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Warner Bros. still intends on releasing Wonder Woman 1984 theatrically and not online, contrary to a report spreading like wildfire across the internet.

The Wrap claims to have heard that the upcoming DC Comics movie sequel, currently slated to open June 5, might forego a traditional theatrical release in favor of a straight-to-digital debut due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) and worldwide closure of theaters.

The site reports that the preliminary discussions happened among the highest levels of Warner Bros.’ top brass and that not even director Patty Jenkins and producer Charles Roven were privy to the discussions.

However, in The Wrap’s own report, Warner President of Domestic Distribution Jeff Goldstein shot down the notion of a streaming-only release: “We’re looking to release the movie theatrically, that’s our plan.”

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Likewise, a source close to the studio confirmed to IGN that Warner Bros. remains fully committed to releasing Wonder Woman 1984 theatrically.

“It’s ludicrous if you consider how big a movie this is,” WW84 producer Charles Roven told The Wrap. “Everybody recognizes that, as interesting as streaming might be, if you want a huge, global worldwide box office, you’ve got to release it in a movie theater.”

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Hollywood has seen nearly every upcoming movie release postponed and production shut down due to COVID-19, with Universal leading the charge this week in releasing a new movie, Trolls World Tour — once earmarked for theatrical exhibition — as a digital release instead.

While it’s entirely likely that Warners brass have spit-balled such ideas — these are obviously unprecedented times for the film industry — our sources were adamant that Wonder Woman 1984 will make its debut as intended in movie theaters.

2020 is quickly shaping up to be the year of Ahsoka Tano. Not only is Ahsoka back in action in the fifth episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ final season, a new report says she’ll be making her live-action debut in Season 2 of The Mandalorian, with Rosario Dawson taking over a fan-favorite Star Wars role.

This news is so exciting because we know so little about Ahsoka’s story after the events of Star Wars Rebels. With that in mind, let’s explore what we do know and how The Mandalorian can build on a story that fans have been following for years in the animated series and novels.

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Ahsoka Tano’s Story Before The Mandalorian

While we’ve previously done a deep dive into Ahsoka’s history, here are the basics. Ahsoka made her debut in the 2008 animated movie Star Wars: The Clone Wars and quickly became a major player in the animated series of the same name. That series explores Ahsoka’s coming-of-age story as Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan and eventual exile from the Jedi Order.

Even though The Clone Wars is only just now getting its belated final season on Disney+, Star Wars Rebels (which takes place after Revenge of the Sith) already revealed that Ahsoka survived Order 66 and eventually joined the Rebel Alliance. The novel Star Wars: Ahsoka helps bridge the vast gap between the two shows, revealing how she escaped the devastation of the Siege of Mandalore and eventually became a Rebel spy.

Ahsoka plays a crucial role in Rebels Season 2, which culminates in a battle with her former master Darth Vader on the Sith world of Malachor. For a while, Ahsoka’s fate was uncertain, as the Season 2 finale is intentionally vague as to whether Ahsoka survives that battle. However, the final season of Rebels reveals she was rescued by her ally and fellow Jedi Knight Ezra Bridger. Ezra was able to reach through time and pull Ahsoka to safety, though the two were quickly separated again.

That’s where Ahsoka’s story begins to get murky. She only has two other canonical appearances in the Star Wars saga after that point. She appears in a flash-forward epilogue in the Rebels series finale (which is set a little while after the events of Return of the Jedi), where she reunites with the surviving members of the Ghost crew to search for the lost Ezra. Ahsoka’s voice can also be heard in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, one of many Jedi who lend their support to Rey in her battle with Emperor Palpatine. This has led many fans to assume Ahsoka is dead by the time of Episode IX, though Lucasfilm’s Dave Filoni has hinted otherwise.

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How Ahsoka Tano Fits Into The Mandalorian: Season 2 Time Frame

The Mandalorian is set roughly five years after the events of Return of the Jedi, a time when the Empire is mostly vanquished but before the New Republic has been able to restore order to the galaxy. Because of this, we’re not expecting Season 2 to settle the question of whether Ahsoka is dead in The Rise of Skywalker. There is the chance she could die in The Mandalorian, but it would seem like an awfully big waste to go through the trouble of introducing live-action Ahsoka only to then immediately kill her off.

Plus. it’s not as though Ahsoka will be a senior citizen in The Mandalorian. Ahsoka is a young teenager at the start of The Clone Wars. There’s about 30 years of time between then and the era of The Mandalorian, putting her in her early to mid-40s in Season 2.

Even if Ahsoka’s sequel trilogy fate is off the table, the series could easily tie into the open-ended finale of Rebels. As we saw in the Rebels finale, Ezra and Grand Admiral Thrawn were both trapped aboard a runaway Star Destroyer as it jumped to the far edge of the galaxy. Ahsoka, Hera Syndulla and Sabine Wren set out to track Ezra down and bring him home. Conveniently, The Mandalorian is also set on the fringes of the galaxy, a lawless place where where bounty hunters like Din Djarin make a living. We could easily see Din crossing paths with Ahsoka as she continues her search for Ezra. Perhaps she would even enlist his services as a skilled tracker to pick up a trail that’s gone cold.

Granted, there are several years separating the Rebels epilogue and The Mandalorian, so it could be that Ahsoka has already completed her mission by this point. If so, she may be like Cara Dune, simply drifting through the Outer Rim and keeping a low profile now that there are no more wars left to fight. Encountering the Mandalorian could give Ahsoka the purpose she’s been searching for.

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Ahsoka’s Role in the Fate of Mandalore

The Mandalorian has already been forging a connection to The Clone Wars with the reveal that Din’s nemesis Moff Gideon is now wielding the Darksaber. This ancient lightsaber is one of the most important relics of Mandalore. The owner of that saber is recognized as the rightful ruler of Mandalore. So the fact that it’s currently in the hands of an Imperial warlord suggests Mandalore is in a pretty bad place post-Return of the Jedi.

With news of Ahsoka’s role, we’re anticipating Season 2 will shed much more light on the current state of Mandalore. When Rebels ended, Sabine willingly ceded the Darksaber to Bo-Katan Kryze and joined her friends on the hunt for Ezra. We can assume Bo-Katan’s reign was short and tragic, with the Empire returning to decimate the world and its people all over again. Ahsoka may feel a certain sense of guilt over pulling Sabine away from her homeworld when it needed her most. With that in mind, Ahsoka’s role in The Mandalorian: Season 2 may involve teaming up with Din Djarin and other surviving Mandalorians to liberate Mandalore (or at least avenge it). Fingers crossed Sabine is still around to help.

Gideon actor Giancarlo Esposito has already teased a major lightsaber battle in Season 2, along with a complicated history between Gideon and Din Djarin. Could he have been foreshadowing a big showdown between Gideon with the Darksaber and Ahsoka her two white lightsabers? If so, we don’t fancy his chances of survival.

It’s also not out of the realm of possibility that Grand Admiral Thrawn could reemerge in Season 2 or a future season. As in the classic Expanded Universe novels, Thrawn may be the one to rally the fractured remnants of the Empire in this chaotic period.

Not only that, we have to assume Ahsoka’s return will tie into the ongoing mystery of The Child aka Baby Yoda. Din is a capable bodyguard, but he’s ignorant in the ways of the Force. It may fall on Ahsoka to train Baby Yoda, share what she knows about his species based on what she learned about Jedi Master Yoda during her years of training, and maybe even help Din track down Baby Yoda’s hidden homeworld.

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In short, Ahsoka should have plenty to keep her busy in Season 2. The wait until October 2020 just got longer.

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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.

Call of Duty: Warzone continues to reach a huge number of players, with the free-to-play battle royale hitting 30 million players in its first 10 days of release.

The Call of Duty Twitter account posted the latest number with a picture thanking its 30 million players for being a part of the community. This increase in people playing comes shortly after Warzone hit 6 million players within its first 24 hours available.

Over 30 million of you have dropped in to play #Warzone. Thank you to this amazing community .

Jump in and play for free now. #FreeCallofDuty pic.twitter.com/KFKhb8CNNK

— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) March 20, 2020

While players were able to play solo in Warzone previously by going up against other squads alone, Infinity Ward released a solos mode on Tuesday. This could have played a role in bringing more people to the battle royale, despite the Plunder mode still not being playable alone.

By choosing to support cross-platform play between Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, more people have been able to play together regardless of their platform.

Warzone was officially announced earlier this month with a launch coming 24 hours later. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a quick reveal and release, especially in the battle royale genre – developer Respawn Entertainment released Apex Legends shortly after it was announced and reached 2.5 million players within its first 24 hours.

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Stay prepared for Warzone whether you’re going in alone or with a full squad by using our guides at the Call of Duty: Warzone wiki. If you’re looking for a quick guide, take a peek at the best loadouts to get right into the action.

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Jeffrey Lerman is a Freelance News Writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @Snakester95.

Police in countries like Spain and China are using drones to stop people from going outside during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Spain’s government announced that the country was in a state of emergency Friday, March 13, and the next day, everyone in the country was ordered to remain indoors, as reported by Business Insider. Days later, police were using drones equipped with speakers to yell at people breaking the rules.

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It’s very Black Mirror-esque, but it does provide a way for police to ensure people remain indoors without having to risk person-to-person interactions themselves. You can check it out in action in the tweet below from BBC News.

Police in Spain have been using drones to check the streets for anyone ignoring Spanish orders to stay home during the coronavirus outbreak

On Saturday, the country’s 47 million citizens were ordered to stay indoors except for necessary tripshttps://t.co/Yqcy5K9OLC pic.twitter.com/jmLlQfQYXc

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) March 15, 2020

China is doing the same with its own drones, warning residents to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary to leave the quarantine, as reported by Global News.

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You can check out China’s drones working below.

Camera drones are employed in Hangzhou, China to urge elderly residents to stay indoors, amid the novel #coronavirus outbreak. #pneumonia pic.twitter.com/jpT3yvHnip

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) February 4, 2020

Check out some ways you can help others and stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

All six seasons of Justified are currently available to stream on Hulu, as part of the streaming service’s FX on Hulu section. 

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Welcome to IGN’s new recommendation series, Binge It! Movies, TV shows, books, comics, music – if you can binge it, we’re here to talk about it. In each installment of Binge It!, we’ll discuss a piece of content we’re passionate about, and why you should check it out.

If you’re a fan of great TV, chances are you already know about Justified, Graham Yost’s stylish, verbose adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s short story “Fire in the Hole,” which ran for six seasons on FX between 2010 and 2015. But whether you missed it the first time around, or you’re an early adopter and just want to revisit a whip-smart, action-packed classic with some of the best dialogue you can hope to find outside of Leonard’s pages, Justified hits the target every time.

The quick-witted (and even quicker-draw) modern-day western stars a devilishly languid Timothy Olyphant as Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, an old fashioned, Miami-based lawman whose itchy trigger finger gets him into trouble with his bosses and finds him essentially banished back to Kentucky, where he grew up.

Within Raylan’s new jurisdiction is his hometown of Harlan County, a bustling hive of scum and villainy populated by an enviable rogues gallery of criminals that would put any superhero to shame – and, even better, most of them still have an ax to grind against Raylan from the prodigal lawman’s misspent youth.

Watch the delightfully retro first season trailer for Justified below:

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While a big part of Justified’s appeal is Raylan’s sardonic wit and endlessly tangled web of interpersonal relationships (he’s seemingly never met a woman who doesn’t want to shoot him shortly thereafter – and, in true Elmore Leonard fashion, the women of Justified are every bit as complex and fascinating as the men), the show’s real strength lies in its baddies. From one-off crooks of the week to slippery recurring players and season- or series-long foes, every single one is written with the same depth, humor, and instant specificity as the main characters. This is a show that has no compunction about exploring the moral ambiguity of its heroes as well as its villains, gleefully interrogating the many shades of grey that make “justice” such a loaded concept.

The series also demonstrates a deft balance between standalone episodes and serialized arcs, so that even those self-contained cases feel engaging and vital, often expanding on the backstories of Raylan’s supporting cast – who are every bit as messed up as he is. This helps each tightly-plotted 13-episode season feel focused and maintain a sense of momentum, making it an easy and surprisingly addictive binge.

Justified boasts a spectacular roster of character actors as both allies and antagonists, and every season is buoyed by the strength of its villains, from Margo Martindale’s imposing crime matriarch Mags Bennett, to Jere Burns’ capricious mobster Wynn Duffy, to the charismatic but deadly Boyd Crowder (a show-stealing Walton Goggins), who is undoubtedly the Joker to Raylan’s Batman.

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The ongoing rivalry between Raylan and Boyd fuels most of the series, complicated by old wounds, familial resentments, and, most frustratingly for them both, an undeniable (despite the fact that they’d both deny it) affection for each other based on their childhood friendship. There’s something truly Shakespearean about the duo’s conflicting trajectories, which grow more tumultuous as the show progresses, but perhaps the best recommendation for Justified is that it manages to thread the needle and deliver a truly satisfying series finale, ending on its own terms in a way that doesn’t leave you hanging. Even five years after Justified left our screens, you won’t regret a return visit to Harlan.

During Sony’s Road to PS5 press conference on Wednesday, Mark Cerny breezed through fifteen minutes of very technical – yet exciting – talk around the PS5’s approach to audio. Let’s take a closer look at what some of that jargon actually means, and how it could be a game-changer for consoles.

The main tenet of Sony’s audio presentation was Great Audio For All, with two goals that related to that theme – hundreds of advanced sound sources, and presence and locality. When it comes to games, or anything with a visual component, sound often takes a back seat, particularly when it comes to assigned resources. All games have a processing resources budget determined by the processing power of the platform, and audio usually gets a small slice of that pie to work with. An important part of designing the sound for a game involves optimization of the sounds being implemented and finding ways to use, or re-use a sound clip, then prioritize what is most important for the player to hear and what can be left out. With the PS5, there’s a real focus being placed on more detailed audio processing in a 3D space than we’ve seen before in a console.

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So how is Sony achieving this? The PS5 will have a dedicated audio hardware processing unit called the Tempest, which is based on AMD GPU technology that has been modified to make it more ideal for audio. The processing power of this new Tempest unit will roughly equal the processing power of the eight Jaguar AMD chips in the PS4, of which only a small portion would have ever been relegated to audio.

This is an enormous increase in processing that will be available to sound designers and allow audio to be far more involved. Currently, because the amount of processing resources delegated to audio is limited, the way designers use audio is also limited.  For example, there could be many layers of sound happening at once, but some sounds have to be given priority over others. For instance, it’s far more important to hear that monster barreling towards you baring its teeth than the birds circling overhead. If the processing power available is limited, the sound of the birds might not be played. But with all the dedicated processing power from Tempest, the sound design can have significantly more depth and complexity instead of prioritizing what’s more important and dropping what is less important.

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3D audio is where much of that extra processing power will go. For VR and PC gamers, 3D audio will sound familiar; more involved implementation of 3D audio has been showing up in games and headsets over the past couple of years. The more discrete channels in a 3D audio system, virtual or physical, help place that enemy player you’re stalking more accurately. The obvious and easy choice for the PS5 design team would be to use an already existing system as the basis for any advanced sound processing. Something like Dolby Atmos that can be found on the Xbox One (although it had some problems when the update was rolled out). But Cerny specifically addressed why Atmos peripherals weren’t the most ideal solution – namely the need for players to use licensed Dolby Atmos product,s and Atmos’ limit to 32 sound sources.

The extra processing in the PS5 will also allow the sound to be tailored to the individual player using head-related transfer function, or HRTF. The main implementation of HRTF has thus far been to help us hear in the virtual space when playing in VR. Without getting too much into psychoacoustics (how we hear and perceive sounds) and our own physiology, basically the shape of our heads affects how sound reaches our ears. One way you can test this yourself is by going to a static sound, like a water fountain, and change your orientation to it. Turn your head left and right, lean backward and forwards, and turn your back to it. The sound changes with each movement and these changes are what help us localize sounds.

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Using HRTF can greatly increase immersive sound. As opposed to the 32 sound sources that Dolby Atmos is limited to, HRTF profiles can have hundreds of possible sound source locations that can more accurately place sounds around you. They also can be tailored specifically to you. Everyone’s HRTF profile is different because everyone’s head and ear shape is different. But that means one of the challenges of using HRTF is making sure whichever profile you’re using is closely matched to what your natural profile would be. At launch, the PS5 will have five profiles to choose from and there are plans to have some sort of test to determine which of those five is closest to your own.

The Best Way to Listen

Most of the presentation was focused on how the PS5’s audio will work while wearing headphones because that’s where Sony started with its implementation and is its gold standard. Sony is still developing a virtual surround sound system for use with TV speakers that will give as close to the same 3D sound experience. This is a tall order, as there are significant challenges in causing two speakers in front of you to localize sound all around you (also, TV speakers are generally terrible).

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Overall, though, this newfound focus on immersive 3D audio is extremely promising. While Sony still needs to develop some of the 3D technology and there are questions as to how that technology will be implemented, this peek behind the curtain of development should be encouraging for audio enthusiasts. Even for those that don’t identify as audio enthusiasts, the benefits could be drastic. In both solo and multiplayer games, you’ll have a more accurate indication of where unseen enemies are and where their gunfire is coming from. If Sony is able to pull it off, the PS5 could very well deliver the best audio experience we’ve ever seen from a console.

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John Higgins has been writing and testing all manner of audio, video, computer, and gaming gear since the early ’00s. He is also a post audio editor, composer, and musician in Los Angeles.