We look back at Danielle Rose Russell ad Kaylee Bryant’s most heartfelt pitches to make a Hope and Josie relationship happen on Legacies.How ubiquitous is Disney? They can make high-budget films inspired by their decades-old theme park rides, and no one even bats an eye. When Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of The Black Pearl released in 2003 the conventional wisdom was that pirate movies, let alone one based on a 1967 boat ride, were box office poison. A $4.5 billion combined gross dispelled that notion.
Disney has established the formula for making this unlikely sort of adaptation work: Keep things light and fast paced, throw in enough Easter Eggs to please the die-hards, and cast an A-List actor to anchor it. But still, no ride-based movie has ever been as successful as Pirates. The Haunted Mansion, Tomorrowland, Mission to Mars, and The Country Bears all underperformed. Could the latest attempted ride adaptation, Jungle Cruise, succeed where those movies failed?
Pokemon Go‘s Valentine’s Day event kicks off on February 14, developer Niantic has announced. As part of this year’s event, the Gen 5 Pokemon Munna and its evolved form, Musharna, will be available for the first time in Pokemon Go, and there will be various other Pokemon spawns and in-game bonuses.
Throughout the event, the following Pokemon will appear in the wild more frequently than usual:
On top of that, the following Pokemon will be hatching from 5 km eggs:
Grand Theft Auto V continues to be a huge success for Rockstar and Take Two. During its latest financial earnings call, Take Two revealed that GTA V has now sold more than 140 million copies–a number that will likely only continue to grow when the game comes to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X later this year.
Despite being more than seven years old at this point, 2020 was GTA V’s single best year since launch. Take Two said “more copies of Grand Theft Auto V” were sold last year than any other year since 2013, when the title first launched on PS3 and Xbox 360. Recurrent consumer spending–Take Two’s terminology for in-game purchases–for Grand Theft Auto Online grew 28% year-over-year, outperforming the company’s third-quarter forecast.
Grand Theft Auto V continues to receive a regular stream of updates to its GTA Online mode. Back in December, Rockstar rolled out the big Cayo Perico Heist update, which introduced the titular heist as well as a new island location, a new nightclub, new vehicles and weapons, and more.
In an earnings brief, Take-Two revealed that GTA 5 has sold over 140 million units to date — that’s about ten million units sold since May of last year. Additionally, more units of GTA 5 were sold in calendar 2020 than in any other year except for the game’s launch year of 2013 — when it sold 32.5 million.
GTA Online is also doing well years after launch, with Take-Two saying the game had more players each month in 2020 than any other month since launch, as well as for the full year of 2020 than in any other year since its launch. It also saw the game’s highest participation rate from both new and returning players, and its revenue was up 28% year-over-year for the quarter.
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As a part of its earnings, Take-Two reaffirmed its commitment to release GTA 5 on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in the second half of 2021, as well as continue to update the game with new content this year.
GTA was not the only Take-Two franchise that saw continued surges of interest in 2020. Red Dead Redemption 2 has now sold over 36 million units worldwide, and Red Dead Online reached more players in December of 2020 than it ever has since its beta launch in 2018. NBA 2K21 has now sold over 8 million units and Borderlands 3 has sold over 12 million units.
Take-Two attributes much of GTA Online’s ongoing success this year to its ongoing slate of new content releases, including the recently-released Cayo Perico Heist — the first-ever heist that GTA Online players can play entirely by themselves if they choose.
Players have also taken GTA Online’s sandbox to create their own storylines and entertainment. The Green versus Purple Alien gang war in GTA Online was something players devised on their own within Rockstar’s online universe and speaks to GTA Online’s enduring popularity.
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Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
Silent Hill fans were overjoyed when longtime series composer Akira Yamaoka seemed to tease a new entry in the series in a recent video interview. However, the clip was later taken down by the original publisher AI Hub, who simply said that they “were asked to remove the clip” by an unspecified party.
Statement:
We thank you for your support which contributed to the spread of the interview that we published yesterday with Akira Yamaoka around the world.
We were asked to remove the clip, and it has been removed.
We apologize
and stay tuned for the next interviews https://t.co/sMuGmf6NIT— Al Hub – الهَب (@TheHubKW) February 5, 2021
In the clip, Yamaoka stated that he was working on a new project that would be announced this summer, and specifically said, “I think it’s the one you’re hoping to hear about.” This would seem to indicate the Silent Hill series, since Yamaoka is closely associated with that franchise. News of the clip’s removal prompted some to point at Konami as the party who asked AI Hub to take it down, given that the company has quashed similar rumors before.
However, Konami told multiple sources (including PushSquare) that they didn’t communicate with AI Hub, suggesting that perhaps Yamaoka himself asked them to take it down. Silent Hill rumors have swirled for years at this point, with Konami outright stating last year that rumors of a Silent Hills reboot were not accurate. Recently, an unknown fan bought SilentHill.com as a response to the popularity of a certain Resident Evil Village character.
In a new report from Bloomberg, EA executives will review the latest version of Anthem Next later this week. Depending on how the project is progressing, EA will continue to back and grow the Anthem Next team or “abandon the project.”
Anthem Next was set to be a re-do of sorts for Anthem, BioWare’s live-service action RPG which quickly lost traction with players. BioWare handed Anthem to BioWare Austin which specifically works on live projects like Star Wars: The Old Republic.
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BioWare Austin executive producer Christian Dailey became the face of Anthem Next, writing three blog posts about Anthem Next’s development throughout 2020. But according to the report, Dailey left the Anthem team in December as part of a management shake-up. BioWare’s Casey Hudson and Mark Darrah also the company in December.
Dailey’s departure put more questions around the future of the project.
In its development blog, BioWare Austin detailed some changes that the team considered for Anthem Next, including updates to loot drops, weapons, the Javelins — the robot armor players pilot and customize — and skill tree changes. Basically, a top-down overhaul and Bloomberg says other major changes have been made to Anthem’s “core systems and user interface[.]”
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This isn’t to say Anthem Next has been officially canceled. That remains to be seen following EA’s internal review, and if the project is shaping up to satisfaction the dev team will be expanded to pursue the project further.
IGN reviewed Anthem and gave it a 6.5 saying its energetic combat can’t save the lack of content and tedious grind. But second chances have become increasingly common in video games thanks to success stories like Final Fantasy 14 and No Man’s Sky.
Meanwhile, BioWare’s Canadian studios are working on a new Dragon Age and Mass Effect
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Matt T.M. Kim is a reporter for IGN. You can reach him at @lawoftd on Twitter.