For years before director Dan Trachtenberg was established enough to get a Predator movie made, he imagined a scene where a lone Comanche warrior faced off against a bone-armored hunter from beyond the stars. That vision panned out into a worthy studio gamble; when Trachtenberg’s Predator prequel Prey hit Hulu...
Wheel of Time’s showrunner wanted you to be ‘100% in love’ with those bad guys
As author Robert Jordan observed, the Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass. The same is true of prestige TV shows, including Amazon Studios’ Wheel of Time adaptation, which just wrapped up its second season. Ostensibly, the focus of season 2’s finale, “What Was Meant to Be,” is...
VTuber Selen Tatsuki’s Nijisanji termination creates uproar and backlash
On Feb. 5, Japanese VTuber talent agency Nijisanji announced that it would terminate one of its talents: Selen Tatsuki. However, unlike a standard “graduation,” the industry-embraced term for the mutually agreed-upon ending of a contract between a VTuber agency and a VTuber, Nijisanji made the executive decision to outright cut...
Fionna and Cake creator says Marceline — and Marshall Lee — were always Black
In the world of Adventure Time, humanity collapses, elemental beings die and get reborn, and monarchs shape the land into candy wonderlands, but at least one thing stays the same: Marceline the Vampire Queen. As an immortal being, Marceline is preserved in her world like a fossil contained in the...
The video game funding gap: How investors are failing marginalized developers
Investors and publishers spend billions of dollars on the video game industry each year, but just a small fraction of that money goes toward funding game companies led by women and those from other marginalized groups. Even as venture capitalist funding surged in 2021 as a response to COVID-19 pandemic...
Making Exorcist movies has always been a nightmare, but they’ve all been great
Making an Exorcist movie isn’t easy. Up until the most recent entry, released in theaters this week, every movie in the series has suffered from a tumultuous shoot, copious rewrites, or entire recuts. But that’s not all that special. Many franchises, especially horror franchises, have had messy productions throughout their...
Oppenheimer undoes decades of American denial about The Bomb
Of the many details worth returning to in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, one of the most striking comes only after learning how the film was made. In what might be the movie’s most harrowing scene, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) delivers a victory speech to the assembled scientists of the Manhattan...
Are Star Wars lightsabers on TV deadly enough? Here’s what doctors say
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of season 1 of Ahsoka.] If you’re up to date on Ahsoka, you’ll know that the Disney Plus show’s season 1 finale boasts a lot of lightsaber action. Sabine (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson), and Ezra (Eman Esfandi) fight a...
15 years ago, the NSA spied on World of Warcraft — but did a leak change anything?
It sounds like the plot of a Bush-era young-adult spy thriller: as millions of players raided their way through Azeroth from 2006 to at least 2013, Western intelligence agencies like the NSA and the British Government Communications Headquarters were working out ways to surveil and build informant networks to keep...
At Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark, I watched a new cinematic ritual being born
Thirty minutes before a midnight screening of Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark at Chicago’s Music Box Theater, the man sitting in front of me and my husband turned around with a sly grin and asked us “Are you cowboys?” I immediately guessed where this was going, so I played along and...