were built 12,000 years ago by an even older, forgotten civilization, to fairly ancient ideas about the same structures being the result of enslaved labor.

“If the people who built the pyramids were slaves, they would never be buried in the shadow of the pyramid, and they will never build their tombs for eternity like kings and queens,” Hawass says, pointing to how in the decades since the initial discovery of the workers’ village, archaeologists have also found lower cemeteries for the laborers who moved stones to build the Great Pyramid and upper cemeteries for technicians; they also have found bakeries, artisan shops, and even a papyri trail suggesting workers on the Pyramid of Khufu (the Great Pyramid) got every 10th day off. (Which, one supposes, means no signs of a union.)

Still, alternative histories and outlandish theories about the Giza Pyramids’ origins remain stubbornly popular, from Ancient Aliens on the History Channel to Netflix’s much-watched Ancient Apocalypse, a TV series where British author Graham Hancock slowly insists the Giza Pyramids and many other ancient sites around the world are remnants or descendants of an advanced culture lost at the end of the last ice age 10 to 12 millennia ago.

“The people who create all these stories, they are uneducated about Ancient Egypt,” Hawass counters. “I always say when I debate Graham Hancock and John Anthony West, or Robert Bauval, ‘Okay, what kind of evidence [do they have]? Not one single evidence! But look what happened a few years ago where there was the discovery of the Wadi Jar papyri. It is a written papyri of an Assyrian workman, his name is Merer, and he’s talking about building the Pyramid of Khufu. How can you ignore all of this?”

Hawass refers to papyrus—also sometimes referred to as the “Red Sea Scrolls”—discovered in 2013 which noted the construction of the Great Pyramid during the 26th year of Khufu’s kingship. Merer apparently visited the project and referred to it by what appears to be its original name, Akhet-Khufu, “the Horizon of Khufu.”

“If you look at these people, they never studied Ancient Egypt, they never understood it, and therefore they can have any theory they want,” Hawass contends. But he is quicker to insist that every year, he meets many more people who want to learn actual verified history rooted in archaeological evidence.

“I gave 33 lectures last summer in 33 cities in America and Canada, and 3,000 people [attended each],” Hawass says. “More people want to hear about discoveries than talking about aliens and things like that.”

Preserving the Past into the Future

Conspiracy theories and “alternative facts” dominating streaming services can threaten abstract knowledge about antiquity, but there’s plenty of real-world troubles and travails to worry about. In the documentary, stunning photos and aftermath footage is shown of the break-in of the Cairo Museum in Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

“That was so bad, I could not leave home because there was a curfew,” Hawass says while thinking back on that night. “A thousand people entered the museum, but what I did is I called the head of the army at night and I asked him to bring the army commanders to the museum, and the army commanders saved the museum.” In the end, Hawass notes they found only 35 objects were stolen and all of them were recovered. “Thank God, the people who entered the museum were ignorant, they were looking for gold, and the gold room was sealed and the museum was dark. This is how the museum was saved.”

The public-facing archaeologist remains vocal about protecting all artifacts, though, especially those no longer in Egypt. During his tenure in the Egyptian government and afterward, Hawass has loudly proclaimed that antiquities taken in previous centuries by foreign powers and still stored in Western museums are a form of imperialism. And there are three above any others he would like to see returned: the Bust of Nefertiti in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin, the Dendera Zodiac in the Louvre of Paris, and the Rosetta Stone in London’s British Museum, the latter of which made the modern translation of hieroglyphs possible.

“The Rosetta Stone was taken by the French and they gave it to the English. How can you give someone something that doesn’t belong to you?” Hawass says. “I’m asking for only an object that belongs to Egypt, because it’s the icon of the Egyptian identity.”

Perhaps more surprising for the former head of Egyptian Tourism and Antiquities, however, is that among his concerns for Ancient Egyptian history’s greatest threats… is the tourists themselves.

“Tourists are the enemy of archaeology,” Hawass says. “We need to accommodate between the need of tourists for the economy and the need for the preservation of the Egyptian. Ten thousand people a day enter inside the tomb of Seti I and Tutankhamun, and Ramses VI, breathing, touching, photos. Tombs were not made for tourists.” It’s for that reason two years ago, Hawass was among the champions for the closure of the Tomb of Nefertari in the Valley of the Queens. It is arguably the best preserved royal tomb in Egypt, and generally the less oxygen breathed on it, the better.

“We need to let the people enter maybe three times a day and you should need a reservation to enter tombs,” the archaeologist suggests. “We really need to do certain rules to protect these monuments, and this is what I’m telling the authorities now to do.” Among Hawass’ more interesting suggestions is the idea of building more replicas of the most popular tombs that tourists could visit instead.

Still Wearing the Hat

Hawass’ documentary comes out at the end of this month, but the archaeologist appears eager to keep going. When we meet, he has just completed press in Los Angeles for the film and is planning several lectures on unrelated archaeological projects he is working on. There is, for example, the Egyptian Genome Project, a national initiative to create a genomic map of modern and ancient Egyptians, and continued DNA research into the royal mummies. Hawass is currently hoping new techniques might confirm the mummy of Nefertiti of the 18th Dynasty, and reveal if the famed “King Tut” had an infection when he died (which would disprove the popular theory he was murdered).

Hawass also seems pleased to still be walking through the monuments and sites he’s studied all his life, both for this film and otherwise. His favorite unsurprisingly is Giza.

“I spent most of my life excavating every piece of sand at Giza,” Hawass says, reminiscing particularly about the time they were able to learn the Sphinx is carved from one “living” rock.

“I lived two years of my life in front of the Great Pyramid in the Guest House. The Giza Pyramids became a part of me, and it’s still a part of me,” says Hawass.

And while he remains hesitant to imagine what his legacy will be, the man who’s spent his life trying to spread enthusiasm for Egyptology among the public—including with a foundation that now teaches courses in learning hieroglyphs and the fundamentals of archaeology—seems keen on wanting to pass that passion down to the next generation.

“The most important thing that I would love people to remember me by is the teaching and the training of the younger people that I did,” Hawass says. “That really can continue my legacy by doing good work preserving the Egyptian history.”

The Man with the Hat is available on Apple, Amazon, and other apps on Jan. 20.

Matt Damon Confirms What We Already Suspected About Netflix Movies

New action-thriller The Rip, from Smokin’ Aces director Joe Carnahan, reunites best buddies Matt Damon and Ben Affleck onscreen for the first time since their 2023 Nike biopic, Air. The Netflix flick has received generally good reviews, and people seem to be watching it, but what does it take to get someone to really watch a movie on streaming these days, even one that stars two popular Oscar winners?

Many of you will have seen various memes on social media poking fun at repetitive, exposition-dumpy dialogue in certain Netflix movies and shows, especially in the recent season of Stranger Things, but if it feels like people are generally over-explaining plots to you these days in an effort to keep you engaged with this stuff, it’s because they are.

Damon has confirmed that Netflix is well aware that most people sit and scroll on their phones while watching movies on the service, and that they suggest dialogue changes to counteract the audience’s lack of attention. He’s concerned that the way movies are made might be fundamentally evolving as a result.

“The standard way to make an action movie, that we learned, was you usually have three set pieces,” Damon explained to Joe Rogan. “One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third — and the big one with all the explosions, and you spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your kind of finale. Now, [Netflix is] like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes?’ We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.”

Damon added that he feels this approach will start to “infringe” on how filmmakers tell stories. However, Affleck seemed slightly more optimistic, citing one of Netflix’s recent critically acclaimed shows as an example.

“You look at Adolescence, and it didn’t do any of that shit, and it was fucking great,” he noted. “My feeling is just that it demonstrates that you don’t need to do any of that shit to get people [to watch].”

Affleck also doesn’t think streaming as a concept is an “existential threat”, explaining that past developments in technology, such as television itself, led to fewer butts on seats in the theater, but that as long as it’s still cool to go there and experience movies like Christopher Nolan’s upcoming fantasy epic The Odyssey, cinema should be safe, even in a world where streaming is more convenient.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Movie Not Allowed to Be Discussed on Set

This article contains spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 1 “The Hedge Knight.”

When HBO set out to adapt his “Tales of Dunk and Egg” novellas into Game of Thrones prequel series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, writer George R.R. Martin had one small request for production.

“I said, ‘Let’s do the best jousting sequences that have been ever put on film,’” Martin revealed at New York Comic Con 2025. “A modest little challenge for [showrunner Ira Parker] and his crew.”

The Hedge Knight, the first Dunk and Egg novella upon which the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is based, features its fair share of Medieval-style tournament action. Following the death of his master Ser Arlan of Pennytree, titular hedge knight Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) decides to make a name (and some coin) for himself by entering the lists at the Tourney at Ashford Meadow. This gives A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms plenty of opportunities to make good on Martin’s challenge and redefine what a live-action jousting sequence can be.

While few often think of jousting stories as their own subgenre of fiction, a surprising amount of movies and TV shows have been built around the spectacle of armored knights on horseback smashing into other armored knights on horseback. Entries within the jousting canon include 2021’s The Last Duel, 1981’s Excalibur, and 1952’s Ivanhoe (which Martin identifies as the closest to getting the whole thing right). One jousting movie in particular, however, tends to stand out among the pack. And its conceit resembles A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms‘ closely enough that showrunner Ira Parker banned mention of it from the writers’ room and set.

“[A Knight’s Tale] is the only thing that we were not allowed to speak of in the writers room or on set,” Parker says, “It’s a brilliant movie that has an enduring quality, but we came out first. The Hedge Knight was written two years before that came out.”

Parker is right. Despite its frankly unacceptable 59% Rotten Tomatoes score, A Knight’s Tale is a brilliant movie. It’s also strikingly similar to The Hedge Knight and now A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. In the 2001 film, Heath Ledger stars as William Thatcher, a lowly squire in 14th century Europe who dreams of big things. Destiny comes knocking for Will in the opening scene when the knight he supports, Sir Ector, dies from unseen injuries following a joust, allowing William to don his armor and finish off the tournament. Together with fellow squires Roland (Mark Addy, who would go on to play Game of Thrones‘ King Robert I) and Wat (Alan Tudyk), William crafts the false identity of Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein and continues to enter into tournaments, gradually improving and becoming something of a Medieval sports celebrity.

This should all sound fairly familiar to those who have now seen A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms‘ first episode (which is fittingly called “The Hedge Knight”). Like A Knight’s Tale, this story opens with the death of a knight and a squire electing to take up his horse, sword, and armor to continue to joust. While Ser Duncan the Tall doesn’t adopt the identity of a fallen knight or fabricate a new one like William Thatcher does, there does seem to be an element of fiction in his assumption of knighthood. He swears that Ser Arlan frequently discussed knighting him before he died, but a flashback reveals that Ser Arlan consented to no such thing. Similarly, the name “Duncan” itself might be a new creation.

“What’s your name?” Ser Duncan’s new squire Egg asks him.
“Dunk.”
“Ser Dunk? That’s no name for a knight? Is it short for Duncan?”
“Yeah…uh, yes… Ser Duncan of… Ser Duncan the Tall.”

To be clear, A Knight’s Tale and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms‘ comparable beginnings is not a case of one copying the other. The Hedge Knight was first published in 1998, two years after the first Song of Ice and Fire novel A Game of Thrones was released and well before the franchise became a global phenomenon so it was unlikely to influence a Hollywood motion picture. If anything, A Knight’s Tale filmmaker Brian Helgeland was more explicitly inspired by “The Knight’s Tale” chapter of Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century classic The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer even appears as a character in the film played by Paul Bettany (which just goes to show you that every Den of Geek article is destined to intersect with Marvel at one point or another).

This is all just a simple case of twin movie kismet – an example of how different storytellers can seize the same concepts simultaneously and independently. Parker sums up the phenomenon with an assist from a literary icon.

“Joan Didion talks about this the best. These ideas float along in the ether. You can pull them down and use them, but if you stop using it, it goes back up and somebody else can grab it down. I don’t know how that works but it seems to work some way. Also, it’s a very classic knight’s tale. Both of these are, which is, I think, a big part of the enjoyment of this. Nobody does these sort of stories better than George.”

New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Peter Claffey on Crafting a New Game of Thrones Hero

This article contains spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 1 “The Hedge Knight.”

The first episode of Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms opens in suitably epic fashion.

The hulking Ser Duncan the Tall a.k.a. “Dunk” (Peter Claffey) digs a pauper’s grave as a torrent of rain pelts his massive figure. He then picks up the shriveled corpse of his knightly master Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb) and gently places the old man into the fertile Reach soil. Having laid his good friend to rest, Dunk handles Ser Arlan’s sword and imagines what kind of future he can cut with it.

“It fits my grip as well as it ever did his… and there is a tourney at Ashford Meadow,” he muses as composer Ramin Djawadi’s iconic Game of Thrones theme swells. Right before the familiar “Duh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuhhhs” crescendo, however, the scene abruptly cuts to Dunk violently spraying diarrhea out of his butt.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms isn’t your granddaddy’s Game of Thrones. This is a looser experience… not entirely unlike Ser Duncan’s stool. While George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy books are certainly not lacking in jokes, the HBO series they inspired is often remembered for its brutal twists, betrayals, and a veritable rainbow of deadly weddings. Equally violent prequel spinoff House of the Dragon has done little to soften the Seven Kingdoms’ gritty reputation. Now, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, based on Martin’s three “Tales of Dunk and Egg” prequel novellas, is ready to put the author’s humor front and center

“George’s writing is incredibly witty and incredibly funny,” A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker tells Den of Geek. “A lot of people say [Tales of Dunk and Egg] is funnier than the other stuff and I actually don’t believe that it’s funnier than the main series. It’s funny in a different way. A lot of George’s underdog characters have a very sharp wit. Dunk doesn’t have that to fall back on.”

The lovably dumb Ser Duncan is indeed a powerful tool for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms to use in finding a softer side of Westeros. In a franchise known for its moral shades of gray, the lowly hedge knight from Flea Bottom might be the most purely “good” character we’ve met yet. Or at least that’s how his actor sees him.

“That good-hearted nature and moral compass that he has makes it difficult to navigate in a world like Westeros,” Claffey says. “He’s a protagonist who isn’t seeking to sit on the Iron Throne or to be a Lord Commander of anything. He’s just a hedge knight who’s trying to survive and work by the values that were bestowed upon him by Ser Arlan. I think that’s a lovely sort of individual to meet in this world that’s so ruthless.”

Game of Thrones‘ historical roster of complex characters has provided many juicy opportunities for very talented performers over the years. The simple goodness of Dunk, however, presents its own kind of acting challenge. And according to Parker, Claffey’s status as a former-rugby-player-turned-novice-thespian made him a uniquely good fit.

“This is a huge job to take on for any actor of any level and Peter has risen to that challenge and more. I’m just so proud of him,” Parker says. “He’s such a charismatic individual but he’s also just like Dunk. He’s got an inner anxiety about him. When he came into the first meeting he was like ‘my palms are sweating’ and I’m just like ‘this is perfect, this is what we wanted.'”

Of course, getting to work with striking material like Dunk’s rain-soaked grave digging certainly helps. Though the moment is eventually undercut by the contents of Dunk’s upset stomach, the burial of Ser Arlan serves as an appropriately mythic introduction for this unlikely hero. Claffey appreciated the significance of the scene, which was shot close to the end of production.

“There is always something quite epic about standing in rain,” he says. “Feeling the raindrops fall off your hair and being completely soaked to the skin while giving this monologue – there is an epic sort of feeling to it for sure.”

In true Dunk fashion, however, Claffey wasn’t concerned only about his performance or comfort.

“That rain that they provide in the rain machine is always completely freezing and Danny Webb who is playing Ser Arlan was down on the ground. I was really anxious for them to get him out because he’s an older dude. Very fit man but he’s in his sixties. I was like ‘You alright, Danny?’ He was like ‘All good, mate.’ And he pulled out these sweets we have called Percy Pigs and asked ‘You want a Percy Pig, mate?’ I was like ‘Yeah, cheers.'”

Sharing a feast of pork with Ser Arlan? Dude really is Dunk.

New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 1 Review: The Hedge Knight

The following contains spoilers for the A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 1.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms may be set in the world of Game of Thrones, but that’s generally where the similarities between the two properties end.

Yes, there are familiar family names, locations you’ve probably heard of before, and a similarly brutal atmosphere that conveys that none of these people are living particularly easy lives. But Seven Kingdoms is lighter in both tone and visual style (translation: you can actually see what’s happening onscreen most of the time). Its world is simpler, in that there are no magical creatures, family dynastic charts, or massive lore dumps. And its characters are those who exist on the margins, the craftspeople and innkeepers and other smallfolk whose lives make Westeros run, but who aren’t considered important enough to be remembered. It’s a breath of fresh air from its opening sequence, which undercuts the most familiar notes of Ramin Djawadi’s familiar score with the literal sound of shit. Truly, the OG series could never.

The story opens, as most Game of Thrones-adjacent properties do, with a death. But it’s a fairly nondescript one, an old man dying from old age after a life of beating up his body in the service of money and honor. Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb) has died, and his squire Ser Duncan the Tall a.k.a. “Dunk” (Peter Claffey) digs his grave, before eulogizing him in a particularly straightforward fashion and getting on with things. That’s a big vibe in this show — the getting on with things. Because unlike the two series that sit alongside it, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms isn’t concerned with politics and succession the way that House of the Dragon or Thrones itself are. Here, dragons are paper tigers that breathe false fire onstage, and our hero is more concerned with where his next meal’s coming from than anything resembling destiny.

Now, left with his former master’s things, Dunk must decide what to do next. The answer, of course, seems obvious: Become the knight he’s always wanted to be, even if what that means in this corner of Westeros is more akin to a wandering minstrel than a Kingsguard captain. (Another character describes the concept of a hedge knight as “like a knight, but sadder,” which seems like a pretty fair assessment when Dunk’s busy using a bit of rope in place of a scabbard.)

Like Dunk himself, there’s something gratifyingly basic and low-stakes about this premiere, which generally follows our hero as he clumsily tries to enter the lists of a jousting tournament at Ashford Meadow in the Reach. But just because he claims to be a knight now doesn’t mean he knows how things work and he spends a lot of time asking random people for directions, advice, or help with getting his name on list to participate in the event. Along the way, he also meets a strange young boy (Dexter Sol Ansell) with a bald head and a bizarre habit of never answering a question directly. Even for those who don’t know the lore behind George R.R. Martin’s Dunk and Egg stories, it’s clear that this kid is more than he seems, an intriguing mix of preternaturally smart and strangely ethereal.

Egg isn’t the only interesting weirdo Dunk comes across as part of this journey. There’s Raymun Fossoway (Shaun Thomas), squire to (and seemingly a much better person than) his more jerkish cousin Ser Steffon Fossway (Edward Ashley). Manfred Dondarrion (Daniel Monks) is the son of the man that Dunk’s good Ser Arlan once served, who seems disinclined to honor the bonds of sacrifice. And, of course, there’s Ser Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings), a knight known as the Laughing Storm, who will one day become Lord of Storm’s End. Lyonel is, admittedly, kind of over the top, hosting a pre-tournament party wearing giant antlers on his head, drinking to some significant excess, and dancing in a way that gives wannabe bullfighter more than grace. He also clearly takes quite a shine to Dunk, charmed by his honesty, forthrightness, and apparently endless love of food.

Lyonel’s interest in Dunk probably shouldn’t be as surprising as it initially feels. After all, it’s pretty much immediately apparent that Ser Duncan is not like anyone else we’ve come across in Westeros before. Big, sweet, and more than a little dumb (complimentary), Dunk isn’t a schemer or a hero of destiny, or even a particularly good knight. What he is, however, is unfailingly kind, generally polite, and so unabashedly good it occasionally feels like he stumbled in from some other fictional universe entirely. The world of Westeros, after all, is best known for its morally gray characters and master manipulators, not its nice guys, and certainly not the kind of person who takes an untested young kid on as his squire just because he’s pretty sure that kid is not getting enough to eat.

“The Seven above gave you tallness, so be tall,” Ser Lyonel tells him in what feels strangely like the show’s mission statement. Ser Duncan is tall, but more than that, he’s true. Essentially a golden retriever given human form, Dunk is kind, honorable, and almost completely without guile. Unfamiliar with the technical ins and outs of things like knighthood and tournaments, he’s more concerned with finding enough coin and food (this boy has a hole in his leg, as my grandmother would say) to survive. The best advice anyone can or likely will give him is to simply stay true to who he is, which is something so very different from almost everyone else we’ve met in this universe to date.

If Thrones and House of the Dragon have taught us anything, it’s that nice guys finish last. But A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms dares to ask what if the hero of this story is actually a guy who talks to his horses, helps feed kids who are hungry, respects women, and just wants to live a life of honor? A guy who lives to make the world a better place instead of getting cut down in his prime? It’s maybe the franchise’s wildest plot twist yet.

New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Timeline Explained: When Is Game of Thrones Prequel Set?

When Game of Thrones concluded back in 2019, the powers that be at HBO faced a fork-in-the-road decision. It was never in doubt that there would be additional television series set in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” canon, the only question was whether they would take place following the events of Game of Thrones or preceding them.

After several false starts in the development stage, a prequel option finally won out thanks to House of the Dragon, a show about the Dance of the Dragons Targaryen civil war roughly 150 years before the birth of Daenerys. Now, with second Game of Thrones spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO gets to have its cake and eat it too. That’s because the six-episode series operates as both a Game of Thrones prequel and a House of the Dragon sequel.

Based on Martin’s three prequel novellas collectively known as “Tales of Dunk and Egg,” A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms depicts a Westeros long after the last of the Targaryens’ dragons have died but well before Daenerys’ fresh three lil guys are born. Though the show is more limited in scope – focusing chiefly on hedge knight Ser Duncan the Tall a.k.a. “Dunk” (Petter Claffey) and his bald, adolescent squire “Egg” (Dexter Sol Ansell) – there’s still plenty of the usual games of thrones percolating in the background.

Before Dunk and Egg head off to the Tourney at Ashford Meadow in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 1, which is based on first Dunk and Egg novella The Hedge Knight, here is what you need to know about where their adventures fall on the Game of Thrones timeline.

When Is A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Set?

Though seasons are notoriously fickle in Westeros, the Seven Kingdoms still maintains a yearly calendar. Like the real world Western timeline, which is split into CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era), the Seven Kingdoms’ timeline is split into AC (After Aegon’s Conquest) and BC (Before Aegon’s Conquest).

Game of Thrones begins in the year 298 AC, while House of the Dragon begins around the year 101 AC and continues through 131 AC. Now, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms picks up in 209 AC. This means that the events of the Dance of the Dragons continue to linger just on the outskirts of living memory.

While the Targaryen dynasty remains on the Iron Throne under the rule of King Daeron II, the family’s power has been greatly diminished. That’s because the last of the dragons (the literal fire-breathing dragons, mind you, not the family itself) died out during Queen Rhaenyra and King Aegon II’s contentious civil war. In the latest A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms trailer, we see how the absence of the Targaryens’ usual firepower has somewhat emboldened the smallfolk against them, with Raymun Fossoway (Shaun Thomas) telling Dunk that the Targaryens are little more than “incestuous aliens and tyrants.”

That’s the situation facing the ancient House as several of its members arrive at Ashford Meadow to participate in Lord Ashford’s name day tourney for his daughter. Among the dragons in attendance are King Daeron II’s son and heir Prince Baelor (Bertie Carvel), his younger son Prince Maekar (Sam Spruell), and Maekar’s son Aerion (Finn Bennett). Den of Geek spoke with Bennett about the fiery Aerion’s understanding of his family’s tenuous political position.

“Aerion can sense that people are laughing behind his back and the Targaryens back,” Bennett says. “He doesn’t think they should be at this kind of event. I think he thinks it’s beneath him and frankly quite embarrassing. That explains a lot of his behavior at the tourney as this kind of brash attempt at regaining some kind of respect.”

What Is the Blackfyre Rebellion?

As if the extinction of the dragons weren’t bad enough, House Targaryen is facing down another political crisis during the time in which A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set: the Blackfyre Rebellion.

Daemon Blackfyre was born an illegitimate bastard to the Targaryen King Aegon IV (often called Aegon the Unworthy due to his ravenous appetites). Aegon IV not only legitimized Daemon but granted him the family’s ancestral Valyrian blade Blackfyre. Daemon would go on to establish his own cadet branch of the family tree known as House Blackfyre and would then lay claim to the Iron Throne after his father died. Due to Daemon’s possession of the symbolically important blade (and the impressive figure he cut) many lords of Westeros supported his claim and joined his rebellion.

Ultimately King Daeron II and his loyalist forces were able to kill Daemon Blackfyre and quell his uprising but several of Daemon’s sons escaped to the Free Cities where they remain a perpetual threat to restart the Blackfyre rebellion. And that’s not even to mention the danger posed by the many other bastards that Aegon the Unworthy recognized on his deathbed.

Though A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms rarely mentions Daemon or the First Blackfyre Rebellion, the characters all live under the shadow of that recently-concluded war and the specter of more potential insurrection to come.

How Does A Knight of the Seven Dragons Lead Into Game of Thrones?

The following contains details from the A Song of Ice and Fire canon that will serve as spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdom season 1 and future seasons.

One might assume that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms being set 80 years before the beginning of Game of Thrones precludes it from featuring any of the flagship series’s characters. And one would assume mostly correctly on that front! There are, however, a couple of strange exceptions.

The first is a character who does not physically appear in any of the three Dunk and Egg novellas but who is canonically alive at the time in which they take place. Remember that abbreviated Targaryen family tree above? The one that talked about King Daeron II and his sons? Well, the Prince Maekar branch of that tree is pretty fruitful when it comes to the larger Thrones universe.

In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, we will get to meet at least three of Prince Maekar’s sons: the aforementioned Prince Aerion, the drunken Prince Daeron, and the precocious Prince Aegon a.k.a. “Egg” a.k.a. the future King Aegon V. Still, Prince Maekar has a few more kids offscreen and one of those kids is little Prince Aemon. You may know him better as Maester Aemon: the blind, century-old brother of the Night’s Watch and Jon Snow’s close ally.

Recall that Maester Aemon’s last words before he died were “Egg, I dreamed that I was old.” The “Egg” he’s addressing is his older brother Aegon: the Egg half of “Dunk and Egg.” Aegon V, known historically as Aegon the Unlikely, only ascended the Iron Throne due to a series of improbable events, one of which was Aemon’s joining of The Night’s Watch, as he assumed the line of succession would never fall all the way down to him.

The other Game of Thrones character who we will likely meet should A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms reach its third season is Brynden Rivers a.k.a. Bloodraven. One of the Great Bastards legitimized by Aegon IV (like his half-brother Daemon Blackfyre, Brynden was born to a noblewoman), Bloodraven is a steadfast Targaryen loyalist. Given the nickname because of his albinism, red eyes, and the crimson avian birthmark that adorns half of his face, Bloodraven is such a brilliant tactician and statesman that enemies and allies alike believe him to be a sorcerer.

Later in life, Bloodraven is sent to join the Night’s Watch by King Aegon V and disappears while ranging beyond the Wall. While that’s the last anybody in the Seven Kingdoms hears of him, it’s implied in the book A Dance with Dragons and confirmed by Game of Thrones that Bloodraven became the powerful all-seeing entity known as the Three-Eyed Crow, who is played by actor Max von Sydow and who eventually bestows his omniscient powers unto young Bran Stark.

Is it crucial to know any of this to better understand A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms or its place on the Game of Thrones timeline? Not at all! The show is very much about Dunk, Egg, and the knightly adventures the embark upon. But aren’t you happy you know the background lore now all the same?

New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.

The Weirdest Comic Book Crossovers of All Time

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

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

Superman and Don Rickles (1971)

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

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

Shang-Chi and Fu Manchu (1974)

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

Original Marvel and DC (1976, 1981)

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

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

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

Godzilla vs. SHIELD (1977)

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

Spider-Man on Saturday Night Live (1978)

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

Team America/New Mutants (1983)

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

Marvel/Transformers/Doctor Who (1987)

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

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

Barry Allen in the Marvel Universe (1990)

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

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

Pinhead vs. Marshal Law (1993)

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

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

Archie Meets the Punisher (1994)

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

Mars Attacks Image (1996)

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

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

Star Trek/X-Men (1996-1998)

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

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

Amalgam Comics (1996, 1997)

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

Sonic the Hedgehog Meets Spawn (1998)

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

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

Marvel/Guiding Light (2006)

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

Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash (2007)

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

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

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

Eminem/The Punisher (2009)

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

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

Ash Saves Obama (2009)

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

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

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

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

Attack on Titan/Avengers (2014)

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

Archie vs. Predator (2015)

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

Batman Meets the Avengers (2016-2017)

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

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

Green Lantern/Planet of the Apes (2017)

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

Batman/Elmer Fudd (2017)

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

Colonel Sanders/Green Lantern (2017)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Wars Is Now Nostalgia for Millennials Instead of Gen X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Pattinson Has a Secret Marty Supreme Cameo

This article contains slight spoilers for Marty Supreme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bride! opens Friday, March 6.

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

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

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

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

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

To Bluely Go

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

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

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

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

Too Familiar Language

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

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

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

Genre Appropriate Cursing

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

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

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