Finally, the Martian Manhunter has revealed himself. A founding member of DC‘s Justice League of America, the shape-shifting Martian J’onn J’onzz was slated to appear in one of the most infamous canceled movie projects, the Justice League film almost directed by Mad Max creator George Miller. Miller’s Justice League: Mortal would have featured the “Big Seven” most associated with the Justice League, including the Martian Manhunter. And to play the Manhunter, Miller turned to one of his favorite collaborators, Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter in the first Mad Max film and would later go on to play Immortan Joe in…

This article contains Alien: Romulus and The Flash spoilers. The reviews are in, and some fans are already holding Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus up as the best xenomorph feature since Ridley Scott’s 1979 original and James Cameron’s Aliens from 1986. It feels like a new era of the Alienverse is ready to burst forward from Hollywood’s chest. But while there’s plenty of praise for Alvarez’s back-to-basics approach, which tries to capture the pulse-pounding horror of Scott’s Alien, it’s not quite a perfect outing. As well as some criticizing the suitably batshit ending that echoes Alien Resurrection’s bewildering finale, it’s the…

Which of these characters has NOT appeared as a captain of the USS Enterprise in the cinematically released Star Trek movies?Captain GarrettCaptain PicardCaptain HarrimanCaptain PikeHan Solo claims the Millennium Falcon can do the Kessel Run in under how many parsecs?1491219In Pandorum (2009), crewmembers awaken from cryosleep to find their colony ship is…At the bottom of an oceanMarooned in deep spaceIn hellA simulationIn Wall-E (2008) the survivors of humanity live aboard a vast space cruise ship called The Axiom. What is an axiom?A statement accepted without questionSomething from a different timeA model of perfectionA typical example of somethingIn the movie Starship…

It is safe to say we will likely never watch Mad Max: The Wasteland, the long teased semi-sequel/prequel set between the events of the original Mad Max trilogy, which starred Mel Gibson, and Mad Max: Fury Road, the one that saw actor Tom Hardy step into the Aussie’s shoes. Like the movie that became this summer’s criminally overlooked Furiosa, The Wasteland was developed by franchise maestro George Miller and Nico Lathouris, the latter of whom is a dramaturge Miller originally brought in to develop an emotional authenticity and depth to Mad Max: Fury Road’s screenplay. Instead their exploration of the…

“Welcome to the circus,” Bruce Banner told Simu Liu’s Shaun, aka Shang-Chi, at the end of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. At the time, the comment seemed to bring the Master of Kung fu into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Since then, however, the MCU has turned out to be an even bigger circus than Shaun or audiences expected… and not everyone is getting to share the spotlight. According to the entertainment website Inverse, who is drawing from anonymous and unconfirmed sources, the role of Shang-Chi in the upcoming Avengers movies has been as in flux as…

A quick perusal of social media shows some fans are still processing the idea that Joker: Folie à Deux, a sequel to Todd Phillips’ billion-dollar-grossing favorite of edgelords everywhere, is going to be a musical. The marketing is being a little coy about it, too, with only snippets of Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck humming a few bars of Burt Bacharach to himself, or Lady Gaga’s Harleen Quinzel playfully quoting Judy Garland’s “Get Happy.” But yes: Joker 2 is expected to be a full-throated, song-in-its-heart, toe-tapper. That departure from the first film is one of the most curious and appealing things…

There are many standards by which we can measure the influence of the Mad Max franchise. The series consists of five excellent movies, all made by Australian filmmaker George Miller and a host of co-creators. The series launched the career of Mel Gibson who, until his hate-mongering came to light, was one of the most engaging movie stars of the 1980s and ‘90s. And it defined the idea of the post-apocalypse so much that revved-up machinery and bondage gear has become the de facto look of the end of the world. At their center, though, the Mad Max movies are…

It’s been a year since Din Djarin and his young bounty hunting apprentice Grogu settled down on Nevarro to enjoy some much needed rest and relaxation. But we know that vacation won’t last forever. The upcoming Star Wars film, The Mandalorian & Grogu, will see the duo back in action, and they’ll be taking on the Empire once again, as revealed in a trailer shown exclusively to fans attending D23 earlier this month. Not only will they face off against the usual stormtroopers but their adventure will even take them to an ice planet populated by AT-ATs that may or…

This post contains major spoilers for Alien: Romulus. It all comes down to Ash—or whatever he is called these days. If the duplicitous android/science officer aboard hadn’t overridden Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) security protocols and allowed the infected Kane (John Hurt) aboard the Nostromo in the original Alien, none of this would have ever happened. So it makes a certain amount of sense that Ash, one of the Alien franchise’s most insidious monsters, would return in Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, a movie the director co-wrote with Rodo Sayagues. After all, the new film is determined to tie the whole franchise together,…

This article contains spoilers for both Alien: Romulus and Alien: Isolation. It’s a green, blinking box. Yet every time it appeared in the background of Alien: Romulus, a cold chill went down the spines of possibly millions of viewers, including this writer. That’s because if you ever played Alien: Isolation, Creative Assembly’s relentless survival horror game from 2014, those proverbial telephone boxes are the stuff of nightmares and lingering trauma. Appearing in more than one scene during Fede Alvarez’s love letter to the larger Alien franchise, these “registration points,” or emergency telephone booths, are littered throughout the Renaissance Space Station…

You wanna get nuts? Then ask Michael Keaton a question about a controversial topic, and he’ll get nuts. That’s what GQ discovered when they profiled Keaton in advance of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The magazine asked Keaton to weigh in on Batgirl, for which he returned as Batman. Even though the movie was almost finished, Warner Bros. decided to shelve it, electing for a tax break instead of completing and releasing the movie. The move outraged anyone who wants a long-running studio like Warner Bros to continue putting out movies. But not Keaton. “I didn’t care one way or another,” Keaton admitted…

Star Trek has always been about boldly going, so it’s no surprise the franchise quickly moved beyond television sets. Even before the series jumped to the big screen, Star Trek expanded into the world of paperbacks, first with novelizations of Original Series and Animated Series episodes and then with original stories created for the page. Starting with 1970’s Spock Must Die! by James Blish, the novels gave fans a chance to check in on the continuing missions of their favorite crews and characters. As of this writing, over 850 novels have made it to print, encompassing not only every series…

The most important person in the Mad Max movies is not, in fact, Max Rockatansky. Nor is it Imperator Furiosa. It isn’t even one of the villains, be they Immortan Joe or Lord Humungus. No, the most important person is the tattooed old man seen in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Played by George Shevtsov, he is known simply to his flock and overlords as the History Man, one of many elderly people in the Mad Max universe tasked with keeping records of times past. When someone like Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) calls for a “wordburger,” it’s the job of the…

In space no one can hear you scream. Or at least that is what some rather ingenious 20th Century Fox marketers pushed back in 1979. Yet we did hear the people scream, and gasp, and panic as the facehugger’s tendrils tightened around John Hurt’s throat in movie houses across the world. And in the near half-century that followed, those screams continue to echo in our ears. Hence this weekend’s anticipated return of the xenomorph in Alien: Romulus, a movie which star Cailee Spaeny previously described to us as walking a careful line between the understated dread of the ’79 classic…

This post contains massive Alien: Romulus spoilers. “I’m not going to go after the women in the audience. I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs.” So declared Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon in the 2002 documentary The Alien Saga, and no one can say he failed. The most famous moment in Alien involved Kane (John Hurt) giving violent birth after a facehugger forced itself inside him. Although later contributors would leave aside the male focus, pregnancy metaphors continued to drive…

This article contains spoilers aplenty for Alien: Romulus and the whole franchise. “I admire its purity,” a robot says during an infamous scene in Alien. Ian Holm’s synthetic science officer is of course referring to the “organism” (or “xenomorph” as Aliens later defines it). However, this line of dialogue has gone on to be cherished by science fiction fans all over the world as a metaphor for the original, sleek, and mysterious 1979 movie that started it all. It would seem director Fede Alvarez and his Alien: Romulus co-writer Rodo Sayagues would agree. Their new seventh entry in the mainline…

This post contains spoilers for It Ends With Us. Lily Bloom sits at the edge of a tall building, smoking a cigarette while thinking about her late father, whose final days she intentionally avoided. Her contemplation is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni), who storms onto the rooftop and kicks a chair. Thus is the meet cute of It Ends With Us. “Meet Cute” is, of course, the term used to describe the unlikely circumstances under which the central couple first encounter one another. It can be a squabbling German couple prompting Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and…

It is fair to say that Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s original million-dollar idea for Alien remains one of the great all-time movie scares. A crew of astronauts, or at least space truckers, sits down for dinner before the long hyper-sleep home. Earlier in the story, one of them, a man, was attacked when an alien organism attached itself to his face. The crew’s science officer, a cagey and unknowable figure, tells us the man is fine. Yet come dinner time, everyone realizes too late that the man has been implanted (or impregnated) with extraterrestrial life. And it is a…

Earlier this month, Argentina’s Ministry of Security announced the creation of an “Applied Artificial Intelligence for Security Unit,” a special task force whose remit will be to “use machine learning algorithms to analyze historical crime data to predict future crimes and help prevent them.” You can read the original announcement in Spanish here. Now whatever arguments exist for and against the creation of this new crime fighting course, all the least funny people reading the headline of this story skipped the article entirely to post animated Gifs of Tom Cruise operating what appears to be an Xbox Kinnect. Because if…

Since the beginning, every sequel and prequel in the now seven-film Alien franchise—yes, there are only seven movies, those other two monster mashes never happened!—has been at war with itself. And the battle has remained the same: How much do we evolve the sci-fi concepts suggested by the monster versus serving up what worked before? Over the past 45 years, the series has flirted with intriguing ideas, such as when Renny Harlin (who quit) and then Jean-Pierre Jeunet proposed respective Alien 3 and 4s that ended up on Earth. There was also the original intentions of Vincent Ward (who quit)…