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.

Noah Hawley, the executive producer of the live action Far Cry series revealed (and then quickly unrevealed, but too late) last year, says he was attracted to the series because it's an "anthology" that tells a different story, with different setting, characters, and motivations, with every new game. And precisely none of those games will be featured in the series, because Hawley has other ideas.

"It was an exciting idea that we could build an anthology game adaptation where each season is a different story about civilized people thrown into situations where they have to become increasingly uncivilized," Hawley told Deadline.

"I’m not specifically adapting any of the games that they’ve put out—I’m saying much as I did with the Coens [Hawley was the chief creator of the Fargo series] or X-Men [he created FX’s Legion] or Alien, ‘Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is'." With last year's Alien: Earth, Hawley more or less ignored the series canon to tell his own story.

Hawley also pointed out the need for "a larger conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of adapting videogames," because of the way they're structurally different from television or films.

"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," Hawley said. "That is death for a show."

I don't necessarily agree with that take, and the idea of the Far Cry story being propelled forward by Hurk and me careening through rural Montana in a beat-up hatchback with a rocket launcher hanging out the back window is fun but perhaps doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. On the other hand, I'll be the first to admit that Hawley probably knows more about making a TV show than I do, and as someone who doesn't skip cutscenes—even in a Far Cry game—I might be an outlier here.

Hawley's approach hasn't been universally welcomed: Plenty of folks in the Far Cry subreddit don't care for it, and Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson seemed to take issue with it as well, saying in response to a post about the report on LinkedIn, "This is kinda pissing me off. And I like Noah Hawley’s work."

Myself, though, I think I see where Hawley is coming from. 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. The details don't really matter, because none of them provide an especially compelling narrative to begin with: Lots of fans cite Vaas from Far Cry 3 as a peak villain, but for my money the batshit ending of Far Cry 5 is the real gold.

The point is that when you view Far Cry that way—that it's a parable about stripping away the veneer of civilization, told over and over again—then you can tell pretty much whatever tale you'd like, and it'll work.

And if that doesn't float your boat, well, there's always Uwe Boll.

I suppose it was inevitable: Less than a year after Activision and Paramount confirmed that a Call of Duty movie is in the works, The Hollywood Reporter says a Battlefield movie is on the way too.

It's still very early in the process—the report says the "hot package" is currently being pitched to studios and streaming platforms—but Christopher McQuarrie, who's written, produced, and directed the last few Mission Impossible movies, among others, is attached to do all of the above for this film, while Michael B. Jordan is onboard as a producer and may also possibly star in it, depending on how things shake out. Electronic Arts is also attached as a producer.

That's kind of ironic, because when the Call of Duty movie's release date was announced, I suggested the plot (which we still don't know about) could very well end up something like Without Remorse, the tale of an unstoppable American hero caught up in a high-stakes conflict between the US and Russia starring—you guessed it—Michael B. Jordan.

Then again, The Terminal List starring Chris Pratt might be a better fit—it's a series, not a movie, but Pratt literally says "Now you're in the battlefield" in it.

This, as I've previously said about the Call of Duty movie, highlights the challenge both of these projects face: How do you make a film based on either of them that's not just a generic war movie with a brand stapled to it—especially given how much both series have borrowed from war films like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, and, never forget, The Big Red One? It's literally the title of a Call of Duty game.

(21 years later, it still hasn't come to PC, but we remain hopeful.)

Call of Duty could follow along one of the Modern Warfare plots and probably do alright (hell, they could just remake Big Red One and call it a day), but Battlefield doesn't have that established cast of killers that's immediately recognizable as those guys from that game, even if you can't remember their names. I've played two or three Battlefields over the years, and the most I can recall about any of them is that one was modern, and two (I think?) weren't. And yeah, that's just me, but I'd bet good money that in this one thing, at least, I'm not too far off the norm.

Be that as it may, THR says interest in the Battlefield film project is running high, and "it will not be cheap" for whoever picks it up. The report also states that a theatrical release is being prioritized, so it's not clear at this point whether streaming powerhouse Netflix will get a shot at it.

There's no hint of a release date yet, obviously, but given that the Call of Duty movie project seems to be considerably further along, I wouldn't expect Battlefield to hit screens for at least a few years—and that's assuming it doesn't end up like the Splinter Cell movie, spending a decade in limbo before someone mercifully pulls the plug.

We've been getting heaps of behind-the-scenes leaked footage and images for the upcoming Elden Ring movie directed by Alex Garland, who last time we checked was on his seventh playthrough. We've seen stills of the sets, an image of Marika with not one, but two braids? Interesting.

But the biggest news we've had so far is undoubtedly the 37 seconds of footage depicting none other than the Loathsome Dung Eater hanging from the stocks in what looks to be a town square while getting pummelled with rotten food by angry onlookers. That's it. It's quite literally just 37 seconds of people hurling food at the poor sod and screaming from the top of their lungs.

In the game, Dung Eater gets hanged in front of a crowd at Leyndell, the royal capital, during the introductory cutscene. But again, if it's anything like the game, this won't be the last we see of him as you can find his apparition in one of the backrooms of the Roundtable Hold and his real body beneath Leyndell in the Subterranean Shunning-Grounds where he was jailed among other noble Omen, (those horned dudes no one seems to like, sorry Morgott).

But why was he hanged? Well the Dung Eater may be iconic among Elden Ring fans, but he's not a very nice fellow. Before his hanging, he was a Tarnished who murdered and defiled victims with the seedbed curse, severing their connection to the Erdtree and cursing them to come back as Omen.

But who knows what shape the film will take or how closely it will coincide with the narrative from the games. While it may not follow how the game plays out (imagine it just being a 60-hour silent playthrough), I do reckon there won't be any changes to the canon, what with Garland clearly being such a huge fan.

So far, the mood of fans after seeing the Dung Eater clip seems to just be elated. The comments under the leaked footage are full of people praising the legendary "Pee-Pee Poo-Poo man" or the "Darstardly Doo-doo Devourer", all fond nicknames. While others take it more seriously: "Amazing shot! Can't wait to see this all coming together", before someone else brings it back down to earth: "If they actually say 'The Loathsome Dung Eater' in this movie it's going to be my personal Chicken Jockey."

I hadn't actually thought of this, but there are a lot of opportunities to send cinemas into the same chaotic haze the Minecraft movie did if Garland plays his cards right. The Loathsome Dung Eater is just one example of this; others include the Radahn Festival, "Bear Witness", or quite literally anything written on Scriptstones, whether that be "Fort, night", "Try finger, but hole", or just "Dog". I'm definitely going to watch the Elden Ring movie, though. I'll just need to mentally prepare myself for another Chicken Jockey moment.

If there's one thing you need to know about me it's that I love the film Death of Stalin, and while there's not a single actor in that film I felt didn't absolutely smash it, I have to say that it cemented Jason Isaacs as one of my all-time favourite actors. Another thing about me is that I love Gundam, but never did I think that those two worlds would collide.

So I am very happy at the latest news that Netflix has cast Jason Isaacs among others in its upcoming live-action Gundam film. "Gundam, the iconic franchise that launched a global phenomenon, is now in production as a live-action film," an official post on X reads. "Starring Sydney Sweeney, and Noah Centineo, about rival mech pilots at war across Earth and its space colonies."

I'm also excited to see Nonso Anozie as I also really enjoyed Sweet Tooth, but fangirling aside I'm not sure if the rest of this cast really hits the spot. In all honesty, while I love Gundam I'm not sure I'd even want to see a live action film, especially one made by Netflix.

My biggest concern for the live action film is the mecha design. There's been no word so far on who is handing this for the film, so it's not a complete lost cause yet. But considering how integral these mobile suits are to the Gundam series it'll likely be the deciding factor of whether or not I check this film out.

If I wanted to watch anything Gundam I'd simply just go back to War in the Pocket or Mobile Suit Gundam 00. But there are honestly so many Gundam series already out there that fans are spoilt for choice.

No release date has been announced yet, and as the social media post points out, the live-action film just started production. So, there may still be a decent wait until we get a glimpse of what a live action Gundam film will look like.

It was reported earlier this month that Amazon MGM Studios' head of global TV Peter Friedlander had requested script rewrites for the in-development Mass Effect TV series in order to make it "more appealing to non-gamers." Not very cool! But the claim may also not be entirely accurate, as writer and executive producer Daniel Casey said on Bluesky that it's news to him.

"So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I'm writing (I've signed NDAs, etc)—but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you," Casey wrote (via Kotaku). "I don't know where that 'non-gaming audiences' quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me."

So, I can’t talk about the specifics of what I’m writing (I’ve signed NDAs, etc) — but for whatever it’s worth, that article by the Ankler caught me off guard just as much as you. I don’t know where that “non-gaming audiences” quote came from or who said it, but at no point has that been said to me.

— @danielcaseytypes.bsky.social (@danielcaseytypes.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-04-20T22:11:54.105Z

Whether that's good or bad is a matter of perspective, I suppose, although frankly I think that if you're writing specifically to appeal to existing Mass Effect fans, you really are running the risk of alienating or shortchanging people coming into it with no foreknowledge of the series. In the bigger picture, though, I think it's better for all involved when executives keep their big ideas to themselves, and let the creative people—who are paid to be creative—do the actual creating.

Of course, at this point not much creation has been done, at least not as far as the public is aware: Casey, who co-wrote the screenplay for F9, is signed as writer and producer for the Mass Effect series, while Doug Yung is showrunner, but there's still no word on a cast, specific timeline, or what the series will actually be about, except that it will not be based on the original Mass Effect trilogy.

Encouragingly, the team behind Amazon's hit Fallout series is also involved in the production. Personally, I feel like Mass Effect is much more of a closed loop than Fallout, but who knows? Maybe lightning will strike twice.

In case you'd forgotten, there's also a new Mass Effect game in development at BioWare, although much like the series we know very little about it beyond the fact that it's happening.

2028 is shaping up to be a big year for movies based on videogames. Just days after Activision and Paramount revealed that the Call of Duty film they're working on is set to debut in June 2028, Bandai Namco and A24 have announced that the Elden Ring film will hit screens on March 3 of the same year.

The release date news comes alongside the reveal of the full Elden Ring film cast, and it's... stacked-ish? There are some names in it I recognize, anyway.

• Kit Connor (Warfare, Heartstopper)
• Ben Whishaw (Skyfall, Paddington)
• Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus, Civil War)
• Tom Burke (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Black Bag)
• Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms)
• Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina)
• Jonathan Pryce (The Two Popes)
• Ruby Cruz (Willow, Bottoms)
• Nick Offerman (The Last of Us)
• John Hodgkinson
• Jefferson Hall
• Emma Laird
• Peter Serafinowicz

I'm not really a movie guy (more of a movie theme song guy, really) so we're not going to go too deep here, but Nick Offerman obviously leaps out: I still see him pretty much exclusively as Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation, but he's done some amazing work since then, including an Emmy award-winning turn in The Last of Us.

The presence of Peter Serafinowicz, who for some reason ended up playing Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, is also great: He's known for being tremendously funny, deeply weird, and unexpectedly menacing, sometimes in various combinations of the three, which would seem to make him a great fit for an Elden Ring weirdo.

And of course Jonathan Pryce is a legendary actor who messed up Stellan Skarsgård real bad in Ronin. (He's done a lot of other stuff too but Ronin is really great, so I'm sneaking a mention.) I'm sure everyone else in the cast is very good, too.

Despite not being a big film buff, I'm genuinely eager to check out the Elden Ring movie, or at least to make someone else on the team watch it and hear what they think. Because as someone who loved Elden Ring and played the absolute hell out of it, I had absolutely no idea what was going on throughout the experience, nor what it all added up to when it was over. A divine world brought to ruin by the hubris of the gods something something, I guess?

But in terms of coherent story—the sort of thing a game can live without, but a film absolutely cannot—I stand by my long-held position that Elden Ring is maybe the purest expression of sound and fury signifying nothing. Which I don't mean as a negative, just that it's way past time we all acknowledge that this guy was right:

For the record, that's why I'm not even going to try guessing about who's playing what (the announcement doesn't say), but I'll tell you this much: If I only watch one videogame-based movie in 2028, based on the candidates I've seen so far it's going to be this one. The announcement says production on the Elden Ring film "begins in spring 2026."

The Call of Duty movie announced by Activision and Paramount in 2025 is set to come out on June 30—of, uh, 2028. No need to start standing in line just yet, I guess.

The two-years-down-the-road debut was revealed today on the Call of Duty X account:

Not much more to it, really, although I do note that there's now a Call of Duty Movie X account, which is where we'll presumably start to see movie-specific CoD news popping up. You'll want to follow that if you're interested in this flick.

We don't know much about the film at this point, but as PC Gamer's TV guy pointed out last year, it does seem to be moving ahead with speed and purpose. Less than two months after the initial reveal, dad TV maestro Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone, 1883) was announced as the scriptwriter, while Friday Night Lights series developer and Battleship director Peter Berg is set to co-write and direct.

But even with that dearth of detail, I don't think it's too hard to guess at what we can expect in the broad strokes: Something akin to Without Remorse, I would say, the Michael B. Jordan-starring Prime-exclusive tale of an unstoppable American hero caught up in a high-stakes conflict between the US and Russia—while the world sleeps soundly, blissfully unaware that its fate turns on the actions of a few hard men willing to do the hard things.

I joke (although I'm not joking about that, to be clear, that's pretty much Taylor Sheridan's whole thing) but I also dig war movies, and so even though Call of Duty really isn't my bag I'll no doubt watch this one when it's out. In 2028.

The first trailer for the upcoming Street Fighter film is out, and I'll tell you this: It looks very Street Fighter.

It seems that the friendship between Ryu and Ken has gone a little off the rails, as have the men themselves: Neither of them are looking especially sharp as the trailer begins. Fortunately for all, Chun-Li steps in to reunite them, perhaps not entirely willingly, for the 1993 World Warrior Tournament, "a brutal clash of fists, fate, and fury."

But why? Well, this tournament isn't the pure Kumite of days gone by: "Behind this battle royale lies a deadly conspiracy that forces them to face off against each other and the demons of their past. And if they don’t, it’s GAME OVER!" So it's up to the three of them to clean house, I guess. Shades of Mortal Kombat, maybe?

Anyway, while the drama is high, the movie is clearly not going to be shy about embracing its videogame roots. Here, for instance, is Ken about to get his ass suplexed through a taxi from 20 feet up by an oddly Donald Sutherland-looking Zangief:

There's also a clip in the trailer of Ken beating the hell out of a car, knocking the hood flying with a single kick while a crowd hoots, hollers, and cheers him on. Hey, the '90s was a weird time.

But while there's cheese a-plenty, this Street Fighter flick looks more knowing about it than the classic 1994 original—or at least it shows the potential—and that could elevate it to an actually good movie, rather than one that's merely accidentally entertaining.

The trailer serves up a pretty good look at just about all the street fighters in Street Fighter, and I have to say that casting David Dastmalchian as M. Bison is a brilliant choice.

Will he say the line? Man, I hope so.

The one notable semi-absence is Jason Momoa as Blanka: He's arguably the biggest name in the cast, but he's only seen near the end of the video, in a very brief clip obscured by dust and motion. Other characters have smaller showings too, but in terms of raw star power, Momoa is the big hook, especially after his turn in A Minecraft Movie. Is Street Fighter holding something back for the next trailer?

This is about as clear as it gets:

So it looks like it might be fun, hopefully in the "actual fun" way and possibly in the "so bad it's good" way. Hopefully the former, but we'll find out later this year: Street Fighter hits the big screens on October 16.

I don't know what compels me to keep forcing you all to confront the ugly history of videogame movies in quiz form. All I can say is, I've done it again, and I'm afraid you have to live with it.

This time it's a straightforward test—though not an easy one. You simply have to name every videogame movie adaptation that has ever had an English-speaking theatrical release. Yes, unfortunately that does mean remembering the names of all the Resident Evil sequels.

Now, let's go over some of the qualifiers here, because a few examples you may be thinking of are not included because of them. First off, these are all actual adaptations—we're not including any movie about a videogame. So for example The Wizard and Gran Turismo are excluded, as are documentaries like King of Kong or Indie Game: The Movie, because they're about people playing games but not adaptations of the games themselves.

All of these movies have also received a commercial theatrical release of multiple screenings in an English-speaking country—so that excludes ones that only came out on DVD or streaming (such as Alone in the Dark II) or that were only released theatrically in Japan (such as Yakuza: Like a Dragon), or that only had one screening as a one-off event (like Advent Children).

I've included a few clues to help you along: you can see the year the movie was released in cinemas, its approximate budget and box office takings, and most depressingly of all its current Rotten Tomatoes score. In a few cases at least that should help—you can probably remember which 2023 videogame movie made a billion dollars, for example.

Of course whenever I giveth, I also taketh away, and in this case I have made the cruel choice to only give you eight minutes to name as many as you can. That's pretty tight, so just go for as high a score as you can manage rather than trying to hit every single answer—and be thankful that it means less time thinking about how long it took before one of these movies earned more than a 50% critics score.

Let us know how you did in the comments below!

Just because a deal is reached to get a movie made doesn't mean it'll actually get made. We've seen it happen a bunch of times with videogame adaptations, like Just Cause, which was announced in 2011 and Splinter Cell, which was in development way back in 2005. Neither film ever materialized.

Enter Metal Gear Solid. Hideo Kojima announced the film adaptation himself back in 2006, some 20 years ago now, and despite occasional names popping up—like that Viggo Mortenson or Hugh Jackman would play Snake, or that Paul Thomas Anderson or Jordan Vogt-Roberts would direct—the movie has never appeared or seemingly gotten past the pre-production phase.

Smash cut to today, and like Snake climbing that ridiculously long ladder in Metal Gear Solid 3, we're just gonna keep going onward and upward. According to Sony, via The Hollywood Reporter, the Metal Gear Solid movie is happening, or happening again, or perhaps still happening.

Sony has signed Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, the director duo of the rather good Final Destination: Bloodlines, to a deal to develop multiple films, including an animated Venom movie, sci-fi film The Earthling, and, yep, Metal Gear Solid.

"Metal Gear Solid was nothing short of a groundbreaking cinematic masterpiece that forever revolutionized video games," Lipovsky and Stein said—though The Hollywood Reporter unfortunately doesn't specify whether or not they said it perfectly in unison. I hope they did. "We are thrilled and honored to bring Hideo Kojima’s iconic characters and unforgettable world to life."

It's a standard, boring statement, but the two directors seem fantastically busy: in addition to those Sony pictures, they're also working on a new Gremlins movie, a film called Long Lost with Amblin Entertainment, and something called The Traveler over at Paramount. They're not necessarily directing all of those, but after the 20-year wait, I might be a bit more hopeful a MGS flick would see the light of day if the directors weren't already nipples-deep in other projects.

At least with the deal in place, we can probably expect some casting news, right? Who would make a good Solid Snake these days? Reacher's Alan Ritchson recently threw his hat into the ring, Oscar Isaac was on board for the Vogt-Roberts version, and we're happy to see Karl Urban show up just about anywhere. Hopefully we won't have to wait more than a couple more decades to find out.

Not every TV series based on a game can be a real corker like Fallout or Arcane. The Halo TV show was a disappointment. The Witcher series on Netflix started strong but fans found more and more to dislike as time went on. Critics and viewers both gave a pretty strong thumbs down to the Resident Evil TV show.

But I've been watching the very first TV show ever based on a videogame, and it's given me some perspective. We're doing real good here in the future of television adaptations. We're spoiled, in fact.

Pac-Man was an animated series produced by Hanna-Barbera from 1982 to 1983, and I probably don't need to explain this part, but it was based on the Pac-Man arcade games. In the show, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man (called Pepper, for some reason) and their child, Pac-Baby, live in Pac-Village, in Pac-Land, which is run by Pac-President and protected by a superhero named Super-Pac.

I know they didn't have much material to work with—in the game Pac-Man is just a circle who eats smaller circles, so it's not exactly a Sapkowski novel—but could they have put a bit more effort into it? Was the script meeting just an exercise in quickly slapping the word "Pac" onto everything between rails of cocaine? Imagine if the Fallout show was as lazy with its worldbuilding. It'd be a show about Fall-Girl leaving the Fall-Vault, meeting Fall-Ghoul, and crossing Fall-Land to find her Fall-Father.

Naturally, Pac-Man is constantly pursued by ghosts (they're oddly called "ghost monsters" here) though instead of four there are five: Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Clyde, and Sue, a lady ghost imported from the Ms. Pac-Man game in a move certain viewers today would probably decry as "woke." The ghosts work for a villain named Mezmaron who somewhat ironically, in a world where creatures fight by eating each other, has a Bane-like muzzle over his mouth. Maybe that's why he's so mad. Everyone gets to eat things but him.

This is speculation, but the year before the Pac-Man show arrived, Hanna-Barbera was producing The Smurfs cartoon, and Mezmaron feels like an off-brand Gargamel. He's obsessed with sending his ghosts to infiltrate Pac-Land to get Pac-Man, because Pac-Man knows where the Power Pellets (those dots Pac-Man eats) come from. Where do Power Pellets come from, you ask?

Why, they come from Power Pellet Forest where they grow on Power Pellet Trees, of course! Some more tremendous worldbuilding.

In a typical episode, Mezmaron will send the ghosts out to chase Pac-Man who runs away until he finds a spare Power Pellet (despite these being instakill powerups, and him being the guy who works in the forest full of them, and the fact that he's constantly hounded by ghosts, he rarely has one with him).

Then he eats the ghosts one by one and Mezmaron is foiled. Oftentimes there is a gadget involved, such as the time Mezmaron invented an earthquake machine to shake the pellets out of the trees or a nightmare ray that would give Pac-Man bad dreams.

One bit of the adaptation is at least a little interesting: when Pac-Man eats a ghost they turn into eyeballs as in the game, then flee back to Mezmaron's lair, where he directs them into a closet to put on new "ghost suits." So, apparently the natural state of ghosts is just eyeballs, and when Pac-Man eats them he's digesting their clothing. Look, I didn't say it made sense, I said it was "at least a little interesting."

I know it's a kid's cartoon so the bar is set pretty low, but just because it's for children doesn't mean it gets a pass for not being funny or even clever. There's almost nothing to enjoy about the show. Pac-Man is a dull, good-natured Fred Flintstone type with a job and a New York accent. Despite watching a bunch of episodes I can barely differentiate the ghosts from one another except that one has a deep voice and one is dumber than the rest, which stands out even with them all being pretty dumb. Pretty much every episode ends with an exhausting sequence of Pac-Man consuming the ghosts as they try to hide in various places from his vengeful mouth.

The best thing I can say for the Pac-Man show is the first time one of the ghosts bit a Pac-Person, I thought they'd legit broken his neck:

Turns out Pac-People just deflate a bit when bitten, but it's still pretty shocking to see for the first time and they seem to have toned it down a bit in later episodes, with most of the actual biting happening offscreen.

Half of the show feels like a poor Roadrunner vs Wile E. Coyote ripoff. In one scene, Pac-Man is being chased by ghosts and pulls out a pack of fast-growing cactus seeds. He plants them and the ghosts get immediately stuck in the cactus. End scene. There's not even a setup to him having bought the seeds in the first place, he just happens to have them!

In a common B-plot, Pac-Man's cat wants to do harm to Pac-Man's dog (such as tricking him to fall into a garbage can), and routinely fails (such as falling into the garbage itself). Maybe this show isn't the result of cocaine-fueled writers, actually. It would at least have more manic energy.

Another weird decision: despite the legendary Peter Cullen (the voice of Optimus Prime) being in the cast, the villain Mezmaron is voiced by a guy named Alan Lurie. Cullen only does the voice of Pac-Man's cat, who just sort of occasionally wheezes. What a waste of an S-tier set of pipes!

I'm pretty sure even the glazed-eyed children of the 1980s didn't love the idea of Pac-Man being an adult who goes to work every day. In Season 2 the show hurriedly added a younger version of Pac-Man named PJ and things got zanier: plots involved Pac-Man becoming a werewolf and the George Washington face of Mount Rushmore coming alive and biting a hole in Mezmaron's hot air balloon. Okay, I'm leaning more toward the cocaine theory again.

The Pac-Man show only lasted two seasons—though in the '80s that still meant 44 flippin' episodes—plus a few specials, and it's not hard to see why. Even for kidslop, it's some supremely low-effort work and makes me appreciate how much goes into modern shows based on games. Maybe the Halo and The Witcher shows aren't perfect, or even that good. But they at least tried.

As the saying goes, records were made to be broken—and that's especially true if you invent a bunch of records just so you can say they've been broken.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie came out last week and, despite it kinda sucking, predictably had a monster of a weekend at the box office. But after reading a bunch of stories breathlessly reporting that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie broke records on its opening weekend, I'm questioning exactly what records it broke and if they should even be considered records. According to articles from around the internet, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie had:

• The biggest global opening of 2026 to date
• The biggest domestic opening of 2026 to date
• The biggest MPA international opening of 2026 to date

Yes, TSMGM had a genuinely massive weekend (which began on Wednesday because that's when movie studios pretend the weekend begins so they can claim they had massive weekends). It made $372,487,455 worldwide ($190 million domestic and $182 million worldwide). That's fantastic. That almost matches the $377.5 million The Super Mario Bros. Movie made its first weekend in 2023—on its way to grossing over $1 billion.

That's inarguably a huge opening, biggest of the year, but just to point out the obvious: it's April. It's the beginning of April, even, and no one releases anything in January or February. Apart from Project Hail Mary in March (which made $141 million in its first weekend), there haven't been a lot of big movies to outperform for this "record." What did it really beat? Wuthering Heights? Scream 7? Another damn Avatar? Whatever the hell Hoppers is? Melania?

It's April. I have no doubt Galaxy is going to be one of the biggest movies of the year, but 2026 hasn't really started yet. Coming up this year we've still got Avengers: Doomsday, Toy Story 5, The Odyssey, Disney's live-action Moana, Spielberg's return to making alien movies, and another damn Spider-Man. Galaxy crushed it, no doubt. But it's April. Calm down.

I also read that SMGM is:

• The only animated franchise with two titles opening over $350M globally
• The only animated franchise to have two titles open over $170M internationally

Yeah, more impressive money stuff, but here you're just throwing the dart first and then drawing the bullseye around wherever it lands.

First, you don't need to differentiate between animated films and live-action films anymore—animation is perfectly mainstream these days—unless you're trying to exclude a whole bunch of live-action films so your invented record looks more impressive. Cut out Spider-Man movies, Avengers movies, The Fast & Furious franchise, Disney live-action remakes, and look who is left all alone on the podium: It's a-me, Mario! (Or as Chris Pratt would say: "It is me. I am Mario. Wa. Hoo.")

Second, unless you say beforehand that $350 million and $170 million are specific milestones, they just feel arbitrary as records. If Usain Bolt doesn't finish a 200 meter dash, you don't give him a medal for running the first 170 meters, right?

• The biggest Wednesday in April ever

There we go! That is simple, and true, and worth pointing out. Galaxy made $34 million on its first Wednesday in April, compared to the next best, which was $31 million for the 2023 Mario movie. A legit record. Good job!

But then we start getting really in the weeds:

• The second biggest three-day animated domestic opening for Universal
• The fourth biggest five-day domestic opening ever
• The fourth biggest three-day Easter weekend
• The third biggest three-day domestic opening for video game adaptation
• The fourth animated franchise with two titles opening over $100M over three days

OK, what are we doing here? Is the weekend three days or five days? Why not throw in a couple two-day and one-day weekends, too? And how many caveats should records have? "If you count two titles but exclude live-action and only count three days instead of five, it's only the fourth time it's ever happened!" Wow, you don't say.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie had a massive opening weekend and is easily going to make a billion dollars. That's a reward in itself: there's no need to invent a bunch of extra ones.

Our first glimpse of Alex Garland's upcoming Elden Ring movie might be in a TikTok video shot by a lucky fan in the UK. Not only is it unmistakably a near-exact recreation of the ruined churches from the game, there's evidence that it's being built in a popular filming location.

Throxtv, an Elden Ring fan and Twitch streamer, posted a short video on Friday of a ruined stone building with a statue of a woman that looks exactly like the churches of Marika found throughout The Lands Between. The open field it's sitting in resembles the game's opening area, Limgrave, minus the fences surrounding it.

In a follow-up video posted earlier today, Throxtv showed off the opposite side of the church and the other props nearby. Wagons, barrels, and stacks of cinderblocks can be seen, along with construction equipment. The cinderblocks bear the logo of Hedgehog Construction, a company known for providing "specialist scenery construction for film and television", according to its website.

Hedgehog Construction also happens to be near the Windsor Great Park, which is a popular filming location for television shows and movies, like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Throxtv wouldn't reveal the exact location of the set to PC Gamer over direct messages, but the park would be my first guess.

None of this confirms the set has anything to do with the movie, though. It could be part of a marketing campaign for the upcoming Tarnished Edition of the game, or something else unrelated. I reached out to A24 to ask if it would confirm that the set is related to the film and will update this post if I hear back.

Throxtv provided PC Gamer with a third video of the set that was taken earlier today by a friend. It appears the church has been camouflaged by a tarp to protect it from photos, and has two people standing outside—presumably to stop anyone else from trying to take a peek.

Meanwhile, Elden Ring fans are busy speculating what the movie could be about now that they've seen something as recognizable as a church of Marika. Very little else is known about the approach director Alex Garland will take with it. The filmmaker is a noted fan of the game, so much so that he whipped up a 160-page script just to convince FromSoftware and Bandai Namco that he should be the one to handle it. But apart from his credentials, the rest of the film, including where and when it takes place, is unknown.

Independent entertainment journalist Jeff Sneider reported last year that actors Ben Whishaw (Skyfall), Kit Connor (Heartstopper), and Cailee Spaeny (Civil War) were "in talks" to star in the film. However, A24 hasn't said a word since its initial announcement.

All I know is that the set is absolutely a church of Marika, and one that has a statue that is more or less intact compared to all the broken ones that inhabit the DLC. Specifically, it looks like it could be the third church of Marika, but it's really far too early to know how it will be used in the film—if at all—at this point.

I don't envy any showrunners currently working on a videogame adaptation, which have been the new hotness since Fallout and The Last of Us hit the big time. On one side, you've got the general TV audience who may be skeptical of what videogames can bring to the table, and on the other, you've got hordes of fans with an axe to grind for anyone who mucks up a take on that thing they love a little too much. In other words, the Mass Effect show was always gonna have an uphill battle—and a new report alleges a rewrite has been ordered already.

The report from The Ankler (via IGN) states that Amazon MGM Studios' head of global TV Peter Friedlander is reviewing various scripts for in-development shows, including Mass Effect, which is "on the verge" of a series order. Friedlander has reportedly requested that the show be rewritten to be "more appealing to non-gamers."

While the phrase "appealing to non-gamers" isn't going to flatter a lot of gamers (who, one assumes, are more excited for this show than anybody), I can't help but think of how The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is currently getting drawn and quartered for basically being a YouTube Shorts-esque parade of incoherent references. Maybe this rewrite will help Mass Effect avoid that sort of pitfall? A wink and a nod every now and then can be fun, but when a TV show is too reverent to the source material, it makes me wonder why I'm not just playing the game instead.

On the other hand, there have been plenty of adaptations that seem embarrassed to be based on a videogame, or fail to fill the void in these stories left by a lack of interactivity. You might remember that the Halo TV show had "absolutely no vibes," as former PC Gamer features producer Natalie Clayton put it. The bar for quality for these adaptations has certainly gone up over time, but bad and funny is usually preferable to okay and boring.

If this kills all your hype for the nascent show, at least you've still got the next Mass Effect game to look forward to—though the recent Saudi-backed buyout of EA reportedly had the team at Bioware wondering how long they had left, and that's after a brutal wave of layoffs carved out a number of the studio's veterans earlier in 2025.

You might find more cause for hope in the realm of off-brand Mass Effectlings: CRPG sicko studio Owlcat has a very Mass Effect-y Expanse game coming next year, Exodus is also set to launch in 2027 and has a lot of former BioWare talent, while even Star Wars Zero Company has a strong BioWare inflection to its pacing and squad interactions.

As was recently spotted by Kotaku, Esquire Singapore published a feature in March all about live-action One Piece actor Mackenyu Arata called "Mackenyu in Resonance." It includes what writer Joy Ling calls "an unprecedented interview for both parties," which isn't so much an interview as it is a transcript from an AI chat bot masquerading as Mackenyu.

"We were stoked to have some face time with the Japanese-American actor, but his schedule prevented it," the story reads. "We had the photospread, but nothing directly uttered by the 29-year-old. With a driving need for a feature, we had to be inventive. Harnessing our creative license, we pulled his [responses] verbatim from previous interviews and fed them through an AI programme to formulate new responses."

The "interview" is a bizarre read, and was produced using Claude and Copilot. Esquire asks about the actor's experience becoming a father, how he deals with "disillusionment" (not in regard to a particular part of his life, just… disillusionment in general, I guess?), and even gets into his memories of his late father, Sonny Chiba. The AI responds with the sort of unsubstantial meandering you might expect, though at one point it does type "(laughs)" so you know it's in a good mood.

Readers and writers are not pleased with the piece. "This makes me so angry," wrote New York Times-published journalist Nicole Clark on Bluesky. "In what world is any of this appropriate or justifiable? And even with 'disclaimers' everything else about the piece looks like a typical interview. It's the equivalent of using ad space to publish misinformation."

"That's not an interview; it's fan fic dialogue," posted Bluesky user Nona Jabiznez. A reply from user Maggie Sharp reads, "Fan ficcers write their own stuff and if they don't they're hunted for sport."

It feels like the golden age of the AI-operated sock puppet, considering this Esquire piece and the AI clones of real journalists recently in use by companies like Grammarly.

The Super Mario Galaxy movie released to some shaky reviews; most critics have slammed the sequel for "having no centre", being only "a series of large, vaguely connected explosions", and simply "a way of gouging cash out of families."

But all the awful reviews of the sequel aside, CEO of Illumination Chris Meledandri is still gushing about the movie's somewhat invisible successes, and how great it was working with Nintendo and director Shigeru Miyamoto during an interview with Cherry the Geek TV: "The secret is being able to bring Miyamoto and the team into the center of the process." (via GamesRadar).

"And I'm not just complimenting Miyamoto because he's standing here," Meledandri adds. "Part of me doesn't want to give away this secret because it's like having the secret to Coca-Cola and then giving it away. The secret actually is the inclusion of Miyamoto and the Nintendo artists in the center of the filmmaking process."

I'm not sure working with the original creators on an adaptation means it'll be better is much of a secret. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that any adaptation, whether it be film or TV, should always include some sort of expertise from the source material. But then again the Super Mario movies do tread new ground for Illumination.

"It's not something that we had ever done at Illumination," Meledandri says. "You know, we had made 10 movies at Illumination. We had made all of them completely inside the studio. So, this was the first time that we were going to work in a new way." Past movies include Despicable Me, The Secret Life of Pets, and Sing, all of which didn't have original source material to look back on.

The Super Mario Galaxy movie, like its predecessor, may not have done well initially, but that doesn't mean it won't break any records in the following weekends. The first Mario movie had an equally shaky start but then went on to earn over $1 billion worldwide, so it certainly wouldn't be surprising to see its sequel reach those heights, despite all the bad reviews.

After the first season of Fallout launched on Prime Video, Amazon boasted it had been watched by 65 million people, making it their biggest hit since The Rings of Power. Unlike The Rings of Power, people actually seem to have liked Fallout's second season, which The Hollywood Reporter reports has now been seen by 83 million people.

At least, in part. Streaming figures are apparently based on how many viewers pressed play, not on how many stuck around for the finale, so it's worth taking them with a grain of salt. Still, 83 million is a lot of people who are at least curious to watch the further adventures of Walton Ghoulgins, whether they checked out five minutes in or not.

The second season's release had a bit of a halo effect on the first season, pushing it up to 100 million views. (Or partial views, again.) "Fallout continues to resonate in a powerful way with our global Prime Video audience," Peter Friedlander, head of global television at Amazon MGM Studios, was quoted as saying by The Hollywood Reporter.

"The show's performance reaffirms this," Friedlander went on, "with season two now joining season one as two of our top four biggest seasons we've ever launched. We're thrilled to see the franchise continue to grow as we head into season three."

Fallout's third season will apparently go into production this summer, and includes a visit to a new location the games have yet to take us.

I haven't seen the Super Mario Galaxy Movie and I won't because I'm an adult. But reviews were published earlier today, and it's difficult not to be curious about how the latest big game-to-film adaptation is faring. The short answer is: not very well.

The most impactful belongs to The Guardian, whose one-star review is scathing. "It’s now commonplace to compare programmatic stuff like this to AI, but this is almost a second evolutionary step downwards," writes Peter Bradshaw. "It looks as if humans, using AI, have tried to copy something that was originally AI generated, creating a bland, simplistic template that can be sold in all global territories where it can be dubbed by local voice talent. It’s certainly a way of gouging cash out of families for the Easter holidays."

The New York Times' critic detects a "flat empty nothingness" in the film, while Variety's Owen Gleiberman argues basically the same, but in different words: "Not a single one of these characters, including Mario and Luigi, occupies the center of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. And that’s because the movie has no center."

The Times' Kevin Maher put his disenchantment very succinctly: "The film is torturous to sit through and, for me, provoked periods of actual physical discomfort."

Super Mario Galaxy Movie was clearly made to generate lots of revenue rather than enrich the interior lives of its impressionable young viewers, many of whom have media diets consisting almost entirely of soul-destroying vertical video slop. Unfortunately, this visit to the cinema won't offer much relief from their relentless exposure to meaninglessness, as the Independent's précis makes abundantly clear: "It’s a series of large, vaguely connected explosions."

Does anyone like the new Mario movie? Even the most positive reviews seem slightly icked about not trouncing it. "If 2023's The Super Mario Movie is the cinematic equivalent of World 1-1 – a safe, frictionless big-screen beginning for Nintendo's iconic mascot, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie does at least expand on a promising start with a starry sequel that sporadically lives up to the Galaxy moniker," Gamesradar's critic writes.

Meanwhile the Boston Globe confers a generous two stars while admitting that you'll probably never want to watch it again. "This is yet another big screen rehash of the Nintendo classics that will make you want to go play the games rather than watch this movie again."

A consistent point among the more positive reviews is that the movie does, at least, keep one occupied for the duration. "The movie’s speedy plot and 98-minute run time help keep boredom at bay," Polygon writes, while IGN's 6/10 review concedes that its viewers may enjoy the easter eggs and "wall-to-wall references".

Look, no amount of positivity is going to make me want to watch this churn. But if you happen to watch it, and want to get its horrible sugary aftertaste out of your mouth, may I recommend to you this nine-hour documentary about the slow decline of a Chinese industrial district.

Only a couple of months ago, we got our first look at Sophie Turner as Lara Croft in Amazon's upcoming Tomb Raider TV show. At the same time, shooting for the series began. But now it already seems to have run into a potentially major setback.

As reported by The Sun, production has been paused two and a half months after it started due to Turner suffering a back injury. The publication claims she discovered a pre-existing issue with her back during training for the series last year, which has then been worsened by the demanding filming schedule until she was no longer able to continue.

“Sophie Turner recently experienced a minor injury," confirmed a spokesperson for Prime Video to Variety. "As a precaution, production has briefly paused to allow her time to recover. We look forward to resuming production as soon as possible.”

It's easy to imagine how physically demanding the role of Lara Croft must be—given the source material and the high budget, the show is likely full of action and stunts, just like the various Tomb Raider films we've (sort of) enjoyed over the years. So the star suffering a physical injury of some kind is unfortunate but very understandable (and of course we wish Turner only the best in her recovery).

It may be extremely bad news for Amazon, however. Given the scale of the project, any pause in filming is likely to be an expensive prospect, and two and a half months seems very far into production to entertain the idea of pivoting to a different lead actor.

If Turner requires a long recovery time, the fate of the show could well be in the balance—and even if she does bounce back in time to complete season one on schedule, it raises the question of whether she'll be willing or able to commit to a season two or beyond. As any fan of Netflix's The Witcher can tell you, recasting the lead role between seasons can be a very difficult trick to pull off.

As it stands the series does not have a confirmed release date, and it's unclear whether this situation will cause any delays to its launch.

Here's hoping things are going rather better with the two big new Tomb Raider videogames in the works—though the repeated layoffs at Crystal Dynamics over the last year don't paint the rosiest picture there either. Sometimes it feels like somewhere in all those expeditions to disturb ancient sacred sites, Lara unleashed a deadly curse on her own franchise.

Kirsten Dunst has been signed up for the Minecraft Movie sequel, which currently doesn't have a title, as the player avatar Alex. Alex is one of the default avatars in the game, is female, and has red hair: so Mary Jane feels like a pretty good fit.

Dunst is of course known for many more roles than her turn in Raimi's Spider-Man films, including The Virgin Suicides, Bring it On, and Marie Antoinette. She has, however, parlayed her early fame into starring roles in a series of cult classic movies in the last decade or so, and only turns up on the big screen every so often these days.

As Town and Country magazine reported in August last year, Dunst would "also really like to be in Minecraft 2, she says, because her kids loved the first one and because she’d like to make a pile of cash. 'Maybe I can just make a movie where I don’t lose money?'"

Well, given the first Minecraft movie made over one billion dollars, that seems a fairly safe bet. The sequel is scheduled for 2027, is being made by Warner Bros. and Legendary, and will feature several superstars among the returning cast: Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Matt Berry and Jennifer Coolidge.

But my favourite is Jason Momoa, purely because during the usual press tour for The Minecraft Movie he adopted the bold marketing strategy of telling everyone he wouldn't let his kids play games.

Jared Hess returns to direct the sequel, with a script from Chris Galletta, and the movie is currently scheduled for July 23, 2027. I'm not exactly holding out high hopes here but, as someone with a young and Minecraft-obsessed son, the thing I enjoyed most about the first movie was the visual language and how clearly it 'got' Minecraft in things like Steve's house and its accoutrements.

Yeah: my son will know Kirsten Dunst as Alex rather than Mary Jane or Marie Antoinette. But she said it herself: how about doing a film that makes a tonne of money (not that those were exactly flops). Fair enough! And not to name names but maybe it would be nice if, on the press tour, she doesn't advocate for kids not playing Minecraft.

Fan casting is fun. For instance, who do you think would make a good Solid Snake in a Metal Gear Solid live-action film?

Well, if you ask Reacher's Alan Ritchson, his answer might be: Reacher's Alan Ritchson. The extra-large action star sure seems to think he'd be a good fit for the role, as he posted an image on Instagram (AI generated, I'm assuming) of a poster from his new Netflix movie, War Machine—but with Ritchson looking for all the world like Solid Snake.

"The Dream," are the words Ritchson used to accompany the image, so I'm guessing he'd be up for the role of Snake in a live-action Metal Gear Solid movie. "La Li Lu Le Lo," he added, a reference to The Patriots, the secret organization controlling the US in Metal Gear lore—indicating Ritchson might be more than just a casual fan of the games. He might be a full-on, die-hard Kojima nerd.

That's cool. It's kinda fun when a celebrity turns out to be a fan of games, like Henry Cavill's nerdy Warhammer obsession or Elijah Wood's affinity for chill puzzlers on Steam Deck.

Unfortunately for Ritchson, he may have missed the boat to Mother Base. We've been waiting for a movie adaptation of Metal Gear Solid for a while now—like, 20 years—since Kojima announced the film way, way back in 2006. All sorts of names have been floated for the role of Snake in the past couple decades, from Viggo Mortensen to Hugh Jackman to Christian Bale. Nothing really stuck, but in 2020, Oscar Isaac was finally announced as the film's Solid Snake.

Of course, that was six dang years ago and as far as anyone knows, production on the film hasn't actually started and it's still in the scripting phase—which could mean that even if the movie does get made, there's no guarantee Isaac will still play the role.

As for Ritchson—I don't think he's right for the role. When I think of Snake, I think of stealth, and when I think of stealth, I don't think of a guy who is eight feet tall with shoulders as broad as a Humvee. Is he really gonna crawl through ductwork? Do they even make ducts that big? How can he sneak up behind someone without calling attention to himself because he's blotting out the sun? And there is simply not a cardboard box large enough for Ritchson to crouch beneath. His role as Snake might have to remain just a dream.

Zach Cregger (of Barbarian and Weapons fame) is currently helming the next Resident Evil film which is planned to release later this year. He's already admitted that it won't intersect with any of the games and that it also likely won't resemble any past films, mainly because he's not watched any of them. But even still I'm nervously confident that he could be cooking.

Cregger has made no secret that he's a fan of Resident Evil, having put in "thousands and thousands of hours" into various games in the series. But now we know he's been keeping up with everything Resi as he's revealed that he's not just finished Resident Evil Requiem once, but he's done so twice (via GamesRadar). Good going.

"I fulfilled a lifelong dream of meeting the whitest kid I know, Zach Cregger and talked to him about Resident Evil Requiem (he said he beat it twice already)," Deadline writer Destiny Jackson said in a social media post.

I completed Requiem in just over 10 hours, and my second playthrough clocked in at over seven hours (although that wasn't helped by me trying to complete the final puzzle) so completing Requiem twice already is certainly doable. But that's still a considerable amount of time to dedicate to a game, especially as Cregger seems like a busy guy, what with the upcoming film and all.

While Cregger has clearly put time into the Resi games, he hasn't managed to complete all of them. Apparently Resident Evil Village was just too scary for him to get all the way to the end: "He said the scariest one is RE8, he noped out." If he found RE8 scary I'd hate to introduce him to RE7, that's for sure.

I'm just happy to have a director of Cregger's pedigree who is also clearly such a fan of the series take a crack at a Resident Evil film. I'll watch it regardless of what the reviews are like and honestly I'll probably enjoy it even if it turns out to be Resident Evil: Afterlife 2.0.

The Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice anime is ticking along nicely—after a brief hubbub about potential AI use (which the director was quick to dismiss, and I never held much stock in any way, smear frames look weird), talk about the series, dubbed Sekiro: No Defeat, mostly quietened down.

Well, it's all livened up again, thanks to both a recent Variety interview with its director, and a new trailer that looks—for lack of a better word—sick as hell.

While the trailer from six months ago was certainly nothing to sniff at, suspicious smear frames notwithstanding, this new one gives off a much stronger visual identity. Scratchy, loose linework and kinetic action combined with some lovely painterly backgrounds—the words 'controlled messiness' come to mind.

Which is somewhat fitting if you're trying to replicate the frantic pace I felt while fighting most of the bosses, several of which can be spotted here—Owl can be seen in several scenes bodying/throwing the poor Wolf around, Genichiro's flinging lightning again, and is that Gyoubu Oniwa I spy? (as he breathes, you will not pass the castle gate).

This kind of trailer-combing has, per the aforementioned Variety review, been of some concern to the series' director Kenichi Kutsuna:

"FromSoftware, they make such high quality game experiences, and they've established this community and fandom worldwide," he explains. "So we understand that the potential audience for what we're making in this anime is going to put this under the microscope, and it's going to be a very, very—I don't wanna say harsh or strict lens, but you could say the audience will be looking at it.

"So I of course, am nervous if we are able to answer that level of resolution that they perhaps might be looking for. But I think we've done everything we could from the production side in terms of maintaining a level of quality that wouldn't tarnish the FromSoftware and 'Sekiro' brand."

I don't think there's any risk of tarnishing going on here, after all, this isn't Elden Ring, ohoho. But in all seriousness, I'm more bought in than I was before. As for what game ending the anime will be bending towards, Kutsuna states that it'll be just as open to interpretation:

"[Sekiro] allows a lot of interpretation on the players' part in terms of how they want to proceed through the game. And those who have played will know that type of experience. So, in taking that and transforming it into an audio-visual adaptation, we wanted it to be open to interpretation in a similar way that the game presented itself to its players."

Sekiro: No Defeat doesn't have an official release date yet, but it'll be coming this year. In the meantime, I'll be preparing myself by watching those sickos no-hit Genichiro off his stupid, lightning-infested tower again.