Could Avengers: Doomsday Be Adapting This Forgotten Marvel Team?
Because of Marvel‘s strangely sparse way of advertising Avengers: Doomsday, fans have had to turn to other leaks and announcements to learn more about the upcoming multiversal adventure. So desperate are they, that even an Italian presentation to cinema owners caught their attention. As fans poured over what amounted to little more than a cast announcement, one thing stood out. The announcer seems to describe one set of heroes as “The Mighty Avengers.”
For readers of Marvel Comics in the mid-2000s, around the time that the New Avengers were a going concern, that phrase stands out. More than just a moniker describing the strength of the combined heroes, the Mighty Avengers signified a team of mainline heroes who went on big, blockbuster style adventures, despite the dark circumstances surrounding their formation. It’s those circumstances that have led Marvel to basically ignore that line-up of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and it’s those circumstances that make their potential return in Doomsday so interesting.
A Different Assemblage
Mighty Avengers #1, written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated by Frank Cho, felt like a throwback to the Silver Age when it released in 2007. It’s not just the use of thought bubbles, which had been almost completely replaced by internal monologues conveyed through caption boxes. Rather, it’s the construction of the issue. In the main timeline, the Mighty Avengers battle monsters who emerge from the underground, in a manner reminiscent of Giganto from 1961’s Fantastic Four #1. In flashbacks, we see Tony Stark and Carol Danvers pick members of their new team, staring at a giant monitor filled with portraits of Marvel’s mightiest.
Cho, an artist best known for his cheesecake pin-ups, renders the heroes as bright and idealized, with colorist Jason Keith providing extra pop. Cho uses wide panels and near-splash pages to convey the awe of the battles, as befits a team full of heavy hitters such as Ms. Marvel (the moniker Danvers used before taking the name Captain Marvel), Sentry, Wonder Man, Iron Man, the Wasp, and the God of War Ares.
Fun as it is, the pop-art nature of Mighty Avengers #1 is more than a mere nostalgia play. Rather, it serves a thematic purpose, both for Tony Stark and for Marvel Comics. The formation of the Mighty Avengers comes as part of The Initiative storyline, the follow-up to the Civil War storyline. As in the MCU movie that bears its name, the Civil War in Marvel Comics saw Iron Man and Captain America come to blows over the issue of superhero registration.
However, writer Mark Millar, who served as architect for the Civil War event, was much more willing than Kevin Feige to have fans hate the belligerents. Framing himself as a futurist who saw what the people would demand, Stark demanded that his fellow superheroes unmask and register with the government. He went so far in his quest that he hunted down other heroes, he enlisted Reed Richards to create a secret prison in the Negative Zone for those who would not register, and created a clone of his recently-deceased ally Thor to help him carry out his plan. His actions even led to the death of Steve Rogers, a death that lasted quite a while by comic book standards.
In short, things looked pretty grim for Iron Man at the end of Civil War. Thus, The Initiative offered a chance at redemption, as Stark—who took the place of Nick Fury as director of SHIELD—starts to give the world its superheroes again. And the flagship of The Initiative was the Mighty Avengers.
The Mighty, The Fallen
As fun as the first issue of Mighty Avengers is, the series never forgot its relationship to the superhero Civil War. In fact, Marvel published another Avengers book at the same time, New Avengers, which focused on a team of heroes who kept up the fight, despite refusing to register. These heroes—led by Luke Cage, and including Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Wolverine, Iron Fist, Doctor Strange, and Clint Barton in his Ronin guise—did their good deeds knowing that the Mighty Avengers would arrest them on sight.
Indeed, both series gave plenty of time for the characters to wonder about the morality of their decisions. As the more street-level heroes, the New Avengers saw themselves as the authentic group, a position that Marvel seemed to endorse by having Cage and company discover a hidden Skrull attack long before the Secret Invasion crossover began in earnest. For their part, the Mighty Avengers insisted that they were doing the necessary work of superheroes, that they put aside their own personal feelings about secret identities and government regulations to save the world.
At its best, Mighty Avengers operated something like a superhero deconstruction. Bendis and Cho, the latter eventually replaced by the ever-reliable Mark Bagley, would serve up a heaping helping of two-fisted action. Issue after issue pit the team against monsters and Ultron and symbiotes, to say nothing of the Skrulls. At the same time, the series would stop for the heroes to consider their moral positions.
Those qualities only increased after the Secret Invasion forced the heroic factions to work together, especially when Norman Osborn, the respectable businessman who spends his evenings as Spider-Man’s archenemy the Green Goblin, becomes the world’s hero after ending the Skrull attack. During the Dark Reign event that followed Secret Invasion, Osborn used his influence to exercise control over the United States, essentially turning heroes into his tools.
A Mighty Good Time
We know that Avengers: Doomsday will feature two versions of the Avengers. The Thunderbolts have become the New Avengers, led by Bucky, but under the influence of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Although he lost government backing with President Ross turned into the Red Hulk in Brave New World, Sam Wilson has his own Avengers that he leads as Captain America. This group, which the Italian leak described as the Mighty Avengers, includes, of course, Captain America and Joaquin Torres as the Falcon, as well as Ant-Man, Thor, and, surprisingly, Loki.
The teaser at the end of Thunderbolts* suggested that the two Avengers groups do not get along, which matches the status quo at the start of the last major Marvel event, Avengers: Infinity War. In that movie, the two groups bury the hatchet almost immediately, as the threat of Thanos renders any other concerns unimportant.
One would think that the multiversal collapse and the coming of Doctor Doom would certainly also make Bucky and Sam get over their hurt feelings and combine their two groups. But if Doomsday and Secret Wars follow the model set by the Mighty Avengers comic, then the tensions are going to linger for a while.
That might be bad news for the people of the MCU. But for us MCU fans, more Mighty Avengers action is always a good thing, especially if the movie can replicate some of the bold action of the comics.
Avengers: Doomsday arrives in theaters on December 18, 2026.
The Moment Review: Charli XCX Movie Is Not Nearly as Brat as It Needs to Be
What does it mean to be brat? The generational riddle wrapped in a TikTok quandary has befuddled talking heads and boomers for the last 18 months (which amounts to a couple of epochs in social media years). But the general definition passed down by Charli XCX herself is that it’s “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things, sometimes… It is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile.”
Youth in revolt.
It’s a great ideal, but an even better idea for a marketing gimmick. And that uneasy tension between those aspirations and the general assholishness that comes with commercialism has bedeviled pop music since time in memorial, and seems likely to gnaw at Charli too, as judged by the “brat” credit card laid out for free at every table of the Alamo Drafthouse screening room Tuesday night. Replicas of a literal prop in the movie, they are as empty and devoid of value as the queasy green paint slapped across their faces. They’re a brand intended to sell you something and nothing, which in this case is a movie ironically decrying the commercialization of music, art, rebellion, and the brattishness that Charli XCX espouses.
As an exercise in post-modern irony, the resulting movie of The Moment is bold—or at least it desperately wants to be so. From another perspective, it’s just self-satisfied enough with its metatextual quality to grate. Personally, however, the film largely amounts to a missed opportunity.
There is something always delicious about public figures willing to play themselves as fools, and Charli’s fictionalized version of herself in The Moment is needy, insecure, and just tragic enough to dimly recognize her own vapidity. It doesn’t stop her, though, from letting her label, handlers, and other music industry users in co-opting the “brat summer” of 2024 when the film’s faux-documentary is set. The sycophants turn a movement in the movie into a regular Madison Avenue Ad Men’s Frankenstein Monster, unleashed this time on the Snapchat generation. Yet the movie from writer-director Aidan Zamiri lacks the humor, imagination, or fanged menace to let this creature do anything too mean, or for that matter funny, during its rampage.
A tonal blending of ostensible cringe comedy, slow-burn horror perfectly in line with the film’s own A24 branding, and the uncanny valley of severe navel-gazing, there are intermittent scenes of ruthless schadenfreude in The Moment. This begins with the film having more than a passing resemblance to cult darling mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap in the film’s opening.
The time is early summer 2024, and Charli is introduced rocking out in what looks like the ruins of a derelict nightclub. Strobing, chic lights throb over music-video ready imagery and rapid editing, evoking the essence of Charli’s onstage and online persona. This turns out to be a soundstage where the pop star is building the look of her upcoming concert tour, and ground zero for real-life filmmaker Zamiri to do something a little playful. During the opening, the logos of production companies and distributors that made his film possible, including 2AM, Studio365, and A24, flash by in their patented brat-green stylings. Shades of the commodification of Charli’s music—including this movie—are already manifest.
Yet structurally what this self-skewering means proves elusive, as the mockumentary setup of the film turns out to be inexplicably filming the making of another more typical concert film-within-a-film, this one directed by industry veteran and sycophant extraordinaire, Johannes Godwin (Alexander Skarsgård). Johannes apparently has a penchant for making the streaming-ready gloss-ups you might associate with a Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber. Confusingly, though, The Moment becomes a documentary about Skarsgård’s attempt to make this even thinner slice of onscreen superficiality. Of course the narrative muddiness of this nesting doll structure wouldn’t matter if the film’s satire of the modern music industry was as sharp or funny as it thinks it is.
Zamiri certainly conjures the anxiety and dread that sustains so many comedy and horror movies this decade. Charli’s steady corruption by the banalities of fame and capitalism come across as a slow-motion car wreck while her handlers seduce her into selling “brat credit cards” to marginalized LGBTQ kids on IG and TikTok. Meanwhile Johannes slowly pushes out Charli’s most protective inner-circle, including BFF creative director Celeste Collins (Hailey Benton Gates), all so he can vibe-shift the upcoming concert tour’s nightclub aesthetic into an insipid paean to self-empowerment, and replace the word cunt on Charli’s concert stage to the more parent-friendly b!tc#. “The song is literally about cocaine,” Celeste protests when told to think of the potential children demographic. “What if the cocaine is a metaphor?!” Johannes suggests, without much rhyme or reason to explain for what.
Sequences like the above have an obvious but effective bite, as do almost all of Skarsgård’s overcaffeinated, strained smiles that appear too acute to not be based on a person or 12 the Swedish actor has met along the way. The film also gets mileage out of other celebrities willing to play themselves, be it I Love LA’s Rachel Sennott as a jelly cokehead needling Charli in a bar’s bathroom, or Kylie Jenner as the superficial ideal for empty fame. The fact Kylie shows up in a bikini and 4K-ready makeup at a spa as the devil on Charli’s shoulder, convincing her to sell her soul to the suits to extend brat summer’s 15 minutes, shows a fair amount of self-awareness and self-deprecation.
Then again, the Jenner-Kardashian brand is a testimonial for fame as an end unto itself, so whether symbolizing supposed perfection, or celebrity-life rot as in The Moment, it all plays the same. For Charli XCX, though, the film is meant to clearly be a cautionary tale of the road taken by so many other pop stars. It seeks to weaponize and mock the whole media cycle of the brat meme, yet like a carefully curated marketing campaign, the film refuses to go in for the most thrilling or provocative kill.
Not nearly funny enough to work as a comedy, or scary enough to be an unnerving thriller, there is the possibility for The Moment to still be a subversive, transgressive satire. The third act—after movie-Charli goes full sellout—indeed flirts with something as triumphantly nihilistic as the ending of Network from 50-odd years ago. Near the end, Johannes, Charli’s record exec overlord (Rosanna Arquette), and a fleet of hangers-on, begin contemplating life without Charli.
Alas, the movie lacks the courage of its convictions. It footsies with doing something truly blunt, honest, or volatile, but by Charli’s own definition, it’s unable to achieve full brat. Or, to use a different music mockumentary’s slang, it fails to take things to 11.
The Moment is in theaters Friday, Feb. 6.
An A24/Texas Chainsaw Massacre Pairing Actually Makes a Lot of Sense
At first glance, that collaboration seems unlikely, and not because of Powell. The name A24 is synonymous with “elevated” horror, scary movies with high ideas and ambitions beyond grossing out viewers. With its garish name and (completely made-up) true crime pretensions, 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an exemplar of the sort of nasty, low-brow stuff that elevated horror was supposed to replace. However, the Texas Chainsaw series has always had a self-aware, dare we say even intellectual streak, behind all of its blood and guts.
Nowhere is the franchise’s self-awareness more apparent than in the second entry, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 from 1986. Partly out of spite for being forced to return to his most famous movie, partly out of frustration that no one saw how funny the first movie was, and partly because he had a huge budget (at least by the standards of the Cannon Group), Hooper made his sequel into an over the top comedy.
The film barely cares about continuity from the first entry, swapping out the hitchhiker from the first movie (Edwin Neal) with Bill Moseley as Chop Top. Instead, it goes for over-the-top sequences, culminating with Dennis Hopper as a vengeful sheriff who bellows a sermon while wielding multiple saws. And just in case anyone didn’t get the joke, the film’s poster pays homage to The Breakfast Club, with Leatherface and Cook standing in for Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson.
However, Texas Chainsaw 2 isn’t the only entry with a brain in its about-to-be-bashed-in head. The first film operates as a dark mirror on America’s involvement in Vietnam, when the country essentially ground up its young people in the same way the Sawyers turned teens into BBQ. Later entries continued to find allegories in the ultra violence, as in the school shooting themes running through 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Even Powell’s involvement makes a bit of sense. Not only is the handsome star a Texas native, but he’s following in the footsteps of fellow A-listers from the Lone Star State, as Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger both appeared in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995).
For its part, A24 has never shied away from grizzly images and plots. The head trauma in Hereditary, Midsommar, Talk to Me, and Bring Her Back alone is as bad as anything in a TCM movie, and that’s just the work of two filmmakers.
Most importantly, both Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A24 have changed the face of horror for the better. Together, they may be able to make something special; something gross, weird, and smarter than you’d think, but also special.
The Underrated Muppets Who Deserve More Love
Among the many joys of the new Disney+ special The Muppet Showis the chance to catch up with some of our favorite characters. Sure, Kermit, Fozzie, and Miss Piggy may sound a little different. But they’re still the same beloved variety show performers that we’ve been following for years.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment of the special is that it’s only one episode, which means that we can’t spend too much time with any of the second and third-level Muppets. That’s a shame, because Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and the Muppet performers have created a host of lovable characters in a cast that goes far deeper than the regular big names.
Until The Muppet Show gets a full revival season, we’ll celebrate those underrated Muppets here.
Beauregard
Were Beauregard just a standard dumb guy, he would still be wonderful. Performer Dave Goelz imbues him with such an innocent sweetness that we find ourselves laughing with him instead of at him, especially when he gets to do absurd bits like his tour of London in The Great Muppet Caper. But Beauregard gets even better within The Muppet Show milieu, where he serves as the janitor. Even more than behind-the-scenes guys like Scooter, Beauregard reminds us that it takes many hands to pull off a performance, and the people off-stage are just as weird as the people on the stage.
Lew Zealand
Lew Zealand, originally performed by Jerry Nelson and now by Matt Vogel, began as one of the many one-off weirdos on The Muppet Show, a guy who could do one thing and would stick to that one thing, even if it wasn’t very interesting. Namely, Lew Zealand would throw fish. However, Lew became so much weirder and so much more interesting when he moved off the stage and into “normal” situations. We never fail to laugh when flying fish start popping out of crowd scenes, and his devotion to using paper towels in jewel heists goes beyond any sort of logic into a whole new level of weirdness.
Clifford
The many failed attempts to revive The Muppet Show past the early eighties aren’t exactly a point of pride for Muppet fans, but that doesn’t mean they lack charm. One of the more interesting experiments involved Clifford, the cool catfish-looking Muppet who took over hosting duties for Muppets Tonight. Performed by Kevin Clash, Clifford brought a different energy than the constantly-frazzled Kermit, which helped set apart Muppets Tonight from other iterations. Since that show came to an end, Clifford has been a background player at best, but it would be nice if new projects put him back in the spotlight.
Pepe the King Prawn
While Clifford has been largely forgotten since Muppets Tonight, Pepe the King Prawn has only grown in prominence over the past years, to the point that he may not even belong on this list. Still, we’re including him just because he’s not from the franchise’s most successful era and, therefore, doesn’t always get the attention he deserves. And he really does deserve attention, as performer Bill Barretta has created an infectious character, a guy whose self-confidence goes far beyond the limits of his stature. Need proof? Just go to social media, where you’re sure to find plenty of clips featuring Pepe charming, or attempting to charm, anyone who might find him attractive.
Zoot
Zoot doesn’t do much. Zoot doesn’t say much. But when he does, it always matters. I’m not just referring to the note he sounds (or attempts to sound) at the end of every episode of The Muppet Show. I’m also referring to the one-liners and reactions he gets to give. Take the moment when he jolts awake in The Muppets Take Manhattan. Yes, bandmate Floyd Pepper gets the more prominent joke (“Go back to sleep, nobody’s landed”), but it’s the combination of relief and annoyance that performer Goelz plays that suggests that Zoot’s very still waters do indeed run deep.
Bobo the Bear
Like Pepe, Bobo the Bear debuted in Muppets Tonight and continues to appear in projects. However, unlike Pepe, he doesn’t have a frequent social media presence or a following. And yet, he remains a delightful member of the Muppet cast, precisely because he has the exact opposite energy as Pepe and Clifford. Performer Bill Barretta somehow makes Bobo’s desire to just be part of the gang into something endearing instead of annoying, and his genuinely good attitude makes for a nice, calming presence amongst the overall chaos of the various Muppet shows.
Big Mean Carl
Most Muppet fans first encounter the franchise as children, and, as they age, the fans talk about these characters as a source of warmth and comfort. But there’s another aspect to some Muppet characters, an aspect that many young children first watching the Muppets know well: some of the Muppets are scary. Over time, guys like Sweetums reveal themselves to be big softies, and that’s why we need characters such as Big Mean Carl, first played by Goelz and now by Barretta. There’s an affability to Carl that softens his big meanness, but you never know when he’s going to suddenly swallow a bag-pipe.
Digit
Speaking of scary Muppets: Digit. Digit made his first appearance in The Jim Henson Hour as the show’s technical advisor, and has only made a few background appearances since. Yet, you’re certain to notice Digit every time he shows up, and not just because of Goelz’s strong puppeteering. Digit has a completely unique look, one that has only become more distinctive—and disturbing—as we move away from the ’80s video art that initially inspired his creation.
The Amazing Mumford
Despite Congress’s attempts to gut it, Sesame Street continues to live on, which means that the Muppets for Henson’s other great series get plenty of screen time. One notable exception is the guy who feels like he should have made a few more visits to the Muppet Theater, the Amazing Mumford. Played by Jerry Nelson, Mumford is a magician whose tricks don’t always go right, most memorable for his magic phrase, “A la peanut butter sandwiches!” His indefatigable desire to put on a show makes him unique to Sesame Street, and he needs more attention.
Marvin Suggs
The Muppet Show is a vaudeville-esque show, so it follows that many of its lesser cast members would be performers with one hook for their act. But, with apologies to Crazy Harry, the weirdest and most wonderful of the bunch is Marvin Suggs. Dressed in a flashy flamenco outfit and performed by Frank Oz, Marvin would simply play musical numbers for his audience. It’s just that his instrument was the Muppaphone, a xylophone-like instrument consisting of ball Muppets that say “ow” in different tones when struck. It’s a bizarre bit, and we never get enough of it.
The Muppet Show is now streaming on Disney+.
Lauren LaVera: Horror’s Next Scream Queen Is Ready to Kick Back
Years before Art the Clown and the Terrifier franchise, horror conventions and the double-edged sword of “Scream Queen” being bestowed by fans, Lauren LaVera was simply a Philly kid answering a casting call in her hometown. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to pursue acting professionally. Nonetheless, the young, undeniable performer found herself drawn to opportunity after learning M. Night Shyamalan was shooting his next Blumhouse feature, Split, in the City of Brotherly Love.
“It was maybe my first on-set experience,” LaVera recalls of the gig years later from another northeast metropolis, this one on the Hudson. Back then, she was initially hired to appear in a single scene behind principals that included Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula. However, during the lone day of work’s lunch, LaVera and her mother happened to walk past the ever-observant director. And Shyamalan stopped to study the extra.
“I didn’t notice this, but he kind of turned around and looked at me like he knew me,” LaVera says. “My mom told me when I sat down. She asked, ‘Have you met him before?’ And I was like, ‘No, I love him, but no!’ The next day, though, I get a call from the casting director asking if instead of being just the background actor, I could be the stand-in, the body double for Anya Taylor-Joy and the other two girls.”
It marked LaVera’s first taste of professional moviemaking, as well as a bit of a crash course in film school where every day LaVera would be on the set, and Shyamalan more than once would bring her beside the monitor to witness what he looked for in a shot or a performance. The makeshift coursework also came during a turning point for the would-be student, as LaVera had actually just finished school, and her studies included a major in literature and a minor in Italian. Cinema and performance was nowhere to be seen in the curriculum.
“I was an optician for about two years,” LaVera reveals. “It was a really good job, right out of college… and I was becoming quite accomplished at it.” Yet there was something in her, the same thing that led to her walking onto a Split set, which was left wondering and wanting.
Looking back at it now, LaVera credits her acting bug coming from beloved grandmother Joan, a matriarch who dreamed of pursuing dance professionally and who counted Ginger Rogers and Vera-Ellen among her idols. Joan passed that passion to her granddaughter, as well as a story about the dream waylaid by life and a different time.
“When my mommom was on her deathbed, and I was losing one of the most important people in my life, I became more aware of my own mortality and it made me realize I was at a defining crossroads,” LaVera says. “I’d just recently got married and now my boss was offering me a comfortable [raise] and lucrative position. I could’ve done what my grandmother did, really settle down in my job, maybe consider children, even. I just couldn’t shake the longing in her eyes whenever we discussed her dreams. So shortly after her passing, I quit my job and that same night I attended my first proper acting class.” She says she cried all the way to the first lesson.
Michael J. Lepor
Thorns on a Scream Queen’s Crown
LaVera’s road on-set beginning with Split seems apropos given her onscreen persona these days. Playing Sienna Shaw in the Terrifier films has placed the actor in rarefied company, with the intentionally archetypal final girl of Terrifier 2 and 3 fame being mentioned by fans in the same breath as Laurie Strode of the Halloween franchise or Nancy Thompson of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The woman who brought Sienna to life might be wary of making quite such grand comparisons, just as she seems flattered if a bit surprised by those who describe her as a scream queen: “That I’ve done enough to earn that feels like a lot for me,” she admits while also pointing out the Sienna character is more inclined to yell with righteous, bloody anger as she stabs David Howard Thornton’s Art the Clown with a sword, as she is to scream in terror.
Still, the performer feels fortunate to have fallen into a singular and tightly woven community with other horror genre faves. The day we meet, LaVera still has sending Linda Blair a “happy birthday” text message on her to-do list. They met at a convention. She also is ready to go to bat for Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, an uncharacteristically feel-good Stephen King adaptation from a fellow maestro of the macabre, and in which LaVera enjoys a small cameo as an Italian reporter.
“He asked me to do a voiceover, which I was thrilled to do, because he remembered I spoke Italian and he needed different voices with different languages,” the actor says.
This bilingual talent is also on display in her latest genre effort, Twisted, which is due out on VOD on Friday, Feb. 6. In the film from director Darren Lynn Bousman, LaVera plays confidence woman Paloma, an ambiguous grifter who along with her romantic and professional partner, Smith (Mia Healey), has made a habit of renting out luxury homes and New York City apartments they don’t actually own. This eventually gets them into trouble when they pull this shtick on a unit in the possession of a doctor with deceptively pleasant beside manner (Djimon Hounsou).
“It is interesting,” LaVera says of the generational dynamics between her heroine and Hounsou’s not-so-good doctor. “I do feel that my generation and generations below me will probably continue to struggle greatly to buy property. So I feel that [the movie] is current in its own fun way. It’s like, ‘Fuck you if you’re not gonna let us afford houses. You’ve been scamming us for so long, so why don’t we scam the scammers?’”
A major appeal of the film was also working with Hounsou whose resume runs the gamut from Gladiator to Jim Sheridan’s In America. LaVera describes the legendary character actor as having a regal presence about him: “I believe he was a king in his past life.” It made doing the movie easy, as did seeing so much of herself in Paloma. After all, they’re women who both love putting on a show.
“I think Paloma had a secret want to perform in some way, and I think that’s why she goes above and beyond to put on these accents for these different characters,” LaVera explains about her characterization. “I think it’s her way of releasing this desire she always had. So I made diaries for every single one of those characters Paloma plays.”
The choice further allowed LaVera and Paloma both to have fun with developing cadence and rhythms, with the actress saying she developed the con woman’s various accents, right down to which regions of Ireland or the UK each persona supposedly hailed from. When it comes to using an Italian accent, however, LaVera sheepishly confides she’s a bit more predetermined to connotations since they match her family, who hail from Naples, Capri, and other parts of Southern Italy. “I learned Italian in college. My family didn’t teach me Italian. But now that I speak with my family and friends, they live in Naples, and Neapolitan is completely different from Italian.”
Michael J. Lepor
One More Dance with Art the Clown
Twisted is the first time LaVera has collaborated with Bousman, a cult favorite for his work on many of the Saw sequels, beginning with Saw II, III, and IV. LaVera grew up with them all, and in fact counts the first Saw (from director James Wan) as one of the formative moviegoing experiences of her life. The film left her completely shaken when the killer turned out to be hiding in plain sight on a scuzzy bathroom floor.
Truth be told, though, her favorite genres as a child were more likely to be the kind of comedies her grandmother enjoyed, and the martial arts movies Lauren discovered along the way.
“My mommom loved watching I Love Lucy with Lucille Ball, and I would put on skits from them when I was like two or three,” says LaVera. “I would just jump out and shout, ‘Presenting Lauren!’ and I would imitate the skit that I saw in a scene. And then I started watching Bruce Lee movie and Jackie Chan movies, and Michelle Yeoh, and I was like, ‘Oh, I want to kick something really hard!’”
The dream of combining the comedy of Lucille Ball with the physicality and also distinct comedic genius of Jackie Chan caused LaVera to pursue martial arts lessons long before that fateful acting class. And ironically, it was also this physicality which led her to horror after Terrifier writer-director Damien Leone saw some boxing reels that LaVera was talked into filming by her management at the time. The choice paid off since in her intentionally half-hearted kicks and punches (she was embarrassed about releasing them online), Leone saw an action heroine in them nonetheless, and one who could stand up to the nastiest movie slasher this side of the 1980s.
“I think a big piece of Sienna is Damien,” LaVera considers, “even though he wrote her as a woman, or as a girl for the second film, I think there’s something about her that is just a part of him entirely, which I think is quite beautiful.”
The pair bonded over conceptualizing Sienna’s musical loves and influences, with LaVera journaling those interests in Sienna’s voice, and Leone in turn creating playlists he thought his heroine would listen to (and which LaVera suspects are largely Leone’s favorites). They also compared notes on many of the final girls of yore, with LaVera going down a rabbit hole of binging Final Destination,Scream, and more.
The approach worked, with Sienna carving out her own place in the final girl pantheon, even as the iconography she cuts is one which LaVera freely admits to having complicated feelings about.
“It’s no secret at this point that I really did not enjoy that costume,” LaVera says of the angelic, and sparse, Halloween costume Sienna spends much of Terrifier 2 wearing. “It was so uncomfortable. It wasn’t finished; it wasn’t really properly put together and there was no lining on the inside, so I got a lot of blisters, a lot of cuts.”
When asked to think of the most extreme thing she experienced on a Terrifier set, it was not a prosthetic effect or mountain of gore that springs to mind (though LaVera notes being forced by Art to bite into a viscera of “pink goo” during Terrifier 3 comes close). No, it’s shooting in the Fright Factory in Philadelphia during winter in that costume: “I’ve never been colder than on that set, especially in that costume. I was freezing in Terrifier 2.”
The amount of pride LaVera feels for Sienna, however, and the impact that image has had, extending into Terrifier 3where a more seasonally prepared Sienna is all but crucified by Art the Clown who adorns her with a crown of thorns, is palpable.
“It’s so easy to kind of pin her as this guardian angel, this savior,” says LaVera, “but in my mind, she’s more in this Grecian epic. Like I think there’s something very Greek about it all and very tragic. She’s experiencing this hero’s journey which is cloaked in mysticism.”
Grecian might be a good term, too, heading into Terrifier 4, which Leone has confirmed will be the grand finale of the saga and will pick up after Sienna saw her younger cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose) vanish into an abyss, which might as well be Hades by another word. Now Sienna is vowing to enter the proverbial underworld and bring her cousin back.
Unlike on Terrifier 3, Leone is apparently keeping the fourth installment close to the chest from even LaVera and Thornton, who were given hints and ideas in the past of where things were going. They also in turn could offer their own ideas.
“I haven’t read any of the script yet,” LaVera confirms. “I don’t think Damien’s even done writing it as of right now. I’m sure he’s close to done based off things he has texted me and what he’s been telling the press, but no, he’s kept it completely under wraps from David, from myself, from all of the other cast and crew. So it’ll be a surprise.”
With that said, the actress can reveal what she would like to see.
“I want Jonathan to be alive; I want Gabbie to be saved; and I want some sort of retribution for Sienna, however that will look. I think our girl’s been through enough and she deserves a win, whatever it will look like for her. Whether or not she survives, I don’t know, but I think she deserves a win.”
Michael J. Lepor
A Final Escape
When we catch up with LaVera, she’s in New York City preparing for what would turn out to be the first of several snowstorms to bear down on the east coast inside of a week. Having lived her whole life around this neck of the woods, she doesn’t seem rattled by the weather. In fact, she ponders if the darkness and general lack of sunlight might explain why so many horror filmmakers come out of the places she calls home.
And with Twisted on the eve of release, and Terrifier 4 in the offing, she has plenty of horror still to come. This might likewise explain when looking to the future, she is hoping for subject matter that is perhaps a little sunnier.
Getting a chance to do an action movie still remains the dream for the actor, as would perhaps working on a layered television series like her current rewatch obsession, Succession. Really though, she seems just ready to laugh.
“I want to do a rom-com,” LaVera reveals. “I just want someone to pay to fly me to an island where I cannot be cold like I was in the Terrifier franchise. There would be a spa so I can get a massage, or just be on a beach. I do love lighthearted storytelling, but that would just be a nice change and a nice break on my body. It’s very stressful doing horror.”
Heavy still lies the crown, thorns or otherwise.
The Muppet Show Revival Is Not for Gen X and That’s OK
Why do Statler and Waldorf, the two curmudgeons sitting in the balcony during every episode of The Muppet Show, have box seats to a show they supposedly hate? In the opening credits, they even have their own refrain: “Why do we always come here? / I guess we’ll never know. / It’s like a kind of torture / to have to watch the show.” In truth, these two old men were the original trolls before social media made hate-watching commonplace, and they’d never admit that they simply enjoy a good train wreck.
But of course that’s the meta of The Muppet Show: everything goes wrong behind and in front of the curtain, and we get to enjoy the backstage shenanigans. The mayhem is the entertainment! But what if Statler and Waldorf represented a different aging demographic: the original audience of The Muppet Show from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s? Would they watch the current special airing on Disney+ and find it lacking in the spark that made The Muppet Show of their youth remarkable? Would they throw metaphorical tomatoes from the balcony?
This isn’t entirely a hypothetical. I, a Gen X-er watched the Sabrina Carpenter special with my family, wanting to share and recapture the magic of the show I remembered from when I was in elementary school. But when the show was over, I felt underwhelmed. Aside from a Miss Piggy skit and a Bunsen Honeydew & Beaker segment, it was mostly musical numbers. Was this The Muppet Show I grew up with? Why did it feel so… insufficient?
Meanwhile, my teenaged daughter loved it! As someone whose exposure to The Muppets mostly consisted of YouTube snippets like the iconic cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” or the Swedish Chef’s “Popcorn” earworm, seeing a full-blown variety show with a current artist like Sabrina Carpenter was a revelation. She immediately asked if we could go back and watch the old episodes somehow.
And that’s when I realized why I found the special lacking. I was unfairly expecting it to be everything all at once, even though this event episode was the same half hour as a regular installment of The Muppet Show. It wasn’t enough for me because Sabrina Carpenter was a modern artist getting in the way of Fozzy Bear the prop comic and Pigs in Space and all the other acts I remembered. Obviously, the guest host wasn’t for a 50+ viewer who might as well have been seated with the geezers in the balcony.
My daughter and I agreed on one thing: there needs to be more of The Muppet Show. I’ll freely admit to welling up during Rowlf’s piano montage at the beginning as the footlights came up on the familiar stage, and the final ensemble number, another Queen cover, was inspiring to say the least. In these times when everything seems to be going wrong behind the scenes, it would be nice to know that Kermit and Scooter could be there to make it alright in the end… no matter what those cynics Statler and Waldorf say.
The Muppet Show event special is available to stream on Disney+ now.
Every Marvel TV Show in the MCU Era Ranked
Seven years after Netflix’sDaredevil series ended with its third season, Daredevil: Born Againbrought back stars Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio, this time for Disney+.
Daredevil’s journey from star of a canceled, violent Netflix series to a new entry completely in the Marvel Cinematic Universe highlighted the strange history of Marvel shows. Although Marvel has been a constant presence on television since the cartoons of the 1960s, the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe reinvigorated public interest in the characters.
Yet, while the movies boasted a shared universe, in which Captain America can drop by Asgard (albeit as a Loki projection) in Thor: The Dark World, the TV shows were strangely sequestered for a long time. Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones lived on Netflix. Cloak & Dagger and Runaways stayed on Freeform. Characters from the movies got spun off into shows on Disney+.
However, with Born Again bringing the Netflix series back, it’s time to look at all of the shows produced under the Marvel Cinematic Universe banner… mostly. A few shows that came out during the MCU era fall a bit outside the scope of this list. Legion and Gifted both deal with the X-Men, but they don’t even wink at the MCU and instead tell their own idiosyncratic stories. Likewise, the animated series Spidey and His Amazing Spider-Friends, Hit-Monkey, and M.O.D.O.K. might have some overlap with characters that appear in the MCU, but they have radically different takes and don’t even acknowledge the multiverse like shows that are on this list.
Even cutting out those shows leaves a ton of superhero action left to cover, some better than others. So let’s dive into the world of Marvel heroes that have been forever changed by the MCU.
33. Inhumans
Perhaps the least essential creation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the Inhumans work best as supporting characters within the Fantastic Four franchise. A messy royal family who support eugenics, the Inhumans are hardly the most likable characters from the House of Ideas. Yet, back when the X-Men adaptation rights were with 20th Century Fox instead of Disney/Marvel, Marvel chief Ike Perlmutter pushed the Inhumans as replacements for the mutants.
To that end Perlmutter advocated an Inhumans movie, something that Kevin Feige resisted as much as he could, bumping the project to a short ABC miniseries. And what a terrible miniseries it was. Despite some likable actors such as Anson Mount and Ken Leung, Inhumans never justified its own existence. When Medusa (Serinda Swan), a character with the cool power of long hair she can control, gets her head shaved at the start of the series, smart people forgot about Inhumans until Black Bolt’s delightful death in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
32. Marvel’s Runaways
Here’s the thing about the Runaways: they have to run away. By issue #2 of the acclaimed comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, the primary teens had escaped from home, upon learning that their parents were supervillains. For some reason, the television adaptation kept the kids in the house for almost the entirety of the series. Even when the kids officially left home, they kept breaking into one another’s houses for one reason or another.
Without actually much running away and with superpower usage limited by television budgets, Runaways only had generic teen angst left to portray. It portrayed the angst ably, but covered the same ground that other shows had done first and better, leaving us viewers wondering why anyone even bothered making Runaways.
31. Helstrom
The best shows on this list figure out a way to take concepts from Marvel Comics and translate them to the medium of television. The worst get that balance wrong, hoping that the slightest gestures at one end can make up for deficiencies on the other. Case in point, the supernatural crime series Helstrom, starring Tom Austen and Sydney Lemmon as Daimon and Ana Helstrom.
In the comics, Daimon and Satana Hellstrom are the literal children of Satan and a human woman, who struggle to make sense of their conflicting heritages. The television show turns the two into children of a demon-possessed serial killer and send them to investigate spiritual mysteries, not unlike Supernatural or Lucifer (a show that does a much better job adapting a comic book to procedural television). The result is a show that trades in tired tv tropes that it’s occasional concessions to the comics cannot overcome.
30. Secret Invasion
The most damning thing that anyone can say about Secret Invasion is that it doesn’t matter at all. You could skip it and not be confused at all when Nick Fury shows up again in The Marvels, seemingly unfazed by what happened in his own show — a show that included the deaths of strong supporting characters Maria Hill and Talos and revealed that Fury had a wife who was a Skrull.
Frankly, those who skipped Secret Invasion were probably the happiest with the show. Despite strong work from the reliably great Samuel L. Jackson and Olivia Colman being Olivia Colman, the show couldn’t decide if it was a sci-fi show about aliens, a spy thriller, or a political satire, resulting in a forgettable, sloppy mess.
29. The Defenders
As this list will show, the Netflix Marvel series were a mixed bag, never able to balance the superheroics of the characters with the more grounded tone the shows wanted to achieve. It’s fitting, then, that the crossover miniseries The Defenders exemplifies all of the other shows’ problems.
The eight-episode mini wisely builds out of Daredevil, the strongest of the Netflix shows, with a plot that involves Hand ninjas trying to gain control of a super weapon called Black Sky, which turns out to be Daredevil’s girlfriend Elektra. As much as the Hand leader Alexandria, played by a disinterested Sigourney Weaver, talks about the end of the world, The Defenders feels shockingly tiny, mostly a bunch of people in business suits having conversations in officers.
28. Eyes of Wakanda
When Eyes of Wakanda was first announced, it sounded like the ideal Disney+ MCU show. Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole created something special with Black Panther, a world so rich and varied that no one movie could fully explore it. The first stills released for the series only heightened that excitement, promising something rich and beautiful.
Unfortunately, what we ended up getting fell far short of that promise. Eyes of Wakanda looks good, for sure, but somehow, the series never seems to justify its existence. The decision to focus on Wakanda’s history made the show feel disconnected from the films. And despite the strong voice work from stars Winnie Harlow and Black Lightning’s Cress Williams, none of the new characters captured our imagination like T’Challa, M’Baku, and Okoye. Even two episodes into Eyes of Wakanda, the eyes of the viewer start to glaze over.
27. Iron Fist
Like The Defenders, Iron Fist also confuses conversations in office buildings with compelling genre television. Somehow, a comic book series about a young man who becomes kung fu master after thrusting his hands into a dragon’s heart transformed into a show about corporate intrigue. Then again, given star Finn Jones’s nothing of a take on the main character Danny Rand, maybe producers didn’t have faith that he could carry the action scenes.
The show’s second season benefits from a change in showrunner and more of a focus on the strong supporting cast, which includes an outstanding turn by Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing. However, it was too little too late, and very few people even cared enough to tune in for a second season.
26. Echo
Unlike the aforementioned Helstrom siblings, at least Maya Lopez had a strong MCU showing before getting spun off into her own miniseries Echo. As portrayed by Alaqua Cox, Lopez made for a compelling antagonist to Clint Barton in Hawkeye. But Maya’s connection to Wilson Fisk, which does exist in the Daredevil comics in which she debuted, overshadowed the character, making her feel like a supporting character in her own show.
Then again, there’s not much to the show itself. Despite gathering some of the best Native actors working today (including most of the cast of the far superior Reservation Dogs), Echo drags across its five episodes, biding time until Maya can finally face off with Fisk. At least creative leads Marion Dayre, Amy Rardin, and Sydney Freeland work in enough underseen elements of Choctaw culture to give Echo some flavor it would otherwise lack.
25. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
Easily the most divisive show on this list, She-Hulk: Attorney at Lawwill certainly rank much higher for some and perhaps even lower for others. No one would place the show in the middle. On one hand, the strong reactions speak to the show’s willingness to break the MCU model, something to be applauded. Harnessing the irreverent humor of writer and artist John Byrne’s comic run, She-Hulk stars Tatiana Maslany in a self-aware legal comedy.
However, the show’s success relies entirely on how much the audience finds the jokes actually funny. If watching She-Hulk twerk with Megan Thee Stallion is the height of comedy, then you probably enjoyed the show. If the series felt like watching the charming Maslany try to sell sub-UCB improv, then everything about the show — including the terrible effects and awkward MCU connections — felt like a drag.
24. Cloak and Dagger
Cloak and Dagger are two of the trickier characters to bring out of their genesis as moralizing characters from the “Just Say No” 1980s. Not only does the story of teenage runaways Tyrone Johnson and Tandy Bowen, who gain powers after being subjected to flawed street drugs, feel preachy, but Dagger has one of the most improbable costumes in comics history.
The television adaptation, starring Aubrey Joseph and Olivia Holt, ditches the costumes and instead plays up the teen drama. As a result, the show works as a melodrama with supernatural elements, gaining a solid following across its two seasons. Fans of weird Marvel characters might be disappointed with the series’ downplaying of the superhero aspects, but those who wanted off-kilter YA tales were pleased.
23. Ironheart
Marvel’s release of Ironheart was long delayed. By the time it finally landed on Disney+, there was little hope it would be good, but in the end, it wasn’t as bad as most fans expected. Arguably, it was fine. But that’s why we see it so low on the list here. “Fine” is not “good.”
Spinning off the character of Riri Williams into her own show wasn’t a bad idea. Dominique Thorne’s performance as Riri had proved to be a highlight of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But the plot of Ironheart didn’t seem well thought-out. Making Riri an antihero who works for a bad guy didn’t work, and the show’s ethical themes fell flat. The characters in Riri’s orbit were also largely underutilized. A late-stage appearance from Mephisto livened things up a bit, but it wasn’t enough to save a largely lacklustre series that felt quite generic when compared to other, riskier MCU shows.
22. I Am Groot
Kids love Groot, so what would be better than a kids’ series about baby Groot getting into misadventures? I Am Groot is beautifully animated and each show’s six-minute runtime meant that the adventures had to stay small and focused.
And yet, even members of the target demographic get bored after one or two episodes. Ten episodes of the series feel like far too many, especially in the second season, which adds characters like the Watcher and alienates young children even more.
21. Marvel’s What If…?
What If…? might be the most perfect adaptation of a comic book series. Like the long-running comic series, What If…? features alternate reality versions of familiar characters, playing out various thought experiments. And like the comic series, What If…? was occasionally interesting and mostly dull.
Which isn’t to say that the entire show was a waste of time. What If…? gave us one more chance to see/hear Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa and the series recently featured Storm in her Asgardian armor, a fan favorite from the comics. Moreover, Jeffrey Wright proved to be the ideal person to voice the all-powerful Watcher, thanks to his ability to keep tongue in cheek without sacrificing gravitas. Still, it’s hard to believe that anyone remembers the episodes as soon as the credits roll.
20. Moon Knight
One’s enjoyment of Moon Knight might depend entirely on one’s feelings about Oscar Isaac. For those who like Isaac, but see the actor’s limitations, then Moon Knight drags every time he deploys his goofy English accent to portray Steven Grant, and depictions of his alternate (and American) identity Marc Spector don’t help things. By the time the show ended with a television CG equivalent of a kaiju battle, Moon Knight was a lost cause.
For those who love everything that Isaac’s handing out, Moon Knight is a lot of fun. The series wisely adapts the great Moon Knight run by Jeff Lemire and Greg Smallwood, combining psychological exploration with archaeological adventure. Even better, May Calamawy steals every single scene she’s in as Layla El-Faouly, leaving us still clamoring for more Silver Scarab.
19. Luke Cage
The tragedy of the Neftlix Marvel shows is that they could have been really, really good. Luke Cage brims with potential, thanks to a captivating performance by Mike Colter in the lead and ambitious storytelling from showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, who did not shy away from the social relevance of the characters. Add in ringers such as Mahershala Ali and Alfre Woodard as villains, and Luke Cage was set to match Daredevil for excitement and intensity.
Yet, the Netflix shows were mired by some requirement instituted by Marvel, most notably a mandatory minimum of 13 episodes per season. As a result, most of the Netflix shows felt oddly paced, none worse than Luke Cage. The electric charge of the first season fizzled out, even before the show unwisely killed off Ali’s character and replaced him with the much sillier Diamondback (Erik LaRay Harvey). Coming out of The Defenders, the show lost any direction, saddling the series with uninspired team-ups and a generic mystery plot.
18. Marvel Zombies
Marvel Zombies had some great runs in the pages of Marvel Comics, and a zombie-themed episode of What If…? had already proved that they could hold their own in an animated series, so when a four-episode Marvel Zombies miniseries hit Disney+, it promised to be a home run.
Perhaps shy of that, Marvel Zombies is still pretty fun TV that doesn’t hold back on the blood and guts we expect from a zombie property. It’s not original, but dang is it entertaining! It helps that so many MCU actors, like Simu Liu and Elizabeth Olsen, agreed to lend their voices to the characters. And hey, who doesn’t want more Blade??
17. The Punisher
The Punisher might be one of the most popular characters in the Marvel Universe, but he’s not one of the richest. The entire appeal of the Punisher comes from the misery of watching broken man Frank Castle inflict all manner of pain on the worst of the worst. So it’s remarkable that the MCU has wrung two seasons of compelling television out of the character and a bonus appearance in Daredevil: Born Again.
A lot of the show’s success can be attributed to Jon Bernthal, who first played the character in Daredevil. Bernthal finds empathy for Castle, ensuring that he feels human, even when he goes to incredibly dark lengths in his war on crime. Then again, the show didn’t always match Bernthal’s efforts, too often falling back into the standard doom and gloom of the Punisher’s world.
16. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
At times, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier pays off the promise of the MCU shows. Where the movies have to tell big stories that leave little room for proper character development, the shows could take their time and flesh out the person behind the mask. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, intended to be the first of the Disney+ series, devotes its best parts to Sam Wilson wrestling with the idea of becoming the next Captain America and to Bucky dealing with the fallout of his crimes as the Winter Soldier.
But the show doesn’t seem to trust the characters enough to really focus on them. Instead, it borrows from excellent Mark Gruenwald-written Captain America comics from the 1980s to tell a thriller dealing with refugees from the Blip who call themselves the Flag Smashers. Throw in Wyatt Russell as an unstable new Captain America, and there’s very little room left over for character growth. Still, the stuff that’s there is pretty compelling, and the series ends with Sam fully grown into the Captain America role.
15. Daredevil: Born Again
Something miraculous happened in the middle of shooting Daredevil: Born Again: Marvel realized that their revived version of the Netflix show wasn’t working, and went back to the drawing board. Other creatives were brought in, and the result was far better than it should have been. Having learned the lessons of previous shows, Marvel didn’t want to finally put Charlie Cox back in the suit and risk underwhelming fans, and the extra effort was well worth it.
But the result is a mixed bag. Some episodes of Born Again are simply incredible, but others in the middle of the season linger from the first round of shooting and aren’t particularly impressive. Still, the influence of Loki season 2 directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead on the better installments easily lifts the first season of Born Again into the sunlight, and their episodes seem to promise that season 2 will be even better with their increased creative input.
14. Jessica Jones
Nowhere was the 13-episode requirement of the Netflix shows felt more keenly than midway through the first season of Jessica Jones. The series had a fantastic hook, with a perfectly cast Krysten Ritter as the acerbic private investigator facing off against David Tennant as Kilgrave, the mind-controlling Purple Man. And yet, all of the tension dissipated midway through the first season, when a subplot involving Jessica’s best pal and an unstable cop took center stage while Jones and Kilgrave bided their time.
Jessica Jones settled into a better rhythm for its second and third seasons, and Ritter remained strong throughout. But without Tennant’s Kilgrave as the main villain, those later seasons feel solid if unremarkable. Still, that’s all a testament to what a remarkable show Jessica Jones was with Kilgrave as the antagonist, adding a level of true menace to the procedural structure and adding true pathos to Ritter’s disaffected exterior.
13. Agatha All Along
For its first few episodes, Agatha All Along felt like Marvel at its least essential. The draw to the series seemed to be watching the always-delightful Kathryn Hahn pal around with other great actors, including Patti LuPone, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, and Debra Jo Rupp as back-biting witches, alongside Joe Locke as a mysterious magic user mostly just called “Teen” and Aubrey Plaza as a flirtatious enemy.
But by the time that the second half of the season kicks in, Agatha All Along finds surprising pathos. It’s not just the depths of Agatha’s backstory, but especially a Doctor Who-style twist to LuPone’s time-displaced witch and a tale of displacement and found family with the Teen. What began as a lackluster spin-off became a starting point for one of the Young Avengers, giving the MCU a shared universe boost that once was the franchise’s calling card.
12. Agents of SHIELD
It’s hard to judge Agents of SHIELD for what it was, not what it could have been. Agents of SHIELD debuted at the height of Marvel mania, promising more MCU action by following fan-favorite Phil Coulson and his secret agents as they do superhero espionage. Yet, that first season quickly revealed itself as a pretty by-the-numbers procedural with only the slightest MCU trappings. When the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier ended by completely recreating SHIELD, it seemed like the series would find its footing in season two, but that didn’t happen either.
Once expectations fell away (and, frankly, a lot of people stopped watching), Agents of SHIELD got room to breathe. It’s likable ensemble cast settled into their roles and the show got room to be more experimental and fun. Kree soldiers, Ghost Rider, and actual supervillains became part of the story. The less that people paid attention to Agents of SHIELD, the more it got to be itself, and the show was better for it.
11. Werewolf by Night
By this point, readers have certainly noticed a recurring complaint across this list, that some shows waste even good ideas because they stretch their stories across too many episodes. The first of two specials created for Disney+, Werewolf by Night fills every one of its 53 minutes with delightful detail, not wasting a second.
Directed by composer turned first-time filmmaker Michael Giacchino, Werewolf by Night pairs Gael García Bernal at his most lovable with a flinty Laura Donnelly, the former playing a good man cursed with lycanthropy and the latter the unwilling scion of monster hunters. Giacchino channels the gothic thrills of Universal Horror and even manages to put Man-Thing on screen without generating any guffaws. By the time Werewolf by Night ends, we’re still hungry for more, a rarity among MCU shows.
10. Agent Carter
Obviously, Agent Carter isn’t the best show on this list. But Agent Carter does the best job at translating the Marvel Universe to television. The series spun-off Hayley Atwell‘s scene-stealing Peggy Carter from Captain America: The First Avenger and lets her be so much more than the long-lost girlfriend of Steve Rogers.
Even better, the World War II setting protected Agent Carter from the expectations that hobbled Agents of SHIELD, letting it play in its own corner of the universe. Yes, Edwin Jarvis and Howard Stark show up, but Agent Carter mostly got to be a high-energy spy show. The fact that it lasted just two seasons proves that Marvel didn’t always know what to do with its shows.
9. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
Given all of the changes that the show experienced in pre-production, given its cast overstuffed with Marvel supporting characters, it’s remarkable that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man managed to be as breezy and fresh as it is. Showrunner Jeff Trammell remixes over-familiar story beats to give us a modern-day take on Peter Parker, unlike any version seen in movies, comics, or television.
All of the changes work. Perennial B-list villain Tombstone gets a tragic arc, Harry feels like proper 2024 rich boy, and Colman Domingo gives us one of the most compelling takes on Norman Osborn ever seen. The entire show comes via stylized animation that recalls both the Spider-Verse films and Steve Ditko’s pop art, capturing the timeless quality of Spider-Man.
8. Hawkeye
No one in their right mind would pick Clint Barton as their favorite Avenger. Although played well by Jeremy Renner, he could never shake the fact that he was just a normal guy with bows and arrows among gods. Avengers: Age of Ultron effectively turned Clint’s weaknesses into strengths, but no one expected him to carry a television series.
Hawkeye works, in part, because he doesn’t have to carry it. The MCU gets a shot in the arm by adding Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop, a rich girl who takes up the mantle of Hawkeye. Bishop’s tangled life, which includes a dashing Tony Dalton as a potential villain and a cameo by Florence Pugh as the White Widow, pairs nicely with Clint’s domestic stress. Plus, the series uses its Christmas setting and gives us Rogers: The Musical. What more could you want?
7. Wonder Man
Caught between changes of TV strategy over at Marvel, Wonder Man dropped into the world with no pretensions and very little hype under its wings. This is a show where superheroes and the MCU are almost entirely irrelevant. It’s just here to tell a lovely tale of a budding friendship between two grown men who have become quite lost. The fact that one of them had incredibly dangerous superpowers is largely beside the point.
Wonder Man is that rare thing from Marvel: low stakes and high drama. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II shines as Simon Williams, a struggling actor who meets the washed-up Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) in Hollywood and teams up with him to land the part of a lifetime. Here, CGI battles and easter eggs are abandoned in favor of a good old-fashioned story. How can anyone hate that? Its success is something that Marvel could definitely learn from…
6. Loki
If Loki didn’t come back for a second season, it would have ranked much lower. The first series gave fans more of the MCU’s first real breakout Tom Hiddleston and paired him with the only person he could love, a variation of himself called Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) as well as a perfectly-cast Owen Wilson as company man Mobius. M. Mobius. Fun, yes, but the multiverse shenanigans muted the show’s emotional stakes.
To the shock of everyone, Loki’s second season did the exact opposite, amping up the emotional power by leaning into the multiversal elements. Even adding Jonathan Majors, then burdened with scandal and failed franchise plans, doesn’t slow things down, as the second show combines the end of all realities as an existential crisis for the God of Lies. The show sticks the landing, giving Loki something so rare among Marvel characters: a proper ending.
5. Ms. Marvel
After Avengers: Endgame, Marvel hoped that younger characters could fill the gaps left by Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. The execution of these new characters has been hit or miss, but Marvel absolutely scored a home run when they got Iman Vellani to play Kamala Khan, the fangirl who becomes superhero Ms. Marvel.
The idea of making a Marvel superfan into a superhero could be self-congratulatory, but Villani plays it with such a lack of guile that no one feels upset. Grounded by a great ensemble cast playing her friends and family, Ms. Marvel takes surprising chances, from the pop art look of the first two episodes to an episode that depicts the Partition of India to an unexpected X-Men twist. Ms. Marvel could be the future of MCU, if only the franchise would let her lead.
4. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special
Leaving aside the fact that the only holiday celebrated in the Guardians of the Galaxy HolidaySpecial is Christmas, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect use of the MCU’s Disney+ connection. After two movies and supporting parts in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, the Guardians of the Galaxy had become some of the most beloved characters in the Marvel Universe, and that affection helps us forgive some of the clunky setups in the special.
Even better, the Holiday Special shows off what James Gunn does best, finding an unexpected genuine pathos in what seems like a goofy, somewhat metatextual tale, in which Mantis and Drax kidnap Kevin Bacon to give Starlord some Christmas cheer. And, of course, it has a killer soundtrack.
3. Daredevil
Daredevil isn’t exempt from the problems that plagued the other Netflix series. The second season in particular sags under the weight of too many plots and characters, and even the mostly-great first season spends way too much time with Matt Murdock recovering from his injuries. But when Daredevil is working, it’s among the best in superhero television.
The show establishes itself within its first three episodes. We meet Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, an endlessly charming man whose tragic history and complicated Catholicism drive him to dress up as a devil and pummel baddies. He’s matched by the Kingpin of Crime, Wilson Fisk, whom Vincent D’Onofrio plays as a hurt child in the body of a massive killer. The electricity between the two powered the series through its low points and beyond.
2. X-Men ’97
X-Men ’97 didn’t have to be this good. It could have just brought back the characters and cast from the ’90s show and made us all feel like kids again. It could have been fantasy escapism, letting us grown-ups ignore the problems in the real world.
X-Men ’97 does the exact opposite. Yes, we have the same characters from the ’90s show, many of whom have the same voice actors. And yes, the series continues to adapt stories from the incredibly popular but artistically questionable X-Men comics of the era. But the series leans hard into our current situation, making the mutant-as-minority metaphor more explicit than ever and offering a thrilling vision of resistance.
1. WandaVision
For a minute, it seemed like Marvel television would be something truly special. Intended to air after The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision ended up making it to Disney+ first and announced itself as the ideal television adaptation. For its first two-thirds, WandaVision took favorites from the MCU, namely Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as her robot husband Vision, and put them in riffs on classic television.
One could argue that the drops in quality toward the end, when the television aspect falls away and traditional Marvel heroics take over. But the show does an excellent job weaving larger universe mystery throughout those early episodes, earning its big ending. Plus, the show wisely balances Wanda’s CGI off against Agatha with Vision having a deep conversation with himself. By the time it finished, WandaVision set a standard no other MCU show has been able to match. Yet.
The Best House Episodes to Rewatch
Dr. Gregory House was never the nicest person in the room. In fact, he was usually the rudest by a lot, but for eight thoroughly enjoyable seasons between 2004 and 2012, Princeton-Plainsboro’s medical Sherlock-in-residence had us in a chokehold.
And guess what? House is also enormously fun to rewatch! We understand that now might not be the right occasion to revisit the entire series (it would take a significant amount of time to do so), but if you’re looking to go back and cherry-pick some absolutely incredible episodes of House, here are some humble suggestions on where to start…
“Three Stories”
Season 1 Episode 21
“Three Stories” is an Emmy Award-winning early episode of the series that really cements how good Hugh Laurie’s performance is going to be in the central role of House going forward.
When House fills in for a sick professor and has to lecture a class of medical students on diagnostics, he decides to tell them about three patients who all had leg pain and how his team treated them. After he tells the final tale, it becomes clear that he’s describing what happened to his own leg, and how he went against his ex’s advice to endure a risky surgery that left him in a coma. While under, his ex made a medical choice that left him with his limp and chronic pain.
The episode has shades of The Usual Suspects, throwing you off the trail of House’s trauma until its staggering twist, and Laurie helps it all play out perfectly, like the conductor of the episode’s emotional orchestra.
“Autopsy”
Season 2 Episode 2
This series is jam-packed with emotional episodes, but the ones where kids are suffering always seem to hit harder. Here, House and the team have to perform a living autopsy on a young girl with terminal cancer when she starts hallucinating, and the cause is traced to a blood clot. If they cool her body temperature down and stop her heart, they may be able to remove the clot and give her one more year.
“Autopsy” is one of those special episodes where House is not only forced to admit he’s wrong, but also really think about how he approaches life.
“Deception”
Season 2 Episode 9
House is at the racetrack when a fellow gambler (Cynthia Nixon) collapses with a seizure. House sends her off to Princeton-Plainsboro and has the team begin working on a diagnosis. After establishing that she previously may have had Cushing’s syndrome, it becomes clear that the patient definitely has Münchausen’s syndrome and has been taking every advantage to become sick.
“Deception” is a cracking episode of House that keeps you guessing until the end. Although it sets up a classic conundrum, there are also a whole bunch of clever diagnostic misdirections that make the patient and her symptoms consistently unreliable, which is why it works so well on rewatch. This is also the episode where Foreman first takes charge of House, and House makes him absolutely miserable as a result. Good stuff all around.
“Euphoria, Part 1 & 2”
Season 2 Episodes 20–21
A superb two-parter begging for a rewatch, “Euphoria” puts Foreman in a life-or-death situation where he seems to have contracted something deadly from one of House’s patients, but the team can’t work out what it is and is also hampered in their efforts to find the cause. After the patient dies, it’s a race against time to cure Foreman before the clock runs out.
The episodes explore Foreman’s relationships with both House and his estranged father, adding significant emotional weight to the unfolding drama.
“No Reason”
Season 2 Episode 24
Season 2 closes out with a humdinger that’s super fun to rewatch, especially if you’ve forgotten how it plays out. It starts with House being shot by a former patient and having to share a room with the shooter after the incident. He’s also asked to diagnose a new patient while he remains in intensive care, but as his investigations continue, he realizes that everything he’s experiencing might be a hallucination.
One of the show’s darker, more psychological installments, “No Reason” blurs the line between fact and fiction in House’s world. It may be the first time he ends up reckoning with himself through a real-life avatar, but it certainly won’t be the last.
“Lines in the Sand”
Season 3 Episode 4
House is thrilled to be treating a patient who can’t talk in this early episode from season 3 that explores the case of an autistic boy who has eaten feces out of his sandbox. House is determined to get the boy back to health, but his work is littered with rude, thoughtless remarks that hurt the boy’s parents and undermine their attempts to care for him unconditionally.
“Lines in the Sand” is a darkly funny episode, but it’s also the only one in which the show goes out on a limb to suggest that House himself is autistic. It’s a suggestion that never really finds its footing – Wilson says he’s just a jerk – but House is clearly experiencing some complex feelings when treating the patient, and upon rewatch, this one is both fascinating and thought-provoking.
“One Day, One Room”
Season 3 Episode 12
A raw, compelling episode that shows us House at his most human, “One Day, One Room” follows House around the hospital while he’s stuck doing clinic duty for Cuddy. He meets one hapless patient after another until he finally meets a rape victim who won’t talk to anyone but him. After she attempts suicide, House stops resisting her wishes to speak to him, and she finally opens up about the rape. In turn, House recalls the terrible abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his father.
There’s a lot here to unpack – the switch of focus to House’s abuse overshadows his “patient of the week’s” devastating story – but the two have met under exceptional circumstances and eventually both move forwards by understanding each other’s pain.
“House’s Head / Wilson’s Heart”
Season 4 Episodes 15–16
Yep, it’s the bus accident episodes, and we would only recommend you rewatch them if you have a lot of tissues handy! In the first part, you may recall that House is injured while travelling home and has to try to get back his memory of what happened. In the second, well, he’s remembered who was on the bus with him, and Wilson gets his heart smashed into a million pieces.
It’s an incredible arc with a huge emotional payoff that’s hard to recover from. Although we’re saying these are some of the best episodes to rewatch, please, please remember how you felt the first time before revisiting them!
“Simple Explanation”
Season 5 Episode 20
When House star Kal Penn got a job working for the Obama administration, he had to leave the show very quickly. Rather than say that his character, Dr Lawrence Kutner, went to another hospital or to live on a farm or something, the series had him suddenly and shockingly end his life, leaving House and the medical team to process his death under terribly traumatic circumstances. While House becomes convinced that Kutner’s death might be murder, the others are left to wonder what was going through his mind when he made his devastating choice.
It’s an upsetting but highly rewatchable episode that gets to the heart of why House can never be “fixed.” He cannot stop trying to work out the puzzle of Kutner’s suicide. Five seasons in, House is making no progress. This one really drives it home.
“Everybody Dies”
Season 8 Episode 22
The series finale of House is very reflective, but it definitely sticks the landing on a story that was never too concerned with happy endings.
Having found out that his best friend Wilson only has months to live, House makes the extremely normal and cool decision to fake his own death to avoid felony vandalism charges, opting to go on a cross-country motorcycle ride into the sunset with Wilson in his final months instead of doing time. Meanwhile, Chase gets House’s job, Taub patches things up with the many women in his life, and Cameron returns to medicine.
It’s a heartbreaking but satisfying ending to the show for fans, and still hits on rewatch. The later seasons of House had some episodes that weren’t quite up there with the best of them, but this finale is good stuff, even if Cuddy’s absence from it still feels wrong all these years later.
DC’s Superman vs. Homelander Showdown is a Super Let-Down
This article contains full spoilers for DC K.O.: Boss Battle #1.
Sadly, the issue falls far short of our expectations. Superman and Homelander appear together on just seven pages of the one-shot comic, four of which involve a single panel. While the two do trade a few punches and a headbutt, most of the fight consists of them shooting heat vision at one another. Worst of all, the fight has no clear conclusion. The showdown manages to disappoint everyone: fans of Superman, fans of The Boys, and, worst of all, fans of weird crossovers.
A Battle Royale
Boss Battle should have worked so much better than most comic book crossovers, simply because it’s part of the already gonzo DC K.O. storyline. The latest chapter in the company’s ongoing storyline about the death of Darkseid and the creation of the Absolute Universe, DC K.O. puts the company’s heroes and villains into a massive fighting tournament. The winner gets to claim the title of King Omega, which might be enough to stop Darkseid’s return.
Written by Joshua Williamson and Scott Snyder and illustrated by Javi Fernandez and Alejandro Sánchez, DC K.O. and its various tie-ins go deep into DC lore. Not only do we see unlikely battles (Hawkman vs Aquaman) and surprising team-ups (Lex Luthor and Supergirl), but we also see variations of the characters from across comic history. That means everyone from Electric Blue Superman to 1960s Captain Atom to Guy Gardner: Warrior gets a little attention in the series. And yet, as dense and weird as it is, DC K.O. is fundamentally a simple fighting story. It feels like a kid taking his toys and smashing them together until one falls over.
Because of the haphazard nature of the overall storyline, DC K.O.: Boss Battle made certain sense. The issue begins with those responsible for sending the mainline heroes into the tournament—Booster Gold, Doomsday as the Time Trapper, and the World Forger—experiencing ruptures in the multiverse. The ruptures send six mainline characters into alternate realities, where they meet the issue’s special guest stars.
Plastic Man and Black Lightning arrive in a different tournament, and find themselves fighting Scorpion and Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat. Lex Luthor meets Samantha Strong, the sweet serial killer bear from IDW‘s Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees. Batgirl encounters the classic alien bloodsucker Vampirella. Star Sapphire lands in Sabrina’s hometown Greendale, while the Joker arrives at the Warrens’s house to meet Annabelle. Wonder Woman clashes with sword and sorcery character Red Sonja and Superman fights Homelander.
Or rather, we think that’s what happens, because we only get a few looks at each meet-up, leaving most the action off-screen.
Too Much is Too Little
In most cases, the excess of D.C. KO has been a good thing. The series has been a logic-free romp, one that celebrates even the goofiest parts of comic book storytelling while still staying true to the main characters. But Boss Battle‘s story exceeds the limits of its 31 pages. Writer Jeremy Adams, who has been one of the most reliable storytellers in DC’s current era, simply cannot find enough room to do justice for the 16 characters. The team of artists—Ronan Cliquet, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Kieran McKeown, Pablo M. Collar—do their best to make the scenes distinctive, but they can do little more than create splash pages.
In some cases, that’s fine. Wonder Woman and Red Sonja look cool facing off with one another, and it’s not like there’s thematic resonance to be gained by watching Plastic Man shout “You get over here!” while throwing Scorpion into Sub-Zero. These are fan debates on Reddit come to life in official form. And Adams does try to get creative where he can, as in the case of Annabelle vs. the Joker. Because Annabelle doesn’t actually do anything in The Conjuring movies, other than look creepy while scary things happen around her, the Joker just has a tea party with the doll, babbling about how he knows something weird is happening while staring at her.
But the Homelander and Superman fight could have and should have carried weight. While writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson have no ambition for The Boys beyond just using superheroes to depict depravity on every level, the Prime Video series has been some of the sharpest satire of our era. More than just an adolescent thought exercise in what someone would do if they could do anything, Homelander has come to stand in the emptiness of America’s current power politics.
So when Superman, comic books’ ultimate symbol of someone using their power for good, shows up in front of Vought American headquarters, we want to see him show Homelander that power isn’t all that matters. Or we want to see a darker story where Homelander’s amorality crushes Superman’s optimism. Or, at the very least, we want to see an exciting fight.
Instead, we get a couple shots of them punching, and then a handful of panels showing them shooting lasers at each other. No big points, no proof that one super-person is stronger than the other, no crazy reveals. Just the most perfunctory fight scenes before the end.
The Never-Finished Battle
Half the fun of a comic book crossover is just seeing unlikely combinations of characters. In that regard, Boss Battle succeeds. Even a longtime DC reader like myself never expected to see the Joker sitting down with Annabelle, and I really wanted to see Superman fight Homelander.
But a good crossover also uses the unlikely meeting to reveal something about the two characters. Even if the meeting doesn’t prove that one character is better than the other (and they rarely do),it at least should help us gain a new perspective.
DC K.O.: Boss Battle gives us no new perspective, no satisfying fights, and no compelling ideas. The fact that the story barely goes deeper than a plot synopsis means that fans of most characters involved will just have to keep arguing the merits of their faves online. In case of Superman vs Homelander, we’ll still never know if pure power wins the day or if truth and justice can win out, leaving us readers disheartened and disappointed.
DC K.O.: Boss Battle #1 is now in comic book stores across the country.
Fallout: Todd Howard Teases New Factions and Locations for Season 3
This article contains spoilers for Fallout season 2 episode 8.
One could plan quite the road trip through Fallout’s post-apocalyptic United States of America. Between the mainline games, their expansions, and the Prime Video TV series, the beloved franchise has introduced numerous Wasteland locations like the New California Republic, New Vegas, and more. Now it seems as though Fallout is ready to add some fresh pins to the irradiated map in season 3.
The Fallout season 2 finale finds the Ghoul and his unwelcome companion, a virtual Robert House, arriving at a secret New Vegas Vault in search of cryopods containing the Ghoul’s wife Barb and daughter Janet. When the cowboy formerly known as Cooper Howard unfreezes Barb and Janet’s chambers he discovers them to be empty, save for one postcard conspicuously marked Colorado. Barbara’s handwritten message on the back confirms that she and Janet have escaped to the Rocky Mountains and Cooper’s quest for them must start anew.
While the state of Colorado exists in the Fallout games’ pre-War canon (where it’s grouped alongside three other states as one of 13 “Commonwealth” regions that make up the U.S., which explains why all American flags have 13 stars rather than the traditional 50), little is known about it in the post-War Wasteland era. According to Bethesda Game Studios director and Fallout TV series producer Todd Howard, that relative blank slate is what made the location an appealing tease.
“We’ve always wanted to do that, where each season we want to go to new places. Just like the games, geography is such a part of the world of Fallout,” Howard tells Den of Geek.“Obviously, there’s going to be a journey to Colorado. But that journey might take us to some other places as well.”
In acknowledging the potential for season 3’s Colorado trip to include some detours, Howard is invoking the Wasteland’s Golden Rule: “thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every god damn time.” The roughly 750 miles that separate Las Vegas, Nevada from Denver, Colorado provide enough opportunities for bullshit that the Ghoul himself isn’t even sure if he’ll make it.
“You just don’t know. And I genuinely mean that,” Walton Goggins tells Den of Geek about Fallout season 3’s potential Colorado setting. “A lot of things can happen right after that camera cuts. But we’ll see. If he does go to Colorado, I’ll be jumping for joy. If he doesn’t go to Colorado, I’ll be jumping for joy. I can promise you this: the story will be thought through and what happens will happen the way it’s supposed to happen for us.”
Whether the Ghoul makes it through the Rockies or not, Howard teases that audiences will be exposed to new Wasteland communities, cultures, and experiences all the same.
“I think it’s good to go new places, even where the games haven’t been. Develop that and [explore]: ‘Who are the people there? What are some new factions? What are they doing to survive?’ It’s the same approach we have with the games.”
Colorado was originally intended to be a major setting of Black Isle Studios’ never-completed version of Fallout 3 in 2003. Under Bethesda’s stewardship of the franchise, beginning with 2008’s Fallout 3, details about Wasteland Colorado have been sparse. According to dialogue in Fallout: New Vegas, however, Denver became home to large packs of wild dogs sometime after the bombs dropped. If that means the Ghoul’s Belgian Malinois buddy meets some new puppers in season 3 then the new setting will be just fine with us.
All eight episodes of Fallout season 2 are available to stream on Prime Video now.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles Trailer Is an Antidote to Our Wealth Obsession
Look, we all love to hate the rich. It’s fun to see the emptiness of the lives of the guests on The White Lotus, the cruelty of the Roy family on Succession, and Benoit Blanc speaks for us all when he chews out the privileged killers in Knives Out. But where are the movies and shows that reflect our lives?
Anyone tired of watching rich people on screen will feel relief while watching the trailer for Margo’s Got Money Troubles, at the same moment when things get stressful for the protagonist. After rifling through multiple pregnancy tests, the titular character, played by Elle Fanning, watches the total of her grocery bill get larger and larger, only to hear her debit card get declined. Even the non-pregnant among us can relate with Margo when she collapses on a store floor midway through the teaser.
The Apple TV series comes from legendary television producer David E. Kelley, who previously chronicled the lives of people under pressure by creating Ally McBeal, Boston Common, and Big Little Lies. But where many of his previous shows rarely dipped below the lower middle classes, Margo’s Got Money Troubles looks at those living gig to gig.
Based on the 2024 novel by Rufi Thorpe, Margo’s Got Money Troubles stars Fanning as a would-be writer and currently-is college student who becomes pregnant by her English professor. While her mother, a former Hooter’s waitress portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer, has her own thoughts about what her daughter should do, Margo chooses instead to reconnect with her estranged father, an ex-professional wrestler played by Nick Offerman. Thanks to her father’s advice, Margo finds success on OnlyFans, which comes with its own set of pressures.
Even 15 years ago, the premise of Margo’s Got Money Troubles would sound like a twee indie movie trying to ape Wes Anderson’s style. Only the rich could afford to let so many members of the family have idiosyncratic dreams like becoming a wrestling hero or a social media star. Most people would have to work in a factory or sling burgers at a McDonalds. But as even entry-level jobs demand several years of experience and none of them pay a living wage, regular careers are just as unrealistic as the weird ones.
If the show can capture this economic trend, then Margo’s Got Money Troubles could restore a once-important television tradition. While the first TV shows focused on upper-middle class suburbanites who could afford a television set, some of the great series of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s were all about people living modestly; shows like Sanford and Son, Roseanne, and All in the Family. Even The Simpsons and King of the Hill started out as more working-class shows, even if the world around them turned Homer and Hank into top earners.
Even better, if Margo’s Got Money Troubles can make us laugh at the character’s plight, it helps us viewers make sense of our own situation. Not only can we enjoy the relief of someone else getting denied in the checkout line, but we can start to see each other on screen, instead of just always watching the rich.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles premieres on Apple TV on April 15, 2026.
Netflix CEO Swears Under Oath That WB Movies Will Go to Theaters
Look, we here at Den of Geek know that there’s a lot going on in the world. We know that there are far more pressing things for the United States government to be dealing with than Netflix‘s plan to purchase Warner Bros. Heck, we know that the reason that Congress called co-CEO Ted Sarandos to testify has more to do with concern about the streamer becoming a monopoly if it buys Warner Bros. than it does anything to do with the future of cinemas.
But, man, are we relieved to hear Sarandos assure lawmakers that Netflix wouldn’t relegate Warner movies to phones and TVs. In fact, Sarandos invoked the weight of the situation when a congressperson asked if Netflix would commit to adhering to a 45-day theatrical window for new releases, holding them in the theater before sending them straight to streaming. “I just said I would do that under oath,” Sarandos responded (via Deadline).
Reportedly, Sarandos expressed frustration at Congress’ questions, as he has been saying for some time that Netflix would honor theatrical agreements. However, it’s also true that Sarandos has been strangely hostile towards the whole idea of going to the theater. Last year, he repeatedly described going to the theater as a type of elitist act, positioning an expensive streaming subscription, a high-quality television, and a high-speed internet connection as a more democratic option.
However, Sarandos’ comments here seem to finally put to rest our concerns. By adhering to a 45-day window, Sarandos promises that at least Warner Bros. movies will go to the theaters first. Even if they don’t play in those theaters for a full six weeks, it will take at least that long before Warner movies appear on Netflix. That wait encourages people who want to watch the newest movies to go to the theaters.
Those concerns became even more pressing in 2025. Last year, Warner Bros released some of the most celebrated movies of the year, from critical favorites such as One Battle After Another and Weapons to the DCU blockbuster Superman to Sinners, the record-breaking Oscar player that has thrilled fans and critics alike.
Each of these movies received praise from observers (including Den of Geek), but it’s the theatrical reception that many use to gauge the success of films. Superman and Sinners were undeniable hits because they pulled big box office numbers; One Battle After Another and Weapons, both great movies, have been scrutinized in part because they did not do as well in the theaters.
Even those who do not consider cinemas sacrosanct can see that movie theater attendance still matters. For that reason alone, it’s good that Netflix is committing to continuing the practice. And with Sarandos’ comments, that’s one less thing for us to worry about. Now if Congress would just start dealing with all that other stuff…
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2 Trailer – What Is Titan X?
The latest look at season 2 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters gives fans of the Apple TV series everything they want. There are glimpses at all the characters introduced in the first season, including Kurt and Wyatt Russell as the older and younger versions of military man Lee Shaw, Anna Sawai as kaiju survivor Cate Randa, and Kiersey Clemons as Apex defector May Olowe-Hewitt. But the big draw for everything in Legendary Pictures‘s MonsterVerse is, of course, the monsters, and that’s where things get interesting.
Throughout the trailer, we get glimpses of the new big bad of the show, a monster previously identified as Titan X. The trailer still doesn’t fully reveal this new monster, which means we viewers can’t really identify him. We know that Titan X is even larger than King Kong and Godzilla and at least spends significant time in the sea. We also see that it has tentacles and horns, including a pair of horns on its snout.
That’s not enough to tell us for sure who Titan X might be, but it is enough to let us speculate wildly… at least until Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 arrives and secures the creature’s identity.
King Ghidorah
Titan X, of course, makes us think of Monster X aka King Ghidorah. King Ghidorah is one of the major enemy monsters across several eras of Godzilla, and has already made its presence known in the MonsterVerse, having appeared in Godzilla: King of the Monsters and played a part in the construction of Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong. In Godzilla Final Wars, Ghidorah becomes Keizer Ghidorah, a bigger monster with horns and a bifurcated tail, all of which tracks with what we’ve seen for Titan X.
Titanus Na Kika
The shot of Titan X’s silhouette swimming through the water brings to mind another mythological monster, the mighty Kraken. Although it hasn’t had a lot of attention, a Kraken does exist in the MonsterVerse, in the form of Titanus Na Kika. Na Kika has never appeared on screen, but it was mentioned in the King of the Monsters official novelization and showed up in the prequel comic Godzilla Dominion. While those depictions mostly track with what we see in the Monarch trailers, they do describe Na Kika as one of the less aggressive Titans, making a clash with Kong unlikely.
Titanus Leviathan
As you might pick up from the description of Na Kika, MonsterVerse tends to take existing monsters from regional mythologies and work them into the universe. Such is the case with Titanus Leviathan, a variation of the creature mentioned in the Biblical book of Job. While a photo of Leviathan shows up in Kong: Skull Island, the image is just a riff on the famous picture of the Loch Ness Monster. King of the Monsters shows Leviathan’s name on a military map, and the novelization of the movie gives a little more information. But basically, all we know about Leviathan is that it’s some sort of sea monster which, you know, is exactly what we see in the trailer.
Dagahra
Godzilla is a long-running franchise that has reinvented itself time and time again, and has given the world tons of fan-favorite monsters that only true nerds know about. Case in point, Dagahra, the water-based dragon kaiju from 1997’s Rebirth of Mothra 2. Dagahra comes from the sea, has a plenty of horns, and has a large tail that could work like a tendril. That said, we don’t really see any giant wings on Titan X, and that is kind of an important part of Dagahra… Still, until we hear otherwise, we can still hope that Dagahra will show up.
Biollante
We see a lot of tentacles coming off of Titan X in that trailer, and when it comes to tentacles, nobody beats Biollante. A plant monster created by splicing Godzilla’s cells with those of flowers (and also the mad scientist’s dead daughter, because of course it is) Biollante first appeared in 1989’s Godzilla vs. Biollante and has been a favorite among fans. Biollante’s glowing center and sharp jaws do match what we see of Titan X, and the water environment would suit a giant plant monster. But it still feels like a stretch to say that Biollante is Titan X.
Sharktopus
I mean, it looks like Sharktopus, doesn’t it? And since you don’t know what Titan X is either, you can’t tell me I’m wrong. So I’m saying Sharktopus.
Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday Marketing Continues to Baffle
In the pages of Marvel Comics, Doctor Victor von Doom is a haughty villain who believes he deserves to rule the world, and he may be right. A master of both magic and science, Doom has conquered the Earth more than once, has become a god multiple times, and each time found it beneath him. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that Doom would also consider the Super Bowl, that celebration of crass Americanism, to be also beneath him.
Marvel Studios, however, doesn’t have the luxury of such selectivity. So the news that Marvel reportedly won’t be showing any trailers for Avengers: Doomsday during the Super Bowl has us all scratching our heads. The Super Bowl is easily the most watched television event of the year, and many Americans watch specifically for the commercials. Yet, Marvel has decided that they don’t need those eyeballs, which is just the latest in utterly bizarre decisions the House of Ideas has made when advertising Doomsday.
Doom Comes to Marvel
It all started with chairs. When Marvel announced the major cast members of Doomsday on March 26, 2025, we had already known that the company’s original plans had gone awry. While Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige always intended to end Phase Six with Avengers: Secret Wars, he initially planned for Avengers: The Kang Dynasty to precede it. That movie, which was to be directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, was to pit Marvel’s heroes against Kang the Conqueror, the new big bad who was introduced in the first season of Loki and in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
However, between news of horrible behavior by Kang actor Jonathan Majors going public and the generally tepid response to Marvel’s offerings in Phases Four and Five, the studio drastically changed course. Not only would it bring in Marvel’s most beloved villain from the comics, replacing Kang with Doctor Doom and The Kang Dynasty with Doomsday, but it would bring back all the old favorites to do it. Infinity War and Endgame helmers Joe and Anthony Russo would direct both Doomsday and Secret Wars, and Robert Downey Jr., who seemed to leave the MCU forever when Tony Stark died, would play Victor Von Doom.
It sure seemed like Marvel was going to play it safe, fall back on all the ‘member berries from when they were the biggest thing in pop culture just a few years ago, and give the people what they want.
Marvel Takes a Seat
But the studio’s marketing for Doomsday has been anything but safe. Again, look back at the way they announced the cast: a video lasting one minute and forty-seven seconds, featuring nothing but actors’ names on the back of chairs (plus an appearance by Downey Jr.), stretched out over several hours.
Just as strange have been the actual trailers that have been released for Doomsday. Three trailers, each attached to a Thursday showing of Avatar: Fire and Ash, none of which dealt explicitly with the plot of the movie. The first revealed that Chris Evans was back as Steve Rogers, and that he had a son. The second reminded everyone that Thor adopted a daughter in Love and Thunder. The third promised that Professor X and Magneto would die on screen… again. And the fourth showed the Thing from the Fantastic Four paling around with Black Panther and M’Baku.
Muddying the waters even further are all of the reports coming from the set, official or otherwise. The leaks from Doomsday have been particularly egregious, as all these insiders rush to YouTube and Reddit to share something they’ve heard about Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man fighting Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and plenty of AI-created photos get disseminated, leading to confusion among fans. Further, we’re hearing credible reports that the script for the movie hasn’t even been finished, and comments from actors involved with the project suggest that they don’t know the overall story, but you’ve got the Russos themselves being cryptic. It’s not just them posting a blurry “A” to Instagram; it’s also saying that the teasers are “clues” and urging fans to “pay attention.”
“Pay attention to what?,” you might ask. And you won’t get an answer.
Thus far, the ramp-up to Doomsday has been a lot of bluster with very little pay off. Marvel is acting like it did during the height of its popularity, when it could put out a middling project like Doctor Strange and people would still rush to the theaters to watch it. As the lukewarm response to even really good entries like Loki season two and Thunderbolts* has demonstrated, the general audience doesn’t have Marvel fever anymore, and they aren’t going to show up just because it has a red logo on it.
A Bad Idea from the House of Ideas
Marvel’s hubris with Doomsday is particularly disheartening because they actually do have a really good entry out right now. Wonder Man has surprised critics and fans alike, and not just because it keeps its superheroics to the side. Wonder Man reminds us that we really like to watch compelling characters hanging out in a fantastic world, even if they’re just going on movie auditions, even if they’re eating shawarma.
With a cast that includes faves like Thor and Steve Rogers and big names like Doctor Doom, Avengers: Doomsday certainly could put characters back at the center of the MCU. But everything about the lead-up to Doomsday feels like Marvel’s not even bothering. It’s acting like we’re going to show up for a movie just because it’s Marvel and just because RDJ and Chris Evans are in it.
Hopefully, this is all just mishandled marketing and Doomsday will actually be a worthwhile movie. Because if the movie is trash, and they’ve refused to market it well, then Doomsday will be more dangerous to the Marvel Universe than anything that Doctor Doom could imagine.
Avengers: Doomsday releases on December 18, 2026.
New MST3K and RiffTrax Crossover Is Great News for Mike Enjoyers
When Joel Hodgson left as the host of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1993, it was a sad day for fans of the delightful comedy series he’d created, but Hodgson was quickly replaced by one of the show’s writers, Michael J. Nelson, and things moved on. Though Nelson had a different hosting style from Hodgson’s, he soon settled into the role and continued to front the show for the rest of its run, earning the respect of audiences who were initially unsure whether MST3K could continue without its original host.
Post-MST3K, Nelson has been creating audio commentary tracks for B-movies with RiffTrax, along with Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, who voiced Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot in later seasons of MST3K. It’s been a successful endeavor that has been happily trucking along for 20 years, but this week Nelson announced that RiffTrax will boldly cross over with MST3K for four new, as-yet-untitled episodes called The RiffTrax Experiments.
“Getting a chance to revisit MST3K after all this time has really energized all of us at RiffTrax,” Nelson said (via Variety). “And for my part, hey, I truly did miss standing next to plastic puppets. It’s been too long.”
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments is being backed by a new Kickstarter campaign that will help RiffTrax riffers Nelson, Murphy and Corbett return to their MST3K roles, with Mary Jo Pehl also confirmed to return as Pearl Forrester. The campaign aims to raise $20,000 to fund the new episodes, but it has been emphasized that they’ll proceed regardless of whether that goal is met.
For Mike enjoyers everywhere, this upcoming MST3K–RiffTrax crossover is terrific news, but it follows a more bittersweet announcement elsewhere. Just a couple of weeks ago, it was revealed that Hodgson had sold his joint interest in MST3K to Radial Entertainment and planned to move on from his enduring creation once more.
“I’ve been incredibly lucky to spend my adult life making a living as an entertainer, and MST3K has been a big part of it,” Hodgson said in a statement. “Creating your own comedic art form like MST3K is deeply fulfilling and fun — but that doesn’t mean I’m required to work on it every day for the rest of my life. This move feels like the best way to encourage MST3K to find its future, while I find mine, including the chance to focus on some new and different projects with fewer moving parts.”
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments will be released later this year.
Wonder Man’s Doorman Gets New Solo Marvel Adventure
This article contains Wonder Man spoilers.
Marvel has decided to immediately bring back one of its most popular characters from Wonder Man: DeMarr Davis, a.k.a. Doorman. After making his first live-action appearance in the latest Disney+ series, the Great Lakes Avengers’ portal-creating hero is now starring in his own digital comic.
Doorman is one of Marvel’s more offbeat heroes, so it wasn’t too surprising to see him pop up in Wonder Man. Created in 1989 by John Byrne, he debuted in West Coast Avengers #46 as a mutant whose body could become a living portal, allowing people and objects to pass through solid matter into the Darkforce Dimension. But over time, his story evolved into something stranger: after sacrificing himself in battle, he was resurrected by Oblivion as an Angel of Death, gaining enhanced abilities.
The character’s recent leap into the MCU came through Wonder Man, where Doorman (Byron Bowers) is introduced as a struggling club doorman named DeMarr Davis, who gains his abilities through a bizarre accident involving mysterious black goo, courtesy of everyone’s favorite evil Marvel corporation, Roxxon.
In the show’s standout black-and-white episode, Doorman’s powers make him a media sensation after he rescues a group of people, including real-life actor Josh Gad, from a fire. This leads to a movie deal featuring his portal powers, but a botched stunt causes Gad to vanish into Doorman’s portal, sparking enough controversy that Hollywood institutes the “Doorman Clause,” a rule that prevents anyone with superpowers from working in film and TV.
Following his MCU debut, Doorman Infinity Comic (2026) #1 was created by Cody Ziglar and Julian Shaw (Miles Morales: Spider-Man). It’s a one-shot in which Davis tries to get a new job in tech security. Unfortunately, his portal demonstration ends up taking his potential employer on a wild tour across the Marvel Universe instead.
Doorman Infinity Comic (2026) #1 is available now exclusively on Marvel Unlimited.
New A24 Trailer Dares You to Imagine the Worst Thing Zendaya Has Ever Done
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? No one entering into a serious relationship really wants to ask that question, but it’s a necessary bit of pre-wedding honesty—and in theory fun. Furthermore, most people expect fairly banal answers, like the little annoyances that Robert Pattinson and Zendaya‘s characters admit throughout the first half of the trailer for A24’s new intentionally aloof The Drama.
But midway through the teaser footage, things take a change. The answer given by Emma Harwood, the bride-to-be played by Zendaya, is enough to shock her friends (Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim) and terrify betrothed Charlie Thompson (Pattinson), leading to a cavalcade of calamities throughout the second half of the trailer.
So what is the terrible thing that Emma did? The trailer doesn’t give us any answers, but with Kristoffer Borgli directing and Ari Aster producing, it’s bound to be something nasty., right? Right?!
After all, Aster built his reputation on documenting the most unpleasant aspects of the human psyche, whether it be the shocking deaths and ravages of grief in Hereditary and Midsommar to… that happening in “The Strange Thing About the Johnsons.” Meanwhile Norwegian-born writer/director Borgli is less well-known to American viewers than Aster, but he already has established a reputation for getting weird. His debut film, the pseudo-documentary DRIB (2017), starred Amir Asgharnejad as a comedian who almost becomes a spokesperson for an energy drink, creating all sorts of chaos in the process. Sick of Myself (2022) follows a couple in Norway who come into possession of an experimental Russian anxiety medication with horrific side effects. Most Americans first learned of Borgli though with 2023’s Dream Scenario, in which Nicolas Cage played a boring middle-aged man who starts showing up in the dreams of strangers.
In each of these films, Borgli thrusts his characters into unlikely situations and invites us to watch the unexpected turns that follow. From that information alone, we can probably guess that Emma’s confession is going to take some dark turns.
However, it’s the absence of the confession that makes the trailer for The Drama so interesting. Much of the trailer features elements that anyone would find stressful in the most banal situations. Everyone experiences anxiety over big relationship decisions, and those feelings only compound with the high stakes—and high price tags—involved in a wedding. Even if the worst thing she ever did was swipe a packet of baseball cards from a Walmart when she was 11, Emma’s confession would create tension.
The fact that The Drama looks so thrilling and funny without knowing the central plot point makes the setup incredibly compelling. We don’t know what Emma did, but we know it’s going to be bad, and we know it’s going to create a mess. So what is the worst thing you ever did? And what do you think Zendaya did to make RPatz react like that?!
The Drama hits theaters on April 3, 2026.
World’s First BioVault for Wildlife Preservation a Good Sign for What’s Turning Into a Dire Future
Is it better to hope for the best and plan for the worst, or to simply be practical… and still plan for the worst? It might be a glass all-empty sutation, but the announcement of the world’s first BioVault in Dubai that will preserve the biodiversity of endangered species from across the globe certainly appears realistic about the direction things are headed in.
Revealed by the UAE government and Colossal Biosciences out of the World Governments Summit—the 13-year-old international event held in Dubai every February—the Colossal BioVault and World Preservation Lab will be housed permanently at Dubai’s Museum of the Future, beginning this year. The revelation is the culmination of a nine-figure-investment into the first of its kind BioVault, which will be devoted specifically to protecting the biodiversity of species potentially on the brink of collapse.
The directive is of major important to the UAE government, with Crown Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum reportedly directing the investment into both the BioVault and accompanying educational opportunities the lab will facilitate. Located in the Museum of the Future—a kind of permanent world’s fair installation where researchers, scientists, technologists, and otherwise self-described futurists put up exhibits each February—the laboratory will be both a research center and presumable tourist attraction in which children will be encouraged to make field trips.
The bottom line, though, is that the BioVault will preserve living cell lines and genetic data from endangered species with the aim of preventing the type of genetic hegemony that is threatening animals on the cusp of vanishing like the red wolf or the white rhinoceros. It will also be part of a larger Colossal BioVault network for the Texas-based company.
Last year, Colossal got much internet attention (including right here) for announcing that it had essentially genetically engineered the return of the dire wolf of legend (or an exact genome-replica of it), but this is arguably part of its greater scientific mission which is to help living species on the edge, as well as store millions of samples from over 10,000 species in BioVaults all over the world. The first one located in Dubai will apparently be targeting what Colossal describes as the 100 most imperiled species globally and in the UAE. The facility will furthermore take advantage of advanced robotics, AI monitoring, and cryopreservation technologies.
“I believe the future belongs to those who harness technology and innovation to address our greatest challenges,” said Majed Al Mansoor, the executive director of the Museum of the Future. “By working with Colossal Biosciences, leaders in synthetic biology and conservation, we are taking a bold step to advance science that safeguards our planet, restores ecosystems, and builds a sustainable legacy for future generations. In its first year, the initiative will prioritize fieldwork and DNA research across species, laying the scientific groundwork for future biodiversity protection and conservation.”
The aims of the initiative seem undeniably prudent and even vital with some studies showing projections where nearly half of the Earth’s species going extinct by 2050 due to climate change, deforestation, overpopulation, and a litany of other manmade woes which are pushing ecosystems to their breaking point. That the technology Colossal is developing will be open-sourced is a positive sign of an attempt to prevent worst case scenarios.
Nonetheless, the fact that this seems more apropos for preserving wildlife on the brink than actually substantially addressing the above issues belies what feels like a global crisis of dithering and an inability to do big things in the 21st century on a macro scale. But maybe we can stop everything else going exactly the way of the dodo…
Arco: The Most Wondrous Animated Movie of the Year Is Finally in Theaters
If you’re not paying close attention, you might mistake Arco , the NEON-backed animated movie that keeps being nominated for awards, including at the Oscars, for any other animated movie at the multiplex. The film features a pair of misfit kids who go on an adventure that teaches them a lesson, a couple of adults voiced by famous Marvel actors, and it even has a trio of bumbling villains voiced by famous comedians.
But outside those superficial similarities, the film has nothing in common with the usual fare that Disney and DreamWorks pump out each year. Arco is a rich, beautiful family movie, one that challenges young viewers and excites the imagination in a way that films for kids rarely do anymore… so it’s kind of a relief audiences outside of the major cities and critics groups are finally seeing it.
Flying Beyond the Ordinary
A French production being distributed in North America by NEON, Arco follows two children who meet one another across time and space. Living in the fantastical world of 2932, young Arco (Juliano Krue Valdi in the English dub) wants nothing more than to fly through time like the rest of his family, but government regulations force him to wait until he’s older.
And with good reason, as demonstrated by what happens when Arco defies the rules and goes out for a test flight in his incredible rainbow suit. He tumbles through time and space to arrive in 2075, where he befriends Iris (Romy Fay). As they hide out and look for the diamond that allows him to time travel again, Iris and Arco find themselves pursued by three odd men (voiced by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea), who seem to have a scientific interest in the boy.
Director Ugo Bienvenu, who developed the script from his original drawings with Félix de Givry, animates Arco in a style that most recalls Studio Ghibli anime. The fluid flying sequences and focus on wide-eyed children brings to mind classics such as My Neighbor Totoro. There’s a sketchiness to the line work and a use of shimmering landscapes that would be familiar to anyone interested in Asian animation.
But in place of the European steampunk that works its way into Hayao Miyazaki‘s stories, Arco has the retro-future aesthetics of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. The flight costumes donned by Arco and his family recall the hoods and frocks worn by the humans in Beneath the Planet of the Apes or participants in the Carousel in Logan’s Run. The pointed glasses donned by the men pursuing Arco and Iris look like the futuristic eye wear devised by the creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Back to the Future Part II.
Animating Our Current Time
Yet when at its best, Arco feels of the moment, as opposed to either the future or the past. Iris’ neighborhood seems idyllic. She passes plenty of trees on her way to school, and it’s safe enough that she’s allowed to go out without parental supervision. When she starts feeling queasy in the middle of a lesson, the teacher does grumble for a bit, but allows her to go. Bath time for Iris and her brother is playful, as their guardian does impressions of cowboys and pirates to entertain them.
However, instead of being bathed by a parent or taught by an older person, Iris spends her time surrounded by robots. We learn later that most adults work in the city, and only come home to be with their children on the weekend. In the meantime, they either speak to the kids via virtual reality holograms, beaming blue, flickering versions of themselves into the living room, or through their blank-faced robots.
Iris’ primary robot, Mikki, looks like a smaller version of K-2SO from the Star Wars movie Rogue Oneand his voice often sounds like the low, machine-like rumble of most movie bots. However, when the parents (Natalie Portman, who also produces, and Mark Ruffalo) need to interact with the kids, they speak through Mikki. The result is at once uncanny and familiar to anyone who has shared intimate moments via Zoom screens and FaceTime.
Arco reflects our current reality, at once close and safe and mediated by technology. The movie makes it clear that Iris’ parents, just like the others in this reality, do care for their kids. They are involved in the lives of Iris and her brother the best they can, and they try to use what’s available to give their kids a good life. And yet, that good life requires them to submit their children to robots and to lock them behind giant glass towers, which cover each of the neighborhood houses when a threat arises in the third act.
A Different Type of Family Film
To its credit, Arco doesn’t attempt to teach the parents a lesson, ending on a false note about how grown-ups can simply drop everything and become perfect caretakers, without having to worry about jobs or their own feelings. The time-travel story does allow for Iris and Arco to have their own lessons, as the latter’s decision to fly leads to massive changes in the lives of both children. Arco‘s final act has real stakes in a way one rarely finds in modern family entertainment, bringing to mind upsetting moments from The NeverEnding Story or Time Bandits.
But that doesn’t mean that Bienvenu is interested only in traumatizing a whole new generation of kids. Even though the final part of Arco takes a surprisingly upsetting turn, there’s genuine humanity to it, one that inspires empathy among young viewers. Furthermore, it leads to a hopeful ending about struggling to make things better for later generations. That’s a theme important to any moviegoer, young or old, and one that you’ll only find in a film as rich and wonderful as Arco.
Arco is now playing in theaters across the U.S.
Ranking Every Season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Most rankings are subjective, and so is this one! Ask a handful of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans to rank the show’s seasons, and you’ll probably get wildly different answers. Some people think the show peaked with Buffy and Angel’s tragic story arc in season 2; others find that whole thing extremely problematic. Some people love the Dawn era; others would tell you it makes them want to throw something. Everyone hates Xander – except all the times they didn’t.
So, here’s the official (but subjective) Den of Geek ranking for all of Buffy’s seven seasons. Hear us out, then feel free to head to the comments and sound off…
7. Season 7
The final season of Buffy gave us a touching ending that wrapped up the series well and promised a better future for most of the show’s characters. After battling The First Evil in its many guises, Buffy and the Scoobies turn Sunnydale into a crater and many of the Potential Slayers into real ones. For the first time in years, life also looks to be full of possibilities for Buffy, who has carried the weight of the world on her shoulders since she was originally chosen to battle dark forces. She has shifted from reactive hero to full-on general, and her actions have felt earned, even when they were uncomfortable to watch.
But unfortunately, the final season dragged at the time, and drags on rewatch. The First is underused in practice as a villain, playing with Spike, the Turok-Hans, and later Caleb as its minions, but proving no real threat beyond psychological manipulation. The Potentials also overload the show with new characters who aren’t fully fleshed out and become quickly annoying. Our faves start acting out of character, ganging up against Buffy and, in Giles’ case, making moves against Spike behind her back. There was certainly precedence for this – killing Ben, his reluctant dirty work for the Watchers Council – but it feels like retreading old ground.
There was a lot of retreading in season 7. Back to Sunnydale High, back to the beginning, looping everything full circle, but it regularly seemed like we’d been here before. The show was running out of ideas and steam, and it was almost a relief when it ended with its uplifting yet occasionally tragic finale. Certain moments are infuriating, though. Spike’s heroic death was immediately undone in Angel, and the killing of the show’s neurodivergent-coded character, Anya, in the final minutes still feels unnecessary and mean-spirited.
6. Season 1
Important elements of the show first came together in season 1, introducing our main characters and showing how they respond to wild situations that no 16-year-old should have to navigate. The “high school is hell” theme and the rubbery “monster of the week” approach landed immediately, and the Whedon-speak dialogue (now largely considered Millennial cringe) was a delight at the time.
Some of the episodes do feel quite quaint now, occasionally laughably so, especially Willow falling in love with a demon online when the technology was still in its infancy. Others have fared better. “Welcome to the Hellmouth” is still one of the best pilots ever created, and “Prophecy Girl” is one of the best finales, delivering an air-punching evolution for the show’s central character as she begins to resist expectations from those with her and against her.
Still, season 1 ultimately feels really rough around the edges because the show hadn’t hit its stride yet. The character of Xander, played by newcomer Nicholas Brendon after Ryan Reynolds turned down the role, remains particularly hard to watch as he refuses to take the hint that Buffy isn’t interested in him and ends up coming off as disturbingly possessive, which fades into the background somewhat in season 2 as the dynamics of the main characters deepen. Persistently bad editing and lighting choices also don’t help – the budget was low, and the crew was likely doing the best they could, but future seasons benefited from learning the lessons of the first, both practically and in characterization.
5. Season 5
Season 5 is a mixed bag, with an equal number of solid and utterly underwhelming episodes.
Glory is a great villain – a God who can’t be killed and who feels like a genuine threat – but the episodes where she has an impact on our gang are interspersed with some real stinkers, usually where Buffy’s little sister Dawn is in danger and screeching about how unfair everything is, but also anything with Buffy’s pathetic ex-army boyfriend Riley, who seems entirely focused on his own selfish needs even as things get worse and worse for Buffy. The Knights of Byzantium are relentlessly silly and easily dispatched in the end, so the episodes leading up to the terrific finale, where Buffy sacrifices herself to save Dawn, also prove a bit annoying to get through.
There’s some really good stuff here, though. The Spike-centric episode “Fool for Love” builds to a surprisingly touching conclusion, and his Buffybot era is truly wild, even today. The fallout from Joyce’s death in “The Body” is heartbreaking. Glory’s attack on Tara is truly upsetting. “Buffy vs. Dracula” remains an incredible monster-of-the-week episode, and the show even manages to create one of its creepiest moments ever when Joyce is resurrected and comes knocking at the door in “Forever.”
4. Season 6
“This is too high on the ranking,” I can sense some of you thinking, and that’s fair! But hear me out: I feel like Buffy season 6 got a rough deal when it first aired and has since become better regarded.
In season 6, the characters were growing up along with the show’s audience. At the time, many fans thought that Buffy’s depression after being brought back to life, and the way she had to cope with joining the adult world, was simply too glum. Much of the humor that propped up earlier seasons had lessened and was replaced by the reality of living. There were bills to pay, and Buffy had to get a humiliating minimum wage job. With no parents around, she didn’t know how to cope with things going wrong. She started sleeping with someone who wasn’t good for her, but briefly lightened the load on her emotional state. These are relatable things that come up for many people at that age. Buffy couldn’t just bounce back from being sucked out of heaven. She was forced to cope with real life, and that meant something to many viewers dealing with their own monsters. Willow’s villain arc may have also divided people, but at least the show attempted to explore addiction issues in a somewhat meaningful way, which was more than many were doing at that point.
After bringing us a “silent” episode in season 4, Buffy also delivered an incredible musical episode here, featuring catchy songs that became enduring earworms, but it’s the season’s central theme – that sometimes life will plunge you into darkness and you have to battle your own demons – that has truly lasted the test of time.
3. Season 4
Season 4 may be slightly uneven, but it’s definitely ambitious. From the groundbreaking “Hush” to the surreal “Restless,” this season is stuffed with memorable episodes that push the show beyond its comfort zone as Buffy goes to college and discovers that independence brings even greater danger. At the same time, the Scooby gang is forced into situations that lead them to bolder character arcs. Willow loses Oz but finds a new love in Tara. Xander realizes he’s going nowhere and begins a serious relationship with someone he’s not even sure he likes. With his steady librarian job over, Giles spirals into a midlife crisis fueled by boredom and the sense that he’s no longer needed.
The season also makes the U.S. military into a joke, which is either hilarious or annoying, depending on how much you love the U.S. military, I suppose. As part of the military influx, Riley’s introduction is sweet to begin with. It’s nice to couple Buffy with someone normal but not totally boring (your mileage may vary), and seeing him slowly get to grips with what’s really going on in Sunnydale and the gray areas that Buffy has to deal with is mostly compelling. The season falls flat with its big bad Adam, but there are so many highlights elsewhere that it’s hard to be too mad about it.
“Living Conditions,” where Buffy decides that her annoying roommate is evil, is hilariously relatable. The twist of “Fear, Itself” – that the demonic Gachnar is only a couple of inches tall when it finally manifests – hits every time. Jonathan’s world-altering installment “Superstar” is so stacked with fun that it’s unexpectedly hard to leave behind. Willow’s spell going awry in “Something Blue” also leads to some fantastic scenes between the cast. But it’s not all breezy stuff. In “The Harsh Light of Day,” the show tackles the possibility that not everyone you’re seduced by will treat you right, and Faith’s return in a phenomenal double bill toward the end leads to an understanding between her and Buffy that finally leaves the door open for Faith to be redeemed, a solid storyline that continues in season 7, Angel, and the comics that followed.
2. Season 2
It’s an understatement to say that season 2 was a huge step up from season 1. Darker and more emotional, season 2’s main arc is planned and executed magnificently as Buffy and Angel’s romance deepens, then implodes spectacularly when she sleeps with him and he turns evil. The Angelus arc presents Buffy with her first real moral challenge: whether to kill the man she loves and break her own heart, or find a way to save him that could lead to more and more carnage in the meantime.
The Buffy-Angel storyline never loses its momentum because season 2 mixes classic monster-of-the-week episodes with that arc exceptionally well. There are some duds for sure (stuff like “Inca Mummy Girl” and “Bad Eggs”), but we also get “Halloween,” “Ted,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” There are also a couple of double-episode story arcs in “What’s My Line” and “Becoming” that are, quite simply, some of the best TV we’ve ever had the pleasure of watching.
Season 2 also introduces Spike and Drusilla, a fresh and massively chaotic couple whose relationship is upended when Angelus is pulled back into their orbit, where he cucks Spike into the stratosphere. Growing the cast of vampire characters was key at this point, increasing the audience’s patience for a little bloodsucking fun in one area, even while Angelus became the worst of the worst in another (the murder of Jenny Calendar is still a tough watch). Spike would go on to become one of the series’ main characters, surprising the show’s writers, and James Marsters’ performance as the Billy Idol-lookalike was so dedicated that a later storyline would even send him to therapy in real life.
1. Season 3
A tonal high point for the series, season 3 of Buffy found the perfect balance of humor, romance, and drama. It also had a great villain, a dark side of the Slayer in Faith, and a thrilling final battle that could have easily ended the whole show right there.
In Mayor Richard Wilkins III, Buffy had something new. Right up until the last episode, he was a subtle but menacing villain who played up his quirky moments as an endearing father figure to two young girls whose fathers were no longer in the picture. His urge to reinforce good in the community and his silly giggles at the most mundane things were deftly offset by the sense that nothing would stop him from ascending into a staggering demonic force. His evil plan had been coming to fruition for so long that Buffy ended up “killing” Faith just to get his attention. Though Faith’s soul seemed unsalvageable at the time, Buffy wrestled with how to deal with her until the penultimate episode. Thus, season 3 had created the perfect storm for its two Slayers, whose lawful and neutral-good tendencies shifted as they were affected by their own choices and actions, each holding a mirror up to the other until discomfort set in time and again.
Meanwhile, every Scooby got a standout episode in season 3. “The Zeppo” proved that Xander could get into trouble all by himself; “The Wish” introduced Cordelia to an even more violent alternate reality; “Doppelgangland” further forced Willow out of her shell; and Giles got his teenage kicks back in “Band Candy.” The school suicide episode “Earshot” was too close to the bone for the network following the Columbine massacre, but its upsetting storyline also remains eternally relevant.
Yes, we can all admit that the CGI on the Mayor Snake Monster has aged very poorly (and it wasn’t great at the time), but season 3 still remains the high point of the series for many Buffy fans.
Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 Trailer Brings the Franchise Back to Basics
We’re all sick of Stranger Things, right? After a finale that cost more, ran longer, and disappointed far worse than several Hollywood blockbusters, we’re all a bit over the Upside Down, Vecna, and whatever the heck the Russians were doing. How did a story about weird things happening to four kids from Indiana get so out of control?
Yet, just when we thought we were out returning our Hawkins High T-shirts and WSQK mugs back to Target, Netflix pulls us back in with the trailer to Stranger Things: Tales from ’85. Set, appropriately enough, to the Naked Eyes hit “Always Something There to Remind Me,” the trailer features the main four boys, along with Eleven and Max, riding their bikes, having snowball fights, and getting into trouble, all while dealing with spooky stuff. In short, it has all the stuff we loved about Stranger Things back when it premiered in 2016.
Set between seasons 2 and 3, during the winter of its titular year, Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 has plenty of familiar sights. In addition to the kids, we get bits with Hopper and Steve Harrington, the latter with immaculately rendered hair, and sights such as the Hawkins National Laboratory. Further, we get both old monsters, such as a puppy version of the Demodog, and some sort of cool-looking pumpkin creature.
Although we’re glad to see the characters, especially back when they weren’t burdened with so much lore, it’s things like the pumpkin monster that really excites us. According to Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer, Tales from ’85 seeks to replicate the feel of the era’s Saturday morning cartoon shows. The smooth animation on display in the trailer certainly doesn’t match that description, but the pumpkin monster does. That creature feels like the sort of one-off beastie you’d see for a single episode of Scooby-Doo or The Real Ghostbusters (or Ghostbusters, for that matter) and never see again.
Even the show’s decision to use sound-alike voice actors instead of the original cast recalls the cartoons of 40 years ago. The fact that Lorenzo Music and Arsenio Hall were playing Venkman and Winston helped The Real Ghostbusters feel like its own thing from the movie, and that can only help Stranger Things. The cast received quite a bit of criticism toward the final seasons, as the kids clearly aged to young adulthood by the time of season 5 and some lost the natural performance abilities they showed early on.
If Tales from ’85 can distance itself from the mainline show’s later seasons and recover some of the charm of the first two seasons, then the franchise could be saved. We all fell in love with the series when it was about ’80s kids fighting monsters, not because of a dense mythology about one psychic boy who became an evil monster. Shots in the Tales from ’85 trailer showing Lucas holding Max’s hand and the kids hitting each other with snowballs are just enough to remind us that maybe we still love Stranger Things after all.
Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 streams on Netflix on April 23, 2026.
Ian McKellen Hints at Massive Magneto Destruction in Avengers: Doomsday
Sir Ian McKellen will be back on the big screen in one of his most popular roles this December, as he’s set to reprise X-Men baddie Magneto once more in Avengers: Doomsday, but there’s been a veil of secrecy over the production to date, with even a teaser trailer released by Marvel and featuring McKellen as the iconic character described as a clue by the film’s directors.
Now, we may have a better idea of what Magneto will be up to when the film finally arrives, and apparently, sitting around playing chess with Patrick Stewart’s Professor X might be on the quieter side of things.
In a conversation with Jake Hamilton for Jake’s Takes, McKellen first discussed making the original X-Men movie in 2000 and recalled how many of the effects were practical compared to those in today’s movies.
“In the first film, I remember the camera behind me, my hands raised up, and as they did that, two motorcars, police cars in front of me, were raised up by cranes, and when [a signal] dropped my hands, the cars dropped,” he explained. “These were not special effects.”
It was then that McKellen added, “Nowadays, I think things will become a little bit easier. Though I did destroy New Jersey the other day. Oh, I perhaps shouldn’t have said that.”
Perhaps he shouldn’t, but the idea of Magneto taking out New Jersey in Avengers: Doomsday seems too delicious not to share. We don’t know what series of events would set that level of destruction in motion, and we also can’t confirm the safety of Dante Hicks and Randal Graves at this time. They may not have made it out alive. The Quick Stop is still open, though.
In the same interview, McKellen also discussed early X-Men conversations he had with late Marvel maestro Stan Lee, who had explained to him that the mutants were Marvel’s favorite property and appealed to readers who felt like outcasts from society.
“The demographic is young blacks, young Jews, and young gays. What an audience!” he said, agreeing that it was an audience who had to fight for civil rights. “The story becomes: how do you fight for civil rights? Do you do it Malcolm X’s way, like Magneto? Do you fight literally? Or do you try and assimilate and guide society to come round to your point of view, which is Professor X’s view – Martin Luther King’s view, perhaps.”
Following this, McKellen was asked if there was anything he learned about Magneto working on Avengers: Doomsday that hadn’t occurred to him before. “I didn’t realize how popular he was. I thought [Magneto] was the villain. But no, I think people rather like his attitude.”
Make of that what you will!
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Just Teased a Major Event in Westeros History
The following article contains spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 3 as well as details from the larger Targaryen family history in George R.R. Marin’sA Song of Ice and Fire canon.
The third episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is full of revelations. We learn that Aerion Targaryen is definitely the monster everyone says he is and that Ser Duncan the Tall is every inch the hero we all hoped. Most importantly, however, we learn the true identity of Dunk’s squire, Egg, who isn’t exactly the runaway stable boy he’s led everyone to believe.
No, he’s actually a Targaryen prince, the fifth child (and fourth son) of Prince Maekar, who will one day sit the Iron Throne as King Aegon V. And while his experiences with Dunk among the smallfolk help shape the ruler he’ll one day turn into, it appears that even the young Egg can’t escape the dark fortune that seems to haunt most of his family — or the hereditary madness that so often goes hand in hand with the Targaryen name. “The Squire” openly hints at the fairly tragic end awaiting young Aegon, though you likely won’t catch it if you’re not already fairly well versed in the horrors of his future.
On a walk through the jousting village, Dunk and Egg run into a fortune teller. She promises Ser Duncan the sort of generally bright fate you expect to hear from someone working the tournament grounds and hoping for tips — great success and more riches than a Lannister! But Egg’s fortune is something altogether different. “You shall be king and die in a hot fire, and worms shall feed upon your ashes,” she says. “And all who know you shall rejoice in your dying.”
Look, let’s just start by saying this is a whole lot to put on a ten-year-old kid, even for a fortune teller out to make a quick buck. But the unfortunate thing is… she’s also not wrong. At least where Egg is concerned. (You can argue about whether Dunk technically ends up being more wealthy than a Lannister, financially speaking, or just richer in terms of prestige.) Because Egg will die horribly, alongside many of the people he cares about most.
To compound the tragedy of his death further, King Aegon V actually turns out to be a pretty great ruler, as Targaryens go. Benevolent and approachable, he devotes a huge part of his reign to trying to improve the lives of the smallfolk he comes to know through squiring for Dunk, granting them new rights and protections they’ve never had before. (He spends the other half of his reign dealing with continued rebellions and his stubborn, intransigent children. Even Targaryens can’t have it all.)
But no matter how unconventional Aegon’s approach to the idea of kingship might be, he turns out to be very much like the rest of his family in one specific and very unfortunate way. Like so many Targaryens before (and after) him, he is obsessed with dragons. Aegon’s fascination with the creatures that once defined his family’s legacy doesn’t go so far as his brother Aerion’s — who literally believes he is a dragon in human form — but it’s still enough to ultimately bring about the end of his life.
The fortune teller’s prophecy in “The Squire” refers to an event that will come to be known as the Tragedy at Summerhall. The former seat of Aegon’s father, Summerhall is a castle in the Stormlands that the Targaryens often use as a vacation retreat. But in 259 AC, a catastrophic fire breaks out during a celebration to mark the birth of the king’s first great grandchild (Rhaegar, future father of Jon Snow according to the Game of Thrones TV series), leading to the deaths of, among others, King Aegon, his eldest son Prince Duncan Targaryen, and Ser Duncan the Tall, who is by this point Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.
The cause of the blaze remains unknown, though it is generally accepted that it was related to Aegon’s quest to restore dragons to the Seven Kingdoms and likely involved an attempt to hatch the last of the family’s dragon eggs by sorcery, wildfire, or a combination of both. (Some say blood sacrifice was also involved.) The tragedy drastically weakens the Targaryen line and marks the beginning of the final downward spiral for the family, leaving Viserys and Daenerys as essentially the only members of their House just a few short decades later.
No one knows for sure how many people died at Summerhall, and the survivors all refuse to speak of what happened, meaning the circumstances surrounding the blaze and its aftermath are a particularly intriguing mystery that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms could provide some answers to, should the show continue long enough to include information about the horrific end of its leads’ lives. Of course, everything to do with this tragedy and Dunk and Egg’s ultimate fates is a real downer for a show that seems to be priding itself on its light touch and low-stakes plots, but this is Westeros, after all. No one gets a happy ending.
Finn Bennett’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Villain Is Just Vibing
This article contains spoilers for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode 3 and contains details from Aerion Targaryen’s history in the larger A Song of Ice and Fire canon.
Every story in the Game of Thronesuniverse needs a good villain, and in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, that figure is Aerion “Brightflame” Targaryen. The latest in a long line of Westeros bad guys we’ve met onscreen that includes everyone from Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton to Aerion’s own distant relation, Aemond Targaryen, he may not get as much screentime as some of those who’ve come before him, but there’s no arguing that he’s pretty darn awful — and an uncomfortably prescient example of the Targaryen madness that so frequently defines various members of his family. (Including his great-grand-niece Daenerys.)
The second son of Prince Maekar, Aerion is a poster boy for the worst excesses of Targaryen power. He’s entitled, vain, unstable, and cruel for no reason other than he’s allowed to be, and has almost certainly never faced a consequence for any action in his life. Like many others in his family with no clear line to the Iron Throne, he spends most of his time being a dick for fun, whether that means purposefully injuring a jousting opponent by killing his horse or physically torturing a young woman he believes has disrespected him…by staging a puppet show with a dragon in it. And these are hardly the worst crimes committed. (Just ask his brothers, who actively hate him, and whom he seems to have regularly threatened and abused.)
Like several other notable members of his family (see also Daenerys’s brother Viserys), Aerion also happens to believe he’s not just a member of the House of the Dragon, but an actual dragon in human form. (The Targaryens may be struggling through a down period for the family brand, but at least they’ve still got the hereditary madness thing going for them.) His nickname “Brightflame” stems from this belief, bolstered by his personal preference for super dramatic heraldry and clothing, often done up in fiery colors of red and gold.
In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, we’re not given much to go on in terms of Aerion’s motivations. The reason why he’s so monstrous isn’t important as the simple fact that he is, something that presented a challenge for Finn Bennett, who plays the Targaryen prince, to convey onscreen.
“He’s kind of mentioned in Game of Thrones, the original series, as being the man who drank wildfire and thought it would turn him into a dragon, which is obviously completely insane,” Bennett tells Den of Geek. “And there are various bits online, and it’s mentioned in the books and in the novellas that he thinks he’s like a dragon in human form. I had no idea how to kind of reconcile that with something tangible onscreen. So instead of research, I just kind of wanted to curate more of a vibe, I guess.”
According to Bennett, his Aerion is the product of many hands who helped him ultimately fully realize the character.
“He’s a character who’s been built by so many people,” he says. “George Martin, obviously, for writing it. Ira [Parker, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms showrunner] for adapting it. Owen [Harris] and Sarah [Adina Smith], for directing me, Pip[pa Woods] and Lucy [McLaughlin] for doing the wig, and the people doing the costume….when you put all those pieces of the puzzle together, you really get a sense of how spiky or volatile or angry Aerion is, and that kind of makes it make sense. It was kind of a collective effort, if you will.”
Part of that effort is clearly evident in Aerion’s appearance. Bennett looks every inch the Targaryen prince onscreen, right down to the infamous armor he wears on the jousting pitch with its black scales and demonic helmet, complete with leaping metal flames. Never let it be said the Targaryens don’t have style.
“It’s very cool, isn’t it? I felt really cool,” Bennett says. “It was amazing for about the first day, and then you realize that it takes you like, 10 minutes to go pee in a suit of armor. You have to get all the belts off and then take all the gauntlets off and everything. So that got a bit old. But it was really cool. Whenever it was on and I didn’t need to pee, it [was] amazing.”
For all that Aerion is the cause of much of the chaos that will unfold through the back half of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the tournament at Ashford Meadow is hardly the most dramatic event of his personal story. He’ll spend several years in the Free Cities, fight with the Second Sons, marry his cousin Daenora Targaryen, and have a son called Maegor, a name Aerion may or may not have chosen just to be a jerk.
But his most infamous moment is almost certainly his death, brought about by drinking a cup of wildfire in the (obviously mistaken) belief it would somehow literally turn him into a dragon. Because these events take place many years from now in the show’s future, it’s unlikely we’ll see them in any detail. Unless, of course, Parker decides to do a season about the relatively tragic ends that await most of the characters we’ve met so far. And Bennett is ready to die horribly onscreen, if necessary.
“I would be lying if I said I haven’t thought about being asked to do that,” he says. “I would like to do that. I’d like to see him come back. Maybe he’s like an old man or something. That’d be fun. [Wildfire tastes like] cider, I reckon.”
New episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiere Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max, culminating with the finale on February 22.
