As production on the Arrowverse’s Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover gets underway, fans are being treated to their first glimpse of the big Superman team-up to come. Actress Elizabeth Tulloch (Supergirl’s Lois Lane) posted an Instagram photo of herself alongside both Tom Welling and and Tyler Hoechlin’s versions of Clark Kent, along with the message “Lois and Clarks.”
Check out the photo below:
The animated series Star Wars Resistance is coming to a close with Season 2–and it will link directly to December’s Episode 9: The Rise of Skywalker. However, the series is leaving a lasting mark on the Star Wars Universe by confirming that two characters from the series are an official couple.
Executive producers of the series Athena Portillo, Justin Ridge, and Brandon Auman discussed Orka and Flix during a press day. “I think it’s safe to say they’re an item, absolutely,” Ridge told press as heard on Coffee With Kenobi. “They’re absolutely a gay couple and we’re proud of that. We love Flix and Orka.”
The Disney Channel animated series is the first place a gay couple has been featured in the history of the franchise. Many fans of the series caught on to the loving relationship between the two characters during the first season, especially from the video above where the two are headed to visit Flix’s mother. Now it’s official, the two are in an item.
Sexuality in a galaxy far, far away has been a hotbed for speculation since The Force Awakens hit theaters in 2015, and many fans have wanted to see the characters Finn and Poe Dameron hook up.
Additionally, Donald Glover, who starred as Lando Calrissian in Solo, has discussed his character being pansexual–a person who is emotionally or romantically attracted to someone regardless of sexual or gender identity. “How can you not be pansexual in space? There’s so many things to have sex with,” Glover said during a SiriusXM interview.
You can check out the latest video for the upcoming Season 2 of Star Wars Resistance below.
After being launched into space by Kaz and crew, the Colossus encounters engineering problems, which are made worse by a mysterious stowaway. Watch the #StarWarsResistance S2 premiere this Sunday, 10/6 at 6pm PDT on @DisneyXD, 10pm PDT on @DisneyChannel, and in the DisneyNOW app. pic.twitter.com/xaq0y19A8F
— Star Wars (@starwars) September 30, 2019
Star Wars Resistance Season 2 premieres Sunday, October 6, on Disney Channel and Disney XD.
Way back in 2017, before Star Wars: The Last Jedi even hit the big screen, it was reported that Rian Johnson would return to the franchise to develop an entire new trilogy of movies after the release of the then-untitled Episode IX. But, this being the internet, the lack of further news and the backlash from some fans have led to speculation about Johnson’s future with the franchise.
Though he took to Twitter earlier this year to address the cancellation rumors, no further news has been announced. It didn’t help that new TV shows have recently been confirmed for the franchise, including the Obi-Wan show for Disney+, without a peep about Johnson’s planned Star Wars trilogy. But as before, no news isn’t necessarily bad news.
After a special presentation of Knives Out during Fantastic Fest, we spoke to the writer and director about his thrilling and entertaining murder mystery, which features a star-studded cast that includes Chris Evans, Jaime Lee Curtis, and Daniel Craig.
When asked if he can confirm anything about his future with Star Wars, Johnson gave an enigmatic yet hopeful answer. “I’m still talking to Lucasfilm about it,” the Last Jedi director said.
Though that’s far from definitive, it could very well be that Lucasfilm is just waiting to see how The Rise of Skywalker is received and decide where they’re taking the franchise after that. They already announced a trilogy of movies to be released between 2022 and 2026, including one made by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and no one outside of Disney knows what the company is planning beyond that.
That being said, while Johnson couldn’t confirm or deny his future involvement with the franchise, he did have something to say about the next release in the franchise–The Mandalorian, which he praised as an example of what he wants for the future of Star Wars.
“I’ve seen some behind the scenes and went to visit the set,” Johnson said enthusiastically. “It looks incredible, and the stuff they’re doing is fantastic.”
“But other than that, I haven’t read any other scripts and don’t know anything about future movies,” he added.
Rian Johnson used The Mandalorian to share what he hopes all future Star Wars projects (including his hypothetical one) offer fans.
“For me, I’m just a Star Wars fan,” Johnson told GameSpot. “What I want is for people to sit down and watch something we’ve never seen in the Star Wars universe before. Tell me a great story, something that’s going to make me feel like I’m 10 years old again watching the original trilogy. I feel like that’s what we all want when the lights go down.”
Check out GameSpot’s Knives Out review for more on Johnson’s latest.
Minecraft Dungeons takes the cute blocky aesthetic of the building game and makes a loot-driven dungeon crawler out of it. The game is set to launch next spring, but in the meantime, you can sign up to take part in a closed beta.
The sign-up form states you must be 18 years old and have a free Microsoft account. It doesn’t give any specifics about when the closed beta would begin, but with launch coming within the next half-year or so you probably won’t have to wait too long.
Mojang announced the closed beta at MineCon, as well as debuting a story trailer for the game. Like all great epic quests, this is a story driven by its villain, so that’s what this trailer focuses on. An outcast Illager travels the world, rejected by society, until he stumbles upon a square-shaped artifact of great power and then he grows corrupt and mad with power. You know, that old story.
This is the first we’ve seen of Minecraft Dungeons since Microsoft announced it at E3. That brief look showed a glimpse at how equipment and food will work, and teased 4-player online co-op.
If you’re subscribed to one or more streaming service, then chances are you’re curious about what’s coming out each week. This week, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and AMC’s horror-themed service Shudder have plenty of new movies, TV series, and original programming for you to check out.
On Monday, Amazon Prime Video is unleashing a tidal wave of movies, and there has to be at least one or two you’ll want to watch. The classic ’90s horror movie Event Horizon arrives that day, which follows a rescue ship that finds a spacecraft after it’s gonet through a black hole and brought something horrifying back with it. Additionally, arriving to Amazon that day areCloverfield, Mad Max 2, Stargate, and Total Recall.
Over at Hulu, October 1 is the big release day for the service. There are over 100 movies and TV shows being released, and you can watch Guy Fieri travel across the country, eating at various places in Season 26 of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. That’s not a typo. This show has 26 seasons under its belt, somehow. As far as new movies go, you can watch the classic Boyz N’ The Hood, Rain Man, The Orphanage, and plenty more.
Below, you’ll find everything headed to Amazon, Hulu, and Shudder this week, and for more streaming service news, check out what’s coming to Netflix this week.
Nintendo is reviving its hit Brain Age series on Switch. The company has announced it is releasing a new Brain Age game for the hybrid console in Japan this December, and it’ll launch alongside a dedicated stylus for the system.
Nintendo revealed the new Brain Age game with a trailer, which you can watch below. While the video is entirely in Japanese, it shows off some new exercises in the game, as well as some of the ways it will utilize Switch’s unique features. Among other things, you can use the right Joy-Con’s IR sensor to do calculations with your fingers. There’s also a tabletop exercise that has two players competing to count the number of objects on the screen the fastest.
The new Brain Age game hits Switch in Japan on December 27. Alongside the game, Nintendo is releasing an official stylus for the Switch. You can see some pictures of it, as well as images of the new Brain Age exercises, above. Nintendo has not yet announced if it will release Brain Age or the Switch stylus in the West.
The original Brain Age was one of Nintendo’s first notable attempts to court non-gamers, and it became a huge hit for the DS, selling more than 19 million copies worldwide and inspiring multiple sequels and off-shoots. The most recent entry in the series, Brain Age: Concentration Training, released for the 3DS in 2012.
Brain Age isn’t Nintendo’s only Switch release targeting non-gamers this year. On October 18, the company is releasing Ring Fit Adventure, a successor of sorts to the Wii Fit line. The game comes with a weird peripheral call the Ring-Con which translates exercises into in-game actions. We had a chance to go hands-on with Ring Fit Adventure earlier this month and it certainly left us sore.
October is a pretty great month for Netflix, and the first week has a few originals for you to watch, including a very adult animated series, a horror original from Stephen King and Joe Hill, and the final season of a Fox superhero show.
Arriving on Friday is Season 3 of Big Mouth. The animated series–which is meant for adult audiences–follows a group of adolescents going through puberty and how everything changes in their lives. If you remember those days, then you obviously remember it was more horror than comedy. Regardless, Big Mouth has a stellar comedic cast leading the charge with Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, Jenny Slate, Jason Mantzoukas, Jordan Peele, Maya Rudolph, and more.
Also headed to Netflix on October 4 is an adaptation of the Stephen King and Joe Hill novella, In The Tall Grass. Directed by Vincenzo Natali (Cube), the movie follows a brother and sister who head into a grassy field in Kansas after hearing the cries of a young boy. However, once they step inside the grass, they find there is no escape.
Lastly, you can watch the final season of Fox’s series Gotham. Taking place in Batman’s home city, the bizarre take on DC Comics mythology wraps up it’s five-year run with everything going to hell in a handbasket, and it all kicks off with the government labeling the city “No Man’s Land” after the bridges were bombed and criminals took over.
Below, you’ll find everything coming to Netflix this week, and for more streaming info, check out what’s coming to Amazon Prime Video and Hulu for October.
Naughty Dog has given the enemy AI in The Last of Us Part II a big upgrade, so the foes you’ll be going up against are smarter and will try to take you down with some deductive reasoning and tricky tactics.
“Our AI now has a new state of awareness between complete awareness of your position and totally unaware of where you are,” The Last of Us Part II co-director Anthony Newman said in an interview with GameSpot. “We sometimes call that vague knowledge.” For example, even if you were to stealthily take down an enemy with a silent weapon–such as a bow or pistol with a silencer attached to it–another enemy can still find the body, look at where the arrow or bullet is lodged in their comrade, and infer in which direction they were attacked.
The Last of Us 2 News
They’ll then begin their search for you in that general direction, using any other bodies you drop to hone in on your position. Of course, you can prove to be smarter by utilizing the enemies’ own search patterns against them. “Not only does this make them more intelligent to new situations where these systems can cause more intense moments to transpire for the player, it also gives the player the opportunity to make predictions,” Newman said. “We all know human beings, we interact with human beings every day. We can make predictions about what they’re going to do next. By having these more refined and nuanced layers of knowledge and perception and coordination, players can make better and better predictions and make more refined strategies about what to do next.”
Even if you’re able to consistently outsmart the new enemy AI, don’t expect combat to be a walk in the park. Naughty Dog wants there to be an emotional toll to combat as well. “[The Last of Us Part II] is meant to be unsettling,” Newman said. “I think along with, honestly, every aspect of the game–narratively, mechanically, and technologically–the AI was just one facet of the game that we really wanted to take to the next level and ask, ‘What can we do that’s next-gen?'” In this regard, individual enemies now have their own names, and their friends will mourn and call out to them when they discover their murdered corpses. It’s just another aspect of the game that helps to really highlight that, within the context of The Last of Us Part II’s story, your actions are questionable even if they seem motivated by what feels like truth and justice.
The Last of Us Part II releases for PS4 on February 21. For more on the game, make sure to read our hands-on preview of The Last of Us Part II.
Developer NetherRealm Studios announced the full DLC roster for Mortal Kombat 11‘s Kombat Pack last month. As previously reported, The Terminator is scheduled to launch on October 8, with NetherRealm now confirming that a gameplay trailer will go live very soon.
The official MK Twitter account shared a short, 20-second video with some targeting system locking onto various MK11 characters like Baraka and Erron Black. The tweet, below, confirmed that The Terminator’s gameplay reveal is scheduled to debut tomorrow, October 1, at 6 AM. The teaser video concludes with The Terminator’s launch date.
Targets found. Sending T-800 Gameplay Trailer to 2019, October 1st, 0600 hours. #MK11 pic.twitter.com/COYUMD8WaR
— Mortal Kombat 11 (@MortalKombat) September 30, 2019
MK11’s Kombat Pack, which retails for $40 USD, features a bevy of characters. Alongside The Terminator, the Kombat Pack includes Shang Tsung, Nightwolf, Sindel, Joker, and Spawn. Shang Tsung and Nightwolf are available now, with Sindel launching in November, Joker arriving in January 2020, and Spawn debuting in March 2020. Previously a pre-order bonus, Shao Kahn is also available as a DLC fighter for $6 USD.
The new Mortal Kombat movie has gained some momentum as of late. After filling a few pivotal roles, like Sub-Zero, Liu Kang, and others, the full cast list has been revealed. Actors from both The Dark Knight (Chin Han) and Avengers: Endgame (Hiroyuki Sanda) have been cast in the reboot.
Last week, the NPD Group shared a prediction for the top 10 best-selling games of the year. While MK11 sits at number five, it’s joined by titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Borderlands 3, Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, and others.
It’s been ten years since the high school horror-comedy Jennifer’s Body hit theaters and while it may have never quite gotten the attention or love it deserved a decade ago, it’s since been elevated to cult classic status. After all, what’s not to love about Amanda Seyfriend and a demonically possessed Megan Fox duking it out in prom dresses? And don’t forget that insanely on-the-nose early 2000s soundtrack or Adam Brody’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the most insufferable jerk in a band to ever grace the big screen.
But there’s more to be remembered in Jennifer’s Body than just the plot and the performances. Like any horror movie worth its gore, it’s jam-packed with Easter eggs, references, and inside jokes about its genre–including everything from winks to classics of the 1980s and shout-outs to some of the actors’ biggest career hits. Sure, we may not have gone through and rounded them all up ten years ago, but better late than never, right?
And while you get into the spirit of spooky season by revisiting a ten-year-old favorite, you might also want to take the time to look into some of the newer horror offerings from streaming services like Shudder, or take a gander at everything new coming for October on services like Netflix and Hulu.
The first line of dialogue comes from Needy, narrating that “hell is a teenage girl.” While the line is a Jennifer’s Body original, it’s also a nod to a major philosophical inspiration. The 1944 play No Exit by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre famously included the line “hell is other people,” which would go on to be misquoted and misinterpreted for decades to come. While it’s easy to assume that Sartre simply meant getting along with other people is a hellish experience, what he actually meant, in his own words, was “[…] if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves.”
Pretty on the nose for a movie that strives to be about the messiest and most twisted relationships between friends, huh?
The aforementioned extremely early 2000s soundtrack for this movie is anything but an accident. Even Jennifer’s room is decorated with some musical relics of the era, like the giant Fall Out Boy poster hanging above her bed, a pop-punk staple of 2009.
While Jennifer’s decorating tastes may skew towards the modern, Needy’s don’t. Her poster of choice is The Evil Dead, the 1981 horror classic about–surprise–a group of kids who accidentally wind up allowing their friend to get possessed by a demon. Needy also owns an Evil Dead shirt, which Jennifer winds up stealing for a bit, just to really drive that symmetry home.
It’s hard to get more iconic in the horror world than a teen girl in a blood-soaked prom dress, a fact that Jennifer’s Body is intimately aware of. Needy and Jennifer’s final fight goes out of its way to invoke Stephen King’s Carrie–even without the pig’s blood and the pyrotechnics. Jennifer even gets to make a throwaway gag about needing a tampon to stop the bleeding of her gaping stomach wound in a nod to Carrie’s mortifying locker room ordeal.
Needy’s finale–being bitten by a demon and surviving, which grants her low-level demonic abilities of her own–is an indirect nod to one of the major inspirations for Jennifer’s Body, the 2000 Canadian horror movie Ginger Snaps. Sure, Ginger Snaps was about two teenage sisters dealing with a werewolf curse and not demonic possession, but the concept remains basically the same, right down to the idea that abilities can be transferred by bite.
Not everyone in Low Shoulder is as chill with the idea of making a demonic pact for fame as their vocalist is–but that doesn’t matter, because they’re willing to go the extra mile if it means getting to be like “that guy from Maroon 5.” If you didn’t know who Adam Levine was in 2009, chances are you probably know him now, though hopefully, his solo fame didn’t come at the cost of a sacrifice.
Demonic Jennifer seduces her classmate with the promise of watching Aquamarine, a movie about a mermaid who “has sex through her blowhole or something.” That last part isn’t actually true, thank god, but the movie Aquamarine is very real–and definitely about a mermaid.
Writer Diablo Cody loves to work in a good Tony Little gag in her script. Her earlier movie, Juno, included a joke, but no on-screen appearance of the home fitness guru, while Jennifer’s Body actually seals the deal and features Jennifer watching a Tony Little infomercial on TV.
Devil’s Kettle may not be the name of an actual town, but it is the name of a real waterfall with a mysterious hole that water drains into and apparently never returns from. The real Devil’s Kettle is located in Judge C.R. Magney State Park in Minnesota.
In yet another classic horror nod, Jennifer’s Body summons the spirit of the 1989 black comedy, Heathers, about a group of murderous teenage girls, by leaning into the tropes of Jennifer’s victims. Both the tearful jock Jennifer murders and J.K. Simmons’ ambiguously midwestern amputee principal could have walked straight out of Heathers and into Devil’s Kettle.
The same way Jennifer’s Body borrows the spirit of Heathers, it also does a fantastic job of nodding to the 2004 high school comedy, Mean Girls, which also starred Amanda Seyfried. Though Seyfried’s two characters couldn’t be more diametrically opposed from one another (a popular ditz versus an outcast nerd) they both manage to hit those strangely lovable extremes high school movies do best.
If Low Shoulder weren’t already overtly evil enough for you, the fact that they start singing Tommy Tutone’s Jenny–you know, the 867-5309 song–as they murder Jennifer in the woods should probably seal the deal. Jenny, they’ve got your number, unfortunately.
Even the name Jennifer’s Body is, in and of itself, a musical reference. It comes from the 1994 alt-rock hit of the same name by the band Hole. The lyrics are extremely on-the-nose for the plot of the film: “You’re hungry, but I’m starving. He cuts you down from the tree. He keeps you in a box by the bed. Alive but just barely.”