Devil May Cry Season 2 Review: DMC Takes Daddy Issues to Extreme Power Levels

Fan-favorite gunslinging “Jackpot-”saying half-demon mercenary Dante Sparda is back for season 2 of Netflix’s Devil May Cry, joined by his equally powerful, more stoic and demonically-leaning twin brother. Dante (Johnny Yong) returns to TV with a renewed purpose: to defeat the king of the demons, Mundus (Ray Chase), and get his brother, Vergil Sparda (Robbie Daymond), back on the right side. However, Vergil is not the same little boy that Dante believed had died in the attack that killed their mother. Instead, he is now one of Mundus’ top soldiers.

In the ending of season 1, Dante was betrayed by Mary “Lady” Arkham (Scout Taylor-Compton), who chose the demon-slaying organization, Uroboros, over the chaotic half-demon gun slinger, resulting in him being cryogenically frozen in the organization’s lab.

Season 2 picks up where season 1 left off, showing the impact that Dante’s captivity has on Lady and the current state of the war in Hell, a world actually named Makai. Lady is faced with the guilt of her hand in the deaths of hundreds of innocent Makai refugees. The head of Uroboros, Arius (Graham McTavish), makes a deal with the literal cowboy president, President Hopper (Jon Gries), to manufacture the war, resulting in the continuous deaths of thousands of Makaians, for both good optics for a presidential campaign and for test subjects for the organization.

Season 1 was a great introduction to this newest rendition of Devil May Cry, but this season makes it really start to feel like a world and is very reminiscent of the world-building in the first and second seasons of Castlevania. Dante is given a level of depth and complexity that, in some ways, hasn’t been seen since the franchise’s first installments. Taking a change from his more serious counterpart in the Devil May Cry anime from the early 2000s.

Vergil is given a chaotic rebrand: a multifaceted personality with a more monotone demeanor than his twin, yet somehow just as, if not more, chaotic. Showing that the recklessness of the Sparda bloodline didn’t just go to one twin. Though better trained than his younger brother, Vergil is just as naive about his own brainwashing and the impact that Mundus’ propaganda has on his ambitions to avenge his mother. Holding the same ambition as Dante, they find themselves on opposite corners of the boxing ring, only to be forced together to take down their mutual enemies, Arius, who is trying to revive Argosax the Chaos, an even bigger threat than Mundus, and Mundus, who lied to Vrigil about who killed his mother.

One of the main emotional themes this season is the impact that father figures and male relationships have on the main characters.

The twins’ father, Sparda, almost literally haunts the narrative. His absence from their lives, even his whereabouts, is never fully explained, even in the stories’ source materials. Dante and Vergil both reject and embrace their father’s legacy in various ways in the season. Vergil rejects his humanity, believing it inhibited his ability to protect his mother. In season 1, Dante rejected his demonic nature due to his seeing demons (Makaians) as nothing but evil due to their hand in his mother’s death. This season, Dante embraces humanity, as it is the only thing he has left of his mother.

Lady still deals with the trauma of her father’s experiments that ultimately turned him into the villainous demon, the Jester – a traumatic transition she witnessed – as her father brutally killed her mother, and set her on the path of hating the Makaians. Lady admits to herself that her father’s greed for knowledge was his undoing, having lost her father long before his transformation.

Even Mundus’ relationship with Sparda and Argosax is a reflection of generational trauma amongst mentor figures. Argosax, the original king of Makai, had his tyrannical reign ended by Mundus, who saw that his mentor had gone too far. Only for Sparda, his top general and loyalist subject, did the same when he saw that Mundus had strayed too far from their path.

Matilda “Mattie,” a young girl whom Lady and Dante meet, loses her grandfather, Prof. Lucan, a powerful, arcane scientist and sorcerer. Mattie is impressionable, dealing with the feelings of hatred and anger that the story’s main protagonists dealt with at her age, acting as a mirror for them in certain scenes.

Even the season’s main antagonistic figure, Arius, is impacted by the cruelty of his father. Learning that Arius had lived numerous lifetimes, his father subjected him to severe abuse that resulted in an event that twisted his childhood ambitions and fascinations into a homicidal and power-driven future.

The entire season shows the impact of childhood trauma, the conclusions made based on it, and impacts people for the rest of their lives, humans, and demons alike.

The season does a good job at really developing the fact that Dante and Vergil don’t know their father; everything they have learned about him comes from second-hand sources. The series has truly conveyed that, despite Sparda’s legacy being the main focal point of the series, no one truly knows him.

The season goes full force on the idea that every single character that we meet has a legacy that impacts their lives, leading some to their deaths.

The season does a great job of captivating the viewer, though there are a few critiques to be made about the CGI used to animate the bigger figures like Mundus, Argosax, and Dante and Vergil’s Devil Trigger forms, whose movements can sometimes feel clunky.

The storyline is well done. The DanLady shippers are in for a treat, as are Vergil stans with the newest take on the character. The season calls back to some of the most iconic scenes in the games, while making the characters feel alive again.

All eight episodes of Devil May Cry season 2 are available to stream on Netflix now.

The 5 Most Unusual (But Realistic) Choices to Play James Bond

The hunt for James Bond is on. Even though it has been years since Daniel Craig ended his run with a bang in No Time to Die, a year since Amazon bought the rights from Eon Productions, and months since Denis Villeneuve was announced as the next director, apparently the search for the next 007 has just now begun in earnest. Amazon MGM has named Nina Gold as the casting director. In a statement released through Variety, the studio said, “While we don’t plan to comment on specific details during the casting process, we’re excited to share more news with 007 fans as soon as the time is right.”

Such is their prerogative as a movie studio. But it’s our prerogative as fans to do our own casting. And because we don’t have to worry about things like budgets, schedules, and franchise plans, we can get as wild as we want. So here are five unusual, but ultimately realistic, choices to play James Bond.

A quick note on the word “realistic”: six different male actors have played Bond since 1962’s Dr. No, and although Amazon MGM is not Eon Productions, they’ll likely follow suit. Moreover, James Bond was imagined by Ian Fleming as a blunt instrument of the British empire, a quality that has remained part of the character, even as the edges are sanded down. Modern Bond stories tend to ignore the degree to which Bond kills people to advance England’s colonial and capitalist interests. And while Amazon is happy to produce The Boys, they likely won’t want audiences thinking too much about how Bond is a colonizer.

Which is to say that Bond will probably be another white British man, and so that’s what we’re sticking with here. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get a little weird daydreaming, at least until Gold has found her man.

George Mackay

Easily the most likely of the choices on this list, George Mackay has two strikes against him when looking at traditional Bond candidates. First, his hair is too light. Second, his face is too distinctive. If you think these are silly complaints, well… they are silly complaints. But do a little digging to find the reaction to Craig’s casting 20 years ago, and you’ll find plenty of griping about the actor’s hair color and ear shape. All this despite the fact that the Bond novels by Fleming compare the spy to Hoagy Carmichael, a man with a longer face and wider ears than Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan.

Moreover, Craig showed that a distinctive look can make for a distinctive Bond, especially if the actor has the chops to suggest sorrow in his cold eyes. Mackay certainly fits the bill here. After debuting as a Lost Boy in 2003’s Peter Pan, Mackay has gone on to do impressive work in independent films, earning acclaim for Femme and The Beast, with 1917 being his most well-known movie. It would be quite the leap to go from those productions to a franchise picture helmed by Villeneuve, but Mackay would have just the right energy to be an off-beat leading man in a unique Bond flick.

Josh O’Connor

As long as we’re talking about Bonds with idiosyncratic appearances, let’s consider Josh O’Connor. Unlike McKay, O’Connor has a higher profile, having played major roles in Challengers, Wake Up Dead Man, and the upcoming Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day. But ever since Villeneuve landed the directing gig—reversing Eon’s tendency to deny big name filmmakers such as Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, and Danny Boyle—a B- or A-list star doesn’t seem impossible.

With his lanky frame, curly hair, and pronounced ears, O’Connor certainly doesn’t fit the usual Bond mold. But O’Connor does have an off-kilter energy that captures something about the secret agent. Anyone who has watched a Bond film knows that 007 isn’t a spy, not really. He walks right into the bad guy’s lair and introduces himself with his real name. He succeeds in his missions thanks to his ability to charm everyone, from women to the villains themselves, even when it doesn’t make sense. O’Connor has just that type of appeal.

Jack O’Connell

Bond films tend to be either serious and brutal or goofy and slick. After five Craig movies that fell into the former category, conventional wisdom suggested that the pendulum would swing toward the lighthearted. But with Villeneuve as director, Bond isn’t going to be driving submarine cars anytime soon, which means that we need another 007 in the mold of Connery and Craig. And if there’s one thing those two actors brought to the character, it’s a sense of danger.

No young British actor has been as charming and scary onscreen as Jack O’Connell. Whether playing an ageless Irish vampire in Sinners or the charitable killer Sir Jimmy in 28 Years Later, O’Connell is at once alluring and unnerving. Moreover, there’s a roughness to O’Connell that can remind viewers that Bond didn’t grow up in the lap of luxury. He’s the son of an arms company rep, and was shuffled around after he lost his parents at the age of eleven. O’Connell can clean up nice, slicking back his hair and slipping into a tux. But he can retain that edge of menace necessary, a reminder that no matter how many martinis he enjoys, Bond always carries a license to kill.

Matt Smith

If we’re talking about unique physiology combined with the ability to play charming and menacing, then we have to look at Matt Smith. Yes, the guy from Doctor Who, House of the Dragon, and, of course, Morbius. Smith oozes charisma that made him a delightful Doctor and a terrifying Targaryen. If he put those qualities together, then he would be the ideal Bond. Don’t believe me? Just look at any of his scenes from Edgar Wright‘s Last Night in Soho, in which he was at once the coolest guy in the room and the one with murder in his heart.

Furthermore, Smith fits the profile of an ideal Bond actor. Like Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan before him, Smith has a strong television career, but hasn’t yet become a movie star. He has just enough cache to bring in fans and to do the work, but not so much that the actor will overshadow the character.

Pierce Brosnan

No, I didn’t make a mistake. What if we just brought back Brosnan? Despite starring in two of the worst Bond films, Brosnan never gave up his love for the character and wanted to keep playing the part, even after the disaster that was Die Another Day. As long as No Time to Die already requires a continuity shift, and as long as the movie has Villeneuve on board, a filmmaker who will likely make a single idiosyncratic film instead of a standard franchise entry, why not bring Brosnan back for something different?

Imagine Old Man Bond, the story of a once dashing spy forced to contend with a world he doesn’t understand. Brosnan never totally left the world of espionage and secret service, having appeared in The Matador and in last year’s excellent Black Bag. It wouldn’t be a great leap for him, and it would give Villeneuve a chance to tell a very different type of Bond story.

Plus, it would give Amazon MGM just a little more time to pick their next long-running Bond, since they seem to be making that decision as slowly as possible.

Star Wars Has Forgotten Its True Villains: The Company Men

At the end of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, after all of the heroes have perished on their mission, Darth Vader arrives to absolutely wreck a bunch of rebels. The 60-second sequence shows Vader slashing dudes with his lightsaber, crushing enemies with the Force, and deflecting every laser blast. Yet, even within that bravura moment, Darth Vader will never be as frightening as Admiral Motti, the little snot played by Richard LeParmentier in the first Star Wars.

Even if you don’t know Motti’s name, you certainly know one of his lines: “This station is now the ultimate power in the universe! I suggest we use it.” Motti gets Force choked by Vader and blown up in the Death Star, and that’s part of what makes him scary. He’s a regular guy, not a corrupted space wizard. Moreover, he’s a regular guy who gleefully calls for global genocide.

Motti is just one of many mundane villains of the Star Wars universe, bland guys with British accents, receding hairlines, and indifference to human suffering. These company men are the greatest villains in the world of Star Wars, and the franchise lost something when it started ignoring them.

Beaucrats lost their importance almost immediately. In the original Star Wars, Darth Vader was a smaller concern. He served as an enforcer for Grand Moff Tarkin and his history with Obi-Wan Kenobi made him an issue for Luke Skywalker, even before their familial relationship was revealed. But when Princess Leia makes a crack about Tarkin holding Vader’s leash, she was not cutting him down as much as she was pointing out what everybody knows: he’s a yes man, a weird religious nut who Tarkin kept around to serve a purpose.

The functionaries stick around through the rest of the original trilogy, most notably Firmus Piett (Kenneth Colley), who debuts as a first officer during the battle of Hoth in Empire Strikes Back and returns as an admiral in Return of the Jedi. But the introduction of Emperor Palpatine immediately diminishes their importance. With the reveal that the Empire is run by a monstrous space wizard who can shoot lightning from his fingertips, Vader changes from anomaly to centerpiece. From then on, the company men are no more important than Storm Troopers, incidental figures on the sidelines of a battle between magic users and their allies.

The franchise has never recovered from the change. The prequel trilogy works beaucracy into its main plot, including trade negotiations, cross-planet supply chains, and legislative rules. But all of these scenes involve bizarre-looking aliens or Palpatine, played only with only slightly less malevolence by Ian McDiarmid. Gone were the banal humans doing evil deeds. The sequel trilogy did no better, pairing Kylo Ren with the functionary General Hux. But not only was Hux increasingly diminished across the trilogy, but Domhnall Gleeson played the character as a passionate lunatic. None of these characters felt like regular guys just doing their jobs.

It’s easy to see why Motti, Piett, and even Tarkin faded to the background. Unremarkable humans could never steal the screen from Darth Vader, Kylo Ren, or Emperor Palpatine. Moreover, Star Wars operates according to moral binaries. There’s the Light side and the Dark side, and you’re either one or the other.

Yet, the series has never been without its shades of grey. One of the reasons that Han Solo remains a favorite, beyond the fact that he’s played by Harrison Ford, is that he’s a scoundrel, a guy who hides his heart of gold under layers of cynicism. The Mandalorian became a hit in part because it dealt with the paper pushers after the fall of the Empire. Werner Herzog’s the Client, Carl Weathers’s Greef Karga, and even Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon had more in common with Motti and Piett than they did Vader or Ren—at least until Gideon’s quest for the Darksaber turned him into a supervillain.

Of course, nothing demonstrates the importance of the Star Wars company man better than Andor, easily the most creatively successful spinoff series. The series takes place entirely within the margins of beaucracy, whether that be Senate chambers where Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) did her part, the offices of the Preox-Morlana Authority that spawned Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), or the industrialized prison of Narkina 5. Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) dies on the beach of Scarif, immolated by a Death Star blast. But that’s not nearly as terrifying as the indifference of the judge on Niamos, who efficiently sentences Cassian to prison because that’s what the paperwork prescribes.

As wonderful as it is, Andor is an outlier in the franchise, and shouldn’t be looked at as a guide for other movies and shows. Star Wars without Jedi and Sith, without aliens and droids, isn’t Star Wars at all. But when the company men are present, the franchise gains a little more grit to make the frothy fun more enjoyable, a little more realism to make the fantasy that much brighter. The fantastic baddies like Vader and Ren work best when there’s a bland little Englishman behind them, treating a million voices crying out in terror like one more item on the daily checklist.

Rivals Stars on Rupert and Taggie’s “Emotional Edging” in Season 2

The following contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Rivals season 2.

Rivals is back for a second season, and it’s bigger, bolder, and more complicated than ever before. But while the show has garnered plenty of buzz for its copious amounts of sex, hedonistic attitude, and gleeful depiction of some of the worst excesses of life among the British elite in the 1980s, at its heart, Rivals is a romance. From Declan (Aidan Turner) and Maud O’Hara’s (Victoria Smurfit) fractious marriage to the sweet but definitely forbidden attraction between Lizzie Vereker (Katherine Parkinson) and Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer) — who are both married to other people — the show is a study in complicated relationships of all stripes and the messy emotions that come along with them.

“I think people just love these characters,” Alex Hassell, who plays the aristocratic Rupert Campbell-Black, tells Den of Geek when asked what it is about Rivals that has captured so many viewers’ imaginations since the first season premiered. “All these characters, really. They love being in this world of Rutshire, and the character dynamics and the naughtiness of it all, and all the characters have a good sense of humor, and they’re just fun to watch.”

Based on the late Dame Jilly Cooper’s best-selling series of so-called “bonkbuster” novels, Rivals features love triangles, illicit affairs, ill-advised flings, sweet crushes, and hidden attractions. But if the show has a central romance, it’s probably the forbidden attraction/overt yearning going on between Hassell’s playboy Olympic showjumper turned Tory MP and Declan’s eldest daughter, Taggie (Bella Maclean), a wannabe private chef with her own catering business. Though there’s a significant age gap between the two — Rupert is roughly 17 years Taggie’s senior — nothing about their relationship feels juvenile or scandalous. In fact, they often seem to be better together than they are apart.

“I think people respond to something about the fact that they’re trying to make changes in each other, that they inspire each other to be kind of happier versions of themselves,” Maclean says. “Rupert is encouraging Taggie all the time, he’s encouraging her to not sacrifice her own needs to everyone else’s, and to put herself first sometimes. Taggie’s encouraging Rupert to be more in touch with his emotions and just be a better person.”

Despite the pair sharing a swoon-worthy kiss at the end of Rivals’ first season, Rupert and Taggie’s relationship takes a decidedly platonic turn in the initial episodes of season 2. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which being Rupert’s relationship with Corinium TV producer Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), who, in her own messy subplot, is busy trying to cover up the fact that she left her boss, Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) for dead after whacking him over the head with an award statuette. But Cameron’s attempted murder situation is the least of Rupert’s problems as he faces down an embarrassing personal scandal that leads to the ruin of his political career. It’s a big swerve for a character who wasn’t necessarily granted a ton of emotional depth in much of the show’s first season.

“It’s so nice to play different aspects of a character like Rupert and to try and show as many layers as possible. Trying to get in touch with that sort of human vulnerability was really exciting to play, and kind of [help] make [him] a fully fleshed out human being.”

But although Rupert pushes Taggie away romantically speaking, season 2 still adds some intriguing new layers to their relationship by having both continue to show up for one another at key emotional moments.

“I think they’re trying to make very clear boundaries,” Maclean says. “I mean, when she picks up the phone to him during that dinner party gone wrong [in the second episode], I think he’s probably the last person she wants to talk to, because she feels mortified. But Rupert can’t help but want to save her in lots of ways; he always wants to rescue her. And even though he’s chosen Cameron, he still leaps at any opportunity to see Taggie or be with her. And, yes, she’s frustrated and angry and cross and furious and all these things, but she can’t help but enjoy the thrill and the fun of him saving the day.”

The second episode is a classic rom-com romp, which features the pair working together to salvage Taggie’s professional reputation — and getting shoved in cupboards together at the same time.

“They have a wonderful, fun dynamic together, and a really great sense of humor with each other,” she says. “I think that was especially fun to play because they can be quite serious, and it’s seldom that you get to see them running around being silly together.”

Season 2 also introduces Rupert’s children, Marcus and Tabitha, whose presence also offers another important glimpse at their father’s more vulnerable side, particularly when it comes to Taggie’s relationship with them both.

“I think it’s amazing, seeing them together, and I also think it’s really, really painful for him,” Hassell says. “He sees the way she is with them and how much she brings them to life, especially [his son] Marcus, who Rupert himself struggles to connect with. Taggie’s so natural and easy [with them], she sort of guides the conversation and looks out for both them and him. She’s so amazing with the kids — when she talks about how lovely Cameron is, actually, and how she’s not that scary at all, actually, it’s an incredibly generous thing for her to do, to say that about [someone who is] her love rival. He just sees them all together, and he sees this family unit that he wishes could be the case, but he daren’t go there.”

But though much of Rupert and Taggie’s arc seems to be focused on their deepening understanding of one another’s vulnerabilities, this is still Rivals, which means that there’s plenty of drama — both sexual and otherwise — to come. When asked to describe Rupert and Taggie’s overall season 2 dynamic in a single word, Hassell’s response is quick: “Edging,” he says. “Emotional edging.”

“That’s two words!” Maclean breaks in with a laugh. “How about I’ll say emotional, and you say edging? Can we do that?”

Buckle up, folks.

15 Shows We Don’t Believe Anyone Actually Watched All the Way Through

TV Shows often become a huge commitment, not only of your time, but of your emotional investment to the characters. As years go on, trying to keep that momentum going is difficult, not to mention that certain stories shouldn’t be several seasons long.

But if something has the proper rating, the show must go on, even if it doesn’t make sense. These are the shows that, unless you’re a serious fan, it’s hard to imagine anyone watching them all the way through. And as a new viewer today, it is even harder to believe.

Once Upon a Time

What began as a fun fairy-tale mystery slowly expanded into a maze of curses, alternate realities, and Disney crossovers. Even longtime fans admit the later seasons became increasingly difficult to follow or finish.

The Walking Dead

The zombie drama dominated television for years, but endless cast exits, repetitive conflicts, and constant spin-offs eventually created the internet joke that nobody actually watched until the end anymore.

Grey’s Anatomy

After more than twenty seasons of hospital disasters and emotional trauma, Grey’s Anatomy became less a TV show and more a test of endurance for viewers somehow still emotionally invested.

Riverdale

Riverdale started as a dark Archie adaptation before evolving into cults, serial killers, superpowers, and bizarre musical episodes. Even fans frequently sounded confused trying to explain current plotlines.

Pretty Little Liars

The mystery surrounding “A” kept viewers hooked for years, but increasingly convoluted twists and endless fake-outs made the show infamous for exhausting even dedicated audiences.

Supernatural

Fifteen seasons of demons, angels, alternate universes, and repeated apocalypses created one of television’s most loyal fandoms, though outsiders remain convinced nobody truly watched every single episode.

Heroes

The first season became a cultural phenomenon, but the series rapidly lost momentum afterward. By the final seasons, many viewers had stopped entirely while pretending they still cared.

Glee

What began as a sharp musical comedy gradually spiraled into chaotic storytelling and increasingly absurd emotional drama. Even former fans often struggle remembering how long they stayed committed.

The Blacklist

James Spader’s performance kept viewers invested for years, but the constantly delayed answers, fake identities, and endless conspiracies eventually made the show feel impossible for casual audiences to fully keep up with.

True Blood

The vampire drama became progressively stranger with each season, eventually introducing increasingly bizarre supernatural storylines that made early small-town murder mysteries feel almost normal by comparison.

The Flash

The CW superhero series lasted nearly a decade despite constant complaints about repetitive villains, timeline resets, and emotional speeches somehow stopping world-ending threats every single week.

Dexter

Dexter remained hugely popular despite one of television’s most criticized endings. Then the franchise returned years later, somehow asking exhausted viewers to emotionally commit all over again.

Shameless

After years of increasingly chaotic Gallagher family disasters, many viewers admitted they eventually stopped because the show became emotionally draining and almost impossible to binge continuously.

Sons of Anarchy

The biker drama remained successful throughout its run, but the increasingly grim violence and constant betrayals created the feeling that finishing the series required pure determination.

House

Even fans joke that House eventually became a loop of medical mysteries, emotional sabotage, and Hugh Laurie insulting coworkers brilliantly enough to somehow sustain eight full seasons.

Alien: Isolation 2 Might Be Losing the Original Game’s Best Feature

The blaring sirens of a space station’s decontamination room are set to hit gaming consoles once again with the sequel to Creative Assembly’s survival horror game Alien: Isolation.

In the teaser for the sequel, a 25-second clip titled A False Sense of Security, we are introduced to the familiar intense atmosphere of a deserted ship, only for the door to open to a desolate planet, then the image of a payphone reading “Emergency,” introducing the idea of a storyline taking place on the surface of a planet, a drastically different scenario than the first game.

Released in 2014, Alien: Isolation remains one of the best-ever games in its genre. The player controls Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise, who is searching for the cause of her mother’s disappearance 25 years ago. Alien: Isolation encapsulates the feeling of the player as prey. You are in a spaceship, stuck in space with a hundred ways to die, and stalked by a predator of unknown potential.

What truly made the game a phenomenon, however, was the xenomorph AI system, which was revolutionary to the 2010s gaming industry and made the Alien franchise’s iconic monster feel alive. The slimy beast operated as a living, unpredictable creature and gave gamers a real sense of survival and dread, when every decision they made was actually being responded to. This set the bar for AI in gaming exceptionally high.

The sequel comes with more than a change in scenery and it’s a change that might jeopardize that xenomorphic experience. Creative Assembly is switching up its software with Unreal Engine 5 being used to build the game instead of the original’s Cathode Engine. This is a cause for concern, as Unreal Engine 5 has had a series of performance issues to the point where many gamers have asked companies to stop using it.

Remnant 2 was a highly-anticipated game and one of the first built using Unreal Engine 5. Once released, players complained of performance issues, including frame drops, stuttering, and low FPS. Players also reported playing other high-definition games with different engines that ran more smoothly.

Borderlands 4 ran exceptionally poorly, with tech experts saying it ran “worse than usual for an Unreal Engine 5 game.” In addition to performance woes, there were also visual issues. Players reported that elements like vegetation would change animation as one got closer, showing a distinct quality difference between visuals at different distances.

In a thread on the gaming community platform Steam, titled “Unreal Engine 5 sucks,” one commenter brings up the quality issues, with numerous replies expressing dissatisfaction with the performance of the engine.

“It’s a laggy, unfinished, and unready mess,” the author of the thread commented. “ It barely looks any better than Unreal Engine 4 and literally runs 10x worse.

Building Alien: Isolation 2 on a new engine means changing the custom-built systems that were included in the original game. On top of a possibly more expansive setting, the prospect of Creative Assembly dumbing down the AI system to make it a smoother-running game means the original mechanic that captivated players might not make it to the sequel

Cathode Engine gave Alien: Isolation a distinct character design and ambience specific to the feel of Alien. Unreal Engine has a similarly distinctive feel that transfers to all of the games designed under it, which takes away from the individualism that brought notoriety to the game in the first place.

The release date and official title of the second installment of Alien: Isolation have yet to be announced.

15 Times the Actor Didn’t Agree With the Creative Direction

A character in a movie isn’t just made by the actor; the director, writer, and many other creatives are deeply involved in what makes a scene work. But the one putting their face on the line is, of course, the actor, and it can happen that they don’t fully agree (or commit) to the creative vision of the film.

Actors clashing with creative decisions likely happens more often than we know, but the cases covered here are with veterans of the industry. These are the cases where the actor isn’t an amateur, but someone with a legacy worth noting, yet their voice wasn’t heard in time.

Mark Hamill, Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Mark Hamill publicly admitted he strongly disagreed with Luke Skywalker’s portrayal in The Last Jedi, saying he fundamentally viewed the character differently than director Rian Johnson ultimately did.

Harrison Ford, Blade Runner

Harrison Ford famously disliked the studio-mandated narration added to Blade Runner, later explaining he intentionally delivered the voiceover poorly because he strongly opposed including it at all.

Charlize Theron, Prometheus

Charlize Theron later criticized aspects of her character in Prometheus, particularly decisions involving emotional distance and certain narrative choices she felt limited the role’s potential.

Edward Norton, The Incredible Hulk

Edward Norton reportedly clashed with Marvel over the film’s tone and final edit, contributing to his departure from the role shortly after the movie’s release.

Burt Reynolds, Boogie Nights

Despite earning an Oscar nomination, Burt Reynolds openly disliked Boogie Nights during production and reportedly argued with director Paul Thomas Anderson about the film’s overall direction.

Katherine Heig, Grey’s Anatomy

Katherine Heigl publicly criticized Grey’s Anatomy writing during later seasons, even withdrawing herself from Emmy consideration because she reportedly felt the material was not strong enough.

Robert Pattinson, Twilight

Robert Pattinson repeatedly joked in interviews about criticizing Twilight’s story and characters, openly admitting he approached Edward Cullen very differently from how the franchise marketed him.

Andrew Garfield, The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Andrew Garfield reportedly became frustrated with studio interference surrounding The Amazing Spider-Man 2, particularly pressure to expand the franchise setup at the expense of character storytelling.

Chevy Chase, Community

Chevy Chase frequently criticized Community’s increasingly surreal direction, reportedly clashing with creator Dan Harmon over the show’s tone and the way his character evolved.

Megan Fox, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Megan Fox publicly criticized director Michael Bay’s filmmaking style and aspects of the Transformers franchise, creating tensions that ultimately contributed to her exit from the series.

Christopher Eccleston, Doctor Who

Christopher Eccleston later explained he became unhappy with the behind-the-scenes environment and creative atmosphere during Doctor Who, contributing heavily to his departure after only one season.

Jim Carrey, Kick-A 2

After the Sandy Hook shooting, Jim Carrey publicly distanced himself from Kick-A 2, stating he no longer felt comfortable supporting the film’s extreme violence.

Jessica Alba, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Jessica Alba later recalled becoming discouraged during filming after receiving direction that prioritized appearance over emotional realism in dramatic scenes.

John Boyega, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

John Boyega openly criticized how the Star Wars sequel trilogy handled certain characters, particularly Finn, arguing the franchise sidelined important cast members after promising much larger roles.

Bruce Willis, Die Hard

Bruce Willis initially resisted elements of Die Hard’s marketing and tone because he believed the studio underestimated audiences’ willingness to accept a more vulnerable action hero.

15 Games That Were Designed to Last Forever but Died Immediately Instead

When we think of video games, we often think of titles that start and end, not unlike a show or a movie. But live-service games offer a different kind of experience, one that tries to go on forever. Fortnite and Marvel Rivals know how to capitalize such an ecosystem, and even if they ever shut down, they would still be considered successful.

That isn’t the fate of all live-service games, since players might have the money, but they don’t have the time to play every game in existence. Without an audience, there is no game, so this are the experiences that tried to compete with the multiplayer juggernauts, and failed almost immediately.

Concord

Sony positioned Concord as a major live-service multiplayer franchise, but weak player numbers and poor engagement caused the hero shooter to collapse almost immediately after launch.

Forza Motorsport

Microsoft promoted the reboot as a long-term racing platform, yet technical complaints, progression frustrations, and declining player interest quickly hurt enthusiasm surrounding the supposedly evolving service model.

Halo Infinite

Halo Infinite launched with enormous expectations as a decade-long platform for the franchise, but missing features, slow updates, and declining player counts severely damaged that ambition early.

Hyenas

Sega and Creative Assembly spent years developing Hyenas as a major multiplayer live-service title before canceling it entirely shortly before release amid wider industry restructuring.

Anthem

BioWare envisioned Anthem as a constantly expanding online universe, but repetitive missions, technical issues, and disappointing post-launch support caused the ambitious shooter to rapidly lose momentum.

Babylon’s Fall

Square Enix designed Babylon’s Fall around long-term cooperative updates and seasonal content, yet disastrous reception led to servers shutting down barely a year after release.

Marvel’s Avengers

The game was clearly built for years of evolving live-service content, but repetitive gameplay and weak player retention caused support to quietly wind down much sooner than expected.

LawBreakers

Cliff Bleszinski promoted LawBreakers as a major competitive shooter, but the game struggled to attract enough players and disappeared quickly despite strong reviews from some critics.

Battleborn

Gearbox attempted to launch Battleborn as a massive long-term multiplayer franchise, but unfortunate timing beside Overwatch caused the game’s audience to evaporate almost instantly.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Rocksteady planned ongoing seasonal support and expanding content, but disappointing player engagement and backlash toward the live-service structure heavily damaged the game shortly after release.

Spellbreak

The magic-focused battle royale introduced creative mechanics and long-term plans for expansion, but player numbers steadily declined until servers eventually shut down completely.

Knockout City

Electronic Arts pushed the dodgeball multiplayer game as a lasting competitive experience, but despite strong early attention, the player base faded rapidly within a relatively short time.

Redfall

Arkane’s vampire shooter was clearly structured around ongoing cooperative support and future content, yet disastrous reviews and technical criticism destroyed excitement almost immediately after release.

Crucible

Amazon intended Crucible to compete in the live-service multiplayer market, but disastrous reception led the company to pull the game back into beta before canceling it entirely.

Evolve

Evolve launched with huge expectations for years of asymmetric multiplayer growth, but controversial monetization and rapidly shrinking player numbers crippled the game’s long-term future.

Celebrity Couples That Are Never, Ever, Getting Back Together

Relationships are about commitment, respect and companionship more than they are about love. As such, even when couples seem fine from the outside, there might be problems brewing on the inside. And that’s quite evident with celebrity couples, where we don’t truly know what happens behind closed doors.

Many of these entries are based on rumors, but it is a reality that these celebrities were once together, and their paths are now set apart. From public breakdowns to quiet separations, these are the celebrity couples that, even if now single, would never get back together.

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

Their relationship collapsed into one of Hollywood’s most public legal battles, involving defamation trials, leaked recordings, accusations from both sides, and nonstop internet discourse that permanently destroyed any possibility of reconciliation.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie

Once marketed as Hollywood royalty, their split became increasingly bitter through custody disputes, lawsuits, and public disagreements that continued years after the divorce proceedings originally began.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West

Their divorce became extremely public through social media posts, interviews, and escalating personal tensions. Any possibility of reconciliation disappeared once the conflict became impossible to separate from constant online attention.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman

Although both remained relatively private afterward, their marriage ended abruptly after years together. Persistent rumors and longstanding distance between them made any reunion seem extraordinarily unlikely.

Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake

Their breakup became one of the defining celebrity separations of the early 2000s, fueled by songs, interviews, tabloid coverage, and years of public scrutiny surrounding both stars afterward.

Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal

The lasting cultural impact of All Too Well alone makes reconciliation feel impossible. The relationship became permanently tied to heartbreak, fan analysis, and years of internet speculation.

Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger

Their divorce became infamous for ugly custody disputes and leaked personal conflicts, creating one of Hollywood’s most notoriously hostile celebrity separations during the early 2000s.

Madonna and Sean Penn

Their turbulent marriage produced years of headlines involving explosive arguments and controversy. Even decades later, the relationship remains more associated with chaos than romance.

Sandra Bullock and Jesse James

Their marriage ended after multiple infidelity scandals became public, completely destroying the relationship and turning the breakup into one of Hollywood’s most heavily covered celebrity divorces at the time.

Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth

After years of breakups, reunions, and eventually marriage, the relationship finally collapsed for good. Public comments afterward made it clear both had completely moved on emotionally.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner

Even though they maintained a cooperative relationship while co-parenting, both repeatedly emphasized that their marriage had permanently ended despite ongoing public interest in reconciliation rumors.

Shakira and Gerard Piqué

Their breakup became international tabloid news after allegations of infidelity surfaced. Shakira later referenced the split directly in music releases that made reconciliation seem completely impossible.

Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher

Their relationship collapsed amid public cheating allegations and intense media attention. Demi Moore later discussed the emotional fallout openly, making the breakup feel far beyond repair.

Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber

Years of on-again, off-again drama exhausted fans before both finally moved on. The relationship became permanently tied to emotional instability and constant public speculation.

15 TV Characters Who Needed to Die Much Sooner

On long-running TV shows, characters tend to die quite often; it’s what keeps a show interesting after all. But certain characters, those that become loathsome for whatever reason, become the target of the audience’s ire, and we wished they left the show earlier than they did.

Not all of these characters are villains, some are just side characters that we don’t want to see anymore. Conflict is an important part of storytelling, but considering how hard it was to watch these characters on the screen, a bit less conflict would’ve sufficed. They did meet their end, but not soon enough.

Joffrey Baratheon, Game of Thrones

Joffrey’s cruelty became so unbearable that audiences spent multiple seasons waiting for someone, anyone, to finally poison him before the show eventually delivered one of television’s most satisfying deaths.

Ramsay Bolton, Game of Thrones

Ramsay remained horrifyingly untouchable for far too long, repeatedly torturing characters while escaping consequences until viewers practically celebrated once his own dogs finally turned against him.

Negan, The Walking Dead

Although eventually redeemed by the writers, Negan’s brutal introduction and extended dominance left many viewers feeling the character overstayed his welcome before the show softened him considerably.

Andrea Harrison, The Walking Dead

Andrea’s increasingly frustrating decisions made her one of the show’s most criticized survivors, with many fans feeling the series dragged out her storyline long after audience patience disappeared.

Livia Soprano, The Sopranos

Tony’s manipulative mother remained emotionally exhausting whenever she appeared, creating constant tension and misery that made many viewers relieved once the storyline finally concluded.

The Governor, The Walking Dead

The Governor repeatedly survived situations that felt like natural endings for the character, causing his storyline to stretch well beyond the point many viewers found believable.

Kai Winn, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Kai Winn’s passive-aggressive manipulation made her one of Star Trek’s most infuriating villains, constantly undermining allies while somehow surviving political disaster after political disaster.

Serena Joy Waterford, The Handmaid’s Tale

Serena repeatedly oscillated between sympathy and cruelty, frustrating audiences who felt the series continuously delayed meaningful consequences for one of Gilead’s central architects.

Tara Knowles, Sons of Anarchy

While tragic, Tara’s constant attempts to escape the club’s violence left audiences emotionally exhausted long before the show finally delivered her brutal and inevitable fate.

Nellie Oleson, Little House on the Prairie

Nellie survived years of manipulation, bullying, and cruelty toward nearly everyone in Walnut Grove, making her continued presence a constant source of frustration for viewers.

Cersei Lannister, Game of Thrones

Cersei spent multiple seasons escaping consequences through sheer luck and political chaos, leaving many viewers disappointed that the series waited until the final episodes to remove her.

Piper Chapman, Orange Is the New Black

Piper increasingly frustrated audiences as the series progressed, with many viewers eventually preferring nearly every supporting inmate storyline over the supposed main character herself.

Ted Mosby, How I Met Your Mother

Not literally killed off, but Ted’s endless romantic disasters and self-important storytelling became so exhausting that many viewers joked the show itself outlived audience goodwill toward him.

Alpha, The Walking Dead

Alpha’s psychological games and repetitive intimidation tactics eventually dragged on so long that many fans simply wanted the Whisperers storyline to finally end altogether.

Nate Fisher, Six Feet Under

Nate’s constant indecision and emotional self-destruction increasingly alienated viewers over time, making his eventual death feel tragically inevitable rather than shocking.

15 Unfortunate Movie Details We Hadn’t Thought of Before

Making movies involves a lot of people, something everyone already knows. Yet this clashing of minds creates a lot of incredible stories, both intended and unintended. They can be things within the movies themselves, casting decisions, or even plot points that we didn’t think that hard about before.

Knowing these details can, sadly, lead to a given movie not meaning the same thing anymore. Iconic scenes can be ruined or elevated depending on what is found by the audience. At the very least, they make for an entertaining thought, considering all that goes behind the scenes in films.

Finding Emily

The casting of Spike Fearn opposite Angourie Rice accidentally created one of the most aggressively British-sounding fictional couples imaginable, to the point many viewers initially assumed both names were invented jokes.

Circle

In the movie’s deadly voting game, one contestant quietly survives almost the entire film simply because nobody notices him enough to eliminate him, accidentally turning invisibility into the smartest strategy available.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

The movie mixes scientific zombie outbreaks with undead corpses literally emerging from graves, quietly implying the franchise somehow contains both viral mutations and actual supernatural resurrection simultaneously.

Zootopia 2

Animators packed parts of the sequel with animal-themed parody movie titles and background gags, meaning many viewers spent entire scenes ignoring the plot while trying to read signs.

Daredevil

The opening credits briefly display cast and crew names in Braille, an unusually thoughtful visual detail many audiences completely missed despite it appearing directly at the beginning of the movie.

Avengers: Endgame

Steve Rogers choosing to remain in the 1940s becomes slightly awkward once viewers remember he willingly returned to an America still deeply defined by segregation and discrimination.

Aladdin

Jafar wishes to become “the most powerful being in the universe,” only to become a genie enslaved to magical rules, accidentally proving that in the Aladdin universe there is no God.

Troy

Achilles humiliating a child saying “no one will remember you” somehow becomes even darker when viewers realize the terrified boy barely qualifies as an actual character and is not even properly credited.

Minions: The Rise of Gru

Because the Minions are canonically drawn toward serving history’s most evil figures, the movie accidentally implies 1970s-era Gru ranked among humanity’s absolute worst people alive at the time.

Hotel Transylvania 2

The movie implies Mavis carried a fully human baby while repeatedly transforming into a bat, creating biological questions the franchise very wisely chooses never to address directly.

Home Alone

The gangster movie Kevin watches, Angels with Filthy Souls, feels so authentic many viewers assume it is real despite being filmed specifically for Home Alone as a fake black-and-white crime movie.

Men in Black II

Agent K failing to recognize a Game Boy while immediately identifying the Backstreet Boys accidentally supports one of the franchise’s funniest background jokes: pop stars probably are aliens after all.

Toy Story 2

Stinky Pete being packaged inside his box his entire life quietly means the Prospector spent decades fully conscious, unable to move, while watching other toys actually experience childhood.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Judge Doom’s plan to destroy Toontown becomes disturbingly bleak once viewers realize he is effectively attempting genocide against an entire species of sentient cartoon characters.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

The movie never confirms the other children safely returned home before the ending, meaning Charlie technically wins the factory while several contestants are still recovering from horrifying industrial accidents.

Nicolas Cage and Spider-Noir Team Talk Hard-Boiled Inspirations for Spider-Man Series

Spider-Noir is a strange mix of the familiar and the strange. On one hand, you have a web-spinner doing battle against classic villains like Sandman and Tombstone. On the other, the hero here is Ben Reilly a.k.a. the Spider, a superhero who turned private investigator after a tragedy took away the love of his life. And that doesn’t even get into how the series nods to classic film noirs, starting with Humphrey Bogart staples The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon.

For star Nicolas Cage, Bogart is the best guide to mixing hard-boiled detective fiction with spectacular superhero adventures. “The thing I always enjoyed about watching Bogart, especially in movies like The Big Sleep, is that he seemed amused by other people’s bad behavior,” Cage tells Den of Geek. “He would start to laugh at other people’s wickedness, he got tickled by it.

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“I tried to put a little of that into Spider-Noir. If Li Jun Li’s character Cat Hardy was doing something dangerous, it would amuse Ben Reilly. He’d think, ‘Oh, I know this is so much fun,’ just like Bogart would be doing.”

Cage’s commitment to film noir impressed showrunner Oren Uziel, who recalls a particularly memorable table read.

“We were out to lunch at a restaurant in Los Angeles, long before we had started shooting and he had already memorized half the script. He suddenly said, ‘I’m going to do this one like Edward G. Robinson,’ and he just did an entire scene.”

Performing the script in the manner of the star of greats such as Little Caesar, Scarlet Street, and Double Indemnity only further endeared Cage to Uziel, who got to combine several of his passions while making Spider-Noir.

“I always loved Spider-Man, but I’ve always also loved noir. So when they came to me with the idea of making a standalone Spider-Man show set in 1930s New York City that’s film noir, I felt like I was the obvious person they should be talking to,” confesses Uziel. “I asked them to please let me do this.”

Uziel cites 1949’s The Third Man as a particular favorite. Directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, with a memorable zither score by Anton Karas, The Third Man stars Joseph Cotton as an American who comes to postwar Vienna in search of his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), now a criminal running the underground.

Uziel’s fandom comes through when he gushes about his favorite parts of The Third Man. “Orson Welles, and the way it’s shot, the relationships, the intrigue, all in postwar Vienna,” he says with an enthusiastic grin. “It’s just so romantic. There are shots we stole from all our favorite noirs… Well, lovingly homaged.”

For Lamorne Morris, the exciting part is getting to play Joseph “Robbie” Robertson, a vital part of Spider-Man’s supporting cast who has rarely appeared in live action. “He’s the voice of reason,” Morris says of his character, who is not a top-ranking editor in Spider-Noir, but rather a principled journalist.

“This Spider-Man is a little bit different than the ones we’ve seen before. He’s faced with this dilemma where he’s over being a hero. He saved millions of lives already, and he’s just ready to be done with it,” Morris explains. “But the city still needs a hero, and so this is the first time Spider-Man has someone in his ear. As reporter for the Daily Bugle, Robbie really understands the pulse of New York. He understands what’s happening with crime and depression in the city, and in the mayoral race.

“So the fate of the city is in the Spider’s hands, and Robbie knows that. He understands the weight of it. And he’s trying to convince Ben that the city could use him.”

While Morris gets to create his live-action Robbie with little interference, his co-star Abraham Popoola has immediate competition for his character Lonnie Lincoln, better known as the villain Tombstone. Just months after Popoola debuts his Tombstone in Spider-Noir, Marvin Jones III will play the MCU version of the crime lord in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But instead of feeling any sense of jealousy, Popoola has nothing but respect for his fellow Lonnie.

“I would love to talk with him about playing Lonnie,” he admits. “Marvin also plays Tombstone in the Spider-Man video game, and he’s amazing. I can’t wait to see what he does with the character in live-action.

“I didn’t take anything directly from the PlayStation video game, but I was definitely inspired by the essence of the story. I still play it now.”

Popoola’s love goes back further than the days of the PS4, back when he was voiced by Dorian Harewood. “Tombstone’s a character I’ve known since he was on the Fox Kids animated series from the ’90s,” Popoola notes. “I’m still processing the fact that I got this role. There’s one moment toward the end of the series where I was like, ‘This can’t be happening!'” he teases. “You’ll have to see it.”

Modern though his touchstones may be, Popoola understands the spirit of noir necessary for his character’s milieu. “The most noir thing you can do is to brood in a corner with the brim of a hat making a shadow over your eyes, watching people across the room,” he contends.

“I think it’s to just pop up,” jokes Morris. “In noir, they’re always just popping up. You never know what’s around the corner.”

But fittingly enough, it’s the show’s writer and creative guide who best understands the genre. “The most noir thing you can do is get your heart broken,” Uziel says. It’s a perfect answer, whether you’re talking about Humphrey Bogart, Spider-Man, or combing them together for Spider-Noir.

Spider-Noir premieres on MGM+ on May 25, 2026, and on Prime Video on May 27, 2026.

Netflix’s East of Eden Trailer Gives One of Literature’s Cruelest Women an Antihero Rewrite

John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel East of Eden is being adapted yet again to question if identity truly is based on what you choose. Now Netflix has released a trailer for the upcoming limited series starring Florence Pugh that makes clear it’s choosing a new narration of the original story.

The novel follows the lives of the Trask and Hamilton families across a multigenerational, interconnected saga about good, evil, greed, violence, and neglect. The story, which takes place between the American Civil War and the end of World War I, begins with Adam Trask and his half-brother Charles Trask, whose father’s favoritism creates a long-lasting dynamic of sibling rivalry and toxicity that follows the Trask family into the next generation.

Adam marries Ames (who goes by Kate Trask while married), a wildly amoral woman, with whom he has twin boys, Aron and Cal Trask, and is abandoned by her after their birth. Ames goes on to become a sex worker in Salinas, California, which is a pivotal part of her character; as Ames rejects the expectations of traditional gender roles. She uses femininity as a weapon to increase her power in the only way permitted for women of the era.

Ames is regarded as one of the cruelest antagonists in contemporary literature, being Steinbeck’s allegory for Satan in this generational rendition of the story of Cain and Abel. Steinbeck even goes as far as giving Ames Satan-like physical characteristics in her later years, after losing the hypnotic beauty that she used as a tool of manipulation, destruction, and selfishness.

A born sociopath, Ames commits murders, divides families, and commits gross acts of violence over the span of the 600-page novel, leading her to be one of the most hated, yet captivating, characters of Steinbeck’s literary catalogue.

In the trailer, Ames is portrayed as a more sympathetic character, giving a soft-spoken yet emotionally captivating monologue, showcasing her hopelessness as a child.

“When I was a little girl, I imagined I could grow smaller. So small that the bad things couldn’t find me. And I could disappear. Because the world is so full of evil,” Ames recounts. As the monologue draws on, flashes of Ames’s life flash along the screen, including her youth, marrying Adam, birthing the twins, and the twins finding her years later in the brothel.

There is a consistent melancholy throughout the trailer, making the viewer feel as captive as Ames has been described in the previous adaptation of her character. While Ames is shown as monotone and calculating, there is a distinct lack of apathy that her character is known for. Similarly, the displaying of emotion and a lack of unabashed arrogance is all new ground for the character.

In Elia Kazan’s 1955 film adaptation of the novel, Jo Van Fleet plays Ames, as the movie follows the second generation of the Trask family, with Cal Trask (James Dean) being the main protagonist. Ames is a character of literal darkness, even down to the brothel where she lives and works, only met down a dim corridor in the back of the building, immediately, and aggressively casting away Cal when he comes to find her.

Zoe Kazan, the granddaughter of the 1955 film’s director, is spearheading Netflix’s adaptation and taking a new direction on Ames’ character, describing the protagonist as an “indelible antihero.”

Some might worry that this seeming new direction to humanize Ames misses the point of Steinbeck’s writing, as Ames acted as more than just a cruel, egotistical temptress character; she is the literal devil of the story. We’ll have to wait and see if the series ends up adopting a similar perspective.

While the official release date of the series has yet to be announced, the Trasks are expected to hit Netflix sometime this fall.

Lanterns May Be Reviving a Controversial Origin Story

Like any superhero concept that’s existed for more than 80 years, Green Lantern has undergone some significant changes. Most notably, the Green Lantern introduced in 1940 had a magical ring vulnerable to wood, while today’s Green Lanterns are sci-fi superhero space cops with power rings. Furthermore, some beats in the Green Lantern story have aged poorly, and get retconned or ignored over time.

One would expect Chris Mundy, creator of the HBO series Lanterns to make liberal use of retconning, choosing not to adapt the time that Green Lantern Hal Jordan repeatedly used a racial slur to refer to his Inuk friend Tom Kalmaku, or the time he dated a 13-year-old, or the time he was played by Ryan Reynolds. But a new profile in EW suggests that Mundy might be willing to revisit a different embarrassment from Hal’s past, one involving his new partner John Stewart.

In between explanations about Lanterns‘s bifurcated timeline, the role Sinestro will play, or how there really will be green in the Green Lantern show, the profile revealed that “John remains a constant source of ire for Hal due to the fact that he is an anomaly.” Specifically, the profile explained that unlike Hal (Kyle Chandler), who received his ring after his predecessor Abin Sur crash-landed on Earth, John (Aaron Pierre) was given a ring when the Guardians of the Universe—the blue-skinned, big-brained founders of the Green Lantern Corps—”intervened to self-anoint a member of their order” because they “felt they had just cause.”

In broad strokes, that description matches the original origin of John Stewart in 1971’s Green Lantern #87, by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams. The series had earlier established that the Guardians had chosen a backup for Hal, should he ever be unable to do his duties. Issue #87 begins with that backup, Guy Gardner (a relatively normal person, having not yet sustained the head injury that turns him into the arrogant jerk who Nathan Fillion plays in Superman), being injured, which sends the Guardians looking for a second understudy.

The Guardians whisk Hal to Detroit to meet his new backup, a Black man who stands up to white police officers hassling two guys playing dominoes. Instead of recognizing a fellow enemy of injustice, Hal only sees a disrespectful young hothead. Although Hal acknowledges his colleague’s bravery and strength, he complains that John “also has a chip on his shoulder the size of the rock of Gibraltar.”

Once John gets a ring, he does nothing to endear himself to Hal. He tosses aside the mask traditionally worn by Corpsmen, boasting “I’ve got nothing to hide!” He lets oil from a runaway tanker truck spill on some corrupt lawmakers. But when those same lawmakers fake an assassination attempt, hoping to pin the blame on Black radicals, John sees through the ruse in a way Hal cannot.

To be sure, John comes off as brash and reckless, very different from the stoic man he’s become since the 2000s Justice League animated show made him into a former Marine. But Hal comes off worse, looking like an authoritarian who can’t admit his racial biases. Such characterizations happened often during O’Neil and Adams’s run, which often paired Hal with Oliver Queen a.k.a. Green Arrow. Where Ollie was a loudmouth jerk, O’Neil and Adams made him the book’s moral center, presenting Hal as a wet blanket and bootlicker who needed to raise his consciousness.

In the years since, the dynamic between the two have shifted. John is often written like a straight-laced military man and Hal as a charming slacker. Moreover, Hal hasn’t shown a hint of overt racism since he stopped calling Tom Kalmaku a nasty name. One would expect James Gunn and Peter Safran to go with that unproblematic version of Green Lantern for the co-lead of their new HBO series.

Mundy’s comments don’t say anything about Hal having any unchecked biases. He framed Hal’s conflict with John as a generational clash, describing the two as “the old guard and the heir apparent.” But if they’re going to follow the comics as closely as other properties in the new DCU have done, then we might get a more complicated story, one that will make Lanterns a richer show.

Lanterns comes to HBO and HBO Max on August 16.

Doctor Who’s New Streaming Home Raises Fresh Questions About the Franchise’s Future

Doctor Who has a new streaming home, but not quite in the way that fans were likely expecting. AMC+ has acquired the streaming rights to the popular sci-fi series, and most of the show’s “reboot” era—over 150 episodes from 2005 to 2022—will be available on the streamer from June 11. But his news will likely have surprisingly little impact (at least for the moment) on the franchise’s larger future, a fact that is sure to frustrate those still desperate for any crumb of news about what’s next for the beloved time-traveling space adventure.

The deal covers the bulk of Doctor Who’s modern period, from Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor to Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth. Unfortunately for Whovian completionists, the 60th anniversary specials, as well as Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor run, will remain on Disney+ for the foreseeable future, and no one has any idea when U.S. audiences will see the spinoff series, The War Between the Land and the Sea, that broadcast in the U.K. last year. (Oh, and if you want to watch Classic Who? You’ll need a BritBox subscription for that. Trying to be an American Doctor Who fan in the year of our Lord 2026 is honestly so much work sometimes!)

But as for where the series goes from here — both literally and figuratively speaking? Well, that remains as up in the air as it ever has.

The acquisition represents a homecoming of sorts for the show, as BBC America, which is also part of the larger AMC Networks umbrella, was the U.S. broadcast home for the series from 2009 to 2022. (Roughly from the Eleventh through the Thirteenth Doctor eras; the first four seasons aired in America on the SciFi Channel.) As a result, this move will almost certainly kickstart speculation about whether some part of the AMC brand is now in the running to take over as a production or distribution partner for the flagship series moving forward. Is the streamer just trying to boost its subscription library? Soft launch a BBC America revival? Some secret third thing?

To be fair, rumors have been flying for months about where the show will end up next, and, per internet scuttlebutt, almost every streamer has supposedly been in talks to take Disney’s place, from HBO Max to Netflix, and no answers have yet materialized. But the clock’s ticking.

A Doctor Who Christmas special is slated to arrive later this year, but we still know very little about what that particular installment will look like. Will it feature Billie Piper, whose surprise cliffhanger appearance closed out season 15? Could David Tennant return? How will it lead into the next era of the show? Or will it just skip past this rather historic mess to the introduction of a new Doctor entirely? And what of forthcoming seasons? The BBC has been rather vocal about its support for the franchise moving forward, but with no current Doctor and no announced plans for future seasons — Will Russell T. Davies remain showrunner? Could Pete McTighe take over? —- everything feels stuck in a bizarre and deeply frustrating limbo.

While the holiday installment will almost certainly broadcast on the BBC in the U.K., the bust-up of the Disney partnership means that the show doesn’t yet have a distribution partner elsewhere, which could leave global audiences scrambling to find a way to view the festive special if something isn’t worked out by the holidays.

It seems unlikely that it would end up on AMC+, but stranger things have happened. Yes, it’s a smaller brand than say, HBO or Netflix, but given that the streamer is already home to some heavy hitters like the Interview with the Vampire franchise and the sprawling The Walking Dead universe, it’s more than proven its genre bona fides. Might it double down by acquiring the Whoniverse? Is that even something fans should be hoping for? Your guess is as good as ours.

My Adventures with Superman Season 3 Trailer Settles a Sartorial Debate

The past few years have been strange for Superman fans. On the big screen, you had David Corenswet famously convincing James Gunn to put the Man of Tomorrow’s underwear on the outside for 2024’s Superman. On the small screen, the second season of My Adventures with Superman gave Kal-El new duds with undies on the inside.

The depictions once again got fans arguing about the Man of Steel’s best look. Yet, just when things looked bleak for Team Visible Underwear, the trailer for season 3 of My Adventures with Superman has arrived, as if on a quest for peace. In the trailer, we clearly see Superman in blue tights, with a red cape, and crimson trunks proudly hugging his nether regions.

Oh yeah, there was a lot of other cool stuff too. My Adventures with Superman continues to take an anime approach to the classic DC character, filling the story with mechs made of abstract shapes and putting fresh spins on villains such as Lex Luthor and Deathstroke the Terminator. For season 3, the show goes deeper into Superman lore by adapting the Reign of the Supermen storyline, introducing the Cyborg Superman and the Kon-El version of Superboy.

For those who missed the ’90s, Reign of the Supermen came shortly after Superman died, sacrificing himself to stop the beast Doomsday. In his place arrived four new Supermen, including Cyborg Superman and Superboy. Although the series will skip Superman’s battle with Doomsday, having already done a variation on Superman’s death in season 2, season 3 of My Adventures with Superman will see Superboy join Superman’s friend group to take the battle to Cyborg Superman.

In addition to some shots of the Wonder Woman antagonist Giganta and some checking in with Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, the trailer focuses on these new additions. Cyborg Superman seems appropriately intimidating, leading a group of robots and smashing our hero through a couple of skyscrapers. Superboy appears without the edgy cool guy aesthetic that marked his ’90s stories, and plays more like an over-excited nerd, befitting the show’s tone.

That tonal consistency extends to the design of each character. Superboy still has the leather jacket and skater haircut that he rocked in the ’90s, but they’ve been streamlined to look more slick and up-to-date. Likewise, Cyborg Superman still has part of his face pulled back to reveal a metallic skull, but the darker tones and rounder edges no longer recall Terminator 2 or Stone Cold Steve Austin.

However, it’s Superman’s look that represents the most distinctive shift from the Reign of the Supermen arc from the comics. Spoilers for a 30-year-old storyline, but the run ended with the real Superman coming back. He no longer wore red trunks, or any color at all, choosing instead a sleek black bodysuit with silver highlights. More memorably, he now sported a mullet, completing an ensemble that suggested “second pairing defenseman on the LA Kings” more than “the Last Son of Krypton.”

Season 3 of My Adventures with Superman avoids that fashion mistake, keeping Clark in his classic blue and red. And with trunks prominantly on display, the underwear debate has officially come to an end.

But for those who want to keep squabbling about Superman’s looks, the trailer raises a question: Why does Superman have shoulder pads that come straight from an Elaine Benes power suit?

My Adventures with Superman premieres midnight on June 13, 2026 on Adult Swim and the next day on HBO Max.

Dan Stevens Talks Depicting the Grim State of Mental Healthcare in The Terror: Devil in Silver

The following contains spoilers for The Terror: Devil in Silver episode 2.

The Terror: Devil in Silver takes place in the confines of the fictional New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital, the sort of dark and oppressive setting that automatically lends itself to questions of reality, truth, and whether viewers can trust what they’re seeing at any given moment. And it’s not like its lead character, the wrongfully admitted Pepper (Dan Stevens), is a poster boy for reliable narrators. But the series is almost shockingly upfront about the fact that not only is there a very real monster at the center of this story, but it’s not the scariest thing at work in this particular hospital.

No, New Hyde is essentially a waking nightmare for the simple reason that it’s a psychiatric hospital in contemporary America. Understaffed, overcrowded, and low on funding, its patients — who are often the most vulnerable and marginalized among us —are left isolated and alone, trapped in a system that fails those both inside and outside of it. Put plainly, it’s the sort of setting that’s perfectly terrifying without the threat of dark or malevolent forces lurking in its halls. And that’s 100% on purpose. The series is based on the novel of the same name by Victor LaValle, a horror author who is known for his socially conscious storytelling and willingness to use monstrous or fantastical elements to explore real-world issues. But, according to LaValle, Devil in Silver, the TV show, is able to explore some of the story’s larger thematic concerns with a bit of a softer touch.

“In the book, there are times when the narrator — really, just me — is saying it all very clearly, right? Maybe it’s a little on the nose even, which is fair. But when you get to see these human beings and start to care about them as human beings, you don’t need to hit that hammer quite so hard,” LaValle tells Den of Geek.

“You’re already seeing and thinking about them [each] as people, who you know have a whole life in them, but after their morning meds or their midday meal, they’re just sitting in a chair, sort of lost. And I don’t have to be told what was lost. I can see what was lost. That’s the beauty of working with actors of this caliber. Their humanity becomes the way to voice that rage and that desperation and that sadness [from the book]. Because I feel like if your heart is open to it, when you see the journey of these characters, you can’t come away from this feeling, ‘Well, sure, things are fine. The system is perfect’.”

As Pepper finds himself increasingly unable to escape the world of New Hyde, Devil in Silver takes the opportunity to highlight many of the most disturbing practices that often go on at such facilities.

“That’s what struck me when I first read the book,” Dan Stevens, who plays Pepper, says when asked about the novel’s focus on the darker aspects of the mental health system. “I’ve done things set in institutions and psychiatric wards before, but the way that this [story] spoke so directly to that, to hear how Vic and Chris [Cantwell, the series’ co-showrunner] were so consciously baking in the social critique to this story was very, very appealing. The fact that we’ve got 122 million Americans who live in a mental healthcare desert, and that there are 329 people for every healthcare provider in this country. That’s not really a healthcare system. That’s a waiting room without a door. There are horrendous, horrendous statistics that I’ve found more haunting than any monster haunting the halls of this story.”

In the end, while some characters fall victim to the malevolent force that’s trapped behind a mysterious silver door, others suffer from a lack of access to basic care. And in the world of the show, it can be hard to tell which is worse.

“Sure, we’ve got a monster roaming the ward and killing people, but then the monster that is the system just does it with paperwork and overmedication and underfunding and willful neglect,” Stevens says. “It’s the same thing. Just one has better PR, I guess.”

It is through his fellow patients that Pepper comes to understand the true horror at work in this facility — not to mention why it’s the kind of location a dark evil might choose to take up residence.

“When you first drop Pepper into that place, he initially sees everyone else as an other or an obstacle to his escape,” Cantwell says. But then he starts to get to know these people one by one: His roommate, Coffee, played by Chinaza Uche. Loochie, who’s been in and out of these places since they were 15. Judith Light’s character, Dorry, who’s the longest living patient at New Hyde and has been there since the ‘60s. It’s all of these different characters that we really tried to build out and humanize.”

For Cantwell and LaValle, the show’s supporting characters needed to feel like three-dimensional people. because it is through them that we experience the real-life horrors at New Hyde that go well beyond the world of the supernatural.

“One thing we focused on was — it’s never really spoken aloud, but they all have real diagnoses. That was important to us, that we didn’t just generalize mental illness,” Cantwell says. “In our minds, they were real neurodivergent people, and [the cast] all researched neurodivergence. They all have individualized diagnoses that they were able to carry forward [in their performances], as well as medication regimens that they were able to incorporate. But they’re all suffering — suffering from things like not enough family support, not enough support from the government, not enough support from the American healthcare system for the medications and treatments they need.”

More importantly, perhaps, is that while Pepper’s relationships with the other New Hyde patients are not only distinct and varied, they represent a rather important moment of personal growth for a character who isn’t initially presented particularly emotionally open or flexible.

“We had such a great cast,” Stevens says when asked about building Pepper’s varied relationships with his fellow New Hyde patients. “Their characters were all different, and they were all so endearing. Contending with the sort of bonkers energy of Judith Light’s Dory was sometimes challenging — not that Judith Light herself is challenging by any stretch, she is a total delight — but I think Pepper’s reaction to what, for all intents and purposes, at first glance is a ‘crazy old lady’ really transitions into something quite moving. Then you have something like his relationship with Loochie, who is played by this fantastic young actor b., who’s fresh out of drama school and brings this intense energy to a beautiful character. And so it was a real spectrum of characters, and every single dynamic was a little bit different. That’s part of the magic of the show.”

New episodes of The Terror: Devil in Silver premiere Thursdays on AMC+ and Shudder, culminating with a finale on June 11.

Laika’s Wildwood Trailer Is a Love Letter to Human Animation

In an industry that’s being rapidly taken over by computer-animated projects and various forms of AI slop, the work of Laika Studios still feels like a breath of fresh air. Probably best known for its (excellent) adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, the studio has had a remarkable run of success in recent years, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature for each of its feature films released to date. That the humans behind the scenes deeply love and respect their craft is more than evident, and each movie, from Coraline and ParaNorman to The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings, feels like nothing so much is a labor of love.

The studio has finally released a teaser trailer for its long-awaited next project, and if the clip is anything to go by, the studio’s sixth feature may be its most impressive effort yet. Wildwood is Laika’s first stop-motion animated film since 2018’s The Missing Link, and is based on the 2011 children’s fantasy book of the same name written by The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy and illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis.

A modern-day fairy tale, Wildwood follows the story of a headstrong seventh-grader whose baby brother is abducted by a murder of crows and taken into the Impossible Wilderness, a magical forest located just outside Portland, Oregon. With a little help from one of her classmates, Prue will have to navigate a world of magical creatures, dangerous bandits, and talking animals to get him back. (If this all has some vague Labyrinth vibes, well, that’s probably on purpose.)

The animation is positively stunning throughout, effortlessly capturing the moody light of the Pacific Northwest and the rich colors of its woodland fantasy world. Both the various magical creatures and the characters at the story’s center are delicately and meticulously crafted, a fact that Laika unabashedly leans into in its promotional material. The teaser boasts a “from the same hands that brought you Coraline” tag, and they’ve already released a short that chronicles the extraordinary effort that went into crafting one of the film’s giant eagles, known as the General. (Spoiler alert: There are 9,000 handcrafted feathers!) In short, it’s positively beautiful from start to finish — the detail on a quick glimpse of a pair of bloody knuckles is stunning! — and we can only imagine what the finished product will ultimately look like.

Travis Knight directed Wildwood, from a screenplay written by his Masters of the Universe and Kubo and the Two Strings collaborator Chris Butler. The film’s voice cast is full of heavy hitters, including as Carey Mulligan, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Richard E. Grant, Awkwafina, Amandla Stenberg, Tom Waits, Charlie Day, Blythe Danner, Arthur Knight, Angela Bassett, and Mahershala Ali.

Wildwood is set to hit theaters on October 23 through Fathom Entertainment.

Spider-Man Teases a Brand New Day for Marvel Effects

At the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Peter Parker went back to basics. Gone was his Iron Spider costume, gone was Tony Stark’s suit-fabricating machine, gone were his EDITH AI glasses. All Peter had was a sewing machine in a crappy apartment, stitching together a homemade Spider-Man outfit.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day will explore Peter’s new status quo in more ways than one. In a new behind-the-scenes vignette, star Tom Holland and director Destin Daniel Cretton talk about the practical effects used for the movie. Over images of Spidey being whipped around on wires or riding a car trailing a truck with a shooting rig, Holland raves, “This is some of the best action that we’ve had in any of these movies. And we shot the most stunts on the day in camera.”

The vignette comes as great news for Marvel fans disappointed with the studio’s recent output. For as much as some love the freeway sequence in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, coherent action has never been the MCU’s calling card. Even the bravado sequences in the two Joss Whedon Avengers movies offer a cinematic equivalent to a splash page, but they had a rubber quality that felt heightened, but not real.

As the general quality of MCU releases has slumped, complaints about the special effects have only intensified. Reddit users regularly share particularly embarrassing shots from Black Widow, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Thor: Love and Thunder to illustrate the general disregard Marvel seems to have toward adapting one visual medium to another. News of Marvel’s mistreatment of VFX artists, culminating in recent mass layoffs, has only exacerbated the problem. So frustrated are viewers that they cannot help but notice a terrible CG effect in this week’s The Punisher: One Last Kill, a special that (for all its problems) features plenty of practical stunts.

It’s notable that one of the major exceptions to this trend is the last movie Cretton directed, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. While that film definitely had some murky CGI, especially the climactic fight between Shang-Chi and Wenwu, the actual fight scenes were legible and visceral in a way that you only get from filming stuntmen performing the action. Cretton praises the practical effects in Brand New Day, saying, “Shooting that opening action sequence was really exhilarating… Putting Spider-Man on the street with cars exploding, it’s just so awesome.” Cretton’s comments play over images of a Spidey stuntman hoisted above a ball of flame.

Certainly, Sony has cherry-picked the best possible moments to include in their vignette. But the mere fact that they devoted a whole promotional clip to highlighting practical effects shows that they understand the importance of the visuals in their film.

Of course, we do have to note that great effects are an important part of a great superhero movie, but they’re not the only part. The first two Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies remain the live-action gold standard for superhero flicks, and they feature some of the most rubbery CGI put to screen. But we don’t care, because the drama and visual design satisfy us enough that we accept the weird contortions as stylistic choices.

We want Brand New Day to usher in a new era for superhero movies, but not at the expense of solid storytelling.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters on July 31, 2026.

Sinner Supper Club Is a Queer Mumblecore Movie About the Imperfections of Grief

Mumblecore continues to grow into new genre offshoots. This year’s Sinner Supper Club has already been called both “mumblegore” and “mumblequeer,” but Nora Kaye and Daisy Rosato, who co-wrote and directed the movie, seem happy to embrace all the mumbles while taking things in a different direction.

“Mumblecore is a movement that kind of started here,” Kaye tells Den of Geek at SXSW in Austin, Texas. “The Puffy Chair, Baghead, Creep. It’s a movement of people who kind of said ‘fuck it’ to the studio system and brought their friends together, shot in the now with a lot of handheld [cameras], using whatever they had to make a movie. We were like, ‘Well, what if we did that, but instead of predominantly cis white men, it was our incredible community of clowns and trans and queer folks?'”

Their movie, an improvised story shot in just six days, tells the story of a turbulent queer friend group who get together for a final party before one of them moves away, priced out by NYC rent. It also just happens to be their first tense gathering since a friend died. This supernatural element has led to some labeling Sinner Supper Club as a “mumblegore” feature, but that’s only a piece of what it has to offer.

“Mumblegore is definitely an emerging subgenre of horror,” says star Sophie Sagan-Gutherz. “I think it takes mumblecore one step further. You’re watching something that you feel like you shouldn’t really be engaging with, and it emits stress and discomfort. There are moments in our film where we do lean into that genre.”

The directors were also influenced by the Dogme 95 film The Celebration, part of the movement originally founded by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg to strip back cinematic artifice, as well as by the tradition of using a more “consumer level” camera. As a result, Sinner Supper Club was filmed entirely on an iPhone.

“I think there’s a lot of resurgence and nostalgia around the mini DV cameras and camcorders that films like that [used],” explains Rosato. “The films made in 2025 or 2026 that are like that are great, but they’re not really ‘of the now’ in the same way. So we were like, ‘What would be our version of a mini DV camcorder?’ which is the iPhone. It started as a creative translation point, but it also became very accessible because I was able to submerge myself and the camera in a shower to shoot one scene. I wasn’t worried about the camera breaking, because these can be submerged under water. We threw it in a freezer, and we mounted it to a bike. It just made it a lot easier to play very quickly and keep up with our actors and ideas.”

Kaye notes that using an iPhone allowed them to get close to the actors and create a movie with “propulsion and freneticism.” They didn’t need to take breaks to set up new shots. And because people are used to having phones in their faces all the time these days, it didn’t feel strange to be improvising in front of them.

“We were given an outline every day,” star Jayae Riley Jr. reveals. “Nora and Daisy plotted out the entire script. We were given a beginning, a middle, and an end, with action beats in between. It was a lot easier to improvise off of that, because we had a ton of information about the character, about the day, about how it was going to go, about any conflicts that needed to happen.”

Co-star Elise Kibler adds, “I think the nature of the way that we made this, at least to me, made the stakes feel a little bit lower. We were surrounded by our friends. We were excited about spending the week creating something together. And because we had such minimal equipment, there was a feeling very different from being on your typical set where there’s a [lot of] people and everything takes forever. This was just fast and loose. I think it took some of the pressure off that you might feel to create the perfect scene, or the perfect lines, and I think that freedom led to a lot of the wonderful lines that my fellow actors created in our film.”

Rosato and Kaye originally met through their screenwriting work, with both finding they were drawn to complicated, “fucked up” ensembles. The pair created the characters of Sinner Supper Club before casting them, using “a base of clown” as archetypal jumping-off points.

“They gave each of us a different one of the seven deadly sins as the center of our character,” explains star Genevieve Simon. “That also really helped in the improvs. Every time there was a scenario, I was like, ‘Okay, how would my sin relate to, not only this situation, but also the other sins’ impulses?’ It allowed us to tap into maybe uglier parts of ourselves, or the parts of yourself that you show your close friends but that you wouldn’t present at work.”

As the film progresses and the pressure mounts on host Genevieve to fix the friend group’s myriad problems before leaving, they take their NYC “wake” from the overbearing heat of a sunny park into the humid apartment from where Genevieve is being evicted. The gathering quickly turns even more tense, and the arrival of their dead friend only amplifies the gang’s problems.

Sinner Supper Club explores deep themes of grief and loss from queer perspectives, which also worked for the cast and crew on a meta level. “Daisy and I have a shared dead best friend,” Sagan-Gutherz says. “A lot of us have experienced loss, so it was an honor to play a dead best friend, because I have one.”

During a standout seance scene in the film, Sagan-Gutherz delivers an incredible performance as the late friend, but Kaye notes that the scene was retooled after it wrapped the story up in too neat a bow. “We watched it with some audiences, and it wasn’t working, because this whole movie is about embracing chaos and messiness, and we were trying to make something perfect out of something that is so imperfect. Laura Conte, an incredible editor, really helped us find how to get a perspective on grief that embraces that mess and unfinishedness, because there is no finishing.”

Sinner Supper Club premiered March 12 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival.

15 Movies That Became Popular Entirely Because of Memes

A meme is not only a joke that’s spread over the internet, it’s a memetic occurrence that’s hard to control. They are ideas that feel contagious, something we repeat without much thought. Said memes can give popularity to films and media that, under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t pay attention to.

Of course, when a lot of people pay attention to something, there’s money involved. These seemingly harmless jokes can be weaponized and monetized into something viral, and artists around the world have been taking advantage of this for years. These are the films only known for their meme status.

Morbius

The superhero movie became vastly more famous through ironic internet jokes than actual audience enthusiasm. “It’s Morbin’ Time” spread so widely online that the studio briefly rereleased the film theatrically.

The Room

Tommy Wiseau’s famously awkward drama evolved from an obscure independent movie into a global cult phenomenon almost entirely because audiences endlessly quoted and mocked its bizarre scenes online.

Madame Web

Before most people even watched it, awkward trailers and strange dialogue clips had already transformed Madame Web into a nonstop source of memes across social media platforms.

Sharknado

The intentionally ridiculous disaster movie exploded online because its premise sounded too absurd to be real. Internet reactions and jokes ultimately became far more important than the movie itself.

Snakes on a Plane

The movie’s internet popularity arrived long before release thanks to its perfectly ridiculous title and viral anticipation surrounding Samuel L. Jackson fighting snakes aboard an airplane.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror

Terrible visual effects and awkward performances transformed the indie thriller into an ironic cult favorite, with viewers sharing clips online specifically because the movie looked unbelievably unfinished.

Minions

The film became inseparable from endless internet memes involving the yellow characters, helping Minions evolve from animated sidekicks into one of modern pop culture’s strangest viral phenomena.

Bee Movie

Years after release, Bee Movie unexpectedly became a meme powerhouse thanks to absurd internet edits, spammed scripts, and widespread fascination with its bizarre premise involving human-bee romance implications.

American Psycho

Patrick Bateman’s monologues and expressions became endlessly recycled online, turning the film into meme material for entire generations who often encountered screenshots before ever watching the movie itself.

Joker

The movie inspired huge waves of memes before release and afterward, with Joaquin Phoenix’s dancing scenes and exaggerated reactions quickly becoming permanently embedded in internet culture.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

The bizarre live-action adaptation gained lasting internet popularity largely because audiences could hardly believe such a strange version of Mario actually existed in the first place.

The VelociPastor

A low-budget movie about a priest turning into a dinosaur practically guaranteed viral attention. Most viewers discovered it through memes rather than traditional advertising or critical discussion.

Cats

The unsettling digital character designs generated massive meme attention immediately after the trailer debuted, overshadowing nearly every serious discussion about the actual musical adaptation itself.

Batman & Robin

Its ice puns, exaggerated costumes, and wildly campy performances eventually transformed the movie from critical disaster into one of the internet’s favorite ironic superhero rewatches.

Napoleon Dynamite

Quotable dialogue, awkward dance scenes, and endlessly repeatable deadpan moments helped Napoleon Dynamite spread through early internet culture long before memes became fully mainstream online.

Can Ahsoka Season 2 Solve Star Wars Live-Action TV Woes?

Ahsoka Tano is finally slated to return to Disney+ subscribers’ screens in early 2027. But now that Ahsoka season 2 has a general release time period, the future of live-action Star Wars television is starting to take shape — and it might all hang on the Togruta jedi.

From Ahsoka season 1’s premiere in August 2023 to now, live-action projects made for Disney+ are in a significantly different environment. When new episodes of Ahsoka were dropping weekly, The Mandalorian was still a show and not a movie, the last episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi had released just a year before, and fans were still looking forward to Andor season 2 after an incredible first run.

This list doesn’t include the other live-action projects that preceded Ahsoka, such as The Book of Boba Fett, or series released after such as The Acolyte, both of which only have one season and received less-than-positive reviews from audiences. A planned second season for The Acolyte was quickly scrapped after the show’s season 1 release, and The Book of Boba Fett never proceeded with season 2. Meanwhile, the show immediately preceding Andor season 2, Skeleton Crew, received the lowest ratings of any Star Wars series — live-action or otherwise.

Dave Filoni, current president and chief creative officer of Lucasfilm, has amassed quite the roster of live-action shows with little to show for it. Although he inherited a large portion of this television junkyard from previous Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, his role in integrating storylines from animated projects he oversaw (chiefly The Clone Wars) into non-animated Star Wars projects might be a key reason why many of those projects are failing.

The Mandalorian-era boom in live Star Wars shows pointed to a future where older viewers turned off by animated shows could enjoy stories about their favorite characters comfortably. However, repeated negative reception of these projects have resulted in stalled release dates and outright cancelations. Filoni’s continued mashing of hefty Clone Wars lore into these live-action projects has resulted in many of these shows becoming bogged down narratively. Although the attempt to play to his strengths and overall background may be well-intentioned, it has repeatedly resulted in overly complex plotlines with minimal room for original ideas.

Animated Star Wars shows have maintained a much more consistent production schedule, with new releases happening regularly. Maul — Shadow Lord — the most recent of these animation projects — has received glowing reviews and broken streaming records with over four million viewers in its first week on Disney+. Other animated projects, such as the Star Wars: Tales anthology series, as well as Star Wars: Visions episodic anthology, have consistently scored positive reviews.

Replicating the success of new generation animated shows in live-action remains a largely unachieved goal for Filoni and Lucasfilm. So far, the only shot at achieving this goal in the near future is Ahsoka season 2 — there are no other live-action shows set to be released in 2027 and onward.

Ahsoka season 2 will have to learn from these previous cancelations and become a show of its own (one that doesn’t rely on rehashed Clone Wars storylines) to succeed. It is also likely a second season for Obi-Wan Kenobi, and even Mandalorian season 4’s release, hinges on the commercial success of the Ahsoka upcoming season 2.

If Ahsoka season 2 outperforms its first season ratings, fans of recent live-action productions can breathe a sigh of relief. If Ahsoka season 2 underperforms critically or commercially, however, Filoni will have to make some tough decisions about the future of live-action television for the Star Wars universe and his creative vision for the franchise.

The Invincible Character That Deserves the Next Battle Beast Comic Treatment

The long-awaited (and long-teased) fight between Battle Beast and Conquest is finally hitting shelves June 17 in Invincible Universe: Battle Beast Issue #10. Readers will finally learn how Battle Beast ends up in the Viltrumite prison Allen releases him from, all while enjoying the carnage-filled brawl between two of the strongest characters in Invincible.

Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley’s Battle Beast comic spinoff follows the titular galaxy-hopping warrior as he pursues his ultimate goal: death in glorious combat against a superior opponent. Since the end of the original Invincible comic run, and with reignited fervor spurred on by the Prime Video television series of the same name, fans have rushed to snag a copy of the Battle Beast series.

In June 2025, Image Comics and Skybound Entertainment ordered a third print of the Battle Beast debut issue after it sold out not once but twice. Additionally, Battle Beast was one of the best-selling comic series of 2025. Almost a year on, the comic remains a financial success; in March, Battle Beast Issue #7 was in the top 20 best-selling comic books, the third most successful Image Comics release, and the second-most successful comic not featuring a Marvel or DC character.

With the numbers Battle Beast is running up, and the renewed interest in Conquest’s history, the question of if another Invincible Universe comic should run and who should be the central character are hardly questions at all. It’s time for Invincible Universe: Conquest.

Conquest’s vulnerable monologue at the end of his and Mark’s battle in the final minutes of Invincible season 3’s finale, as well as the chilling blood heart moment in the middle of their globe-spanning fight, left a major impact on viewers, spawning original characters and variants. They also represent key ways Kirkman sought to elevate Conquest’s source character.

With a comic spinoff, Kirkman and Ottley would be able to develop the underlying themes of loneliness, imperialism, and violence that shape Conquest beyond just his few appearances on the TV screen and in print. There’s no doubt a Conquest solo comic would sell — why not delve into the complex implications of his millennia-long life of conquering? For what it’s worth Kirkman already said there was more to explore about Conquest when talking about the Viltrumite’s appearance in the show.

“If a character becomes popular at Marvel or DC, they bring them back over and over and over again until they are less popular,” Kirkman told Variety in March 2025. “By trying to make Invincible something that celebrates traditional superhero storytelling but also tries to play against type, no matter how popular Conquest got, we’ve told his story. That’s all you get. There’s a lot left on the table that I would love to get to at some point. Because of that, you’ll see a lot more stuff with Conquest in the show.”

The demand for more Conquest content is here, and the solution is simple — deliver Invincible Universe: Conquest to the masses.

Good Omens Ending Explained: Aziraphale and Crowley’s Relationship Status, The Second Coming, and More

The following contains Major spoilers for Good Omens season 3.

Though many of us were nervous that this day might never actually come, the Good Omens finale is here and brings the beloved story of the angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) and the demon Crowley (David Tennant) to an end. But will fans be satisfied with the ending they waited so long to see?

It’s certainly true that much of “The Finale” feels rushed — a side effect of being forced to condense a story originally intended to be told over six episodes into 90 minutes — and occasionally has to sacrifice character depth in favor of moving the plot along. Still, it’s a conclusion that manages to hold true to many of the same themes we’ve seen throughout the rest of the series: Humanity is a miracle. We are who we choose to be. Love endures in every form. And sometimes great love requires great sacrifice. It’s a bittersweet conclusion, to be sure, but one viewers will almost certainly be talking about for a long time to come.

Here’s a rundown of the big reveals from Good Omens finale.

The Second Coming Isn’t the Real Apocalyptic Threat

Though the premise of “The Finale” ostensibly revolves around the Second Coming, and even introduces Extraordinary standout Bilal Hasna as a soft-spoken, endlessly charming Jesus, the potential End Times are less of a threat than you might expect. Part of that is Aziraphale’s doing; in his new role as Supreme Archangel, he’s been promoting a more universal happiness versus a fire-and-brimstone kind of vibe. But the question of the Second Coming almost becomes irrelevant in the face of the disappearance of the Book of Life. A celestial register upon which all of reality is recorded, its also the means by which that same reality can be erased, and the scope of its threat becomes glaringly apparent when the all-powerful Metatron and several archangels vanish from existence.

The finale rushes through much of this plot — understandable as it clocks in at just 96 minutes – but the upshot of it all is that the Archangel Michael, tired of being overlooked in Heaven, stole the book and burns it page by page in the Eternal Flame at the center of the universe. Though Azirphale attempts to talk her off the proverbial ledge, they fail, and the Book of Life is destroyed, save for a single page Crowley manages to rescue, a charred entry for the pair’s beloved Whickber Street bookshop.

The Problem of Free Will

Now essentially the last beings in the universe, Crowley and Aziraphale are confronted by both Satan (Toby Jones) and God (Tanya Moodie), who are summoned into appearing by virtue of being omnipresent through all things. This awkward family reunion essentially turns into a fairly familiar debate about free will and predestination, as Crowley questions why the Almighty would create a universe where humans are punished for simply behaving like humans and, subsequently, essentially being set up to fail. Aziraphale simply wants to know why God decided to give him Crowley and the promise of completeness he represents, only to take it all away.

As Satan points out, these are all questions that will be familiar to any religion or philosophy major: the problem of evil, the question of free will, why an omniscient Creator would allow their creations to suffer needlessly. Good Omens smartly doesn’t attempt to settle thousands of years’ worth of debate on these topics. Instead, it upsets the board entirely. God offers to let Crowley and Aziraphale choose what comes next: Everything can be put back the way it was or something else can be made in its place. But whatever that something else will be, is up to them.

Sequestered in a corner of the shop that transforms into a sort of hybrid Garden of Eden, the pair debate what sort of world they want to make (and live in). For Aziraphale, the answer is easy: He just wants Crowley. But Crowley’s feelings are more complicated: He longs for a universe where free will is real and humanity can truly make their own choices, even if it means creating a world where no angels or demons exist, even if it means the pair of them will never get the chance to be an “us” the way he’s always wanted them to be.

**The Good Omens Universe Ends**

In the end, a teary Aziraphale agrees, and after a brief and gut-wrenching farewell, the pair disintegrate into nothingness, holding hands and gazing at each other the whole time. The Good Omens universe as we knew it blinks out of existence, before restarting again with a literal Big Bang.

Billions of years pass, as humanity is born again, and ostensibly makes many of the same mistakes all over again. (Humans are going to human, after all.) But this time around, they do it on their own terms, and that’s what makes all the difference.

Do Aziraphale and Crowley Get Their Happy Ending?

While this is undoubtedly the thing that most viewers will be interested in when it comes to the events of this finale, the answer is a bit more complicated than most likely expected. The beings we have watched for three seasons, the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale, technically cease to exist when the Good Omens universe is erased.

But Professor Anthony Crowley and Asa Fell, two figures who are clearly human versions of Crowley and Aziraphale, just reborn into a reality where neither a divine nor a demonic hierarchy exists, do get an adorable meet-cute and happily ever after.

In this reality, astrophysicist Crowley meets bookseller Asa Fell when he wanders into his shop in search of some reading material. The pair hit it off and have dinner (this time with a helpful push from the Metratron, now simply a bookstore owner named Derek). Fast forward 20 years, and Asa and Anthony are stargazing in the backyard of a South Downs cottage, sporting wedding rings and listening to nightingales sing. Given that the two spent six millennia pining for one another, it’s a soft and fully earned happy ending, even if neither remembers the literal centuries of history they shared in a previous universe.

Yes, it’s something of a bittersweet conclusion to Aziraphale and Crowley’s story — especially for viewers who likely hoped their favorite angel and demon would be granted an eternity together after centuries of being kept apart — but one that reflects the very human heart of this series and its larger themes. The pair’s love for the Earth that they made their home led them to sacrifice everything for it, but their love for each other was strong enough that they still found one another again. That certainly feels ineffable, if you ask me.

Good Omens is now available to stream in full on Prime Video.