I've long held that no RPG is quite as spectacular as Kingdom Hearts, and I'm careful to specifically use the word "spectacular." For every ounce it is great, it's specifically great to gawk at, ideally with a mixture of awe and bewilderment. This is a game series where, if you die at a climactic moment, Mickey Mouse can emerge from your Christian soul and start killing people with a giant stick. It's incredible.

A good Kingdom Hearts game is such a delight to watch in action that it's also kind of great television, so it makes perfect sense to me that an anime is on the way to the Disney Channel and Disney+. The news was announced last week at D23, Disney's big biennial fan festival. Notably, Disney+ has been named as a priority boycott target by the BDS movement protesting the role of various corporations in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

As for what to expect, Kingdom Hearts famously has a long-winded plot that's impenetrable unless you're willing to play about a hundred spinoffs, many of which are on different archaic consoles. Given that, you might be wondering—will a season of TV explain this gargantuan story to me? Will I finally get it? While we don't have much to go off just yet, the answer is easily guessed: No.

While Disney has said the show "reimagines the iconic adventure with a brand-new story," series creator Tetsuya Nomura is involved, and you have to remember this is the guy who was hesitant to let Sora show up in Smash Bros. because it might not get on with KH canon. I'd be amazed if this series didn't pull from or at least reference the decades of convolution that have come to define Kingdom Hearts, and I don't even strictly think that's a bad thing. Picking through the endless sea of details is half the fun.

Will it be better than Seth Kearsley's abortive 2003 TV series would have been? We can only guess—but it's still Kingdom Hearts, so at the very least it will almost certainly be interesting.

On an August 13 episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, actor Matthew McConaughey spoke about almost playing Joel in HBO's The Last of Us TV series, and why he ultimately turned down the role.

McConaughey said he was in contact with showrunner Craig Mazin about playing the part, and that he seriously considered taking it up. "I wasn't really acting at that point," McConaughey explained. "I was doing more writing and looking at leadership roles in life." Even with that caveat he was still tempted: "It was really good, I was really excited."

At least part of the problem seems to have been that Mazin had a tough act to follow: McConaughey is a prolific Hollywood actor, and has lent his voice to TV animation here and there, but his only lead role on a TV series? The legendary first season of Nic Pizzolatto's noir anthology, True Detective.

"We pulled off a real coup with True Detective, at a time when [TV] series were not something that actors like myself or Woody Harrelson would hop over and go do," said McConaughey. "That one succeeded in a real fashion. Last of Us was really good, it just wasn't for me at the time. I don't know what would have been for me at the time."

McConaughey also expressed trepidation over the potential long-term commitment required by a successful TV show: "In success, this is something you'll be doing for years and years and years."

Maybe not so much with Joel in The Last of Us, given, uh, spoilers. The role likely still demands an obligation through flashbacks and the like, though. True Detective S1 made me a McConaughey sardaukar for life, but even for me, him passing on this role doesn't seem like a great loss for human flourishing. By all accounts, Pedro Pascal is killing it.

Payday-in-Fortnite isn't the day's only big news out of everybody's favorite violent clowns rob banks franchise. Starbreeze, in partnership with Vice Studios, has also done a deal with Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson's G-Unit Film and Television to "executive produce" an adaptation of Payday.

What sort of adaptation is being made—that is, television or movie—isn't specified. The deal between Starbreeze and Vice, announced in March, says only that the two will "adapt Payday for audiences beyond games, across screen and other formats," and that's the case in today's announcement, too.

"G-Unit Film and TV has built cinematic crime stories that connect with audiences around the world," said the man they call Fiddy (do they still call him that?). "Teaming up with Starbreeze and Vice Studios and bringing the world of Payday to the screen gives us the chance to build something big, a high-energy franchise that pushes the heist genre forward."

"Payday has always been about the fantasy of getting away with it," Starbreeze CEO Adolf Kristjansson said. "Curtis and G-Unit don't do subtle, and neither do we. This is not about playing it safe; it's about doing the franchise justice with people who are as immersed in the world as we are."

If there's one thing I've learned from Michael Mann, it's that capping off your bank robbery with a running firefight against heavily armed cops is not a good idea, so I'm not sure how that "getting away with it" analogy really holds up here. Jackson does seem well suited to the task, though: His debut album is called Get Rich or Die Tryin' and its followup was The Massacre, so if nothing else at least he's got the right mindset.

He also appeared with Val Kilmer at the 2009 American Music Awards, for some reason.

Also unclear is how this jibes with Starbreeze's 2023 deal with production company Stockholm Syndrome "to develop a Payday story for TV or film." That isn't mentioned in today's announcement, so whether this new deal follows onto that one somehow or supersedes it entirely, I do not know—I've reached out to Starbreeze to ask, and will update if I receive a reply.

Excited for The Witcher to finally wrap up? No, I'm not talking about that Witcher 3 playthrough you abandoned after 70 hours of wandering around, I'm talking about the Netflix show probably best known for its prominent recast of Geralt and for being very different from the books and games. Well, it's been delayed (via What's on Netflix).

Even though it reportedly wrapped filming late last year, the story from What's on Netflix says that "a little digging" confirms "that the release has indeed shifted to next year, though Netflix has neither confirmed this publicly nor is thought to have locked in a specific 2027 release window just yet."

The article speculates that this is to brush up the VFX before release and move the show's finale away from other big releases, but there's no explicit confirmation as to why this delay has happened. It's a bummer if you've been chomping at the bit to see Liam Hemsworth totally witch all over the place, but since no major reshoots or further recasts have been confirmed, it's at least less grief than the God of War series is experiencing right now.

In the meantime, there are famously a lot of Witcher things you probably have to catch up on. Check out, for instance, our guide to reading the acclaimed novels by Andrzej Sapkowski and the associated comics—I have admittedly only read The Last Wish, but I recommend it for the short story where a goat man throws metal balls at Geralt while heckling him.

There's also, as you may have heard, a videogame series. I assume if you've gotten this far into this article you already like those games (at least more than Sapkowski does), so I'll recommend the Witcher let's play series by original lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec. Squint really hard, and mid-aughts CG Geralt probably looks a bit like Liam Hemsworth.

Amazon's God of War series has already seen one major recast, with Kratos actor Ryan Hurst having to depart the role after suffering a bicep tear on set. While Hurst has reportedly had surgery and is recovering, the injury was severe enough that production was paused and Amazon has opted to seek out a replacement. Dave Bautista is apparently in talks to replace him.

But Kratos isn't the only character in the TV show who will be seeing a change in actor. Amazon also plans to recast roles of Atreus and Thrud. Unlike Kratos' impromptu recasting, however, the switch for these characters is a planned, creative decision that will take effect from Season 2 onward.

In Season 1, Atreus and Thrud are played by child actors Callum Vinson and Island Austin. But as reported by mp1st, casting calls for Season 2 suggest these characters will be significantly older when that second season rolls around. The casting calls for both characters (who have the codenames 'Joshua' and 'Ruth') to be "Teen" versions, while Joshua's casting call states that in Season 2 Kratos' son "finds his new identity and grows into manhood."

The new casting also implies that Season 2 will roll straight into the events of God of War: Ragnarök rather than splitting the first game into multiple arcs of television. Both seasons are being produced back-to-back, with production originally planned to wrap in April 2027. Whether or not this will be affected by the ongoing hiatus is unclear, as production is not expected to resume until October.

As for who will be playing Kratos instead of Hurst, there are reports Dave Bautista is "in talks" to step into the role. Presumably, Bautista would be more expensive to cast than Hurst. But this is Amazon we're talking about.

At least by the time the God of War show launches, they'll have a third season of material to film. The next game in the series, God of War: Laufey, is due to launch in February next year. Sadly, it isn't coming to PC, as PlayStation has sworn off launching games on the platform for the time being. I'm curious to see how long this lasts, given how much money Sony made by releasing its PlayStation exclusives on PC thus far.

A new report suggests New Zealand born actor Sam Neill, who passed away in July, will appear in the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda film adaptation. According to Deadline's sources, filming for the Nintendo and Sony collaboration wrapped in April, just months before the star's death.

While Neill's appearance hasn't been confirmed by Sony, the late star will appear alongside three newly confirmed actors. Uli Latukefu, best known for his role in Young Rock, will play Ganondorf. Dichen Lachman and Yvonne Strahovski, who have appeared in Severance and The Handmaid's Tale respectively, will play yet-to-be-specified roles. These join a cast including Bo Bragason (Renegade Nell) as Zelda and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (Son of a Critch) as Link.

It's not the only posthumous appearance for Neill: he'll also appear in Godzilla x Kong: Supernova and The Last Resort in 2027. As for The Legend of Zelda, that's scheduled for an April 30 release. It was filmed in Neill's native New Zealand.

Neill died suddenly on July 13 in Sydney, Australia. "The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free," an official statement read, alluding to the actor's struggle with blood cancer.

The Legend of Zelda is directed by Wes Ball, whose recent work includes Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Maze Runner. Shigeru Miyamoto is onboard as a producer.

The Borderlands film was not good. I don't know anyone who likes it, and I've never read anyone say something nice about it on the internet. Even its creator, Eli Roth, doesn't seem to like it very much, and in a new interview with the director we can gain some insight into why it ended up as bad as it did.

Speaking to Variety about his new film Ice Cream Man which, as far as I can tell, is not a videogame adaptation, Roth said the exorbitant $120 million budget had the non-creatives worried. “As things grow bigger, studios just naturally become more risk averse,” he said. “My nature as a filmmaker is to do the thing that’s left of center, because that’s what has worked for me.”

With a budget like that the film needed to cast the widest net possible. Lionsgate executives demanded tweaks to accommodate a family-friendly PG-13 rating, which seems like an odd creative choice given that a) it's a Borderlands adaptation and b) it's made by the guy who made Hostel and Cabin Fever. To be authentic, it basically needed to be an ultraviolent gorefest, which it wasn't.

“You got something that belonged to nobody,” Roth went on. “It’s not a kids’ movie, but it’s trying to appeal to everybody. It’s for gamers, but it doesn’t have the violence the gamers want because it can’t be that extreme because it costs too much. You just wind up with a movie that’s neither fish nor fowl.”

PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens seemed to agree in his review (which was not classified a "review" when it was published, possibly out of mercy). "It's not just bad, it's bland tasteless mush that no one involved seemed interested in saving," he wrote.

Other critics ranging the games press through to actual film mastheads didn't like it either: even IGN—who loved the otherwise near-universally condemned Super Mario Galaxy Movie—called it "awful".

It's a shame because the Borderlands games can apparently spin a gripping yarn. Some of my colleagues really rate the storytelling in Borderlands 2, and Telltale's Tales From The Borderlands was received very well. But given the response to Roth's outing, it feels unlikely anyone will take another stab at it again.

As Games Workshop let slip in a financial report last week, acclaimed horror writer/director Mike Flanagan, fresh off an adaptation of Stephen King's novel Carrie, will be writing a new live action Warhammer 40,000 series in production at Amazon. Noted Warhammer hunk Henry Cavill is producing the series, but has also reiterated in an Instagram post today that he'll be in front of the camera, too.

"We have already been working with [Flanagan] to craft the creative, and we're making some considerable advances in story," Cavill wrote on Instagram. "Importantly, some of you have been asking if I will still be starring in the lead role in the live action TV series—rest assured, I most certainly will! Who that character is, however, shall remain a secret for now!"

Warhammer 40K heads who know the series far better than I will surely have their theories—my guesses pretty much tap out with Gregor Eisonhorn, an inquisitor who's the star of many a Warhammer novel, and Demetrian Titus, the ultramarine in both Space Marine videogames. I'd take Cavill in green makeup playing an ork, though, if only to see how good of a Waaaagh! he can deliver.

While Flanagan is better known for horror than sci-fi, this isn't the first colossal media property he's attached his name to. Nearly four years ago he acquired the rights to adapt Stephen King's Dark Tower book series, and he's supposedly written the scripts for the first of five planned seasons. But Flanagan has yet to get anyone to sign on to pay for the show, so in the meantime he's pumped out Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher, film The Life of Chuck, Amazon miniseries Carrie, and the script for DC's upcoming Clayface movie.

If there's an ultramarine chapter focused on prolific screenwriting, Flanagan must be a member. One has to wonder how many "Warhammer 40,000 lore, explained" YouTube videos he's watched to get up to speed.

"As the fans will know, it's an absolute monster to wrestle but Mike's extraordinary talents are helping it take form wonderfully," Cavill wrote about the live action series on Instagram. "As a combined force and with the good folks at Games Workshop we are all working tirelessly to bring you the best, most Warhammer universe that you could possibly imagine."

Today in news that makes perfect sense, Dave Bautista may take over the role of Kratos in Amazon's God Of War TV series.

According to Variety, sources say Bautista is "currently in talks" to play demigod Kratos, the role that originally belonged to Ryan Hurst. Hurst, most recently seen in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey as Mentor, was injured while filming the series and had to bow out of the part to avoid delaying the production while he recovered.

Bautista immediately feels perfect for the part of Kratos, though I'd have to imagine the asking price for the movie star will be considerably higher than it was for Hurst, who has mainly played supporting roles. The show was also ordered for two seasons which were scheduled to shoot back-to-back, which would mean tying up Bautista for quite a while, no doubt raising his asking price even more.

On the other hand, this is Amazon we're talking about, so I have a hard time imagining they couldn't find an extra couple million dollars in the budget for Bautista.

It's not the only big videogame role that's been rumored for Bautista, who was lobbying hard back in 2022 to play the role of Marcus Fenix in Netflix's Gears of War live-action film. No casting announcements have been made yet for the Gears movie, though it sounds like the gears are still turning: director David Leitch said "I think" the Gears movie was still happening as recently as a few months ago.

It seems like it was only yesterday we were getting leaks from the Elden Ring film set, and now you're telling me Alex Garland and co have wrapped filming? Time sure does fly when you're doing pretty much the same thing day in day out.

We know that filming is over thanks to a now deleted Instagram post shared by prop artist Sean Schofield (via IGN):

"Dear cast and crew, thank you for your incredibly hard work on Elden Ring. Your skill, dedication, and all-round professionalism were integral in bringing this unique project to life. We wish you a well-earned rest. Thank you and very best wishes, Alex, Allon, Matthew, Peter, Andrew, and Charlie."

It's no wonder that the image was promptly deleted—if the movie has already wrapped filming it means that they somehow only needed six months to capture everything as production on set began in Spring earlier this year. Now, I'm no filmmaker, but that seems like a pretty quick turnaround.

"Dream job to end all dream jobs," Schofield captions the photo. "Six solid months of blood, sweat, and tears making the coolest stuff ever, working alongside the best of the best. Can't share anything else for a very long time, but I couldn't be more proud of what we did."At least we know it went well.

Now filming has stopped it does mean, however, that the team has over a year for post-production work, since release is slated for March 3, 2028. It's pretty unsurprising that the team would need more time for special effects than for filming thanks to the, likely substantial, amount of CGI which will be needed to bring George R. R. Martin and Miyazaki's story to life.

This will likely be the last shred of information we get concerning the Elden Ring film for some time now. If you find yourself really yearning for more live action tarnished, then just search up all the set leaks which came out when production first began—there's a lot to see.

In 2024, Games Workshop's plan for a line of movies and TV shows in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, with Henry Cavill on board as both star and executive producer, resulted in a deal with Amazon Studios. In case you'd forgotten about it, or started to have doubts it was going anywhere, Games Workshop made sure to bring it up in the company's annual financial report for 2026.

"This is a long-term partnership with Amazon", the report says, "and these adaptations will take years to bring successfully to market. The project continues in line with our contractual agreement with Amazon. This same contract prohibits us from sharing certain specific details or commercial terms. What we can share is that Amazon has brought onboard United Artists (UA) and Mike Flanagan. Vertigo and Henry Cavill remain involved as they have been for some time. Having completed initial outlines, Mike should soon be moving on to script."

Mike Flanagan is best known as a horror director, having created TV shows like The Haunting of Hill House, The Fall of the House of Usher, and the upcoming Carrie miniseries, as well as directing movies like Gerald's Game, Hush, and Absentia. Horror expertise is perfect for Warhammer 40,000 given that the movie I'd say comes closest to its tone is Event Horizon.

Flanagan's also worked with 40K superfan Rahul Kohli on several of those projects, so I guess that raises the odds of getting the voice of Boltgun protagonist Malum Caedo into power armor for real.

Elsewhere the report announced a year of "revenue and profit before tax at record levels" despite Games Workshop having to pay roughly £12 million ($US15.95 million) in tariffs to the USA, £7.8 million of which ($US10.37 million) was reclaimed after the supreme court ruled said tariffs were illegal.

I'm in such a bubble of positivity for Barbarian and Weapons director Zach Cregger's upcoming Resident Evil movie (out September 18) that I had no idea anyone was upset about it until I looked at the reactions to some of PC Gamer's coverage.

The movie is Resident Evil "in name and nothing else," one person wrote in reply to one of our social media posts.

As it turns out, some Resident Evil fans are unhappy that the film doesn't directly adapt any of the games, that it takes liberties with the setting—there were no iPhones or snow-covered streets in Resident Evil 2—and that it 'doesn't look like Resident Evil.'

It's true that the first trailer (embedded above) doesn't scream 'Resident Evil,' though I assume that's by design. Explicit references to the setting are withheld until after the title reveal, when we hear in the stinger that the protagonist's very bad day takes place in Raccoon City. Theater audiences are meant to go ooh and then connect the dots they missed earlier in the trailer, like the conspicuously-placed typewriter, a reference to Resident Evil's save locations.

But this is obviously not a straight adaptation of Resident Evil 2. Rather than putting existing Resident Evil characters and stories on the screen, Cregger says he's centering the player's experience.

"I want fans of the games to just know that I am a giant fan of the games," the director told ScreenRant recently. "I am making this movie to celebrate the games. I haven't seen the other movies.

"What I'm not doing in this is that I'm not going to cannibalize the characters and the stories that the games already do so well, because I'm not going to be able to improve on Leon. I feel like Leon exists in the games and anyone I cast and any haircut I give him or any line of dialogue I make him say, it's just not going to be Leon because Leon exists.

"What I'd rather do is tell an original story that lives in the world of the games, that obeys the rules of the games largely, but feels more like the experience you get when you're playing the games. That is leaning into the survival horror aspect of it—it's not survival action, it's survival horror."

That sounds like a great approach to me, though I do understand the desire for a more direct adaptation. By chance, I had just finished reading the first of the Foundation books when the Apple TV show based on the Isaac Asimov series came out, and was appalled by how little the show resembled what I'd just read. Some say the story as written was 'unadaptable,' but I'm not sure I ever think that's true.

That said, even if it's possible to make a good, direct adaptation of Resident Evil 2, there's a real chance you'd wind up with something that only a narrow band of filmgoers care about, or worse, that resembles a Tommy Wiseau flick.

(The game's opening cutscene features Leon casually saying "What's up with that guy?" while firing into a crowd of the first zombies he's ever seen in his life.)

The closest Capcom has come to greenlighting a direct, live action Resident Evil adaptation is the most recent film, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which wasn't especially good. Before that were all the Milla Jovovich movies, and Milla Jovovich is not, in fact, a Resident Evil videogame character.

After seven not-all-that-great Resident Evil movies that also aren't direct adaptations of the games, it's not entirely clear to me why Cregger's approach is taking heat. It might partially be a reaction to the comedic undertones in the trailer. Cregger is funny, as his Whitest Kids U'Know sketch comedy career attests, and I get the sense that his Resident Evil movie will be laced with levity.

I'm looking forward to it. One of the best working horror directors of the moment making a movie based on a game series he personally loves is the kind of thing we could only dream about back in the day, when the closest thing to that you got were Uwe Boll flicks.

If this movie's no good, I'm sure there'll be more shots at adapting Resident Evil in the future, because not being very good hasn't stopped the film series from continuing thus far.

How are you feeling about what you've seen of Cregger's take on Raccoon City? There's a poll above, and comments below.

I am actually really excited for Zach Cregger's upcoming Resident Evil film. I think this may be the best chance there is for getting an actually good adaptation, mostly thanks to the fact that Cregger seems like a super fan who actually understands what makes the games so charming. In other words: he knows ball.

"I want fans of the games to just know that I am a giant fan of the games, I am making this movie to celebrate the games—I haven't seen the other movies," Cregger said during an interview with ScreenRant. "What I'm not doing in this is that I'm not going to cannibalise the characters and the stories that the games already do so well, because I'm not going to be able to improve on Leon. I feel like Leon exists in the games and anyone I cast and any haircut I give him or any line of dialogue I make him say it's just not going to be Leon because Leon exists.

"I feel like what I'd rather do is tell an original story that lives in the world of the games, that obeys the rules of the games largely, but feels like more of the experience you get when you're playing the games. That's leaning into the survival horror aspect of it—it's not survival action, it's survival horror."

As someone who has indeed watched the WS Anderson Resident Evil films this is actually a really good explanation of what the dividing line between a good and a bad resi film is. A film which embodies the survival action side of Resident Evil is incredibly hard, perhaps even impossible, to do well.

It just comes off as corny when watching film characters levitate and flip through a corridor full of red lasers or pull off inhuman stunts, whereas those same actions are cool as all hell when you're the one doing it in the games.

Whereas a Resident Evil film which instead chooses to play on the survival horror aspect of the games has a higher probability of doing well, because it's more grounded. That's not to say that Baron Harkonnen-looking zombie found in the sewer was realistic, it's just that the protagonists' actions and responses to said situation are more believable.

"What the games do well is they build this incredible atmosphere and this dread and this tension as you progress through these set pieces, and things just escalate, and escalate, and escalate," Cregger explains. "You always feel like you have not enough resources and you're wounded and the whole world is completely stacked against you—that's what makes Resident Evil so enjoyable for me to play. That's what this movie is built to do, to give you that slow dread tension and escalation that the games have perfected."

Don't give me hope, PC Gamer's Elie Gould expressed when Zach Cregger's upcoming Resident Evil film got a teaser in April. They've been let down by Resident Evil movies before, as have we all, but that teaser did give the impression that it might be good.

Now the full trailer for Cregger's take on Resident Evil is out, and I'm not sure if this counts as good news for Elie or bad news—but yeah, it really does look like this might be a winner.

What's interesting about the film, as Cregger explained in May, is that it "takes place alongside the events of Resident Evil 2," but won't include any of them, or anyone you know from the game: "It's an alternate storyline that takes place on the periphery of the hero's storyline, so it's a story that could be happening without necessarily breaking the universe of the story the games are telling."

Cregger said at the time that the film reflects what would happen if he were thrown into a Resident Evil situation in real life, utterly unprepared or unequipped for the situation: "I think it's just fun to be following someone with no combat experience whatsoever as they're walking through hell with a machine gun."

You can see that kind of "fun" in the trailer, which has a very down-dressed Austin Abrams—average guy extraordinaire—suddenly up to his neck in awfulness. There's a humor to it not present in that April teaser that reminds me a bit of the Evil Dead flicks: That zoom-in on the shotgun over the mantle is just about a dead lift from Sam Raimi's groundbreaking splatter flicks, and Abrams' reaction as he looks out the window and sees the zombie running toward the house, well, maybe it's just me but I find it very funny.

I don't think the whole film is going to be played for laughs—Cregger has previously said that what he loves about survival horror and Resident Evil specifically is the "overwhelming feeling of dread," and individual moments of levity don't mean that the experience as a whole isn't going to be horrific. But I do think that by making a parallel addition to the mythos, Cregger has a chance to cook up something much more interesting than previous films—and maybe, one that's actually good.

Resident Evil is set to hit screens on September 18.

A Deadline report says Atari, in partnership with management and production company Entertainment 360, has signed a deal that gives Universal Pictures the right to turn 10 of Atari's best-known games into movies.

"For more than five decades, Atari has created games and worlds that have remained part of popular culture long after their original release," Atari chairman and CEO Wade Rosen told the site.

"We are excited to work with Universal and Entertainment 360 to bring the spirit of our iconic brand and games to a new medium."

The games in question are undeniably Atari classics, although not necessarily obvious fodder for film adaptations:

• Asteroids
• Adventure
• Berzerk
• Breakout
• Centipede
• Crystal Castles
• Millipede
• Missile Command
• Pong
• Yes, Pong
• Yars’ Revenge

The intent, according to the report, is to turn the properties into "big-scale action-adventure fare."

"Matt Reilly and I grew up playing Atari 2600 games and have remained fans ever since," said Guymon Casady of Entertainment 360, a producer on the first film to come out of the deal. "The best Atari games dropped you into a world and let your imagination do the rest.

"[Screenplay writers Carl Hampe and Matt Reilly] saw an opportunity to take that same spirit and build an original, large-scale adventure around it. From the moment we read the screenplay, we believed there was a great movie here."

Well, they made a Battleship movie, didn't they.

Did it suck? Sure did. Did it make money? Eventually, apparently, although it took some time and a tour of duty on streaming services. Is this sort of thing symptomatic of a creatively bankrupt entertainment industry that's running on the fumes of nostalgia and not a whole lot else? I'm gonna say maybe!

But here's the thing: When I read this Deadline report I immediately had a sense that this had been done before, and I was correct—to an extent. Film projects based on Missile Command and Centipede were announced in 2016, and an Asteroids film project was picked up by Universal in 2009. I don't know whatever came of them (and, as an aside, I would advise caution when searching for Centipede-related movie trailers), although I would assume they all fizzled out. I've dropped a line to Atari to ask about that.

Atari itself seemed destined to meet the same fate, although it appears to have turned things around in recent years with notable and (so far) not-disastrous moves like buying Nightdive and Digital Eclipse, releasing a new Jeff Minter game, finally doing great things with its huge back catalogue, and—this is particularly important—getting away from the crypto business.

Does all of that make me think we're likely to get a good movie based on Breakout? Absolutely not. But it might be fun to watch them try.

Remember that photo which stirred all sorts of talk about Amazon's upcoming God of War TV series? Well, the show won't look like that anymore—the role of Kratos is set to be recast since actor Ryan Hurst tore a bicep on set, according to Deadline. Anonymous sources in that story claim Hurst has had surgery and is recovering.

As Deadline points out, this comes after Hurst "underwent a physical transformation" and put on 40 pounds of muscle specifically to play Kratos. But for such a physical role and with a child actor (who's in every scene with the character, one assumes) to consider, it seems starting over is the simplest way forward for Amazon.

Production paused right after the injury and is planned to restart by mid-October with someone new in the role. In other words, any scenes that have already been shot will have to be redone—with four episodes already wrapped, that's a huge reset. After a mixed reaction to that initial photo, Hurst won't get the chance to prove his naysayers wrong in the end.

Hurst is also in Christopher Nolan's new Odyssey movie as Mentor, and theater-avoidant gamers may know him as Thor in God of War: Ragnarok or Beta in AMC's Walking Dead series. It's not clear who will take his place, but given the reported production schedule, we won't be waiting long to find out.

Setbacks aside, at least the show will be easier to experience on your PC than God of War Laufey, which seems likely to forego the PC.

When Konami revealed back in February that it's finally making a new Castlevania, the teaser trailer's art and color palette was so reminiscent of the Netflix anime series that it seemed possible the game was actually using the show's designs, or at least had gotten a little love from the folks at Powerhouse Animation. In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Konami confirmed there's no explicit continuity between the show and the new game, but the similarity was certainly intentional.

"We know that there are so many fans of the anime series who’ve never played the games before. So even though obviously we wanted to put the game at the forefront of our ideas when we were directing, we really did want to make sure that everyone felt welcome, especially the anime fans who’ve never played the games," said series producer Tsutomu Taniguchi.

Creative director Emmanuel Nouaille from development studio Evil Empire said that there's no "specific reference" to the anime in Belmont's Curse, but the art style of the Netflix show did serve as inspiration.

"Through the art direction and through the music and the story, I think we are very close to the cinematographic aspect of the series," Nouaille said. "This is what we want to capture and want to replicate. I think cinematography is more important than a specific reference to the game."

Unfortunately neither developer mentioned if the Castlevania series is kaput at Netflix—it's been a year-and-a-half since the most recent season's release with nary a peep. My bet is we get a surprise new season based on Symphony of the Night at some point, but for now, we'll just have to make do with the first game to follow in Symphony's footsteps since 2008.

"There’s not a wall between the game and the anime," Taniguchi added. "We’re really hoping that people who’ve only watched the anime also enjoy the game."

Thanks to his lead role in Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey, which hits theaters this week, a Matt Damon skin has come to Fortnite.

The news led us to wonder if Damon had ever appeared in a videogame before. No, as far as I can tell, but he did get close-ish when he was asked to lend his likeness to The Bourne Conspiracy, a 2008 console game based on the novels behind the film series he starred in.

Damon rejected the offer for the endearing reason that they wouldn't make the violent action game—which is what you'd expect from a Bourne game—more like classic puzzle-adventure game Myst.

"I lobbied hard to not make a first-person shooter game but to make it more like Myst, which was a great interesting puzzle you tried to solve—you know, to play with his amnesia or his memory," Damon said in a 2008 interview with The Boston Globe. "They weren't interested. They made the video[game] anyway, without my likeness."

Damon also recounted the story with a laugh on an episode of Hot Ones in 2021.

"They offered me a bunch of money," the actor said. "But it was like, a little more thought had to go into it. You know, like Myst, I love that game. So I was like, 'You know, more like Myst.' And they were like, 'no,' and just went and made it without me."

I couldn't find any examples of Damon's likeness appearing in a videogame before his new Fortnite skin, though he did say he was interested in the medium during a 2016 Reddit AMA, when he was asked if he'd ever consider doing voice acting or motion capture work for a game.

"I've never been approached to do that, I'd totally be into it," Damon said. "I'm really interested to see where entertainment heads as these videogames, the graphics are getting so good, and VR is getting so good, and you know, what's going to happen to movies? What are the implications for movies, and does this morph into a new kind of storytelling, and what is that, and can I be a part of it? You know, ultimately those of us who make movies are storytellers and we want to gather you around and tell you stories. If gaming is the way to do that I'm all for looking into it, but nobody has asked me as of yet."

How things have changed in just 10 years. Damon's 2016 comment would come across as out-of-touch today, when the industry's biggest players have mostly moved on from discussions that center authors, actors, storytelling, or competition with Hollywood.

Instead, execs and investors are excited about things like user-generated content, AI, and "the metaverse." Genres focused on emergent storytelling, such as multiplayer survival and comedy co-op, have boomed, while story-focused RPG hits like Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 tend to be viewed as anomalies (even if it seems just as hard to release a live service hit). A new Fallout game is reportedly in development, but the biggest new Fallout thing of the 2020s has so far been a TV show.

That shift is perfectly encapsulated by Damon's first videogame role: Rather than a prestige console exclusive action adventure game or Kojima epic, he's a Fortnite skin promoting an old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster.

In another universe, we might be prepping to review a big Odyssey tie-in game right now. No such game exists, but our Chris Livingston did dig up an old adventure game based on the epic poem, which saw him spend an hour trying to figure out a loom.

Christopher Nolan's long-awaited epic adventure film The Odyssey opens this weekend, and I won't be there to see it because the IMAX theater near me is already sold out except for those really terrible seats way down in front.

Which is fine, really: at a running time of two hours and 53 minutes, I'm much more likely to be thinking about how badly I need to pee than focusing on Matt Damon's adventures.

Besides, I've just gotten a sneak peak of the story of The Odyssey by playing the 2012 point-and-click adventure game The Odyssey, a mobile game developed by Crazysoft (they're crazy, you guys!) that was ported to Steam in 2016.

Hoping for a comparable cinematic experience, I played it for the exact running time of the movie: two hours and 53 minutes. If the film follows the game's blueprint—and I have no reason to believe it won't—here's exactly how the movie will go. I just saved you like $25. You're welcome.

Hour one: Matt Damon tries to operate a loom

The poem, the game, and presumably the Nolan film all begin the same way: Odysseus is held captive on Calypso's island, but Hermes shows up and is like, hey, Cal, he's not into you so maybe just let him go? My first task in the adventure game is to build a raft to escape the island, something that Odysseus has apparently not even contemplated before because he has to ask Calypso for step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

And it's easier said than done. If the movie is like the game, Matt Damon will wander back and forth between Calypso's small cave and the beach outside, occasionally picking up a handful of mud or touching a vase, staring intently at everything and wondering why simple tasks, like using an axe to chop down a tree, simply don't work.

This game is the definition of a pixel hunt: it's extremely difficult to tell what is a clickable item and what isn't. For example, the reason I can't cut down the tree with the axe is because I haven't gotten a branch from the tree yet, and that branch takes me, no lie, several minutes of clicking every square inch of that tree just to locate. It does not stand out from the rest of the tree at all.

This is not the only time in the next three hours this will happen.

The most frustrating thing for my impatient little Matt Damon is the part that seems like it should be easy. I need to weave a sail on Calypso's loom, and before asking Calypso how to do it, I just start clicking on the various handles and pedals of the loom, hoping that will work. It doesn't, so I ask Calypso for help, and she tells me only one handle and pedal needs to be pressed, though she won't say which.

Since I stupidly already monkeyed around with it, I'm not sure which state the pedals and handles are in, pressed or not pressed, so with a deep sigh Matt Damon methodically tries every single combination of them before finally stumbling on the solution. This is similar to how Matt Damon will soon use every item in his inventory, including a handful of mud, on every single other item on the screen, including himself and Calypso.

Even when Matt Damon finishes the sail, he's stumped for several more minutes because he needs two long, sturdy pieces of wood for his raft, and can't find them anywhere despite having (finally) leveled a forest's worth of trees with his axe. That's because he needs to break pieces of wood off the loom itself. I know Calypso has kept him prisoner for years, but it still seems rude to bust up her only loom before peacing out.

Hour two: Matt Damon swears a lot while trying to identify constellations

Let me give you a hypothetical. You're on a tiny raft. Your rudder has broken. You're Matt Damon. You ask a god for help and they magically summon a fish into your empty food bowl.

What do you do with that fish? Name the first 50 things that come to mind.

Was any of them "throw the fish into the ocean?" No? Why, because it would be completely nuts to throw away the life-sustaining gift of food a god just broke the laws of the universe to deliver to you?

That's the solution. Throwing the fish away summons a talking bird who gives Matt Damon 12 statuettes with images carved on them, and to figure out which way to sail, Matt Damon has to identify 12 constellations in the sky and match them to the statuettes.

Fine. Easy. Click on the constellations to get a bit of info about them, click on the statuettes to do the same, then take a statuette and use it to click on the correlating constellation. Right? WRONG. WRONG, MATT DAMON.

It doesn't work. It just doesn't work! I take each of the 12 statuettes and click on each of the 12 constellations and nothing freakin' happens. I click and click and click.

And then I click one of the statuettes against the raft, just because there was literally nothing else to do. That worked.

"Welldone," [sic] the game said. "You rub the statuette on the trunk of your raft and symbols and illustrations appear on it."

No one told Matt Damon that rubbing rocks on his raft was part of the puzzle. No one, not the talking bird, not Calypso, not the stupid fish I threw in the stupid ocean, gave Matt Damon even an inkling that might be part of it. And it's not even necessary! I could already tell which statuette and constellation was Orion and Zeus and Cancer and all the rest! Matt Damon is furious.

Hour three: Matt Damon makes tea

Matt Damon is in a black mood when he's shipwrecked by Poseidon and wakes up half-naked under a bush near two women playing with a ball near a river. The game tells him he can't stand up: the women might see his unclothed body! So what does he do? He lies there clicking on everything in the world before discovering he can pick up stones and throw them at the women's ball, knocking it into the river, at which point he stands up and they can see his unclothed body.

That's a lot of clicking for Matt Damon to discover how to do the thing he was told he can't do.

To win the women's trust so they'll give him clothing, he agrees to get the ball he just knocked into the river, and also to fix their broken wagon wheel. At least the wagon wheel makes a bit of sense: take the iron wheel from the wagon, heat it in a fire, and melt an iron blade to fix the gap in the wheel. (I said it made a bit of sense.) Affixing the wheel to the wagon means finding the smallest stone ever hiding on a bridge.

Could you have spotted it if I hadn't told you it was on the bridge?

Inside the city, Matt Damon learns he needs to make tea so Athena can turn him invisible to sneak him in to see the King, and I get most of the way there: I find a bowl and a mint leaf, I start a fire, but I can't brew the tea without making the fire hotter by using some bellows that a soldier won't let me have.

At this point Matt Damon is up to here with this shit and pulls out a scroll some might call "a walkthrough" to discover the solution: he has to pick up a piece of a wood, find a knife under it, cut a rope hanging on a wall, tie the rope to the trident on a statue of Poseidon, pull the rope that makes the trident move, which makes the soldier think a miracle is taking place, which lets Matt Damon steal the bellows while the soldier is distracted.

Of course. It's such an intuitive solution, because statues always have moving parts and soldiers historically can't see ropes!

Athena turns me invisible by surrounding me with mist, which I suppose counts as invisibility, but whoops! Two hours and 53 minutes have elapsed in the game, so yeah, the movie is over. (Judging from the length of the walkthrough I used, I'm about a third of the way through the game, though one Steam reviewer played it for more than 50 hours—and doesn't recommend it.)

If you go see The Odyssey this weekend, please enjoy watching Matt Damon eventually figure out how a loom works, get furious at stars, and make tea. Sounds like an Oscar-winner to me.

Have you ever thought to yourself, I bet Steve Buscemi would make a good Far Cry villain? I think he would. He's charismatic, superficially good-natured, kind of odd looking, extremely high-strung, and prone to sudden, sometimes random outbursts of extreme violence. And I'm not the only one who thinks so—the people making the live-action Far Cry series for FX do, too.

Word of Buscemi's big role was delivered by the official Far Cry account on X: "Welcome Steve Buscemi to the world of FX's Far Cry. Hope you’re ready to get thrown into the deep end, lose your mind, and make a few catastrophically bad decisions along the way."

There's actually no indication as to what role Buscemi will be playing in the Far Cry show, good guy or bad. At first blush, the announcement might seem to be warning Buscemi of bad things to come during his time in the cast, but I think it's also quite possible to read it as a warning to viewers of all the bad things he's going to do to other people. "Lose your mind and make bad decisions," that's kind of his whole vibe, right?

Buscemi is too old to play Pagan Min or Vaas, and there's obviously only one person who could fill the shoes of Antón Castillo. But he does have kind of a natural Joseph Seed vibe going on—I could definitely see Buscemi as a guy who psychologically breaks someone so completely that they never speak again and won't go outside without a mask on.

Others on Team PCG feel differently. Chris Livingston thinks he's going to be "a weird helpful NPC," maybe like Hurk—Buscemi doesn't really have a Hurk-like physical presence but I can definitely see him firing rockets at random passers-by from the back seat of a busted-up hatchback.

Wes Fenlon, on the other hand, thinks Buscemi will portray Jason Brody, the barely-out-of-his-teens hero of Far Cry 3. They're de-aging actors for the upcoming Lord of the Rings flick The Hunt for Gollum, but even so I think this scenario is unlikely. I suspect it may even be possible that Wes isn't being entirely serious here.

Issy van der Velde opined that Buscemi would "be a great villain" in Far Cry, which is correct, but then went on to imply that he doesn't much care because Michael Mando was "phenomenal" as Vaas and all Issy really wants is to see Mando turn up somewhere.

The press release from FX isn't any help, for the record: It says only that Buscemi has "built a career out of portraying some of the most unique and unforgettable characters" in movies and TV shows ranging from Reservoir Dogs and The Big Lebowski to Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, and Wednesday. 'Odd' might be Buscemi's signature move but the man has range, and he could fill either role with equal ease.

Here's his big entrance as weird psycho killer Garland Greene in the 1997 Nicolas Cage classic Con Air:

And here's his big moment as weird sidekick Buscemi (Robert Rodriguez isn't really a details guy, I guess) in the 1995 Antonio Banderas classic Desperado:

(Yes, I have seen some of Buscemi's more recent work, but I like what I like.)

The truth is that Buscemi almost certainly won't play any of the characters we've encountered in the previous Far Cry games. Executive producer Noah Hawley said in April that he's "not specifically adapting any of the games," but will instead build the series around the broader concept of "civilized people thrown into situations where they have to become increasingly uncivilized," and his own take on what a Far Cry story is. But even with that more open-ended approach to the series, if we take it as a hard-and-fast rule that bizarre, flamboyant characters are an essential part of the formula—and I do—then I reckon Buscemi will fit right in.

21st Century Fox, Columbia, Tristar, Pixar, MGM, Turner, New Line, Lucasfilm, DreamWorks, Miramax, RKO—these were all, at some point, movie studios or production companies that weren't owned by a multibillion dollar empire like Disney, Sony, NBC Universal or Amazon. After decades of mergers, acquisitions, and tech companies horning their way into the TV and movie business, Hollywood looks an awful lot like the games industry. There are fewer owners than ever, they're richer than ever, with an ever-shrinking focus on making just the films that are likely to bank a billion at the box office.

We've seen how effectively this plan has worked out for the games industry: Tens of thousands of layoffs over the last few years, with companies like Embracer and Microsoft divesting themselves of studios they don't know what to do with nearly as quickly as they acquired them. Leave it to the games business to speedrun a path that the wider media ecosystem has been headed down for a long time.

As much of a mess as Hollywood is now, the balance of power stands to go even more askew if Paramount, led by Saudi-backed David Ellison—billionaire son of Trump pal Larry Ellision—gets to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. If there's any silver lining to the game's industry's disastrous consolidation in recent years, perhaps it will be regulators looking back at what they should have prevented and actually doing something this time around.

Unlikely? Absolutely. But there's at least evidence that a few are trying.

On Monday, California attorney general Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit to block Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying consolidation "leads to fewer opportunities for important stories to come to life, and fewer ways for audiences to encounter stories, ideas, and perspectives beyond their own experiences." The suit is backed by the attorneys general of 11 other states: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington. It claims that the merger would create a "media behemoth," leaving just four companies in control of "over 85 percent of all wide-release theatrical films in the United States." Paramount and Disney would alone command control of nearly 60% of all basic cable television in the country.

That just seems like an all-around bad idea, and an even worse one if you know anything about the Ellisons or consider how much of the news media they'd have under their thumb with an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. On top of that company's hundred-year movie legacy, it also owns and operates the likes of:

• CNN
• HBO
• DC
• WB Games
• Discovery Channel
• Cartoon Network

It would be a dramatic reshaping of an industry power structure that looked quite different just a few years ago, with Ellison taking over Paramount via a merger with his company Skydance in 2025. Unsurprisingly given his family's coziness with the Trump administration, that acquisition sailed through the FCC—after the company agreed to pay the president $16 million in a bunk lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and subsequently canceled Stephen Colbert's Late Show. FCC chair Brendan Carr, meanwhile, is investigating Disney for "DEI discrimination" and has already more or less shrugged at the state lawsuits taking aim at the Warner Bros. acquisition.

The UK's communications regulators may also be poised to protest the deal. Paramount's lawyers, of course, have insisted that the merger is actually "pro-competitive," despite the thousands of jobs the company has already cut and the thousands more it surely would after taking over Warner Bros. And WB Games has already been dismissed as an insignificant part of the acquisition story, so it's hard to imagine the takeover being good news on the gaming front.

Fans of misery will, I suppose, have a new streaming lament configuration to look forward to as HBO Max and Paramount+ will somehow find a way to charge more for streaming apps that inexplicably offer smaller portions of their back catalogs.

The last administration's FTC at least tried, though ultimately failed, to stop Microsoft's acquisition of Activision. The federal government isn't even interested in trying this time around—but the Columbia Journalism Review writes that the states at least have a chance to stop the merger. If they don't, the combined company's new $80 billion in debt will inevitably mean dramatic cost-cutting—exactly the sort that Xbox's Asha Sharma hinted at when saying the publisher would be "shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects."

Is there a good outcome here? Even if the deal falls apart, that presumably leaves unpopular Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav in charge of a movie legacy he seems uninterested in beyond its ability to make a buck. The last four years in the games biz have imparted one message above all, though: It can always get worse.

The Television Academy (which is not a place where TVs go to school, I've just learned) has announced the nominations for this year's Primetime Emmy Awards. And, yeah, yeah, The Pitt got 25 nominations, of course it did, Widow's Bay got 19 noms, and Pluribus got 18.

Eh, who cares? This is a PC gaming site. How did TV shows based on PC games do?

Great! Sort of. Fallout Season 2 hauled off an impressive nine Emmy nominations, but don't pop the Nuka Cola yet—none of the actors on the show were nominated. Not Ella Purnell as Lucy, not Aaron Moten as Max, not Kyle MacLachlan as Hank, who were all great this season. Not even Justin Theroux got a nomination, despite being deliciously creepy as the unhinged Robert House.

And somehow, Walton Goggins as Cooper Howard and The Ghoul didn't get a nom. I am surprised at this! Goggions would seem to be a shoe-in as a crowd favorite: he was nominated for Fallout Season 1 in 2024, though the award went to Hiroyuki Sanada for Shōgun, and I can't really beef about that because he was great. But Goggins was even better in Season 2, particularly his scenes as Cooper Howard in the pre-war sequences, which are easily my favorite parts of the show.

Who did get nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a drama? Noah Wyle, obviously, for The Pitt, Mark Ruffalo for Task (he was good), Gary Oldman for Slow Horses (no argument here), Sterling K. Brown for Paradise (only watched the first episode), and Rufus Sewell for The Diplomat (didn't see it).

How do you feel about those guys getting nominated and Goggins not getting gogginated? Here, do me a favor and answer this quick poll:

At least the people who turn Goggins into the Ghoul are up for a nomination: Fallout Season 2 is up for two Outstanding Makeup categories (non-prosthetic and prosthetic), and one for Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes.

The show is also nominated for Outstanding Stunt Performance for the episode "The Profligate," though I just scrubbed through that episode and I'm not sure which stunt was being submitted—possibly the performer leaping through the air while wearing power armor, at the end.

Other categories include sound editing, sound mixing, hairstyling, and production design. Just no acting!

You can see Fallout's complete list of Emmy nominations here. We'll just have to cross our fingers for Goggins to finally win an Emmy in Season 3.

Readers! Exciting news about the future direction of PC Gamer, heretofore your number one destination for news about things Henry Cavill is doing. We are now also your number one destination for news about things Obsession star Inde Navarrette is doing. Come with me as we march boldly into this new era.

It turns out, based on a recent chat Navarrette had with Etalk, that what she's doing is, well, what Henry Cavill is doing. The star—who is a known, documented, and unrepentant gamer—chatted about her process for building a gaming PC. Like the rest of the freedom-loving world, one of her first steps was to watch Henry Cavill do it on YouTube.

"I saved up a lot of money to do that. Building a PC is not cheap, at all," said Navarrette (and boy, don't we know it). "I watched a lot of YouTube, and I watched Henry Cavill build his own so, like, [I was] bouncing around between all of those videos." The stars, folks—they're just like us: attentively watching Cavill don a headlamp and vest to assemble a personal computer.

I do wonder when Navarrette put together her build—pre- or post-RAM crisis—because the immense price of the thing is a subject she recalls with a wince. "I think saving your money [is important], but if you can't there's a lot of really good options out there. Just do your research… on what you want to use it for and what are the best components for that."

There are some ways you can save money, I suppose. For instance, back when Navarrette was streaming The Last of Us, she had a big ol' "Activate Windows" watermark occupying space in the bottom right of her screen the whole time. I should probably write to her about OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I bet she'd appreciate that.

Atlus RPG series Persona could be getting a live-action Netflix adaptation, according to a new Variety report. The production company responsible for Stranger Things, 21 Laps, will be substantially involved, as will Story Kitchen, another production company with a focus on game-to-film adaptations like Sonic The Hedgehog, as well as forthcoming projects including Tomb Raider, It Takes Two and Vampire Survivors.

The writer and showrunner is Christopher Monfette, who has worked on a bunch of nerd stuff including the forthcoming VisionQuest (a Disney series featuring Marvel's Vision) and Star Trek: Picard. Joining the list of seven executive producers is Sega's Toru Nakahara who has also executive produced the Sonic film trilogy.

I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for a live-action Persona to materialize. Persona 5 has been an enormous success: the core game, taking in Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, had sold 10.46 million copies as of August 2025. It's released on three console generations since its initial launch in 2016, and spawned five spin-offs in Persona 5 Strikers, Persona 5 Tactica, Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, Persona 5: The Phantom X and Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth. Its success has led to remakes of Persona 3 and Persona 4.

Of course, there have already been lots of Persona screen adaptations: Persona 5 has its own animation series which ran between 2018 and 2019, as did Persona 4 in 2011. A Persona 3 anime miniseries also exists. And for those who want to go way back, the wider Shin Megami Tensei series was originally a novel trilogy, and crossmedia promotion is very much in the universe's DNA.

Still, this is the first live-action Persona series, and I'm pretty skeptical about how the overwhelmingly American production crews are going to handle it. I'd be surprised if it had a Japanese cast, equally so if it took place in a Japanese locale. Adapting a series so inextricably linked to anime is also going to require some careful tonal adjustments in its move to live action. Or they could just cast Jack Black or that Parks and Recreation guy and call it a day.

More exciting is the prospect of Persona 6, which after a long wait was finally revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase earlier this month. There wasn't any gameplay footage, or screenshots, nor even a release window, but Atlus does at least intend to release it one day.

This article will contain spoilers for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is an excellent anime, and it's also very sad—its ending does a great job of reaching into your chest, busting past your ribs, grabbing your heart and ripping it out. It's a genuinely thoughtful examination of the cyberpunk genre's dystopia, the corrupt ideas of success and legacy we can get in a society that views people as disposable.

David's fate at the end of it (along with the unceremonious stomping of Rebecca mid heart-to-heart) is a prime example of that—there aren't any happy endings in Night City, just a staving off of entropy and cyberpsychosis, or a meaningless life in a dead-end gutter somewhere.

Basically, its ending is heartbreaking. But did you know it could be even worse? That's per an animecorner interview with the show's writer and producer, Bartosz Sztybor, who spoke to the publication about its potential endings:

"There was never a happy ending," Sztybor says, then follows up that light jab with the haymaker: "There were even worse endings. There was one ending in which David doesn’t die entirely. Arasaka gets him and [he] ends up fighting in Africa or South America in corporate wars as a robot."

The word 'grim' feels like an understatement. The idea of David's consciousness being torn off his dead body and placed inside a military robot to fight some corporate war for capital, all while his love is powerless to stop it—or worse, the idea that he might become some sort of reprogrammed Adam Smasher cyborg?

That's a bad ending that would've turned Edgerunners from a Shakespearian tragedy into a straight-up existential horror, even if it would've been deeply setting-appropriate. Good thing we aren't tainting the memories of deceased people with AI facsimiles in real life. That'd totally never happen.

Either way, Sztybor's adamant about keeping David dead and buried: "Yeah, I think it would be disappointing. If David is resurrected, finds Lucy and has seven babies, people would be like 'you destroyed those feelings.'"

Anyway—we're going to be getting round 2 of emotional devastation in Night City coming this fall, so Sztybor has plenty of other opportunities to roundhouse kick our little hearts into even mushier pulps.

I had several immediate thoughts when the Call of Duty movie was announced in 2025, most of them some variation of, why? Regardless of your preferred Call of Duty sub-series, movie theaters and streaming services are already awash in an array of movies telling tales virtually indistinguishable from the big-time military shooters. Slap a CoD brand on The Terminal List, and you've basically got yourself a Modern Warfare movie right out of the box.

Which brings us to today's news, delivered by Entertainment Weekly, that a Sea of Thieves movie is also in development. It's apparently still very early-stages as a director hasn't been signed, but the film will be produced by Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of films including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day, through his Hisako Films production company.

"The main character of a Sea of Thieves game is actually the player and the community," Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty said. "So if you sit down to think about Sea of Thieves, it's not, 'who are the main characters? What's the plot?' It's a super social game, but there's a tone to Sea of Thieves. It's built on a very cooperative community, so you can start to sense what that's going to be like."

I can't say that really gives me a sense of anything at all, whether it's what kind of movie it will be or why it's being made in the first place. But the justifications for it do at least seem a little more solid than the Call of Duty movie, if only because there aren't as many examples of 'we have a Sea of Thieves movie at home.' Pirates of the Caribbean is the obvious choice—so obvious that an official crossover happened years ago—but otherwise? I'm admittedly not as hip to the pirate movie scene as I am to the war movie situation, but nothing else really leaps to mind.

Which doesn't necessarily make it a good idea, strictly speaking, but I think the open-ended nature of Sea of Thieves, which doesn't tie it down to a particular cast of known characters, gives it a better chance of finding an audience than a movie that has very rigid, fixed expectations right from the hop—and woe betide all involved if some aspect of it is wrong.

Far as that goes, you could even do a Pixar-style animated Sea of Thieves movie and pull it off—or, even better, ring it up in the classic Disney style for a real banger. Honestly, the more I turn this over in my head, the more I think that'd be a better approach than CGI'ing the hell out of a big-budget live-action production.

Yeah, you know what? I can see that working pretty well.

This article contains spoilers for Critical Role Campaign 4, episode 30.

I've been rather enjoying Campaign 4 of Critical Role—a 13-player, three-table epic that plans to reinvent the West Marches type of game for a modern actual play show. It's almost daedalian in scope, pure and utter hubris. It shouldn't work. And yet, 30 episodes in, it absolutely has.

The first four-episode overture was impressive. As I wrote back then, Brennan Lee Mulligan set up and spun 13 individual plates with the ease of someone who has been doing this his whole life—because he has, wielding a documented history with LARP, TTRPGs, and improv comedy with experience and ease.

But the recent arc, where all three parties have come back to the main city of Dol-Makjar, seemed to me a higher task. It's one thing to juggle three tables of players when the story's just finding its feet, it's another to bring those three groups back together and tie off their stories in what essentially constitutes the actual-play equivalent of a first-season finale.

The Hallowed Round; playing host to the history of the rungjani and their failed, but inspiring rebellion, turned into a ritual to heal a scar on the face of the world. Wicander Halovar somehow duping the shrewd matriarch of her house, a prodigal son returning with his fingers crossed behind his back, bearing witness to the judgement of the Tachonis patriarch in front of his equally power-hungry peers.

And, most importantly, an ill-fated expedition into the house of Tachonis itself while papa's away—the focal point of my effusive praise, and something I'm going to spoil, including the ending of episode 30. You have been warned.

No pulled punches

One promise of the 13-player campaign that hadn't (until this point) really taken flight was the idea that any character could die, something oft-repeated by Mulligan but never really practised.

The idea is this: With a thicker-set cast comes more opportunities to be lethal and uncompromising in character design. It also fits with the Game of Thrones-esque plot afoot, the revving-up narratives of institutions grasping tight to their power. Sometimes the hammer comes down.

But 30 episodes in, and not a dropped body in sight (well, apart from Occtis, but he got better). Not for lack of trying, mind—there have been plenty of close calls, including one at the very tip-top of episode 30 itself. But the doom of one Teor Pridesire within the Tachonis Manor finally scratches the very last itch I had: Legitimate consequences for poor play.

Up until this point, a winning streak of good luck had protected the cast against destruction, and there have been some truly miraculous turnarounds. Not just Bolaire narrowly dodging a disintegrate spell that would've certainly killed them, but also—well, pick any one of Azune Nayar's natural 20s.

While I've never assumed Mulligan would pull his punches when the time came, he has been absolutely given a lot of good dice-rolls to justify softening his blows. It's one thing to know, in theory, that anybody can die and that encounters are not tailor-balanced to the party—it's another to throw that lever yourself.

The tragedy of Teor's wrong turn, and the dice rolls that led to it, ran the show's erstwhile paladin headfirst into an encounter which, as Mulligan outright states, was designed for the possibility of six fully-healed party members.

And to his credit, Mr. Mulligan wound up that haymaker and threw it as hard as he could. Both justifying the existence of the Desperate Measures mechanic—which lets players mark off death saving throw failures for powerful boons, and nearly had Teor vanquish a great evil before he went down—and establishing, properly, the stakes for the campaign going forward.

I'll miss the Pridesire brothers, but this fate was an important vital brick in the construction of this campaign. Without the looming threat of death—resulting from bad choices, inopportune rolls, or a mixture of both—nothing about the oppressive weight of the Sundered Houses works. You can't have a world flooded with institutional big bads if none of them are actually scary.

Episode 30, even more so than the frankly impressive full-house episodes that came before it, confirms for me that this whole campaign could be a masterpiece. I ended the Overture overstimulated, but frankly grateful its cast would be splitting into three more manageable groups—now I'll be counting down the days until the parties converge again.

YouTube's glassy-eyed ever-king MrBeast (real name James Donaldson) has partnered with prolific thriller author James Patterson to write a book about a version of his Beast Games show where it sounds like people probably die? Yes, that is accurate. That's the world you and I live in now. We both let it come to this and did nothing to stop it.

The book is called The Most Dangerous Games and was announced a while ago, but its cover and release date have just been revealed. The deluxe edition, available for preorder now for $33, has a cover which boasts that it is co-authored by messrs James Patterson and—up top, in a larger font—"MrBEAST". It is said to be "The book event of the year."

"In a world on the brink of collapse, one hundred players face off in a ruthless, high‑stakes competition with everything on the line," goes the blurb. "The reward? The chance to save humanity—and one billion dollars. The stakes couldn't be higher… You’ve seen MrBeast break the internet. But nothing could prepare you for a competition this wild."

Donaldson—who recently became the "first individual creator" to hit 500 million subscribers on YouTube—put out a statement to accompany the book's announcement: "Growing up, I thought books were boring. As I got into my 20s I realized I was just reading the wrong books and they can be exciting if it’s the right match. Writing this book with James—who’s literally one of the greatest storytellers on the planet—was an opportunity to create a story that I would’ve been obsessed with as a kid.

"I wanted to make something that would draw young people in and get a whole generation psyched about reading again. I think we pulled it off, and I’m so proud of what we made. I hope our fans love it." I am quite curious as to what books Donaldson would put on his personal top 10. He's so associated with a plasticky pursuit of fame that I want him to secretly be an expert on Water Margin or something.

It's worth mentioning that Beast Games is essentially a copy of the concept behind Squid Game, the popular South Korean thriller about contestants risking their lives for money. Squid Game is, itself, inspired by Battle Royale, the film and novel about Japanese teenagers forced to fight to the death on a secluded island. It all makes The Most Dangerous Games feel like a copy of a copy of a copy, which probably means it will be… really good? I think that's how that works.

Patterson, meanwhile, is an extremely prolific author (though, as Polygon notes, he does cop to utilising a whole stable of co-authors to keep the pace up) that I mostly associate with thrillers, though he writes across genres. "Jimmy has the best storytelling instincts of anyone I’ve worked with," said Patterson, "and we had a great time working in collaboration, going back and forth with ideas, making the novel better and better every step of the way."

The Most Dangerous Games releases on September 1.

I've got some exciting news for fans of Sharknado, Sharknado 2: The Second One, Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, Sharknado: The 4th Awakens, Sharknado 5: Global Swarming, and The Last Sharknado: It's About Time.

Anthony C. Ferrante, the director of all six Sharknado movies (and the upcoming Sharknado prequel, Sharknado Origins, coming soon to probably-not-a-theater) has a new film out, though it's surprisingly both shark and 'nado free. It's the official live-action film for Dave the Diver: In the Jungle. It's about 10 minutes long and you can check it out below:

Yes, it's silly. It's cheesy. The casting is pretty good, but the production values are on par with mid-range cosplay. And that's fine! Look, you don't go to Asylum, producers of proudly bad-good shark flicks, unless you want your movie to be goofy and, dare I say it, shot quickly and affordably.

Instead of sharks, the film is mostly about Dave and his pals fighting Sulong, an enormous crocodile that serves as one of the expansion's bosses. And don't worry, though Ferrante has mainly focused on sharks in his movie-making, gators are still well within his wheelhouse: he co-wrote the song "Meth Gator" for the Asylum film Meth Gator, which is about a gator on… let me check my notes… yep, meth. You can even hear the song Meth Gator in the Dave the Diver film credits. Gotta say, it kinda slaps.

I'm fully on board with the cheesiness of the Dave the Diver short, with one exception: I took a bit of psychic damage from seeing the mighty Bancho depicted with a glued-on beard from Party City. I know the Asylum specializes in low-budget offerings, and that's completely fine: I've only seen the first Sharknado movie but I thought it was hilarious.

But I can't forgive that dollar-store beard. Do not disrespect Bancho again, Anthony C. Ferrante, or you will answer to me.

Last year I told you the creator of your dad's favorite TV show was writing the Call of Duty movie. I was speaking of Taylor Sheridan, naturally, creator of Yellowstone and its many spinoff series, who is writing the CoD movie that Peter Berg will direct and that Mark Wahlberg will almost certainly star in (they've already made five movies together).

Today, more tidings from that same neck of the woods: your dad's favorite show, which as we've just established is Yellowstone, might become a game.

This comes to us via Polygon, who spoke to Shawn Kittelsen, the head of creative and production at the newly formed Paramount Games Studio. The studio's first game has been announced: it's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin. But the future may include not just pizza-loving reptiles but cattle-ranching cowboys.

"All of the Yellowstone and Yellowstone-adjacent titles, Landman, Tulsa King, these are all priorities for us," Kittelsen said.

There are no details yet as to what kind of game or games the "Sheridanverse"—a term I don't plan on ever using again—will grow to encompass, but Kittelsen explained that the studio wanted to find the right partner to explore the possibilities with.

"We are cultural stewards, and these stories, characters, and worlds mean something to the fans who invest so much of their time and money in them. We need to honor that relationship, or we will lose them," Kittelsen said. "If we start like, willy-nilly licensing everything that we can and just to check boxes and fill the coffers, people will get wise to it, and we won't actually see the success that we could."

At the same time, Kittelsen said the new studio is also interested in other Paramount properties like Star Trek, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lioness, Spongebob Squarepants, the previously mentioned Tulsa King and Landman… pretty much every show on Paramount could be fodder for a game, sounds like. So, if you and your dad were itching to play some co-op game based on Yellowstone, or 1883, or 1923, or 6666, or Marshals, or Dutton Ranch, or the rumored 1944, you might be in for a wait.

It was just a few months ago that Jason Momoa was announced as the headline star of the upcoming Helldivers film, but it seems that plans have changed. A Deadline report, later confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter, says Momoa is now out.

The reason for Momoa's departure isn't currently known, although both sites confirmed that the project is still moving ahead, with Fast & Furious director Justin Lin at the helm. Still, the loss of Momoa is a big blow: To me he'll always be Ronon Dex, the hunka hunka burning Satedan renegade and sad-eyed wife guy of Stargate Atlantis, but in the years since then he's become one of the biggest big-screen draws in the business.

Momoa isn't hurting for work: He's appearing as Blanka in the Street Fighter film coming in October (which looks surprisingly fun) and will reprise his Minecraft movie role in the upcoming sequel, A Minecraft Movie Squared. Alongside those videogame-focused roles, he's also portraying Lobo in the Supergirl film coming later this year, turning up as Duncan Idaho in the concluding chapter of Denis Villeneuve's Dune, doing Dante Reyes in Fast Forever, and has other stuff coming on top of that. Basically, he's a busy man.

There may have also been a salary beef behind the split, or the classic creative differences, or maybe he just gave Starship Troopers a rewatch for the first time and realized that, hey, it's already been done. Whatever the reason, Sony is now on the hunt for a new star. I would imagine that's going to be a little disruptive for the shooting schedule, but the Deadline report says that for the moment, the Helldivers film remains set to arrive in theaters on November 10, 2027.

I've spent the past several weekends swearing I would make time to watch Obsession, but that day has yet to come. I've read the rave reviews, seen the YouTube essays in passing, and heard about its box office record. All of that is cool and all, but I keep kicking the can further down the road.

You know what would have resolved this earlier, though? Someone stopping to tell me that Obsession's Inde Navarrette was a painfully likeable Twitch goblin before all the fame. Actually, someone finally did—shout out to PC Gamer's Tim Clark for that—but a VOD of her rampaging through The Last of Us gave me the push I needed.

It's true, before she was the star of a box office horror hit, Navarrette was streaming her Call of Duty killstreaks unbothered in a Toad hat with the type of chill and unclenched jaw I aspire to have. In an interview with GQ, the Obsession star explained she started the hobby like a lot of us, influenced by an older sibling or relative. In the case of Navarrette, it was her older brother and mom:

"We started on the PS2, and we would play Shrek games in Big Head mode with my mom," said Navarrette. "And then I would branch off by myself to play campaign games. Me and Amani [her brother] would play Call of Duty. He was really into Halo. Then we got into Red Dead and like, Fallout, like all of these games. I just would play or watch my older brother."

The Shrek deep cut is what really got me. They don't make low-budget games based on children's movies like they used to, but if she's talking about Shrek: Super Party, that's good taste. Don't go look it up. Just trust me.

Navarrette's Twitch streaming era started during the height of Covid lockdowns, and she told GQ she was inspired by other YouTube stars like Markiplier. She started by building her own PC, and streaming just seemed like the natural progression of two major parts of her life, working on set and playing games: "If I'm not working on a show and I love playing videogames by myself and I love playing with friends, then why not stream? It became a lot of fun."

Look, I'm usually of the mind that you look goofy pulling a "they're just like me for real" with celebrities, but she stopped to ogle Joel after the man had just totaled his car. So I'm sorry, but you'll have to excuse me when I look at her and whisper, "she's just like me for real."

Also, the top comment on the YouTube archive calls out her "Activate Windows" desktop warning, and I will neither confirm nor deny if I've ever seen such a warning in my life. I'll just say I think it makes her funny and cool. Let's leave it at that.

Beloved actor Anthony Stewart Head, best known for his role as surrogate father Rupert Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, died this week from complications with pneumonia. He was 72.

"It is with heavy hearts that we announce the death of our extraordinary father," Giles' daughters Daisy and Emily Head said in a statement to the BBC. "It has been, and forever will be, an honour and a privilege to be his daughters, and to have witnessed firsthand the impact both he and his work have had on so many."

Head's seven season role as Rupert Giles on Buffy placed him firmly in the canon of all-time TV dads, while occasionally giving him a chance to highlight his talents beyond the screen.

Head was an accomplished singer and theater performer, early in his career landing a role in the musical Godspell. In the early '90s he starred as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in a stage production of Rocky Horror; he reprised the role in another production in the early 2000s.

Head also starred in the 2008 film Repo! The Genetic Opera and released a pair of albums, as well as a single of his rendition of Rocky Horror's Sweet Transvestite.

Head more recently starred as another Rupert—evil ex-husband and former owner of A.F.C. Richmond, Rupert Mannion, on the Apple TV series Ted Lasso.

While he was not a frequent performer in games, Head did join much of the Buffy cast in reprising his television role in 2002's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, released on the Xbox. His narration is the first thing you hear upon booting up the game. He again played Giles in the 2003 sequel, Chaos Bleeds.

Head's most prominent game role was another villain turn: Destroy All Humans! 2's Reginald Ponsonbny-Smythe, in which he's delightfully and snivelingly posh.

He is survived by his daughters, Emily, 37, and Daisy, 35, who both followed their father into acting.

Not only is the Backrooms movie really good, it's also extremely successful. In its first weekend in theaters it destroyed the record for the best A24 release ever and earned nearly $120 million worldwide at the box office.

That bodes well for fans who were left wanting more after the movie's ambiguous ending, because director Kane Parsons says he isn't done with Backrooms yet. His film adaptation of his YouTube series wasn't the end of the story, Parsons told Variety, and while he hasn't officially confirmed that a film sequel is planned, there is still more to come.

"For people who are into it, I've got a contract, and I got a hold at my end," Parsons said, "and that means I am definitely not done with Backrooms."

That could mean a sequel to the film is likely, but it sounds like Parsons might also return to the Backrooms YouTube videos that enthralled so many viewers in the first place.

"I don't want to leave YouTube behind. I immensely enjoy the work I've done there, and I feel creatively fulfilled by it in a way that's proportional to what I've done with this film," Parsons said.

"I personally think there's merits, because there's a lot of projects that I just could never do outside of YouTube, or outside of a more free-form internet multimedia container. So I wouldn't limit myself just to one spot, but I do think it’s a way of saying that I've got a bit of a good thing going right now that I want to utilize with the energy and positivity around this film."

Parsons, under the name Kane Pixels, began creating Backrooms YouTube videos in Blender in 2022, which racked up tens of millions of views. Further works explored the horrors of other liminal spaces, like a shopping mall found deep underground in The Oldest View and a fictitious adventure game in People Still Live Here.

"Without a doubt, Backrooms has always been planned to be more of a series that goes outside the confines of this film," Parsons said. "If anything, I would say this is a bit of a foot in the door that would lead to more of a progression towards the true root of the narrative, which has been set up online for years."

We recently got an update on the next Minecraft film, A Minecraft Movie Squared, during Minecraft Live over the weekend, and in it we saw some familiar faces, a couple of teases, and heard about the upcoming build competition.

"We're so excited to be back in beautiful New Zealand shooting the sequel to A Minecraft Movie," Jack Black told fans during the showcase. "There is a lot of new in this movie and a massive team hard at work taking this production to the next level." He then went on to introduce the "newest addition to our Minecraft family," Matt Berry.

Now, Berry was in the first movie, cast as the villager Nitwit, and Jennifer Coolidge's love interest. But I doubt he'll be reprising that role: Instead it seems he could be taking on a much bigger part, possibly the mysterious and sinister Minecraft urban legend, Herobrine. This only comes to mind as Berry is handed a jumper during the Minecraft Live event similar to the one Jack Black wore while playing Steve, but he could also just play another Steve.

Later on in the event, actress Danielle Brooke, who played Dawn in A Minecraft Movie, announces that “we are taking you so much deeper into the Minecraft world. New biomes, new characters and new mobs along with some of my favourites." We also got to see some concept art such as cute cubed polar bears.

But the biggest news for fans during this section of Minecraft Live was the announcement of a new contest, which is tied into A Minecraft Movie Squared—and a chance to have their work appear in it.

"We are planning an epic build challenge with amazing prizes," Jens Bergensten, chief creative officer at Mojang, said. "The winning build will actually appear in the movie or the end credits of the movie. We'll also set up private screenings for the finalists. All you need to do is create something awesome in a custom map; we've picked four biomes that are relevant to the movie which should help inspire your builds. We'll select the finalists, then we'll go back to the community for the final vote, and yes, there will be a cape up for grabs."

One of my favorite genres of film isn't a real genre, though if it was it'd be called "survivalone." It's when one person winds up in a dangerous environment and pretty much spends the whole movie alone trying to escape it. In this genre there's very little talking or exposition, you only know as much as the main character does, and instead of being told what's happening with dialogue or voiceover, you're simply shown it in long stretches of unbroken film: the "show, don't tell" rule writ large.

This genre includes survival films like Cast Away or All is Lost, and lately, much to my satisfaction, some videogame-adjacent horror movies. Earlier this year it was Exit 8, based on the game The Exit 8, where a man finds himself trapped in a repeating series of subway tunnels. And this week it's Backrooms, where a man finds himself trapped in an endless maze of dingy yellow offices.

I know Backrooms isn't, technically, a videogame movie. There have been a bunch of backrooms games—dozens of them, in fact—but A24's Backrooms movie that's out today isn't based on them, it's based on director Kane Parson's own Backrooms YouTube video series, which was in turn based on the anonymously written 4chan creepypasta from 2019—which all those Backrooms games are also based on.

I think that's close enough to claim as a videogame movie. I saw Backrooms last night and it's pretty good, especially the first half. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a man whose life has hit the skids: his marriage has failed, he's lost his job as an architect, and he now works (and sadly lives) in the least popular furniture store in town. One night he spies a crack of light in the basement wall that leads him to discover the Backrooms, a bizarre labyrinth of unending corridors, and becomes obsessed with unraveling their mystery.

Ejiofor is very good, as is Renate Reinsve who plays Mary, Clark's therapist, who winds up lost in the labyrinth, too. But the backrooms themselves are the real star of the film. The pre-title found-footage sequence of someone exploring the backrooms is gripping, and Clark's first excursion is utterly engrossing: a long, slow, unsettling journey deeper and deeper into the maze of rooms and hallways.

Everything in the backrooms is just slightly askew, slightly wrong, and your eye can't help but be drawn to all of the unintuitive architectural choices: that wall shouldn't end there, that door wouldn't be hung like that, these angles don't quite fit together. The buzzing and blinking of the fluorescents, the stale mustard-colored walls and carpeting, the distant (and sometimes not distant enough) muted sounds behind the walls, and the deep unease when you spot a corridor is so poorly lit that you can't see the end of it.

It's a weird mix of claustrophobia and agoraphobia: you're surrounded by walls but can also sense just how large, terrifyingly large, the backrooms beyond them really is.

As a space, it's brilliantly constructed and utilized. The sets were apparently mostly practical: 30,000 square feet of stage was built for the movie, though I'm sure plenty of CGI was used to enhance it. The sets are so well-designed and effective it makes me wish they'd turn it into a theme park or escape room. I want to wander around there and explore those halls myself.

As you might suspect of a film based on a two-sentence creepypasta, it doesn't quite manage to remain intriguing or eerie throughout its nearly two-hour running time. After Clark's first, gloriously slow and tense excursion, it switches back to found-footage for a while with diminishing results, and when it slips into full-on horror instead of slow-burn dread it starts to tread water a bit. But it's still a good movie and I'd easily be down for a sequel.

Similarly, Exit 8 is about someone alone and lost in another bizarre pocket universe. In the game, players walk down the corridor in a subway station in Japan looking for "anomalies"—things that have changed since the last time you walked down the hall. Each time you correctly spot a difference (or the lack of a difference) you advance closer to the eighth exit, the only way to escape. Make a mistake and you're back to square one.

The film is about as close to the game as any adaptation could be. Kazunari Ninomiya plays a character only known as "The Lost Man" who finds himself in this maze, slowly figuring out how it works on his own, though never quite discovering why he's stranded down there. Again and again, we slowly walk with him down this corridor, looking, as he does, for anomalies, gritting our teeth when he misses one and has to start over.

It's like we're playing the game along with him, and it's great, tense fun.

Exit 8 is also technically brilliant, with exceedingly long "oners," unbroken shots that can last for minutes at a time as Ninomiya wanders through the subway corridors and tries to put the puzzle together. It, too, switches focus between Ninomiya and one or two other characters trapped down there with him. Both films also subtly explore the feelings that being lost in these blank, directionless spaces embodies: trauma, fear, guilt.

Like Backrooms, Exit 8 can't quite sustain its running time. The game can be played in under an hour (depending on how good your memory is) and while the film never gets boring, the creepiness of the corridor does lose a bit of its impact after a while. A dive into more blatant horror doesn't hit as hard as it might.

But Backrooms and Exit 8 are both well-worth watching, and make a great double feature for game-adjacent "survivalone" psychological horror movies. I know The Super Mario Galaxy Movie made a billion dollars this year, but these smaller, quieter, more thoughtful films are doing a lot more with a lot less to bring games to the screen in a satisfying way.

Backrooms is in theaters now, and Exit 8 is streaming (for rent) on Prime Video and Apple TV.

Videogame movies have never really gone away, but it certainly feels like they've had a bit of a renaissance in the 2020s. They're less crap, for starters (at least most of them are, anyway), and generally feel a little more catered to the nerd crowd who love the source material in the first place.

It's become somewhat of a ritual for me and my pals to get together and see the big videogame movies at the cinema. Even when they're a bit naff (looking at you, Super Mario Galaxy Movie) they've become this grand event that genuinely makes me look forward to whichever game is going to get Hollywooded out the wazoo next.

It seems you, the PC Gamer readers, perhaps do not share my same enthusiasm for the craft. I recently polled you lovely folk on what videogame you'd like to see adapted into a movie next and, erm… well. The most voted-for answer was that you don't.

28% of you opted for "Please, no more videogame movies!!" Which, listen. I get it. I watched the first Mortal Kombat movie in anticipation of the second one and it made me question what I even liked about both gaming and watching movies in the first place. (For the record, the second one is much better and I liked it far more.)

Yes we live in a world where the Warcraft movie and that one terrible Hitman movie exist. But we also live in a world where the Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy exists, and that's peak!

You're not all praying for the downfall of the humble videogame movie adaptation, though. Unsurprisingly at PC Gamer dot com, out of all the options I presented, Deus Ex came out on top as the game you'd like to see hit the silver screen. While I'm not quite the JC Denton stan like my colleagues, I do think you could make a thrilling 90-minute romp out of the immsim.

As far as the other options go, 12% of you thought a Diablo movie could be pretty cool, and not far behind with 11% of the votes was Baldur's Gate 3. I do actually wonder if you could capture what's so special about the latter within the confines of A-List actors and some special effects. I reckon it'd be a bit naff, you know.

Games you were less enthusiastic about (but still had some fans) were Arc Raiders with 5% of the votes, The Sims with 2% of the votes, and finally a paltry 116 of you showing up to declare you'd want to see a Fortnite movie happen.

Personally I reckon you could do something wicked with The Sims—think similarly to how the Barbie movie transformed a personality-devoid doll into one of my all-time favourite movies. You just don't see the vision yet!

And erm, well. Quite a lot of you didn't actually like any of the options I put forward. 17% of you, in fact, had totally different ideas for which game should be turned into a videogame movie. First of all, my deepest apologies for not presenting only the finest of PC Gamer curation for you.

But hey! Now's your chance to tell me which game you reckon should be turned into a movie next. I'd love to know which ones you personally think would suit the silver screen the most. Be sure to drop a comment and let me know (and feel free to scold me on the terrible poll options I presented to you in the first place).

Ahead of A24's Backrooms release, director Kane Parsons has been discussing not only the influences behind this film, but also his early career, which includes his web series and the hugely popular The Backrooms (found footage). And as it turns out, a certain Valve game has played a very influential role in his creative works.

"Portal would be the earliest influence," Parsons says in an interview with Letterboxd. "It's the easiest one for me to pin down as like the strongest influence over everything I've done in my entire life probably.

"The general set construction of the Portal games is something that's been in my brain for so long, I frequently have dreams where I'm just in the Aperture [Science Enrichment] Center. It's not yellow, it's very gray, and blue, and kind of bleak. And by the second game it's rotting and it's totally falling apart. But it's vast in a lot of ways, it feels like an eternal indoors that goes on in all directions, that is just absurd in its scope. So I think it's actually very similar to the Backrooms on that front."

Out of the two games in the Portal series, the second stands out as "the bigger inspiration". Not only does the sequel refine its identity but Parsons picks out its "inherently comedic and absurd" premise as a major reason as to why it had such a huge impact on his work.

"There was one specific thread that really stuck with me when I was younger which was throughout the first game, and more so in the second game when they've solidified their art direction," Parsons explains. "You can see these murals on the wall; you can clearly see traces of another human being in this place. And there's some specific moments in the [Backrooms] film with these murals."

Just as in Portal, Chiwetel Ejiofor's character Clark is not the first person to venture into the backrooms, as some teaser clips have shown signs of others trudging through the space beforehand. The film also takes place in the established narrative of Parsons' found footage mini-film, which has another character fall between the gaps of our reality into the backrooms.

But the comparisons between this Backrooms adaptation and Portal don't just end in its location. There's also The Async Research Institute, which shares many similarities with the legendary Aperture Science Inc.

In the same way that Aperture is an unregulated corp, which prioritises research at the expense of human collateral, Async is responsible for mapping the backrooms and creating a 'stable' doorway known as the Threshold which allows its scientists and researchers (the hazmat guys) to move in and out of the liminal space freely. It's also what sets off the chain of various entries opening up around the world dropping unsuspecting victims inside the seemingly infinite hallways.

I thought I couldn't be any more excited to watch Backrooms this weekend, but hearing how Parsons has been inspired by Portal has me even more intrigued to see how this film will pull off one of the greatest modern creepypastas the internet's seen.

A live action Elden Ring movie is in the works, as you may have heard, and as is sometimes the way with these things, it's been a little leaky: Not the whole damned game went out two days early kind of leaky, but rather in the form of behind-the-scenes bits and snippets we're not supposed to see. The latest purported leak comes to us from the nation of Wales, where a clip of an old castle watched over by vaguely creepy soldiers conjures thoughts of, as the caption puts it, "Stormveil IRL."

I say this is "purportedly" Elden Ring because it's not nearly as obvious about it as previous leaks. This one, from April, very clearly features a church of Marika, and this one from later the same month, well, that's definitely the Loathsome Dung Eater.

This new video, shared on Tiktok by mightbeliber (via Culture Crave on X), is more generic: That's definitely an old castle, and those sentries do look an awrul lot like guys I butchered in large numbers in Elden Ring. But nothing about it definitively points to Elden Ring, aside from mightbeliber saying so: Based on the video alone, this could be a reboot of The Lion in Winter for all I can tell.

But that's not all we have to go on. In April, North Wales Pioneer reported on the planned closure of Conwy Castle in order to accommodate filming on a project that the site said "could be linked with Alex Garland," the writer and director of the Elden Ring film. Garland also served briefly as a director of London-based company Katana Films, which sent letters to residents impacted by the closure of the castle and nearby facilities.

So despite the absence of clear and obvious proof (obvious enough for me to pick up on, at least), I would definitely call it a very good bet that Conway Castle here is going to be an Elden Ring castle in a couple years—although specifically which castle remains an open question that is of course the subject of debate in the comments.

As for the real castle in question, Conwy Castle was built between 1283 and 1287 by Edward I during his conquest of Wales; it stood for centuries through multiple wars, until its ruination in 1665. Today it's classed as a World Heritage Site, recognized by UNESCO as one of "the finest examples of late 13th century and early 14th century military architecture in Europe, as demonstrated through their completeness, pristine state, evidence for organized domestic space, and extraordinary repertory of their medieval architectural form."

The Elden Ring film is slated to hit the big screen in 2028. I assume they'll fix the services truck, phone booth, and drone in post.

We're just over a week away from the release of A24's Backrooms film, and while horror fans have been eating particularly well so far this year, this one's really for the horror game players as director Kane Parsons seeks to adapt a long running and much loved creepypasta.

The bar's pretty high considering just how much unique and interesting Backrooms media already exists online, but—without getting my hopes up too high—it seems as if Parsons has stepped up to the task, not least by creating a gigantic set that surprised even the actors.

"I thought the set was amazing and I was very late to understanding that this was the first physical set," actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, known for his roles in The Martian, 12 Years a Slave, and Love Actually, explained in an interview with DiscussingFilm. "I thought, when I watched all the shorts, I thought that somewhere, it had been built before. I didn't really understand he had created all of it."

I don't blame Ejiofor, the various Backrooms shorts and even some games you come across look eerily real. So much so that it can be easy to believe the liminal space and endless tunnels could be located somewhere. It all probably stems from the fact that the inspiration behind it all is, in fact, a real place, located in a Wisconsin Hobbytown Oshkosh.

But the set for the Backrooms film is much larger than its real life counterpart. Parsons ended up creating a set that spanned 30,000 square feet. It was so expansive that "some people were getting lost" Parsons explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

"Once I got hip to that I was really excited," Ejiofor added. "Also because [Kane Parsons] was so excited. Kane was buzzing being in the space. So it was great. Yes it was vast and trying to find your way through it was complicated, but to have a visceral tactile set like that was great."

It's important to archive things for future generations—books, culture, music, film, and hey, absolutely videogames. The awareness of the very latter being a hot button topic per the Stop Killing Games movement. The British Film Institute (BFI)—a charity funded by our national lottery which, among many other things, maintains the world's largest film archive—has similarly expanded its scope to, well, British memes.

No, really. Per this video from last week, the BFI now has an online video archive to conserve the best and brightest of online culture: "First came the Cinema Age, then the TV Age, and now the age of Online Video. Digital film created for distribution online is today’s most dynamic, influential screen form," the site reads.

"Encompassing much that’s new, from ASMR and Unboxing Videos to Twitch streaming and TikTok twerking, it’s also breathed new life into older film forms, filling our screens with fresh takes on advertising, journalism, satire, public information, campaigning, training and much else that’s been with us since time immemorial, and variously taking the forms of comedy, drama, documentary and animation.

"It’s become embedded into every aspect of UK (and world) society." The collection, which is currently 60 videos strong, includes a lot of classics. There's Weebls Stuff's "Badgers" video, Charlie Bit My Finger, I Can't Believe You've Done this, and a couple of videos related to gaming, too.

Take this granny having a rampage in Grand Theft Auto to exact terrible vengeance on British Gas—and here's where the site's value makes itself clear, because wouldn't you know it, I actually wound up learning something: "British Gas Rampage was a skit made to mimic the ‘Let’s Play’ style of gaming video … it was masterminded by the award-winning creative duo Dom Moira and Kieron Roe."

There's also Twitch streamer and comedian Limmy trying to say Purple Burglar Alarm.

Honestly, I'm downright delighted by this. Not just because the BFI has managed to grab a couple of interviews with some of these video's creators (did you know the parent of the Charlie Bit My Finger children was contacted by the Dalai Lama? Well, now you do) but because this kind of stuff is genuinely important.

History's not just the big, overarching stuff—but the little things, too. Take the graffiti in Pompeii, for instance. I'm not saying that Limmy's Purple Burglar Alarm's going to be immortalised in the ashes of a volcano (and if it is, we've got bigger things to worry about), but rather the mundane nonsense we get up to in our spare time's as much a part of our history as the wars we've fought.

As far as I'm concerned, people getting a nan to yell "you British Gas bastards! I'm gonna blow you to hell!" while a helicopter blows up a power station in GTA for a lark, and Theophilus being told not to get nasty "against the city wall like a dog"? They're one and the same.

Besides, the collection does have some more reflective videos—essays and the like—which will be worth preserving, too. You can delve into the whole thing on the BFI's website.

Japanese fans of the mega-franchise Love Live!, which spans anime, manga, live performances, and games, recently spotted that the domain for the official fan club of Aqours expired and is now up at auction. Top bid? 97.14 billion yen, or $615 million dollars to you, sir.

There are various iterations of Love Live!, all of them being either Jpop groups or solo idols, but Aquors is arguably the most wide-ranging and successful, with over a decade's worth of games, several anime seasons, and live performances. The official Aquors fan club was shuttered in June 2025, which probably explains the timing of this, and fans are fuming that Bandai Namco has let the registration lapse in this manner.

After the shutdown last year, the Aqours Club domain—lovelive-aqoursclub.jp—switched from its previous form to display a fairly standard "thank you and goodbye" message to any visitors. As of May 1 2026, however, that's changed to an auction for the domain hosted by Japanese registration service Onamae. The auction ends on May 27, and obviously is being gamed: either it's Love Live fans making a point, which seems the more likely explanation, or trolls having a laugh.

The main cause of consternation among fans seems to be that a once-official domain being acquired by a third party opens up the brand and fans to malicious behaviour: this may seem pie-in-the-sky, but the domain currently remains linked across many other official Love Live! sites, including the main one.

Japanese news outlet ITmedia writes (thanks, Automaton): "If the domain falls into the hands of a third party, there is a risk that phishing sites mimicking the official fan club could be created. Since the domain is identical to the genuine one, it cannot be ruled out that such sites could bypass browser security features or cause password management tools to automatically fill in usernames and passwords.”

The Aqours fan club ran alongside the second season of the anime focusing on this particular version of the group, and was tied-in to various pieces of merch and games around it: the old "buy a CD and enter this code for a year's free membership" kinda thing.

But I did promise you furious fans. "Is Bandai Namco stupid or what?" asks AkiraReynir (via machine translation). "A fool who discards the domain less than a year after ending service! They've apparently already forgotten that their brand domain got hijacked before, and that there was a series collab on onamae.com. Beyond saving."

Eesh! The Japan DNS Operators Group has previously made calls for "end-of-life planning" when it comes to such sites: "When discontinuing a domain, it is recommended to put it into dormancy, perform reverse SEO measures such as requesting removal from search engines and backlink sites, and removing content from archive sites, and only make a decision [about abandoning the URL] after the number of DNS queries falls below a predetermined 'threshold.'"

Well, that clearly hasn't happened here: though I somehow doubt Onamae are getting their $615 million. But it does prove at least, as PCG's Jessica Kinghorn put it, that Love Live fans are "simply something else."

It looks like infamous filmmaker Uwe Boll is staging a comeback: The Hollywood Reporter says he's begun production on a new film called 23 Years Later—The Castle of the Dead, a spiritual successor to his 2003 flick House of the Dead, based on the Sega game series of the same name.

The report says Michael Roesch, a long-time Boll collaborator who worked with him on films including Blubberella, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (which somehow features Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, Ray Liotta, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys-Davies, Claire Forlani, Kristtanna Loken, Matthew Lillard, and Burt Reynolds, to which I say, what the hell), Bloodrayne (with a comparably stack cast—Ben Kingsley! Michael Madsen! Michelle Rodriguez! Billy Zane! Udo Kier! Meat Loaf!) and House of the Dead. Jonathan Cherry and Ona Grauer, who starred in the 2003 film, will return for this one.

Boll's been out of the gamer eye for some years now, but he's continued to produce and direct poorly-received flicks based on other topics, like migrants crossing the Mediterranean, the Bandidos gang, and "the first QAnon mass murder." His return to the world of videogame cinema was apparently inspired in part by director Paul W.S. Anderson, who's working on an officially licensed reboot of House of the Dead.

"When I heard that Paul Anderson is rebooting House of the Dead, I immediately knew that it will be a soulless CGI orgy," Boll said. "And I want to do a completely different zombie movie: Bloody, gory and handmade."

How "completely different" Boll's new film will be remains to be seen: The plot isn't known at this point but the title is kind of a giveaway. "We're upgrading from a house full of zombies to a castle full of zombies," Roesch said.

Well, look: Nobody's going to see these things for the enthralling cinematic experience they offer. Uwe Boll was making videogame adaptations long before Hollywood took the medium seriously, after all—primarily as a means of exploiting loopholes in German tax law.

You know what you're in for when you go to see one of his films—shlock and garbola—and at this point in his long, legendary career (and I mean that entirely unironically, this is a man who challenged five of his harshest critics to boxing matches and beat the shit out of all of them) I'd be disappointed if he delivered anything else. Imagine if Uwe Boll demonstrated growth as a commercially viable director by putting out, say, a serviceable Mortal Kombat film? I think the world would be a lesser, sadder place for it.

Boll's House of the Dead has a Rotten Tomato score of 3%, by the way, and no, that's not a typo, there's no missing number, it's just 3. Here's a trailer:

A release date for 23 Years Later—The Castle of the Dead wasn't announced, but principal photography is set to start on September 5.

If you think about actors who have starred in a bunch of videogame adaptations, Jack Black probably leaps to mind immediately, what with him starring in A Minecraft Movie, Borderlands, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, all in the past few years.

But Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul might be gunning for Jack Black's crown, if they give crowns for "starring in a bunch of videogame stuff." Paul was the lead in the Need for Speed movie in 2014 and played Nyx Ulric in the English version of animated film Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV in 2016. Now he's adding a third videogame adaptation to his resume: Deadline reports that Paul will appear in Prime Video's Fallout Season 3.

Makes sense: Paul worked with Fallout executive producer Jonathan Nolan on HBO's Westworld series, and interestingly enough, Paul also joined that show in its third season. (He joined the cast of Invincible in Season 3, too. Maybe that's just his thing now?)

It makes even more sense if you realize, as I just did, that he's been hanging around the fringes of Fallout for a while. Like: more than 15 years. While looking for a Getty image for this story, I noticed that Paul was spotted by shutterbugs at the Fallout Season 2 screening in London in December of last year and the world premiere of Fallout Season 1 in Hollywood the year before that.

But even further back, Paul attended a Fallout: New Vegas launch event way back in 2010 at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. Maybe that's how to get a role in a videogame adaptation: just keep hanging around until they invite you in?

There's even a bit more Aaron Paul videogame stuff on the books. Notably, he had his first ever role in an actual game last year when he starred in Dispatch, and for a deeper cut, he also voiced a character named "Gamer691" in the "USS Callister" episode of Black Mirror.

I guess the big question now is, who will Aaron Paul play in Fallout: Season 3? I'm gonna guess it'll be an original character, since only a handful of legacy characters have appeared on the show. Will he share screentime with Walton Goggins? I sure hope so—a quick search indicates they've never worked together, and I wouldn't mind seeing them go nose-to-no-nose in a scene or two.

To celebrate Paul joining the cast, how about a Fallout version of that Breaking Bad meme?

Big fat spoilers for the entire Mortal Kombat 2 movie ahead. You've been warned!

2021's Mortal Kombat is not a good movie. It's a little under two hours of pure, terrible decision making. It's filled with some of the series' most boring characters—and the select few interesting ones still end up sidelined. All of its so-called comic relief is put on Kano, whose attempts at quips and witty one-liners fell incredibly flat for me. Lest we forget sloppy choreography (khoreography?), amateurish editing, and kringeworthy attempts to hamfist in an iconic "fatality" line or two.

At the centre of it all was the movie's biggest offender: Cole Young. If that name doesn't ring a bell to you, that's because he's not in any of the games. A wholly original creation for the movie, a bland everyman to serve as the protagonist in an attempt to cajole people who've never done a quarter-circle forward in their life into watching the film without asking questions like "What's a Johnny Cage?"

That's not to slight actor Lewis Tan, who does the best job he can with the material he's served. But his talents would have been significantly more appreciated as a pre-existing Mortal Kombat character. Instead, entirely too much of the first movie is wasted on establishing his character, trying to implement some kind of stakes with his wife and child, with incredibly little time spent on the actual Mortal Kombat of it all.

So imagine my surprise when, around half an hour into Mortal Kombat 2, Cole Young had barely made an appearance at all. For how much the first movie revolved around him, his awkward relegation to a background character in this one was all the more obvious.

He gets a fleeting introduction from Raiden as he shows Johnny Cage around his gaff, little more than "that's Cole Young, he has cool armour, okay moving on." A quick line from Cole himself about how he left his wife and kid behind to come and fight, and how there was very little chance of him ever seeing them again.

And, well, he sure was right. Because not even halfway into the movie, Cole Young faces off against Shao Kahn on the iconic Dead Pool stage, and promptly takes a sledgehammer to his head, completely obliterating his dome into a brain-blood-skin smoothie. Shao Kahn drags his now-headless corpse off into the green sludge, and his time as a Mortal Kombat fighter is over.

And you know what? I quietly cheered. I even did a little fist pump. I'm not sorry about it.

I'm not sure whether it was the intention all along or whether some heavy pivoting occurred between the first and second Mortal Kombat movie, but Cole Young's quick death—and a pitiful passing "Oh Cole is dead? Ah, bummer," from the other characters—was a loud-and-clear indication that the focus was where it should have been all along: on the characters that Mortal Kombat fans know and love, and ones that newcomers could get to know and love.

Despite my cinema-appropriate hootin' and hollerin', I admit I did feel a little bad for Cole. He almost bested Shao Kahn—a crazy feat in itself—and only met his demise thanks to some amulet immortality shenanigans. In another timeline, he would have emerged victorious. Head intact.

But Mortal Kombat 2 is a significantly better film for his decentralisation and posthumous absence. It's one that puts Johnny Cage and Kitana—two actually interesting characters—in the limelight. I know Karl Urban's portrayal of everyone's favourite cocky Hollywood actor is divisive, but I personally loved it, while Adeline Rudolph absolutely killed it as the fan-wielding princess.

Liu Kang is still criminally underutilised, and Kano is regretfully brought back to life to continue being his incredibly irritating self. He does seem more tame in this sequel, which I'm grateful for, but I certainly wouldn't have said no to less of him regardless. He at least gets to share some of the comic relief with Johnny Cage, including a genuinely hilarious scene where he faces off against Baraka, unsightly prosthetic teeth only serving to be slightly distracting.

Do I think Mortal Kombat 2 is the best videogame movie to ever hit our screens? Absolutely not. But good grief, it is so much better than the first film. That surprise alone made me enjoy it far more than I had anticipated, even if it still lands as a rather mid adaptation. I'm not quite sure I can stomach yet another sequel—the final 10 minutes or so sets up all manner of third-movie plot points—but for a studio that's clearly listening, I have higher hopes this time around.

Mortal Kombat 2—the film, not the game—released earlier this week and reviews were mixed: games outlets like GamesRadar and IGN were generally favorable, but it copped a flogging in most other quarters. AV Club called it "dreck", The Hollywood Reporter called it "tacky", and Vulture called it "depressingly rizzless".

It's a familiar story where game-to-film adaptations are concerned: we saw a similar split with the recent Mario movie. But Todd Garner, producer of Mortal Kombat 2 and its predecessor, doesn't want to have a bar of it.

"Some of these reviews are cracking me up," he wrote on X. "It's clear they have never played the game and have no idea what the fans want or ANY of the rules / canon of Mortal Kombat."

He goes on: "One reviewer was mad that a guy 'had a laser eye!' Why the fuck do we still allow people that don't have any love for the genre review these movies! Baffling."

To some extent his position rings true: if a critic best known for tackling deliberately difficult Central European arthouse films was randomly assigned Mortal Kombat 2, you might very well smell a hatchet job. But most of the critics who panned Mortal Kombat 2, at least in the mainstream outlets like AV Club and Hollywood Reporter, write about mainstream Hollywood blockbusters as a matter of course. And that's exactly what Mortal Kombat 2 is, game-to-film adaptation or not.

Garner seems hellbent on positioning the film as "for the fans" which I guess is a decent enough motivation, albeit unnervingly humble in light of the film's reported $80 million budget. In response to an X user claiming that "critics are losing influence and fans don't care about their opinions", Garner wrote, in apparent full sincerity: "Absolutely. The gamification of movie reviews has gotten absurd."

Whatever that actually means—and I don't know—it's ludicrous for Garner to expect an $80 million Hollywood action film with ubiquitous marketing, tied to a household name IP of over 30 years vintage, should only be appraised by "fans". You made a film. You sit in a theatre and watch it. You don't get to perform any fatalities. And we're basically forced to know about it.

Anyway, as someone on X points out, the lore isn't even handled with perfect robustness. "Bro to be fair, you invented Cole Young, Arcana and couldn't even get the simple lore of Mileena and Kitana correct. I'd say you shouldn't be tossing any stones here," some dedicated pedant wrote.

To which Garner replied: "Fair".

A Minecraft Movie released in Spring 2025 and was an enormous success: even the iffy reviews couldn't stop it from chicken jockeying its way to almost $1 billion over its theatrical run. That kind of number made a sequel inevitable, and the production has started filming in New Zealand.

Returning star Jack Black, who plays Minecraft's Steve avatar, has marked the occasion by posting a rather lovely painting of himself to Instagram (thanks, GR+). It depicts the actor as Steve, perched atop a comfy leather chair and holding a blocky flame in his hand, with the caption "and so it begins." There's also a skull on the floor, which is a nod to some of the in-game paintings that can be found in Minecraft.

The painting is oil on panel and was created by Swedish artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand, who is also behind 40 paintings that can be found in Minecraft. Zetterstrand also posted some more detailed shots of the painting, and the final image of his post shows the artist in his studio with multiple other Minecraft paintings on the wall, which may just be works-in-progress but could also be a tease for their appearance in A Minecraft Movie 2.

The New Zealand Herald has been breathlessly reporting on the presence of various Hollywood talent in Auckland. Obviously Black is returning, as is co-star Jason Momoa and director Jared Hess, and Jennifer Coolidge has apparently been spotted on-set. The only new star confirmed thus far is MJ herself, Kirsten Dunst, who will play the character Alex and very honestly said she jumped at the chance to be in a film "where I don’t lose money."

I doubt anything can stop A Minecraft Movie 2 being a commercial juggernaut, though it may struggle to replicate the real-world virality of the first movie's chicken jockey moment, which had cinemagoers chucking popcorn in the aisles and even, in one case, taking a live chicken to a screening. Even Mojang itself eventually threw up its hands and added the chicken jockey to Minecraft.

Another lightning-in-a-bottle moment was Black's ditty 'Steve's Lava Chicken,' which at 34 seconds became the shortest song ever to crack the Billboard Hot 100, with my young son contributing to its success by playing it approximately three billion times. A Minecraft Movie 2 is due to release on July 23, 2027.

The Mortal Kombat 2 movie comes out Friday May 8, and early reviews have begun emerging from the portal. Does the sequel right the wrongs of the first film, which oddly didn't even feature a Mortal Kombat tournament? Is Karl Urban an improvement over… uh, whoever that main guy was in the first movie? Does someone else get cut in half lengthwise by a hat?

Let's find out. Not by going to the movie itself—I unfortunately couldn't make it to a press screening—but by seeing what some other outlets thought of the sequel. Early opinions seem pretty mixed, with some reviewers liking all the action but others unhappy to find a distinct lack of anything but action.

On the plus side, this easily feels like a film where the audience scores will wind up much higher than critics scores, so even if there are some negative reviews out there, Mortal Kombat fans might still wind up having a fine time.

TotalFilm (GamesRadar+): 3/5

Awarding it a score of 3/5, Jordan Farley says the sequel "lands some killer blows" but is "far from a flawless victory." Farley says MK 2 is a step up from 2021's Mortal Kombat—though that's a pretty low bar to hurdle. Karl Urban as Johnny Cage "has undergone a Deadpool personality transplant, with the character riffing on everything from Squid Game and Harry Potter to Big Trouble in Little China and The Lord of the Rings," making the sequel more fun than "its strangely self-serious predecessor."

IGN: 8/10

Max Scoville says the sequel "doesn’t waste any time delivering on everything the first film took time setting up." While MK 2 "might not be Oscar-caliber cinema," Scoville says, "it’s big and loud and gruesome and not afraid to have fun." The sequel "fully understands that its appeal lies in the thrill of seeing characters tear each other apart, not so much their motivations for doing so."

TheGamer: 2.5/5

Rhiannon Bevan says MK 2 is "great Kitana movie, and a bad Johnny Cage movie," saying Karl Urban isn't miscast but "misused," with his characterization "so egregiously boring at times that it gives Urban little to work with." Fortunately, "Mortal Kombat 2 has a deep respect for the worlds created in the games, and uses them as a starting point to give us the best scenes in the film, whenever we’re in Outworld."

Slashfilm: 8/10

MK2 brings "much more of the recent games' lore and aesthetic with them while keeping the strong focus on the fight sequences and an earnest take on the material," says Bill Bria. Calling it "a peanut butter and chocolate mix of a film," Bria says it's "easily one of the biggest surprises of the year," and "while not every little thing in the film works, it's honestly a little astonishing how much of it does."

Polygon: "Extremely forgettable"

Jake Kleinman calls MK 2 a "desperate apology to angry fans" who didn't like the tournament-less 2021 Mortal Kombat, and says "calling it a movie is actually pretty generous: It feels more like a series of well-choreographed fight scenes set against meticulously crafted backdrops" with a story that feels like "a video game cutscene." Ultimately, MK2 "is an extremely forgettable movie."

AV Club: "Dreck"

Jacob Oller calls Urban's version of Johnny Cage "humorless" and says the film "combines direct-to-video schlock with blockbuster boredom." Mortal Kombat 2 is "simply an excuse to pit the fighters against one another in different combinations and justify a third film where those who died in ridiculously gory ways can be snagged from hell (Netherrealm) to cash another paycheck."

Mashable: "Nonsensical mess"

"The bar is in hell for video game movies, huh?" asks Kristy Puchko. MK2 is "another ugly, nonsensical mess," and is "another example of good trailer, bad movie." Karl Urban's Cage feels "wedged in" instead of the focus of the film, and as his "clichéd plot line demands he become a selfless, brave hero, he becomes more grave and less giggle-inducing."

Here's a few more, continuing what looks like a pretty mixed response.

Vulture, 3/10: "Depressingly rizzless."
Movie Web, 3.5/5: "Does not disappoint."
Dread Central, 2.5/5: "Same fight, different characters."
Screen Crush: "Definitely not a flawless victory."
The Hollywood Reporter: "A tacky sequel strictly for the fans."

Earlier this week writer and director Noah Hawley, who's previously been behind the Fargo series as well as Alien: Earth, spoke about his upcoming TV adaptation of Ubisoft's Far Cry. Hawley made some comments that caused a bit of a stir while explaining why he wouldn't be directly adapting any of the existing games.

"I'm not specifically adapting any of the games that they've put out," Hawley told Deadline. "I'm saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men or Alien, 'Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is.'"

What really put the cat among the pigeons though was Hawley's contention that "games are built in a way that doesn't make for the best drama. When you play a videogame, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cutscenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline. That is death for a show."

The director of Far Cry 4, unsurprisingly, did not agree. "This is kinda pissing me off," Alex Hutchinson wrote on LinkedIn. "And I like Noah Hawley's work."

Hutchinson has now expanded on his thoughts in a new interview with IGN, saying that "gamers just want to feel their loves are respected, not dismissed, as they often were historically," before taking aim specifically at Hawley's claims about cutscenes.

"I think in certain genres a lot of people skip cutscenes," says Hutchinson. "Certainly the player story takes primacy, but story is a complex topic in games. Theme, setting, character are all key to story and are certainly drivers of player engagement so, even if they're skipping some cinematics, they are deeply engaged in narrative as they occupy a role and move through a designed space."

I'm not much of a cutscene-skipper myself (except on repeat playthroughs), and don't understand why you'd play something like Resident Evil Requiem, or indeed a Far Cry game, and skip the narrative context. It's also inarguable that the quality of production and writing across the industry has, generally speaking, improved massively over the last decade or so: I can genuinely call Requiem a well-written game with a straight face, which certainly wouldn't be the case with some of the older Resident Evils.

"The best Far Cry game to me is a fish out of water story," continues Hutchinson. "Dropping the player as a 'normal' person with limited knowledge into an extreme situation with a bunch of toys and challenges. Then the story acts as both asking the player questions and then providing reactions based on the player's input.

"My biggest problem is [Hawley's] dismissal of the game stories as pointless. His position isn't without merit, and his adaptations of Alien and Fargo also basically threw away history. This worked well in Fargo but less well in Alien, which turned into a kind of weird Peter Pan gets a dog story instead of remaining true to the best elements of the brand."

That's a rather brutal drive-by on Alien: Earth, though it's one I agree with: that show started fantastically well, but for me ended up in completely the wrong place. There's lots to enjoy in the first series, and hopefully Hawley can channel the best bits into a great season two, but that show's finale in particular was both absurd and unsatisfying.

But I don't want to come across as being too dismissive of Hawley's remarks (after all, he certainly knows more about making good TV than me). As PCG's Andy Chalk noted, "Far Cry at this point is a formula: A guy, some pals, and a situation that can only be resolved through the persistent application of extreme violence." A little like Bioshock and its lighthouse, you can start from that and tell any number of stories.

There's no further details about what to expect from Hawley's Far Cry series. Though if he does get it wrong, you can bet these comments will come back to haunt him.

I liked Atomfall quite a lot, especially after I stopped trying to play it like British Fallout and treated it as a linear survival-shooter instead. It was also the most successful game launch in Rebellion's history, which is not nothing given that the company has been around for more than 30 years.

Even so, I was surprised to learn, as I did when I read this Deadline report, that it's being adapted into a TV series.

Details are scant at this point, but the show is being developed in a partnership between Rebellion and British TV production company Two Brothers, best known for award-winning series The Missing and Fleabag. The report says Two Brothers founders Harry and Jack Williams will write the series.

"Atomfall has such a distinctive British tone and setting, and it’s been a real joy developing it alongside the Rebellion team—especially as two brothers working alongside two brothers (Rebellion founders Jason and Chris Kingsley)," the brothers said. "There’s something very exciting about expanding this strange, unsettling story for television."

That's certainly true, and I do think Atomfall as a setting has the potential for far more interesting stories than those of big-budget blockbuster games beloved by legions of fans who love nothing more than to argue about the minutiae of canonic lore. (You know what I'm talking about.)

In Atomfall, by comparison, you can do pretty much whatever you want. It's got sci fi, folk horror, action, comedy, conspiracy—and because it's British, you can cram in pretty much whatever else you want and people will just say, "oh, it's so cultured and sophisticated. Just like Masterpiece Theatre!"

And frankly, that pretty much is what I want from Atomfall on my TV: One of those distinctly British murder mystery shows set in the quaint English countryside where a retired librarian teams up with an amusingly-crass-for-her-age tea shop owner to solve crimes, except instead of trying to figure out why the per-capita murder rate is so goddamn high in their village of like 300 people, they're unravelling the dark secrets of Windscale and the quarantine. I don't really watch much TV, but you better believe I'd tune in for that.