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22 Oct

One of the Biggest Captain America: Civil War Moments Almost Didn’t Happen

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It’s hard to imagine Captain America: Civil War packing anything close to the same emotional punch without the climactic fight scene that sees Steve and Bucky facing off against Tony in the Siberian Hydra facility during the film’s final act. It’s the moment that much of the film’s promotion rested on, and it gave a sense of stakes to a MCU installment that, with the comic source material’s ideological exploration mostly gutted, needed it. Apparently, however, the Marvel higher-ups pushed to cut the sequence from the film, which means Civil War almost ended very differently, with Steve and Tony teaming…

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22 Oct

Inside Job Wants to Make Conspiracy Theories Fun Again

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Conspiracy theories used to be the realm of late night AM talk radio, obscure internet forums, and breathless conversations with trusted friends. Whether it’s talking about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing on a soundstage or a global cabal of reptilian elite pulling the strings, sometimes it’s just fun to indulge in the ridiculous and grandiose.  Unfortunately, however, conspiracy theory thinking has run amok in the digital age. This has led to the mainstreaming of some truly dangerous ideas, like let’s say hypothetically, that a vaccine for a deadly virus is actually a microchip/population control device/mark of the best/whatever else.…

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22 Oct

Are GTA Trilogy: Definitive Edition’s Remastered Graphics Too Cartoonish?

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Rockstar has finally released the first full trailer for Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition (the official remasters of the GTA trilogy), and while it looks absolutely incredible in most respects, the remasters’ updated visuals have quickly triggered a debate over whether these remastered games are abandoning realism for a more cartoonish style. Context is incredibly important in this particular conversation, so if you haven’t watched the new trailer for Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, be sure to do so now. That trailer makes it pretty obvious that the upcoming GTA remasters vastly…

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22 Oct

Link Tank: Stranger Things Season 4 Set to Be the Darkest Yet

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Stranger Things actor Finn Wolfhard teases the franchise is getting darker by saying the hotly anticipated 4th season will be “really messed up.” “Sometime next year, Stranger Things season 4 will find its way onto Netflix. The previous season left us with plenty of questions about our favorite characters, including Hopper and Eleven. Fast-forward several months, and the latest teaser had us guessing about the identity of one Victor Creel, played by ’80s horror legend Robert Englund.” Read more at Mental Floss Warner Brothers just sent out a casting call that could be for Batgirl that might imply introducing a…

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22 Oct

GTA 3’s Scariest Urban Legends and Myths

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Much has been said about GTA 3 in the twenty years since the open-world PS2 helped change gaming overnight, but one aspect of the title you won’t always hear people discuss are the times the game’s various myths and urban legends genuinely scared them. In the early internet age, it was easy enough to believe that just about any urban legend that someone told you about GTA 3 could be real. In a game where anything seemed possible, the scariest and strangest rumors felt like they could exist somewhere in GTA 3‘s digital vast world. There’s something to be said…

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22 Oct

What We Do in the Shadows Season 3 Episode 9 Review: A Farewell

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This What We Do in the Shadows review contains spoilers. What We Do in the Shadows Season 3 Episode 9 Talk about sucking all the air from the room. Vampires are impressive, lethal, and mythic, but energy vampires can take center stage with the subtlety of a passing wind, breezing by. Silent, but deadly, the stench of their memories lingers on interminably. In What We Do in the Shadows  season 3 episode 9 “A Farewell,” Nandor (Kayvan Novak) makes a final decision as the sad co-head of the Vampiric Council, but Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) usurps all authority, attention, and…

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22 Oct

Dune Ending Explained

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This article contains major Dune spoilers. Read our spoiler-free review here. Paul Atreides has survived the fall of his father’s house. When you get right down to it, this is very much the central conflict and core narrative arc to writer-director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, a film which waited until its opening title card to reveal that it is merely “part one” of a larger story. The film begins with Paul (Timothée Chalamet) having visions of his family’s army lying scattered and dying, and it ends with that horror coming to pass. Yet despite all that inherent tragedy, the conclusion of…

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22 Oct

Marvel Almost Cast Robert Downey Jr. As a Major Villain

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As surreal as it may now seem, 2008’s Iron Man was initially dismissed as yet another visually-driven but unexceptional comic book movie for an era filled with them. Not only was it a Hail Mary moment for the upstart Marvel Studios over its attempt to bring old Shellhead into the mainstream, but its selection of the notoriously-troubled Robert Downey Jr. as the star was seen as a risk. Of course, the film brought a winning formula that ultimately proved epochal for not only the comic book movie genre, but the film industry as a whole. Interestingly, it seems that Downey…

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22 Oct

Why The Sopranos Prequel Series Is a Bad Idea

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The best thing that Sopranos creator David Chase ever did for us was cut to black.  Though the ending of the classic HBO mob drama remains controversial years later, it’s hard to argue with the fact that it wasn’t definitive. Counterintuitively, refusing to show Tony Soprano’s presumed final moments has made the final scene of The Sopranos feel more ironclad than many other shows that attempted to achieve real closure.  The answer to “how does Tony Soprano’s story end?” is a very curt “none of your goddamn business. That’s between that man and his creator.” That ending, combined with Chase’s…

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21 Oct

Last Night in Soho: The Haunting History of Anya Taylor-Joy’s “Downtown” Song

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“Maybe you know some little places to go to where they never close,” Anya Taylor-Joy sings in the latest music video from director Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho. After all, both the film and the song, “Downtown,” which was made famous by Petula Clark, are about destinations. From the moment the needle drops on the onscreen vintage Dansette record player, Last Night in Soho lands in the world of British pop. The surrealistic ghost story follows fashion designer Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) as she dreams her way into Swinging London, and the pleasant nightmares of the mod nightlife. Taylor-Joy plays…

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21 Oct

Uncharted Movie Trailer Breakdown: All The Video Game Easter Eggs

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After numerous delays and more than a few production problems, Sony has finally released the first trailer for Uncharted: the long-awaited film adaptation of the PlayStation franchise of the same name. Whether or not the Uncharted movie is able to break what can only be described as the “video game movie curse” remains to be seen. For what it’s worth, though, part of the reason why so many people wanted to see the Uncharted series make the leap to the big screen is that the games borrow so heavily from classic adventure movies such as The Jewel of the Nile,…

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21 Oct

Link Tank: How Sora Joined Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

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The creator of Super Smash Bros. explains how Kingdom Heart’s Sora came to be the latest character in the video game’s roster. “As announced earlier this month, Sora became Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s final DLC character. But how did Sora, Keyblade and all, end up in Smash Bros.? In his latest Weekly Famitsu column, creator Masahiro Sakurai explains just that. Sakurai noted how Sora was the number one choice among players for a new character. The Kingdom Hearts character seems like such an obvious choice, too—especially because the character’s name is the same as Sakurai’s company.” Read more at Kotaku…

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21 Oct

How What We Do in the Shadows Exploits Vampire Clichés

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What We Do in the Shadows on FX is a supernatural comedy that allows its characters to go beyond all of the powers and vulnerabilities that viewers expect of vampires, while still honoring the tradition established by the bloodsuckers that preceded them. In fact, the humor of a particular scene often stems from the subversion of the archetype, whereas the more expected wooden stakes and sunlight vulnerabilities are reserved for story arcs where the danger is more serious and real. The most obvious use of humorous artistic license with vampire lore lies in the depiction of Colin Robinson as an…

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21 Oct

The American Horror Story Double Feature Finale is Nuts…Even for Ryan Murphy

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This American Horror Story: Double Feature review contains spoilers. American Horror Story Season 10 Episode 10 It took the full four episodes, but American Horror Story has finally tied its two story threads together using the most unlikely character. Of course, it wouldn’t be American Horror Story without a last-minute twist that may or may not make sense, and Death Valley continues that tradition with a jam-packed finale episode that doesn’t necessarily tie up the plot, but definitely doesn’t lack for big, crazy ideas. That has never been a criticism leveled at any Ryan Murphy show. However, the execution of…

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21 Oct

Batwoman: The Importance of Jada Jet to Gotham City

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This article contains Batwoman spoilers. Batwoman Season 3 Episode 2 Slowly, then all at once, Batwoman became a show as much about Black womanhood as it is about heroism. Season two saw Ryan Wilder (Javicia Leslie) step into the titular role, and so began the evolution of Batwoman from vigilante to hero. Ryan made the Bat much more than a symbol for justice, she transformed it into a reflection of the city and the people it protects. Ryan confronted Gotham’s many injustices through brute force as a vigilante but also through advocacy, using her connections and their vast resources to…

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21 Oct

These Are The Hottest Marvel And DC Comics To Collect Right Now

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This article is part of our Collector’s Digest series powered by: There are two tracks to being a comic collector. The first is to be a comics reader: someone who likes the stories and buys the books to read and enjoy them, and just happens to accumulate them over time. The other is to take that love for comics, have a look at the media landscape, and make a little money on the side. There has always been some money in comics collecting. Ever since comics started being a specialty item and not something kids grabbed for a dime off…

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21 Oct

Why We Can’t Quit I Know What You Did Last Summer

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This article contains spoilers for I Know What You Did Last Summer on Amazon Prime. Replication is the name of the game when it comes to horror.  It’s so hard to scare people…genuinely scare them, that if an idea works once, its creators have little choice but to try it again. That’s how you get a movie landscape dominated by sequels, reboots, and remakes like Halloween Kills, Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Even with the knowledge that horror franchises are self-perpetuating machines, however, there’s one horror imprint whose continued existence is rather surprising. …

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21 Oct

From BTS to Busan—How Marvel is Courting K-Culture

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If you needed any more proof that Korean entertainment is becoming globally mainstream, look no further than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Over the weekend, rumors surfaced that “Friends,” a song written by BTS’ Jimin and performed by Jimin and V, would be on the soundtrack for Marvel’s Eternals. On Monday, the rumors were confirmed, getting many ARMY excited about the group’s inclusion in one of the world’s biggest pop culture franchises. The U.S. is not the center of the universe (contrary to some Americans’ belief), but it is the world’s largest exporter of popular culture and has been for a…

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21 Oct

Legends of Tomorrow Gets Revenge for the Red Scare

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This Legends of Tomorrow review contains spoilers. Legends of Tomorrow Season 7 Episode 2 With about ten minutes left in last week’s Legends of Tomorrow season 7 premiere, I started shaking my head and chuckling. As soon as I realized the crew was going to become bank robbers in the 1920s, through Hoover’s death at Nate’s hands (or forehead, whatever), I both could and could not believe that this was where the show was going. That didn’t stop this week – as soon as Ava looked at the bottles of whiskey on the table, I slapped myself in amazement that…

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20 Oct

Night Teeth: Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney Should Lead Their Own Vampire Movie

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This article contains Night Teeth spoilers. Netflix’s Night Teeth stars Lucy Fry and Debby Ryan as Zoe and Blaire, two vampire enforcers in a battle over the vampire underground in Los Angeles. They work for Victor, played by Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen, who set the stage for a changing of the guard in one nocturnal mission. A formidable trio, yes, but Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney pull the real coup in the film. Their vampire queens Grace and Eva only get one scene and make off with the movie. So perhaps Fox and Sweeney should bare their fangs in…

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