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29 May

The 11 Movies That Paved The Way for Ridley Scott’s Alien

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Alien didn’t just spring fully formed out of the heads of director Ridley Scott and writers Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett, Walter Hill, and David Giler. Its combination of “monster on the loose” and “haunted house in space” scenario was perhaps the ultimate distillation of a long line of sci-fi and horror pictures that had come before it, from quick B-movie cheapies to some of the genre’s most elegant offerings. What Alien did under the visionary hand of its director, however, was meld all those influences together in a way that transcended the schlockier elements of the film’s influences and elevated…

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28 May

The Newest Star Trek Origin Movie Rumor Makes This Film Feel Even More Unnecessary

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Every April 5th, Star Trek fans celebrate First Contact Day. As established in the 1996 movie Star Trek: First Contact, First Contact Day celebrates the anniversary of Vulcans establishing contact with humans, after the latter launches their first warp-capable vehicle. From that moment, humanity took its first steps into the wider galaxy, establishing Starfleet and then exploring the cosmos, as documented in the prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise. But apparently First Contact and Enterprise weren’t enough to tell that Star Trek origin story. According to a report by THR, the first film in production will be an origin film “set…

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28 May

The MCU Rebrand Shows Marvel Is Finally Learning From the Comics

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“You break the rules and become a hero,” Wanda Maximoff tells Stephen Strange at the start of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. “I do it and I become the enemy… doesn’t seem fair.” That line from should confuse some viewers. After all, such rule breaking didn’t occur in 2016’s Doctor Strange, to which Multiverse of Madness is a sequel. It happened in Avengers: Infinity War. And Wanda’s rule-breaking happened in WandaVision. During the drive to Avengers: Endgame, this type of comprehensive world-building was a feature and not a bug of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it’s become a…

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27 May

Star Wars: Let’s Face It, the Jedi Were Always Jerks

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Nearly seven years after its release, one of the most controversial scenes in Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi continues to be when Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master and veritable legend, tells the next generation about what the Jedi really represent. While training the franchise’s newest protagonist, Rey (Daisy Ridley), Mark Hamill’s now grizzled and ancient Luke intones, “The Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure; hypocrisy; hubris.” The scene wasn’t taken well by some corners of the Star Wars fandom in 2017, and…

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27 May

Furiosa Box Office Crash Sounds the Alarm Bell for the Summer Movie Season

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“What do you people out there want?!” a Warner Bros. executive might be forgiven for asking after arguably the worst Memorial Day weekend box office in 40 years. Despite Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga opening to glowing reviews, glitzy standing ovations at the Cannes Film Festival, and as part of a revered IP franchise whose last installment is considered one the best summer movies ever—Mad Max: Fury Road is a six-time Oscar winner!—the prequel’s box office still marked the lowest debut for a number one Memorial Day release since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And that came out…

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26 May

Furiosa: What That Twisted Biblical Imagery Really Means in Mad Max

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This article contains Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga spoilers. It all begins with a a peach. That is the first thing audiences are asked to bear witness to at the start of George Miller’s long-awaited Furiosa. And it’s this simple luxury for which young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) will soon be cast out of paradise. Never one to make a play toward subtlety, even when he strives for plenty of nuance, Miller knows exactly what kind of loaded comparisons he’s demanding audiences to make. A girl; a red, ripe piece of fruit; and a forbidden act that invites lifelong punishment. Despite…

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25 May

How Furiosa Defeats the Unnecessary Romantic Subplot

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This article contains Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga spoilers. Furiosa’s world is not a romantic place. George Miller’s post-apocalyptic Wasteland is barely habitable and fit for the toughest of survivors only. The young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) must learn this fast in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga when she is snatched from her idyllic home. Her mother tries desperately to rescue her and very nearly manages but instead is caught, tortured, and killed by Dementusm (Chris Hemsworth) and his men in front of her daughter. Dementus wants to know where Furiosa’s home is. But Furiosa knows she can’t tell him, even…

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24 May

Netflix’s Atlas Is the AI Love Letter We Never Needed (and Still Don’t)

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This article contains full spoilers for Atlas. After surviving an attack orchestrated by the rogue synthetic Harlan (Simu Liu), cyber analyst Atlas (Jennifer Lopez) lands in her mech-suit on a mysterious new planet. And it is there that she notices a strange flower, which the artificial intelligence Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan) informs her has never been seen before. When Smith asks what she wants to call the flower, Atlas responds with an uncreative name: “Planty.” Although Atlas insists that she’s making a joke, Smith accepts the name, and Planty returns at the end of the film as a…

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24 May

Knives Out Sequel Title ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ Promises A Darker Benoit Blanc Mystery

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“Jesus, Jesus help me,” sings Bono, front man of the classic Irish rock band U2. “I’m alone in this world, and a fucked up world it is too.” Even though U2 fans had long grown used to Bono’s mixture of Christian faith and endless ennui by the time the band released the techno-infused album Pop in 1997, the frankness displayed in the song “Wake Up Dead Man” shocked and dismayed listeners. Alongside the playful dance track “Discothèque” and sultry numbers such as “The Playboy Mansion” and “If You Wear That Red Dress,” “Wake Up Dead Man” had a raw honesty…

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24 May

The Beauty of Furiosa Ending with a Tree

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This article has some pretty big Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga spoilers. For 18 years and 148 minutes of runtime, Furiosa simply wants to go home. This primal, human need is a universal motivation, and it takes on mythic proportions in a movie where audiences know that quest is doomed. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is of course being marketed as an “odyssey;” an epic about the formative years of the most badass character to ever cross the Wasteland. Yet because you should remember that the Green Place is long destroyed by the time Mad Max: Fury Road rolls along,…

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24 May

Why the Summer Is a Great Time for Horror Movies

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The darkness enveloped me, and despite the summer heat outside, the air in the building was cool. I sat in silence, intently focused, anticipating what happened next, but not quite prepared. I tensed up upon seeing the spectral woman directly ahead of me. She silently floated, translucent and seemingly unaware — until at last facing me and lunging with a guttural growl as her face distorted into some horrific entity. This memory is entirely true; it is a ghost story, but not one that took place in a haunted house. Rather, the setting was a haunted library, projected on screen…

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24 May

The Dad Movies That Defined the ’90s Dad Thriller Genre

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Few types of movies sum up the 1990s quite like “dad thrillers.” A term popularized by the brilliant Max Read a few years ago, the dad thriller is a subgenre of thriller movies that was largely designed to appeal to older male viewers or otherwise featured thematic elements associated with that demographic. Yes, such movies often feature men being really good dads, but it’s about more than that. Dad thrillers were often closer to ’70s paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, which pitted crusaders of truth against staggering odds in a slow-burn narrative. They typically featured lawyers, law…

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24 May

How Pixar’s Inside Out 2 Deals With Riley’s New ‘Gen Z Emotions’

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. When we last left Riley Andersen, the young protagonist of Pixar’s 2015 animated classic, Inside Out, she was 12 years old, and her still-developing mind was finding a way to balance all the core emotions of childhood, including Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Nearly a decade later, Pixar is returning to the vast territory inside Riley’s mind as she turns 13 and enters adolescence with Inside Out 2. This time she’ll grapple with new emotions, changes to her psyche and body,…

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24 May

Dune 3 Needs to Include This Children of Dune Storyline

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This article contains dune spoilers for across the saga. Even the most casual Dune fan knows that, at some point, there’s a giant worm boy. Since its first printing in 1981, Frank Herbert’s fourth book in the franchise, God Emperor of Dune, has proudly displayed a human/sandworm hybrid on its cover. Dune fans know that hybrid as Leto II, the son of Paul Atreides and Chani, who melds with a sandworm and becomes an all-powerful tyrant. Leto II is also one of the most fantastic elements of the Dune franchise, a series already filled with images wonderful and bizarre. God…

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23 May

Bad Boys: Ride or Die Directors on the Return of the ‘Best Duo in Cinema History’

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. When Bad Boys for Life came out in January 2020, it ended a 17-year wait for the third film in the franchise, which launched in 1995 with Bad Boys and continued in 2003 with Bad Boys II. It’s only taken a relatively brief four-plus years to get the latest entry in the series, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, to the screen—but it’s been a tumultuous stretch, to say the least. “The hope is definitely that everything will be a little bit smoother…

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23 May

Beetlejuice 2 Trailer Promises to Remember Michael Keaton Plays a Demonic Villain

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It’s easy to be jaded in the year of our lord 2024 about legacy sequels. What once seemed like a novelty less than a decade ago—back when Harrison Ford said, “Chewie, we’re home”—has increasingly become a threat. Hollywood studios continue to be hellbent on dragging from the grave every 1980s and ‘90s pop culture relic. However, terms like “hellbent” and “the grave” have always befitted Tim Burton’s second, and in some circles still best, feature film: Beetlejuice. Released in 1988 to a smattering of amused if confused critical notices, Beetlejuice’s dark comedy setup about a bland small town couple (Alec…

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23 May

The Mad Max Fan Theory That Breaks the Franchise

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“Who broke the world?” asks graffiti scrawled across the room where Immortan Joe locked up his “wives” in Mad Max: Fury Road. Fury Road and each of its three predecessors argue pretty persuasively that the answer is men like Immortan Joe: power hungry people whose actions lead to war and economic disaster. But an interesting fan theory poses another culprit, one whose breaking made the world of Mad Max: Max Rockatansky, the heroic road warrior portrayed by Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy. According to this idea, the policeman Max’s mind broke down after the events of the first movie in…

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23 May

Animated Movies Need to Stop Celebrity Stunt Casting

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Recently, I watched the trailer for Transformers One, the Cybertron-set sequel about the origins of Optimus Prime and Megatron. Every time I see that trailer attached to whatever movie, an unenthusiasm washes over. It’s mainly a byproduct of Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry’s casting as pre-Adam’s-apple-dropped versions of their respective characters. And make no mistake, they did not change their voices at all for these roles. It’s not just Transformers One that’s the butt of this phenomenon though. Nearly every animated movie emphasizes a celebrity voice cast as part of its marketing. How else can you explain the overexposure…

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23 May

Dan Stevens on Creativity, Comedy, and That Good Morning Britain Moment…

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Dan Stevens is a busy man. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire landed in theaters at the end of March, where Stevens played charming leading man Trapper, then anarchic horror Abigail arrived hot on its heels in April. Next up, August brings strange horror/sci-fi Cuckoo, which sees Stevens playing a deranged scientist. Between press tours, festivals, and new projects, he’s got a lot going on. And we get the sense he wouldn’t have it any other way. Describing himself as an “experience hound,” Stevens is a man who thrives on challenges. He began his career in theater, made it big…

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22 May

A Quiet Place: Day One Imagines What Could Make New York ‘Go Quiet’

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This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here. Meals eaten off lettuce leaves, walking barefoot on paths made of sand, furious arguments taking place entirely in sign language. A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place: Part II introduced us to a world of oppressive silence through the eyes of the people who had lived long enough to learn those lessons. It is a very different world to the one at the opening of A Quiet Place: Day One. “There’s a lot more sound. We’re in New York, so as you…

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