Month: July 2020

The CW’s subversive take on Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead will be back with more murder and mayhem

Underage bootlegging. Voyeuristic stalking. Tickle porn. And murder–lots of murder. It’s all par for the course on The CW’s Riverdale, a dark and bizarre adaptation of Archie Comics.

Season 4 ends on a cliffhanger. Betty and Jughead get their hands on a creepy video cassette–the latest in a season-long series of them, mailed to Riverdale’s prominent families. As they watch in horror, a gang of psychopaths stabs a man to death. The murderers are dressed in cartoon masks of the Riverdale teens, and the hapless victim is dressed as their principal, Mr. Honey. Is this latest snuff video real or staged? Who’s been sending these videotapes to everyone in town? And will this somehow factor into the upcoming senior prom?

We were supposed to already have the answers to these questions. But then, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down filming, and Riverdale was forced to cut its fourth season short. The Season 4 finale was actually Episode 19 of an original 22-episode order, which would have shown the prom and tied up all the loose ends.

Here is everything we know about the upcoming season of Riverdale, including how they’re going to resolve the current narrative problems.

1. Air Date

Riverdale is scheduled to return to TV in January 2021, per an announcement by CW.

2. Season 4 Followup

Due to the pandemic, there were three Season 4 episodes that were never completed. Riverdale will begin Season 5 with these three missing episodes, so we’ll finally get resolution to all of the dangling plot threads from the prior year. It’s been a long time coming, but the decision to wait was probably the best one. The writers only have one shot at this; it’s better that they tell the story they want to in the manner they wish to tell it, instead of forcing a conclusion that probably wouldn’t have held up to scrutiny.

3. Time Jump

Multiple sources have confirmed that after these three episodes air, Riverdale will do a time jump, which will bring the actors closer to the age proximity of their respective characters. In a recent Live Kelly and Ryan interview, Camila Mendes, who plays Veronica Lodge, confirmed the time jump, and said it will be five years into the future.

Since the characters are currently high school seniors, a time jump would pick up the story after they’ve attended and graduated college. It’ll be interesting to see how everyone’s life shakes out. Will Jughead fulfill his dream of being a writer? Will Betty follow her natural aptitude for crime and forensics? And how will everyone’s romantic entanglements shake out after some distance from one another?

4. Former Cast Members

Two cast members will not be returning full-time for Season 5: Skeeter Ulrich, who plays F.P. Jones, and Marisol Nichols, who plays Hermione Lodge. This will be disappointing to fans who wanted to see more of the budding relationship between F.P. and Alice, or loved watching the Lodge family drama unfold.

5. Silver Linings

But there is good news as well. Firstly, creator and showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa stated to Variety that Ulrich and Nichols are “always welcome back in Riverdale,” which means their characters won’t be killed off. It leaves the door open for possible reunions down the line.

Secondly, Aguirre-Sacasa confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that both actors had agreed to wrap up their storylines from Season 4 before leaving for good. Nichols confirmed on Instagram that she would be appearing in Season 5 in a more limited capacity. So expect to see both characters for at least the first three episodes of Season 5. And once the time jump happens, it’ll be easier to write them off the show or cut back their involvement.

6. Breakups

A CW schedule announcement this past May included a synopsis for Season 5, which tells us that some couples will be breaking up in their senior year. We’re betting that Archie/Veronica and Betty/Jughead will split, especially since Archie and Betty are secretly falling for each other. The press release further states that after the time jump, the teens will return to Riverdale “to escape their troubled pasts,” which is especially interesting. One would think that leaving Riverdale would be escaping the past. What event would compel them all to reunite?

7. Katy Keene Information

Katy Keene, the Riverdale spin-off that debuted in February 2020, was canceled in July 2020. But before it went off the air, we got some interesting tidbits about Riverdale Season 5. That’s because Katy Keene Season 1 takes place five years after Season 4 of Riverdale (the same as the planned time jump), which gives us a sneak peek into some, but not all, of the characters’ lives.

Assuming Riverdale sticks to its own canon, we know that Kevin Keller will become the drama teacher at Riverdale High. We know that Archie is still in Riverdale and keeps in touch with Josie (maybe he never left in the first place, much like Fred?).

We know Hiram Lodge is still alive and up to no good; he appeared in Katy Keene’s series finale to shake things up. If he has time to wheel and deal in real estate, he’s probably not mayor of Riverdale anymore. It also means that his potentially fatal neuromuscular disorder in Season 4 was either cured in the past five years or was a bald-faced lie from the start.

It’s hard to believe, but it’s nearly August, and the holidays will be here before we know it. Major retailers are already anticipating the busy holiday shopping season and making changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. One major change: Stores that would normally stay open on Thanksgiving Day will be closing their doors. Walmart confirmed as much last week; now, Target is the second major retailer to announce all of its locations will be closed on Thanksgiving Day.

Additionally, Target confirmed that its “biggest holiday deals” (read: Black Friday) will be available starting in October, much earlier than usual, to help avoid the huge crowds that flood stores near the end of November. Plus, all of its best holiday deals will be available online as well as in stores so that you don’t even have to shop in person at all. This is a major change from previous years, when some of the best doorbuster discounts have been in-store only. Walmart’s press release didn’t mention its deals strategy for this holiday shopping season, but we do expect (and hope) that more stores will follow Target’s lead and offer all of their Black Friday deals online.

Target is also offering pickup and same-day delivery services for an additional 20,000 products, which will be a great option for those looking to avoid the crowds while also picking up that new game or console day of.

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The screen went dark for a moment at the end of Grounded’s reveal trailer. A rumbling growl could be heard before a gigantic spider popped on screen. It was a jump scare that was more effective than Obsidian intended it to be.

“We watched through a bunch of reactions there was huge number of people that was not ‘oh gosh, that’s scary,’ it was ‘oh gosh, I can’t play this,'” Obsidian technical game designer Jerrick Flores tells GameSpot. “That was a big red flag.”

It was at that point that Flores and others on the Grounded team decided to build and arachnophobia mode so that players who were sensitive to spiders could still play. It wouldn’t be like the arachnophobia modes other games (Satisfactory by Swedish studio Coffee Stain replaces spiders with a picture of a cats face) or the Insect Begone mod created by the Skyrim community that removes spiders from the game altogether. Obsidian wanted the accessibility option to be client side since Grounded is a cooperative game—it needed to only affect players who chose the option.

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In celebration of its 35th anniversary, Back to the Future is getting a brand-new Blu-ray box set later this year. For the first time, you’ll be able to watch the adventures of Marty McFly and Doc Brown in 4K UHD. Back to the Future: The 35th Anniversary Trilogy arrives October 20, with Amazon, Best Buy, and Target each having exclusive editions to pre-order.

If you pre-order from Amazon, you’ll get a replica hoverboard collectible, while Best Buy’s edition comes with three steelbook cases instead. When placed beside one another, they create an image of the famous DeLorean time machine. Each set comes with 4K UHD Blu-ray discs, standard Blu-ray, and digital copies of each film. Amazon and Best Buy are both selling the box set for $70.

Back to the Future has received multiple box sets in the past, but along with the 35th Anniversary set being in 4K for the first time, you’ll also get more than an hour of new special features on the bonus disc. The 35th Anniversary set contains the hours of bonus features included in previous releases, too, such as original shorts, commentaries, deleted scenes, interviews with the cast and crew, and more.

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The recent Nintendo leak has offered up a treasure trove of gaming hypotheticals, including numerous cancelled projects, Luigi in Mario 64, and prototype character designs. But one of the more peculiar finds is a Pokemon MMO that never saw the light of day.

The idea of a Pokemon MMO isn’t what makes the cancelled project interesting. Instead, it’s the fact that it was being developed for the Game Boy Advance, with online features offloaded onto a version you would hook up to a PC to play.

The game would’ve been based off Pokemon Fire Red and Leaf Green, with online elements borrowing from Pokemon Coliseum. It was in development at Chinese studio iQue, which has since closed their doors. The game was slated to launch initially in 2005 and eventually grow into its online component by 2006, but for unknown reasons Nintendo decided to pull the plug on it.

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Toy behemoth Hasbro has announced that its new G.I. Joe movie Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, initially eyeing an October 2020 release date, has been delayed into 2021 due to COVID-19’s impact on the company’s bottom line. After posting second-quarter financial results that missed Wall Street forecasts for earnings and revenue, Hasbro Chairman and CEO Brian Goldner told the Hollywood Reporter that the company is “working out the specifics with Paramount.” The film is a joint production between Hasbro and Paramount Pictures.

Snake Eyes will be the third installment and also a reboot of the G.I. Joe film series, which kicked off with 2009’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Snake Eyes has a script from Evan Spiliotopoulos, who worked on Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast and The Huntsman: Winter’s War. Robert Schwentke (R.I.P.D., The Time Traveler’s Wife) is the director.

The movie reportedly stars Henry Golding in the titular role, and Andrew Koji will portray Storm Shadow. All that’s really known as of this writing about the movie’s plot is it will serve as an origin story for the character Snake Eyes, who is the G.I. Joe team’s original commando–whose history and even basic biographical information have remained from the very beginning unclear or classified. In the original comics, his voice has never been heard and his face has never been seen since the character was disfigured and his vocal cords were permanently injured after a helicopter attack.

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