The news was first reported by Deadline and confirmed by Green in a post on Twitter. In her tweet, she said that 2006’s Tomb Raider: Legend is her favorite “classic era” game in the series and 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is tied with 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider as her favorite in the current series.
My fav from classic era is Legend & from survival era it’s a tie between Rise & Shadow. So I’m thinking something like:
Green is not just the showrunner behind Lovecraft Country but also wrote every episode of the show’s first season and directed an episode. Green hasn’t written or directed a feature-length movie yet, but Deadline said Green recently wrote a movie, The Mother, which Netflix won after a heated competition with rival studios.
There’s no word on why Wheatley isn’t involved in the project anymore. The filmmaker has kept busy by directing a horror movie during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Empire. That movie is set for release in 2021. Variety says that Wheatley is also set to direct The Meg 2 with Jason Statham.
Details are slim regarding the Tomb Raider sequel. All that’s known at this time is that Vikander will reprise her role as Lara Croft from the first movie.
The first Tomb Raider movie with Vikander was released in 2018. Captain Marvel screenwriter Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Small Axe writer Alastair Siddons wrote the script that was directed by Roar Uthaug. IGN gave the movie a 5.5 out of 10 in our review. We said Tomb Raider “fails to develop interesting characters or motives but at least offers viewers some fun action.”
GameStop’s stock is acting strangely, still. It’s gone even higher after last week’s surge drove GameStop’s value skyrocketing to record levels. And although the week is still young, it shows this unexpected rise is, rather than a result of anything the company’s done, a savvy bit of investing, at least in the short-term.
The interest in GameStop’s irregular stock activity has thrust the Reddit group seemingly driving the surge into the spotlight. Popularly described as “4chan with a Bloomberg Terminal,” r/WallStreetBets is a wild west of stock investing “advice” and memes. And the pearl-clutching establishment has certainly painted this group as a rogue troll army messing with the established practices of Wall Street.
IGN has reached out and spoken to several r/WallStreetBets day traders to find out more about this group that has thrust the struggling video game retailer into the spotlight.
What Is Going on with GameStop Stock?
GameStop stock (traded as $GME) is on the up-and-up. Prices for a single piece of stock peaked today at around $145. Compare that to a year ago, when prices for the biggest video game brick-and-mortar retailer hovered around $15 but went as low as $3 a share.
Some Wall Street investors bet that GameStop would continue to struggle and began short-selling the company, a strategy where an investor borrows stock of that particular company — in this case, GameStop — and sells it in the hopes that prices for the stock will continue to drop. If that happens, they can buy back the stock for even cheaper and keep the difference as a profit.
But instead of going down, prices are going up, and this is bad for short sellers who have to buy back the stock they borrowed. Redditors on r/WallStreetBets saw the short early and moved in to buy GameStop stock early and cheap, creating a short squeeze.
Short sellers rushing to buy while minimizing losses created a rush to buy GameStop stock, which in turn drove up prices. A vicious cycle, if you will.
Who Is Squeezing Wall Street?
In speaking with traders on r/WallStreetBets, it’s evident that these traders are not wolves of Wall Street, but hobbyists who trade on the side and have either a clear-eyed or irreverent view of the stock market.
Three traders from r/WallStreetBets IGN spoke to say that they are not full-time traders, while a fourth says they’re still relatively new to trading. And all three also joined the community fairly recently with the longest member following the subreddit about a year ago.
“I had seen the subreddit in some YouTube video after I got into trading but was only doing my own thing until this GME stuff really started to pop off and I bought in,” one trader, who asked to go by Ike for privacy reasons, tells IGN.
Source: Google.
Ike bought GME stock when it was around $30 and says he spent about $600 on his position. He says his option is now worth around five times that value but is still waiting before selling.
When asked why they went in on GME, Ike says that it took “some convincing” and due diligence but that it was “mostly FOMO [or, Fear of Missing Out].”
Another trader named Tj says they invest “on the side for fun,” while working as a full-time engineer at a major tech company. Their option is worth six-figures after going in at a buying price of around $18 per stock.
In keeping with their 4chan with a Bloomberg Terminal mantra, these traders prefer memeing their way through Wall Street, using terms like FOMO or YOLO [You Only Live Once] to explain away their investment decisions.
One investor named Sage says they’ve only been following r/WallStreetBets for “around two months” and that investing is a “side hustle.” For “about five minutes” Sage’s GME options were worth $33,000, based on an initial investment of $1000. Though they chose not to sell.
The biggest success story is someone who goes by u/DeepFu*kingValue on WallStreetBets who regularly updates the subreddit on the price of their option which is currently valued at $13 million.
The energy the subreddit brings into trading can only be described as chaotic. One thread by user u/dumbledoreRothIRA is titled, “I’M NOT SELLING THIS UNTIL AT LEAST $1000+ GME” with an additional expletive and some rocket ship emojis for good measure.
The subreddit is also claiming a “victory” against hedge fund Melvin Capital Management, a short-seller that the Wall Street Journal reports is getting an outside investment to help stabilize the fund after a variety of short bets fell through. One of which was Melvin’s bet against GameStop.
GameStop, a Meme?
One reason why the GameStop stock situation is so absurd is that for the past three years, GameStop has been struggling as a business. A brick-and-mortar video game retailer, GameStop has not been able to compete with digital retailers like Amazon as well as the growing trend of customers buying primarily digital versions of games through portals like Steam, PSN, or Xbox Live.
When IGN spoke with GameStop’s chief customer officer Frank Hamlin back in 2019, he explained that “As a specialty retailer, we are linked at the hip to this category of video games. We compete with a bunch of generalist retailers who don’t have the same seasonality as we do because they sell paper towels and loaves of bread and they can use video games as a loss leader to sell a loaf of bread.”
But GameStop is a mainstay in the public gaming consciousness, and the brand recognition has driven WallStreetBets to embrace the struggling brand. Whereas investors on Wall Street proper saw a struggling retailer, WallStreetBets saw an underdog and piece of gaming childhood.
Sage says that while “Reddit Hype” factored into their decision to go in on GME, so did “childhood memories.” Meanwhile, Tj tells IGN that their non-retirement investing is done with additional income. “So I figured might as well throw it into the latest meme and let it ride,” they said.
Another trader who spoke with IGN named Branyan said that knowing GameStop helped them go in on their own position.
“I’ve done my fair share of shopping there,” says Branyan. “It definitely did make a difference that I knew the business opposed to going in blind. I’ve trusted them with my business so I should be able to trust them with my trades.”
Ike says they were very aware of GameStop both from their childhood and recent news. “Like most my age [GameStop] used to be a place I’d go often for games as a kid, and I knew about its decline as I’ve watched the closure of one [of the stores] close to me.”
One side-effect of the GameStop Stock squeeze is the increased scrutiny on r/WallStreetBets. Mainstream and finance-focused publications are covering the subreddit in recent days — and not in a way the community finds helpful.
“News coverage has been unfair and misleading, often referring to WSB as a single entity that makes decisions for millions of people,” says Ike. “But take only a glance at the sub and you’ll see just how wrong that is, [it’s] full of people taking all sides [on an investment] and people posting random sh*t half the time.”
Tj says they’re worried that the media coverage could harm inexperienced investors “jumping into stocks without researching.” They believe that “a lot of people will lose more than they can afford to,” because of the notoriety.
“Well to tell you the truth [the media coverage] is very worrisome,” Branyan adds. “Many subreddits have been shut down in the past and wiped out due to getting negative media coverage. The coverage we’re getting now seems to want to suggest that we are attempting to manipulate the market as a collective single organism. This isn’t the case. We are just a bunch of investors who like to chat about what we do.”
“People make huge YOLOs and succeed sometimes and people like to see that. That is what you’ll find at the base of WSB. People making it big or losing it all trying. We aren’t trying to manipulate the market, we’re trying to go big or die trying. Each and every one of us.”
As for their GME options, the investors say they’ll eventually sell and hopefully make a profit.
“I’ll sell when u/deepfu*kingvalue sells,” Sage says.
In an era where the streaming wars are only growing more cutthroat all the time, big franchises matter. WarnerMedia is bringing one of its biggest weapons to bear on HBO Max, as we’ve learned the company is in the very early stages of developing a Harry Potter series for its flagship streaming service. We don’t yet know what the series is about or when in the Potter timeline it’ll be set, but at long last, Harry Potter is headed to TV. And that’s exactly what the franchise needs at this point.
Much like how Star Wars has thrived thanks to shows like The Mandalorian and The Clone Wars, the Harry Potter franchise could easily find its second wind on the small screen. Read on to find out why streaming TV, not theatrical blockbusters, is the way forward for Harry Potter.
Fantastic Beasts: Time For a Change
Despite the original Harry Potter series having concluded ten years ago in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Warner Bros. is still keeping the franchise alive on the big screen. So far, two films in the Fantastic Beasts prequel series have been released, with a third currently in production and creator JK Rowling hinting at a five-film series overall. Plus, many fans are assuming it’s only a matter of time before Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a stage play that continues the saga several decades down the road, will eventually be adapted as a feature film.
Still, it’s hard to argue the franchise hasn’t seen some of the wind go out of its magical sails in recent years. The Fantastic Beasts movies are neither the critical nor commercial smashes the core Potter movies were. 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald currently ranks as the lowest-grossing Harry Potter movies to date, as well as being the only one to earn a “rotten” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn’t help that the franchise is so strongly associated with behind-the-scenes controversy nowadays, whether it’s Johnny Depp’s legal troubles or Rowling’s unfortunate history of transphobic writing.
Warners is still moving forward with the third Fantastic Beasts movie, even going so far as to replace Depp with Mads Mikkelsen as the villainous Grindelwald. Production finally began on the untitled third movie in September 2020, with a planned release date of July 15, 2022. But as for whether the fourth and fifth movies will still materialize, that remains to be seen. Given the bad mojo surrounding the series and the diminishing box office returns, Warner Bros. may opt to cut their losses and give the Potter franchise a fresh, clean slate. And what better way to do that than pivot from film to television?
It’s a pivot that’s certainly worked in the Star Wars franchise’s favor. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is generally regarded as an underwhelming conclusion to Disney’s sequel trilogy. Nor was Solo: A Star Wars Story a major critical or commercial success. By comparison, The Mandalorian is the first Star Wars project of the Disney era that’s managed to cross party lines and please the vast majority of fans. While it’s tougher to gauge the success of streaming projects without hard figures, the widespread critical acclaim and the massive popularity of Mandalorian-themed merchandise both suggest the series has been a big hit for Lucasfilm and Disney. And with spinoffs like Rangers of the New Republic, Ahsoka and The Book of Boba Fett in the works, it’s clear Disney is going all-in with Star Wars TV projects even while the next movie is years away.
It’s not hard to imagine the Potter franchise finding similar success shifting away from the big screen and toward streaming TV. Both the Fantastic Beasts movies and the Cursed Child play have their detractors. A TV series offers Warner Bros. a chance to wipe the slate and start fresh without all of the baggage of those other projects. Handled properly, the first Harry Potter series could inspire a whole wave of spinoffs just as The Mandalorian has. This isn’t to suggest the franchise can immediately shed the various controversies surrounding it, but it would be a start.
A Wide Open Timeline
There are many reasons the Harry Potter books struck such a chord with readers, but the massive, fully realized fantasy world they reveal is certainly among them. The seven books take place roughly over the course of seven years, as Harry becomes inducted into the Wizarding World and makes his way through Hogwarts. Even though the series ends on a definitive note, as Harry conquers his nemesis Voldemort and frees the world from magical tyranny, it’s clear we’ve only seen a small piece of a much larger tapestry. The magical community existed for centuries before Harry came along, and it will continue to exist long after he’s become nothing more than a snoozing painting on a castle wall.
There’s so much of the Wizarding World left to cover, and even the Fantastic Beasts movies are barely scratching the surface in that regard. Many fans would love to see a Marauders series – a show that covers the youthful exploits of James Potter, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin and shows a very different side of Severus Snape. That premise alone justifies a streaming series – one where each season could chronicle another year at Hogwarts. In the process, fans would find out what it was like to live during Voldemort’s original rise to power. Perhaps even more importantly, the series could transform Harry’s parents from ghostly mentor figures to actual, fully realized characters.
That’s just one option on the table. The series could also be set after the Potter movies but before the events of Cursed Child, chronicling Harry’s journey toward becoming an Auror and his role in rebuilding a government brought to its knees by the Death Eaters. That would also provide an opportunity to introduce new threats and villains who aren’t members of the Voldemort or Grindelwald clans.
The series could even take the opportunity to veer far away from the characters and locales of the movies. The Fantastic Beasts movies have taken a more multicultural approach, with the first taking place largely in New York, the second in Paris and the third reportedly in Rio de Janeiro. Even so, these films only have so much room to showcase these new locations amid all the emphasis on Newt Scamander and friends. There would be a real novelty in a series that sheds light on what it’s like to attend wizarding school in the US or Japan or Kenya.
In short, there’s a reason they call it the “Wizarding World,” and there’s only so much Warners can do to capitalize on that world with one theatrical movie released every few years.
Characters Over Spectacle
If there’s one reason for the Potter series to pivot to a TV series over movies, it’s the characters. Fans need well-rounded heroes they can identify with, or else all the wand-waving and beast-catching is just empty spectacle. That’s arguably the greatest flaw weighing down the Fantastic Beasts series compared to its predecessor. It’s difficult to connect with bumbling collector Newt Scamander and his friends in the same way it was so easy with Harry, Ron and Hermione. It doesn’t really help that the Fantastic Beasts movies are based on what’s basically an in-universe zoology book. The source material has no real narrative or cast of characters to adapt, so it’s the titular beasts themselves who tend to steal the show.
A Harry Potter series would have a valuable opportunity to really dig in with these characters in a way none of the movies have been able to do. As faithful as the core Harry Potter movies are, there’s inevitably wide swaths of material that gets cut when you try to condense the story of an entire school year into a two or three-hour film. Even in the books, supporting characters like Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, the Patil sisters and the extended Weasley family aren’t terribly well developed. But in the movies, they’re often little more than background cameo roles.
There’s an argument to be made for treating the HBO Max series as a full-fledged Harry Potter reboot and exploring the events of the books in far greater depth. That doesn’t seem the most likely option, given the enduring popularity of the movies and WarnerMedia’s habit of using HBO Max as a platform fr spinoffs of blockbuster movies (Dune: The Sisterhood, Gotham PD, Peacemaker, etc.). Still, it would certainly be an interesting move. Nor is there reason to worry about the series’ ability to replicate the scale and special effects quality of the movies. If The Mandalorian has proven anything, it’s that it’s no longer cost-prohibitive to tackle truly cinematic stories in a small screen format.
A true Harry Potter reboot is likely still much farther down the pipeline for Warners. But whenever and wherever the HBO Max series takes place, the hope is it’ll be able to flesh out its cast to a much greater degree. We’ve gotten more than enough movies about Chosen Ones battling the forces of darkness. What about the other 99% of characters who make their way in the Wizarding World without the benefit of prophecies or the watchful eye of Albus Dumbledore? Who else has magic worth conjuring and a story worth telling? It’s about time we found that out.
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
Capcom’s release of the Resident Evil Village demo, Maiden, is a short slice of what the full release will offer…sort of. Maiden doesn’t even include combat, it’s over in about 15-20 minutes (unless you get stuck on a simple puzzle, like I did), and in one of my favorite demo design choices, it isn’t even a scenario you’ll encounter in Village itself. Instead, it’s a mood piece, designed to give a sense of the atmosphere of one of Village’s main locations, tease some of the characters we can expect to face, and, hopefully, creep the hell out of you with a constant feeling of dread, as it did me.
While they’ve perhaps less ubiquitous than when publishers tucked demo discs into a gaming magazine, Maiden and other recent examples show there are many right ways to execute a demo, reminding us of just how damn effective they can be in selling players on a game in a way no other part of the video game hype machine can.
Regardless of what form a demo takes, a good one should accomplish at least a few things: let a player get a sense for some key aspect of gameplay, whether it’s basic gameplay mechanics or how they’ve changed within an ongoing series (like last year’s Bravely Default II demo), or introduce you to an atmosphere of a new world (like BioShock’s demo did back in 2007), or give you a sense of scale and spectacle, (like Final Fantasy VII Remake’s demo in 2020).
I’ll never forget the BioShock demo specifically, as BioShock was a game I was unsure whether I’d like before launch. That demo, which replicated BioShock’s opening minutes in Rapture, is forever ingrained in my head. I don’t know if I would have ever picked up the full game had I not actually played it; it gave me just enough to want more. No amount of reviews, gameplay teases, or trailers could have properly conveyed everything that hands-on did.
Maiden does a fantastic job of preserving the twists and turns the developers have in store for the full game while still communicating what it is about. While it’s likely the more rare case, a totally new slice of gameplay can still thematically and mechanically touch on the full experience.
More commonly, a part of the existing game is sectioned off as a demo on its own, either a level a bit into the game to give a full understanding of gameplay, or even just the game’s opening. And thanks to modern advancements, many of these opening mission demos now let players carry progress forward to the full experience. I will always be happy when I can pick up from that spot in the full game without needing to replay anything. Even when progress doesn’t carry over, though, developers have found smart ways to incentivize players to play a demo with content they may or may not have to replay later. Take Monster Hunter Rise’s recent demo, which doesn’t carry over progress to the upcoming Switch game, but playing it does earn an item booster pack for players when the full game is available.
Games by their very nature have to be sold on interactive levels that movies and TV just don’t. Trailers and images are all those entertainment mediums can offer, and while there’s no shortage of both in gaming, they pale in comparison to how much a demo can convey about what playing a game is actually like.
Of course, there’s also the inverse risk – a player can experience a demo, decide a game isn’t for them, and move on without ever buying that game. I can only imagine the risk-cost analysis in releasing a demo. Not every game is for every person, and you can just as easily decide to buy a game after loving a demo as you can decide to never touch it again.
I don’t know if Maiden will necessarily usher in a new era of demos – their popularity seems to come in waves, either from generation to generation or even just on a given console. And plenty of developers have been putting out demos in recent years, so Capcom’s move here isn’t necessarily a new or unexpected one. Tt’s a reminder of the power of a demo. And they’re an enormous player service, allowing for discoverability and understanding of upcoming games on a deeper level. Demos may help you decide a game isn’t for you, but when they help a player fall in love with a new game, they act incredible gateways to worlds you’ve never experienced before, in a way no other tease could ever accomplish.
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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor, host of Podcast Beyond!, and PlayStation lead. Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.
