SXSW Vice President of Film & TV Claudette Godfrey Talks 2026 Festival Line-Up

With South by Southwest set to begin on March 12, it’s time to start planning out what film and TV premieres, concerts, panels, and comedy shows to attend. As much as one might want to experience everything the festival has to offer, there’s simply too much to see it all. In the spirit of innovation, the festival is adapting this year, featuring TV, music, film, and comedy programming running concurrently for the first time in SXSW history.

What goes into curating a lineup that’s intriguing for audiences while also benefiting the creatives behind these ambitious projects? Den of Geek got the chance to speak with Claudette Godfrey, SXSW’s vice president of film and television, about planning around tricky timeslots, program locations, the coveted midnight movie slots, and the “super, super weird” picks in the lineup that may turn out to be the best films and shows of the year. Below is the transcript of the interview.

DEN OF GEEK: This year is especially exciting for SXSW because the comedy, film and television, and music programming are all running concurrently for the first time. What level of coordination and collaboration does it take to pull it off?

CLAUDETTE GODFREY: I think it’s definitely a big change. Part of the reason they were staggered before was because Austin just didn’t have the infrastructure for everyone to be here. It used to be that there wouldn’t be a room left in the city, but now there are like 100 more hotels or something and we don’t have those capacity and logistic issues that we used to have. Everybody can be together, and I think it’s going to be very exciting.

In terms of the coordination, it’s really the same as always. We’ve been the spine of the event, where we were going the full 10 days, so we’ve always had a lot of coordination with all of the other events that were happening during it. It kind of just lifted some of the previous restrictions that existed around scheduling.

What was the selection process for assembling this year’s programming? What are you looking for?

The biggest difference this year is that we had a much tighter schedule because we lost three days. So the process was actually just a bit more deliberate because we were very concerned we would fall in our normal programming habits and end up with too many films and not the right slots for them. That’s why we did kind of a more split thing between our two announcements because we just really wanted to make sure we were getting the right films and the right locations. We do our final programming in tandem with the schedule so we can kind of fit in as many projects as we can. In terms of our shared programming vision, that really doesn’t ever change. It’s really, really focused on finding the most exciting gems in the program.

I think it’s so hard to explain the taste of a festival. Even the idea that festivals have different “tastes” is sort of a revelation for some people. But for us, our taste is really focused on two main things: the films and the filmmakers. If this festival is the right place for this film and if the filmmaker will have a great experience, we really want to give that to filmmakers because we know we can. A really serious war documentary could be great, but it’s not really what our audience is going to go see. If we program that then it might be a little bit of a disappointing experience for the filmmaker.

We’re really focused on the discovery aspect of things. At the very end, the last decisions become the hardest because we get into this crazy headspace. We always end up with a good spread and we want those last spots that we fill to be opportunities to take chances. We want to have space for things that aren’t perfectly polished. We want to make sure we’re making an ideal space for the newest voices. Our program this year has about 50% first-time feature directors, which is what we usually have. That’s the most exciting part of things to bring people who have not had a film into our existing community. I’ve started calling it the South by Southwest Filmmakers Club.

We’re also just really focused on our audience because we want to make both sides successful. We want our program to reflect a super broad spectrum so filmmakers see that we celebrate all kinds of film and TV and not just what’s supposed to be important. Everybody is at the same screenings and it’s a different experience for everyone because we don’t separate press and industry. Austin has such a great movie-going tradition and there are so many people here in town that may only go to a few things, but we have a bit more of a general audience than some festivals do. We’re really just trying to have a big party and celebrate the filmmakers.

This year I started saying that our event is like an inflection point for the younger people who are volunteering and attending, who become inspired, and those whose work is being seen for the first time at a festival. Even the big talent who are coming attached to tent pole films still get to see their work with an enthusiastic audience.

I’m always really impressed with the different programming blocks that are assembled for television and film, like Visions, 24 Beats Per Second, and the Midnighter block. You guys always go above and beyond with the Midnight picks. How do you meet expectations there and does it always seem appropriate to heavily program horror in that space?

I think there’s been a growing feeling that a lot of festivals’ genre blocks have become broader with their interpretations, but that’s not the case here. We’ve had a few documentaries in those sections over the years, but it’s also been within a logical context. It can be jarring with some festivals when you’re like, “Why is this airing at midnight?” A midnight movie sets your expectations and you want it to be a dark, bloody, weird affair, but also one that prompts a real emotional reaction.

I think we have pretty high expectations for what goes in that block, while we want to maintain the diversity and different kinds of filmmakers. They’re all really different and crazy. One of our favorites is Fifteen, which is about a Mexican girl who’s on the eve of her quinceanera. It’s a horror movie centered around a quinceanera, which is awesome. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

This year has some extremely interesting headliner films, like Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body, and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. Why did these feel like the right movies to stand out as showcase pieces for the year?

I wouldn’t make I Love Boosters the opening night film if it wasn’t phenomenal. I’ll say that much. It’s perfect for opening night because it sets the tone. It’s a party. Everybody in it is so good, but then Boots is also such a unique filmmaker who actually has a distinct vision. Everything he makes has his fingerprints on it and this film is no different. I can pretty much predict what’s going to happen in most films, but I could not do that with this. They’re going to do so many cool activations around it because it’s such a unique piece. It’s a match made in heaven for opening night.

We’re hoping that some of these other first-time filmmakers with their weird movies and visions are going to keep making that kind of groundbreaking stuff. Ready or Not 2 is also phenomenal. We’re not playing a sequel unless it’s amazing. And it starts like the minute after the first one ends. And Pretty Lethal? Have you ever seen teenage girls who have to fight their way out with just their wits and their ballerina outfits that they happen to be in.

I love that SXSW doesn’t just celebrate film, but also television, which only seems appropriate as lines continue to blur between these industries. You’ve got some great TV programming this year between The Audacity and The Comeback. Claudette, what has it been like to see this festival element continue to expand?

I just always want more of it. But it’s harder to program TV because they get finished later and they are moving their dates even more wildly than the film release schedule. So there’s a lot of stuff that we saw that ended up moving around. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is here opening night and it presents such a next-level situation. Michelle Pfeiffer is maybe one of the best people that’s ever been alive and she’s amazing in this, especially when she’s together with Elle [Fanning]. And then Nick Offerman is playing a totally different kind of character than he normally does. Nicole Kidman shows up. Greg Kinnear, too.

Then there are also things like Family Movie, which is quite literally the Bacon family making a horror-comedy movie together. It’s ridiculous and hilarious. I’m kind of excited for there to be a renaissance of genuine people who are involved in amazing artistic projects. The Dark Wizard is really interesting, too. It’s not from [climber Dean Potter’s] point of view, but it’s all the people in his life talking about what makes you into a person. It’s a really interesting portrait of a life.

Lastly, what are one or two under the radar selections from your SXSW Festival block that people need to check out?

The Peril at Pincer Point is super, super weird. It’s like a prophecy that has to do with crabs. It’s in black-and-white and it’s a whole thing. Once I was like 10 minutes in, I knew we’d be getting it. There’s not going to be anything else like it, which is always exciting. There’s another film called Perfect, that’s in the Visions block. It may not end up being that under-the-radar because Julia Fox is in it, but they do a really good job of taking what appears to be a super micro-budget and creating what feels like a much bigger story and world.

Amazing Live Sea Monkeys is also exactly for SXSW audiences. It’s like Grey Gardens, but it’s the woman who was married to the guy who invented Sea Monkeys. She’s older now and trying to keep the legacy going, but there’s all this crazy history and this toy company is fighting her for the patent. It’s just really interesting. Power Ballad isn’t getting its premiere at SXSW, but it’s going to be the number one crowd-pleaser. It’s John Carney’s new film with Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas. It’s unbelievably charming and there’s a ton of singing in there. A lot of conflict, too. It’s pretty great.

The Case for Michael B. Jordan Winning Best Actor at the Oscars

For a lot of awards prognosticators, the race for Best Actor comes down to two names. In one corner, you have Leonardo DiCaprio, a perennial awards favorite who only nabbed his first piece of hardware over a decade ago, putting himself through the wringer for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. In the other corner, there’s Timothée Chalamet, an up-and-comer who already has acclaimed performances in blockbusters and art films. Best Picture contenders One Battle After Another and Marty Supreme gave both men opportunity to play complicated characters, all but confirming that it will all come down to DiCaprio and Chalamet.

And then on March 1, Michael B. Jordan won the Actor Award for Best Actor. Not only did Jordan’s win disrupt the two-man race, but he might have rendered it irrelevant, becoming the new front-runner for the Oscar.

At first glance, Jordan has the easier assignment in Sinners. Yes, he does play two characters, twin brothers Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore, and yes, the twins are both criminals. But the movie treats the pair as clear heroes, at least until Stack gets turned into a member of the thrall led by vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell).

Contrast that to Chalamet’s work as Marty Mauser, a mewling, selfish jerk who somehow guesses correctly that he’s at the center of a bombastic sports movie. Chalamet never apologizes for his character, and invites the audience to dislike him, even when Mauser himself is convinced that everything he does is great. Then there’s burned out revolutionary Bob Ferguson, who stumbles his way toward rescuing his daughter, with none of the cool that once made DiCaprio a teen heartthrob.

Yet, that reading overlooks the nuances that Jordan infuses into the characters to distinguish them beyond their different color schemes. As the more serious of the two, Smoke has a more stoic disposition, getting right down to business and asking the tough questions. Conversely, the good natured Stack has a less cynical nature, and is more open to what life offers him.

Different as these two personalities are, Jordan never overplays them. Instead, the differences show in subtle ways. When Smoke finds two men stealing from his truck outside a general store, he has no problem shooting them, even after identifying one as an old accomplice. But he thinks carefully before doing so, with Jordan creasing his brow and letting the sides of his mouth droop as Smoke feels a bit of sadness about his actions.

Contrast that to the openness displayed by Stack, especially when he first hears Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) play guitar. Director Ryan Coogler trains his camera off to the side of the instrument’s neck, letting us see all of Jordan’s face as Stack takes in the sounds he hears. Jordan holds Stack’s excitement for a moment before finally exploding in excitement, showing us everything we need to know about the character’s joie de vivre.

While Jordan’s technical prowess is impressive, that’s not the only element to his performance. He’s a full-on movie star in Sinners, bursting with charisma. When he swaggers into the town as Smoke and Stack, we viewers have no choice but to watch. In the second half of the movie, he makes Stack into a seductive villain and Smoke into a proper action hero, playing both sides of a classic genre flick all by himself. Just as much as Coogler’s bombastic direction, Jordan’s pure magnetism helped Sinners become a blockbuster sensation, despite the hard truths it has to tell.

Having already earned acclaim for his work in The Wire, Black Panther, and Creed, Jordan is clearly one of our most exciting actors. The Actor’s Award only proves that his technically complex but incredibly satisfying take in Sinners deserves attention. It reminded us that the Best Actor race was never just a two-man affair, and is far, far from over.

Sinners is now streaming on HBO Max.

Game of Thrones Franchise Continues to Evolve With Movie in Production

Since 2011, Game of Thrones has been the defining franchise of HBO. And as the channel’s famous slogan taught us, HBO is not TV.

The latest Game of Thrones project is about to take that slogan seriously. According to The Wrap, a movie based on the George R. R. Martin books has gone into production. The screenplay will be written by Beau Willimon, former showrunner for the Netflix series House of Cards and a writer on Andor. The film will be the latest continuation of a franchise that seeks to expand beyond books and television to become an enduring pop culture powerhouse.

Game of Thrones began life as the 1996 novel A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, which was followed by four more full-length novels through 2011 and several novellas and companion books. The series launched a host of comic books, board games, video games, and other media, but it truly became a pop-cultural sensation with the release of Game of Thrones on HBO in 2011. Even though the show ended on a down note with the unpopular eighth season in 2019, new shows House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms have renewed interest.

Impressive as all of that is, Game of Thrones still doesn’t have the reach of, say, Star Wars or even Lord of the Rings. Which is to say, that it doesn’t have a movie, the one last entertainment sector left untouched by Martin’s work. Clearly, HBO and its studio Warner Bros. can change that.

Still, the question remains: what will the movie be about? Martin has certainly given adapters plenty to work with, and Warner could even create new versions of the stories covered in the TV series, in the same way that the studio is readapting the Harry Potter books with a new cast. But with so much lore from the books untapped, it seems most likely that Willimon will explore some aspect of Westeros unseen on TV.

The most obvious choice would be the conquest of Aegon I, which has long-been rumored as the subject of a movie. Aegon I Targaryen a.k.a. Aegon the Conquereror established the world of Westeros as we know it. With his two sisters and three dragons, Aegon took control of six of the seven kingdoms and was the first to sit upon the Iron Throne. The Targaryen dynasty flows from him, and every Game of Thrones show has been in his shadow. Few events in the history of Westeros are more deserving of the big screen treatment.

The conquest of Aegon isn’t necessarily the most exciting story in the franchise’s history, as it just involves regular people getting smooshed and burned by dragons. But, then again, the HBO series became a sensation by showing horrible things happening to people, so maybe that’s exactly how Game of Thrones will conquer the movies the way it conquered the TV screen.

Scream’s Carpenter Sisters Shouldn’t Just Be Forgotten

This article contains spoilers for Scream (2022) and Scream VI but NOT Scream 7.

Even before the 2022 movie called Scream hit theaters, most anticipated how it would begin. A young woman gets a call from a stranger speaking in the voice of Roger L. Jackson. The stranger asks the young woman about her favorite scary movie, and then begins quizzing her on horror trivia, with the threat that wrong answers will end the life of a loved one. When the stranger gets bored by the game, someone in a Ghostface mask will attack the woman, stabbing her several times as the sound of her shrieks accompanies the movie’s title card.

Everyone knew Scream 2022 would begin this way because the first Scream began that way in 1996. In the first movie, the death of Casey Becker, played by big-name ’90s girl Drew Barrymore established the slasher’s stakes. 2022’s Scream threatened to do the same with Tara Carpenter, played by Generation Z it girl Jenna Ortega. But when Tara survives, and especially when she learns her sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) is to be revealed the daughter of original killer Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), the latter movie moves into new territory, even for a legacy sequel.

From that moment on, the Carpenter sisters became a different type of Scream final girl, one that deserves more than the offhand reference they receive in Scream 7.

The Rules Have Changed

At the end of Scream (2022), one of the Ghostface killers, Amber Freeman (Mikey Madison), strangles Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and gloats about killing her ex-husband Dewey Riley (David Arquette). Amber had just beaten down original final girls Gale and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and was ready to take control of the franchise. “Time to pass the torch!” she sneers, just before Gale recovers and she and Sidney both shoot Amber and set her ablaze.

Amber’s death fits perfectly with the legacy sequel narrative that the movie set up about an hour earlier, when everyone except Sidney and Gale gathered together to discuss the plot of Scream. After realizing that the most recent victim, Vince Schneider (Kyle Gallner), was the nephew of Matthew Lillard‘s character Stu Macher, cinephile Mindy Martin-Meeks (Jasmin Savoy Brown) concludes that the killer is creating a “requel” or legacy sequel. Mindy postulates that the latest Stab film—the franchise-within-the-franchise based on the Woodsboro Murders of Scream (1996)—has disappointed some fans so much that they’re bringing things back to the first film by murdering people involved with the franchise.

That’s bad news for most people in the living room, as it includes Dewey, Billy Loomis’ daughter Sam, Wes Hicks (Dylan Minnette), son of Sheriff Judie Hicks (Marley Shelton) from Scream 4, in addition to Mindy and her brother Chad (Mason Gooding), children of Martha (Heather Matarazzo) and relatives of the first guy to explain the horror rules, Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy).

Mindy’s theory makes perfect sense for a legacy sequel like Scream (2022). As Mindy herself points out, everything from Halloween to Star Wars had been following those rules, and the 2022 movie was executing it well. The franchise had always been self-aware, ever since screenwriter Kevin Williamson began penning a film called Scary Movie, which he and Wes Craven would bring to the screen as Scream. New directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick followed that lead by having the Meeks-Martin twins and Sam’s boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid) comment upon the state of horror, before revealing that Richie was the other Ghostface, mirroring the romantic partner twist from the first movie.

Just like Sidney, Sam has to kill her boyfriend Richie, while it’s up to Gale and Sidney to take down Amber. Except, that’s not what happens. Before the credits roll, a burned and bloody Amber pops up for one more attack, and Tara grabs a gun and shoots her. Moreover, Sam doesn’t just kill Richie out of self-defense. She stabs and slices him with the brutality she inherited from her father Billy, who appears as a hallucination and stares in approval.

Sam prefaces her attack with a new rule, adding and expanding on the franchise’s vernacular: “Never fuck with the daughter of a serial killer.”

New Kids in New York

Of course, the rules line and the Carpenter girls’ connection to Billy are all knowing winks to the rest of the franchise, an expected part of any legacy sequel. However, the ending to Scream (2022) went far beyond simply commenting on genre. It turned the Carpenter girls into complex characters, very different from Sidney or even the oft-prickly Gale.

Nowhere is that more clear than in Scream VI, which moved Sam and Tara out of Woodsboro and relocated them to New York, leaving Sidney behind. Certainly, Scream VI had its connections to earlier in the franchise, as Gale returns, as does Kirby Reed, Hayden Panettiere’s fan-favorite from Scream 4. Moreover, the climax takes place in a theater playing the Stab movies, filled with memorabilia from previous murders.

Yet, within that overabundance of references, Scream VI gives Sam and Tara room to breathe. The killers this time are Richie’s father Wayne (Dermot Mulroney) and his siblings Quinn (Liana Liberato) and Ethan (Jack Champion). The trio seek revenge for Richie’s death, which they undergo by staging an elaborate campaign to convince her that she’s a killer.

The plan works, but not in the way that the family intended. Sam once again gives into the urgings of her father, going so far as to put on the Ghostface mask and to make threatening phone calls to Wayne and his family before killing them. The movie ends on an ambiguous note, suggesting that Sam may not be able to resist her legacy much longer.

By focusing on Sam’s deteriorating mental condition, these two Scream movies add something new to the franchise. No longer are the movies about people who take their love of scary movies too far. Now they’re about someone who cannot escape the legacy of violence her father left to her, a legacy that not even her sister’s love can break. The Carpenter sisters deepened the themes of the franchise and moved them into a new direction, reviving the franchise once more.

And then, they were tossed away because studio heads got their feelings hurt.

Goodbye, Carpenters; Hello, Sidney

It’s hard to be excited about the return of Sidney Prescott for Scream 7, but it’s equally hard to hate her return too. Campbell was an integral part of the franchise’s success, and Sidney remains a compelling final girl.

But the Carpenter sisters were something different, something new to the Scream franchise and something rarely seen in horror in general. Sam’s fight against her father’s memory and the connection she had with Tara made her distinct from Sidney, Gale, and any other character who came before her.

With the Carpenter sisters at the center, Scream could still deliver all the great kills and smart commentary that people wanted. But they could also deliver a depth and complexity that no Scream fan anticipated.

Scream 7 is now playing in theaters worldwide.

Mike Flanagan Will Bring Carrie into the 2020s By Updating the Bullying

Even if you’ve never seen the 1976 Brian De Palma classic Carrie, you know the central image: telekinetic teen Carrie White, covered with pig’s blood at the senior prom. The scene comes directly from the 1974 Stephen King novel, and has rightly earned its place in horror history. However, like many of King’s concepts, it’s rooted in teen culture from decades ago, even feeling a bit outdated by the time the movie arrived in the mid-1970s.

While teen culture may change, bullying is eternal. So while Mike Flanagan‘s upcoming miniseries adaptation of Carrie for Prime Video will certainly share some elements of the King novel and the De Palma movie, its depiction of bullying will feel fresh. According to Matthew Lillard, who plays high school principal Henry Grayle in the series, Flanagan “went back, pulled out other elements from the book, then took real-life examples of what’s happening with bullying in America and applied them to this new adaptation.” Lillard told Screen Rant that Flanagan’s “literally ripping things from the headlines and applying them to modern day so that people can relate to what Carrie’s going through.”

More than just ensuring verisimilitude, Flanagan’s updates can enhance the story’s central themes. Carrie follows the last days of high schooler Carrie White—played by Sissy Spacek in 1976 and by Summer H. Howell in the miniseries—a sheltered teen who manifests telekenetic powers. Originally portrayed by a thundering Piper Laurie, and now by Flanagan regular Samantha Sloyan, Carrie’s religious fundamentalist mother Margaret abuses her daughter, making her afraid of herself and making her a target of high school bullies.

As such, Carrie plays as a twist on the classic trope that regular humans are the real monsters. Carrie is a sweet and vulnerable girl who is mistreated by her classmates and, in the novel, by townspeople. Even after her powers manifest, Carrie doesn’t initially embrace them to lord over others. Only after a prank leaves her covered in pig’s blood at the prom does Carrie crack and go on a rampage, killing friend and tormentor alike.

Since 1976, Carrie has been updated three times, with most trying to bring the tale into the present. 1999’s The Rage: Carrie 2 continues the story of the first film by having survivor-turned-guidance-counselor Sue Snell (Amy Irving) encounter another telekinetic girl (Emily Bergl), who experiences date rape instead of bullying. While the 2002 TV movie starring Angela Bettis brought little new to the story (which is surprising, given the involvement of screenwriter Bryan Fuller), the 2013 remake starring Chloë Grace Moretz and directed by Kimberly Peirce integrates social media into the story.

Even more than the 2013 film, Flanagan’s update will have to deal with the reality of school shootings, which fundamentally change the tenor of King’s novel. In 1974, a school massacre seemed unthinkable. In 2026, they are old news. However, Flanagan has never been one to go for shock value, and his soulful, monologue-heavy approach may be just what Carrie needs to make even tired images feel fresh and scary again.

Carrie streams on Prime Video in October 2026.

Batman v. Superman: Inside Zack Snyder’s MPA Rating Battle

Zack Snyder is known to be a vocal defender of his own work. The Rebel Moon director, who was considered the overseer of the DCEU for a number of years before the torch eventually passed to James Gunn and Peter Safran, is still defending some of the decisions he made while crafting those movies today, and his 2016 DC superhero movie, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, is no exception.

The theatrical cut of the film, which saw Henry Cavill’s Superman and Ben Affleck’s Batman duke it out before bonding over their moms both being called Martha, was a smash hit despite largely negative reviews from critics, but Snyder’s director’s cut is often held up as a better version of the story.

In a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Snyder told host Josh Horowitz that his “100 percent honest reaction” to the movie and how it’s been received is “Do you really want a movie that’s [had] all the edges shaved off it by the focus groups? Do you really want a movie that has [had] decisions made in the boardroom, or tested ideas being rendered for your enjoyment? Do you really want the Kmart version of your story? Is that what you really want?”

Snyder also revealed that he was locked in a battle with the MPA (then known as the MPAA) over the content of Batman v. Superman before its release, saying that when they attempted to secure a PG-13 rating for the movie, the MPA kept “kicking” it back to them, maintaining it was still an R.

“I’m like, ‘What are you talking about? We’re taking everything out!’ And I remember someone saying we got a report from the MPAA saying like, ‘We just don’t like the idea of Batman fighting Superman. So that kind of makes it an R,'” Snyder recalled, adding that when the two DC characters battled each other, the MPA thought it was “rude” for them to also destroy various surroundings, such as radiators.

“We should’ve realized then that we were kind of kicking the zeitgeist in the nuts a little bit,” he said. “That we were going to anger people, because not only do they not want their heroes deconstructed, they don’t want their heroes battling each other on a road to deconstructing the ‘why’ of their existence. That is another sacrilege.”

Yes, that was definitely the issue with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. For sure.

Original Scream 7 Plan Would Have Given Us a Unique Final Girl

With Scream 7 out in theaters, slasher fans are saying “Hello, Sidney” all over again… for the sixth time in 30 years. Neve Campbell remains a scream queen for her work as Sidney Prescott, survivor of the Woodsboro Murders, but this latest outing has revealed that the franchise may have long run out of things to say about its central character. That feeling only is only intensified by the fact that Sidney had moved away from the chaos, ceding the attention to Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera), a very different type of survivor.

Unlike her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega), Sam had hallucinations of her father Billy Loomis, the original Scream killer, once again played by Skeet Ulrich. More than just a call back, Billy’s return would have been a longer arc, as “part of coming back for five and six was being a part of seven,” Ulrich told the New York Post. “It was a three-picture arc for Billy Loomis, or the imagination of Billy Loomis in Melissa Barrera’s character’s head. But when all that went down with her, obviously you lose her and you lose what’s in her head.”

The “her” in question is Barrera, and “all that went down” was the decision by Paramount and CEO/Trump sycophant David Ellison to fire her from the project after she spoke out against ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Ortega and eventually director Christopher Landon soon quit in solidarity with Barrera, forcing the studio to restructure Scream 7. They settled on a tired slasher rehash with Campbell back in the lead, the return of the other original killer Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), and original screenwriter Kevin Williamson behind the camera to direct.

Even those who liked the Scream 7 that hit theaters must admit that the Loomis/Carpenter plot was building up to something more interesting than the standard slasher story. From 2022 reboot Scream through the NYC-set Scream VI, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick had found a new twist to the franchise’s central premise about obsessions with killers.

Certainly, both films had murderers whose love of scary movies drove them to put on a Ghostface mask and stab people to death. But where Sidney Prescott was always a woman hunted for the actions of her mother Maureen, Sam was a woman hunted by her father and his expectations for her. Both Scream (2022) and Scream VI played with the idea that Sam would eventually succumb to the family madness and start killing.

That tension made Sam both a victim and a potential killer, something rarely seen in slashers. The concept showed up in 1981’s Happy Birthday to Me, the very end of 1988’s Halloween 4 (only to be botched by Halloween 5), and more recently in James Wan‘s insane Malignant (2021). But the slow burn of Tara’s struggle made her conflict more rich and complicated.

But in the end, she said something that offended the boss’s political preferences, so now we don’t get that movie. Instead, we have Sidney still dealing with Ghostfaces in her 50s. It almost makes you want to scream.

Scream 7 is now playing in theaters.

TV Premiere Dates: 2026 Calendar

Wondering when your favorite shows are coming back and what new series you can look forward to? We’ve got you covered with the Den of Geek 2026 TV Premiere Dates Calendar, where we keep track of TV series premiere dates, return dates, and more for the year and beyond.

We’ll continue to update this page weekly as networks and streamers announce dates. A lot of these shows we’ll be watching or covering, so be sure to follow along with us!

Please note that all times are ET.

Note: These are U.S. releases. For upcoming British releases, head on over here.

DATE	SHOW	NETWORK
Wednesday, March 4	Blue Therapy	Netflix
Wednesday, March 4	America’s Culinary Cup (9:30 p.m.)	CBS
Wednesday, March 4	Young Sherlock	Prime Video
Thursday, March 5	Vladimir	Netflix
Thursday, March 5	Ted Season 2	Peacock
Friday, March 6	Boyfriend on Demand	Netflix
Friday, March 6	The Dinosaurs	Netflix
Friday, March 6	Hello Bachchon	Netflix
Friday, March 6	Still Shining	Netflix
Friday, March 6	Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese	Hulu
Friday, March 6	Outlander Season 8	Starz
Saturday, March 7	Beastars Final Season Part 2	Netflix
Sunday, March 8	Rooster (10:00 p.m.)	HBO
Tuesday, March 10	One Piece Season 2	Netflix
Wednesday, March 11	Age of Attraction	Netflix
Wednesday, March 11	Love Is Blind: The Reunion	Netflix
Wednesday, March 11	Scarpetta	Prime Video
Wednesday, March 11	Sunny Nights	Hulu
Thursday, March 12	Virgin River Season 7	Netflix
Thursday, March 12	Love Is Blind: Sweden Season 3	Netflix
Friday, March 13	Dynasty: The Murdochs	Netflix
Friday, March 13	Fatal Seduction Season 3	Netflix
Friday, March 13	That Night	Netflix
Saturday, March 14	Rooster Fighter (12:00 a.m.)	Adult Swim
Saturday, March 14	The Madisons	Paramount+
Monday, March 16	Born to Bowl (9:00 p.m.)	HBO
Wednesday, March 18	Eva Lasting Season 4	Netflix
Wednesday, March 18	Radioactive Emergency	Netflix
Wednesday, March 18	Furies: Resistance Season 2	Netflix
Wednesday, March 18	Invincible Season 4	Prime Video
Wednesday, March 18	Imperfect Women	Apple TV
Thursday, March 19	Steel Ball Run JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure	Netflix
Thursday, March 19	Meal Ticket	Prime Video
Friday, March 20	Deadloch Season 2	Prime Video
Friday, March 20	Jury Duty Presents Company Retreat	Prime Video
Sunday, March 22	The Comeback Season 3	HBO
Sunday, March 22	The Bachelorette Season 22 (8:00 p.m.)	ABC
Sunday, March 22	The Faithful (8:00 p.m.)	Fox
Sunday, March 22	The Forsytes (9:00 p.m.)	PBS
Sunday, March 22	The Count of Monte Cristo (10:00 p.m.)	PBS
Monday, March 23	Inside Season 3	Netflix
Tuesday, March 24	Ready or Not: Texas	Netflix
Tuesday, March 24	Daredevil: Born Again Season 2	Disney+
Wednesday, March 25	Heartbreak High Season 3	Netflix
Wednesday, March 25	Homicide: New York Season 2	Netflix
Wednesday, March 25	Bait	Prime Video
Thursday, March 26	Jo Nesbo’s Detective Hole	Netflix
Thursday, March 26	Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen	Netflix
Friday, March 27	The Parisian Agency: Exclusive Properties Season 6	Netflix
Friday, March 27	For All Mankind Season 5	Apple TV
Wednesday, April 1	Love on the Spectrum Season 4	Netflix
Thursday, April 2	XO, Kitty Season 3	Netflix
Friday, April 3	Your Friends & Neighbors Season 2	Apple TV
Monday, April 6	Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord	Disney+
Wednesday, April 8	The Boys Season 5	Prime Video
Wednesday, April 8	The Testaments	Hulu
Thursday, April 9	The Miniature Wife	Peacock
Sunday, April 12	The Audacity (9:00 p.m.)	AMC
Thursday, April 16	Beef Season 2	Netflix
Friday, April 17	Roommates	Netflix
Sunday, April 19	From Season 4 (9:00 p.m.)	MGM+
Monday, April 20	Kevin	Prime Video
Monday, April 20	Sullivan’s Crossing (8:00 p.m.)	The CW
Thursday, April 23	Stranger Things: Tales from ’85	Netflix
Wednesday, April 29	The House of the Spirits	Prime Video
Wednesday, April 29	Widow’s Bay	Apple TV
Thursday, May 7	M.I.A.	Peacock
Friday, May 8	Unconditional	Apple TV
Tuesday, May 12	Devil May Cry Season 2	Netflix
Friday, May 15	Berlín and the Lady with an Ermine	Netflix
Friday, May 15	Rivals Season 2	Hulu
Thursday, May 21	The Boroughs	Netflix
Wednesday, May 27	Spider-Noir	MGM+
Friday, May 29	Star City	Apple TV
Wednesday, June 3	The Legend of Vox Machina Season 4	Prime Video
Thursday, June 11	Sweet Magnolias Season 5	Netflix
Friday, June 19	Sugar Season 2	Apple TV
Thursday, July 9	Little House on the Prairie Season 1	Netflix

If we’ve forgotten a show, feel free to drop a reminder in the comment section below!

Want to know what big movies are coming out in 2026? We’ve got you covered here.

Baz Luhrmann Nearly Made a Silver Surfer Movie

Elvis director Baz Luhrmann was once a big fan of the Silver Surfer, revealing that he came close to making a solo movie featuring the Marvel character back in the ’90s.

On the Happy Sad Confused podcast recently, Luhrmann told host Josh Horowitz that he also “very stupidly” turned the first Spider-Man and Harry Potter films, adding that he “would be a very wealthy person” if he’d decided to helm those movies instead of choosing projects like Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!.

“My brand is about taking stuff that people think is cheesy or forgotten or even new works, but primary stuff,” Luhrmann mused. “I need to prove it to be relevant and new and fresh and of the moment. I’m not quite sure why, but it is [my] brand.”

Still, the Aussie director was tempted by the offer of making a Silver Surfer movie following the release of his successful debut feature film, Strictly Ballroom. “Way back in the day, I just thought, oh, I love Silver Surfer so much. Before Marvel was so big, you know, this was really early. And the guy who owned Marvel sent me all those Silver Surfer toys and books, and I went like, hmm, philosophical, surfer in space, you know. But alas, no, I did Romeo + Juliet instead. It worked out for everybody.”

Astronomer Norrin Radd was originally created by Jack Kirby for Marvel in 1966, when Radd saved his homeworld by agreeing to become a herald for the planet-devourer Galactus and was imbued with immense power. He also got a new silver body and a surfboard that allowed him to travel faster than the speed of light, becoming the Silver Surfer.

The Radd version of Silver Surfer has appeared in a clutch of Marvel TV shows and movies over the years, including in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, where he was portrayed by Doug Jones and voiced by Laurence Fishburne. 2025’s The Fantastic Four First Steps featured the Shalla-Bal incarnation of the Silver Surfer, played by Julia Garner.

A standalone Silver Surfer movie has so far eluded Marvel, but 1998’s Silver Surfer: The Animated Series did a grand job of telling Norrin Radd’s tragic tale.

Marvel Had to Work Around the Clock to Save Hawkeye

Hawkeye became one of Marvel’s most well-received TV shows when it launched during the 2021 holiday period on Disney+, gaining both critical acclaim and solid reactions from MCU fans as it caught up with its titular superhero following the events of Avengers: Endgame. But it seems like the series had a rather bumpy road to the small screen.

In a conversation with The Watch podcast, Hawkeye producer Andrew Guest recently revealed that they had to work “around the clock” to save the show, which saw Jeremy Renner reprising his role as master archer Clint Barton alongside new protégée Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), noting that it was completely overhauled right before filming was due to start.

Both Avengers: Endgame director Joe Russo and the Executive of Production & Development at Marvel Studios, Trinh Tran, reportedly called Guest right ahead of the Hawkeye shoot, with Tran saying, “I’m going to send you six one-hour episodes. I want to meet tomorrow to talk about it. We start shooting in New York in a week and a half, and we want to rewrite the whole thing.”

Wonder Man showrunner Guest said that Hawkeye had already been written and rewritten “a couple of times,” by that point, adding, “I was literally the last call they could make to anybody.”

Marvel has been known to use a formula that includes fixing projects while they’re filming and in reshoots, which Guest said was “very much the case” with Hawkeye. “You know, Hailee Steinfeld’s character was written too young. The dynamic between her and Jeremy wasn’t there. There were a lot of extra twists and turns that were sort of gumming up the works. We worked around the clock, and I was very much involved with Trinh and Brad Winderbaum, who was not running TV at the time, but was very hands-on on this project. I needed their help as much as they needed mine. And we got through that process.”

After Hawkeye’s positive Disney+ debut, there were rumors that Marvel would move forward with a second season of the show, though development seemed to stall on the project.

“We did explore creatively what season 2 of Hawkeye might be if we were able to do it,” Guest previously told The Direct. “Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work out in terms of Marvel and all the various pieces that need to come together, but I loved working on Hawkeye. I think [Jeremy] Renner and Hailee Steinfeld are so terrific together, and I would love to see more of those two.”

Connor Storrie’s SNL Monologue Was Like Snorting Pure PR Damage Control

Connor Storrie became a key cog in some rather obvious PR work during his Saturday Night Live debut this past weekend. Fans of the Heated Rivalry star’s performance as Ilya Rozanov in Crave’s enormously popular queer ice hockey romance series weren’t quite sure what to expect before his opening monologue, though it had been reported he would be joined by Olympic ice hockey gold medalists Jack and Quinn Hughes during the show, and this news had been poorly received by some fans following several viral incidents that occurred in the wake of the USA’s triumphant win in Italy last month.

It had been over 40 years since the men’s ice hockey team had secured Olympic gold in the so-called “Miracle on Ice” in 1980. New Jersey Devils center Jack Hughes, whose front teeth were smashed during the climactic game, scored the winning 2026 goal against Canada in 3-on-3 overtime, shooting the puck past goalie Jordan Binnington. U.S. fans in the crowd and those watching at home were largely jubilant about the win, but when the men’s team went back to the locker room to celebrate, videos and images that captured the ruckus soured the good vibes for some.

The team were seen drinking beers with FBI Director Kash Patel before a congratulatory call came in from President Donald Trump, who invited the players to attend his State of the Union address but said he would also have to ask the women’s team to attend or he “probably would be impeached.” The men’s team, including Jack and his brother Quinn Hughes, laughed at Trump’s comment in unison.

To say that this did not go down well would be an understatement. Hilary Knight, whose U.S. women’s ice hockey team also won gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics, described Trump’s comment as “distasteful” and added that “whatever’s going on should never outshine or minimize their work and our success on the world stage.” The U.S. women’s team have won gold three times since women’s hockey became an Olympic event at the 1998 Winter Olympics, and is currently supported by the Hughes brothers’ mother, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, who serves as player development consultant for Team USA.

Reactions to the men’s team’s behavior also came in thick and fast on social media as the players and their respective NHL teams were bombarded with negative comments online. Some fans felt that Quinn Hughes, who plays for the Minnesota Wild, should feel particularly ashamed, given that the state has been such a visible target for Trump’s ICE crackdown. A defaced Hughes jersey was later left outside the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, where it was pictured scrawled with such comments as “bootlicker” and “fascist cuck.”

After the men’s team, with a few exceptions, indeed attended Trump’s State of the Union and were seen wearing MAGA merch, the backlash continued across social media. It appeared that the new fans the NHL had picked up following the success of Heated Rivarly – reportedly boosting ticket sales by as much as 20% – were also becoming swiftly disillusioned by the sport. At this point, it was clear that the controversy wasn’t just going to go away.

In the midst of this PR nightmare, Storrie stepped in, delivering some fun jokes about his road to stardom during his opening SNL monologue before bringing the Hughes brothers onstage wearing their Team USA jerseys and gold medals. The crowd clapped the men’s entrance before Storrie made some gags about the content of Heated Rivalry. The brothers admitted they hadn’t seen the show. That’s when Storrie brought on U.S. women’s hockey captain Knight and her teammate, Megan Keller, to massive applause from the audience. “It was gonna be just us, but we thought we’d invite the guys too,” Knight said pointedly, before Keller added, “We thought we’d give them a little moment to shine,” while the Hughes brothers stood smiling as the butt of the joke.

It was no surprise to see NBC running this level of PR damage control. After all, both the Olympics and SNL are NBC properties, but some feel that Storrie, Knight, and Keller should never have been hijacked as PR puppets for the men’s team when they were just as capable of addressing the controversy themselves and taking some accountability for it. Nevertheless, the PR coup seems to have inevitably worked for the most part, with the players’ joint appearance alongside Storrie described as “healing” and “cathartic” for viewers.

“A raise to whoever helped thread this PR needle because this managed not to be agonising despite literally everything pointing in that direction,” noted a user on r/hockey. “Storrie and Knight handled this with immense grace.” Another replied with “Accomplished more with a 3-minute skit than all of the NHL has managed in a week.”

For the second time in six months, the NHL owes Connor Storrie. Big time.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 2 Will Feature Less Battling, More Yearning

This article contains details from the novella that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 2 will be based on. There are no spoilers but do not read on if you want a fully unsullied experience.

The first season of HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was pretty perfect. A small-stakes story about a village jousting tournament that’s also a metaphor for what it means to be a true knight, it managed to be both narratively and emotionally satisfying. Even if some of us — cough cough me cough — are going to be mourning Bertie Carvel’s Baelor Targaryen a long time. Thankfully, the show has already been renewed for a second season, so viewers won’t have to say goodbye to Ser Duncan the Tall and his adorable squire, Egg, for long. But the show’s second season is most likely going to look quite a bit different from its first.

That’s part of the appeal of this slice of George R.R. Martin’s universe, if we’re honest. His “Tales of Dunk and Egg” novellas are simple yarns about a hedge knight and his squire who are just kind of traipsing around the country looking for worthy lords to serve and hoping to make a little cash. It’s not an anthology, in the strictest sense, but each is a fairly self-contained story, set in a different location featuring a different cast of characters.

As a result, viewers shouldn’t expect much overlap with the events we saw in season 1. Characters like Lyonel Baratheon, Raymun Fossoway, and Maekar Targaryen don’t show up again in these books, and probably won’t onscreen either. (Though the dangling thread about Maekar not knowing where his kid is feels like a thing the show will have to deal with at some point. Surely someone would notice a missing dragon prince. Right?)

Season 2 will be based on the second of Martin’s three novellas, “The Sworn Sword,” which is set roughly two years after the events of “The Hedge Knight” (which is the story season 1 was based on). In it, Dunk and Egg find themselves in service to Ser Eustace Osgrey, a poor knight who chose the wrong side in the first Blackfyre Rebellion. He’s in the middle of a land dispute with his neighbor, a conflict that introduces Dunk to a woman named Lady Rohanne Webber. He’s somewhat taken aback to learn he’s not the old widow he was led to believe, but rather an attractive young woman with whom he has an immediate spark.

The pair spends a large part of the story flirting and/or looking longingly at one another, all while Dunk attempts to help determine who has the right to the river that bisects their two properties. He’s repeatedly frustrated by the pettiness of both parties in the midst of a dispute in which the smallfolk, once again, suffer as a result of their alleged betters’ choices.

There’s some fighting and another trial (not of seven this time) for Dunk, as well as a great deal of flashbacks focused on the Blackfryres and the Battle of the Redgrass Field. Season 1 of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was loath to get too deep into the politics of the Black Dragon and his supporters, so we’ll have to see if season 2 is more willing to show us that history, or whether it’ll simply embrace the quieter, more romantic elements of this second novella. Either way, we’ve got a lot to look forward to.

The Secret Agent’s Revolutionary Spirit Is in its Mundane Humanity

In the opening scene of the Best Picture nominee The Secret Agent, motorist Armando Solimões is pumping gas when he’s approached by two police officers. Despite the fact that Armando has been driving for days and simply wants to get to his destination in Recife, the capital of the Brazilian state Pernambuco, the officers take their time inspecting his vehicle. After assuring themselves that everything is in order, the officers ask Armando for a donation to the Police Carnival Fund, revealing the whole thing as an exercise in petty state corruption.

Just yards from Armando and the cops lies a dead body in the gas station’s dusty parking lot. Before the officers arrive, Armando talks about the body with the station attendant, who complains about the stench from the corpse, but also laments that leaving the pumps to dispose of the body could get him fired. As he and Armando chuckle at the banal horror of the situation, the attendant admits, “I’m almost getting used to this shit.”

In the nearly three hours that follow, writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho will fill The Secret Agent with all manner of cinematic absurdity and unchecked cruelty. As the gas station scene shows, that cruelty is often banal, something you can get used to… almost. But The Secret Agent also knows that powerful forms of resistance can also be found in the mundane.

Agents of Chaos

Despite what the title might suggest, The Secret Agent is not actually about a secret agent. Filho keeps the motivations Armando Solimões unclear until midway through the movie. Played with depth and charm by Wagner Moura, a Best Actor nominee, Armando is quiet, kind, and clearly exhausted. Yet, it’s easy to believe that Armando may be an agent given the heightened tension of the world around him.

The Secret Agent takes place in 1977, midway through the Brazilian military dictatorship that began in 1964, when the country’s armed forces—with the help of the United States—overthrew the government. Citizens live in the constant fear of those in power, people who oppress others for even the pettiest reasons.

Reminders of that power appear throughout the film, in the form of the body at the gas station or a severed leg found in the belly of shark. News of a shark with a leg in its mouth inflames the imagination of the public, who are just as crazy about Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws as everyone else in the late ’70s, but police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his men know that the leg belonged to a communist student they murdered. Euclides encourages increasingly outrageous stories about a severed leg attacking the gay community during carnival because it distracts from the real source.

Euclides also takes notice of Armando, who calls himself Marcello and has taken a job at the city identity office. Smart enough to know that Armando isn’t who he claims to be, but worried that he might be sent by a higher-ranking official with a grudge, Euclides attempts to befriend him. Worse, a businessman called Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) has sent a pair of immoral hitmen (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone) after Armando.

Filho contrasts this heightened situation with absurd interludes, ranging from a sequence featuring a stop-motion severed leg attacking people to shots of moviegoers convulsing while watching The Omen. Yet, the most powerful moments in The Secret Agent or those that are quiet, unremarkable, human.

The Human Element

This rest of this article contains spoilers for the film.

About halfway through The Secret Agent, we finally learn the truth about Armando’s intentions. Years earlier, Armando served as the head of a science department at the Federal University of Pernambuco, which drew the attention of the industrialist Ghirotti. Not only did Ghirotti insult Armando’s wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho) and express racist and classist views during his visit to the school, but he dismantled the department to increase his own profits.

After Fátima’s death, Armando wants to leave Brazil with his son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) and take a position at another school abroad. But before he leaves the country, Armando needs to find files of his late mother, a woman who died when he was very young. As he puts it while speaking with a pair of resistance fighters who can help him leave the country, Armando is looking for “the only document to prove that my mother existed.”

The reveal is so subtle, so unremarkable that viewers could be excused for missing it. Armando may spend time with resistance fighters and communists, he may be a target of government officials and assassins, he may be operating under an assumed name and false pretenses, but he is no warrior. He’s simply a man who mourns the loss of his wife, who wants to protect his son, and who wants to remember his mother.

Such simple desires appear throughout The Secret Agent. Filho uses the movie’s leisurely 161-minute runtime to linger on people being people. Couples sneak off to have sex. Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), who runs the refugee community, stops to listen to everyone from revelers to those suffering from headaches. In a touching but infuriating coda, the grown Fernando (also portrayed by Moura) speaks with a university student researching about Armando in the present day.

In each of these instances, we’re reminded that no matter how dangerous and nonsensical the regime may be, it cannot fully destroy the one thing that always stands against it: the mere existence the people.

Watching As Resistance

For most of us catching up with it during Oscar season, The Secret Agent is opaque and challenging, even when it’s thrilling. Filho’s eye for detail and penchant for surrealism makes the movie feel inaccessible for those who don’t understand the specifics of 1970s Brazil.

Yet, there are two things that every viewer of The Secret Agent has in common with those on screen. First, they are all human, and the passion, anger, love, and sorrow on screen connects us all, no matter how far away from Recife we may be. Second, we are watching a movie, and the characters in The Secret Agent are all cinephiles. They know that even pulpy stuff like Jaws and The Omen can create immediate, powerful reactions.

Those connections remind us of the work that The Secret Agent does, especially for viewers watching their own government become more petty, silly, and cruel. The movies show us human beings as human beings, they act as machines for empathy. And as long as there is empathy, no oppressive regime will succeed.

The Secret Agent streams on Hulu on March 1, 2026.

The Most Underrated Batman Animated Series Can Finally Be Streamed for Free

The opening credits sequence of Batman: The Animated Series defines that series’ take on the Dark Knight and, for many, the definitive take on Batman in any medium. Set to the theme Danny Elfman wrote for the 1989 film, the credits tell a short story, in which a pair of thugs escape from an exploding bank with loot in hand, only to be thwarted by Batman himself. The sequence fully establishes Batman as a creature of the night, his eyes narrowing at the sight of the cowardly criminals, him standing in victory as lightning strikes behind him.

On March 1, you can go to Tubi and see the very different opening credits of the 2008 cartoon show Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which has been added to the free streaming service. Batman hardly even casts a shadow as he runs through a cityscape, let alone skulks in one. Instead, he bursts with bright blues and yellows, befitting the jazzy score playing underneath images of him swinging past buildings or racing the Batmobile through the streets. Even better, the buildings are just silhouettes, not for the sake of moodiness, but to give space for names like “Elongated Man” and “Gentleman Ghost.”

Batman: The Brave and the Bold isn’t better than The Animated Series. But as the contrast between the two openings highlights, it’s not trying to live in its predecessor’s shadow. It’s doing something brave, bold, and outrageously different.

The Bright Knight

When the debut episode of The Brave and the Bold, “Rise of the Blue Beetle!” first aired on the Cartoon Network on November 14, 2008, it felt completely different. Between Frank Miller‘s work in the 1980s, the gothic Tim Burton movies, The Animated Series, and Christopher Nolan films such as The Dark Knight, which had released just months earlier, Batman had a clearly defined aesthetic. He was brooding and moody, constantly at odds with other people and with the darkness within him.

Brave and the Bold eschewed all of that. Before even getting to the titular hero in “Rise of the Blue Beetle,” the episode’s cold open found Batman not working along, but tied up alongside Green Arrow. The two have been caught in a death trap, dangling above some boiling liquid, while the Clock King cackles in delight. This is not the precise plain clothes sadist of The Animated Series, but rather a completely goofy version straight from the comics, with ostentatious regal garb and a clock for a face.

After he and Green Arrow find a way to escape the trap, they battle through a giant cuckoo clock while Batman monologues in voice over about how he and his fellow hero make each other better. Batman hurls batarangs at the robots that attack him, while Green Arrow deploys arrows with giant boxing gloves at the end. The two then launch themselves at the Clock King, with Batman quipping, “Lets clean the King’s clock!” All that before the episode’s A-plot, in which Batman helps the young Jaime Reyes find his confidence as the new Blue Beetle.

That’s a far cry from what was considered the standard Batman story in the late 2000s. But it was classic Batman all the way.

A Brave Old Take

Batman: The Brave and the Bold comes from producers Michael Jelenic, who would go on to make Teen Titans Go! and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and James Tucker, who worked with Bruce Timm on Superman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond.

That duo’s bonafides captures the unlikely but effective mixture at the heart of Brave and the Bold. As Tucker’s involvement suggests, there were plenty of elements recognizable from the so-called Timm-verse. Not only did Batman have the sort of barrel chest familiar to The Animated Series, but there was also the wide view of the DC Universe seen in later entries, especially Justice League Unlimited. But Jalenic’s influence underscores the show’s irreverence toward DC heroes, a willingness to embrace the silliest side of not just Batman, but everyone in Gotham, Metropolis, and beyond.

Brave and the Bold hearkens back to the pop art of the 1966 Batman series, especially in the strait-laced approach voice actor Diedrich Bader takes with the character. His growl may be entirely modern, but his penchant for puns and aphorisms could come from the mouth of Adam West. Visually, the show borrows from the clean lines of Alex Toth and the grotesques of Jerry Robinson, making each episode feel like an adaptation of a comic from DC’s checkerboard era.

That embrace of DC’s goofiest comics also influenced the stories in The Brave and the Bold. Each episode paired Batman with another hero, and set them against a classic villain. While big names such as Superman, Joker, and Lex Luthor do eventually make their presence known, the best episodes go deep into the bullipen. Batman joins forces with Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, and he takes the form of the ghostly knight from the Tangent Universe comics. A stand-out episode sees Batman and Black Canary join forces against the Music Meister, a villain who can control minds through song, voiced (of course) by Neil Patrick Harris.

At no point does the episode take any of these characters seriously. Yes, Batman usually ends by spouting some moral lesson, and there’s often real poignancy to the dramatic arcs (see the holiday episode “Invasion of the Secret Santas!” in which the android Red Tornado laments that he cannot experience the Christmas spirit). However, the series never mocks the characters either, not even the fourth-wall-breaking finale “Mitefall!,” in which the imp Bat-Mite (voiced by Paul Reubens, naturally) wraps up the series with a clip show of episodes we’ll never see.

Instead, Brave and the Bold understands that the world of DC superheroes is inherently silly and inherently a lot of fun. And that includes Batman, no matter how many people insist that the Dark Knight must stay dark.

Bold on Screen

Batman: The Brave and the Bold aired 65 episodes across three seasons but, like most Cartoon Network shows from WB, has been strangely hard to find. It bounced around the schedule in its original run, and was originally only released on DVD as episode collections until full seasons. While DVD and Blu-ray sets now exist, the show regularly gets added and removed from streaming services, even its most natural home on the Warner Bros-owned HBO Max.

There’s no telling how long Tubi will get to keep the show, but the timing couldn’t be better. We still have a long way to wait until the Dark Knight shows up on big screens again with The Batman: Part II and, unless Matt Reeves does a complete reversal, it will probably be as dour and grounded as the first film.

However, we do know that James Gunn has another Batman movie in the works, one that (unlike The Batman) will take place within the DCU. Moreover, we know that it will feature Robin as a major character, drawing inspiration from the Grant Morrison storyline Batman and Son, which introduced Bruce Wayne’s snotty ninja offspring, Damian. Moreover, we know that Gunn loves the Z-list weirdos who showed up in The Brave and the Bold, especially Bat-Mite.

We don’t know much more about Gunn’s Batman movie, but for those of us ready for a change from the gritty movies that have defined the Caped Crusader, we’re hoping that he’ll look to the cartoons for inspiration. And if that seems unlikely, well, just take a look at the title that Gunn has given the DCU film: The Brave and the Bold.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold streams for free on Tubi starting March 1, 2026.

Bugonia Cements Emma Stone as One of the Greatest Actresses of Her Generation

This article contains spoilers for Bugonia.

Anyone looking at any of the promotional materials for the Oscar-nominated sci-fi comedy Bugonia can safely assume the movie’s tone, if not its plot. After all, it’s the latest collaboration between idiosyncratic Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, who previously starred in The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness. The poster and trailer prominently featured Stone’s character Michelle Fuller staring out at the camera, her head shaved and her body covered in white goo. Clearly, it seemed like Stone would once again give a brave, weird, and otherworldly performance in another Lanthimos oddity.

Bugonia is weird, there’s no doubt. And Stone certainly gives it her all, allowing herself to be vulnerable and disparaged on screen. But the most impressive part of Stone’s work is the humanity she brings to Fuller, enriching the film’s themes and establishing her as one of the greatest actresses in Hollywood today.

A Real Human Being

A remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan, Bugonia follows conspiracy theorist Don (Jesse Plemons) as he and his autistic cousin Teddy (Aidan Delbis) kidnap high-powered CEO Michelle Fuller. Don is convinced that Fuller belongs to an alien race called the Andromedans, and that she uses her position atop the pharmaceutical corporation Auxolith to transform Earthlings into slaves, a plot he uncovered by studying the planet’s dying honeybee population.

Against expectation, Stone is at her broadest in the first act of the movie, before Fuller gets abducted by Don and Teddy. She sashays into boardrooms and stumbles while recording a video on work/life balance as if she’s in a Saturday Night Live skit about girl bosses. None of these scenes give credence to Don’s theories, but they do establish Fuller as an unlikable, out-of-touch rich person. Even the scenes in which Teddy and Don abduct Fuller are played for laughs, with Stone varying between precise martial arts moves and frantic flailing to escape her attackers.

As soon as she wakes up in Don’s basement to find her head shaved and her limbs in chains, Stone changes her approach. Initially, she allows Fuller to register some shock and confusion as she tries to make sense of the situation. Next, she plays a woman very used to getting her own way, as Fuller lays out, in very plain language, security protocols for Don and Teddy. Finally, after realizing that Don truly believes that she is an alien, she plays sympathetic and understanding with him, even as she insists that he’s wrong.

In the span of five minutes, Stone gives her character three different communication styles. But none of them goes over the top, none of them involves the easy hysterics that a lesser actor would use when playing an abductee. Instead, she keeps playing real, playing it like she’s a human interacting with humans—which is the entire point of the movie, even if it’s not the point of the scene.

Compassion in the Chaos

As in the original Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia ends with a terrifying reveal. Don and Teddy were right. Fuller is an Andromedan, and she has been using her company to experiment on humans. However, her people were not, in fact, turning humans into slaves. Rather, Andromedans created humans in their image, an act of apology to the Earth after accidentally killing off the dinosaurs.

As much as they hoped the humans would flourish on Earth and make it better, the Andromedans watched in horror as people destroyed the planet and each other. Fuller has been on a mission to guide Earth’s residents toward enlightenment and happiness. But they just keep acting like Don, wallowing in hatred and fear.

After a wonderfully retro sequence in which Fuller returns to her ship, declares the Earth experiment a failure, and pops the atmosphere, we’re treated to shots from all around the world, all immediately dead after Fuller’s actions.

While that ending is indeed darkly funny, and could be read as mean-spirited, Lanthimos and his screenwriter Will Tracy retain a sympathy toward people, even deeply flawed people like Fuller’s captors. Beyond the inherent sweetness in Delbis’s performance, there’s the reveal that Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) has been in a coma since she participated in a drug test for Auxolith. Even a shocking admission by local sheriff Casey (Stavros Halkias) that he molested Teddy when they were younger comes across in deeply sad, humane ways. It never justifies the harm that Casey did, but it acknowledges that a flawed human being acted upon another human being.

Taken together, Bugonia plays like a wild plea for people to be good to the planet and to each other, to stop acting the way we’ve been acting for millennia. But that plea would be easily laughed away if Stone ever allowed the viewer to dismiss her as a weirdo, as something wholly unknowable and unrelatable. Instead, Stone retains Bugonia‘s empathetic core by keeping Fuller as a real person.

Real Award-Worthy Work

Of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture, Bugonia feels the most unlikely. Yes, The Favourite and Poor Things established Lanthimos as an Oscar player, but a film involving kidnapping, alien invaders, and the end of the world hardly feels like it fits alongside One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, or Sinners. Yet, its message is just as relevant as any of those, urging for systemic change and compassion.

That message would fail without Stone’s work as Fuller. Even though she faces a stacked Best Actress category, against four other women who have done incredible work, no one had a challenge quite as demanding, or succeeded so marvelously, as Emma Stone, truly one of the best actresses of our generation.

Bugonia is now streaming on Peacock.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Stars Discuss Season 2’s “Tragic Throuple”

This article contains plot details from the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 premiere.

For a show that has both Godzilla and King Kong in it, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a surprisingly human story. Yes, giant Titans occasionally fight each other and destroy a bunch of presumably expensive property along the way, but the Apple TV series’ real hook is its characters, who are all tied together in a sort of time-wimey web that’s very hard to explain.

Set across two distinct timelines and in between the events of several other franchise properties, Legacy of Monsters has a little bit of everything: kaiju, worlds between worlds, an interdimensional rift, multi-generational family drama, and an incredibly tragic love triangle that’s tangled up in the foundation of the organization that gives the show its name. Its second season leans hard into its human element, a choice that the show’s creators say is a deliberate one.

“We always talk about the fact that the monsters are so oftentimes a metaphor for what we’re facing as humans,” executive producer Tory Tunnell tells Den of Geek. “Monsters are this existential threat. They represent the things that are out of our control. We’ve talked a lot about how in our show we’ve really felt like this season we’ve earned the title Legacy of Monsters, and how are the choices that we make, how do those create the monsters in our own life? What are the consequences that our actions have? We see that both literally and figuratively.”

Nowhere is this theme more apparent than in the relationship between scientists Bill Randa (Anders Holm) and Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and army sergeant Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell in separate timelines). Much of the show’s first season explored the early days of the group’s friendship, Keiko’s romantic feelings for both men, and the lead-up to their founding of Monarch, with a kaiju sighting or two along the way. But what makes their relationship so compelling is that all three of them form deep and very real bonds with one another, outside of anything romantic that may or may not be going on.

“I think Billy and Keiko are powered by passion, and I think that Lee is more task-oriented,” Anders Holm, who plays Billy, says when asked about the group’s unique dynamic. “Lee’s given a task, and it’s like, ‘I’m either going to complete the mission or not.’ And then he meets the two of us and is linked up into our passion, and he’s like, ‘Oh, there’s more than just completing the task. There are living, breathing aspects of the journey that become part of you.’ I don’t think he expects that. And I think that’s what he clicks with Keiko about, and I think that Keiko and Billy share the passion aspect.”

But in a rare move, Legacy of Monsters’ primary love triangle isn’t constructed in a traditional “who will she choose” kind of way. Yes, Keiko ends up marrying Bill, but their relationship doesn’t make her feelings for Lee go away, nor does it damage the two men’s friendship with each other. In fact, things just kind of get more complicated all around, as the three chase Titans and butt heads about what kind of organization Monarch is supposed to be. At least until one of them is pulled into a pit by monsters in Kazakhstan.

“I think that the problem is that they all love each other, like Lee and Billy too, all the same — probably intensely — and that’s what makes it complicated, but also compelling and tragic,” Yamamoto says. “The throuple [vibe] is something that we’ve accepted. It’s baked into the name. It’s just … supposed to be tragic.”

The connection between all three only gets deeper and messier in the series’ second season, especially now that Keiko has returned from the interdimensional portal world known as Axis Mundi to find that over 50 years have passed in her absence. Bill is dead, Lee has grown old, she has a pair of grandchildren, and is now technically younger than her own son. It’s kind of a lot. And though it’s evident she still loves Lee — after all, only something like 60 days have passed for her — she is also confronted with the fact that he’s not entirely the person she remembers.

“It’s interesting. Looking back at how I played it, I think there’s a lot of disorientation around who Lee has become because she’s expecting him to be the same person [she left],” Yamamoto says. “But there are things that she hears and snippets of things she sees, which isn’t who he used to be. So there’s an adjustment that happens, and more and more as the season goes on, I think she understands that he’s lived a whole life that she doesn’t know about. Ultimately, I think she finds that he’s become a different person — but I think, maybe the core of who you are never really changes. But in some ways, he’s not who she remembers him to be.”

Yet, despite everything, the two remain drawn together, and it is their complicated reconnection — as well as the search for a series of interdimensional portals that was once Billy’s life’s work and answers about what really happened to him on Skull Island — that powers much of the season to come.

“In the end, I feel like it’s beyond love,” Yamamoto says. “It’s just some karmic thing. The tragic throuple. They talk to each other and are connected over space and time, and that’s what’s beautiful about it.”

New episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters premiere Fridays on Apple TV.

What Hollywood’s Hays Code Era Can Teach Us About the Warner/Paramount Merger

Things have gone from bad to worse in the pop culture landscape. After months of worry about what Netflix and its antagonism toward movie theaters would do with Warner Bros., the streamer has withdrawn its bid and now Paramount is poised to acquire its longtime rival. While it would be somewhat better for another studio that has silent era roots and at least an appreciation for the cinematic experience to take over Warner, Paramount’s current CEO David Ellison has been quite open in his plans to create material that pleases the current administration.

If there’s a sliver of hope to be found in this turn of events, it can be found in the early days of Hollywood. In 1922, Adolph Zukor, who ran the studio Famous Players-Lasky and recently acquired smaller competitor Paramount, met with other Hollywood heads to discuss the rising public outcry against immoral movie content. Hoping to stave off government interference and to protect their profits, Zukor and the other studio heads formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. They appointed as head of the group Will Hays, former postmaster general and President Warren G. Harding crony to help clean up Hollywood’s image.

What followed was a decade of mass censorship in the movies. But a contradictory and creative spirit also followed, resulting in some of the best movies in Hollywood history.

Sanitizing Cinema

Five years after the MPDAA formed, the organization agreed on a list of guidelines, a collection of “Don’ts” and “Be carefuls” intended to help filmmakers avoid public scrutiny. The former included bans on profanity or nudity, as well as “miscegenation” (romantic interactions between people of different races), and ridicule of the clergy. The latter spanned from use of the American flag and religious ceremonies to depictions of safe-cracking or law-enforcement officers.

Certainly, the studio heads encouraged their filmmakers to follow these rules… as long as they didn’t interfere with profits. But if the public wanted to see violent gangsters gunning down their enemies, the Warner Bros weren’t about to tell Darryl F. Zanuck not to make The Public Enemy. They would just hope that the other studio heads would be more faithful to the rules, and they certainly wouldn’t fear any reprimand from Hays.

Despite the big box office returns from The Public Enemy, Scarface, and Little Caesar in the early ’30s, religious and community groups demanded more attention, and the MPDAA had to amend the code to create the Motion Picture Authority in 1934. From that point on, no movie theatre—which were then owned by the studios—would play a film without MPA certification.

That addition of real consequences to the MPA coincided with the assent of a man who was willing to wield them, Joseph Breen. All film scripts made their way through Breen’s office, and everyone from studio heads to directors to actors complained about the battles they had to wage against Breen to get their movies made.

And what kind of films did Hollywood release during this two decade era of increased censorship? Only some of the best movies ever made.

Encoded Resistance

While some certainly recognized its significance, most moviegoers in 1941 didn’t leave the theaters after watching Citizen Kane thinking they’d just watched one of the greatest movies ever made. Heck, some didn’t get to see it at all, as exhibitors feared reprisal from Nelson Rockefeller and William Randolph Hearst, the latter of whom inspired Orson Welles‘ character Charles Foster Kane. And yet, despite pressure within and without, Citizen Kane did make it to theaters as both an angry polemic against the strength of the rich and a dazzling technical achievement.

That same year, audiences could watch Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade lech on grieving women, grouch about incompetent police, and down copious amounts of alcohol in The Maltese Falcon. Writer and director John Huston, adapting the hard-boiled novel by Dashiell Hammett, had to fight Breen about Spade’s sexual activities and his hard drinking, losing the battle about the former but winning the right to keep plenty of the latter. But even with those concessions, Huston brought to the screen a moody, bleak bit of work with no reverence for authority.

Some might dismiss the previous year’s His Girl Friday as a breezy screwball comedy, thanks to the rapid pace that director Howard Hawks shot the one-liners that Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell fire at each other as reporters and former lovers Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson. But driving their will they/won’t they energy is an upsetting story about anarchists, dead cops, and sleazy reporters. There’s just as much ill-repute and excellent filmmaking at work here as in the other greats of the era.

And that doesn’t even get into the nastier noirs, the more absurd Marx Bros comedies, or the innuendo-laden Preston Sturges films. In some ways, Breen and the Hays code made movies better, because they forced directors to get more creative with the way they told their stories.

Audience Autonomy

As we stare down the prospect of another corporate merger shrinking the potential to make movies and deal with the ramifications of conservative politics being prioritized over art, that last sentence seems foolish. Certainly, Welles, Huston, and Hawkes would have preferred to have simply made the movies they wanted to make, without having to deal with Breen and the Production Code Authority. Perhaps saying that the movies are better is just apologizing for a horrible regime.

But even if we don’t want to say that the Hays Code made for better movies, we can at least agree that the code didn’t destroy movies. No matter how much control those in power wanted to exert over the creation and reception of films, moviemakers and movie watchers continued to find meaning in the cinematic arts, even meaning that directly resisted those power brokers.

So while Paramount may very well acquire Warner Bros. and David Ellison may very well use his clout to create a right-wing media empire, the Hays era reminds us that no rich person can control what we as humans do with the art we create.

Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz’s New Mummy Movie Will ‘Push PG-13 Boundaries’

In 1999 director Stephen Sommers made The Mummy, an action romp starring Brendan Fraser as treasure hunter Rick O’Connell and Rachel Weisz as librarian turned Egyptologist Evelyn Carnahan. Together they woke the mummified remains of high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo). Adventures and peril followed, as well as two sequels— one of which saw Weisz replaced by Maria Bello as Evie.

The first two are beloved. The third, not so much.

Now almost two decades later, horror mavens Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, best known for Ready or Not, Scream VI, and Abigail, are resurrecting the series, bringing Weisz and Fraser back together again to star. And while recently chatting with us, the direction portion of the Radio Silence collective was ready to unearth some of their own mummified past with Den of Geek.

“One of the first projects that Tyler and I did was called ‘The Treasure Hunt,’ and it’s a little online YouTube interactive adventure thing; it’s Indiana Jones and Mummy adjacent,” says Bettinelli-Olpin, talking ahead of the release of their own gory sequel, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. “That whole genre is in our DNA. It’s ingrained, we just love it so much.”

The two are absolutely stoked to be able to bring the franchise back to life, having grown up with the original. They’re also keen to make it a bit of their own, bringing their unique sensibilities to the material.

“We want to push that PG-13 rating, because that’s how the first movie was for us,” Gillett smiles. “It had all of the fun action-adventure flavors but it also wasn’t afraid to be scary and cut away right at the nick of time. So bringing our genre sensibility into that has already been just really fun. There’s a level of magic and mythology that has created a lot of opportunities to do fun things.”

If their slate is anything to go by, we can expect big set pieces, thrills and as much horror carnage as the rating will allow.

A thread that comes across through must of their work including Ready or Not, Abigail and even their first feature, Devil’s Due, is a marrying of ancient and modern; the mythical with the grounded. Ready or Not and its sequel, for example, follows ultra-rich people who control the world as we see it today, who have made a pact with a primeval evil.

“We’ve already been talking a lot about that on The Mummy,” Bettinelli-Olpins says. “How do we bring a modern feel to stuff within the world of the movie? Not like modern filmmaking, but how do you get a sense of something that at the time would be extremely modern? We love that idea, we love it in everything we do, there’s something about that clash of institutions and foundations, and then the modern interpretation crashing into that.”

The two say it’s amazing to have Brendan Frasier and Rachel Weisz back together, “their chemistry is so lovely,” they agree.

The script for the new Mummy movie will be by David Coggeshall, which Gillett described to Empire as “very beautiful and sweeping and scary and fun,” and the film, which is currently in preproduction, is slated for a May 2028 release.

Before then we’ll get more mummy action with Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a supernatural horror produced by Jason Blum and James Wan—Cronin made Evil Dead Rise for Warner Bros./New Line Cinema in 2023.

Ahead of that you can satisfy you’re genre itch with Ready or Not 2 premiering at SXSW next month before opening in theaters on March 20.

Cressida, Eloise, Hyacinth: Who Is Bridgerton’s Next Lady Whistledown?

The following contains spoilers for Bridgerton season 4.

One of the most unexpected twists in Bridgerton season 4 was Penelope’s decision to retire as the infamous Lady Whistledown. Her decision makes a certain amount of sense, if only because she’s so happily settled in her own personal life. But the ton abhors a vacuum, and the reveal that someone had simply taken over her mantle probably shouldn’t feel as surprising as it does. (Outright stealing Penelope’s brand and reputation like that is something else, though.)

“Are you perhaps feeling a little shock?” asks the new Whistledown (still voiced by Julie Andrews, thank goodness.) “You thought I was gone for good, but far too much transpires for this author to remain silent. It is assuredly a reunion rooted in care and love. Though this time with a very different author.”

Of course, this naturally leaves us all wondering once more: Who is Lady Whistledown? Here are a few of the most likely choices to pick up the infamous gossip monger’s quill.

Eloise Bridgerton

Honestly, it’s kind of amazing that Eloise isn’t regularly publishing her own newsletter already. Though season 4 saw her soften some of her most vehement criticism of marriage as an oppressive institution that controls women, she’s hardly chomping at the bit to enter into it herself. She’s also certainly got the free time to pick up a quill and the level of access to society that would allow her to discover most of the same information her best friend did.

Still, Eloise is perhaps the unlikeliest of our options, if only because now that we’re back in book-accurate romance order, season 5 should be her turn as the series’ main character. And since we’ve already seen Penelope attempt to juggle love alongside her secret pen name, such a twist would involve retreading fairly familiar ground. Now, should the show’s fifth outing turn out to be about Francesca instead, all bets are off. But it’s likely Bridgerton will give her some time to mourn before throwing her back into a romance.

Cressida Penwood

The woman formerly known as Cressida Cowper has already claimed to be Lady Whistledown once. Sure, it was a lie, but we shouldn’t put it past Bridgerton to pull a sneaky switch and make her lie eventually turn out to be true. And, to her credit, Cressida was smart enough to figure out that Penelope was Lady Whistledown before she announced herself. Yes, she tried to blackmail her with that information, but isn’t that just good business?

However, season 4 seemed to be somewhat leaning into the idea that Cressida is reformed. She’s seen the error of her ways, settled down, and has even made a point of proactively apologizing to Eloise and Penelope for all that she did to them. Furthermore, there’s no real reason for Cressida to take up the Whistledown mantle, other than sheer love of the gossip game. (Which admittedly isn’t nothing.) But she’s married now, and to someone who isn’t old enough to be her father, thankfully, meaning that she no longer needs the independence (or money) that her original scheme would have brought her.

Hyacinth Bridgerton

In all honesty, Hyacinth Bridgerton would make a perfect Lady Whistledown. She’s young, obsessed with society, desperate to be part of things, and a huge fan of the OG scandal sheet. Her upset at Penelope’s decision to quit is both loud and evident. (How will anyone name her the season’s diamond when it’s her turn to debut if there’s no one writing about it?) The show is unlikely to get to her book for at least three seasons, which means Hyacinth needs something to do with no romance on the horizon. And her new sister-in-law, Sophie, has already taught her how to blend in: Pretend to be of the lower classes. Hyacinth’s delight at realizing that she can pretty much do anything as long as she pretends to be a maid feels an awful lot like it could be foreshadowing how she’ll collect information in the future.

The only downside is that Hyacinth is quite young and hasn’t technically entered proper society yet. She’s unlikely to hear much good gossip from her younger compatriots and would surely be missed if she were constantly sneaking off to infiltrate her way into balls dressed as a servant. But it surely would be fun to watch her try.

Mrs. Varley

Bridgerton season 4 is the series’ most class-conscious yet, acknowledging both the privilege most of its main characters exist in and all the ways that the servants are who really make the proverbial trains run on time. That a servant — a maid, a footman, a butler — might decide to pick up Penelope’s mantle makes a ton of sense. After all, they’re uniquely positioned to both have access to the upper-class elites they’d want to cover and to be able to move among them largely unnoticed. (Hyancinth ably proves this point for us in season 4.)

The most obvious candidate among the regular servants has to be Mrs. Varley. The Featherington housekeeper is lauded multiple times this season for her ability to suss out information and find out things her employers need to know. She’d be an amazing Lady Whistledown from a gossip-gathering perspective. And the concept of making her broadsheet a servant’s commentary on those around them is an appealing one. It would allow the show to still pretend to care about some of the class issues it raised in season 4, while keeping its focus firmly on the ton’s elite. But does the show still care about those issues now that Sophie’s rags-to-riches romance has it’s happily ever after? It’s probably too soon to tell.

Penelope Bridgerton

What if this is all one big bait and switch? Penelope mentions several times over the course of the season how frustrated she is by what Lady Whistledown has turned into. Everyone knows who she is now, meaning that they either blame her for everything she writes or are somehow angry with her for what she doesn’t include in her broadsheets. She gets manipulated by the queen, has to deal with people constantly trying to use her formerly secret identity for their own ends, and doesn’t even get all that much good gossip anymore, since it’s not like she can hide who she is while she’s out and about. If Penelope wanted to fully reclaim her gossip empire and decouple it from her personal life, there are certainly worse ways to go about it than to fake a death of the author, if you will.

That said, her surprise at the arrival of a new Whistledown seems genuine enough, as do her reasons for hanging up her quill. She’s got a young child and a hot husband at home, and doesn’t need the independence and safety net the role once offered her. Plus, she’s still writing and has even started a novel. She’s truly achieved the best of both worlds. Would she risk all of that to reclaim her secret identity?

Matthew Lillard on the Legacy of Scream, ‘90s Hollywood and the Tarantino Incident

Back in the day, Matthew Lillard planned to be Billy Loomis before he became Stu Macher. Either way you slice it, he was on the precipice of making a killing when he first arrived in Hollywood as a hungry young actor and was handed a Kevin Williamson screenplay called Scary Movie (later Scream). When we sit down with Lillard 30 years after the fact, he reveals he still remembers the first time he met Billy and Stu, and their fateful phone tag games.

“It’s totally clear,” Lillard says with a conspiratorial smile. He was in the Hollywood Hills, staying in the additional dwelling unit—a fancy term for a dilapidated pool house in the back—of film critic Bill Harris. The At the Movies TV reviewer was an acquaintance of Lillard’s mother, who actually raised the young burgeoning thespian not too far from the City of Angels. But that was before Lillard had seriously pursued acting, moving as far as the prestigious Circle in the Square Theatre School in Manhattan to become a stage performer.

“I was a New York actor, and it was just so much harder to get auditions,” says Lillard, “so I came out to LA for a week, and after landing, my agency out here was said, ‘We want you to meet people.’ So I got these two really great auditions immediately.” One of them was the aforementioned Scary Movie, which Lillard read alone at night, with only two lights and the sounds of the city creeping through a pool house’s wooden slants.

“I’m in the hills, so it’s like coyotes everywhere, and I’m reading the opening sequence, and I finished [the part where Casey Becker is gutted], and I remember shutting it because I was too scared to read on. That’s how terrifying that first sequence was in the movie.”

It also would change his life when he auditioned to play one of the two high school kids who did the gutting, specifically chief secret psychopath Billy Loomis. Yet when Lillard auditioned for the part with casting director Lisa Beach, she didn’t see it. She flatly told Lillard “you’re not Billy,” but she was curious what he could do with Stu—a character he hadn’t rehearsed or studied but who he would be allowed to audition for in a couple hours when Scream’s director, Wes Craven, swung by the office. Lillard did exactly that, apparently improvising a lot of the infectious tics and spasms now synonymous with the character.

Says Lillard, “I had that same energy that I’ve always had, and at the end of the audition, Wes looked at me and said ‘Well, that was pretty fantastic. Do you think you’d want to play this part?’ I’m like, y-eah!”

It was a turning point in Lillard’s career, one which he confides has seen long peaks and valleys when we meet up at a jazzy New York brasserie the night after a blizzard. These days he might even feel like the experience is turbo-charged since, along with Paul Dano and Owen Wilson, Lillard was on the receiving end of Quentin Tarantino’s inexplicable surprise attack on actors the director does not care to watch. Yet by Lillard’s own telling, the amount of support he immediately experienced throughout the industry from co-stars he works with to this day like Neve Campbell of the Scream franchise, or those he worked with once more than a decade ago, such as George Clooney on The Descendants, was an out-of-body experience.

This moment, specifically, feels like a new peak for Lillard who 30 years after seeing Stu Macher die by having a TV dropped on his head is seemingly back in Scream 7. And when we chat, it is right before a long celebratory dinner with fellow Circle in the Square Theatre alumni following a marathon reading of Tracy Letts plays.

All of which gives Lillard perspective, especially of those early days when he was coming up with peers and classmates in the 1990s Hollywood horror scene: contemporaries like Paul Rudd, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Freddie Prinze Jr. Looking back now, he surprisingly reveals his mindset from that era was “bleak,” especially when some were getting the leads and he was being cast in supporting roles. But he also describes that time as “lovely” and informative. We discuss that time and place, Lillard’s appreciation for his community’s support after Tarantino’s dismissal, and just what his real reading is on Stu and Billy’s relationship in the conversation below, which has been edited for length.

I wanted to begin by asking you something that has been on my mind for nearly 30 years. If Stu Macher had lived, what would he say when his parents got home?

“I’m sorry, I blew it. I followed the wrong influence.”

And do you think he might have meant that?

It’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever played that out. “I did it all for love” is probably what he would have said.

Was it love in your mind?

I don’t really know. He’s got that line about “peer pressure, I’m far too sensitive.” So I definitely think there’s that high school thing that for Kevin Williamson is a cheeky moment. But you know, over the years it’s developed that we are these two young gay boys. Somebody called us “the First Husbands of Horror,” and I think the two of us [Lillard and Ulrich] really glommed onto that because in the current situation we’re living in politically—with the religious right pushing their authority over people who are different, people with different sexual identities, different genders, this idea of pushing back against wokeness—I think we both hold onto that moniker because it’s important to us.

If there’s a kid out there that needs these two characters to be gay because they’re a horror fan, and that somehow makes them feel seen, then I will stand chest-out and say they’re two gay young men and there’s nothing you can fucking do about it.

How would you describe that energy you brought to Stu and maybe other characters you’ve played?

Certainly early on there’s a youthful exuberance about my work that was really about trying to be the best actor I could on every line I had. New York at the time when I was coming up, the craft was such a big deal, the work was such a big deal, right? And I think that back then, it certainly differentiated actors in New York versus LA. It’s one of the reasons I came to New York. I wanted that next level of credibility and I wanted to be pushed.

So back then, I think in those early days, I tried to be brilliant every line. Every line I tried to have a reason packed with meaning, packed with motivation, making bold choices, and it’s funny as I would always come to work with this whole arsenal of choices, and the reality is that a lot of times, directors are paying attention to a million things, and number six or seven or eight on the call sheet isn’t one of them. So a lot of times early in my career, directors just let me do what I wanted to do. They’re more interested in getting shots, making sure the leads are right. So I feel like a lot of the stuff I did just sort of snuck past.

When Scream came out it was a big deal for horror, but it was also a big deal for Hollywood. What was it like being a young actor coming up in that scene in the ‘90s?

That’s a good question. I always wanted to be—and I still want to be—number one on the call sheet. I want to be the guy carrying whatever I’m doing, right? Nobody wants to play in the NBA and be the guy on the bench that doesn’t play. So for me, I always wanted more, and for the longest time, especially in the early ‘90s, I don’t think I was ever really satisfied because I was always in competition with other people. I was constantly in competition with Freddie Prinze Jr. I was constantly in competition with Paul Rudd. They don’t know that, but in that moment, I wanted their jobs. And every time I was the second, third, fourth, or fifth banana, I took it like an indictment on my work in a lot of ways because I was like, “Well, why don’t I get a chance to be number one on the call sheet?”

Is it my work? Is it because I don’t have great abs? What is it about me that wasn’t getting that job? So for the longest time in the early ‘90s, I was eternally jealous and it was a horrible place to live a career.

Also, for me, acting was more than just a job. It was like everything I was about. I started two theater companies. I’ve been acting since I was 14. I am surrounded by all these incredible artists. All these people are incredible actors. My life’s acting. So when I wasn’t working, I would be calling my agent, my manager, like, ‘What’s next? Did I get that job? When’s my next audition?’ I would just be desperate for work. So I would say that during the ‘90s, it was pretty bleak, even though it was wildly successful. It was never enough to satisfy anything.

Was there any camaraderie as well in the horror scene? You mentioned Paul Rudd, famously of Halloween 6, of course, and you obviously were friends with Freddie and Sarah, and Neve.

Yeah, I definitely think so. I mean, Neve and I dated for a hot minute, so that thing of gathering and going to parties, or having friends over, or going to a bar or grabbing dinner, that was super relevant because we were all friends. This idea of the Hollywood scene is hilarious. It really just ends up being who are you friends with? Your friends are the people you work with, and they just happen to also be working actors.

So we would go and play games, we would go and play pool. You would go to dinner and we’d all hang out and bullshit. It’s not like we were doing drugs and bouncing around town. We were just fucking friends that happen to have weird jobs. So I do think there’s a world where people are there to be seen or trying to status-climb, or be in the right scene. But the reality is that back in the ‘90s, it was all people we hung out with because we were just friends. It’s a very different thing.

It’s interesting, nobody’s ever asked me about the ‘90s scene, so I don’t have any reflection on it, but my memory of it is that it was super lovely. There’s no Instagram, there’s no TikTok, you know, the world was just a simpler place. And to me, it was about working. If I wasn’t working, I didn’t know who I was.

To jump ahead, one of your more recent co-stars, George Clooney, said some very nice things about you recently. You’ve since said his and other coworkers’ comments were like reading your own wake. Did anyone you’ve worked with personally reach out and specifically say something that meant a lot?

Being validated by industry peers out loud meant a lot. James Gunn doesn’t have to say anything. Mike Flanagan doesn’t have to say anything. George Clooney certainly doesn’t have to stand on stage and defend all three of us. Not that we needed defense, but I’ll tell you that the thing I have really deeply appreciated is the person on the street or who at a bar will come over and be like, ‘Hey, F that guy.’ It’s one thing to read it from anonymous people online, it’s another for someone to break human barriers, come into space, and say, ‘FYI, you mean a lot to me and my family.’ That to me is super rewarding.

You know, I’ve been around a long time. And I’ve had moments of great performances and great bounties. I’m in one right now. I’ve had moments where I don’t know if I’m ever gonna work again. So the great thing about being older is that you have a depth of appreciation that you never had as a young man. So these moments remind you that you have an impact.

We were speaking about camaraderie with your peers starting out earlier. Do you feel it even more so today?

Yeah, because there’s a rallying call, right? You could be driving along blissfully and have no idea anyone’s thinking about you, and all of a sudden a pebble drops in a huge ocean, and it’s like everyone comes running. This bell went off that said it’s time to remember this person.

Somebody once asked me what is the performance you want people to remember most. And the reality is that I’d actually rather people remember who I am on set, how I treat fans, how I treat actors, how I treat my students when I teach. That to me is way more important than if you liked Stu Macher.

You mentioned your students. What is the most important lesson about this craft you want to pass on to the next generation?

That’s a great question. Every time you work, you’re collecting hours and you’re collecting experience. It’s not about what’s next, it’s about duration and longevity. And the greatest thing teaching taught me is that it allowed me to put language to my own beliefs around my own craft and practice.

I went to Circle in the Square Theatre School. I’m an alumni of the school. I’m very proud of the work that school does but I was given thought bubbles to what great acting meant, and it’s not until I have to live it, articulate it in others, and then in a laboratory, which is the classroom where I see it in practice, that I understand really what my beliefs are. If you’re arguing politics or religion and at some point you don’t feel connected to the argument, you know you’re not arguing based on your beliefs. You’re arguing based on what you think are facts.

And it’s when you are arguing full-chest with everything you have that you know that this is a core tenet of who you are as a person. Same thing with teaching. What am I as an artist? What do I believe? Well, I’m going to apply those beliefs directly to people in the process.

You mentioned longevity, and you’ve had longevity. What is the greatest lesson you’ve learned from that?

That it doesn’t matter. Whatever Scream 7 does on this upcoming Friday, or Thursday starting at midnight, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that on the other side of this bar, I have fucking 10 actors who I am so excited to go spend the next three hours talking to. It is who you travel with in this job, in this career, that gives you joy.

I have zero fucks to give about a box office number, but we did a reading of Tracy Letts’ plays, in which I sat in a room and read scripts for five hours on Friday and I’ve never been happier. The community and the people you gather with is the reason to do anything.

AKOTSK: Dunk’s Knighting Remained Ambiguous at George R.R. Martin’s Request

Any universe as sprawling and full of lore as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is bound to be full of unanswered questions, narrative gaps, and unconfirmed theories. Granted, the smaller scale of something like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t lend itself to the scope of the theories fans regularly debated so vigorously on Game of Thrones (R + L = J, Maggy the Frog’s prophecies, Cleganebowl), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t similar lingering questions from the original novellas that readers are hoping the show might one day clear up. And one of the biggest (no pun intended) centers around Ser Duncan the Tall.

No, it’s not whether he’s actually an ancestor of Brienne of Tarth, one of Westeros’ other famous tall knights. (That seems pretty well confirmed, actually.) It’s the question of whether he’s actually a knight at all. The show opens with the death of Ser Arlan of Pennytree, the knight whom Dunk served as a squire. But while he almost immediately begins referring to himself as a knight in his former master’s place, we never actually see the ceremony that made him one. This is, of course, because it may not have happened at all. Or, it might have. We just don’t know. And that’s on purpose, apparently by way of a direct request from Martin himself.

“There is no confirmation, one way or the other, coming out of that scene.” Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner Ira Parker said during a recent interview with Collider. “That’s exactly how Mr. R.R. Martin requested it. It remains [ambiguous], and people can decide for themselves.

The series is very careful to never commit to either answer. Dunk tells people Ser Arlan knighted him, but offers no actual proof. He’s called away before he has to knight Raymun Fossoway prior to his trial of seven, leaving the duty to Lyonel Barathoen and allowing the show to neatly avoid the question of whether he can even perform the task legitimately. In the season finale, we see a flashback in which Dunk asks an ailing Ser Arlan why he’s never knighted him, a question Pennytree doesn’t answer. But that’s not the end of Ser Arlan’s life or of their story together. There’s every possibility he knighted him later, in the gaps between this moment and the one in which we saw Dunk bury him. In short, it really could go either way.

“At that moment, Dunk had never been knighted by Ser Arlan,” Parker explains. “He says, ‘Why did you never knight me?’ And then, Ser Arlan dies, and we think it’s over. But then, he’s back and, as far as we know, the continuation of that scene is, ‘Boy, go get me my sword,’ and then he knights him.”

Of course, if the first season of this show has taught us anything, it’s that the answer to this question doesn’t really matter. Sure, it’s possible that Dunk is regularly referring to himself using a title he never received. But when it comes down to it, he still chooses to behave like one, whether he technically is or not. He defends the innocent, honors his friends, and tries to do right by the least fortunate around him. What’s all of that stacked against a ceremony?

“This whole journey is going to be about what makes a true knight,” Parker says. “Whether or not you’re given the title, or if you have to earn the title even after you’re given it. Can you earn it, even if you’ve never been given it?”

Starfleet Academy: Mary Wiseman Breaks Down Sylvia Tilly’s Star Trek Return

The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 8.

Since Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is set during the years immediately following the events of Star Trek: Discovery, it’s natural that the former should reference the latter fairly regularly. Admiral Vance makes frequent appearances, Commander Jett Reno is an instructor, and there are frequent references to the U.S.S. Discovery helping out on various missions and rescues. In “The Light of the Stars”, another familiar face returns: Sylvia Tilly, the sunny former Discovery crew member turned Academy instructor, whose infectiously bright personality was such a highlight of that series.

Tilly’s return is just one piece in the larger puzzle of this episode, an hour that explores grief and healing through the lens of communal experience, all filtered through Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our Town. But while we may not spend as much time with her as some of us (read: me) might like, “The Light of the Stars” offers fans a lovely glimpse at how much Tilly has grown since we last saw her.

“I felt like she’s really settled into herself,” Mary Wiseman, who plays Tilly, tells Den of Geek. “In Discovery, I thought she was always battling some level of imposter syndrome being on the ship, and I didn’t detect that in the writing of this. And I love it that she really did find her place here and has found a deep comfort and confidence in being a teacher. It’s satisfying that she really has landed somewhere where she can feel like she belongs and use her skills effectively.”

Invited to campus to help the struggling cadets try to process their lingering grief and trauma in the wake of a classmate’s death during a training mission (as well as the fact that several of them were attacked and held hostage by a vicious gang of aliens at the same time), Tilly turns to the unifying and emotional power of performing theater. An unorthodox method to be sure, but one that turns out to be surprisingly effective.

‘There is something about engaging with theater, acting in it, and buying into it that is allergic to having walls up,” Wiseman says. “You really have to open yourself and be vulnerable and give in to the text and the world that’s created there. The sense Tilly has when presented with the issue the cadets are facing right now is that they need to move through this experience, but they’re already [building] walls to try to batten down the hatches and move through it. But what needs to happen for them to experience real growth and for them to develop resiliency against these kinds of events is to [face] them openly and with vulnerability. In Tilly’s mind, this is the perfect challenge to get them through this. And I think she models a kind of anti-coolness, an anti-toughness approach to processing really difficult emotions.”

Tarima, particularly, is struggling with the aftermath of everything that happened on the wreck of the U.S.S. Miyazaki, which saw her not only unleash the full extent of her heightened empathic abilities, but also wipe out a squad of alien enemies in the process. Forced to transfer from the War College into Starfleet Academy, she’s not adjusting well, and although everyone is doing their best to be supportive and caring, it’s not helping her to process what’s happened and Tilly susses that out almost immediately.

“I think it’s interesting because the way she gets through to Tarima is by not being a doormat, it’s by pushing her a little bit, which is not always Tilly’s way,” Wiseman says. “Tilly tends to lead with a lot of softness. She does not mind making herself the fool, but I think she’s got a strong emotional intelligence and can sense that Tarima wants to shut down. So what Tilly senses in that moment is that she has to push and needle her to elicit these big feelings so that Tarima can actually deal with them. And once those feelings are up and out, then the softness comes and the empathy and the shared vulnerability.”

Tilly, perhaps better than most, is very aware that this won’t be the first tragic event or personal loss these students will have to navigate over the course of their Starfleet careers. And, for Wiseman, part of her time with the cadets is about helping them learn to survive them.

“I think the way you move forward is by letting things move through you,” she continues. “You have to process the emotion so it’s not still clamped down in you. You have to move with it, not against it, to really develop the grit necessary to keep encountering difficult situations again and again.”

While Wiseman can’t tell us whether we’re likely to see Tilly reappear in Starfleet Academy’s second season. “You’re allowed to hope,” she says with a laugh. But, for the moment, the actress sounds pleased with her character’s emotional and professional journey.

“What I really wanted for her was that she find a place where her skills and what she loves can really sing. She’s settled into being a teacher in a way that makes her really happy, she has a real talent, and it’s given her confidence,” she says. “That’s what I was trying to bring to it, that she’s been out in the Beta Quadrant with the third years working hard, making friends, and having fun, and feeling real good about Starfleet Academy.”

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

The Rookie Crossover with Game Changer Is a Fan Convention Geek’s Dream

Nathan Fillion built plenty of credibility with sci-fi fans back in 2002 with his starring role as Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds in the one-season cult hit Firefly, and his geek star has never really fallen since. From his role as Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog to his turn as Guy Gardner in Superman, he’s the superhero of every cosplaying Comic-Con attendee out there. But that doesn’t necessarily mean all of his adoring fans have watched many episodes of his long-running ABC cop dramedy The Rookie.

That may be about to change with the March 2 installment, which will feature improv comedians from Game Changer, a hilarious and varied game show on the niche streamer Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor). Dropout operates at peak geekdom with shows like Dimension 20 and its compelling live D&D campaigns and Um, Actually in which hardcore fans of video games, fantasy lore, and all of the nerdiest IPs nitpick their favorite franchises. Having Dropout regulars like Vic Michaelis, Jacob Wysocki, and CEO Sam Reich on The Rookie with geek royalty like Fillion seems like a match made in fan heaven.

The crossover is not without controversy, however. Besides being hardcore nerds, the typical Dropout demographic leans to the left, and many of the streamer’s chronically online viewers have been very vocal about their disappointment in seeing their beloved comedians appear on a “copaganda” show like The Rookie. It’s possible that Fillion fans had similar feelings when Captain Mal signed onto the cop show in the first place, never mind his eight-season run as an NYPD consultant on ABC’s Castle.

But Dropout’s star is on the rise, and exposure on a mainstream network like ABC could bring in plenty of new subscribers. Some of its regular stable of comedians have springboarded into bigger projects already with Very Important People host Vic Michaelis starring in Ponies on Peacock and Game Changer veteran Jeremy Culhane joining the cast of Saturday Night Live, among others. And the premise of the crossover episode as depicted in the latest trailer seems genuinely hilarious.

Plus, let’s not forget that The Rookie has another regular cast member that sci-fi fans may recognize. Melissa O’Neil, who plays officer Lucy Chen on the cop show, originally gained recognition as a Broadway performer before landing her television debut on Syfy’s Dark Matter (not to be confused with the more recent show of the same name on Apple TV) from the makers of Stargate SG-1.

Will genre fans become regular viewers of The Rookie because of Game Changer‘s involvement in the show? If nothing else, they might just watch the crossover episode, but even if viewers tune in just to witness their favorite improv comedians doing their thing, the fan convention regulars will probably enjoy seeing their beloved Firefly captain again. And who knows? Maybe some of the Dropout employees geeked out a little on set, too.

The Rookie season 8 episode 9 “Fun and Games” airs Monday, March 2 at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.

Sinners Is More Than a Horror Movie, But its Not Less Than a Horror Movie

With a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations under its belt and certainly some wins in its near future, Sinners has been at the center of cinephile discussions. As moviegoers think about what the movie means for the past and future of the medium, some have resisted the temptation to describe the film as a “horror movie.”

That group includes star Delroy Lindo, who earned a Best Supporting Actor nom for his turn as bluesman Delta Slim. “The vampire aspect is only one of [the various narrative strains in the movie], albeit a very fundamental and necessary component,” he told EW. “But I felt that the vampires represented outside forces infiltrating a community, and we see what happens as a result of that infiltration.”

Certainly, Lindo’s not wrong in his assessment. But horror movies have long used monsters to represent some sort of outside force or deeper issue. Sinners does it exceptionally well, but that doesn’t mean Sinners isn’t a horror movie.

Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, Sinners tells the story of twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), who return from Chicago to their Mississippi hometown in 1932 to open a juke joint. On its first evening, the juke is beset upon by vampires led by Irishman Remmick (Jack O’Connell), turning a night of musical celebration into a fight for survival.

As Lindo correctly notes, Remmick and his undead are just one of the threats that Smoke and Stack must deal with. Even before the vampires arrive, Smoke and Stack must deal with unscrupulous white people who, despite the insistence to the contrary, are indeed members of the KKK. Young Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) struggles with his father’s religious beliefs, alcoholism and war trauma wracks several of the characters, and that’s beyond the systemic racism that affects them all. Moreover, the opening sequence and the film’s standout musical scene frames artistic work as a cosmic, spiritual battle.

Coogler and his co-creators deserve all the credit they’ve earned for taking those themes and more and turning them into a wildly entertaining picture, a rare case of a Hollywood blockbuster that’s smart, relevant, and a ton of fun to watch. And part of that fun comes from the fact that Sinners is a horror movie.

All of those various threats come to a head when Remmick and his thrall come knocking on the juke joint door. While he wreaks havoc on Smoke and Stack and everyone around them, Remmick isn’t pure evil, as Coogler takes time to acknowledge that he, as an Irishman, is also victim of oppression, an oppression that he repeats after being turned. Sinners visualizes that turning and repeated oppression with Remmick’s glowing eyes, with the sharp teeth that he sinks into the necks of his victims.

It’s scary stuff, which hits viewers on an immediate, gut level. Horror can get a quick reaction out of viewers, and filmmakers have been taking advantage of that fact to churn out cheap, disposable horror entertainment for as long as Hollywood has existed. Horror has a stigma around it as some lesser form of movie making, so even incredible films and performances get overlooked.

With that history in mind, it makes sense that Lindo and others would want to keep Sinners from getting lumped in with Friday the 13th or Saw. But like those movies, Sinners deals with monsters. The fact that those monsters reflect monsters in real life doesn’t make Sinners any less of a horror movie. It just makes it a rich, powerful, and excellent horror movie.

Sinners is now streaming on HBO Max.