The Muppet Show Is Returning at Exactly the Right Time
In 2026, it will finally be time to play the music. Now, more than any other point since Disney bought the rights to the characters in 2004, is the time to light the lights. This is the exact correct point for The Muppet Show.
So it’s a good thing that Disney is finally bringing back The Muppet Show. Not Muppets Tonight or Muppets TV or any other variation. As announced with a short clip of Kermit flipping the switch on the Muppet Theater, set to an instrumental version of “The Rainbow Connection,” the actual, original style of The Muppet Show is coming back, right when Broadway and musicals are bigger than ever.
For those who haven’t seen the series that made the Muppets into household names, which aired 120 episodes between 1976 and 1981, The Muppet Show was a variety show with backstage antics. Each episode of The Muppet Show featured a special guest star, who would come and perform various songs and sketches, sometimes with the Muppet performers and sometimes without. There would also be segments featuring Muppet performers without guests, most famously Fozzie Bear’s stand-up routine or Gonzo the Great’s daredevil stunts, and storylines involving the behind-the-scenes production of the show.
More the felt characters that Jim Henson and Frank Oz brought to life with their fellow performers, The Muppet Show was about the agony and ecstasy of putting on a show. Even if the kids first watching the series didn’t know or care who Joel Grey or Harvey Korman or Twiggy were, they remained invested in the series. They sympathized with Kermit stressing out over production snafus, laughed at Miss Piggy trying to steal the spotlight, and swooned when, despite everything going wrong, Elton John belted out “Crocodile Rock” alongside puppet crocodiles or when Gilda Radner played along with Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s shenanigans.
That emphasis on performance is why 2026 is the perfect time to bring back The Muppet Show. Not only are musicals as popular as ever, with touring productions bring hits like Les Misérables and Hamilton all over the world and Wicked once again brining in big Hollywood cash. It’s also because performance has become a part of daily life. Social media apps like TikTok make it possible for everyone to put on a show from their bed room, and thus get the chance to experience the anxiety that comes from a performance gone wrong.
Granted, Disney has tried to tie the Muppets to the zeitgeist before, with very mixed results. The Jason Segel-led The Muppets managed to work as a nostalgia-filled early legacy sequel, and the recent Muppets Now translated The Muppet Show format to a streaming service conceit. But other attempts to update the franchise, especially the ill-conceived Office-style sitcom the muppets. suggested that Disney had no idea how to bring the characters up to date.
The heavy nostalgia of this first teaser for the new special suggests that Disney has realized that they don’t need to update the Muppets for our times, because our times have learned to love the showbiz razzle dazzle that The Muppet Show has always celebrated.
The Muppet Show airs on Disney+ on February 4, 2026.
Wonder Man Will Make Trevor Slattery Into More Than a Joke
Even though his Lear was the toast of Croydon, Trevor Slattery has never enjoyed respect, neither within the fictional MCU nor in the real world. Some fans still hate the fake out from Iron Man 3, which revealed that Iron Man’s feared magic-using terrorist arch-enemy is an actually an English actor called Trevor. Others like him, but only as a bumbling fool who undercut the racist tropes in the Mandarin character and then got to pal around with Shang-Chi.
According to Trevor’s actor Sir Ben Kingsley, all of that will change with the Disney+ series Wonder Man. The series will not only return Trevor to Hollywood, but also give him a chance at success. “A series of extraordinary events place him exactly in that space, which crowns him and compromises him at the same time,” Kingsley told Entertainment Weekly. “He’s pulled in two directions at the same time.”
Wonder Man will team Trevor with Simon Williams, a struggling actor portrayed by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. When he learns that an idiosyncratic auteur plans to remake a ’70s children show about a fictional superhero called Wonder Man, Williams goes all out to earn the part, including hiring Trevor as an acting coach and, eventually, getting superpowers.
Wonder Manfinally brings a long-standing member of the Avengers to the MCU, but it does so in a somewhat unexpected manner. The Wonder Man of the comics began as a likable lunkhead who gets tricked into fighting the Avengers, and promptly sacrifices himself to save the team. Long later, and after his memories were used to help create the Avenger Vision, Wonder Man is resurrected and his backstory is fleshed out, revealing that he was a nerdy scientist who gained super-strength during ionic-based experiments. Some time after his resurrection, and during his tenure with the Avengers, Wonder Man went to Hollywood to become a stunt man and, eventually, a leading man.
As a Hollywood story, Wonder Man will deal with the idiosyncrasies of show biz, Kingsely explained. “We look at the casting process, we look at the auditioning process, we look at the directing process, the writing process… We look at the ego traps. We look at the seductive side of fame. We look at everything that’s beautiful and good, and also everything that’s vulnerable and rather unhealthy, but in a very entertaining, non-judgmental way.”
Even more importantly for his character, Kingsley said Wonder Man presents a “fascinating” story, in which Trevor will be “faced with a terrible dilemma: he can reach his ambition, but it’s at a terrible cost.”
Hard choices and terrible dilemmas? Sounds like the sort of thing that would make for Shakespearean drama and a fitting role for someone who brought King Lear to the good people of Croydon.
Wonder Man streams on Disney+ on January 27, 2026.
Neon Has a Novel Approach to Promoting No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is already one of the most talked-about films of the year after winning Best Director at the Sitges Film Festival and the International People’s Choice Award at TIFF. It’s also been selected as South Korea’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the next Academy Awards, but distributor Neon isn’t letting the conversation around the movie slip away ahead of its limited December 25 release stateside.
The dark comedy thriller, which Park also co-wrote, adapts Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax and follows a middle-aged man called Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) who gets desperate after being laid off after 25 years. To support his family and secure new work, Man-su resorts to extreme measures to hobble his competition.
No Other Choice promises to be a razor-sharp social satire from the man who brought us Oldboy and Decision to Leave, which seems to have inspired Neon’s promotional team to set up a very targeted screening.
“This is truly a film that speaks to our gracious executive leaders and the culture they have cultivated,” Neon posted this week, along with an open invitation to all the Fortune 500 CEOs that promised them a private screening of the film that will spotlight “many parts of your humble mission to achieve corporate greatness.”
On behalf of Director Park Chan-wook's new film, we are cordially inviting all Fortune 500 CEOs to a special screening of NO OTHER CHOICE.
This is truly a film that speaks to our gracious executive leaders and the culture they have cultivated.
“From the unbearable weight you carry upholding your employees’ livelihoods, to the systems you strive to conquer for economic growth, to the conditions and resources you govern in times of strategic mergers and realignment – this is truly a film that speaks to you and the culture you have cultivated,” the invite continues.
Social media reactions to the screening invite were largely supportive, with comments like “marketing on point” to “Awesome. None of them will go. But still awesome.”
Though it’s unlikely that any Fortune 500 CEOs will show up, this screening of No Other Choice really would be like holding up a mirror to some of those who are responsible for the human cost of corporate greed, so it would be interesting to see if its themes moved any of them.
Probably not, but we can dream.
A Brief Note About the Comments Section
As it may have come to your attention in recent months, the comments section has not been as well-moderated as we—and perhaps especially you—would have liked it to be. This was partially due to behind-the-scenes technical issues with Disqus that did not present an easy solution.
We have now found one. Taking a page out of the patron saint of xenomorphia, we decided to nuke the old system from space. It was the only way to be sure. However, comments will not be gone for long. We plan to have the comments section reinstalled within the next 48 hours at which time, conversations can continue uninterrupted—and hopefully more unpolluted going forward. Unfortunately old discussions from the past five years will be lost, but it is in hopes that new ones can be saved. Apologies for the inconvenience and happy holidays.
The Den of Geek Team
First Look at Netflix’s Extraction TV Show Reveals Omar Sy’s Mercenary
Netflix has shared a first look at its upcoming Extraction TV series, Mercenary. The project is set in the universe of the streamer’s Extraction movies and stars Lupin’s Omar Sy as a mercenary who embarks on a dangerous mission to rescue hostages in Libya.
Boyd Holbrook (Narcos), Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones), Waleed Zuaiter (Omar), and Ed Speleers (Star Trek: Picard) star alongside Sy in the upcoming action thriller series, which has been filming in Ireland but will continue shooting in Morocco for a while before it wraps. Louise Hooper (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) and Tim Southam (Foundation) are directing for showrunner Glen Mazzara, who was instrumental in producing early seasons of The Walking Dead.
Netflix is keeping the finer details of Mercenary’s plot underwraps for now, but the logline says that Sy’s character will be trapped between warring factions and ruthless killers, and that he must navigate life-or-death choices while confronting deep emotional wounds. The series aims to explore the trauma, betrayal, and moral conflicts of characters pushed to the edge.
The show is being produced by AGBO, the indie entertainment company founded by the Russo brothers. AGBO has guided the Extraction franchise from the outset and is also handling the forthcoming Marvel movies Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, as well as a second season of Prime Video’s Citadel.
The Extraction movies have been big hits for Netflix, which is not only shooting the Mercenary show but also has another Extraction-universe feature film lined up in South Korea called TYGO, led by the popular Don Lee (Train to Busan) and Lee Jin-uk (Player 246 in Squid Game).
Starring Chris Hemsworth as Tyler Rake, the first Extraction film found his burned-out mercenary undertaking a brutal rescue mission in Bangladesh, while the second globe-trotting film doubled down on wild stunts and set pieces, featuring a long, seemingly unbroken fight sequence that wowed audiences. It also introduced Idris Elba as the franchise’s mysterious, Nick Fury-like stranger who convinces Rake to join a new mission after he almost died completing his last one.
Hemsworth will reprise the role of Rake in a third mainline Extraction movie, which director Sam Hargrave hopes to start filming in 2026 if Hemsworth can find room in his Avengers shooting schedule.
Colin Farrell Really Loves That “Piece of Shit” Oz Cobb
Colin Farrell is very fond of Oz Cobb, the crime boss he played in Matt Reeves’ The Batman and last year’s HBO Max spinoff show, The Penguin.
“I love that piece of shit. I love Oz. I love him,” Farrell told Hamnet actress Jessie Buckley during an Actors on Actors interview for Variety, explaining that he becomes so immersed in the role that he could sit and talk to her for 12 hours in the Penguin makeup and not break character.
Farrell revealed that he knew he’d become quite protective of Cobb when he considered pulling a kind of “Andy Kaufman-light” stunt on a chat show by giving an interview in-character, only to change his mind when he realized that he didn’t want Cobb to become a joke. This extended to meeting young fans while inhabiting Cobb, as he felt that too much behind-the-scenes access might undermine the character’s mystery.
The actor, who recently starred in Netflix’s dark comedy Ballad of a Small Player, also elaborated on how he was able to find the character of Cobb within himself after donning the DC villain’s mask.
“The last thing I want to say is that the mask allowed the real me to come out,” Farrell cautioned. “But I certainly have felt ugliness in me. I can feel moments of envy, or I can feel anger. It isn’t being born in the moment. It’s something from fucking seven generations ago. Because my face was covered, I was given permission — through being obscured, I was greenlit to experience a kind of revelation. When I saw the face, I started to feel a sense of sympathy.”
Despite the critical acclaim that was heaped on Farrell’s performances as Cobb, The Penguinwas initially designed as a limited series, and though Farrell knows that “the powers that be” are considering a second season of the show, he doesn’t know if one would work in the current context of Matt Reeves’ Batman universe.
“It conveniently worked that the death at the end of The Batman and the devastation within Gotham opened up a power vacuum that then Oz could try and capitalize on,” Farrell told Comicbook earlier this year. “That was perfect for the parallel eight hours that we had.”
Whether The Penguin returns to our TV screens remains to be seen, but we’ll definitely see Farrell’s Gotham power player again in The Batman Part II, which is set to start filming next May.
A Classic Roger Corman Movie Is Getting a Remake
Beloved cult classic The Wasp Woman is getting a fresh reimagining nearly seven decades after its original release, but this time with a wildly different tone. Strangers with Candy duo Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello are teaming up for a comedic remake of the 1959 sci-fi horror movie, with Dinello taking on writing and directing duties and Sedaris starring as the titular wasp woman.
This will be a modern twist on the cult film by legendary low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman. The original Wasp Woman was made quickly and on a shoestring budget, which was a system that often paid off for Corman. It follows Janice Starlin, the founder of a cosmetics company who, desperate to reverse aging and save her business, tests an experimental wasp enzyme serum on herself. Initially, the treatment appears to work, but it soon has horrifying side effects, causing her to transform into a violent, insect-like creature.
The film is campy and riddled with cheap effects, but its social commentary on vanity and aging was ahead of its time and helped it achieve cult status long before the likes of Death Becomes Her and The Substance. As a result, it’s not the first time The Wasp Woman has been remade, with Corman himself producing a TV version directed by Chopping Mall’s Jim Wynorski back in the 90s.
Dinello says that the project came about when Strangers With Candy producer Mark Roberts showed him the Roger Corman catalog and asked him if he was interested in doing a new spin on any of his films.
“A lot of that stuff is like Attack of the Crab Monsters, and that sort of ’50s feel,” Dinello told Variety. “It didn’t really jump out. But when I read the synopsis to Wasp Woman, it has elements of ’50s sci-fi, which I like. But it also has this very modern story about this former model, a supercharged businesswoman who’s dealing with aging and is willing to take a fringe product to try to salvage her looks or give her youth. When I read it, I immediately thought, ‘This is perfect for Amy.’”
Sedaris agreed, adding, “Are you kidding me? A wasp woman? And just the costumes alone, it seems like it’s going to be like a very artistic film. I’m into that, wardrobe and sets. It’ll be interesting to see who else we get to cast in this movie. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
Fallout Season 2: Moises Arias on Norm’s Icy Choice
This article contains spoilers for Fallout season 2 episode 1.
The first season of Amazon’s video game adaptation Falloutends on an unsure note for many of its characters. Cheerful protagonist Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) is left reeling from the reveal that her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) has secretly been a Big Bad this whole time. Meanwhile, the anosmic Ghoul (Walton Goggins) remains on the hunt for his missing family and young squire Maximus (Aaron Moten) finds himself back in the good graces of the Brotherhood of Steel but separated from his most useful traveling companions.
One character’s fate that seems pretty clear, however, is that of Lucy’s Vault-bound younger brother Norm (Moises Arias). After spending the season investigating a grand conspiracy involving Vault-Tec’s post-apocalypse bunkers, Norm stumbles into the mysterious Vault 31 and makes a starting discovery. Gathered in the otherwise empty silo are cryogenic chambers containing Vault-Tec junior executives from before the nuclear apocalypse. Selected for their loyalty to company sales executive Bud Askins, the frozen folk known as “Bud’s Buds” are periodically revived and clandestinely sent into Vaults 32 and 33 serve as leaders and contribute their superior pre-nuclear Vault-Tec traits into the gene pool.
Norm’s reward for uncovering this conspiracy is death by starvation. That’s because Bud, whose brain lives on in a robotic construct resembling a Roomba, cheerfully informs Norm that there’s no way out of Vault 31 without his help and he sure as hell isn’t helping. As the season comes to a close it seems as though Norm’s only reasonable option is to pry into one of those sleep pods and take a cold nap through Fallout season 2 to come. As Fallout season 2 episode 1 reveals, however, Norm isn’t going out so easily. He resolves to defrost the junior execs rather than join them and together, they will find a way out of this mess.
Norm’s decision is certainly a welcome surprise to audiences eager to dig deeper into the story of Vault 31. It’s also, it turns out, a welcome surprise to the actor playing norm.
“Of course [not being in season 2] crossed my mind but it was definitely something I was hoping not to read in that first script,” Arias tells Den of Geek. “I was very happy being able to discover what he actually does because I also had questions – I also was on the edge of my seat, wondering how he’d survive Vault 31. It’s very exciting that he does the unthinkable and has found a way to, perhaps, get out of this vault.”
Of course, springing the junior execs from their icy slumber now means that Norm has to deal with the most terrifying force in the Fallout universe: middle management. How he will convince “Bud’s Buds” to follow his lead will be one of season 2’s biggest challenges.
“I think he balances leadership and deceptiveness quite well as he goes,” Arias says. “That’s the only way he’s going to convince these ‘super managers’ that he is the hyper, super biological species of a manger that they are all waiting for. Of course, none of that is true. He’s learning on the fly how to lead but at the same time how to balance power.”
With Lucy, the idealist; Hank, the villain; and Norm, the survivor; The MacLean family continues to lead the narrative way in Fallout season 2. Given the show’s new California filming location to affect a New Vegas desert landscape, the actors behind the MacLean family don’t get to spend as much time together. Still, the bonds they built in season 1 continues to manifest in some distinct familiar traits.
“The first season was shot in New York. We all met up a little bit more just because most of us aren’t from there, and we’re in the same general area,” Arias says. “But now with the second season being shot in California, a lot of us are from here and it’s a much vaster city so it was harder to get together. When we did there wasn’t talk about work for the most part. But there was definitely excitement about what we had just read.”
Should Norm and company make it out of Vault 31 intact, a very uncomfortable MacLean family reunion may be in the cards. Until then though, Bud’s Buds will just have to be Norm’s Network.
The first episode of Fallout season 2 is available to stream on Prime Video now. New episodes premiere Wednesdays, culminating with the finale on February 4.
The Best McFarlane Toys Collectibles to Buy This Holiday Season From Walmart
This article is presented in partnership with Walmart.
Comics legend Todd McFarlane is widely known for his work on iconic properties like Spawn, Spider-Man, and his original creations, such as co-creating Venom and co-founding Image Comics.
Since 1994, however, McFarlane has made a new name for himself as the creator of McFarlane Toys, a purveyor of illustrious and diverse line of figures and collectibles. With McFarlane Toys now expanding into and keeping up with fresh new IPs like the second season of the popular TV series Fallout and the latest installment of the Avatar franchise, Avatar: Fire and Ash, allow Den of Geek to guide you through the best McFarlane Toys collectibles to buy this holiday season at Walmart.
The Ghoul 7” Deluxe Action Figure (Fallout TV Series)
$34.99
McFarlane Toys brings the wasteland to your shelf with The Ghoul from the Fallout TV series. The 7″ figure showcases intricate details, including the man formerly known as Cooper Howard’s radiation-scarred face, tattered clothing, and signature sidearms. The minutiae of this figure truly captures the rugged and off-putting presence of the newly iconic character. With second-to-none intricate joint articulation, including up to 22 moving parts, you can pose The Ghoul in various action stances, recreating all of your favorite Ghoul scenes from the TV series. The deluxe packaging includes a themed display base coming together at $34.99; you won’t find a deal like that in the wasteland.
Lucy Movie Maniacs 6” Posed Figure (Fallout Season 2)
$29.99
McFarlane Toys introduces the Movie Maniacs figure for Fallout protagonist Lucy MacLean in her season two apparel, emulating the pose of Nuka-Girl, as many long-time Fallout fans may recognize. The naive and sweet, but resourceful, vault dweller we’ve been rooting for from the beginning really shines through with this figure, as even the pose we see is an upbeat, ready-to-take-on-the-world head tilt as she toasts her Nuka-Cola to the unknown. This 6” collectible is a part of McFarlane’s Movie Maniacs line, a special line of figures known for their detailed and expressive portrayals of iconic movie and TV characters. Originally aimed toward horror icons, this line eventually expanded their range of IP’s to the world of Fallout.
Varang, Mangkwan Leader 7” Action Figure Collector Edition (Avatar: Fire and Ash)
$34.99
This 7” figure showcases the mysterious new Na’vi villainess Varang, leader of the Mangkwan a.k.a. the “Fire Navi” as many have dubbed them. As a collector edition, the item comes with premium packaging and accessories, making it a standout piece for display. The Na’vi anatomy is particular and unique but McFarlane Toys steps up and takes it even further for Varang with intricate sculpting and paintwork that enrich her Mangkwan warrior attire and commanding presence. Seeing as it comes with multiple points of articulation, an alternate head portrait, four extra hands, and four handheld accessories, the figure allows for a variety of dynamic poses. Whether you’re a fan of Avatar or a collector of top notch action figures, Varang is an impressive addition to any collection.
Jake Sully, Metkayina Final Battle 7” Action Figure Collector Edition (Avatar: Fire and Ash)
$34.99
Jake Sully, the chosen one, is now on the path to protect his family at all costs in the third installment of the Avatar franchise, Avatar: Fire and Ash, as we see this figure don warrior attire. It is also equipped with Sully’s dagger, axe, and rifle, mixing Na’vi culture and human culture, something that’s become a staple of this character. This 7” figure doesn’t skip out when it comes to detail either, with a special blacklight-activated bioluminescent paint deco to mimic the Na’vi’s own bioluminescent skin patterns. Between the paint deco, accessories, and up to 22 moving parts the posing for this figure can’t possibly get more immersive.
Sub-Zero vs. Mileena Action Figure 2-Pack (Mortal Kombat Klassic)
$69.99
The Mortal Kombat Klassic line from McFarlane Toys brings the iconic Sub-Zero and Mileena to life with incredible seven-inch detail and action-focused articulation. Sub-Zero, the lin kuei ninja warrior, comes equipped with his signature ice weapons and a severed frozen skull and spine, showing off his chilling victory to any who dare to witness. Mileena, the monstrous political assassin, is equally impressive, featuring her deadly sais and menacing presence with two switchable heads—one masked and one unmasked. These figures capture the essence of the original Mortal Kombat games, allowing fans to relive their favorite arcade and console moments. Each figure is designed with high attention to detail, making them perfect for both collectors and fans looking to own a piece of Mortal Kombat history.
Liu Kang vs. Reptile Deluxe 2-Pack 7” Figures (Mortal Kombat Klassic)
$69.99
We continue this list with two of our most iconic kombatants, Liu Kang and Reptile. Both figures appear in their Klassic apparel with fighting accessories, swappable heads, and even a mini lore book within the package that helps you get familiar or reacquainted with these versions of the characters. Some may remember the legendary fight scene between these martial arts masters in the 1995 cult classic film Mortal Kombat, and with this deluxe two-pack, you can relive the magic all over again. These ultra-articulated and highly detailed 7” figures make for great hands-on items to recreate your favorite fatalities or admire their beautifully detailed frames on display as collectibles.
Behold Raiden, protector of Earthrealm, in all his Klassic glory. This Mortal Kombat Klassic figure perfectly embodies Raiden, the eternal God of Thunder, as he appeared in the original Mortal Kombat games. The figure includes Raiden’s sleek white classic fighting apparel, multiple points of articulation, and swappable hands, allowing you to recreate a plethora of his electrifying moves and poses. The packaging itself speaks to everyone’s inner nostalgia with its classic arcade cabinet designs, where this journey all started.
From the horizontal skin ridges to the jet-black widow’s peak, this beautifully detailed figure brings the metallic mutant Colossus to life in impressive fashion down to the diorama base that recreates the epic comic book cover this piece takes inspiration from. The 1:10th scale figure celebrates the iconic X-Men #1 comic book cover, in which the team finds themselves facing off against Magneto while he’s in control of Asteroid M, nuclear weapons, and a lot of other mustache-twirling villainy to go up against. To this day, X-Men #1 holds the Guinness World Record for the best-selling single-edition comic book of all time, with sales of over 8.1 million copies.
Based on the legendary Jim Lee cover art for X-Men #1, McFarlane Toys commemorates the legendary comic book with this 1:10th collectible figure, showcasing Hank McCoy, a.k.a. Beast, and a rocky diorama. This piece brings the intelligent and agile mutant to life with his iconic blue fur, claws, and fangs protruding as he prepares to go into battle against Magneto and his Brotherhood. The figure truly looks like a piece of the comic cover in 3D, which is enhanced by the sculpting and paintwork that mimic the colors and shading of the original cover. It all really enhances his fur, signature hairstyle, and primal physique.
Iceman 1:6th scale Collectible With Scene Red Platinum Edition (Marvel Tales #229)
$59.99
McFarlane Toys commemorates Marvel Tales #229 with the Iceman 1:6th scale collectible figure, a Red Platinum Edition that captures the essence of the iconic X-Men character. This figure showcases Iceman in his sleek, solid ice form with his hands out, beginning to unleash freezing blasts. From the intricate sculpting to the translucent finish and collectible character art card, this is a must-have that blends nostalgia with McFarlane’s spectacular quality. The included diorama base aids in recreating the cover of Marvel Tales #229, in which Iceman goes on a crazed frenzy after breaking from a foe’s mind control, leading to fellow heroes Spider-Man and Angel attempting to break their friend’s mind of the rampage it’s consumed with. With premium packaging and accessories, this collectible figure should appeal to X-Men enthusiasts and collectors alike.
New Odyssey Images Remind Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland Fans to Manage Their Expectations
Summer 2026 will welcome one of the most anticipated blockbusters of the decade: Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey, a big-budget adaptation of the foundational Greek heroic tale from the man who made the Dark Knight trilogy, filled with A-list stars and shot on IMAX cameras! The mind reels to think about the images we’ll see: clashes with mythical beasts, gods and goddesses interceding in human affairs, an incredible archery challenge!
Which is, in fact, true to Homer. As exciting as it is to have such big names in The Odyssey, fans of those two particular actors need to understand that Penelope and Telemachus have a very different role in the story.
Set after the decade-long Trojan War, The Odyssey mostly follows Odysseus, King of the city-state Ithaca, trying to make his way back home. Along the way, he’s beset by various forces that prevent him from returning, from the nymph Calypso, who has fallen in love with him and wants to keep him for herself, to an island full of cannibal giants.
His wife Penelope, however, has her own difficult task. She must wait in Ithaca for her king or pronounce him dead and move on, a task made more difficult by an onslaught of suitors who arrive and want to take her place. The impatience of her son Telemachus only further complicates things, as he doesn’t not know what his role should be in his father’s absence.
At first glance, it sounds like Hathaway and Holland got a raw deal. They have to lounge around a big party, while Damon and his co-stars get to do all the adventure. But that reading misses the thematic importance of Penelope and Telemachus.
The suitor plot that takes up half of The Odyssey isn’t just a simple question of romantic devotion. The question isn’t whether or not Penelope will stand by her man or dump him for any one of the hot guys who have come to woo her. Rather, it’s a question of social order, decorum, and hospitality. She must decide if she should maintain the status quo by holding place for Odysseus or if she should allow a new king to take his place, all while navigating the complexities of the host/guest relationship.
Likewise, Telemachus isn’t just a brat who isn’t going to respect his mom’s new boyfriend. He is told by the gods early on about his father’s heroics, yet still feels the call to action, to take up his own heroic quest. To do so too early or too late would have horrible ramifications not just for himself, but for all of Ithaca, as would Penelope’s decision.
Important as these roles are, they aren’t always the most visually stimulating. That’s why the two just seem to be standing about in the movie stills. But if Nolan has proven anything, he can make even a conversation exciting, which is good news for fans of Hathaway and Holland.
The Odyssey arrives in theaters on July 17, 2026.
The Quiet Decision That Made Drive a Masterpiece
Nicolas Winding Refn’s mid-budget crime drama Drive was released to positive reviews back in 2011. Its mix of graphic violence and minimal dialogue, combined with stylized visuals and an intoxicating synth soundtrack, led to a solid following with audiences looking for something different from the standard blockbusters at their local multiplex.
Ryan Gosling, who starred in Drive as a subdued LA getaway driver who gets tangled up with the wrong woman, had very few lines to say in the movie, which allowed the actor to use subtle physicality to convey his driver’s thoughts and emotions. However, on the page, the character was supposed to have much more dialogue, until Gosling made a significant change when discussing the script on the first day of shooting that would alter the movie’s vibe for the better.
“Ryan, who has a very specific process, said, ‘This is a character that doesn’t speak much, so I don’t think I’m going to say much of this dialogue,’” Drive producer Marc Platt told THR. “It was an independently financed movie, and I froze for a moment because I thought ‘people have put all [this money in].’ So I sweat it a little bit, which never happened to me [before].”
Platt says he understood Gosling’s choice to ditch most of the script’s dialogue as soon as the camera started rolling. “I knew in an instant that he’d made such a smart, intuitive, truthful decision. That character didn’t speak, and it made him so much more powerful.”
Gosling’s star power grew considerably after he delivered a strong central performance in the film. He would go on to star in La La Land and Barbie, both of which landed him Academy Award nominations. He’s only made one movie since Barbie, but he has two big sci-fi films on the horizon: Lord and Miller’s Project Hail Mary next year, and the standalone Star Wars movie, Starfighter, set for release in 2027.
New Steven Spielberg Trailer Has a Real War of the Worlds Feel
Something is very wrong in the world of Disclosure Day, the latest film from Steven Spielberg. The first trailer for the film gives us very little detail about the plot or even nature of the threat facing its characters. Instead, the teaser establishes an ominous tone, from the uncanny noises coming out of the mouth of a newscaster played by Emily Blunt to the sci-fi equipment surrounding Colin Firth.
But in our world, things are very right, at least for a moment, because not only is Spielberg re-teaming with blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp, but the duo are evoking the mood of one of the filmmaker’s mid-period masterpieces War of the Worlds.
For those who have forgotten about 2005’s War of the Worlds, or perhaps were turned off by the ending and thus put it out of mind, Spielberg turned the classic sci-fi tale into a powerful piece of post-9/11 art. Written by Koepp and Josh Friedman, War of the Worlds sets the H.G. Wells story in modern day Brooklyn, where deadbeat dad Ray (Tom Cruise) has his kids for a weekend, the same weekend in which Martians attack the Earth.
Even more than dramas such as Spike Lee‘s The 25th Hour or Paul Greengrass‘s United 93, which openly evoked 9/11 to great effect, Spielberg’s sci-fi tale captured the feeling of the attacks. The scenes of Ray and other Broolynites treating the first signs of invasion with bemusement, the total social breakdown that puts Ray and children in constant danger, even the hyper-militarization of the final act all reflect the unreal feelings of that era.
Powerful as it is, War of the Worlds suffers from a lack of conviction in its final act, in which Tom Cruise’s character pulls off an incredible feat and the American military fights the aliens. However, some (read: this writer) find the ending of the film discordant in a way that highlights the false triumphalism of the presidential administration of the time. War of the Worlds showed why it’s not the aliens that we needed to fear in the 2000s.
With Disclosure Day, Spielberg and Koepp seem ready to do the same for the 2020s. Instead of any plot details, the trailer introduces a variety of characters, including Blunt’s newswoman, Firth’s rich-looking guy, Josh O’Connor as a very earnest-looking man with a backpack, Colman Domingo as someone with an incredible voice, and more. The characters talk vaguely about people needing to know the truth and how there must be more out there than just “us.”
This combination of some nebulous truth hidden from the people, lots of screens, and combinations of the super rich and the devout cannot help but resonate in our time, when we can still mistrust media enough to know images aren’t always truth, and we feel the pull of various economic, religious, and ideological forces on our daily lives.
Yet, we often fail in trying to articulate what those forces are or what we should do about it. When we open our mouths to speak about it, only indecipherable noises come out… not unlike Blunt’s character in Disclosure Day.
Disclosure Day arrives on June 12, 2026.
It: Welcome to Derry Creator Reveals Season 2 Story Details
This article contains spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry season 1.
While HBO’s gruesome prequel series It: Welcome to Derry hasn’t officially been renewed yet, it almost certainly will be. The show has been averaging around 10.7M U.S. and 18.3M global viewers, so it’s pretty much nailed on for a second season at this point.
If you’ve already got a Welcome to Derry-shaped hole in your viewing schedule and are wondering what will go down in season 2, rest easy, because creator Andy Muschietti already has some details on what you can expect to see when the show inevitably returns to our screens.
First up, you can definitely expect that big, timey-wimey Pennywise twist to be explored further. In the series finale, it was revealed that Pennywise knows that Margaret will become the mother of Richie Tozier, played by Finn Wolfhard and Bill Hader in the movies, and that he has knowledge of both present and future events. Muschietti says that the series plans to flesh out how and why the villainous clown experiences time in a non-linear way over the next two seasons.
The story will be unraveled as we travel farther back in time, matching Pennywise’s 27-year feeding cycle. Season one covered 1962, 27 years before It: Chapter One. Season 2 will jump backward by another 27, and season 3 will be another 27-year jump.
“The pitch to Stephen King was we’re going to tell a story backwards, and it has to do with that hint,” Muschietti told Deadline, adding that future seasons will clarify whether Pennywise is travelling backwards in a linear way, or whether he’s omnipresent. More importantly, we’ll discover if any actions Pennywise takes affect the events of the It movies.
According to Muschietti, we also haven’t seen the last of the original Pennywise, Bob Gray, nor his daughter, Ingrid Kersh. There will be a lot more to discover about the pair in seasons 2 and 3.
“We are going to know more about the Bob Gray of things, and we are going to know more about Ingrid, because Ingrid was around in the 30s,” he explained. “I think it’s a pretty tragic character. She’s a very specific, very unique character, because she’s a victim, but she’s a perpetrator too. She’s tricked into thinking that her dad is still there somewhere in the shadows of that monster, and she wants to liberate him, but the only way to see him and try to liberate him is by creating all these baits [and] all this pain, because she knows that he will show up.”
All eight episodes of It: Welcome to Derry season 1 are available to stream on HBO Max now.
Rian Johnson Urges Star Wars to Take More Creative Risks
Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, who has been out promoting his Knives Out threequel, Wake Up Dead Man, has also been chatting about the current state of Lucasfilm’s sci-fi fantasy franchise and what it might need moving forward.
The director understands that his 2017 flick remains one of the most debated installments in the Star Wars saga. To many fans, The Last Jedi’s bold decisions to paint Luke as a reluctant hero, kill Snoke off without much fanfare, and declare Rey’s parents as ordinary slid too far from expectations and tore down the franchise’s mythos instead of building on it. To others, those were all plus points, and The Last Jedi was right to risk alienating some of the audience to do something, well, different!
Johnson, who grew up a Star Wars fan himself, says he understands that when the franchise gets challenging, there’s “recoil” against it. “I know how there can be infighting in the world of Star Wars,” he told Polygon. “But I also know that the worst sin is to handle it with kid gloves.”
He added, “The worst sin is to be afraid of doing anything that shakes it up. Because every Star Wars movie going back to Empire and onward shook the box and rattled fans, and got them angry, and got them fighting, and got them talking about it. And then for a lot of them, got them loving it and coming around on it eventually.”
Indeed, some are old enough to remember the backlash to George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, but for many younger fans at the time, those movies were their first exposure to the franchise, and there remains plenty of nostalgia for them. There will be a section of Gen Z and Gen Alpha whose love for Star Wars is really rooted in The Mandalorian. The upcoming Starfighter movie also aims to breathe new life into the franchise – set in a new era with new characters.
As for his own involvement in Star Wars, Johnson has moved on to other projects, but he’s still a fan of the franchise, and being a vocal advocate for risk-taking and creative evolution within the galaxy far, far away can’t be a bad thing in a Hollywood landscape where even big franchises like the MCU are falling back on legacy to keep fans interested.
Welcome to Derry’s Big Pennywise Twist Is an Absolute Headache
This article contains spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry season 1.
The season 1 finale of It: Welcome to Derry was heading towards a resolution of sorts over much of its runtime, at least within its 1960s setting. The good guys teamed up to put Pennywise back in his box for another 27 years, aiming to right the wrongs of the pillar-destroying military and save all the kids they could from his Pied Piper-esque Deadlights parade before guiding him into his big old nap.
Everything seemed to be unfolding with that aim in mind, until one particular moment when Marge (Matilda Lawler) ran into the blood-soaked dancing clown. Isolated from the others, Marge was vulnerable, and Pennywise was in a chatty mood, ready to deliver a twist so staggering it would reshape everything we know about the malevolent entity.
During the confrontation, Pennywise taunted Marge with knowledge she shouldn’t yet have. He addressed her as “Margaret Tozier,” a name that confused her because it wasn’t hers. He then continued, predicting her future: “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Richie in a baby carriage.”
Yes, Pennywise revealed that Marge is the mother of Richie Tozier, one of the Losers Club in the It films and novels, who ultimately kills It in the future. With this revelation, Pennywise established several things: It knows Marge’s future, and It also knows the sequence of her life events and how they lead to Its defeat.
While it might be more straightforward to assume that It can time-travel, that doesn’t appear to be the case here; it’s more than It doesn’t experience time the way that humans do. When Pennywise told Marge that “tomorrow, yesterday — it’s all the same for little Pennywise,” he revealed It’s non-linear perspective on time. For It, the past, present and future are all equally accessible, and It perceives its own future defeat by the Losers Club as already known and co-existing with current events.
Does It have this overview of time in the book? Mmm, yes and no. In Stephen King’s massive source tome, there’s a brief hint that It experiences time differently from humans, but King never explains this idea, let alone explores it. The creators of the show decided to pick up this suggestion and run with it, deliberately developing the creature’s non-linear time perception in that direction as a driving force for the show’s story.
Welcome to Derry is telling Pennywise’s story in reverse and is set to continue this narrative over two more seasons. As Pennywise goes back in time, he will try to kill the Losers Club’s ancestors so that they never exist, and they never kill him. He thinks he can undo his own demise by rewriting history.
This opens up the classic “Grandfather” time-travel paradox. If Pennywise had managed to actually kill Marge, he would have prevented Richie’s birth and ensured his survival. But if the Losers Club never kills It, why would It then try to kill Marge? If It succeeds, the events that motivated It to take action in the past never happen. If It fails, they do. This is precisely what makes “ancestor-killing” time-travel plots such a headache.
Of course, there are definitely ways to tackle the Grandfather Paradox in Welcome to Derry. A fixed timeline could be established where anything It does already happened, so It can’t actually prevent Its own death because any attempts to do so are already part of history. Then there’s alternate timelines or the multiverse, where killing an ancestor creates a branch universe where It lives, but the original timeline still exists where It dies. Perhaps It is so omnipresent that It can even retain knowledge of events that never come to pass, rendering the Grandfather Paradox somewhat moot.
However, if we were to consider this non-linear time-perception twist cynically, the most genuine way it makes sense is for the It franchise as a whole. If the creators of Welcome to Derry can wrap up the series with It undoing the future or creating an alternate timeline where It lives, the possibilities of expanding the story are limitless: more It movies, more It TV shows, more Pennywise, more franchise dollars.
Do fans want more, or could Welcome to Derry choose to scratch that Pennywise itch for good? Much like the dancing clown, time could be on our side either way.
Avatar: Fire and Ash Review – James Cameron’s Shallow Spectacle Still Earns Your Money
There is a moment early in Avatar: Fire and Ashwhere the copious and three-dimensional CG vistas of James Cameron’s Pandora are not picture perfect. It is after an action sequence in which one group of renegade Na’vi firebomb another tribe. Our heroes are thus blasted out of the sky and laid low along a heavily forested jungle floor. It is in this precise breath, or perhaps a blink that occurs between breaths, where a bioluminescent vine reaches out for the children of Jake Sully and Neytiri, that I clocked it: an incongruity; a computer-generated image which does not look quite photorealistic. As it turns out, even gods bleed.
Pointing this out, of course, is the definition of nitpickery. When so much else of Avatar 3 is as gorgeously realized and methodical as this third trip to Pandora tends to be, it can admittedly be jarring to catch imperfections out of the corner of one’s eye. But like a microscopic flaw in a jewel, it is only worthy of commentary to a point. The thing still shimmers in its king’s scepter when he waves it around declaring himself ruler of the world. In fact, there might be more visual inconsistencies that my feasting, 3D-bespectacled eyes simply missed while being overwhelmed. If there are any aesthetic quibbles to be had, though, they vanish like mist beneath a neon-tinged sunrise in a movie this uniformly rapturous across its gargantuan 197-minute runtime.
Whatever else you make of Avatar: Fire and Ash’s narrative cul-de-sacs about blue aliens once again rising up against the ravages of the human race, the threequel remains an aesthetic triumph and simultaneous indictment of so much else churned out of the Hollywood blockbuster machine. Why can’t the plains of Minecraft, or the wastelands of Deadpool and Wolverine’s Void look this eye-poppingly wondrous?
Then again, I am left to also wonder why I take it all for granted—so much so that I get distracted by the most trivial of blemishes when considering what to write about a movie with a running time longer than Oppenheimer and a stone’s throw away from Return of the King. It might be because while this has the scale of an epic, it frustratingly maintains the thematic depth and complexity of a children’s fairytale picture, and Disney’s Pocahontasto be specific.
To be absolutely clear, Fire and Ash is a good movie. It is also a step up from second film The Way of Water, which in many respects felt more like a showcase on a tech convention’s floor of what James Cameron’s digital innovations can now do with H20. One of the most damning critiques I’ve heard from colleagues about Fire and Ash is that it is The Way of Water all over again, but if so, it is a better iteration of the same story. This time we have some semblance of narrative momentum due to the travails of the only Sully child with any dimensionality: the adopted child Spider (Jack Champion).
Fire and Ash is genuinely Spider’s movie since he is the impetus upon which the entire plot pivots. After the events of The Way of Water, where the eldest son of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) died during a replay of Titanic, Neytiri has come to despise their humanoid “Sky Person” son, Spider. Also unable and unwilling to return to his Homo sapien heritage in the “civilization” corner of land that’s been deforested into a Blade Runner-esque hellscape, young Spider is effectively being banished by all sides to live with distant Na’vi relations. That is until the Sully clan’s floating transport is attacked by Varang (Oona Chaplin), a witchy Na’vi whose Mangkwan clan worships the flames of war and nihilism after a volcano wiped out their homes and neighbors some years ago.
It is this crossing of the paths which leads to the Christlike member of the Sully kin, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, still bizarrely cast as a teenager), to call on Eywa to save Spider’s life after his oxygen mask is broken. Enter those aforementioned glowy vines and some New Age mysticism which turn this young man into an—ahem—half-breed who resembles a human but physiologically mirrors a Na’vi. It also captures the attention of Spider’s dastardly biological father, the returning sourpuss Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who continues to insist on his hatred for all things Pandora and Na’vi. But after so many years spent trapped inside a Na’vi avatar’s body, the crusty army man is starting to protest too much as he finds a soulmate in Chaplin’s Varang. The pair turn out to have a lot of the same interests in common: sweet nothings like genocide, no-quarter battle tactics, and maybe a dabble of blood stuff in the bedroom.
Their union is what truly endangers the waterbending tribes within which the Sullys now live, leading inevitably to another climactic battle between the technologically advanced Sky People, now with their own Na’vi death cult providing air support, and the virtuous aquatic tribes and their space whale bestie battalions.
It is an often remarked critique that the Avatar movies seem to generally lack the same lasting relevancy of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings in the cultural imagination, despite Cameron’s films making more money (at least when you do not account for inflation). But the density of Reddit posts and fan art notwithstanding, the charms of Avatar: Fire and Ash are obvious to anyone with eyes.
The CG worlds are sumptuous, even without the three-dimensional gimmicks added on. In an age where tentpole spectacles dominate the multiplex, here is a vision that honestly invites the audience to inhabit its daydream for maybe a quarter of your waking day. It’s a steep time investment, but its lack of self-awareness or self-effacement remains as novel and refreshing in 2025 as it did at the dawn of irony-drenched blockbuster “comedies” in 2009. It’s just a pleasure to visit Oz once in a while.
If the movies lack staying power in the imagination, it is probably because the screenplays that Cameron co-writes for this wonderland never match his visual inventiveness. Sixteen years since its inception, the Avatar films remain a pastiche of colonialist and white savior fantasies in the Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and literal O.G. Pocahontas legend vein, the latter fanned by English soldier of fortune, John Smith. But those derivative roots do not mean you cannot do interesting things with the fantasy, problematic though it might be.
In the case of Fire and Ash, Cameron and co-writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver introduce a variety of interesting wrinkles that would seem to channel real, troubling histories between European explorers/conquerors and Indigenous peoples in North and Central America. The villainous temptress Varang and her followers flirt with being a metaphor for the complicity and/or cooperation of some Native tribes and nations siding against their longstanding enemies during colonial inflection points. Think of the rival communities who sided with Cortez and the Spanish against the Aztec (mind you, in actual history it was the standalone Aztecs who did blood sacrifices, as opposed to their native enemies). Similarly, the potential tragedy of Spider, a young person caught between two worlds and civilizations that both reject him, is one of the most poignant narratives of frontier history. Look to the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, or for that matter, the real historical Pocahontas.
Avatar: Fire and Ash flirts with some substantively big ideas that could undergird its visual splendor. However, as with most Cameron screenplays, any dramatic or historically knotty idea is mostly straightened out or glossed over in favor of the commercial beats that he knows how to play to the hilt: star-crossed lovers on a doomed vessel! A grieving mother renewing her maternal instincts with a surrogate daughter! And yes, another iteration of the proud and noble Indigenous people, led by their own adopted white man, calling on mother nature herself to defeat the technologically advanced white devils who run the world.
Cameron plays those well-worn, and lucrative, beats incredibly well again, it’s just the novelty has worn a bit thin after a third bite at the apple. That isn’t to say it’s poorly done. It is, again, superior to The Way of Water if for no other reason than Chaplin’s evil sorceress Na’vi matches Lang’s scenery-chewing as Quaritch, and the two have some diabolical fun as Quaritch begins going native enough to be redressed by his superiors a la Lawrence of Arabia. The climactic battle is also more satisfying this time around since all of Pandora’s ecosystems get in on the anti-human action, suggesting that when the time finally comes, Cameron will definitely side with the orcas in their anti-yacht uprising.
Some of the audience-servicing still seems a little forced to a critic’s brain—especially the addition of another star-crossed young romance that this time involves one half of the coupling being played by a septuagenarian—but for family audiences looking for a visual distraction this holiday season, it will matter naught.
This thing is meant to be admired, consumed, and then like holiday lights forgotten about in a box until roughly the same time next Avatar season. One can be a grinch and wish for more—or, like a certain holiday movie classic, grouch that a few of those little lights are not twinkling—but such petty qualifications in the face of this million-watts-light-show leads to pedantry. Fire and Ash is more of the same, and in some areas better. Overwhelm your senses and then go back to forgetting about the blue people until Cameron and 20th Century Studios need to collect a couple more billion dollars from us in three to 20 years.
Avatar: Fire and Ash opens on Friday, Dec. 19.
The Best TV Shows of 2025
When it comes to the media landscape, a lot can change in 365 days.
Around this time last year, TikTok was banned in the U.S. (and still technically is if you believe Congress is a thing), Max was a couple months out from realizing that it’s good to have “HBO” in an entertainment brand name, and Netflix was not yet eyeing Warner Bros. with a lustful gleam. Meanwhile, you, dear reader, might have been on the couch, flipping through the streams and stumbling upon a new TV program where Noah Wyle plays a doctor. But wait, didn’t he already play a doctor in that ’90s thing? That was pretty good so maybe this will be as well. Lo’ and behold The Pitt was good. In fact, it might have been the best show of the year.
Point is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Even as the market-movers play their corporate game of thrones and consolidate, there is always good television to be found for those who care to find it. And thanks to show’s like the aforementioned Pitt, that more than held true in 2025. Here are the best TV shows of the year – Pitts, Peacemakers, Pluribuses, and all.
25. Doctor Who
Look, we all know that the Doctor Who season 15 finale was objectively not a great episode of television, even though it’s possible to argue that some of its worst sins were not entirely its fault. (Showrunner Russell T Davies is still on the hook for the way he wasted the return of the Rani, though.) But we also shouldn’t let a bad ending erase the fact that the rest of the season was actually pretty darn great. After all, before “The Reality War” came along and harshed everyone’s buzz with Ncuti Gatwa’s surprise regeneration into Billie Piper, most would have likely agreed it was, at least collectively speaking, one of modern Who’s best!
After all, season 15 features some all-time bangers that run the gamut in terms of tone and subject matter. “Midnight” sequel “The Well” was a deliciously tense horror story, the Ruby Sunday-centric “Lucky Day” gave former companion Millie Gibson a chance to be a hero on her own terms, and meta-episode “Lux” was as much a love letter to the show’s fandom as anything else. But the real highlight of the year was “The Story and the Engine,” a fresh and visually striking hour that uses magical realism to explore how we (and the cultures we live in) are all defined by the stories we tell. A less-than-perfect ending to the season doesn’t erase all the good stuff that has come before it, and we should all take a moment to remember and appreciate that. – Lacy Baugher
24. The Eternaut
The Eternaut (El Eternauta) was a surprise global hit for Netflix when it launched on the streamer in April 2025, becoming the top non-English-language series worldwide. The Argentine sci-fi series was critically acclaimed, but more importantly, audiences everywhere became intrigued by its premise and locked in for the journey.
The show is set in Buenos Aires and tracks what happens after a mysterious snowfall wipes out most of the global population. We follow one friend group as they struggle to survive in the aftermath. They don’t know why it happened, but the dynamics between them are slowly shifting as they get closer to answers, so we’re never sure who will turn out to be a good guy or cause enough problems to spark further catastrophe.
The Eternaut is based on the comic by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López, published in the 1950s. You wouldn’t be able to tell, though, because many of the book’s themes carry over seamlessly into the modern day, and the show’s world feels realistic and lived-in, even when monsters populate it. Oesterheld was “disappeared” by the Argentinian military dictatorship in 1977, but his work lives on. If you haven’t checked out this hidden sci-fi gem yet, we can’t recommend it enough. – Kirsten Howard
23. Daredevil: Born Again
Daredevil: Born Again shouldn’t be as good as it is. Not only does it come to an audience that has forgiven and forgotten any problems in the original Netflix run, but the series also underwent an extreme change in direction during production. Although new showrunner Dario Scardapane and the directing duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead got to shoot plenty of new material, they had to use much of what the previous regime shot. The result is an uneven season of television, with even more visible seams than the usual MCU product.
And yet, Born Again still manages to be powerful superhero fiction. Part of the appeal comes from its incredible core cast. Charlie Cox moves from charming to guilt-ridden to furious so effortlessly that we fully understand why people fall for the obviously not-okay Matt Murdock. Vincent D’Onofrio gets to put new spins on his take on Wilson Fisk as a baby in a giant man’s body as the Kingpin becomes the Mayor of New York. But the most incredible part of Born Again is the way it takes seriously Matt’s guilt about being a vigilante, making the audience actually fear for his soul when the series finally gives us what we want, Daredevil in costume. A devil’s bargain has rarely felt so rewarding. – Joe George
22. Such Brave Girls
One of the perils of the streaming era is that there’s simply more quality television out there than anyone could feasibly hope to watch in a 365-day period. So don’t feel bad if you’ve never actually heard of the Hulu comedy Such Brave Girls — just take this as an invitation to please fix your life immediately. But, to be clear, this isn’t a show for the faint of heart. A bleak, biting, often deeply uncomfortable story of a dysfunctional pair of sisters beset by mental health crises, financial woes, relationship dramas, and the emotional malaise that often goes hand in hand with figuring out the person you’re supposed to become; it’s chaotic, brutally honest, and frequently unhinged in all the best ways.
In its second season, the show takes even bigger swings, allowing its characters to unapologetically be the absolute worst versions of themselves in subplots that range from cruel to cringe. Real-life siblings Kat Sadler and Lizzie Davidson deftly navigtate the combative, occasionally hateful, but strangely moving bond between their onscreen counterparts without forcing either character to fit into the pre-determined boxes a lesser series might require them to, and the gloriously messy result is a series that feels unlike virtually everything else on TV at the moment. – LB
21. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
It’s true, the shining star in Paramount+’s larger Star Trekuniverse got a little tarnished this year. Yes, Star Trek: Strange New Worldsseason 3 was pretty uneven towards the end, what with that terrible documentary-style episode and the one where half the main crew got turned into Vulcans and subsequently became huge jerks for no real reason. Yes, there was often a frustratingly uneven sense of pacing throughout. And yes, the season’s larger arcs (literally everything involving Captain Batel’s condition) were repeatedly sidelined in favor of adventure-of-the-week style antics that didn’t always tie back to the show’s larger themes. And yet, despite these flaws, it seems important to acknowledge that most of this season was actually pretty great.
The “Space Adventure Hour” Holodeck murder mystery. The creepy, almost unnameable evil at the heart of “Through the Lens of Time.” Ortegas getting stranded on an alien planet with a Gorn, a la Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Enemy.” These are genuinely great episodes — all for different reasons — which once again shows us the depth that this series is capable of when it tries. Successfully balancing weekly adventures and ongoing character subplots that frequently mix in fan favorites from The Original Series era is no small feat, and the fact that Strange New Worlds so frequently makes it look so effortless while having to serve so many masters is something I suspect a lot of us have begun taking for granted. If you ask me, any show is allowed a few clunkers when the bulk of its offerings are this strong. – LB
20. Peacemaker
How do you follow a universally-praised blockbuster reboot of the world’s first superhero? If you’re James Gunn, and only if you’re James Gunn, the answer is obviously “With another season of Peacemaker.” Further, anyone who wasn’t Gunn would have probably used Peacemaker as little more than an expansion of the new DCU from Superman and as set-up for the sequel Man of Steel. While some of that does appear in Peacemaker’s second season, in cameos from the Justice Gang and Lex Luthor as well as the introduction of the planet Salvation, Gunn keeps the attention on the show’s main cast, including its Z-list protagonist.
Peacemaker season 2 uses comic-book multiverse shenanigans as a tool to challenge the maturation Chris Smith (John Cena, showing remarkable range) underwent in season 1. Offered the chance to simply go to a reality where he is adored by the public and loved by his family, Smith can avoid the hard work of repentance and reconciliation before him. Adding to the complex character work is a fantastic supporting cast consisting of Jennifer Holland, Danielle Brooks, Freddie Stroma, and more, as well as a heavy dose of superhero humor. Peacemaker will never challenge the Man of Steel as an A-list hero, but in the hands of James Gunn, he’s just as compelling and complex. – JG
19. Ludwig
Cozy British mysteries are having something of a moment lately, their picturesque settings, rich character relationships, lack of overt gore and violence, and smart humor offering a welcome and convenient escape from… well, everything that’s happening in the real world. While 2025 saw several outstanding entries in this particular sub-genre of British crime television, including Death Valley, Art Detectives, and Murder Before Evensong, the buzziest of the bunch was almost certainly BBC One’s Ludwig (available on BritBox in the U.S.).
A mystery series that’s firmly aimed at non-mystery fans, it follows the story of a socially awkward puzzle setter named John Taylor (or “Ludwig” as he is known in the papers) who is forced out of his comfort zone when his police detective twin brother disappears and he must assume his identity to try and figure out what happened. Peep Show’s David Mitchell plays the oddball eponymous lead, whose logical mind (surprise!) also turns out to be remarkably skilled at solving murders. Yes, it’s the sort of mystery show whose premise you require to suspend a great deal of disbelief, given that multiple people are repeatedly required not to notice when John-pretending-to-be-James starts acting as though he’s never seen an episode of Law & Order before, let alone been to a crime scene. But the result is such fun you won’t care. – LB
18. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Few shows airing a 17th(!) season find their way onto a best-of-the-year list. Then again, not many shows make it to their 17th year in the first place. Thankfully FX comedy It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has and TV is all the better for it. After a stretch of funny but ultimately dispensable installments in the show’s late teenage years, Rob Mac, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton’s demented creation became the best version of itself once again in 2025.
Save for the second half of its charming yet inessential crossover with Abbott Elementary, Always Sunny season 17 features nothing but bangers. Everyone is at the top of their game here. Mac (Mac) salsa dances while under the influence of hot peppers. Dee (Kaitlin Olson) slaps some people. Dennis (Howerton) becomes a waxy-faced vampire. Charlie (Day) shaves his head. Frank (Danny DeVito) is cake. It all culminates in another one of the show’s hilarious, yet oddly touching finales. – Alec Bojalad
17. Murderbot
Apple TV‘s Murderbot features one of the most slam dunk elevator pitches of the 2025 TV season. They’ve got Alexander Skarsgård … and he’s a murderbot. Ok, the titular cyborg (made from machine parts and cloned tissue) at the center of Murderbot isn’t actually called that. He’s an anonymous security tool known as “SecUnit” who is purchased to assist some egghead hippies on a dangerous scientific mission. Unbeknownst to both his creators and purchasers, however, Murderbot has achieved autonomy and given himself a colorful new name.
Just like Martha Wells’ beloved book series upon which Murderbot is based, this is easy-breezy sci-fi capable of entertaining mass audiences. Skarsgård is as likable as ever as he balances the needs of protecting his charges and keeping up his ruse all the while bingeing episodes of his favorite show The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. The first season’s 10 episodes flow together nicely, ending in a finale that promises expanded Murderbot adventures (or Diaries) to come. – AB
16. Task
A slow-burn affair for HBO, Task nevertheless became must-see TV by the time it wrapped its first season, which pit Mark Ruffalo’s priest-turned-FBI agent Tom Brandis against a gang of violent robbers. Focusing on three groups – the FBI task force headed up by Ruffalo, the stash house robbers, and the motorcycle gang they both despise – Task is a worthy prestige follow-up from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby.
He’s very good at getting under your skin by creating flawed heroes and villains. Ruffalo is also on form throughout as a guy trying to work out how to live after his adopted son murders his wife. Despite its bleakness, Task is riveting. By the time you get halfway through it, you’ll be ready for 10 more seasons of misery as long as you get a couple of moments of levity along the way. – KH
15. Death by Lightning
While Americans, as a general rule, love period dramas, we don’t necessarily make all that many of them. Neither, for that matter, does anyone else. That’s slowly starting to change, thanks to the success of shows like The Gilded Age and Manhunt, but mostly, period dramas focused exclusively on American history are few and far between. This is a big part of why the Netflix drama Death By Lightning feels like such a breath of fresh air.
Turning the story of a presidential assassination that almost everyone seems to have forgotten about — President James Garfield was shot less than four months into his first term and died of sepsis several months later — into a genuinely entertaining television series with real stakes and tension is an accomplishment enough on its own. But with the help of an all-star cast that includes Michael Shannon, Matthew Macfadyen, Nick Offerman, Bradley Whitford, and Betty Gilpin, Death By Lightning manages to feel as contemporary as anything on TV at the moment, wrestling with questions of power, progress, and political violence in ways that feel incredibly relevant to the moment we find ourselves in now. – LB
14. Slow Horses
Rolling into the fifth season of Apple TV’sSlow Horses, you’d assume it might be starting to lose some of its charm, but the combined power of the returning cast and Will Smith’s sublime adaptation of Mick Herron’s spy thriller novels is still overwhelming.
In season 5, a bloody massacre in London is paired with the hilarious trials and tribulations of obnoxious computer nerd Roddy Ho’s love life. It sounds like a recipe for tonal disaster, but somehow it works. Case in point: there’s an episode where Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) takes Ho to hide out in a glamorous rooftop restaurant. Complaining about the prices as they discuss how to take down a Libyan terrorist gang, Lamb is asked why he picked a place so out of whack with his character to lie low. As Lamb bluntly replies, no one who’s ever set eyes on him would expect to see him there. All this is taking place just a few moments after Ho has gone through yet another assassination attempt. It’s ridiculous, but it couldn’t be more fun if it tried. That’s the Slow Horses way. – KH
13. Alien: Earth
“There is surprisingly little mythology in the Alien film universe,” Alien: Earth showrunner Noah Hawley observed in an interview with Den of Geek. “All we really know is that there’s this company called Weyland-Yutani, and it has a knack for putting its employees in terrible danger.” Hawley is right. Much of the appeal of Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic comes down to the simplicity of letting an apex predator loose in a confined space amid a vacuum where no one can hear your scream. How can such a cinematic, elemental concept stand up to the episodic rigors of television? Pretty well it turns out!
Thanks to Hawley’s vision, a capable cast, and FX’s newfound Disney money, Alien: Earth presents some of the most compelling worldbuilding from an Alien story yet. Set just two years before Scott’s film, Earth imagines its title location as a playground for five megacorporations looking to achieve immortality. Young trillionaire Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and his Prodigy Corporation believe they’ve reached that goal with the creation of powerful, child-brained hybrids, led by the indestructible Wendy (Sydney Chandler). Those ideas combined with some genuinely thrilling and bloody action have made for a heady, enjoyable sci-fi experience. – AB
12. Squid Game
Thanks to Netflix’s creative (and frankly annoying) release strategy, Squid Gamecame close to airing two full seasons of television this year, with season 2’s Dec. 26, 2024 release date missing the cut by only six days. The fact that only season three’s six episodes premiered in 2025 might make its inclusion on this list controversial. The concluding arc to creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s modern dystopian masterpiece was divisive to say the least.
We would argue it shouldn’t be, however. Aside from the aforementioned release model that made it feel like half a season, Squid Game season 3 was another pitch perfect round of dark storytelling. The central games, which are always equal parts thrilling and revolting, took on an added foreboding resonance as viewers were forced to contend with the introduction of the ultimate innocent contestant and the lingering question of whether Player 456 could actually survive the brutal gauntlet twice. Somehow a very cynical, at times angry show found room to get even angrier while still introducing the slightest bit of hope for a brighter future. – AB
11. Dying for Sex
FX miniseries Dying for Sex didn’t receive quite the same attention as its franchise and IP-centric television peers and that’s a shame. This funny, touching, and bittersweet eight-episode series was one of the more pleasant and human experiences for the medium this year. Based loosely on a real-life story, Michelle Williams stars as Molly Kochan, a woman who receives a Stage IV breast cancer diagnosis. Faced with the prospect of death, Molly sets off on a journey of sexual self discovery.
Williams shines with a vulnerable performance and Jenny Slate chips in superb supporting work as Molly’s friend Nikki Boyer. Dying for Sex is ultimately a refreshingly blunt look at the most taboo of subjects – death and sex. By the time Rob Delaney enters the proceedings as a neighbor Molly finds herself equally repulsed and turned on by, it’s clear the show has something to say about both. – AB
10. The Lowdown
FX’s The Lowdown pulled off the near impossible in 2025: it made a journalist seem cool. Sure, it helps that said journalist is played by Ethan “I Once Rizzed Up Rihanna” Hawke. And sure, said journalist prefers to call himself a historian or, more haughtily, a “truthstorian.” But he writes investigative stories for printed publications so we’re going to take the W.
Created by Sterlin Harjo of Reservation Dogs fame, The Lowdown is clearly the work of someone who loves and cherishes detective fiction. Hawke’s Lee Raybon is an immensely appealing sleuth, his ability to suss out a rat being second only to his ability to take punch after punch from the local riff raff. As the central mystery surrounding the dynastic Washberg family and their corrupt dealings continues to unfold, Lee and the show around him never lose sight of what matters: the underdog. – AB
9. Pluribus
While the question of whether Apple TV’s Pluribus is the best TV show of the year is worthy of debate, we can likely all agree that it’s certainly the weirdest. (Complimentary.) The story of an apocalypse that brings about world peace and universal happiness by way of joining all of humanity into a single hivemind, it’s the sort of sci-fi series that delights in asking big philosophical questions about free will, individualism, and change.
Better Call Saul’s Rhea Seehorn stars as Carol, a cynical romantasy author who is one of a handful of humans who are mysteriously unaffected by the great Joining that has changed the world. Desperate to find a way to reverse what has happened, she is forced to reckon with deep personal truths — like whether she may have actually been, in some part, responsible for her own misery in the world that used to be. – LB
8. The Rehearsal
The first season of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal was a worthy follow-up to the Canadian satirist’s landmark Nathan For You docuseries. Still, it was hard to shake the feeling that the narrative, in which Fielder attempts to rehearse every encounter in his life, could have benefitted from a little more focus. That focus arrives in The Rehearsal season 2, with Fielder locking in to save the American aviation industry.
Over the span of six brilliant episodes, The Rehearsal season 2 identifies a problem (plane crashes), diagnoses its solution (lack of pilot communication), and rolls up its sleeves to fix everything (through rehearsal, of course). By the time you get to Fielder’s “Miracle Over the Mojave,” The Rehearsal‘s second season has truly entered into the “social advocacy comedy docuseries” genre Hall of Fame alongside pretty much just other Nathan Fielder projects. It’s a narrow category. – AB
7. Long Story Short
It’s hard to make an animated comedy series more personal, elegiac, and melancholy than BoJack Horseman. With Long Story Short, BoJack creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg gives it a shot anyway. This 10-episode effort puts its viewers through the emotional wringer. Following the middle-class Jewish American Schwooper family over a span of 30-some years, Long Story Short doesn’t let the perpetual forward movement of time interrupt with its storytelling mission.
Whether it’s experiencing young Yoshi’s (Max Greenfield) bar mitzvah, checking in with an adolescent Shira (Abbi Jacobson), or jumping forward to a middle-aged Avi (Ben Feldman) after experiencing multiple personal tragedies, Long Story Short examines the quiet desperation of American family life from every angle. And of course: it’s very funny… as all families are. – AB
6. The Chair Company
When you click “play” on a new series from I Think You Should Leave creators Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, you know you’re about to see something baffling, but The Chair Company exceeds all expectations in that regard. The show’s inciting incident sees Ron Trosper (Robinson) falling to the ground after giving an important speech at work, thanks to a faulty chair. He’s so embarrassed by the humiliation, he decides to investigate the chair manufacturers and tumbles into a sprawling conspiracy.
Each episode is like a 12-layer dip of cringe, surreal moments, and relentless twists, with Robinson at the center of a story that barely makes sense but still leads you to places you wouldn’t go with a gun. Of course, it’s been renewed for a second season. That’s just what Tecca wants. Don’t you get it? – KH
5. Severance
Viewers want answers when it comes to mystery box storytelling. In the case of Severance season 2, that means resolutions to questions like “Who was Kier Eagan?,” “Why is Lumon doing all of this,” and of course “What’s with the goats.” At the same time, however, wrapping up any mystery just ends that mystery. How can a show like Severance keep its audience engaged without stringing them along?
Season 2 makes that tightrope act look absurdly easy. Yes, some questions are answered in this batch of 10 episodes on Apple TV (including the goat one, believe it or not!). But the season’s real strengths lie in the quiet moments between those discoveries. Between Ben Stiller’s revelatory direction, immaculate production design, and a pitch perfect cast led by Adam Scott, there is truly never a dull moment on the Macrodata Refinement floor. – AB
4. Adolescence
Extended single-take shots or “oners” are all the rage on television nowadays. So much so that another 2025 show (that you’ll be reading about on this list soon enough) built an entire episode, fittingly called “The Oner,” out of the technique. With so many talented filmmakers and performers getting in on the action, the standards for what makes an effective oner have been raised. It can’t just all be about logistical mastery – the lack of interruption within a scene has to play emotionally as well. Enter Adolescence.
Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, this four-episode Netflix series represents the most effective and affecting use of single take storytelling in some time. At the beginning of one unassuming day in an unspecified northern English town, police arrive at the doorstep of the Miller family to deliver unthinkable news: 13-year-old son Jamie (an astonishing Owen Cooper) is wanted for the murder of his classmate Katie. What follows are four excruciating installments examining a family and community’s pain, all without the relief of a single cut. – AB
3. The Pitt
It might be hyperbole to say that The Pitt saved television this year, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t think that more than once while watching it. Amid a sea of low-effort streaming sludge and long-in-the-tooth franchise storytelling, only HBO Max’s The Pitt had the courage to step forward and say “what if it we just made an awesome ’90s medical drama?”
The Pitt obviously owes a lot to its med drama forefathers, particularly ER from which it borrows star lead Noah Wyle (and according to the Michael Crichton estate: a bit more than that). But its dedication to real-time storytelling and relentless plot movement is an entirely modern invention. These 15 episodes (released weekly obviously) just absolutely fly by. There’s always something going on at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. Glance down at your phone for a second and you’ve missed no fewer than 14 intubations. Take that, second screen TV culture! – AB
2. The Studio
Despite feeling as though his job is to destroy them, Continental Studio head Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) really loves movies. The TV show built around him, The Studio, also loves movies… but maybe not as much as it loves television. In addition to being a satirical love letter to Hollywood, even in its imperfect IP era, The Studio has a deep appreciation of what works for its small screen brother. In this case that means gags…lots of ’em.
Save for arguably the premiere and a two-part finale, The Studio‘s 10 installments are wonderfully episodic. One episode finds Matt continually ruining a “oner” on Sarah Polley’s film. Another finds him tussling with Ron Howard over the indulgent end of his flick. Then, just when he thinks he can have a breather on a date with a pediatric oncologist, suddenly he’s suffered a gruesome injury. It’s almost as if this story about movies continues to present situations saturated with comedy. If only there were some kind of term for situational comedy. Maybe then Continental Studio could break into the TV biz. – AB
1. Andor
The success of Disney+’s Andorcan be observed by its frequent use as a measuring stick. Across the entertainment landscape, any studio introducing a fresh new take on an existing IP plainly states that it’s intended to be the “Andor of [INSERT-FRANCHISE-HERE].” Marvel’s Secret Invasion was teased as the Andor of the MCU (and hooboy, that was a swing and a miss). More successfully, the aforementioned Alien: Earth has been pitched as the Alien’s Andor. Truthfully, however, there’s only one Andor and the show’s second and final season proved why.
Andor season 2 is quite simply a masterpiece of sci-fi genre storytelling. Imbued with authentic revolutionary spirit, the “conclusion” to Cassian Andor’s story (give or take a Rogue One) was a triumph. Diego Luna once again embodied Cassian as an unwilling folk hero who’s always there for the rebellion when it needs him. Meanwhile, the political analogies at play were more astute than ever with the villainous Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) finding out how little use fascism has for its adherents. Andor season 2 had friends everywhere and we count ourselves among them. – AB
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy – The Strange Klingon Tick Paul Giamatti Brings to His Villain
Star Trek has given popular culture some of its most memorable villains: Khan Noonien Singh, Q, and the Borg. With the new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, veteran actor Paul Giamatti hopes to extend that run with his character, Nus Braka. As a character of both Klingon and Tellarite descent, Nus Braka allows Giamatti to draw from the whole history of Star Trek, but there’s one aspect of the character’s most honorable ancestry that struck the actor.
“I remembered reading something about Klingons standing too close to people,” Giamatti told TrekMovie. “And I thought, ‘I’m going to stand too close.’ So I’m always getting way too close to people, like the physical body space.”
Close-talking may be something that most viewers associate with a Seinfeld annoyance more than they do anything from Qo’noS, but Giamatti’s not wrong to identify it. The first Klingons seen on The Original Series were haughty and imperious, and while John Colicos wouldn’t exactly get in William Shatner‘s face when his character Kor challenged Kirk, he certainly filled up the space. After their redesign in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Klingons became more aggressive, and then close-talking became more common within the empire.
A bonafide Trekkie, Giamatti’s not limiting his inspiration to just the series’ most well-known enemy race. “I think I probably had in my head a lot of different villains,” he continued. “I probably had some Khan. I had sort of Chang [from Star Trek VI] and Gul Dukat [from Deep Space Nine], these kind of guys who love the sound of their own voices. These guys who love to kind of ‘blahblahblah,’ just bulls—ing, constantly. I thought of the chaoticness of Q and stuff like that.”
It’s easy to see what all those characters have in common. Each one is imperious and domineering, a military leader who openly challenges the Federation and its adherents. But Giamatti adds another, unexpected layer to Nus Braka, something he found in two other classic villains.
“The thing that I think is interesting about this guy is that—as it goes along, and by the end of it, you really see it—he is very much a kind of malformed child inside. He’s this very angry, angry, psychopathic child inside,” observed Giamatti. “Which actually made me think of Trelane, who is kind of a child a little bit. And even Q has a kind of child to him. So whether it’s unique or not, what I bring to it, I don’t know, but that’s something that became more and more important to me as I went on with it. That he’s arrested as a little boy.”
Of course, there will be more to Nus Braka than just impressions of other characters. According to early solicitations, he has a deep connection to Nahla Ake, the academy chancellor played by Holly Hunter.
How that connection will play out still remains to be seen, if it will be a lot of monologuing in the model Gul Dukat or pranks in the form of Trellane. But whatever, he does, it sounds like Nus Braka will be doing it just millimeters from his opponent’s face.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.
Zach Cregger Is Bringing a Classic Indie Horror Comic to the Screen
With his solo debut Barbarian, Zach Cregger revealed the secrets lurking underneath Michigan homes. For his next film, Cregger will be exploring the dark side of the mitten state’s rival Ohio. Cregger is set to produce Torso, an adaptation of the 1998 indie comic by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko.
According to TheHollywood Reporter, Cregger will co-produce with Roy Lee from Vertigo Entertainment, along with Alex Hedlund and Nick Antosca. The latter two may give us an idea of what the finished product will be, as the duo’s production company Eat the Cat also made true crime series Candy and A Friend of the Family. Given that Cregger and co. will be making Torso for Netflix, it sounds like the adaptation will go for more of a lurid thriller tone, rather than match the grounded horror of the comic.
Which might not be a bad thing at all. As Bendis famously recounted in his 2000 miniseries Fortune and Glory, Hollywood has long had its eyes on Torso, as well as his previous hardboiled mystery comics Jinx and A.K.A. Goldfish. Despite getting attention from David Fincher and Paramount Pictures, the film never left Development Hell, leaving Bendis more than a little disillusioned. Bendis’ work did see live-action adaptation, both in the form of the many Marvel stories that have been reimagined for the screen (especially on Netflix’s Daredevil and Jessica Jones series) and his indie series Powers, which was turned into a series for the short-lived PlayStation Network in 2015. And yet, Torso has heretofore been unadapted.
It’s easy to see why the series would gain so much attention from Hollywood. Published by Image Comics between 1998 and 1999, Torso has an irresistible hook: the true story of Eliot Ness, after his showdown with Al Capone in Hollywood, investigating a series of grisly murders in 1930s Cleveland, Ohio. In each case, all that investigators find is a torso, free of limbs or head, making it difficult to even identify the body, much less find the killer, in the days before high-tech forensic science.
Moreover, Bendis and Andreyko make the book read like a movie. Bendis has become infamous for his quippy, chatty form of comic book dialogue, which replicates the banter found screwball comedies, for better or for worse. Moreover, the duo uses mixed media, integrating photographs and newsprint into Bendis’s moody illustrations, all emphasized by thick black inks. Even the way the story unfolds recalls a movie more than it does a comic, as in an early scene in which the words “pop pop” appear over panels of kids discovering a body and continue into panels of Ness giving a press conference, as if sound effects overlayed between two scenes in a film.
Despite all the misfires, this current group seems particularly well-suited to bringing Torso to screen. Not only is there an appetite for true crime stories about horrible things happening in mundane places, but Cregger is riding high after his triumphant 2025 film Weapons.
Can Cregger be the one to finally bring Torso together? Or will this outing end in failure, adding just one more dark turn to an already despairing tale?
A Brief History of Hideo Kojima’s Passive-Aggressive Movie Reviews
Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima loves cinema. The legendary Japanese game designer, who says his body is 70% made of movies, is known for posting about upcoming releases and his reactions to current ones on social media. Less a critic than an observer, Kojima’s reviews have become required reading, not so much for his comments, but for their perceived depth.
When posting about movies that he really likes, Kojima will happily write a lengthy, thoughtful mini-essay on their themes or visuals. For those he doesn’t care for, a minimal post awaits. Sometimes, this simply means saying he saw a film without elaboration, but he’s been reporting his thoughts online for long enough that the latter has accidentally become shorthand for “movie bad.”
Kojima might prefer not to post negative remarks about other people’s art. That doesn’t change the perception that a post without depth can now come across as passive-aggressive to his fans, bringing a little anguish to those who loved the movie in question or were looking forward to seeing it.
Take the recent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk, which Kojima described as “great”, adding “Within the absurdity of this game, the youths help each other, understand one another, reflect on their past, and come to realize the ‘path’ that stretches toward tomorrow. Dropping out isn’t just the end of one person—it’s passing the baton and entrusting their ‘will’ to the winners. It’s a meta, philosophical film about friendship and growth and also a declaration of war against the adults.”
Now compare that to his famously brief post about the highly anticipated Marvel movie between Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame: “Saw Captain Marvel.” Or, there’s his comment about 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: “Went to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”
There are plenty more. He also “saw Madame Web at the theater”, “watched 65 since Adam Driver and the dinosaur are starring”, and “Finally got to see” X-Men: Dark Phoenix, but had no further comments on any of them. Since all those movies were divisive at best and critically panned at worst, Kojima’s short remarks spoke volumes and showed a commitment to the bit for his fans.
However, all this seems like bad news for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery in terms of a Kojima stamp of approval. The latest Rian Johnson flick got a dreaded “watched” from Kojima this month, and the reactions were swift.
“I know this means he hated it but for those curious it really was the best one in the Knives Out series so far,” responded one person over on X, while several simply posted “uh oh”, knowing this might be a clear thumbs down from Kojima.
It’s possible that Kojima will have more to say about the movie, which marks a more philosophical shift in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out trilogy. But for now, fans of Kojima’s movie reviews must learn to live with the possibility that Wake Up Dead Man might have been another Madame Web-level disappointment for him.
It Sounds Like Marvel Is Cooking Up Something Big for Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Release
Doom is coming to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But how it will come is still something of a mystery. And Avengers: Doomsday directors Joe and Anthony Russo aren’t helping things. The duo posted a strange image to their instagram with the hashtag #avengersdoomsday, a blurry black and white image with what appears to be a “V” in the center.
What does it mean? We have no idea. And it’s just the latest bit of confusing information in the lead-up to the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, rumored to be releasing with Avatar: Fire and Ash this Thursday.
Here’s what we do know so far about Avengers: Doomsday. The movie will star Robert Downey Jr. as Victor Von Doom, the arch-enemy of the Fantastic Four who will challenge the heroes of Earth-616 while dealing with Incursions, calamities across the Multiverse that lead to the destruction of multiple Earths. We know that several groups of heroes will appear, including the two sets of Avengers teased in Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts*, the Fantastic Four seen in First Steps and a variation of the Fox X-Men team, both of which will may or may not make their way to Earth-616. And we know that Doomsday leads into Avengers: Secret Wars.
And that’s about it. While the three Secret Wars storylines published in Marvel Comics might provide some clues about the overall plan, the casting of Downey Jr. as Doom completely changes the dynamics of the character. In the comics, Victor Von Doom is the despotic but beloved ruler of Latveria, who is driven by insane jealousy of his former University classmate Reed Richards. But not only was Doom absent from Fantastic Four: First Steps, save for a post-credit scene that was actually taken from Doomsday, but the Russo Brothers have said that there is a specific reason that Doom looks like Tony Stark, hinting at a connection between this version of the character and the MCU Avengers.
Rumors surrounding the film and its marketing only further muddy things. Even by MCU standards, leaks have been frequent and uncorroborated. For every hard bit of information we get, such as Kelsey Grammer talking about a scene with Beast and Reed Richards that he shot with Pedro Pascal, there’s some AI-generated nonsense or a would-be influencer throwing out speculation as news (see: the many people certain that the Doomsday trailer would drop last week).
However, the following rumors about the trailer seem to have coalesced to the point that they seem likely, though still unconfirmed. Marvel will be releasing four trailers for Doomsday, starting this Thursday. The first three are teasers focusing on a specific character, each one ending with a countdown, before the release of a final, proper trailer for the entire movie. The first two teasers will be about Captain America and Thor, while the third will be about Doom himself.
The countdown motif matches the comic book lead-up to the 2015 Secret Wars event. Each of Marvel’s comics published before July 2015 had a banner reading “Time Runs Out” at the top, building tension as the Avengers and other heroes tried and failed to save their Earth from increasing incursions.
But the decision to lead with Captain America and Thor veers from the comics. While both certainly play big roles in every Secret Wars storyline in the comics, they are less important to Doom than the Beyonder, the godlike being who drives the first two Secret Wars stories from the 1980s, and certainly less so than Reed Richards, Doom’s classical arch-nemesis and the hero of the 2015 Secret Wars.
Rumors suggest that Doom will have a personal grudge against Steve Rogers, perhaps something involving Cap traveling across time to replace the Infinity Stones at the end of Endgame. But that still leaves the question of Thor, and why he would earn Doom’s ire? And what about Tony, does he get a trailer? And isn’t Doom’s whole thing that he hates Reed Richards, a guy who hasn’t even been on screen with him in the MCU yet?
In short, we probably won’t know what the teasers will be or what Doomsday will be until Marvel officially releases them. Until then, any attempts to see the future are doomed.
Avengers: Doomsday finally arrives to theaters on December 18, 2026.
James Gunn Addresses “Irritating” Superman 2 Rumor
James Gunn can’t sit online all day and debunk rumors about what is and isn’t going to happen in his rebooted DC Universe, but it seems some chatter is just too annoying to let slide.
Recently, there have been unofficial reports that Braniac will be the main villain of Gunn’s Supermanfollow-up, Man of Tomorrow. There have also been plenty of casting rumors about who might play him, with anyone from Matt Smith to Sam Rockwell on Gunn’s supposed shortlist. The director seems aware that these rumors will naturally spread amongst fans, but one particular rumor that singled out Guardians of the Galaxy alum Dave Bautista as a potential Braniac was a bridge too far for Gunn, who took to social media to set the record straight.
“Oh boy,” he posted on Threads. “Let’s forget a moment I’ve never said Brainiac was in the movie. I freaking love @davebautista & I have many ideas for who he could play in the DCU. But he & I have never discussed a role in Man of Tomorrow, nor have we discussed it amongst ourselves at DC. In addition, truly, NONE of the names, from the six or seven I’ve seen rumored for a role, have auditioned or been discussed at all.”
Gunn added that in general, he’s letting the “silly” rumors go, but that “Dave is a friend and that makes it more irritating.”
There are reasons behind fans’ hopes that Brainiac will turn up in Man of Tomorrow. The villain has long been considered one of Superman’s greatest adversaries. If Gunn is considering pitting him against Clark Kent, this would mark his first proper live-action cinematic debut as a primary antagonist.
However, Gunn says he’s holding off on any deeper confirmation for now, preferring to focus on Superman’s relationship with Lex Luthor in the upcoming sequel, where the pair will have to work together “against a much bigger threat”.
Whether that threat will be Brainiac, only time (and Gunn) will tell.
Rob Reiner: One of the Great Directors Who Defied the Myth of Auteurs
When most people think of the great directors of the ’80s and ’90s, they’ll probably list names such as David Lynch, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott. These filmmakers all had distinctive styles, so much so that their work could be identified in a single frame. The same could not be said of Rob Reiner. He doesn’t fill his movies with surreal dream sequences, moments of characters looking on in awe, or even a little dry ice. And yet, Rob Reiner did what any great director should do. He made great movies. Some of the best of all time, in fact.
Reiner’s run from his directorial debut via This is Spinal Tap in 1984 through A Few Good Men in 1992 stands as one of the most impressive streaks in cinema history. Nor did his great work stop at the end of that run, as he still had The American President and Ghosts of Mississippi come out in 1995 and 1996, respectively. What made these films classics wasn’t a series of easily recognizable tics or bombastic camera work. It was just an innate understanding of how to bring a story to life, no matter what the genre may be.
Another Type of Auteur
For evidence, let’s look at the four films that concluded Reiner’s miracle run: The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally… (1989), Misery (1990), and A Few Good Men (1992). All four live forever in cinema history, each with oft-quoted lines—”I’ll have what she’s having;” “you can’t handle the truth!”—and iconic moments, such as Wesley’s battle of wits with Vizzini or Annie hobbling Paul. Yet all four belong to wildly different genres and have starkly different tones.
How did Reiner manage to do justice to them each? By putting the story and characters first—which isn’t always considered a priority, at least not to cinephiles discussing their favorites.
Too often, discussions about great directors subscribe to the simplest version of the auteur theory, that famed approach that compares the director of a movie to the author of a book. While the specifics of the term have been debated since even before critic Andrew Sarris crystalized it Stateside in 1962, auteur theory tends to treat individualist and distinctive works as inherently good on at least some level. Thus Rob Zombie‘s The Devil’s Rejects or Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland earn some sort of respect simply because they reflect the vision or demonstrable sensibility of their directors, even if the actual stories they tell are trash.
Character Over Action
Reiner always put the story first, and constructed his shots to emphasize the clarity of the character’s emotions and the plot beats unfolding. Take for example the great fight sequence between Wesley (Cary Elwes) and Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) in The Princess Bride. The scene provides all the necessary information that viewers need to understand the conflict. We know where the two combatants are in relationship to each other, where they are in the geography of the arena, and what they want from the fight: Wesley wants to get by to rescue Buttercup (Robin Wright) and Inigo wants to kill him on the orders of his boss.
Even though fight scenes have become hyper and kinetic over the past decades, this 1987 clash still thrills. Reiner takes time to show how the two fighters tease one another out, how they gain and lose advantages. He sets up each reveal that the combatants have been using their non-dominant hands so that it creates maximum effect, allowing the stakes, humor, and finally tension to build.
But best of all, Reiner uses the fight scene not just as an entertaining diversion, but as a way to build character. Of course the fight shows how both men have incredible skills. But we also learn about their fundamental decency, despite one working for a braggart who hires his services to an evil prince, and the other apparently being the Dread Pirate Roberts. They are honorable men with legitimate pathos, whose fundamental goodness is only enhanced by their skill and cunning.
In other words, Reiner shoots the sword fight in The Princess Bride not just as the requisite genre pleasure expected from a swashbuckling fairy tale, although it is very much that. He also shoots it as a character drama.
A Subtle Signature Style
That approach drove all of Reiner’s best movies. A Few Good Men had thundering Aaron Sorkin-penned speeches and high-stakes legal maneuvering acted out by movie stars like Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, but it gave space for Lt. Kaffee to doubt himself, for Ross to wear the weight of the conflict. Misery is one of the bleakest Stephen King adaptations to hit the screen, but it never lets Annie Wilkes just be a crazy person. Instead it finds moments of humanity in her. When Harry Met Sally… takes its time to allow the title characters, played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, to be fully formed people, not just soon-to-be lovers on a direct course to an inevitable coupling.
To successfully pull off these feats, Reiner often had to get out of the way, so to speak, and let the story unfold. Flashy camera work would have distracted from the sparkling dialogue he got from writers such as Sorkin and Nora Ephron, and it would have diminished the themes that William Goldman and King established in their original works. The movies are better for Reiner’s restraint and prioritization of tone and character.
Sadly, such restraint means that Reiner rarely got the praise he deserved, even in his prime. It often felt more like an interesting bit of trivia than a recognition of greatness when cinephiles pointed out that the guy who made Misery also made The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, and A Few Good Men. All back to back.
But anyone who brought such enduring classics to the screen deserves praise, even if no one style or image defines his work. The word “auteur” doesn’t capture what he did so well, but “magic” just might.
Stranger Things’ Priah Ferguson on Why Everyone Loves (Fears) Erica
In the world of Stranger Things, nerds are heroes and bullies are baddies. Anyone who makes fun of Mike, Will, Dustin, and Lucas clearly aligns with Vecna, while even a prep like Steve wins us over by joining with the nerds. Yet, there’s one great exception to that rule, one person who can toss out an insult and make us love her for it: Erica Sinclair, Lucas’ spunky little sister.
For Erica’s actor Priah Ferguson, there’s a simple secret behind Erica’s power.
“I think that someone needs to say what people are thinking on the show,” Ferguson tells Den of Geek. “Her intelligence is her own little personal weapon. She’s the smartest one in the room, and it’s great to have her there in the midst of confusion all the time.”
Erica certainly established that dynamic in her first appearance, interrupting Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) showing off his (frankly incredible) Ghostbusters costume in season two by observing, “God, you are such a nerd.” When her mother (Karen Ceesay) pushes back, Erica refuses to relent. “Just the facts,” she insists.
Lines like that not only made Erica a fan favorite, but also kept her on the show. “Originally, Erica was written just to have one appearance in season two,” Ferguson reveals. “But the Duffers kept finding ways to write her back in a little in season two, wherever they could. Then in season three, she came back with a lot, you know, the whole ‘You can’t spell America without Erica’ speech, which was great.”
Grateful as she is for the continued work, Erica’s popularity comes as a surprise to Ferguson. “I definitely wasn’t expecting the fans to like her so much,” she enthuses. “I knew she was written well, but I wasn’t expecting such a huge fan base for her. But it was so exciting!”
“She comes in at a perfect time, especially when everything is going on and people just want answers to stuff,” Ferguson adds. “She comes in with the answers, says what people are thinking and wants to handle straight business. So I think that’s why people like her so much. She’s relatable.”
Erica certainly gets a chance to handle straight business in the most crowd-pleasing moment of season five’s first volume. Enlisted to help capture Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly) before Vecna can take him, Erica joins her frenemy and Derek’s older sister Tina (Caroline Elle Abrams) for dinner, ready with pie laced with a sleeping agent. When Tina refuses, Erica has to get resourceful, forcing everyone to partake before beasties from the Upside Down can arrive.
Tense as the scene was on screen, Furgeson had a delightful time shooting it. “Oh, my gosh, that scene was so much to film!” she exclaims. “We had a lot of laughs But we also just wanted to tell a great story, so we weren’t laughing super hard to where we weren’t focused. And Frank [Darabont] who directed the episode, was amazing. He made sure to affirm us, and he made sure we were doing a great job.”
And, of course, Ferguson did her part to maintain solidarity with castmates where the pie was involved. “I did eat some of the pie, and I didn’t fall out from eating it,” she confesses. “The pie was pretty good!”
Willing though she may be to blend fiction and reality when it comes to baked goods, Ferguson points out that she doesn’t share her character’s sharp tongue.
“I’m definitely not a bully or as blunt as her, but me and Erica have some similarities. I would say she’s very confident in who she is. She kind of fills up any room, she goes into, and I think that that’s me as well.”
Becoming a fan favorite in a show full of fan favorites proves that Ferguson has certainly earned the right to be confident. Equally exciting is what the young star has planned as she moves out of Hawkins, Indiana. In addition to appearing in the Jean-Michel Basquiat biopic Samo Lives, alongside Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Jeffrey Wright, Ferguson is lending her voice to the scripted podcast series Hard Drive, from The Umbrella Academy producers the Neese Brothers. “It’s basically about this girl named Dasha who discovers her grandfather’s hard drive and finds out about this secret life he had,” she explains, teasing another sci-fi adventure.
But for right now, Ferguson is focused on saying goodbye to Stranger Things.
“It’s definitely emotional,” she admits. “It’s a tender feeling for me because I started doing the show when I was nine. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I’m more familiar with the show being part of my life than being without it, so I’m kind of saying goodbye to my childhood. That can be bittersweet, but she’ll always be a part of me.”
And Erica Sinclair will always be a part of fans’ lives too, as long we need someone to say what we’re thinking amidst the chaos.
Stranger Things season 5 volume 1 is now streaming on Netflix. Volume 2 premieres Thursday, December 25 at 8 p.m. ET.
