Jamie Lee Curtis Defends Timothée Chalamet from Online Backlash
The path to an Oscar isn’t all glamor and parties. It’s also a lot of politicking and watching your words, which is something Timothée Chalamet learned the hard way after he said that “no one cares” about ballet or opera.
The comments bothered a lot of people, but so has the way they have been interpreted by an always ravenous social media machine. Jamie Lee Curtis has intimate understanding of both.
“He’s a talented kid and he made a stupid comment that he’s going to regret,” Curtis told Den of Geek at SXSW on the eve of both the Oscar ceremony and the premiere of her own new film about eerie online culture. “And that’s okay. In today’s marketplace, where every single word we say is recorded, it’s going to happen to all of us. It certainly happened to me, and I’ve been raked over the coals for things I said on a podcast about something once—when in fact, it wasn’t what I said, but I got reamed for it, and that’s okay. We’re all grown-ups. He’s growing up, and I’m sure he regrets his comments. And if he doesn’t, that’s okay too, but it was a silly comment that obviously denigrated a beautiful art form.”
Curtis shared those thoughts with Den of Geek while promoting Sender, which she produced through her company Comet Pictures and in which she plays a supporting role. The issue was close to her mind, and not just because Sender also features Anna Baryshnikov, daughter of ballet dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lisa Rinehart. Curtis was thinking about the awards season discourse because Sender debuted at SXSW, the same festival that premiered the movie that led to her Best Supporting Actress win, Everything Everywhere All at Once.
According to Curtis, her journey with Everything Everywhere All at Once began with a recommendation from a young filmmaker working at Comet Pictures named Russell Goldman. “When I told Russell that I had been offered a movie by the Daniels, he said, ‘Do it,’ not a second after the word ‘Daniels,'” she reveals. “I didn’t know they were geniuses because I had not seen their work. Russell was really one of the loudest voices that convinced me to do it.”
Now Curtis is back with Goldman as her director via Sender, which stars Britt Lower of Severance fame as Julia, a recovering alcoholic who gets caught in a “brushing scam,” which Goldman describes as a particularly modern racket.
“They send you cheap objects that are most likely related to your search history online, and they send it to your home so that they can write five-star reviews in your name,” Goldman explains. “Then those products can then get boosted on the algorithms on Amazon or any site like that. It sounds very complicated, but it’s how some people feel like they can make money. And it makes you feel insane.”
After her sister was caught in a brushing scam, Curtis discussed the phenomenon with Goldman. “We talked about how creepy that is for a woman who is basically trapped in her house to receive packages she did not ask for. What she gets and why she gets it is very personal, and paranoia and psychological torture occur,” says Curtis.
According to Lower, Julia is already in a vulnerable mental state before she begins receiving unwanted packages at the start of Sender. “Julia’s world has gotten much quieter in her journey to sobriety, and so she’s hyper focused on every detail of new things coming into this space she’s created for herself. There’s a mystery to them.
“Julia is getting a quick fix from ordering things, but then other things come in. She’s been addicted to alcohol, and all of a sudden she transitions to trying to quickly fix her life by ordering a bunch of stuff, and it just gets way out of hand.”
Mail getting out of hand isn’t something that Baryshnikov has experienced. “I loved getting packages as a kid!” she enthuses; “The idea of things arriving is so delightful to me, especially when I don’t know what it means yet.”
But for her co-star David Dastmalchian, things are a little different, especially since he was mailed a pair of dirty underwear. “I have a fan mail post office box, and it’s happened a couple of times, from the same person I don’t know,” Dastmalchian shares. “My dear stepfather, who I love so much, he’s my first line of defense. So anything that is scary or weird or inappropriate, luckily, never gets to me, because he goes through everything, and then I get all the nice stuff. But I got them when I was picking it up myself one time, and they were accompanied by a really bizarre letter.”
Unlike the people in their movie, the makers of Sender can laugh about their mail experiences. And hopefully Curtis’s kind words mean that Chalamet doesn’t have to worry about unpleasant things arriving in his mailbox.
Sender premiered at the SXSW Film Festival on March 14.
One Battle After Another Is Political But It Isn’t About Politics
This post contains spoilers for One Battle After Another.
Like anyone who wins a major Oscar, Paul Thomas Anderson was given a platform. And he used that platform to urge people to treat one another better, providing few specifics in any speech he gave after One Battle After Another earned another award. For some, that lack of detail stems from the movie, which gestures at revolutionary politics but doesn’t offer much detail. But Anderson himself isn’t interested in details, at least outside of the movie.
“Our film obviously has a certain amount of parallels to what’s happening in the news everyday, so it obviously reflects what’s happening in the world,” he admitted to Deadline. “In terms of where it’s going – I don’t know… But I know that the end of our movie is our hero, Willa, heading off to continue to fight against evil forces, and I think like I said in my speech, at least put common decency back into fashion.”
While his imprecision may annoy some, Anderson’s comments remind us that One Battle After Another is less a strident political work and more a picture of people who live political lives.
Nothing illustrates this point better than the final exchange between Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). The two had just spent the past two hours of screentime running from Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and the U.S. military, as well as an assassin from a secret White Supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club. Moreover, Bob used to be Ghetto Pat Calhoun, who served alongside Willa’s mother Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) in the revolutionary group the French 75.
But as Willa leaves, Bob just shouts, “Be careful,” to which she answers, “I won’t.” It’s the type of exchange any parent would have with their kid, no matter how dull their lives may be, a point underscored by the fact that we then watch as Bob fumbles his way around an iPhone. The scene feels so relatable because that’s what it’s trying to be, just a picture of a parent with a teenage kid. Nothing more.
Yet, it’s easy to understand why some viewers would want One Battle After Another to be more strident in its politics. The film features many elements that resonate with anyone angry at the state of the world in general, and America in particular. The movie begins with a thrilling mini-film in which Bob, Perfidia, and the French 75 liberate immigrants from a detention center. Later in the film, Lockjaw leads a group that blurs the line between military and police, and which look an awful lot like the ICE agents who kill and kidnap civilians. Anderson even cast former Homeland Security agent James Raterman as Lockjaw’s right-hand man, Colonel Danvers.
Yet, as much as the Christmas Adventurer’s Club may bring to mind the shadowy forces who work to shore up power among a small group of elites, it also reminds us of the true source material of One Battle After Another. Anderson drew inspiration for his movie from Vineland, the 1990 novel by high-postmodernist Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon’s work certainly responds to the fall-out of the ’60s and the reactionary turn American politics took in the 1980s, but it exists in its own, absurd world, one of secret societies and pop-culture mysteries. If it’s a reflection of the real world, then it’s a reflection in a fun house mirror.
Instead, One Battle After Another talks about the need for revolutionary politics only broadly, which is part of the movie’s point. The way that the French 75 fought against oppression must be different from what Willa and her generation does. The threat mutates, the specifics change, and resistance must be as nimble as the regimes they hope to undo. Bob—and, it is implied, Perfidia—must learn how to let the next generation fight in the way that speaks to their times.
The same is true of the audience. Movies can and do paint specific pictures of oppression and ways to fight back; see classics such as The Battle of Algiers and Medium Cool, or, more recently, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. But there’s value to a sort of fill-in-the-blank type movie too, such as 2024’s Civil War. These films gesture toward evils that exist, but they don’t do the audience’s resisting for them. Instead, it simply reminds the viewer that there are forces in the world that would destroy good things in their pursuit of power.
What are those good things? Again, the film doesn’t get specific. The “common decency” that Anderson mentions is certainly one of them, but so is the imperfect love between a dad and daughter, which is, after all, the real subject of One Battle After Another.
One Battle After Another is now streaming on HBO Max.
The Wire: Remembering Michael B. Jordan’s First Great Role
Last night, Michael B. Jordan won the Oscar for Best Actor, beating out estimable competition including long-established greats Leonardo DiCaprio and Ethan Hawke, as well as up-and-comers Timothée Chalamet and Wagner Moura. Certainly, Jordan deserved the victory for his work in the juggernaut Sinners, which pulled in a record-breaking 16 nominations and 4 wins.
At only 39, Michael B. Jordan seems to belong more with the 30-year-old Chalamet and with Wagner, who only started making American films in 2013. But Jordan’s been doing excellent work for twenty-five years, starting with his role as Wallace on The Wire. Even as a kid, Jordan demonstrated the charisma and dramatic chops that would win him an Academy Award.
Way Down in the Hole
Created by David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who spent a year embedded with homicide detectives in the city police department, The Wire still has a reputation for being one of the greatest shows of all time. It earned such praise thanks to its realistic depiction of life in Baltimore, showing the political, social, and economic forces that drive the cops and criminals. That extends to the show’s portrayal of the drug trade, in which kids who live in project housing have little choice but to sell.
The first season of The Wire illustrated this point with three young teens, Wallace, Poot (Tray Chaney), and Bodie (J. D. Williams), all of whom work under D’Angelo Barksdale, a lieutenant in the organization run by his cousin Avon (Wood Harris). The three kids sell drugs in the common area outside of their homes in an inner-city Baltimore housing project, and the first season often blurs the line between work and play.
The trio have to adhere to the rules that allow Barksdale’s operation to run outside of police observation, observations that only become effective when the Baltimore police begin using the titular ware. If a kid makes a mistake, such as taking counterfeit bills or allowing an addict to draw attention to their drop-off spot, they are reprimanded. At the same time, the show takes time for the kids to actually act like kids, teasing one another or praising the virtues of Chicken McNuggets.
The last point is where Jordan shined as Wallace. Where Bodie presents himself as a hard man willing to do what it takes to climb the ranks and Poot is simply willing to go along with others, Wallace is a genuinely good kid suffering from a lack of options. Jordan plays him as a sweet person, a guy who loves his friends and takes responsibility for those younger than him. We see him helping younger kids with their homework, packing their lunches, and making sure that they get to school, not out of some large philosophical conviction, but just because he wants the kids to be safe.
Through Wallace, The Wire shows the tragedy of kids stuck in a system that forces them into the drug trade. Wallace works in the Barksdale organization alongside Bodie and Poot, but only because that’s what his friends and role models do. However, when Wallace identifies the boyfriend of Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), the burglar who has been robbing Barksdale drug houses, he’s sickened by the violence that flows. That disgust leaves him open to the detectives searching for Barksdale, who convince him to identify Avon’s right-hand man Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) and relocate him upstate.
But Wallace feels out-of-place and lonely in the country, and he eventually returns home to the projects, a decision that drives Stringer to order his death.
Not The Way It Should Be
Jordan plays all of Wallace’s contradictions in the character’s final scene from the episode “Cleaning Up,” in which Poot and Bodie enact Stringer’s orders to kill their friend. The scene begins with the trio heading back to the apartment where Wallace lives with the younger kids. Wallace immediately decides to check in on the kids, at first playfully calling for them and bounding up the stairs as if they’re involved in a game of hide and seek and then turning his voice stern as he becomes worried.
The tension turns when Wallace finds a walkman left by one of the kids, and picks it up to show Poot. When Wallace turns around to see Bodie pointing a pistol at him, Jordan has to embody surprise, betrayal, and fear. Wallace had been less overtaken by the fatalism that consumes many of the others in the projects, but it’s less the onset of death that shocks him and more the fact that his best friends are threatening to kill him.
Jordan has to maintain the reality of the situation, expressing that Wallace is a child who is about to be murdered by the people he trusted most. But he must also bring to life the high-concept, often poetic writing that Simon and co-creator Ed Burns brought to the series. Jordan pulls that off with the mixture of terror and defiance he puts into his readings of the lines, “Why it gotta be like this?” and “You my boys.”
By delivering those words as a scared but clear-minded boy, Jordan captures the central moral of The Wire: it doesn’t have to be like this.
Way Beyond Baltimore
Wallace is hardly the only striking death in the series, but D’Angelo’s confrontation with Stringer over the murder remains one of the most memorable moments in television history.
For his part, Jordan went on to do more excellent and varied work, even before playing twins Smoke and Stack in Sinners. With director Ryan Coogler, Jordan portrayed the real-life victim of systemic racism, Oscar Grant III, in Fruitvale Station, as well as Adonis Creed, son of doomed fighter Apollo Creed, and the fiery and principled supervillain Killmonger in Black Panther. He also had memorable turns in other TV series, as a troubled teen named Reggie Montgomery in the soap All My Children c(a role he took over from his future co-star Chadwick Boseman) and as hot-headed quarterback Vince Howard in Friday Night Lights.
Across these and other roles, Jordan showed he had the dramatic chops and magnetism to be a star. The Oscar win may have cemented his status, but Jordan had already proved he was capable, way back when he was a teen, way back on The Wire.
The Wire is now streaming on HBO Max.
Vince Gilligan Recalls Brutal Reaction to His Breaking Bad Pitch
Breaking Bad is now considered by many to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time, but when creator Vince Gilligan first started pitching it, not everyone warmed to the idea of seeing a chemistry teacher decide to start cooking meth after getting a stage-three lung cancer diagnosis.
During a South by Southwest Film & TV Festival panel last week (via THR,) Gilligan recalled finding a notebook where he cooked up his first basic thoughts on Breaking Bad. All he’d written down was “Good guy does something bad to save his family,” but this seed soon blossomed, and he took an expanded pitch to Sony, where an executive told him, “‘That’s the single worst idea I’ve ever heard.’”
Gilligan noted that the executive in question was no longer at Sony, saying, “To his credit, he’s a good man, and he acknowledged [his mistake later].”
It wasn’t the only bad reaction Gilligan faced as he tried to make Breaking Bad a reality. He previously told Emmy TV Legends about a meeting with TNT that went downhill after he unveiled the meth element of the show’s story. “[The two executives] look at each other and they say, ‘Oh god, I wish we could buy this.’ Then they said, ‘If we bought this, we’d be fired … We cannot put this on TNT, it’s meth, it can’t be meth, it’s reprehensible.’”
HBO was also ice cold on Breaking Bad, emitting “a toxic gamma radiation of disinterest,” while Showtime didn’t want to greenlight another Weeds-like show about a parent dealing drugs. Eventually, FX bought the script but passed it to AMC. “God bless them, that…when AMC came calling, [FX was] big enough to allow AMC to purchase the script for Breaking Bad…that behavior’s kind of rare in the business.”
Suffice it to say, everyone who turned down Breaking Bad must have felt a bit silly after the series finally got made and was met with universal acclaim, enviable viewing figures, and awards aplenty. That’s show business, folks.
New Firefly Series in the Works, But No Guarantees Yet
Ever since Fox canceled Firefly in 2002 after airing just eleven of its episodes, fans of the space Western series have longed for the show’s return. They would get a conclusion to the story just a few years later in the form of Serenity, a movie that marked Firefly creator Joss Whedon’s directorial debut, but the premature loss of the show remained an itchy wound that never healed for some.
Now, it finally looks like a new animated Firefly series is in the works that will fill in the gaps between the show and the movie, but Deadline says the reboot is still in “advanced development” and therefore not a done deal, with no network or streamer attached.
The good news is that this new spin on Firefly has already come a long way. Original stars Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres, Jewel Staite, Morena Baccarin, Sean Maher, Summer Glau, and Adam Baldwin are all set to lend their voices to the animated revival, with Fillion producing. Some concept art and a script have also been completed, and Marc Guggenheim (Arrow) and Tara Butters (Agent Carter) have stepped up as showrunners. Fillion has said that Whedon has given the new Firefly series his “blessing,” but he will not be involved.
“The dedication of Firefly fans has kept this 25-year-old show relevant,” Fillion said. “Clearly, the return of Firefly is something the fans want. More importantly, it’s something they deserve.”
While this news has been met with a tentative “hell yeah,” the fact that it came along in the same week that Hulu canceled its Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot makes the announcement bittersweet for some fans of Whedon’s old TV universe. But although Buffy stayed on the air for seven seasons and even produced a successful spinoff show, the world of Firefly still remains largely unexplored. That makes it a good candidate for any streamer looking to give the cult IP a home.
Hopefully, this animated series will soar into production soon. Keep everything crossed.
V for Vendetta Director on the Movie’s Hope and Relevance 20 Years Later
“Remember, remember, the fifth of November.” So goes the English poem commemorating the arrest of Guy Fawkes on November 5, 1605, for trying to destroy Parliament with explosives. These days, the image of Guy Fawkes is as prevalent as ever, but few remember the Gunpowder Plot at all. Instead, they associate the face with the mask worn by V, the protagonist of the 1982 comic book V for Vendetta and the 2006 movie adaptation.
And that’s just fine with James McTeigue, director of V for Vendetta. “I think people really got what the movie was about,” McTeigue told Den of Geek. “And people get what the mask is about, too. It has cultural legs beyond the film. It’s about your right in a free society to protest, that there’s more strength in ‘we’ than there is in ‘I.’ The mask affords you the ability to protest without vilification or being arrested.”
Written by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, V for Vendetta stars Hugo Weaving as a masked vigilante known only as V, who recruits/forces young woman Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) into his crusade against a fascist English government. Set in the near future, the film shows how the Norsefire party, under the control of leader Adam Sutler (John Hurt), uses media and censorship to create a compliant populace. In addition to recovering works of art and pop culture that the government tries to destroy, V seeks to inspire the people to fight back, while waging his own personal war against those who ran the concentration camp that transformed him into the man he is today.
“What jumps out to me is how timeless it actually is to tell the truth,” McTeigue says of revisiting the film after 20 years. “The political environment hasn’t really changed that much from when I made the movie 20 years ago. And I’d guess Alan Moore and David Lloyd would tell you that the political environment that they made it hasn’t changed that much from when they made the book in the ’80s. I think we’re in another cycle of that, and I’m really appreciative of people who watch the film and recognize that.”
The continuing rise of reactionary politics in the West certainly has helped the film remain relevant. But V for Vendetta also remains a favorite because of the incredible performance by Weaving, who came in late in production to replace James Purefoy and did his entire part behind an unmoving, unchanging Guy Fawkes mask.
“I called him up and said, ‘Hey, Hugo, I’m in a bit of trouble with the actor I got in the mask at the moment. I think I’m gonna have to make a change.’ Then I said, ‘But don’t come over if you’re gonna have a problem being in a mask. And he’s like, ‘I won’t have a problem being in a mask. I want to be in a mask.’
“It was a challenge he’d never had. He did mask work at drama school, working through the Greek theater and Norwegian theater. So he came over and was amazing. He knew exactly what to do. He saved me.”
While he is quick to credit Weaving for making V come to life without the use of his face, McTeigue also deserves credit for finding ways of shooting the mask and making it look interesting.
“I wanted to get the different facets of what made his character, so I would light it differently. I did a bunch of tests to make him look benevolent, to make him look crazy, to look sinister. The secret of it was just to treat it like a face, as I normally would. In a dramatic moment, I would push the camera in, even though the face wasn’t doing anything. It showed that if you watched closely enough, V’s telling you everything about himself.
“Even in the moment on the sofa, where V and Evey just watched a movie, and the news breaks in about the death of Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam), the Voice of London. Evey turns around asks if V killed him. We’re in this wide shot when he just answers, ‘Nope.’
“Other times, though, I wanted them to have a connection. So I’d cut from a close-up of V to a close-up of Evey, just to get the juxtaposition. Part of it was playing off the character with him in the scene, whether it was the crazy priest Lilliman (John Standing) or Evey. I thought it was important that you saw them as equals.”
The movie’s depiction of Evey Hammond differs quite a bit from the version that Moore and Lloyd created in the comic. Where the original Evey was a timid 16-year-old who gets forced into joining V’s crusade, the version in the film is older and has more agency.
“Don’t be slavish to the graphic novel,” McTeigue says as advice to anyone adapting comics to the screen, even when working with a writer as lauded as Alan Moore. “I think in Alan Moore’s brain, he would have just put the graphic novel on a pedestal or just put the pages on screen.”
Joking aside, McTeigue did translate some images directly from the comics. In particular, he recreates a shot from a flashback sequence, showing a naked and unmasked V in silhouette standing in front of the flaming concentration camp.
“It was a crazily graphic image, so I had to do it in the movie. And in the same way it’s important to the graphic novel, it’s important to the film. You need to see who he is and what formed him. That’s the point when V’s being reborn. He’s filled with rage, but he’s filled with hope too.
“By the way, the guy that I used in the burn suit in the movie was Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wickmovies,” McTeigue adds. “It was raining that night, and I told him what I wanted to do. He was game, came out and did it, and we got it all in one take.”
While Lloyd’s art provided some guidance, McTeigue had to make stronger decisions to bring the comic into live action.
“For the other visuals, we had to make a distinction between the state-run media and the rest of the film. Everything that was run by the state had this very video-esque quality to it, like a surveillance camera. And then we had John Hurt as the Leader, which is a callback to Big Brother and the 1984 movie [in which Hurt played protagonist Winston Smith], with a big pixilated head.
“In contrast, I wanted V’s headquarters, the Shadow Gallery, to feel warm. It was a repository of great art, music, and film, and a lot of my tastes got in there, the books and movies that I thought were important. I took inspiration from Gordon Willis, who shot all the Godfather movies, or Gregg Toland, who shot Citizen Kane. I borrowed from the paranoid thrillers of the ’70s like The Parallax View, some of which Willis shot, as well as Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, The Battle of Algiers… A lot of things influenced me.”
Classic as the influences may be, the real power of V for Vendetta retains its revolutionary spirit, a spirit not diminished by the unfortunate real-world situations that keep the movie relevant. The final moments of the movie see Evey leading a revolution against the Norsefire government after V’s death, with a crowd of people donning Guy Fawkes masks, including people who died earlier in the film.
“The ending still holds true, because there’s hope, right?” McTeigue contends. “That was the idea of including people who were killed in the movie, that the cost of their lives wasn’t for nothing. The power of the people would carry forward.
“The way that protests work now, in this country and other countries around the world, the things that were happening then are happening now: fear to justify stronger state power, the detention of groups that are seen as threats, controversies around state surveillance, struggle over political narrative, constant conflict with press and comedians, crises that increase executive authority—all of those things are in the film.”
In short, V for Vendetta remains just as pressing as it was 20 years ago. Hopefully, 20 years from now, we can just enjoy it as a great film.
V for Vendetta is now streaming on HBO Max.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Reboot Gets Staked Through the Heart
When news hit in early 2025 that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was to be revived at Hulu, there were mixed reactions. The supernatural drama series, which ran for seven seasons from 1997 to 2003, remains beloved by its fans. Could an updated look at the world of Buffy Summers ever live up to the original show?
Unfortunately, we may never find out. According to returning star Sarah Michelle Gellar, Hulu has decided not to move forward with the proposed series after completing a pilot last year that was helmed by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao.
Gellar revealed the decision on Instagram this past weekend. “I am really sad to have to share this, but I wanted you all to hear it from me,” she said. “Unfortunately, Hulu has decided not to move forward with Buffy New Sunnydale. I want to thank Chloé Zhao because I never thought I would find myself back in Buffy’s stylish, yet affordable boots, and thanks to Chloe, I was reminded how much I love her and how much she means not only to me, but to all of you. And this doesn’t change any of that.”
Gellar wrapped up by adding, “I promise, if the apocalypse actually comes, you could still beep me.”
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale was reportedly set 25 years after the events of the season 7 finale, with Gellar reprising the role of the titular Slayer. Ryan Kiera Armstrong had been cast as the lead in the pilot, and writers Lilla and Nora Zuckerman had described the Star Wars: Skeleton Crew actress as “the chosen one.”
“I’m really proud of what we did,” Armstrong said after the cancellation news broke. “I’m sad that you guys won’t be able to see it, but that doesn’t take away from the amazing experience that I had.”
The decision on New Sunnydale’s future finally came after fans noted there had been no production news about the show since the pilot was filmed last year. Sources told Deadline that the pilot was “not perfect” and that Zhao “may not have been the perfect match for the reboot.” The trade also noted that there had been recent discussions about reworking the pilot, but that Hulu plans to “regroup and mull a possible new incarnation” instead.
Project Hail Mary: Andy Weir Talks About Giving Away Book’s Biggest Secret in the Trailer
The way author Andy Weir sees it, he doesn’t set out to write books that can make good movies. Yet two of his first three novels, The Martianand Project Hail Mary, have turned into exactly that—and the third, Artemis, is still in development. Furthermore, if you are reading the near universal praise for Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of Project Hail Mary, you might understand why the sci-fi bestseller seems pretty confident when we sit down to discuss the new flick.
Project Hail Mary is indeed a bold gamble both for Lord and Miller—who have not made a finished live-action movie since 22 Jump Street in 2014—and Amazon MGM Studios, which is releasing the sci-fi epic in theaters. The film imagines a future where due to an intergalactic microbe dubbed “astrophage,” our sun is dimming by the minute. It’s a bold premise, but one which gives turn to an even grander one when substitute-astronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is tasked with traveling across the cosmos to find a solution for Earth… and ends up meeting a fellow traveler: a sentient alien he nicknames “Rocky.”
Unlike in the novel, where the existence of Rocky and his budding friendship with Grace was kept a secret in the book’s marketing, the Project Hail Mary movie has been upfront about its unlikely buddy comedy premise. We talk to Weir about giving away the novel’s biggest secret in the trailer, as well as where the terrifying idea of astrophage came from, and finally what Gosling, Lord, and Miller bring to his out-of-this-world material.
So what came first? The idea of the astrophage or doing a meet-cute with an alien named Rocky?
[Laughs] Astrophage came first. It actually came from an unrelated book idea that I was working on and then abandoned because it sucked. But I wanted to think about what would happen if we, in the modern day—not a thousand years from now—had access to a mass conversion fuel.
So how did Rocky come into that narrative?
Well after a while, I decided I wanted it to be a first contact story where they’re both trying to save their planets, so I needed an alien. I don’t like the science fiction tropes where the alien is comfortable in our atmosphere and looks kind of like a human with forehead bumps and stuff. I wanted my alien to be truly alien. So I started with the homeworld that I’d chosen, the exoplanet that I picked for them, and then I built up a biosphere that would work there. Rocky’s species is what I came up with for the intelligent life on the exoplanet.
It sounds like you based the science of the species on what we know about this type of exoplanet planet. So how do you decide that such a species could master interstellar travel but not know about radiation?
Well, they were desperate, right? They barely had any sort of space travel or anything at all going before they ended up acquiring astrophage too. So they were just desperate to figure out a solution to the problem. They didn’t understand relativity or radiation, even in their own world. So their planet, in order to maintain a thick atmosphere and be that close to a star, would have to have a tremendous magnetic field. So that means it has to spin very fast.
And with a magnetic field like that, even during their early experiments into low orbit, they wouldn’t have encountered radiation. And of course being at the bottom of a 29 atmosphere thick layer of ammonia between them and space, they didn’t get any radiation on the surface either. They just never discovered the concept.
When I read the book, I did not know it was a first contact story. That was a very pleasant surprise when I got to that point in the novel. Do you like that the film’s marketing is a little more upfront about what the story is about?
Well, books and movies are different media, and they’re different methods of storytelling, and they’re very much different methods of marketing and publicity. There is just absolutely no way that we would have been able to keep the first contact aspect of this a secret. I mean, there’s already been millions of people who have read the book. Nobody’s going to walk into that theater not knowing about Rocky, even if we’d hidden it from the previews.
Also while it is a twist that caught the readers off guard, it’s not like some huge twist at the end of a story. The meat of the story is the relationship between Ryland and Rocky, and we wanted to make sure that the potential film viewers would know that this is what this movie is about.
At the same time, you said the story started originally with the astrophage, and I’m curious is the idea of something like that theoretically possible, or is that something you came up with?
So you get down to the quantum level, I invented the idea of super cross-sectionality of the astrophage cell membrane that can actually reflect neutrinos. Normally with neutrinos, you have 100 trillion neutrinos passing through you every second. They pass clean through Earth without hitting a single atom, but somehow, astrophage cell membranes can just completely contain them like a balloon. And then also astrophage has the ability to turn heat into neutrinos and turn neutrinos back into infrared light.
So that’s s all the stuff going on down there, but having accepted those MacGuffins, everything else flows from that with real physics.
Obviously when you wrote The Martian, you had a story to tell and you were just writing it. But given the success of the movie that came afterward, when you were developing this did you think at all in the back of your head how Project Hail Mary could work as a movie?
No. Or I definitely tried not to. Advice that I give to every writer and advice that I try to take for myself is if you want to write a movie, write a movie. Write a screenplay, go for it. But if you’re gonna write a novel, you need to write a novel. Your consumer is a person who’s gonna read the novel. If somebody wants to make a movie out of it later, great, but it’s their problem to adapt it.
In a novel, you want to take advantage of all the tools you have, and when you’re writing a novel, you have a much larger canvas to paint your story with. You can go off and have side plots, you can have exposition that you can explain things in greater detail than you ever could in a film. So you should be taking advantage of all the tools that novel writing gives you when you’re writing a novel and not thinking about any sort of adaptation.
What are the key differences between Ryland Grace and The Martian’s Mark Watney?
Well, Mark was an astronaut, right? He beat out probably tens of thousands of other really qualified candidates for a seat on a mission to Mars. So he really has the right stuff. He is absolutely qualified for the job that he finds himself in. He ended up with a really tough time, but he is a guy who was chosen for this mission. Whereas Ryland was just kind of chucked into it at the last minute, and he’s not at all anyone’s first choice for this mission, especially his. So these are very different people.
Do you appreciate that you made them both, and for that matter Artemis’ Jasmine, single people who are still worthy of being heroes?
Yeah. They’re all different. Like you can almost not call Mark a hero. He just is a guy who didn’t want to die. He didn’t save anyone. He just didn’t wanna die.
Jasmine chose heroism kind of toward the end to undo a problem that she herself had created. And then Ryland is actually going out there and trying to save the entire human race, but would rather not be doing it. So they each have their own little way of backing into heroism.
But you seem to be playing with perceptions. In the case of Ryland Grace, everyone looks at him as expendable. ‘You don’t have a family, you’d be perfect for this!’
[Laughs] Yeah, but he certainly doesn’t think of himself as expendable.
What was it like working with Lord and Miller on this one?
Oh, it’s fantastic. So we knew that the story was going to live and die on the representation of Rocky. We had to get Rocky right. And Lord and Miller have a long and extensive history of animation, so they know how to take seemingly inanimate objects and make them awesome, and make you empathize with them and make you love them. They were the right team for this job. I can’t imagine it being done by anyone else.
They figured out how ‘so Rocky doesn’t have a face and talks in whale song’ but he’s still got a body. He’s got body language, and you can tell from moving him around this way, moving him around that way. Oh, he’s sad; he’s happy. They figured out how to make this work, and they absolutely nailed it, so I couldn’t be happier with the result.
Was there anything they did with Rocky that surprised you?
Not really. I was involved in every step of the way, of course, so there weren’t any huge surprises. But I thought it was cool they came up with a bunch of stuff. Within the book, Rocky just has vents, just kind of like holes in the top of his carapace for air transfer, but the Rocky in the movie, the vents are actually kind of these little rocks that move up and down to let air in and out. And that helps give him some kinetic motion while he’s doing things. So there’s more going on than just his body moving around.
Tell me a little bit about what Ryan brought to his character, and did he find dimensions or something that surprised you or intrigued you about Grace?
Oh, absolutely. So I’ve always considered one of my biggest weaknesses as a writer is my character’s depth and complexity. I feel like I’m always trying to get better, and I’m a very plot-driven author. So with Ryland, I tried to give him some complexity and depth, but he’s still kind of a little bit more shallow than I’d like. But then in comes Ryan, and he adds all these layers that I never envisioned before. He’s just really good at riffing and ad-libbing and stuff like that, and oftentimes he’ll come up with much better ways of doing something than the screenplay even had.
So what’s awesome is people are gonna watch this movie, they’re going to see this well-rounded character of Ryland Grace, and that’s largely because of Ryan’s performance, and then I’m gonna get credit for having come up with such a well-rounded character. So thanks to all of Ryan’s hard work, I’m going to get all the credit, and that just absolutely works for me. [Laughs]
Given the names Rocky and Adrian in this story, how happy were you that this ended up at MGM?
I know! That was a really sweet coincidence. That was really nice. We liked that. That felt good. [Laughs]
We didn’t need to show any clips if we weren’t able to [get the rights]. We still needed to secure rights from Stallone specifically to be able to show even him on screen at all. So we did.
You could’ve just had Ryan do his Stallone impression.
Right! Like we didn’t need to actually show clips from Rocky, but it was nice to be MGM so we get it for free.
Project Hail Mary opens in theaters on March 20.
Hokum Review: Adam Scott’s Irish Holiday Is Like a (Grim) Fairy Tale
There might be something in the air in Ireland. It’s in the water and the soil too. Despite being surrounded by an endless, rugged sea of green, or perhaps because of that emerald desolation, it is a land marked in the popular imagination by centuries of hardship and sorrow. Some would even claim it’s haunted.
The Gaelic wellspring of fairies and changelings, and from whose shores authors like Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde emerged, alongside the banshee and Dullahan, is a source of elegiac fiction. Here the magical and bitterly real mingle, often with a despairing wail. And early in Damian McCarthy’s Hokum, the misanthropic, lonely scribe Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) seems likewise drawn to these dreary charms. After all, he is an author himself, albeit of a yankee disposition; the grandson of the Irish diaspora, Ohm has returned to his forefathers’ country to mirthlessly toast “bleak endings” while finishing his next book at a hotel at the end of the world. So imagine the delight when he’s teased by his bartender that this inn also is said to have a witch. No, really. The owner keeps her locked in the abandoned honeymoon suite upstairs. And it’s been locked off since time immemorial.
As a sucker myself for tales of the doomed and damned, this is where I too leaned forward—and never had a reason to sit back again in what amounts to a pleasantly macabre bit of campfire hokum from an Irish filmmaker in his element.
As the director of the cult darling Oddity, McCarthy has developed a sizable following ahead of only his third feature. Yet while Hokum certainly picks at heightened (or “elevated”) themes of guilt and regret in its portrait of a man given to loving the miserable company of one—and a writer who in turn is even more pitiless to his fictional creations than McCarthy might be to his own—Hokum is very much a late night ghost story that a few hundred years ago would’ve been shared on Christmas Eve beside candlelight. Indeed, the film is bathed in shadows and mystery, as well as the recognition that there really is a witch upstairs, and what it wants is nothing that can be mistaken for liberation or empowerment.
Owing perhaps more debt to Stephen King’s The Shining than Kubrick’s, Hokum fixates on a deeply troubled novelist who imbibes too much Scotch and bourbon. So rude is Scott’s Bauman when he is in his cups that it is a wonder the hotel staff can put up with him for a day—luckily Florence Odesh’s Fiona shows enough kindness to him that she saves him from a particularly bad night before All Hallow’s Eve (or Samhain as the Celts would’ve called it in pagan times).
So when Fiona goes missing from the hotel—and after confiding in Bauman that she always was curious to poke around the allegedly witched honeymoon suite—sympathy gets the better of wisdom as the yank likewise finds himself going into the private chamber. Even when lit with what might be hundred-year-old electric light, the gloom of the place is nothing short of oppressive. It’s a space filled with bad dreams and worse waking hours.
The pleasures in Hokum emanate from its pulp. There are moments of superbly atmospheric dread wherein a soaked and abandoned Scott hides behind a Victorian bed curtain while the countenance of a creature hovers outside. Similar to Oddity’s use of the creepiest mannequin to ever crawl out of Hell’s department store, it is the belabored shots of eerily smiling cherubic statues on the the bridal suite’s clock, or of Edwardian figurines the hotel owner uses to frighten small children in the lobby, wherein Hokum earns its bite.
Less successful are the ubiquitous jump scares, which while sometimes effective, are often telegraphed and used liberally to a fault. The subtextual thesis of the film also about how even an artist’s pain can be destructive to the art feels at times a wee contrived; a fig-leaf to the modern expectations for “serious” horror cinema.
To be sure, Hokum is seriously good, but mostly when it embraces its fairy tale qualities about dark forgotten corners of the woods where spirits seek to still carry off the un-careful child of God to heathen ends. The film seeks to find a light outside of the misanthropic bleakness which can bedevil even rolling hills of beatific green. But, really, we are all here to enjoy the dark, which in McCarthy and cinematographer Colm Hogan’s compositions, is invitingly nihilistic.
Hokum premiered at SXSW on March 14. NEON releases Hokum in wide release on May 1.
Ready or Not 2 Review: The Devil Is in the Bloody Good Details
How does one cheat the Devil? With a lot of style and grace if you’re Samara Weaving and Radio Silence, the charmers who gave us the perversely delightful Ready or Not seven years ago. Close to a decade later, the same creative team, which also includes scribes Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, are back and doubling-or-nothing their wager with Mr. Le Bail (Lucifer by a fancier, blue-blooded name). And incredulously, they’re coming out ahead.
To be clear, the blood that pulsed and poured throughout their 2019 horror satire was indeed blue, aristocratic, privileged and, before the end, combustible. Which on a certain level made a sequel a tricky proposition. The first film is essentially a great gag wherein a working class gal named Grace (Weaving) marries into one of the rich and powerful families of ancient wealth, only to discover they’re, um, Devil-worshipping satanists who gained their success by selling their souls to Old Nick in exchange for obscene wealth and power. They also need to sacrifice a bride to Beelzebub every generation or two in order keep the pact alive. If they fail to do so by the first dawn after the wedding night, they go poof into a warm red mist. That’s what the regal Le Dormas clan believed, anyway, and the first Ready or Not got a lot of mileage out of Grace and the audience second-guessing whether the pact was real or these were just the indulgences of rich eccentrics.
When that film ended with the Le Domas’ going boom-boom, and Grace standing alone as the delirious winner of the best hide-and-seek game ever, it was nothing short of euphoric—a giddiness that transcends the simple favors of horror or comedy. What is there left to say, really?
In terms of Grace’s journey from wide-eyed believer in fairy tale happily-ever-afters to a burned out bride fed up with the in-laws, not really a whole lot. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come introduces us to Grace’s younger estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton)—and a decent gag of a new patrician sneering “fucking Irish-Catholics” at their names—but the heartwarming story of Grace and Faith finding each other again is ultimately a nice bit of frosting on an already crimson-dotted wedding cake. It gives new dimensions for Weaving to play, but only until we get to see her go full bridezilla on the latest Masters of the Universe. And in truth, we are just waiting for those absolutely gonzo bloodletting set-pieces in Ready or Not 2, of which there are many.
Weaving and Newton have a nice chemistry, especially in the sequences where they side-eye each other with guarded annoyance stemming from the fact that Grace left the younger Faith behind at their foster home when she moved to New York at 18 alone. But the real pleasure of the movie is how mirthful directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett—two-thirds of the Radio Silence creative collective—can be while building out the draconian lore and devilish details in their ever expanding world of the evil elite.
As it turns out, the Le Dormas were just one of many rich billionaire broods who made a deal with Mr. Le Bail. In fact, it seems to be pretty much all of the globe’s top one percent who are in on the action, who betwixt one another run the world’s governments and social orders from behind-the-scenes. This is demonstrated when we are introduced to Mr. Danforth (David Cronenberg) watching an international crisis on television. He picks up his phone and orders a “ceasefire.” Seconds later a breathless cable news anchor announces “a ceasefire has been reached” in the televised quagmire.
It would seem the Danforths were the greatest rival the Le Dormas’ knew on a council of the world’s Devil-worshipping families, albeit with the Le Dormas’ in the highest seat. But now that the Le Dormas dynasty is extinguished, the big chair is vacant. Alas, that is where poor Grace comes in. As revealed to her by a smirking, well-groomed retainer simply known as the Lawyer (Elijah Wood), the only way for another family to fill the empty high seat is to succeed where the Le Dormas’ failed and hunt Grace down in another lethal game of hide and seek before dawn. This makes her prey to Cronenberg’s nasty twin heirs Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), as well as a whole ensemble of kooky character actors and genre favorites like Kevin Durand.
If Grace, and a conscripted Faith—who is used as leverage against the older sister—can survive the night, the pair might just end up with the power of the Devil on Earth (read: a real-life tech mogul). But to do that they are going to have to fight their way across 18 holes, various ballrooms outfitted for fancy weddings, and every other stereotype you might expect from the film’s country club setting that looks suspiciously like Mar-a-Lago.
Ready or Not was never subtle in its eat-the-rich social satire. It was, however, early in tackling that in the new zeitgeist since the first movie came out a handful of months before Parasiteand Knives Out, never mind the growing trend of class schadenfreude in the 2020s that’s coincided with the growing consolidation of wealth at the top. So if the first movie was tangibly angry in its social satire, Here I Come seems much more at peace with its punch-drunk gallows humor. Indeed, after a bravado opening sequence that marries the final scene of the 2019 film seamlessly with the 2026 picture’s kick-off—scored, appropriately, to “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”—Grace’s rescue by the authorities quickly descends into her willingly throwing back on the blood-soaked bridal gown from the first movie.
“It gives mobility,” she insists to her sister as they duck around a deserted hospital gurney while being hunted. It also is emblematic of both Grace and the film’s nonchalant and chipper nihilism. There’s no way out, so we might as well get comfy while making a night of it.
For Radio Silence and their scribes, that coziness arises from basking in the neuroses of its moneyed antagonists. The big bads of the Danforth country club is like a retinue of SNL characters gathering at the Bohemian Grove (a real-life meet-up for the elite in Northern California, which for decades has gained whispers of pagan rituals). Given the direction of the world in the last seven years, and specifically with regard to the drip, drip, drip of the Jeffrey Epstein files, the concept of satanic elites no longer seems as sinister as it does mundane.
Hence various scenes of the privileged and bored who’ve come to partake in a new game of hide and seek being more concerned with the hors d’oeuvres being served during the hunt than the actual kill—or sequences of another thwarted bride in their ranks being obsessed with challenging Grace to a duel on a dance floor where they got Bonnie Tyler queued up. As the most reasonable seeming of the hunters, Sarah Michelle Gellar gets a little monologue about how there are no good guys or bad guys anymore. Everything is gray.
Of course, she is saying this to a woman she intends to ritualistically murder in an offer to Satan in order to attain yet greater power. In this way, Ready or Not 2 is a rejection both of the times it is made in and the actual nihilistic despair of so many other, bitter horror movies these days.
As with the first film and every chilly laugher Radio Silence has made since —including the two best Scream movies made in this century, plus Abigail—Ready or Not 2 is buoyant in its optimism and good vibes, even while staring into the abyss. If the world is doomed, we can at least take catharsis in a fantasy where Grace relaxes in her murder-gown while eviscerating the ruling class with (eventually) a smile on her face.
As with the original film, the sequel transcends during its climax, this time with Grace, Faith, and everyone left alive vanishing into the country club’s most hallowed of unholy sites for a ritual involving goats, a pit with spikes, and a whole lot of blood. It’s moments like this where Weaving shines brightest while delivering one-liners, coup de’graces, and sweet, sweet wish fulfillment that turns the devilish into the divine, and a second round of a bad wedding-match into a damn good party. Mazel tov.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come opened at SXSW on March 13 and releases wide on March 20.
Rolling Stone’s Future of Music Festival Night One Electrifies ACL Live
Since 2023, Rolling Stone has brought the music industry’s biggest up and comers to South by Southwest. This year’s Future of Music festival spans three nights and dozens of artists, with nights two and three anticipating names like Fuerza Regida and BigXThaPlug. Thursday night kicked off the festivities at Austin City Limits Live with a trio of captivating supporting acts and Rolling Stone’s most recent covergirl.
Susannah Joffe was the first to take the stage in a triumphant homecoming. The Austin native engaged the audience with her hometown charm and full, resonant vocals. Her baby blue ball gown adorned with black lace was a visual metaphor for her lyrics – sparkling, lively, and shrouded with darker meaning. Amongst country references of cows, Dolly Parton-esque hair, and prize ribbons in her imagery, the opener has built an image of hometown pride. Joffe kept great rapport with the audience as it continued to grow.
Following Joffe, Saint Harison mellowed out the venue with his incomparable crooning. The Southamptoner’s soaring tenor was matched with delicate piano accompaniment, echoing backdrops, and cheeky anecdotes. Harison tossed emotionally ripping songs detailing past relationship woes with occasional vengeful bursts in songs like bad. A natural stage presence, Harison was quick to thank the audience after each song. Harison’s own future of music looks like an EP titled Ghosted set to release May 29.
The final supporting act was Sofia and the Antoinettes, a four-piece band whose coquettish style, both in fashion and musicality, did their name justice. As with the first two performers, Sofia’s lyrics are characterized by gutting emotional depth and equally matched vocal prowess.
“Name dropping, it’s good for the soul,” Sofia announced, owning up to her blunt writing in songs like Matthew. A balance of leg-kicking drums and powerhouse backup vocals kept audiences pulsing with excitement for what was to come.
The evening ended with an explosive performance from headliner Lola Young, whose recent return to performing has been highly anticipated and was expertly delivered. Young graced the stage in a pink, eyeleted jumpsuit to juxtapose the dark dress of her supporting band, all in matching cowboy hats. As the most recent Rolling Stone covergirl, Young took a moment to thank everyone involved.
“That’s something that you only dream of,” Young gushed.
Audience members – spanning pre-teen and beyond – sang along word for word, matching Young’s bouncing energy. After the first few tracks, the Londoner interrupted her setlist to read a poem she had recently written about the circumstances of the world, titled “Art is Rebellion.”
“And as we smell the sloppy, disgustingly stinky s–t they dish out, we must s–t on them back,” Young extolled.
Rolling Stone’s signature festival has barely begun. With previous lineups endorsing standout artists such as Peso Pluma, Remi Wolf, Flo Milli, and Teezo Touchdown, the festival’s crystal ball has been quite transparent. Only time will tell if Rolling Stone will continue to predict the future of music.
The Vampire Lestat’s Tour Will Hit AMC This Summer
After two years and a title change, the third season of Interview with the Vampire, now rebranded as The Vampire Lestat in honor of the second novel in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, will finally hit our screens. And AMC is leaning hard into the rock star agenda, dropping a new song, some extremely campy opening credits, and a date for when we can expect the tour, er….the new season to officially begin.
The series will follow Lestat de Lioncourt as he takes center stage in his own narrative, an attempt to set the record straight after the release of Daniel Molly’s infamous book, Interview with the Vampire. That he does this by deciding to embark on a multi-city tour with his new rock band is perhaps the most Lestat-coded choice ever, but it’s also pretty much guaranteed to be a good time. Billing the titular character as the “world’s first immortal rockstar” in the press materials promoting the show’s return, the network is promising “a sexy pilgrimage across space, time, and trauma” as Lestat tours the nation and is haunted by various “muses” from his past.
Anne Rice readers already know that this adventure won’t be for the faint of heart. While it recounts Lestat’s life as a mortal and his early years as a vampire, the novel also introduces key figures from his past, including Gabrielle, Magnus, Marius, Nicolas, and Those Who Must Be Kept, who all have a major role to play in the franchise’s future.
In addition to confirming that The Vampire Lestat would officially premiere in June, AMC also dropped the series’ new opening titles, which feature another would-be banger from Lestat’s musical catalog. The slightly shortened track, called “All Fall Down,” is composed by Daniel Hart and performed by series star Sam Reid. Like Lestat’s previous single, “Long Face,” the track is now available on all major streaming platforms, with the promise of even more songs from everyone’s favorite immortal rocker to come.
In the new credits, “All Fall Down” plays over a montage of various character images and possible Easter eggs from the forthcoming season. (No idea what’s up with the ice cream scoop, but those random road signs are definitely going to be song titles. Bet.)
Everything we’ve seen about this season thus far is dripping with glam rock, full-on brat prince vibes, right down to the supposed quotes from the man (vampire) himself slagging off his production partner (“Predictable”) as the show blurs the line between fictional character and real-life celebrity. How much crazier will this get in the lead-up to the premiere? Your guess is as good as ours, but it’s bound to be a wild ride.
The Vampire Lestat will premiere June 7 on AMC and AMC+.
Steven Spielberg: Disclosure Day Marks Lifetime Believing ‘We Are Not Alone on Earth’
Fifteen minutes before Steven Spielberg walked onstage at the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Austin Hotel, the room filled with the ambient sounds of a pedal steel guitar. In anticipation of the upcoming conversation with the film industry’s most prolific director, the music transformed the space into something ethereal, almost extraterrestrial. It’s befitting an auteur who was in town to discuss a specific genre he has contributed to—and a set of beliefs he holds well beyond the screen.
Spielberg was joined by Sean Fennessey, host of The Big Picture podcast for the Ringer, to discuss his filmography and extrapolations of the film world’s future. But first, Fennessey inquired about the filmmaker’s childhood.
“When I was really little, I had an abundance of fears, and the fears actually came from my imagination,” Spielberg said. “I saw Fantasia … and it just destroyed me. For the next year, I couldn’t sleep. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen… That’s kind of how the whole thing started, with me wanting to find some kind of an outlet, to be able to exorcize the demons of fear and put it on someone else, right? Take it out of me and put it on something else, and that’s where the whole movie thing started for me.”
It was these fears that drew Spielberg to the world of fantasy and science fiction, inspiring films like E.T.and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg admitted that E.T. was the primary experience that inspired him to have children of his own, calling it “the most joyful time” in his career. The director also spoke to the influence Close Encounters had on his future projects.
“[Close Encounters]was kind of on the fringes of science and mythology, and so no one really got it when I said I want to make a UFO movie,” Spielberg recalled. “Everybody thought, ‘What, you want to make a movie about The National Enquirer? That’s what you want to do? You want to make a movie about crackpot reporting of things that aren’t really occurring?”
These misconceptions of Close Encounters predicted Spielberg’s newest project: Disclosure Day. The film is set to release in the summer of 2026 and is premiering at an interesting moment in the national discussion around UFOs—or UAPs as they’re now more commonly called in government documentation. It also foreshadowed current debates to this day, including among former commander-in-chiefs. Take last month when former President Barack Obama stated on a podcast hosted by Brian Tyler Cohen that he believed in extraterrestrial life; he just hasn’t seen it for himself.
“When President Obama made that comment, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is so great for Disclosure Day,’” Spielberg said. “Then, two days later, he stepped back and said he believed it was in the cosmos, which of course everybody should believe in, because no one should ever think that we are the only intelligent civilization in the entire universe… The big question is, are we alone now, and have we been alone over the last 80 years?… I have a very strong, sneaking suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now, and I made a movie about that.”
Despite his penchant for telling extraterrestrial stories, Spielberg disappointedly shared that he is not among the population of believers who have seen a UFO in real life.
“I’ve made Close Encounters, I’ve made E.T., you’re about to see Disclosure Day,” Spielberg said. “You know, I’m really into this. Why haven’t I seen anything? My friends have seen UFOs, now called UAPs. I made a movie called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I haven’t even had a close encounter with the first or second kind. Where’s the justice in that?” Maybe someone will finally want to say hi after Disclosure Day makes contact with movie theaters on June 12.
Tommy Lee Jones Is Returning to TV In the Best Show You’re Probably Not Watching
FX’s The Lowdown is almost certainly one of the best TV shows most of you aren’t watching. (Or possibly haven’t even heard of. It’s a wild time in these streaming streets.) Nevertheless, consider this an exhortation to fix your life immediately.
From Reservation Dogs’ Sterlin Harjo, the series follows the story of a citizen journalist and self-proclaimed “truthstorian” named Lee Raybon. If you’re thinking Misty from Yellowjackets here, that’s not…entirely inaccurate, just with a little less overt creepiness and more humor. (Though Lee’s obsession with finding the truth tends to get him into almost as much trouble.) Season 1 followed Lee as he worked to uncover corruption in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a move which brought him into conflict with a powerful family whose patriarch (played by Kyle McLaughlin) was running for governor.
The show’s a delightful mix of drama, mystery, and straight-up quirkiness, all grounded in a fantastic (and very funny) star turn from Ethan Hawke; it’s precisely the sort of smart yet entertaining television people always say they want more of, but seem to forget to watch. Well, now’s your moment.
The series was renewed for a second season immediately following its premiere and is now adding even more talent to an already stacked cast that includes Keith David, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tim Blake Nelson, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Tracy Letts, and Peter Dinklage. Former GLOW and Mrs. Davis star Betty Gilpin has already been announced as joining the cast for Season 2, but the new addition that’s sure to get everyone’s attention is Oscar winner Tommy Lee Jones, who hasn’t taken a role on a television series in 37 years.
Primarily known as a film actor, Jones has been in projects that run the gamut from The Fugitive and Cobb to Batman Forever and the Men in Black franchise. But he’s had a few notable TV roles over the years, including a stint on soap opera One Life to Live and an Emmy-nominated turn in the 1989 adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. He last appeared on TV in the HBO telefilm The Sunset Limited opposite Samuel L. Jackson, which he also directed. But, if we’re going to be technical about it, Lonesome Dove was the last time Jones was in a television series of any stripe.
However, what sort of character he’ll be playing remains up in the air. Details about the second season’s plot remain under wraps, but since season 1 cleared up the key points from its primary mystery, it seems safe to assume Jones’s undisclosed character will be involved with whatever conspiracy or case Lee finds himself embroiled in next. Here’s hoping his presence gives this very deserving but sadly underrated show a boost.
Daredevil: Born Again Teaser Reveals Two More Returns from the Netflix Show
“Can you stop him?” asks Jessica Jones at the end of the latest teaser for Daredevil: Born Again‘s second season. The question comes after a series of images reminding us of everything that Matt Murdock will have to deal with this time, including an ascendent Mayor Wilson Fisk outlawing all masked vigilantes and sending an army of highly-militarized cops onto the streets. There’s also the matter of Bullseye on the loose, as Dex Poindexter becomes as deranged and dangerous as his comic book counterpart.
“Not alone,” Matt answers, a point also underscored by the teaser. The clip shows Matt’s friends Karen Page, new White Tiger Angela del Toro, former detective Cherry, and current NYPD detective Angie Kim. But it’s two long-missing faces who truly complicate the scenario. First, we see Royce Johnson back as Detective Brett Mahoney, last seen in season two of The Punisher. Then we see Toby Leonard Moore as James Wesley, Fisk’s late righthand man, who died long before his boss entered the MCU on Disney+.
What do these returns mean for Born Again‘s second season?
The arrival of Mahoney certainly makes sense. He first appeared in season one of the NetflixDaredevil series, working as a beat cop in Hell’s Kitchen. Mahoney supported Nelson & Murdock’s work to better the lives of underprivileged residents, and while he never fully endorsed Daredevil’s vigilantism, he knew that the Man Without Fear was trying to help people. Mahoney regularly encountered Daredevil and Jessica Jones.
By the time he appeared in The Punisher, Mahoney had made detective. Whatever reservations he had with Daredevil were only quadrupled when it came to the violent Punisher. Yet, Mahoney forged an uneasy alliance with Frank Castle, which eventually led to him getting credit for bringing the Punisher into custody. The credit gave Mahoney a promotion, but also left him with sleepless nights.
Mahoney’s absence was conspicuous in the first season of Born Again, which took a critical look at policing in general. Most of the cops were either untrustworthy or outright corrupt, especially the bullies who worshiped the Punisher as a type of figurehead. Cherry and Detective Kim were rare outliers. They’ll gain a third with Mahoney, but it will be interesting to see how he, a man already critical of masked avengers, deals with Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Force.
The more puzzling of the returns is that of Wesley. In the first season of the Netflix show, Wesley acted as a sort of harbinger. If Fisk needed something done (such as eliminate Karen Page), he sent Wesley to do the deed, allowing himself to stay in the shadows. In fact, Wesley prevented people from even saying the name “Wilson Fisk.”
Wesley added to the mystique of the Kingpin, helping to build the threat of Fisk. When Karen shot Wesley in self-defense, Fisk was forced to do more dirty work himself, as not even current lackeys Buck Cashman and Daniel Blake have quite the same presence.
But how can Wesley still be alive? We’re probably just seeing a flashback to an earlier time in Fisk’s life, before Wesley’s death. That would jibe with another big Netflix return happening this season, Elden Henson reprising the role of Foggy Nelson, who died in the premiere of Born Again. We know that Henson is in season two of Born Again, so it would follow that we’d see some scenes from the past, and that’s probably where Wesley comes in.
Still, Foggy fans are hoping that Attorney Nelson can cheat death in the show like he has so often in the comics. Who’s to say that James Wesley can’t do the same?
Daredevil: Born Again season two premieres on March 24, 2026, on Disney+.
Two of the Most Sought After Missing Doctor Who Episodes Found at Last
Sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen, and we call them miracles. So says the Eleventh Doctor back in Doctor Who season 5 episode “The Pandorica Opens”. But it’s very applicable to how many fans are likely feeling, now that two more classic episodes thought to have been lost forever have been rediscovered.
One of the best things about Doctor Who is how long-lived the franchise is. But one of its great tragedies is the fact that we can’t actually watch all of it. Though nearly 900 episodes have aired since the show first premiered in 1963, many of its earliest installments have been destroyed or lost, thanks to the BBC’s tendency to erase, tape over, or even throw out previous broadcasts in the name of saving money on space and storage costs. (And before archive rules were put into place.) Many classic era Who episodes from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton eras are missing, and 26 of their stories are incomplete. But, miraculously, we got a little closer to fixing that problem today.
The previously lost installments were discovered in a private collection by Film is Fabulous, a charitable trust and preservation organization run by film collectors and vintage television enthusiasts. They were recovered from a posthumous collection of hundreds of film reels, which were donated to the charity, and are the first to be returned to the BBC archives since several episodes were found in Nigeria in 2013.
The two episodes, “The Nightmare Begins” and “Devil’s Planet,” feature First Doctor William Hartnell are part of twelve part story “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, which was only ever broadcast in the U.K. Written by the creator of the Daleks, Terry Nation, and Dennis Spooner, the serial also starred former companions Peter Purves and Adrienne Hill, alongside an early appearance by Nicholas Courtney as Bret Vyon. (Courtney would later go on to play the Brigadier.) The story revolves around (what else?) a Dalek plot to take over the Earth, the solar system, and the galaxy.
Seven of the 12 episodes that comprise “The Daleks’ Master Plan” remain missing, including “The Feast of Steven,” the first Doctor Who episode to be broadcast on Christmas Day. This story has been assumed to be especially difficult to recover, as it was never sold to international broadcast markets, presumably due to its surprisingly violent content. (“The Enemy of the World and of The Web of Fear”, the last two lost episodes to be rediscovered, were found in a television relay station.)
The BBC has worked to restore these newly found episodes, and they’ll be available to stream as part of BBC iPlayer’s “Whoniverse” this Easter. How or when they’ll make their way to fans in America remains to be seen, but if this incident proves anything, it’s that there’s always hope.
I Love Boosters Review: Boots Riley Blends Fashion With Surreal Sci-Fi
Few filmmakers follow their bliss quite like Boots Riley.
The Bay Area writer/director burst onto the movie scene with 2018’s Sorry to Bother You, a surrealist romp that blended elements of magical realism with political commentary on an exploited labor class. He followed that up in 2023 with the Prime Video TV series I’m a Virgo, also a surrealist romp that blended elements of magical realism with political commentary on an exploited labor class. Now, for his second proper feature film, Riley is leading off the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival with I Love Boosters, a period piece about House Booster’s succession crisis in 14th century England.
Just kidding: I Love Boosters is a surrealist romp that blends elements of magical realism with political commentary on an exploited labor class.
Three projects in to his burgeoning film career, it’s fair to say that Riley has developed a house style. For a lesser creative, that level of one-note fixation might begin to grow stale. Thankfully, the marriage of the surreal with leftist politics is a note that this rapper, songwriter, and record-producer-turned-filmmaker knows how to play quite well. And he continues to do so in I Love Boosters.
Keke Palmer stars as Corvette, an aspiring fashion designer who ekes out a living as a “booster,” pinching high-end textiles and selling them to her neighborhood at a discount. Together with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), Corvette sets her booster sights on high-end fashion entrepreneur Christie Smith (Demi Moore) to close the fashion gap between the haves and have-nots.
Like Sorry to Bother You before it, I Love Boosters‘ premise is merely a jumping off point for all the vivid imagery and offbeat twists to come. The movie that a ticket-buyer expects to see at minute 0 is very much not the movie they experience by minute 60 or so. Unlike Sorry to Bother You, however, Boosters‘ absurdist twist isn’t a completely out-of-left-field human-animal hybrid situation but a far more mundane science fiction tool that we won’t spoil. Despite the relatively conventional sci-fi trappings of its back half (and that’s a strong “relatively” given that we’re talking about Boot Riley here), I Love Boosters feels satisfyingly anarchic and bizarre all the way through.
In fact, the film’s relatively tame (again: relatively) first half is undoubtedly its strongest. The director’s infectious love of fashion, art, and people shines through in vibrant color, largely thanks to an expectedly ambitious costume design. His penchant for magical realism is incorporated satisfyingly casually as well. Corvette and her friends routinely encounter the impossible – buildings tilted at 45-degree angles, Indiana Jones-style boulders of paperwork rolling down empty streets, 30-second lunch breaks – with a shrug. Such is life for working class schmoes.
The cast is uniformly excellent with Palmer, Ackie, and Paige centering the plot with winsome charm and clear chemistry. Paige, in particular, shines as the somewhat dimwitted Curly Howard or Charlie Kelly of the trio. Demi Moore proves that her The Substanceawards season Linsanity Run was no fluke and that she is a tremendous cinematic asset when granted the right material and the right director. Eiza González, Poppy Liu, and Will Poulter round out the ensemble in sturdy fashion.
And then there’s LaKeith Stanfield, who turns up in a Jheri curl and just about vibrates off the screen… in no small part because many of his scenes feature his face in closeup with the frame literally shaking. Alongside a literally unrecognizable Don Cheadle, Stanfield helps make I Love Boosters Riley’s funniest effort yet by a wide margin.
Perhaps this is a lazy comparison to make because they’re both Black filmmakers from the Bay Area who use genre conventions to comment on race and class in America, but Riley’s dynamic with Stanfield reminds me of Sinners‘ director Ryan Coogler’s work with Michael B. Jordan. Both Stanfield and Jordan are fine actors in their own right, but their performances truly level up when guided by a trusted, consistent collaborator.
There’s another area in which I Love Boosters is faintly reminiscent of Sinners and it’s in that aforementioned divide between the movie’s first and second halves. Just as Sinners stands on its own as a period piece before the vampires even show up, I Love Boosters operates as an effective satire before the real sci-fi weirdness arrives. Unlike Sinners, however, I Love Boosters may have been genuinely better off without the sudden injection of genre madness. While the truly bonkers stuff gives Riley ample opportunity to flex his directorial muscles with impressive DIY-style miniature special effects, the script buckles under the weight of all the absurdity. Characters disappear throughout key passages as though there’s simply not enough room onscreen to accommodate them. And the film’s conclusion is more than a bit too simple and clean.
Still, if one counts I‘m a Virgo as a de facto film (and one should), Boots Riley is now three-for-three with his cinematic efforts. I Love Boosters‘ strained third act suggests that he might not be able to pull off the magic trick again on his fourth try but I won’t be the one to bet against the director continuing to follow his bliss.
I Love Boosters premiered at the SXSW Film & TV Festival on March 13. It opens in theaters on May 22.
Friday the 13th: Jason’s 10 Best Kills, Ranked
Even the biggest fans of the Friday the 13th franchise have to admit that the series isn’t on the cinematic vanguard. Creator Sean S. Cunningham saw the big returns generated by John Carpenter‘s micro budget Halloween and put his own holiday-themed horror movie into production, announcing the title long before he had a cast, a crew, or even a script. Killer Jason Voorhees didn’t even get his iconic hockey mask until midway through the third entry.
So how did Friday the 13th become a financial success in its own time and a beloved franchise today? Simple: it’s all about the kills. Right from the beginning, Cunningham knew that fans wanted subversive thrills, and so he hired the legendary effects artist Tom Savini to work on the first movie, setting a standard for everything that followed.
For this Friday the 13th, we’re going to look back at the 10 best ways Jason (or Jason pretenders) offed the denizens of Crystal Lake.
10. Kevin Bacon Gets Penetrated in Bed (Friday the 13th)
Revisited today, the original Friday the 13th from 1980 feels like an outlier in the franchise it launched. Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) does all the killing to get revenge for the death of her son Jason, and the film has a more obviously Giallo-inspired whodunnit structure. However, there is one aspect of the original that all of the sequels try to match: the kills.
No kill better demonstrates this point than the death of counselor Jack Burrell, who gets an arrow shoved through the back of his neck. Played by future great Kevin Bacon, Jack and his girlfriend Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) sneak away to a cabin for some alone time during a storm. After finishing, Marcie goes to wash up while Jack leans back to enjoy a post-coital joint. Only then does he notice the blood dripping from the top bunk, blood leaking from victim Ned (Mark Nelson). However, Jack notices too late, as Pamela’s (surprisingly beefy) hand grabs his head, holding him down as she drives an arrow through his Adam’s apple.
9. Campground Rotisserie (2009)
Time has only helped the 2009 Friday the 13th remake. Even if the movie can’t quite overcome bad decisions like squeezing the plot beats of the first two films into an extended prologue or providing an explanation for Jason’s apparent ability to teleport (underground tunnels). But like all the torture-heavy horror of the 2000s, the mean-spirited tone of the movie has been reevaluated, allowing us to admire what once revolted us.
From this new perspective, the early kill in which Jason cooks a woman in her backpack is a thing of cruel beauty, establishing this Jason (Derek Mears) as more intelligent than previous iterations. After discovering the body of his dead friend, camper Richie (Ben Feldman) rushes back to find his girlfriend Amanda (America Olivo) trapped in her sleeping bag and dangling over the campfire. He runs to free her, but gets caught in a bear trap, forcing him to further mutilate his leg while watching his girlfriend burn alive.
8. Post, Coital (Jason Goes to Hell)
There isn’t a lot to recommend about Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Not necessarily because it’s a bad movie—even though it is sloppy in its construction—but because it’s not really a Jason movie. The whole plot about Jason being a demon worm who infects other people after his body is destroyed makes the flick seem like an interloper in the franchise.
Still, we do get one classic Jason kill, even if “Jason” in this case is an infected coroner played by Richard Gant. When hitchhikers Luke and Deborah (Michael B. Silver and Michelle Clunie) sneak off to a tent to have sex, the coroner follows them. Right at the moment of climax, Coroner Jason shoves a fence post through the tent and right through Deborah’s chest. He then yanks the post upward, splitting Deborah in two and spilling blood all over Luke.
7. He’s Killing Me (The Final Chapter)
Most Friday the 13th fans agree that either fourth entry The Final Chapter or Part VI: Jason Lives belongs at the top of the franchise rankings. However, neither of those movies have the most spectacular kills. Instead, they satisfy fans by offering other genre thrills. In The Final Chapter‘s case, that means a tight slasher with interesting side characters.
Those interesting side characters make for the fourth movie’s best kill, in which Jason takes down Rob Dier (Erich Anderson). Rob enters midway through The Final Chapter and presents himself as an expert, having been hunting Jason since his sister Sandra (Marta Kober) was killed in the second film. But as soon as he actually finds Jason, Rob fumbles it, first tripping on the stairs and then running right toward his enemy—who proceeds to pin Rob to the wall and starts hacking him to bits. Still, Rob does prove his expertise in one way, shouting, “He’s killing me!” as Jason does the dirty deed.
6. Smiley Face (Jason Lives)
After The Final Chapter perfected the Friday the 13th model, Jason Lives parodied it, injecting self-aware humor into the series. Writer and director Tom McLoughlin revitalizes Jason as a Frankenstein’s Monster who lumbers after antagonist Tommy Jarvis (Thom Mathews), while the nearby campers make knowing wisecracks along the way.
The combination of humor and horror is found in the movie’s best kill. A corporate retreat sends a group of doughy office workers to play paintball in the woods outside of Crystal Lake, giving the drones an opportunity to indulge their inner Rambo. After being bested by the new female executive, would-be Alpha male Burt (Wallace Merck) mutters about gender equality while hacking through the foliage with his machete. In need of a new sharp object, the resurrected Jason catches Burt by the arm, tearing away the appendage, and smashing his head into a tree trunk, leaving behind a smiley face and a splash of blood.
5. Unmanning Handstanding Andy (Part 3)
It really took four movies for Friday the 13th to figure itself out. In the meantime, filmmakers filled the movies with all sorts of nonsense to kill time, none more so than the 3D-enhanced third entry. To take advantage of the gimmicky technology, director Steve Miner instructed his actors to stick all sorts of stuff into the camera, from yo-yos to car keys to eyeballs. Most of it is pretty forgettable, even for those watching it in stereoscopic vision, but the loose structure makes space for one of the best kills in the series.
Like his pal Shelly (Larry Zerner), Andy Beltrami (Jeffery Rogers) cannot resist a prank. However, unlike Shelly, Andy knows when to make a joke and when it’s time to stop goofing around. For example, Andy doesn’t pull any goofs before he and his girlfriend Debbie (Tracie Savage) have sex. But after they’re done and she goes off to take a shower, then Andy decides to do a handstand and walk across the hallway on his hands. That is, until Jason appears in the hallway and hacks Andy right down the middle. MPAA censors cut up the scene worse than Jason did, but the weirdness of the handstand more than makes up for the lack of gore.
4. Back to Bed (Freddy vs. Jason)
All these years later, Freddy vs. Jason remains divisive among Friday the 13th fans. Director Ronny Yu’s slick, CG-assisted action and predilection for dutch angles suits the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but Jason plays a secondary role in the movie, as demonstrated by the nonsense lore about fear of water.
Still, the movie manages to give Jason one incredible kill, early in the film. After having sex with his girlfriend Gibb (Katharine Isabelle), meathead Trey Hutch (Jesse Hutch) leaves to clean off. Like the most bro-tastic of bros, Trey immediately cracks into a brewski, but he’s interrupted by Jason, who starts stabbing away. When the bubbling beer can in Trey’s hand indicates that he’s still alive, Jason grabs both sides of the bed and folds it closed, bending Trey backwards in the process.
3. Death by Enchiladas (A New Beginning)
As this list shows, characters in Friday the 13th movies don’t act like normal people. That’s especially true of the fifth movie, A New Beginning. After the death of Jason in The Final Chapter, A New Beginning tries to reboot with another whodunnit involving someone dressed like Jason. The mystery isn’t interesting, but there’s enough strangeness involved to elevate the film, as seen in its best kill.
Like most Friday the 13th couples, biker Demon (Miguel A. Núñez Jr.) and his girlfriend Anita (Jere Fields) like making out. However, their makeout session comes to an abrupt end when Demon’s stomach starts gurgling, sending him running to the outhouse while complaining about “damned enchiladas.” Undeterred, Anita stands outside the outhouse and starts singing, prompting Demon to continue the duet from inside the campground outhouse. Their stinky serenade comes to an end when the killer arrives to slit Anita’s throat and then starts stabbing into the outhouse, eventually impaling Demon.
2. Sleeping Bag Beatdown (The New Blood)
As a horror series set at a campground, Friday the 13th has a lot of sleeping bag deaths. The best of all came in one of the weaker entries, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. Directed by the great John Carl Buechler, The New Blood goes for a sort of monster mash, pitting Jason against Tina Shepherd (Lar Park Lincoln), a girl with Carrie-like telekinetic powers. The match makes for some absurd fight scenes, none of which drive the best kill scene.
Unlike others on this list, Judy (Debora Kessler) does not have sex with her boyfriend Dan (Michael Schroeder). Instead, she sends him off to find firewood first, and slips into her sleeping bag to prepare for her return. That’s when Jason returns, cutting open her tent and yanking her sleeping bag outside. He drags Judy into the woods and slams the sleeping bag against a tree, dropping her bloody body onto the ground. It’s a nasty kill, ironically made worse by the MPAA’s insistence that Buechler cut the shot down to a single slam.
1. Frozen Face (Jason X)
Jason X is easily the dumbest movie in the Friday the 13th franchise. To be clear, I mean that as a compliment. Writer Todd Farmer and director James Isaac completely ignore good sense and good taste to tell a bizarre story set in 2455, when a group of space-traveling archeology students recover Jason’s cryogenically frozen body. Jason stays dormant at first, that is until a professor and a student sneak off for a tryst, the sounds of extramarital sex pulling him back to life.
Unfortunately for intern Adrienne Thomas-Hart (Kristi Angus), that reawakening happens at the same time that she’s examining Jason in a lab. Immediately after coming back to life, Jason grabs Adrienne’s head and drives it into a pool of liquid nitrogen. He then pulls it out and smashes her frozen face onto the table, spraying chunks of flesh and ice across the room.
Tech in the Year 2050: What AI Means for Work, Art, and the Environment
This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
For centuries, our ideas about the future have been shaped by science fiction. From Mary Shelley’s Frankensteinto Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:A Space Odyssey to Isaac Asimov’s robots, we have imagined technology as a moral force that either saves humanity or turns against it.
But in 2026, tech is less a science-fiction spectacle and more a mundane reality. Technology regulates our homes, tracks our bodies, and optimizes our movements. “The algorithm” has become cultural shorthand for global behavioral influence. We say it casually—the algorithm made me buy it, boosted this, buried that—half joking, but half aware.
Will we always effortlessly adapt to technological change, though? With the help of several experts in an array of fields, we are fast-forwarding to 2050 and imagining how technology will reshape the way we work, connect, and even inhabit the planet.
Work As a Collective Consciousness
Prediction: By 2050, work will shift from human hustle to hive-mind coordination.
Sometimes, the past shows us how the future will arrive. In 1973, German-Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for decoding the honeybee’s “waggle dance,” a subtle movement that communicates the location of food to the hive. For the colony, this is coordination. Individual bees follow simple rules and local signals, yet they make coordinated decisions collectively. Von Frisch’s decoding of the waggle dance later inspired bee-based optimization research, and waggle dance–driven algorithms have since been absorbed into modern swarm-based decision-making models.
“Many AI models have been directly inspired by biological systems, especially collective intelligence in animals,” says Dr. Asad Tirmizi, CEO of Trener Robotics, an AI platform that equips industrial robots with built-in intelligence. “Swarm intelligence from bees, ants, and birds has shaped several important algorithmic families.”
That biological logic is now migrating from nature into the systems that shape how we work. Sharon Gai, a former Alibaba digital strategy advisor and author of How to Do More with Less: Future-Proofing Yourself in an AI-Driven Economy, experienced that biological logic jump from nature into the workplace.
During Alibaba’s ramp-up to China’s Singles’ Day shopping festival, which features five times the volume of the entire U.S. Cyber Week, she was part of a team experimenting with an early generative design system that reduced the work of roughly 1,000 contract designers into prompts managed by a much smaller core group, a coordination model that mirrors the kind of distributed intelligence seen in hive systems.
With that experience in mind, Gai argues that by 2050, work will be reorganized around machine-level output. Gai describes this as a shift in mindset. Work has felt like an endless to-do list—humans operating as busy bees, constantly executing tasks. As AI systems grow more capable, she argues, the human role changes. Instead of performing every task, we become more like beekeepers, supervising a hive of AI agents.
Inside DingTalk, Alibaba’s version of Slack, she said the first role they modified was the project manager.
“Within DingTalk, you had the ability to create a bot. And the first thing we bot-ified was the project manager (PM). So if we had a working group of 40 to 50 people in that big group thread managing timelines for us, that bot became our PM. All we had to do was set rules, like how many times can you bug someone before they really get pissed off? … and that was three. So we couldn’t ask the fourth,” Gai says. Inside Alibaba’s internal systems, Gai saw how quickly workplace coordination began to resemble programmable swarm behavior.
For Gai, the deeper issue is not automation itself but boundaries.
“Is it good to hand over so much of our decision-making powers and tasks that we originally did as humans over to this hive of AI agents?” Gai considers. “I think the answer is sometimes, and that’s the part that so many of us are trying to navigate: What should I hand over to AI and what should I keep for myself.”
Finding Joy in the Little Things
Prediction: As AI increasingly automates busywork, humanity will come to appreciate the “small frictions” in life.
Gai frames the future of work through Iain M. Banks’ Culture series novels, shifting the focus from machine capability to human purpose: if AI agents supervise other agents, what remains distinctly ours? In that universe, humans are fed, clothed, and free from the labor needed to survive. Life is frictionless.
Gai believes a similar dynamic could emerge in our work if AI continues to advance.
“If work becomes fully automated, if AI agents supervise other agents, what remains distinctly human? Are we just going to become hollow biological beings where the algorithm has done so much of the work for us, and we’re just there to click the enter button?”
“His recommendation is to buy one envelope at a time instead of buying a box of envelopes.” The theory is that you have to go to the post office, buy a stamp, then maybe walk past a café, and meet people. That creates intentional community.
Vonnegut argued that computers will end up doing all of that for us, saying, “And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. We love to move around. And we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
He was arguing that the small, everyday things you can do on your own matter.
So if AI reduces friction at work, removing the need to gather in tall glass buildings, what happens to how we connect outside that work world? If meetings are handled by bots, and projects are executed before humans arrive, what becomes of the accidental exchange between humans?
Art Becomes Experiential
Prediction: By 2050, immersion will evolve into true presence through fully multi-sensory experiences.
While no one truly knows what the world will look like as immersion and virtual reality technology improve, the market agrees on one thing: we will leave behind chunky headsets and move to more invisible, ubiquitous interfaces.
Some scenarios still feel far more sci-fi than we can swallow now. But even in 2015, the futurist Ray Kurzweil said we would be living in an immersive reality with neural implants by 2030. In 2026, the experience of virtual reality (VR) or immersion is more likely to come through entertainment using multiple sensory inputs.
VR artist Estella Tse has created large-scale VR installations around the world. She brings nature into each of her XR installations to ensure a blend of the organic and humanity in an otherwise tech-heavy experience. Her 2023 exhibition “In Bloom,” a collaboration between the University of Oxford’s TORCH and the Ethics in AI Institute, was created as she was recovering from complex PTSD and debilitating depression, inviting audiences to believe that even in the darkest days, they can find light again.
The installation unfolded within a hand-painted physical forest, designed as a fully immersive environment. The installation used the backdrop of a damaged forest that progressed into a flourishing ecosystem again. She integrated physical wood bark, which added a natural scent to the tangible experience. For the latter part of the exhibition space, Tse integrated geranium and lavender scents for a full immersive experience.
“I combined my knowledge of visual storytelling and theme park design for ‘In Bloom,’” says Tse. “There’s a beginning, middle, and end. There’s a climactic part, and all design elements were made to support that build-up. From darkness to light, from grayscale to full saturated colors, from flat 2D progressively into full 3D immersion, I utilized multiple design elements to create emotional intensity at the most important parts.
“The immersive nature of VR metaphorically and literally puts the viewer into a different world—the brain feels like it’s transported to another place. This is so powerful for building empathy and a felt experience.”
For the future, she’s not sure where the medium will go. “Outside of XR moving into film, the industry is heavily reliant on the big corporations and their ROIs on what makes sense for their businesses in this economy,” she adds. But Tse believes creative efforts make it possible for XR to become mainstream. “We literally create the possibilities of what new tech can do.”
AI Companionship
Prediction: By 2050, we will have AI robot buddies.
In 2025, Gai attended an Eva AI “dating café,” where people brought their AI companions to a café, just like you would take a date to meet friends. While she was there, she said a reporter approached the event “from a very critical lens,” asking, “Is this going to replace human relationships?”
But Gai said she was looking at this interaction on the perky, rosier side.
“The AI dating humans thing is weird right now because it’s not very mainstream,” she says. “If it brings that person comfort, how bad is it for those people who want to partake?”
Gai believes this could create a new branch of relationships.“If you think about it, relationships have branched out over time, right? First, it was your family; then your partner; then your friends; and finally, your colleagues. So who’s to say that the next branch isn’t an AI?”
The progression of how we interact with AI in our lives is more about expanding how we create and live our connections. What feels unfamiliar now may simply become another layer in the way humans relate, communicate, and find meaning. As with earlier technological shifts, the shape of connection evolves before we fully understand what it will become.
Technological Doppelgängers
Prediction: In 2050, accountability remains human, even when presence is proxy.
The era of proxy presence has already begun. On Feb. 15, 2026, OpenAI acquired OpenClaw, an experiment in AI agents posting and interacting on a social forum. Early screenshots sparked outrage and alarm across social platforms, with users reacting to provocative posts attributed to autonomous agents. Gai cautions that much of what circulated online was not independent machine behavior, but content humans had prompted the agents to produce for attention and clicks.
“A lot of the things they were posting were very far-fetched,” says Gai. “And the far-fetched-ness was not created by the AI agent. It was humans creating and feeding it that content, for eyeballs, for clicks.”
The real shift, she explains, is not spectacle but representation: agents interacting with other agents. Systems negotiating with each other before humans enter the conversation. OpenClaw is experimenting, Gai says, with AI agents interacting directly with one another, effectively moving toward a social network for AI agents.
From an efficiency perspective, if AI understands how a human worker responds to clients, friends, or collaborators, it could interact directly with their agents, attend meetings, negotiate timelines, and even pre-complete projects.
“You don’t even have to show up for meetings; your bot already went through all of them,” she says. “And your bot went through all of them with the other bots, so they have already run through this project and know exactly what the deadlines are, and then it autonomously finishes the project on behalf of you.”
In that scenario, coordination takes a backseat. Systems exchange signals, set expectations, and execute tasks at a speed that no longer depends on human scheduling.
But Gai draws a boundary. “The one thing we can’t outsource is human responsibility. You can’t put a bot in jail.”
As efficiency expands in a bot-driven world, accountability still remains human. OpenClaw illustrates one possible direction for agent-to-agent networking, and even today, such systems have provoked caution from major tech firms, underscoring how quickly proxy autonomy raises real-world governance questions.
Non-Negotiable Planet
Prediction: By 2050, we will be living inside ecological limits.
The idea of a “non-negotiable planet” can feel abstract. Even today, we’ve altered more than 75 percent of Earth’s land surface, degraded a third of soils, and drained ancient aquifers. When soil can’t absorb rain and roots can’t hold slopes, development becomes physically unstable in addition to being ethically questionable. For Caroline Howell, CEO of Canopy Development Group, the hardest planetary constraint to ignore in 2050 will be water and the living systems that regulate it.
“Not just water scarcity in the abstract, but broken water cycles,” explains Howell. “Floods where forests once slowed rainfall and droughts where soil once held moisture like a sponge.”
But Howell poses a bigger question, one that challenges conventional market thinking: what if real estate were treated as a living system rather than a financial project?
Time horizons would shift: development is optimized for short exit cycles rather than the decades-long lifespans of living systems. Forests regenerate over generations. Soil formation is measured in centuries. Watersheds stabilize slowly but collapse when pushed too far. Howell believes that if real estate were treated as a living system, long-term stewardship funds would be embedded in every project.
“Ecological metrics would sit alongside financial ones in investor reports. Property values would be tied to biodiversity gains and water resilience. Governance structures would include land councils or ecological oversight boards, rather than just HOAs focused on aesthetics,” she says.
Yet Howell contends the deeper shift is cultural, and we need to stop asking how fast we can extract value and start asking what the landscape needs to be healthier in 50 years.
Howell frames technology not as a savior or villain, but as a reflection.
“Technology is a mirror. It reflects our intentions,” she adds.
Canopy’s approach fuses technology with natural ecosystems. They use a “land listening” system and remote sensing to gather critical data for land planning, making projects more resilient to future weather. This also helps teams understand the creatures and patterns of a shared home. In this framework, technology doesn’t erase limits; it exposes them and teaches us how to live within them.
On Panama’s Azuero Peninsula, Canopy’s Playa Venao sits within an endangered tropical dry forest ecosystem. Rather than clearing and subdividing, they planted 40,000 native trees to protect the watershed and are building food systems within the development. Howell says they will be the first real estate project to generate and sell biodiversity credits globally. The work is tied to restoring a 20,000-hectare biological corridor with Pro Eco Azuero, creating local jobs in regeneration.
Howell believes that living within planetary boundaries is less dramatic and more beautiful than people imagine.
Shade trees lower ambient temperatures by several degrees; buildings oriented for wind flow, reducing mechanical cooling; food growing within walking distance; and materials chosen for durability and repair. Most importantly, Howell dreams of a 2050 where neighborhoods are designed to gently return people to the living world around them.
Obsession: Inside the Most Disturbing Indie Horror of the Year
This article appears in the new issue ofDEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
Finding love ain’t easy. But what if it was? What if you didn’t have to go through the agony of meeting someone you have chemistry with, only to go on two dates and realize you have nothing in common, or end up on a third just to get ghosted? What if you could avoid the low-grade anxiety of constantly wondering whether your partner might get bored with you and leave? Curry Barker’s Obsession is here to answer all those doubts and fears, and it’s probably going to make you feel a lot better about the warts of modern dating.
The film centers on Bear (Michael Johnston), a private, secretly miserable homebody who has it bad for his best friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). Bear is sweet, unassuming, and quiet, making his infatuation with Nikki more cute than creepy. He’s the kind of protagonist that you feel for, especially after his cat unexpectedly dies due to helping itself to Bear’s medicine cabinet. He’s just a boy trying to impress a girl, and losing his cat in the middle of it all! That is, until a joke purchase ruins everything.
Meanwhile, Nikki is as cool as they come. She’s collected and self-assured, and has no time to do things that aren’t fulfilling her soul. Her friends are deeply important to her, and you can tell that she’s the exact kind of person who actually listens. It’s immediately evident why Bear has a crush on her. What isn’t evident is whether or not she feels the same way. This is where the seemingly innocent novelty toy “One Wish Willow” comes in, and where everything starts to get… sinister.
Rather than risk telling her how he feels, Bear wishes that Nikki loved him more than anything else in the world and then snaps the toy in half as instructed. Things immediately start to get weird, but there’s nothing that can prepare you for how twisted their “it’s complicated” dynamic becomes.
The concept of “be careful what you wish for” or the proverbial monkey’s paw fable is not new. So much, in fact, that Obsession director Curry Barker got the idea for his script from The Simpsons’ “The Monkey’s Paw” segment in “Treehouse of Horror II.” Still, his movie offers an unsettling wrinkle about human nature and desire when the wish in question is used by a man, intentionally or otherwise, to oppress and subjugate the will and identity of a woman he claims to adore.
Obsession’s themes are heavily rooted in consent: who is able to give it and who is not. When we meet Bear, we find someone who we believe is a good guy. You want that little fella to win. The second he makes his wish, though, everything gets dangerously complicated. Playing with such difficult subject matters appealed to Barker, but he had a clear line in the sand regarding Nikki’s autonomy after the wish.
“Nikki can’t even give consent to hold hands,” Barker explains. “She’s not there. So nothing is real. That was really a dark and interesting concept to play with.”
Things also get a little bit more complex for Johnston, who has to play Bear as a good guy while also seeing the very gray area as a performer.
“The way I approach the character is very—I think he’s a good guy, but it’s sort of like he has this willful blindness. He knows there’s a monster under the bed, but is it really there?”
The monster is very much there. The beauty of Obsession, however,is that you don’t know that monster’s going to eat you until it’s fully in view. Of course, blurred lines are central to the success of the slow-burning terror, and their fuzziness played a major role in the way Navarrette both viewed and portrayed Nikki.
“It always gets tricky when we want to talk about consent, a very important issue and conversation,” Navarrette considers. “I think that the film does a really good job explaining how those lines can get blurred, and how one person’s story and experience may not be what other people perceive it to be. It’s very specific to that, and I think with Nikki, you really get it into the nitty-gritty of what that looks like.”
Going into Obsession, one expects to be confronted with thematic horror, with the trauma of what Nikki is going through playing a central role in the viewer’s discomfort and fear. That is, of course, prevalent throughout the film. Full disclosure, though: this bad boy is gonna make you jump in your seat more than once. Seasoned horror fans let out full-on hollers in early festival screenings of Obsession, and those screams were earned.
For Barker, it is about playing with a metaphor for the “modern toxic relationship.” Still, the tangible scares were as important as the thematic ones: “You want to incorporate those scares, and then you want to weave it with all the psychological stuff,” he says.
Meanwhile, Navarrette was excited to, in her words, act nuts and get paid.
“I think it’s one of the best parts of my job,” she says with a laugh. “At least to me, there’s no better shoe to put my foot in.” Humor aside, there’s never a moment that Navarrette lost sight of what her character was going through. “Nikki had a beautiful life. She had wonderful friends; she had trivia night; I mean, what an absolute gift to have all of those things! And then for all of it to be taken away completely out of your control.”
What made that lack of control extra horrific for Navarrette is that everything that happens on-screen, and every depraved action that eventually unfolds in Obsession, is technically caused by Nikki’s own hand. Yet she fundamentally is unable to say “stop.”
Practical effects are also essential when it comes to meaningful scares, and it’s something that Barker and his team took very seriously when crafting the layered horrors of Obsession. Navarrette enjoyed all the work she was able to do on the film, but one stunt and set piece stood out. The scene in question involves Nikki running out of nowhere and bludgeoning someone to death.
“[The victim’s actor] gets replaced by a wonderful little dummy that our special effects woman had to do; the dummy’s face is caved in, and I have a foam brick, and then they wired tubes through the face and the eyes [of the prop],” Navarrette explains with delight. “That blood was coming out at the same time as I’m smashing, and that doll’s head probably weighed… 15 pounds? So as I’m smashing, my hand’s getting tired, and my hits are getting slower and slower, and Curry never calls cut.”
Barker remembers the scene fondly as well, and the lack of a cut call was entirely intentional. For him, it was just as much about getting Bear’s reaction as the audience stand-in as it was about playing with the practical goo of it all. “I wanted it to be grotesque, and if Bear has to look at it, you have to look at it too.”
Grotesque isn’t an exaggeration either. “I actually had a lot of trouble with [the scene] because we had to cut it down,” Barker reveals. “The version you saw won’t make it into theaters. Don’t worry, though. It’s still crazy.”
The MPA might be out here ruining everyone’s fun, but given the rest of Obsession’s overall vibe, you should feel comfortable taking Barker at his word when it comes to the final cut being just as, well… sticky.
Obsession premieres at SXSW on March 14 and opens in theaters nationwide on May 15.
The Strange New Worlds Team Still Wants to Make Star Trek: Year One
Star Trek is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, but despite reaching this impressive milestone, the franchise is in something of a holding pattern. Filming has officially wrapped on the second season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which means that, at this precise moment, there’s no new Trek series in production, or even greenlit.
There are a lot of reasons for this that aren’t as dire as they may initially seem. Though Star Trek: Strange New Worlds wrapped production on its fifth and final season back in December, there are two seasons still to air. (Although one of them is slightly truncated.) Plus, parent network Paramount is undergoing some fairly significant changes, thanks to its recent merger with Skydance and proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. It’s very likely that Star Trek isn’t as high on their list of internal priorities as most of us would like it to be. But that doesn’t mean discussions aren’t taking place behind the scenes about the future of the franchise.
Fans have probably already heard about Star Trek: Year One, a proposed pitch that would continue the story of the U.S.S. Enterprise where Strange New Worlds is expected to leave off, following the earliest days of Captain James T. Kirk’s command. Many legacy characters from Star Trek: The Original Series are already part of the Strange New Worlds cast, including Kirk, Mr. Spock, Nyota, and Uhura, while the series finale will introduce a new Doctor McCoy and Hikaru Sulu to the group. (Heck, one season three installment has served as a quasi-TOS episode already.) The groundwork is in place, and it certainly sounds as though the folks in charge are working toward making their idea a reality.
Speaking with TrekMovie.com at the recent Saturn Awards, Strange New Worlds showrunner, Henry Alonso Myers, said that their team had officially pitched Year One to Paramount.
“We think it would be a great [show], it’s the next thing for Star Trek, we think, in the story that we’ve been telling. But it’s out of our hands,” he said. “We’ve brought them a lot. We’ve done a lot to give to them. It’s in their hands right now. They’re taking a look at it, trying to decide it. I mean, there’s a lot of love for our show over there, and obviously a lot of love for Star Trek.”
Of course, no one can predict what Paramount will choose to do, but there are some hopeful indicators. Namely, that the Enterprise sets from Strange New Worlds are still standing at CBS Stages Canada in Toronto.
“Well, our sets have not been destroyed yet. That is what I can say,” Meyers said. “That makes this the big decision for them, because it’s about, do you hold on to the sets, currently? As I said, they have not been destroyed, so we’re waiting to find out what they want to do.”
But, as with so much else about this franchise at the moment, only time will tell. After all, almost everyone involved with Star Trek: Picard pushed for a Star Trek: Legacy sequel after that series concluded back in 2023, and nothing has come of it as yet. Could the Captain Kirk factor make the difference? There is an appealing symmetry to the idea of announcing a show like Year One during such a milestone anniversary year and bringing things full circle back to the show that started it all. But will Paramount go for it? Place your bets now.
Superman Will Have a Very Different Green Lantern to Deal With in Man of Tomorrow
At the end of the first trailer for the upcoming HBO Max series Lanterns, Hal Jordan scoffs when his new partner John Stewart asks if he ever talks to other members of the Green Lantern Corps. “I’m the only human, they’re all aliens,” answers a disbelieving Jordan. As many have pointed out, Jordan’s comment makes no sense in the new DCU, where Green Lantern Guy Gardner serves as a member of the Justice Gang. But as even more have pointed out, Guy Gardner hardly meets the definition of “human.”
Superman would never say such a thing about Guy, but no one would blame him if he preferred working with another human member of the Corps. And it sounds like he just might get his wish, as The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Aaron Pierre has been added to the cast of the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow, reprising his role as Stewart.
By adding Pierre to its cast, Man of Tomorrow continues to serve as a sequel to every DCU project since James Gunn and Peter Safran relaunched the universe. Obviously, Man of Tomorrow is a direct continuation of Superman, as it sees Superman and Lex Luthor forced to work together. The reason they’ll work together was introduced in the final episode of Peacemaker‘s second season, where Chris Smith was sent to a prison planet called Sanctuary. And who sent the Peacemaker to Sanctuary? Why it’s Rick Flag Sr., former boss of the Creature Commandos, who developed a hatred of all metahumans after the death of his son in The Suicide Squad.
What this means for John Stewart is still unclear, as we obviously don’t know how his story will unfold in Lanterns. The Lanterns trailer tells us that Stewart has been training under Jordan for two months, which means that he’s still a pretty green Lantern. Yet, if Stewart is anything like his comic book counterpart, then he already comes to the role with military training and a keen mind, having served as a Marine and worked as an architect. He has a cool and introspective demeanor that is, at the very least, much less chaos-prone than the attitude of one Guy Gardner.
The most obvious guess is that Stewart will be called upon to investigate the disappearances on Earth, as the planet falls under his jurisdiction in the Green Lantern Corps. Founded millennia ago by the Guardians of the Universe, the Green Lantern Corps are space cops and they each have their precincts, or sectors, to patrol. If metahumans start disappearing under his watch, the Guardians will assign him to investigate, as their authority supersedes that of even Flag and the U.S. government.
For fans of the Justice League Unlimited cartoon series, Stewart’s arrival adds a more interesting wrinkle. While the comic book Guy Gardner is a charter member of the goofier Justice League International operated by Maxwell Lord, a clear inspiration for the Justice Gang of the DCU, Stewart often serves on the main Justice League. And on Justice League Unlimited, Stewart not only served on the team, but he also had a compelling and tragic romance with fellow member Hawkgirl, who just so happens to be in the DCU already, played by Isabela Merced.
Will John Stewart be all about the investigation in Man of Tomorrow? Or will we see the start of something beautiful between him and Hawkgirl? Either way, Superman’s just glad that he doesn’t have to add Guy Gardner to his list of headaches in his next adventure.
Man of Tomorrow releases July 9, 2027.
Could The Doctor Who Christmas Special Be a Stealth Doomsday Sequel?
While Doctor Who is slated to return at the end of the year with a brand new Christmas installment, the franchise still feels like it’s stuck in a strange limbo. This isn’t all that surprising, given how little we know about where the show is headed. The much-vaunted Disney deal imploded in rather spectacular fashion, the rumored third season with Ncuti Gatwa failed to materialize, and his Fifteenth Doctor unexpectedly regenerated after just two seasons in the TARDIS. Not only that, he regenerated into former companion Billie Piper, and no one has any idea what character she’s meant to be playing. To say that Doctor Who feels…well, rather rudderless at the moment may sound dramatic, but it isn’t entirely wrong.
With no official answers to any of these questions arriving until at least December, it’s no surprise that fans are busy grasping at anything that even resembles a straw. And the latest popular theory running through the fandom involves both a popular former Doctor and a beloved season 2 episode. An in-universe blog post from UNIT, accessible to logged-in users on the Doctor Who website, includes a memo ostensibly from Ruth Madeley’s character, Shirley-Anne Bingham. It references “the 20th anniversary of the return of Rose Tyler, who went ‘missing’ for one year after Operation Mannequin”. Operation Mannequin, of course, is a reference to “Rose,” the very first episode of Doctor Who’s modern era, which saw the introduction of the Ninth Doctor and a subplot involving store mannequins seemingly coming to life. But what’s really interesting is the next bit.
“As Rose Tyler is currently both missing from this universe and flagged as a complex space-time event, maybe keep an eye out,” Shirley’s post reads. “I’ve got the Vlinx scanning all media channels and the subwave network.”
This is, it seems safe to say, a reference to the season 2 finale, “Doomsday,” an episode that saw Rose cross over into a parallel universe where she was separated from David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in one of the most emotionally devastating episodes of all time. She briefly returned to help save the world once more in season 4’s “The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End” two-parter before being sent back across the dimensions with her own half-human Ten clone in tow. (Just go with it, it makes sense in the story.)
It’s certainly fair to wonder if this is some sort of setup, meant to hint to eagle-eyed fans that the Piper we saw at the end of season 15 isn’t playing the Doctor or some secondary figure like The Moment, but the modern era’s original companion once more. But does it make sense? Well, yes and no. Showrunner Russell T. Davies second turn at the series’ helm has seen him revisit a lot of Doctor Who history, reintroducing classic villains, bringing back familiar characters, and even revisiting some of his own previous stories. (“The Well” is essentially a sequel to the season 4 episode, “Midnight.”) But Rose Tyler’s story isn’t exactly unfinished. Sure, technically she’s still considered a missing person on Earth, but in her alternate universe, her father’s still alive, her mother joined her, and she’s got a Tenth Doctor of her very own. That’s pretty much as happy an ending as anyone could hope for on this show. What story is really left to tell here? Could revisiting that episode even tell us anything about her journey that we don’t already know?
Plus, there’s the David Tennant of it all. Look, Piper’s presence, no matter what character she turns out to be playing, was always going to invite speculation that Tennant might pop back around for another spin in the TARDIS alongside her, particularly since his Fourteenth Doctor is essentially just hanging out at Donna Noble’s house at this point. Yes, it’s true that Tennant just came back for the 60th anniversary a few short years ago. But love him or hate him, he’s still the most popular modern-era Doctor, and the prospect of seeing him reunite with Piper onscreen once more is a tantalizing one for any fan. And there’s a certain logic to trying to use him — and whichever one of the three different characters he’s played on the show — to try and smooth over some of the historic bumps the franchise is currently facing. Would it work? Honestly, it probably would. But would it be the best choice for the show and its future? That’s a murkier question.
After all, while this Christmas episode will certainly have plenty of loose ends to tie up and plot holes to explain, at the end of the day, it also has to look to the future. Whether or not we’ll meet the Sixteenth Doctor in this installment is a question only Russell T. Davies can answer, but even if we don’t, the hour at least has to leave things in a place where it feels like the show can continue organically — and survive without Piper (or even Tennant’s) help. Can one episode ever hope to serve that many masters? As with so much about this franchise at the moment, we’ll have to wait and see.
KPop Demon Hunters 2 is Coming: What We Want from the Sequel
Huntrix is back for an encore. Just days before KPop Demon Hunters is sure to net a couple of Academy Awards, Deadline has announced that Sony has put a sequel to the Netflix hit in development, with Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans back to direct. “These characters are like family to us, their world has become our second home,” Appelhans said. “We’re excited to write their next chapter, challenge them and watch them evolve — and continue pushing the boundaries of how music, animation and story can come together.”
It’s those last lines that really have us excited about the future. The first KPop Demon Hunters melded modern pop star spectacle with Korean folklore and CGI animation with classical cartooning, resulting in a unique work that pleased a range of viewers. How do Kang and Appelhans follow that up? We don’t know, but we do have some requests for the next stop on the Huntrix tour.
Sunlight Sisters
Easily the biggest mystery surrounding the KPop Demon Hunters narrative involves Rumi’s mother, Mi-yeong Ryu. At first, it seems as if Ryu and her fellow performers in the Sunlight Sisters exist as little more than table-setting, a brief and easy explanation for how Rumi became a demon hunter. But as we learn more about Rumi’s backstory, Ryu becomes more complex. How did she come to fall for a demon? What sort of conflicts did that create in her profession? What led up to her death?
We don’t necessarily need Ryu and the Sunlight Sisters to become the stars of KPop Demon Hunters 2, but there’s clearly some narrative and thematic ground to travel there. If the sequel can show us the path that Ryu traveled, we may get a better understanding of where Rumi will go as she comes to accept her new normal.
Mira and/or Zoey
Given her dual identity and her connection to Jinu, Rumi was the perfect focal point for the first film. But Mira and Zoey clearly have more to offer than just being supporting characters. If Rumi’s main arc has more or less finished, it’s time to let a new member of Huntrix take the lead.
Obviously, a shift in focus will change the balance of the story, as Mira and Zoey have very different personalities than Rumi. But that could allow KPop Demon Hunters 2 to have a new tone. Will we get a darker story, with Mira coming to grips with her band’s even greater fame? Will Zoey allow her exuberance to get the best of her, forcing her to clean up a mess she didn’t intend to make? Whatever the direction, we’d love to see Zoey and Mira become more than just backup singers.
The Other Acts
Part of KPop Demon Hunters‘s magic stemmed from its ability to work a high-stakes spiritual battle into the world of pop music competition. To pull off something on such a cosmic scale, Kang and Appelhans had to narrow their focus to just two acts, Huntrix and the Saja Boys. They could only gesture toward the existence of other KPop performers.
The sequel is the perfect time to let us see (and hear!) some other groups in the KPop Demon Hunters universe. Maybe we see Huntrix go on tour with an act that has nothing to do with the demon hunting side of things, leading to new hijinks. What if they get paired with a traditionalist act who wants to dethrone Huntrix while rejecting Rumi’s new sympathy for demons? There’s clearly a lot of room to expand in this universe.
No More (But No Less!) Bobby
Voiced by Ken Jeong, Huntrix’s nervous manager Bobby was a highlight of the first film. He always brought welcome comic relief to the story, and stole every scene he was in. However, animated films have a bad habit of taking a likable side character and pushing them to the forefront in the sequel (see: Mater in the Cars movies and Olaf in Frozen).
KPop Demon Hunters 2 cannot do that with Bobby. They have a perfectly good side character already, one who works great with less than ten minutes of screen time. Putting more attention on Bobby not only takes up space that could be used for other acts or Rumi’s mother, but it also stretches Bobby beyond his limits, turning him from a welcome distraction and into an annoyance.
Beyond Demon Hunting
By the end of the first KPop Demon Hunters, Gwi-Ma had lost and the Honmoon was restored, blocking the demons out of our world. So, that’s one problem out of the way, but surely a world in which demons exist also has a lot of other monsters lurking around. Let’s see Huntrix hunt something other than demons.
What, exactly? Well, that’s where we don’t know, because we don’t have the knowledge of Korean folklore to make recommendations. But Kang and Appelhans brought such specificity to the first film that they can surely do it again, giving us another look at monsters most of us in the West have never even heard of.
KPop Demon Hunters can be found streaming on Netflix.