BioWare has shut down, and while that doesn't inherently mean we won't be seeing more Mass Effect—EA owns the rights to that IP—the next Mass Effect game's been cancelled, and I certainly wouldn't hold my breath for EA to make anything that isn't sports, Sims, or shooter related in the near future.

According to sources who spoke to IGN, however, the TV series, which has been in the works at Prime Video since 2024, will still go ahead. It'll be set after the original trilogy, so it won't be quite so awkward as seeing Commander Shepherd making winks and nods to a series of games built by a slowly-dismantled studio, but still.

There's something deeply bittersweet about a videogame series arriving after the studio responsible for its creation has gone out of business. And perhaps reflective of how EA has treated BioWare itself—grabbing a studio known for making some of the best RPGs ever—and chipping away at it. Coasting on the good will from a studio it had precious little interest in managing and rarely gave a fair shot at doing what it was actually good at.

I mean, just look at Anthem. I could point to any number of developer tell-alls that might suggest EA didn't know what to do with the studio it'd bought. Or former executive producer Mark Darrah, who said: "Someone once described to me EA as a hedge fund with a videogame hobby that it wished it didn’t spend so much money on. And I think that remains true."

Dragon Age: The Veilguard itself went through development hell as a live service game, only to come out and meet with middling reviews. I had plenty of negative things to say about it, but the fact we still got a semi-decent action RPG out of that slow-motion trainwreck is honestly commendable. The lesson EA seemingly took, however, was that it should've committed to that live service vision than just… I don't know, having the studio famed for single-player RPGs make a single-player RPG from the get-go?

In this sense, the deal with Prime feels like the last wringing out of a nearly-dry towel. The final few drops of profitability to be had out of Mass Effect before a final nail is driven into its coffin and, in true EA fashion, if it is good, it'll be created by people who the publisher can't rightfully stake any claim or credit over. BioWare's legacy'll live on less uncomfortably in the games it inspired, though, of that I'm sure.

We learned last week that a Cyberpunk 2077 movie is in the works, an announcement I used mainly to talk about a completely different cyberpunk movie starring Keanu Reeves as a guy named Johnny who's having a bad week. Now we've got a bit more insight into what CD Projekt Red has in mind for the film, and it's possible that a guy named Johnny may not be involved at all.

"Our contract with Anonymous Content expired, and in the meantime, an opportunity arose to establish cooperation with Paramount Pictures," co-CEO Michał Nowakowski told Polish PAP Biznes (Google translated), referring to the Cyberpunk 2077 "live action project" that was announced in 2023 and ultimately went nowhere. "We decided that we would conduct a live-action Cyberpunk project in a new formula.

"At this point, we can only say that we definitely don't want to make a film adaptation of the game. We want to tell a story in the world of Cyberpunk, but it won't be a one-to-one translation of the game's story."

I loved Cyberpunk 2077, and the fact that it featured two Hollywood stars in central roles might make it seem like a natural fit for a direct translation. But I think avoiding that approach is the wiser move: V's story has been told, and trying to replicate it on film only invites unflattering comparisons and criticism. And it's not as though the world of Night City is short of other stories to tell, after all, nor would it be difficult to indirectly tie it to the game through references or cameos, if the urge to do so is really that strong.

Remember as well that two of the most successful game-to-screen adaptations, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Resident Evil, took their respective underlying settings and made them their own. That's basically what Cyberpunk 2077 is, as far as that goes: A vision of Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk tabletop setting, interpreted through the lens of a new timeline. They're all stronger for it, because they allow creators to work within a particular framework without tying them to specifics.

It's way too early in the process to say when all of this big-screen fun will actually happen, but Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is set to debut on Netflix on October 20.

I had such high hopes for the Street Fighter movie: The trailers were so promising, the cast so charismatic, and it seemed to get the inherent ridiculousness of the franchise, playing it seriously without ever really taking it too seriously. I mean, you don't put a guy like David Dastmalchian in the role of M. Bison unless you expect him to do something with it, right?

Alas, it seems that this may be a real Tuesday, at least for my Street Fighter movie aspirations. The reviews are in, and they are not especially kind. Street Fighter isn't a complete catastrophe, according to the critical consensus, but I don't think JCVD has to worry about having to turn in his "Best Street Fighter Movie" trophy anytime soon, either.

Here's what they're saying:

"Dumber than a box of rocks, but have you ever thrown rocks at things? It can be pretty fun"

IGN: 6/10

The story is too thin to support its bloated roster, but IGN reckons the Street Fighter film is "all about landing as many punches as it can before the round timer hits zero. Even though there are plenty of misses, the ones it does manage to land hit hard."

"A garish and incoherent mess that amuses in fits and starts but barely improves on the Mortal Kombat movies before it"

The Guardian: 2/5

Fans might enjoy the new SF flick, and the performances are "likeable," but its repeated self-knowing acknowledgment of how silly it all is "would land better if the movie ever rose above the stuff it’s making fun of. Instead, Street Fighter is satisfied punching down on itself, and everything that’s cringe about the '90s, while happily being stuck there, in the past, so it could pretend that this is as good as it gets for videogame adaptations."

"Not a great adaptation of what is one of the most recognizable brands in all of gaming"

Collider: 6/10

"The movie is at its most fun when it truly locks in for those high-octane fights and the surprisingly beautiful and not-much-publicized animated sequences," Collider reviewer Aidan Kelley wrote. "Unfortunately, to get to those, you have to deal with a lot of exposition and unengaging character drama."

"One of the most overtly mixed bags of any movie this year"

ScreenRant: 7/10

Despite calling Street Fighter "a fundamentally flawed movie on an underlying storytelling level," ScreenRant's review is one of the more positive takes floating around out there: The film is "buoyed by the overall 'go for broke' tone" and director Kitao Sakurai's "great work helming the film, working with the cast and crew to deliver consistently entertaining fight scenes that are flush with personality and style."

"Like a trip to a ’90s mall arcade, Street Fighter’s pretty fun — for about 30 minutes"

ScreenCrush: 5/10

"The sheer absurdity and fevered intensity of the pacing, not to mention some very athletic fight choreography, is good enough to carry things along through the jittery first act," reviewer Matt Singer wrote for ScreenCrush. "But you can only mainline caffeine for so long before it starts to give you a headache."

"A campy '90s nostalgia ride and a complete mess"

Associated Press: 1/4

Street Fighter is a "very enthusiastic, weirdly convoluted and jumbled mess of a movie," Jake Coyle wrote for AP. As much as you might think a Street Fighter movie, good or bad, would at least offer up some bluntly entertaining hand-to-hand combat, it’s so messily plotted and chaotically conceived that it makes a game with six buttons seem comparatively artful."

"Dull fight scenes and tonal whiplash make this mostly forgettable videogame adaptation work only for superfans"

The Film Verdict

Street Fighter "is a little bit of everything that amounts to a lot of not-much," The Film Verdict declared, comparing it unfavorably to this year's Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil flicks: Street Fighter has all the elements that made those films successful, "but never lands on a formula than functions."

"I’m not sure Street Fighter meets any conventional standard of quality, but it’s undeniably its own thing"

The Wrap

This review takes a more holistic approach to Street Fighter, calling it "an action-packed, hyper-stylized, borderline-nonsensical fever dream with a central storyline that begs to be taken seriously" despite being goofy, horny, largely incoherent, and somehow "even weirder" than the 1990s movie. But hey, maybe that's your thing: As reviewer William Bibbiani wrote, "What even is a 'good movie' anyway?"

"A jumbled tonal mess that feels deadly serious one moment and like parody the next"

The Hollywood Reporter

"Featuring so many characters and elements from the games that non-aficionados are left desperately attempting to keep up, Street Fighter tries to thread the needle between fan service and welcoming the uninitiated," THR says. "The result is that neither camp is likely to be fully satisfied."

"Not even close to coherent, but it does have some good fight scenes"

Gizmodo

Gizmodo's review says the Street Fighter film is a bit like its portrayal of Ken Masters, an oafish clown who can actually fight: "The editing choices, scene transitions, and even the basic plot are frequently baffling. And yet, it can throw a punch when it wants to."

"The closest any filmmaker has come to bringing the franchise’s signature verve and bombast to the big screen"

Inverse

In another relatively positive review, Inverse declares that "Street Fighter might not be a film that sticks in your brain for days afterwards, but while you’re in your seat it feels like a shot of adrenaline to the arm, the kind that you might get from hearing the coveted 'You Win' announcement after the end of a hard-fought match."

"Something goes terribly awry in its back half, hinting at either a troubled production, or one that was doomed from the start"

Variety

Variety was impressed by Street Fighter's strong start, but says the wheels come off in the second half: "It’s a film at war with itself, in which a straightforward narrative about strained brotherhood is spread far too thin across unconnected snippets of action and comedy that grow increasingly disparate."

So there you have it: Not a disaster, but definitely a mess. We'll hopefully have our own critical take on the Street Fighter film up eventually, if we can ever talk Mollie Taylor into going to see it; in the meantime, if you've seen it, let us know what you think.

Most may know Chandler Riggs from his role as Carl in The Walking Dead, but now some may know him as the director of the short film fan-adaptation of Resident Evil 7. Lasting but 20 minutes, it's set in the Baker's bayou home and takes place during the garage fight scene between the protagonist Ethan Winters and the infected Jack Baker. The most jarring thing about this short film isn't the graphic fight, though, it's Ethan's face.

Fans of Resident Evil 7 and Village will know that Ethan Winters is quite a shy guy, almost never showing his face apart from a couple instances in the Shadows of Rose DLC (and when you get the camera angle just right). Since both games are done in first-person there's no need to spend a lot of time looking at the man you're playing, and Capcom really leaned into that.

But Riggs made the decision to not only star as Ethan, but also to give him some more face time. "It was absolutely an intimidating thing," Riggs says in an interview with IGN. "We're trying to do so much [that's] super faithful and true to the game, but this is a huge aspect that we are breaking from it.

"But there isn't really another good way to tell [the story] in a live-action format. I was going back and forth like 'Okay, could we do first person the whole time? Could we avoid getting his face in or anything?' But the more we went back and forth on it, the more I was like, I mean, if we are going to do this and are going to appeal to a wider audience—more than just the people who played the games—then we're going to have to break those rules. It was very intimidating. Hopefully people are okay with it."

In this sense Riggs empathises with Zach Cregger and his film interpretation of Resident Evil levelling that "it's impossible to please everybody" and that there will always be "a crowd that is unhappy… But I think that it's a great way to try to get more people into the series, into the franchise, and tell a story that you want to tell."

Riggs goes on to admit that adapting Resident Evil for the silver screen is no easy task, which is why he respects Cregger's choice to go his own way and do his own thing instead of being chained to the lore.

"I've been looking forward to [Cregger’s RE movie] for so long," Riggs adds. "And I mean, one of the big reasons I even made this is, you know, I was just dying to see a good, true-to-the-game live-action adaptation of Resident Evil. I cannot wait to see the new one." The crew even tried to get their film out before Cregger's Resident Evil but unfortunately "parts just didn't align that way".

But Riggs does mention that "a huge reason for me even doing this in the first place is that I love being on set and collaborating with cool people", so he'd be game for a future collaboration with Cregger sometime: "I'm all for it. Listen, my phone is open. Hit my line!”

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film was released to critical acclaim last month, with more than one reviewer calling it 'the best videogame movie ever.' Another review dropped today, from none other than Hideo Kojima, and it's (seemingly) a glowing one.

"I wasn’t particularly interested at first, but since it’s Zach Cregger’s latest film, I went to see Resident Evil," Kojima posted on Twitter on October 12.

"Right from the opening, it hits you with music reminiscent of "The Thing." From there, it’s a relentless barrage of classic horror techniques, terrifying situations, and jump scares that never lets up until the very end."

That bit is sorta why I said seemingly above. Do I detect a little backhanded praise? Calling it a "relentless barrage" isn't necessarily a compliment, saying a director used "classic horror techniques" could be a way of saying it's unoriginal, and pointing out that there are "jump scares" throughout might suggest it's not a particularly sophisticated film.

Or, maybe I'm coloring Kojima's statements with my own paranoia which endlessly scans any compliment I'm given for potential criticism. You be the judge.

Anyway, here's the real meat of Kojima's little review:

"This isn’t a film adaptation of Resident Evil. It’s a film about the experience of playing Resident Evil, controller in hand," Kojima continued. "It reminded me of how I felt when I first played the original Resident Evil on PlayStation back in 1996. I was just like Bryan in this movie. I kept getting game over after game over, shouting 'F***!' over and over again. lol"

Preach. The movie was so much fun because it really did feel like you were watching someone play the game, as Bryan dealt with the horrors he faced the same way we all do in a Resi game: by screaming, running, and often demonstrating terrible aim. As Elie observed, the Resident Evil movie is the best because Bryan sucks.

I've embedded Koj's tweet below, and you should check it out because it includes a picture of the Japanese poster for the Resident Evil movie. It's rad.

Unlike PC Gamer's UK editorial staff, Ben Affleck knows ball. Metaphorically, I mean. Though he probably also knows what the Miami Heat is. Speaking on the October 12 episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Affleck reflected—with a touch of regret—on the time Starcraft swallowed his entire life.

"There was a game called Starcraft that probably took the most life out of me for a period of time. I had just gotten famous, and all I did was stay home for three years and play Starcraft."

The celebs, folks—they're just like us. More so than usual in Affleck's case, I suppose, since the actor's videogame career doesn't only encompass a brief dalliance with Blizzard's RTS series. "Valorant's a great game. It's a great game," he continued, "The problem with that game is that—the kids that have been raised playing, I just get fuckin' rocked. I'm like, 'Are you mother fuckers cheating?' And I get mad. And they're like 11, they're like, 'Fuck you loser!' It's very humiliating, but that's a great game."

Which is pretty much my experience playing anything with anyone. But do you think Affleck—one whole Batman and one half of Good Will Hunting—stopped there? More fool you. "I love 2K, I love Madden. The early Doom—which then gave rise to Quake and gave rise to all that—we played that endlessly," he recalled.

"We were doing Good Will Hunting, we were playing Doom… I remember writing and taking these long breaks to play Doom. I can't believe it's been out that long." Doom, for our younger readers, released in 1993, which was the same year I was released also.

Also on the big Affleck list of videogames: Myst, Donkey Kong, Tetris, and Miss Pac-Man, though I don't know that those last three count as elite ball-knower knowledge.

Anyway, it sounds like RTSes were Affleck's big love, and he laments that they've "sort of gone out of style." You and me both, Ben. At least we got those Command and Conquer remasters.

XA Deadline report says Paramount Pictures is working with CD Projekt Red on a live-action movie set in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe, with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, whose previous films include a pile of Transformers movies, a couple GI Joe flicks, and the 2005 Doom movie starring The Rock, attached to produce.

CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski confirmed the report on X:

There's really no more detail at this point, so instead of talking about that I'm going to take a hard swerve and remind everyone that the perfect cyberpunk movie already exists, and it even stars Johnny Silverhand himself, Keanu Reeves—as another guy named Johnny who's having a rough time in the cyber-future, believe it or not.

It's called Johnny Mnemonic, and folks, it is cinema.

Johnny Mnemonic, based on a William Gibson short story of the same name, came out in 1995 and is set in the year 2021, which as you may know has already come and gone. Reeves plays a "mnemonic courier" who transports sensitive information in his head—he can carry nearly 80 gigs of data!—because the internet is an insecure digital goat rodeo filled with scammers, grifters, hackers, and various other forms of criminal lowlife. (The movie sure got that right, at least.)

Johnny (Mnemonic, not Silverhand) takes on a high-risk, high-reward mission, which naturally goes south almost immediately: He's hunted by the yakuza, betrayed by his handler, rescued by a sexy cyborg, gets his ass beat by a preacher, is saved by a dolphin, and ultimately destroys capitalism. Something like that, anyway—it's been a while.

This is what the internet should have been

I did in fact pay money to see Johnny Mnemonic in the theater: I'm not sure why, really, except that Reeves was still flying high after Speed, and the Johnny Mnemonic cast was absolutely stacked:

• Keanu Reeves
• Dolph Lundgren
• Ice-T
• Ice-T's heroin-addicted dolphin
• Dina Meyer
• Udo Kier
• Henry Rollins
• Shannon Tweed's sister
• Von Flores
• Don Francks
• Takeshi Kitano

Okay, look, it might seem silly now, but trust me, in 1995 this was a goddamn who's-who of people who were cool and not too expensive in 1995. And while the film was, uh, not particularly well received (but it did make money!), I dug it. I was baffled by the dolphin thing and had no idea what the hell Dolph Lundgren was even doing there, but I distinctly recall leaving the theater thinking, that was fun!

"I want room service!"

Is that a recommendation? One hundred percent! There's no word on when the Cyberpunk 2077 film will hit the screens, but that doesn't matter because you can watch Johnny Mnemonic right now, on Netflix, Prime, Apple, Tubi, and probably other places too. [The B&W director's cut included as an extra if you buy the movie on iTunes is the best way to watch—Ed.]

You might even find a DVD (or VHS, if you're really lucky) for 50 cents at your local thrift shop! If you do, grab it—trust me, you're gonna love it.

Yup, that just happened.

The System Shock TV show announced in 2021 is no longer moving ahead. "The company we were working with, they had also licensed the rights to a number of other video game properties," Nightdive Studios chief Stephen Kick told FRVR. "I don’t believe that company is still around [in that form]. So that won’t be happening through Binge."

Kick said "preliminary scripts" for the show were written, and that he'd had conversations with the screenwriters, "but that’s really as far as the whole thing went before it basically became vapour." Still, he expressed hope that an adaptation might still happen, someday: "I would love to see System Shock adapted to either television or streaming or a movie. I think that would be the perfect vessel for that. And there are so many unique and creative ways that you could approach it."

Binge did indeed have licenses to make shows based on other games, including Driver and Hunt: Showdown; the Driver show was confirmed cancelled in 2024. and while the fate of the Hunt: Showdown series isn't officially known, it's probably safe to say that it's not happening either. The Binge website doesn't appear to have been meaningfully updated since it went live, while its most recent social media post, on X, was an April 2024 advertisement for a Web3 gaming convention being held in Dubai.

Last week, I said that I wasn't entirely sure who would make it out of Critical Role's next episode. Well, the next episode has happened, and let me tell you—I was absolutely, concretely right in that assumption. Spoilers for Critical Role episode 37, if you've not watched it yet.

The episode opened with the attempted assassination of one Wicander Halovar. Two hours later, they had successfully completed the first round. This isn't because anyone at the table is bad at playing D&D, it's because there were a ton of moving parts:

A Hold Person spell, two assassins with three attacks each, a Command spell from Wic's father to force him to accept his fate, guards who weren't in on the scheme rushing in to protect him, his mother desperately trying to stop it all from happening, his little brother being held back, Tyranny sprinting down the streets of Dol-Makjar to get to the theatre, everyone else barrelling through the stands: Utter chaos.

It's an incredibly difficult thing to do, stacking the deck so thoroughly against one player. On the one hand, you want to do justice to the world everyone's playing in—Wicander messed it up with his wannabe religious dictator grandma, so she decided to have him bumped off. But on the other hand, Wic simply getting instagibbed wouldn't make for a good game.

Even still, the deck was toppling high. Hold Person grants auto-crits to melee attacks and requires a Wisdom saving throw, and Wic has a whopping zero for an ability modifier. What's more, the person casting it clung tight onto concentration, and was vanishing into the crowd. And god, was it close. On his final death save, a bardic inspiration that was a mere one short on the die spelled the end for Wicander Halovar.

Here's where some consternation from the more diehard rules lawyers of the fanbase comes in—particularly those who want the game to be more brutal: Brennan, seeing this unfold, decided to give Sam Riegel a devil's bargain. Make one last save with disadvantage, or release Tyranny from her bondage to his evil family.

If he made the save—which is a roughly 30% chance at disadvantage, since he needed both dice to be a 10 or higher—he'd be able to hold onto his life. If he didn't make that save? He'd die anyway, and Tyranny would be doomed. Or he could go quietly into that good night and release Tyranny for his sacrifice. For some, this scans as going easy, to which I say: Phooey. A few things!

• A 70% chance of the absolute worst-case scenario cannot, in a sane mind, be considered "going easy" on someone.
• Riegel was, understandably (everyone was stressed) under a lot of pressure to go against his first instinct, which was to just pop the shield spell. Which would've saved him from the attack that put him a single save away from death to begin with.
• It kinda sucks to spend a multi-hour combat just making saving throws while fearing for your character's life.

Anyway, In a moment that will live forever in my memory, Riegel took a moment to look at his dice tray while his panicking, stress-ulcer suffering table flurried around him to look for a way to help, and dropped two dice into the tray. A 12 and a 13: A success.

When this happened, I made a noise.

I can't quite put the noise into words—I wish I had recorded it—but it was not a noise I had made before. It was something between a laugh and a yell. I sort of went "HAAA!" The emphasis on the H was gummy and flimsy, like my primal ape brain, buried in my amygdala, was trying to reach down my stem and out of my throat to throw a rock at my screen. I am considering calling this noise a portmanteau of laugh and yell. A lell. A laull? I'm working on it.

In case you've not started watching Critical Role so far—and are one of those spoiler-immune people, in which case, bless you—let me tell you: This campaign is worth watching, it is absolutely some of the best actual play out there right now, and it will likely produce similarly novel noises from your mouth hole, as well.

Critical Role's 4th's campaign is in full swing, and this past episode we followed the schemer's table—for those not in the know, this campaign's a "West Marches" style adventure, where the stacked cast of 13 players split off into their own groups.

The schemer's table, so named because of the political scheming it's involved in, just spent four and a half hours spinning out last week as the chickens came home to roost. Allow me to give you the bullet points (spoilers, obviously):

• Halandil Fang's (played by Liam O'Brian) daughter has been expelled from school after the prior episode, where the equivalent of the pope personally popped in to threaten his life. He rolled a natural one to try and calm his now-revolutionary daughter down.
• Azure Nayar (played by Luis Carazo) is getting pulled in all directions—playing nice with two sorcerous houses while being loyal to neither of them. Also, the head of one such house now thinks he's in a relationship with his cousin (he is not, he just has her axe, long story).
• Murray Magnesson (played by Marisha Ray) is on the cusp of getting fired from her job at a school which is rapidly becoming less about teaching magic, and more raising soldiers for another sorcerous house while leaving them without any magic that'd be useful in standing up against them.
• Also, Azure's boss hates her.
• Tyranny, a demon (played by Whitney Moore), has been ordered by her father to destroy her corporeal form and return to hell.
• Also, she got the crap kicked out of her by her sister (also a demon, also playing reformed bodyguard for the church, it's—don't worry about it).
• Wicander Halovar (played by Sam Riegel) is perhaps the most screwed of all of them, having embarrassed his control freak grandma (the same pope who threatened Halandil Fang).
• As a result, he's now been marched to Halandil's theatre, likely to be assassinated by his grandma in a staged killing that'll kick off a civil war between the church and the orcish people of Dol-Makjar proper.

Throughout the entire episode, absolutely nobody could roll well—a streak of terrible luck that plagued the cast during the whole thing. Absolutely terrible timing, given the walls are closing in. While earlier episodes of this campaign have had me clenching my cheeks, this one tops it.

This'd be the part of the article where I try to make predictions, but I truly, thoroughly, have no idea what's going to happen. Wicander's getting assassinated, probably by his grandmother. Tyranny's not even there, having chosen to actually go to hell (but with backup). Halandil Fang is both beloved and also marked for death. There might be a revolution and a teacher's strike going on at Murray's school.

Will the Kaedra, orcish paint angels that were created in an elaborate ritual during this very play's opening night, rush to Halandil's defense? Will the glade of fey (oh there's a glade of fey nearby, under the lake, where there is a dragon, don't worry about it) appear? Will the assassination attempt be a convincing lie—and if isn't staged, then who the hell is trying to kill Wicander?

There are so many goddamn plates spinning at this point that I haven't the faintest clue which ones are going to get knocked off their poles, but I absolutely cannot wait to see the porcelain fly.

Zach Cregger's take on survival horror in his recent Resident Evil film has gone down pretty well—ask just about anyone here at PC Gamer and they'll tell you how much they loved the interpretation. But it's not just done well critically, Resident Evil is also raking in the cash.

Cregger's Resident Evil earned $23 million across the US and Canada in its second week (via Fangoria), second only to the re-release of Avengers: Endgame, which has returned to theaters in the lead up to Avengers: Doomsday. But Resident Evil did manage to beat out Brad Pitt's The Heart of the Beast and the Chris Hansen biopic Primetime, a pretty impressive achievement.

$23 million may not sound like a lot, especially when you chalk it up against the whopping $75 million Sony Pictures spent making the film, so it's a good thing that Resident Evil has made way more money overall. Looking at The Numbers, Cregger's Resident Evil is already the third most lucrative movie in the Resident Evil film franchise, with $60 million earned in its opening weekend, $103 million in total domestic box office, and an impressive $197 million in the worldwide box office.

Interestingly, Cregger's Resident Evil is easily the top domestic box office Resident Evil film ever, with Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil: Afterlife taking second place, and Resident Evil: Degeneration and Extinction vying for third place.

But the worldwide box office tells a different story. Here, Cregger's Resident Evil remains in fourth place, behind Resident Evil: The Final Chapter's $314 million, as well as Resident Evil: Afterlife and Resident Evil: Retribution.

The overall standings for top five grossing Resident Evil films—so far—are as follows:

• Resident Evil: Afterlife - $356,002,756
• Resident Evil: The Final Chapter - $340,945,882
• Resident Evil - $300,364,617
• Resident Evil: Retribution - $282,993,160
• Resident Evil: Extinction - $200,519,782

Cregger's Resident Evil still has some ground to make up but with it only being out for a couple of weeks now I'm pretty confident in its ability to rise above the rest.

I think Leon Kennedy may be the only valid answer to the question of which Resident Evil videogame character you'd want protecting you throughout the events of Cregger's Resident Evil film (via PlayStation Blog). The only other substitution I'd accept is Jill Valentine and maybe Billy Coen—that is if you can lure him out of the woods.

I wouldn't take the overtime.

The fact that Bryan was forced down this spiral of blood, guts, and tears just because he thought he could make a bit more cash is simultaneously the most realistic and tragic aspect of the new Resident Evil movie.

And honestly, I get it. Who doesn't need a bit of extra money right now? So if my hands were really tied and I didn't have any choice about taking the package into Raccoon City, here's what I'd really do differently.

Spoilers ahead for the Resident Evil film

• Don't call and drive. Even if your girlfriend's angry at you, jeopardising your safety on an icy road is never the answer.
• I wouldn't have thrown the ladder at the dog because that's not nice. Although I also wouldn't get that close to it.
• Getting a snack is a good shout although I'd miss out the milk as I'm lactose intolerant.
• No way in hell I'd open the door in the RV.
• I'd have snatched those car keys so fast.
• In the interest of preserving bullets, I'd have taken a close range shot at the padlock first.
• Take the stairs, man. Yes, I would have complained about it the whole way up, but the elevator is out of order for a reason.
• I would like to think that I'd tell the scientists I was infected and hopefully reason with them to give me the antidote, but in all honestly I probably would have gone out like Bryan.

But the main difference between Bryan and I (other than taking the overtime), would be that I would not have followed that lady into the woods. I know that's bad after hitting her with my car, and I would call for help. But come on: anyone who just walks off a hit like that is not alright and should not be buckled into the passenger seat next to you. That's scary movie rule number one.

It's impossible to gauge a wider community's feelings towards something, thanks to the simple problem of 'the angriest usually shout the loudest', and even if they're the minority, it usually doesn't sound like it. I've had this problem with a lot of things, but Zach Cregger's upcoming Resident Evil film is the latest victim.

Despite some promising trailers, some fans just can't get behind this film. People have complained about it existing outside of the games—running parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2 instead of a shot for shot imitation. The fact that it will include some liberal interpretations of what the T-virus is capable of has also ruffled some feathers. To which I say, Tolstoy got it right—If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.

I'm going to get crucified for saying this, but here it goes: some fans get too caught up in 'lore accuracy'. Yes I'd be pissed if Zach Cregger started trying to drastically change iconic elements of Resident Evil, like erasing Umbrella from the records or renaming Raccoon City to Badger Town (even though that kind of slaps). But I think we need to have more faith in Cregger, given his clear love of the games and outstanding filmography, which includes bangers like Barbarian and Weapons—bro knows how to make an outstanding horror film.

Lore-abiding citizens

I'm not convinced by the argument that this film will just be a good horror movie, rather than a good Resident Evil adaptation for lore-specific reasons, either. Especially given how liberal Capcom itself has been with the 'established truth' in Resident Evil.

While the main story remains the same across the originals and remakes, some smaller details have been changed for the sake of creating a better story, or just for funsies. One example that comes to mind is Krauser's allegiance in Resident Evil 4. In the original, he's working for Wesker and is sent to grab a sample of the ambfer, but in the remake he's on Saddler's side, working as one of his henchmen. Why change this? Well, it connects to another change the remake made: making Saddler more menacing and mysterious.

Instead of having him wander around the village and speaking to Leon directly, Saddler works in the shadows during the remake and only shows himself more towards the end of the game. But this means he's not out and about for vital moments, and someone had to grab the amber for him. If Krauser had just taken it back to Wesker then the game would have ended there and then, a real anti-climax. So the decision was made to turn Krauser into Saddler's henchman, so he could chill out in his evil lair while also progressing the story.

Likewise, Capcom changed Brad Vickers' death in the Resident Evil 3 remake, having him bitten by some joe-schmo zombie while saving Jill instead of getting turned into a shish kebab by Nemesis.

When did the outbreak kick off in Raccoon City? Well if you're going off the original games, there'd been several outbreak scenarios by September 25th and the city is already feeling it, Resident Evil 3 which was made in conjunction with Resident Evil 2 at the time even added a military blockade which wasn't there when Leon and Claire entered the city. But the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes make it clear that September 25th is the main start, with just one example of a 'cannibal' case being cited a few weeks prior.

Capcom's most recent entry into the series, Resident Evil Requiem, actually takes some lore from the Outbreak spin-off series, which contradicts Resident Evil 2 and 3 in parts. It also uses Leon's original story of being late for his first day at the RPD instead of the remake retelling which says he was told to stay away, and decides that Raccoon City wasn't completely destroyed after the thermobaric missile.

Let's also not forget that Requiem does a 180 on Spencer's character. Turning one of the most inhumane villains in the series into a remorseful old man whose last act in this world is to undo his life's work in an attempt to make the world a better place. That was wild.

But one of the funniest decisions Requiem made was Zeno. It was so clear that the devs wanted to drag Wesker up from the bottom of that volcano, but just couldn't justify it, so they just went 'fuck it, there's a clone of Wesker who is genetically predisposed to wearing trenchcoats and sunglasses'—but I thought Zeno was great, so no complaints here.

I don't mean to nitpick any of this—that's not the point. In fact, I really appreciate how Capcom treats Resident Evil as an ever-evolving story. Not having to be unwaveringly loyal to the lore means the team can make the best games possible, which sometimes means changing old choices so it works better now. The latest games in the series and remakes are better for it.

The T-virus has also been shown as an ever evolving threat, with Requiem adding a twist which makes the infected remember and reenact their most prominent memories whether that be cleaning, cooking, or eating loads and getting angry. So I think Cregger is well within his rights to play on how the T-virus will affect the infected in his film.

For me, the key to a good Resident Evil adaptation is all in the vibes—understanding what makes these games so scary and how to best honour its survival horror roots, which it seems Cregger gets. But as with everything, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Even if I am super excited to see a Resident Evil movie that understands vibes over a strict adherence to lore, I'll wait until I see the film to judge it fairly.

So give Cregger some grace for pete's sake. I, for one, am just happy the whole film industry hasn't been forever scared off from trying to adapt the games by Paul W. S. Anderson.

The Hollywood Reporter says noted huge guy Alan Ritchson, best known as the star of the popular Prime series Reacher, is in talks to take the lead on Sony's upcoming Helldivers movie. If negotiations are successful, Ritchson will step into the role left behind by fellow huge guy Jason Momoa, who dropped out of the project in June.

The Helldivers film was first announced in February, with Momoa starring and Justin Lin, known for his work on the Fast and Furious films, set to direct. Reasons for Momoa's withdrawal just a few months later weren't provided, but given his star power, it was a blow.

But his departure also represents a big opportunity for Ritchson, whose own star has risen rapidly following the debut of Reacher in 2022. Ritchson has appeared in numerous movies in the past—more than I realized, frankly, I'd never heard of the guy before he started wandering into small towns and breaking bad guys in half like they were dry twigs— but according to THR this would be his first time actually headlining a major feature film.

I'm kind of torn on the casting, frankly. I'm sure he'll be fine in the role—along with being huge, he's also got easy on-screen charisma—and action is definitely his thing. But I can't help wondering if maybe he's a little off for the role, too. To me, Helldivers is about unremarkable, anonymous guys being fed into the meatgrinder of fascist imperialism, and Ritchson comes off as a little too heroic (and beefy) for that.

I may be assuming too much about the film, but to me, there's really only one true John Helldiver, and it's this guy:

Or at the very least, someone who looks like him: A soft, compliant man of unremarkable talent who's suddenly realized that he's made a very big mistake. Can you see Alan Ritchson pulling off this face? I sure can't.

The Helldivers film is currently slated for release on November 10, 2027, although given that it doesn't have its lead actor fully nailed down yet, I wouldn't be too shocked if that gets pushed back.

Matthew Rhys is having quite a moment. The actor cleaned up at the Emmys on Monday, making history by becoming the first man to win two Emmys for a leading role on the same night (for comedy series Widow's Bay and limited series The Beast in Me).

And in doing that, he actually set another record by becoming the only person to receive a lead actor Emmy for all three genres—he'd already won one for drama series The Americans back in 2018.

And his moment continues: Rhys actually has yet another new show out this week. Golden Axe is an animated comedy based on the Golden Axe video game series made by Sega way back in 1989. All 10 episodes are streaming now on Paramount+.

Joining Rhys, who plays dwarf warrior Gilius Thunderhead, is Danny Pudi (of Community and Mythic Quest) and Liam McIntyre (he played JD Fenix in Gears of War 4). Improv comedy fans will also be thrilled to hear the voice of Lisa Gilroy, playing sorceress Tyris, and Cart Tart, who voices… let me see if I've got this right… a humanoid panther.

"In an homage to Sega's iconic 1989 video game, Golden Axe follows legendary warriors Ax Battler, Tyris Flare and Gilius Thunderhead as they reunite to save Yuria from the evil giant Death Adder, who just won't seem to stay dead," says Paramount+. "Their quest is complicated by Hampton Squib, an inexperienced and wildly underprepared adventurer whose dream of heroism far exceeds his abilities. Forced to work together despite their flaws, they must find a way to stop Death Adder once and for all."

I'm a fan of just about the entire cast, and while I haven't seen it yet—and in fact only heard about the show for the first time today, and I've never played the games, either—I'm gonna check it out. If, like me, you're not subscribed to Paramount+ because you simply aren't interested in 26 different Taylor Sheridan shows, you can still see the first two episodes of Golden Axe for free on YouTube here and here. I've thoughtfully embedded the trailer below, too.

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie comes out this week on September 18, and the early reviews have just dropped. It's good news for games and horror fans: it sounds like just about everyone likes it, with more than one reviewer calling it the best videogame adaptation ever made.

(That's a pretty low bar, but still.)

Granted, early reviewers are hand-picked by studios, so it pays to take these first batch of glowing reviews with a grain of salt—and speaking of salty, PC Gamer (despite asking nicely a number of times!) wasn't granted a press screening, so we can't offer our own take. I know, boo hoo, poor us. In the meantime, until we get a chance to see it ourselves, you can get hyped by what a bunch of other outlets have said about the latest Resident Evil flick:

GamesRadar+ (4/5): "Turns out eighth time's a charm, as despite much pre-release griping over the absence of iconic game characters like Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield, director Zach Cregger's Resident Evil isn't just the best Resi movie by a distance; it's the best video game movie full stop," says Jordan Farley.

Polygon (91/100): "Cregger takes his love for both the franchise and the genre and channels them into something we've never really seen before," says Jake Kleinman. "Resident Evil is funny, scary, gross, and beautiful. Above all else, it captures the fight-or-flight experience of actually playing a Resident Evil game."

Gamespot (8/10): "By backing away from the stories and characters of the video games, Cregger dodges the giant bullet of 'that’s not my Leon Kennedy' and instead lets us finally experience Resident Evil ourselves, through our own eyes," says Eric Frederiksen.

IGN (8/10): "With a laser focus on putting its hero through the worst night of his life," Tom Jorgensen says, "Resident Evil is a simple and exciting survival horror story that benefits greatly from director Zach Cregger’s sensibilities."

Discussing Film (4/5): "Even though it’s an original story, Cregger’s take on Resident Evil sets a new high bar for video game movies by capturing the source material’s demented spirit while doing something clever and inventive with it.

Collider (8/10): "Clocking in at 90 minutes, Cregger's Resident Evil puts a lean, mean spin on an iconic horror franchise that's only poised to keep getting bigger, with a story that sits within the margins of the existing games while still giving fun, clever nods to its source material," says Carly Lane.

AV Club (B): "The 90-minute B-movie so deftly juggles gags and gross-outs that, when it’s finally boxed in by the larger demands of IP, it’s as tragic as watching a beloved character succumb to the dehumanizing effects of a virus."

Rolling Stone (Unscored): "Screw what hardcore fans say a movie adaptation should be," says Pie Conzaga. "Cregger’s take on RE is just as gross, funny, and scary as the games."

Variety (Unscored): "Is it a good movie?" asks Owen Gleiberman. "Let’s call it a sweetly executed piece of escapist trivia. It’s got a quirky relatability… for a Resident Evil movie."

The Hollywood Reporter (Unscored): "Cregger very much makes the film his own while displaying his obvious affinity for the source material," says Frank Scheck. "He’s crafted a propulsive, simultaneously terrifying and hilarious thrill ride that showcases both his cinematic chops and perverse sense of humor."

A few more quotes? Lisa Laman of Land of the Nerds says "Resident Evil is automatically up there with Exit 8 and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as the best live-action video game movie ever made," Donald Clark of the Irish Times says "Cregger’s shameless romp, though smallish in scale, feels like the best Resident Evil film in the franchise’s long history," and Adam Olinger of Adam Does Movies (YouTube review) calls it "the best videogame movie of all time."

Crazy Taxi is a game all about speed—no time for any lore when the average time a passenger spends in your vehicle is under half a minute. I just need to know that you wanna go to the KFC, not why you're heading there in the first place.

Sega is somewhat trying to pump a narrative into its attempt at reviving the series, Crazy Taxi: World Tour—a game I'm not totally sold on yet based on a one-hour hands-on I had at Gamescom. I'm don't know how good a story you can get out of a bloke committing several traffic violations—though then again, you could argue that's every Fast and Furious movie ever—but Netflix clearly sees something in the zaniness as it's one of the many Sega projects the company has decided it wants to adapt.

As reported by Variety, in Crazy Taxi's case, it'll be taking the form of a comedy movie written by Dan Gregor and Doug Mand (responsible for Naked Gun's 2025 reboot). On the production side, it'll be handled by Original Films and Toru Nakahara—both of whom also produced all three Sonic the Hedgehog movies along with the Knuckles and Sonic Prime television shows.

"We couldn't be more excited to continue our longstanding relationship with Sega and bring Crazy Taxi to life with our partners at Netflix," a statement from Original Film's Neal H. Moritz and Toby Ascher read. "This film is for anyone who's spent hours behind the wheel of a yellow cab on their Dreamcast, with the music cranked up, smashing through everything in sight just to make the next fare."

Now I am one of those people, but I'm honestly a little unsure how you can get a full 90 minutes of action out of someone with a painfully 90s updo picking people up and dropping them off about 20 meters down the road. Movies have certainly conjured up more material with less, though, so who knows?

That's not all Sega and Netflix has up its sleeve, either. It also has yet another animated Sonic television series in the works, along with a movie adaptation of Stranger Than Heaven. You know, that game that isn't even out yet.

I feel like we've been on a relatively decent hot streak for actual good videogame movie adaptations over the last few years, though I fear Netflix's penchant for turning absolutely anything into a straight-to-streaming romp may careen us right back into mediocre territory before long.

Zach Cregger has a brilliant track record of directing horror films that are both horrifying and hilarious (at times). Weapons and Barbarian had moments of levity which made each respective film so much more bearable to sit through. Cregger is trying to do the same with his upcoming survival horror film, Resident Evil, the only problem was he did too good of a job at first.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter Cregger revealed that one change he made after Resident Evil was shown at test screens was to dial down the jokes. "I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny," Cregger explains. "So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible."

Resident Evil isn't averse to a good quip or wise-crack—that's like 40% of Leon Kennedy's personality—but its humour only works so well because it happens infrequently. Leon's almost constant stream of action film-style one liners is one of the many reasons as to why I wouldn't class Resident Evil 4 as a horror game at all. And while there are certainly protagonists in other Resident Evil games who know how to joke around, like Ethan Winters, they are more serious than not.

Too many jokes in a horror film wouldn't work for the same reason they don't when packed into games. The point of a light-hearted moment amidst the horror is to provide some respite for viewers who have had their nervous system stretched and strained almost beyond tolerance—there's a reason it's called comic relief. You want to settle their hearts and blood pressure just enough to ensure they don't break and clock out of the movie entirely, so you can carry on scaring them. "A little bit of humour goes a long way in a horror movie," Cregger adds.

But too many jokes can turn it into a gimmick. A horror film with rabid zombies doing weird stuff is already a bit fantastical—add loads of jokes and then it'd just lose all of its atmosphere. So it comes as no surprise that after some of the jokes were removed Cregger "found that not only did the audience enjoy the movie more, but I also liked the movie a lot more." I'm sure the Resident Evil film will be better off for it.

After months of complaining about Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film, the internet has finally broken him. In a recent interview with IGN, he admitted how naive he was to think that everyone would be excited, and apologised for not creating the specific vision that those who are unhappy with the film's direction have. Instead, Cregger relied on his own instincts as a renowned director and writer—the nerve.

"I was naive," Cregger says. "I thought that fans of these games, like me, would be thrilled that somebody was coming along and turning Resident Evil into a survival horror movie." It's not naive to think that some fans of the games would be excited for this film, because they are—myself included. But there's nothing on this earth that can unite an internet full of bots, rage baiters, and those whose favourite hobby is being pissed off.

"I didn't really appreciate the sentiment that [players] have been waiting forever for Leon's story, and I appreciate that," Cregger continues. "And I'm sorry that that's not the story that I'm bringing here. I understand the frustration." That's very nice of Cregger to say, but I don't know a single Resident Evil fan that actually thinks Leon's story should be explored via a live-action film. Because that would suck.

Yes, we always want more Leon—that's one of the few certainties of this life. But it would be nigh impossible to cast an actor as Leon and have the community actually accept him. The only solution would be to do an animated series, but again, that's not without its pitfalls. If we do get more Leon, I would want it to be through DLCs or standalone games, because the best part about Leon Kennedy is getting to play as Leon Kennedy.

"I understand [the frustration] so well because I haven't seen the earlier movies, because they don't look like the Resident Evil I love," Cregger adds. "So how could I be frustrated with fans who have that same attitude? My only hope is that they will see the movie, regardless of their scepticism or their disappointment and that they will feel seen when they do watch the movie and they will recognise all of the love for the games that is in this movie. Because it is there, and this is not just me telling a story and slapping Resident Evil on it so I can get a budget. This is me telling a Resident Evil story."

It seems like Cregger is just trying to be nice—which is admirable, but ultimately pointless on the internet. Some people will like the upcoming Resident Evil movie and some people won't, there isn't much else to it. But I doubt many will change once they've made their mind up about it either way—even if Cregger is making it "from a true place of love".

Curse of Strahd is one of the most popular D&D modules for a reason—it's actually really compelling. Set in the misty, cursed lands of Barovia, Curse of Strahd is dominated by the titular Strahd von Zarovich, a vampire lord with a tragic backstory and a propensity for showing up at random intervals to give you a fantasy wedgie.

In the one Strahd campaign I played in, my first encounter with the man involved him bleeding our cleric and making my thief drink his blood—so, you know. Normal.

Anyway, per Deadline, we'll be getting a fully-fledged live action Netflix series about him dubbed Ravenloft—after the wider set of domains that darklords like Mr. Zarovich himself enjoy dominion over. It's being helmed by writer and executive producer John August and executive producer Alfonso Cuarón.

The latter of which worked on Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban. Fittingly, one of the darker Harry Potter films—and owner of exactly the kind of murky, grey aesthetic I'd anticipate in any series taking place in Ravenloft.

The report reads: "Described as a prestige fantasy series where adventure collides with gothic horror and tragic romance, Ravenloft and its Domains of Dread tackle adventure through character-driven stories of dark magic and supernatural intrigue.

"At its heart, the series follows the making of the vampire Darklord Strahd von Zarovich, whose story of power, love, obsession, and undead transformation charts his origins from tragic antihero to one of Dungeons & Dragons’ most notorious villains."

And hey, genuinely? I think this could work out great, assuming it can escape the executive Netflix meddling and second-screen scriptwriting that's been creeping its wormy fingers into games recently. Strahd's entire backstory is tragic enough and appealing enough that unwinding it underpins one of the most popular D&D modules.

I look forward to the season finale where, presumably, a group of four adventurers with increasingly absurd backstories and a sword made out of sunlight punt down his front door and kick his byronic ass.

What's the weirdest bit of Resident Evil lore you know of? Is it the fact that Claire Redfield's favourite food is a cheeseburger? Maybe it's that Hunk spent a week lost in Raccoon City's sewers eating rats after getting his ass beaten by Birkin? Or perhaps it's that the Tyrant's trench coat is more than just a bold fashion statement—it's actually integral to the build.

There's been a few explanations as to why Tyrants wear trench coats in Resident Evil games. One perk of the coat is that it helps disguise the mutations, which allows Tyrants to infiltrate more sensitive areas, but its biggest bonus is its power-limiting function. Wearing the trench coat holds the Tyrant together by preventing out-of-control mutations, and if it's damaged or the Tyrant removes it you'll get a Super Tyrant.

You'd be forgiven for not knowing this as it's not exactly a widely talked about tidbit, which is exactly why Zach Cregger, director of the upcoming Resident Evil movie, is staying away from Resident Evil's deep lore: to keep the film as grounded as possible.

"Some of the Resident Evil games get a little magical," Cregger says during a recent junket (via DiscussingFilm). "You know we have a woman who can turn into birds [he means Mother Miranda] and fly around. I love it, I love it, I've played [Resident Evil 8] a bunch of times, I think it's an awesome game, but in terms of me making a movie out of it, it's like I gotta try and limit some of the wild aspects of Resident Evil.

"So I chose to stick with the T-virus, keep it as grounded as possible. So that means I'm not going to have a gigantic jacked dude in a trench coat, because I'm like, 'Where'd the coat come from? How did he get the coat?'"

The was, expectedly, met with a flurry of fury as some accused Cregger of not understanding the intricacies of Resident Evil. But they've failed to see that Cregger actually does understand "why [the Tyrant] exists and why he has the coat". It's not that Cregger doesn't know about the structural integrity of the trench coat, it's just that he doesn't believe it's valuable information for a film, and he's right.

There's so much to Resident Evil that it's completely unrealistic to think that anyone could condense it all down into a manageable chunk for a film which will likely be under two hours long. It also has to appeal to more than just fans of the game: Someone who has never heard of Resident Evil should be able to watch this film and have a good time without getting confused or bogged down in excessive lore and fan service. Striking that balance is truly an artform.

Kane Parsons actually managed to pull this off with his Backrooms movie. For those who were knowledgeable about Backrooms the film was full of references and easter eggs, like Clarks furniture store being a reference the photo that inspired the Backrooms as well as other small info dumps about Parsons' Backrooms YouTube series. But you didn't need any prior knowledge to enjoy the film, which is what I think Cregger is gunning for with Resident Evil.

"In the world of this [film] where the outbreak just happened, I want to keep it chaotic, I want to keep it primal, and I want to just keep it just as grounded as I can," Cregger says. "The T-virus has all kinds of cool and fun mutations—that is enough. So I'm limiting it there."

We got confirmation a few weeks ago that former WWE and Marvel superhero star Dave Bautista would be taking on the role of Kratos in Amazon's upcoming God of War series after an unfortunate accident that saw the previous lead, Ryan Hurst, have to step down from the role after tearing a bicep.

Even before Bautista was confirmed as a replacement, rumours spread of his involvement because, well, he's about one of the only actors who has the physique to step into Kratos' big boots at short notice. But that doesn't even seem enough for the actor, as Bautista has begun an intensive three month long training course.

"Third week into weight training again," Bautista writes in an Instagram post. "Two more months to get to where I need to be. Like ridin a bike! LFG!" Given how Bautista looks ready to don the red paint, Leviathan axe, and Blades of Chaos right now, I have no idea what he'll look like after the months of training have come to an end—is there such a thing as too buff for Kratos? Probably not, but we'll see.

But he's not just being used for his muscles. Asad Qizilbash, Sony's head of PlayStation productions and head of product at PlayStation Studios, previously explained how Bautista brings "extraordinary presence, depth, and humanity to the role," in a LinkedIn post. "There's a lot of excitement across PlayStation productions and Santa Monica Studio about what Dave will bring to Kratos, and about continuing to bring this world and these characters to the screen with the care they deserve."

I'm certainly interested to see what Bautista will do with the role of Kratos. I've loved his work in Guardians of the Galaxy, Blade Runner 2049, and Dune Part 2. But I've also always thought that he thrives in oddly comedic roles, and if there's one thing Kratos isn't it's comedic, although that doesn't mean some well-timed and subtle quips are completely off the table.

I have high expectations for Zach Cregger's upcoming Resident Evil film. As a superb director and seemingly a genuine fan of the games it really feels as if he's got the vibe of Resident Evil down, demonstrated by his inclusion of little easter eggs, choice of location, and now choice to highlight a staple of the Resident Evil games: their resource management.

"I love the resource management aspect of the games and it was really important to me to bring that to the movie," Cregger says in a Reddit AMA. He loves it so much, in fact, that viewers will be able to follow the protagonist Bryan's management.

"You will know how many bullets are in his gun," Cregger adds. "You will care when he misses a shot. That's one of the things that makes the games feel so intense and it translates really well into the film (in my opinion)."

One of the funniest clips I've seen from the Resident Evil film so far has to be Bryan cautiously lining up a shot at a padlock hanging from a door handle, sheepishly covering his ear with his spare hand, and then missing the shot. As someone who knows what the pain of wasting ammo in a RE game feels like, that resonated in my soul.

But it's not all just about ammo, as with any survival horror game, healing supplies are also at a premium. "I also want viewers to be keenly aware of his health as he progresses," Cregger adds. "Won't say much about that but it's another way to utilize the game mechanic that heightens the narrative engine of the movie."

I can think of several ways in which Cregger may be able to implement some health mechanics from the games. If he wants to reference earlier Resident Evil games, there could be a scene wherein Bryan is hooked up to a ECG monitor that's bright red if he's in particularly bad shape. There's obviously the classic limp that Bryan will probably do if he's hurt—although that's less of a reference to Resident Evil 4 and more of a reference to hurting your leg really bad.

Something that could look cool if done correctly could even be using screen effects on a first-person POV, which we've seen in recent games. Something like Bryan's sight having a red hue as his eyes fill with blood—it could go nicely with some loud and rapid heartbeat noises. Cregger has even previously discussed how the film will have a few first-person POV scenes.

But what I want more than anything else isn't to see Bryan blue or bloody—I want to see him try and organise an attache case like it's some twisted game of Tetris, ultimately failing to find a space for just one more bag of scraps. On the flip side, it'd be fun to see Bryan start to encounter more handgun ammo after he picks up a random silver case—I have a feeling he'll need it as well.

Some trailers—like, for instance, a Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer—are meant to be consumed slowly and carefully, dissected and analyzed, until every last bit of information is wrung out of them. Others are about nothing more than kicking back and enjoying the fun. The new promo for the upcoming Street Fighter film is definitely one of the latter, and I'm really starting to think that as videogame movies go, this might be a good one.

We're not talking about great cinema here, and the overarching story, well, it's Street Fighter: M. Bison has invited the world's greatest fighters to a tournament for unknown but certainly nefarious purposes, and it's up to the gang to put a stop to it.

I can't put my finger on exactly why, but this image is very funny.

But it looks like the movie might just strike the right balance between taking itself seriously—the bits of fight scenes look very Street Fighter but also have pleasingly bone-crunching impact—and not seriously at all, with a full understanding that it's built entirely around a cartoonish arcade game rooted in the mid-1980s.

There's a very pro wrestling vibe to it, really, which is appropriate given that two of the sport's biggest stars—Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns—play prominent roles in the film, as Guile and Akuma. Rhodes in particular has a couple of choice moments in this video, even though the focus is clearly on Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li, but I expect (or, more accurately, hope) the full film will deliver scene stealing moments from Jason Momoa, Eric Andre, and of course David Dastmalchian, one of the few men who might have the juice to live up to Raul Julia's magnificent "It was Tuesday."

I'm reading a lot into a single trailer, so take it for what it's worth: It's a fast, flashy video with good action, catchy music, and a funny stinger. Whether or not that adds up to a good movie remains to be seen, but at this point I'm feeling pretty hopeful about it. Street Fighter is set to hit the big screen on October 16.

In his review of Transformers: War for Cybertron, Dan Stapleton referred to "the tingly nerd-joy of hearing original Optimus Prime voice actor Peter Cullen's authoritative dialogue". Every time the character appeared on screen, as he did many times in videogames like Transformers: Devastation and Fall of Cybertron or the middling movies, it was thrilling to hear him and realize, yes, they got the "real" Optimus Prime.

As noted by The Hollywood Reporter, Cullen has died at the age of 85. He joins a string of particularly beloved celebrities to have died in recent days, including Dolly Parton, Yayoi Kusama, and Red Alert 3 star and camp icon Tim Curry.

While most famous for his recurring role as Optimus Prime, Cullen also voiced Venger in Dungeons & Dragons, Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, Monterey Jack in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and provided the menacing clicking sounds for the Predator.

His connection to videogames goes back to the first TV show based on a game, Pac-Man, in which he voiced Pac-Man's pet cat. As our Chris Livingston said after his recent viewing of the show, "What a waste of an S-tier set of pipes!" A year later, Cullen voiced Mario in Saturday Supercade, an anthology series with episodes based on videogames including Frogger, Pitfall, and Donkey Kong, making him the first actor to portray Mario in English.

Cullen also portrayed orcish warchief Orgrim Doomhammer in Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, a point-and-click adventure that Blizzard cancelled in 1998, but which has since appeared online in a playable form.

I wouldn't dream of telling you how to live your life, but if you're planning to play Onimusha: Way of the Sword on September 3, that gives you one weekend and approximately 120 waking hours to fill with samurai movies before the game's release. What else are you going to do—not watch so many classic Japanese films that you intuitively know how to walk the path of the blade the moment you pick up a controller as Miyamoto Musashi? Seems like a bad way to live to me.

But okay, benefit of the doubt: Maybe you're not planning to spend every second of the next week with your eyes peeled open going nuts on the Criterion Channel samurai tag because you have some appropriate gaming plans already established. Perfectly reasonable to devote the hours you could spend watching Akira Kurosawa's whole oeuvre to playing the remasters of the first two Onimusha games, Onimusha: Warlords and Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny, which are only about 3½ and 8½ hours long, respectively. You might even be able to rush through the first game more quickly than you could watch Seven Samurai!

Otherwise I can't think of any particularly good excuses. Job? Eh. Cooking? C'mon. Loved ones? The samurai code demands sacrifice for a greater purpose.

Assuming you're not yet ready to devote yourself wholly to such a singularly focused existence, here's a small selection of great samurai films you can watch between now and next Friday, each of which I think makes for a particularly good appetizer for Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Lemme tell you why.

Sword of the Stranger

Stream on: Crunchyroll | Buy on: Blu-ray

You're going to spend a lot of Onimusha parrying viciously fast sword swings, the likes of which have never been animated on film better than they are in Sword of the Stranger. This 2007 anime isn't as famous as it deserves to be: one of the best samurai films of the last 20 years, it throws a classic "wrong place, wrong time" ronin hero into a plot involving the emperor of the Chinese Ming dynasty. It's the rare jidaigeki flick to involve foreign characters—both the protagonist and his rival—while still feeling fully centered on the Japanese perspective. The Last Samurai it ain't.

Really, though, we're just here for the fights. Studio Bones, known for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, My Hero Academia, and Mob Psycho 100, put in the work here. Despite the name on the video above, I promise there's even better in the full film.

Yojimbo

Stream on: Criterion Channel | Buy on: Blu-ray | Rent on: Prime Video, Apple TV

In Toshiro Mifune's definitive samurai performance, he stars as a cunning ronin playing two rival bands of criminals against each other in a small Japanese village. It's a classic plot, originating decades earlier in the American pulp crime novel Red Harvest and later remade as the spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars, and it rocks in every single form.

The reason to watch Yojimbo specifically, though (other than it being one of the most acclaimed films by one of the most acclaimed directors of all time, nbd) is to see Mifune roll his shoulders, scratch his head, smirk, and furrow his brow. He does so much acting even when he's not saying a word, delivering a performance that conjures up a vivid character despite how little we know about him. I have no doubt Capcom pored over every microscopic detail of Yojimbo with Mifune in the frame while recreating his face and mannerisms for Way of the Sword.

The Sword of Doom

Stream on: Criterion Channel | Buy on: Blu-ray | Rent on: Prime Video, Apple TV

Noble, clever, fierce, brave; these are often the qualities of the heroes in samurai films, particularly the ones typically played by Mifune. Sometimes, instead, you get the coward or the trickster. Ryunosuke, in The Sword of Doom, is none of these things. He's evil incarnate, a psychopathic killer who murders his way through quite possibly the starkest, most nihilistic Japanese film of the 1960s.

Ryunosuke is not an anti-hero, but the cracked mirror image of an honorable samurai. To drive the point home, Mifune even shows up in a small role in Sword of Doom playing a wise, controlled master swordsman. The story here isn't about Musashi or his rival Sasaki Ganryu, but Ryunosuke has some spiritual similarities to Onimusha's depiction of Ganryu as a mad, jealous swordsman. Many films in this genre cover the same themes and emotional beats, but none of them look or feel like The Sword of Doom.

Ninja Scroll

Stream on: HiDive | Buy on: Blu-ray | Rent on: Prime Video, Apple TV

The Onimusha series dips into fantasy and sci-fi as it mixes Japanese folklore with stuff that must've started with someone at Capcom saying "this would be sick in a videogame"—like a magical gauntlet that sucks up demon souls to power up a famous samurai warrior. In Onimusha 2, samurai Jubei rides a robot horse and an ancient, magical machine-fish. That blend lends the game series a different flavor than the historical chanbara dramas that, melodramatic bits aside, tend to be fairly grounded.

Iconic early '90s anime Ninja Scroll, on the other hand, is very much not grounded. It's graphic and at times outright nasty, but pretty much delivered the all-timer version of 'a hero with a mysterious past fighting through a roster of increasingly fucked up henchmen on his way to the big bad.'

We've got a guy who turns his body to stone, one who can melt into shadows, and another who can reattach his severed body parts—all classic videogame boss behavior. I'd be surprised if more than a handful of developers on Capcom's Onimusha team haven't seen Ninja Scroll. If you're splitting hairs I guess it's not really a samurai movie, but no samurai I'm aware of can transform into a demon demigod, so I think it's close enough.

This is the only film on the list you should maybe wait to watch: a new 4K restoration is debuting in theaters in October.

Samurai trilogy: Musashi Miyamoto, Duel at Ichijoji Temple, Duel at Ganryu Island

Stream on: HBO Max, Criterion Channel | Buy on: Blu-ray | Rent on: Prime Video, Apple TV

Okay, I couldn't stop at just five movies—I'm cheating a bit, but for this final entry I had to include Toshiro Mifune's Samurai trilogy, starting with Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto. These 1954-1956 films come from early in Japan's post-war cinema revival (Godzilla and Seven Samurai were released in 1954 as well), and star Mifune playing the same character he plays in Onimusha: Way of the Sword, one of the country's most famous historical figures. There have been many, many adaptations of Musashi's life, but this is the one to watch for the broad strokes of his life, depicted in dreamy, vivid color and even more vivid melodrama.

Compared to the work Kurosawa was directing around the same time, they're not great films—the sword fights aren't very convincing and the intertwining romances and tragedies are as unnuanced as they come. Still, they're a perfect introduction to Musashi's story, with Mifune in the first film playing him as a wild, untameable ruffian before a Buddhist priest finally pushes him into learning the honorable ways of the samurai. In the second and third he's a markedly different person, pursuing stronger and stronger opponents before he reaches true enlightenment, choosing mercy over killing and honor over winning at all costs.

The second and third films focus increasingly on Musashi's rivalry with Sasaki Ganryu, which offers a great introduction to how their dynamic has classically been depicted ahead of Onimusha's adaptation. Watch the trilogy, and then imagine somewhere in the middle both samurai got their hands on magical gauntlets that turned them into superpowered demon warriors and you'll be primed for Way of the Sword.

As a millennial (boo, hiss) born in the 90s, I was just old enough to enjoy The Guild, a YouTube series about a group of dysfunctional MMO players, when it debuted online in 2007. 12-year-old me, who'd just gotten big into World of Warcraft and online games in general was downright invested—but that was then, and this is now.

I am currently 31 (also boo, also hiss) and I've got a lot less hair, which is part of why I was honestly surprised when I awoke to the news this week that The Guild: Ren Faire'd has become the highest-funded Kickstarter movie of all time—and one of the most successfully-funded movies to be fuelled by crowdfunding.

If you head on over to Kickstarter and apply the correct filters on its search function, you'll see it playing second fiddle to Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina's animated "special"—which has since become a fully-fledged series spanning multiple seasons.

Originally asking for $1.5 million, the movie has brought in over $6.8 million at the time of writing. Now, this doesn't actually make it the highest-crowdfunded movie of all time by technicality—that award goes to 2025's David, which raised around $52 million, though that was achieved through asking for investors, rather than backers.

It was also based on a little book called The Bible, not a web series from 2007-2013 about World of Warcraft players. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have a significant advantage when it comes to word of mouth.

"The Kickstarter is over. $6.8 million. You guys are incredible. Thank you for the support. The community. The creativity. We are so excited to make a movie and so much more for you guys," writes Felicia Day, who created the series itself. Day has since had a prolific career as an actress and the founder of Geek and Sundry, who we have to thank for the existence of Critical Role.

Which is cause for celebration! Though, I can't help but gnaw a little at my fingernails—The Guild was created originally in, quite literally, a different era, where MMOs were mysterious and inaccessible, and communities were more common. Heck, the OG series got picked up and streamed on Zune Marketplace and MSN Video. Remember those? I sure didn't.

And hey, maybe the Knights of Good going to the ren faire'll be a good laugh, but you'll either have to trade out most of the humour for jabs about how everything's on a Discord server now and high-end raids are datamined to death—or you'll have to become a little dated, only appealing to… well, people like me.

Which'll lead to three outcomes, two of which I dread: I'll be reminded of the sorry state of my favourite game genre by a bunch of actors who've aged better than me, I'll be mercilessly pandered to, or Felicia Day will successfully thread the needle and I'll have nothing to worry about. And hey, 45,500 people with $6.8 million bucks to spare aren't nearly as nervous. The Guild: Ren Faire'd plans to release sometime in 2027.

Dave Bautista has been the rumoured replacement for Kratos in Amazon's God of War series for a few weeks now. It started after we got the very unfortunate news that the previous lead, Ryan Hurst, would be stepping down from the role due to a torn bicep which needs surgery and therefore rules him out of filming.

But now we know for sure that Bautista really is going to be the new Kratos thanks to a report from Variety. I'm not saying that Bautista was the only option, but as Deadline pointed out, Hurst "underwent a physical transformation", managing to put on 40 pounds of muscle for the role of Kratos, and there are few in Hollywood who can just turn up to a role which demands that kind of physical presence with little prep.

That doesn't mean, however, it's smooth sailing from here. The show reportedly started shooting back in February this year and while filming is expected to carry on in Vancouver the production will now have to do all of Kratos' scenes again, with Bautista as the lead.

The show is set to follow the story from the God of War 2018 game, where Kratos and his young son Atreus travel through Midgard, fighting plenty of gods along the way, to scatter their wife and mother's ashes, and God of War: Ragnarök. The second season will likely pick up on Ragnarök's story, in which Kratos and Atreus renew their rocky relationship and prepare for the end of the world.

There aren't any other reported recastings for the first season, but with the likely timeskip after the first season, word is out that the series is looking for older actors for the roles of Atreus and Thrud. It may seem premature but as filming for season 2 is apparently going to start as soon as production on the first season wraps, the team will have to iron these changes out quickly to prevent any further delays to filming.

Epic Mickey man Warren Spector—also known for other games you may have heard of, like Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Deus Ex—recently took to LinkedIn to share some thoughts about Disney's upcoming Oswald the Lucky Rabbit miniseries, which was showcased by Jon Favreau at the recent D23 event. Spector said he's "seriously looking forward to it," but he's also a little annoyed by what he sees as the erasure of the game that helped bring the character back into the public consciousness.

Favreau provided a brief overview of Oswald's creation in the 1920s during his presentation, relating how creator Walt Disney lost the rights to the character shortly thereafter. While numerous Oswald shorts were produced, the character was utterly overshadowed by Disney's subsequent creation, Mickey Mouse, and languished in obscurity for years. Disney reacquired the rights to Oswald in 2006, and "we've seen him pop up in games and in shorts and things" since then, Favreau said—and, well, that's the extent of it.

That didn't sit right with Spector, who made Oswald a major NPC in Epic Mickey, and a playable character in Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two. "I’m seriously looking forward to it but it seems as if people are looking at it as the debut of the character," Spector wrote. "Call me small-minded but that ain’t right.

"In the Epic Mickey game—released in 2010—the team at Junction Point featured Oswald in his first Disney role since 1928. Two years later, in Epic Mickey: The Power of Two, we gave him a voice (thanks to the incredible talent of Frank Welker). That was the first time he ever spoke in a Disney story. And just to put a cherry on top, we gave Ortensia her name, her voice, her personality and her role as Oswald’s paramour. None of that dates back to Disney."

Spector admitted he's "a little bitter about the lack of credit the team gets" for all the work they put into bringing such a foundational character back into the public eye. But his real concern is simply ensuring the record remains accurate.

"I was blown away that Disney trusted us and saw fit to reintroduce the little guy in a game," he wrote. "But the team did a great job and deserves to be recognized for it before Hollywood makes people forget the games ever existed."

One of the challenges facing Spector here is that the Epic Mickey games were, well, forgettable, despite some striking concept art. The original was a Nintendo Wii exclusive that posted middling reviews and sales alike; it didn't come to PC and other platforms until the Rebrushed Edition in 2024, which holds "very positive" reviews on Steam—perhaps in part because of the presence of Deus Ex DNA that writer Jeremy Peel detected in it. 2012's Epic Mickey 2 sold even fewer copies than the first game, though, and Junction Point was closed just a couple months after its release.

None of which invalidates Spector's point: Junction Point pulled Oswald out of the past and gave the character a depth and distinctiveness it never had when it was merely a Mickey precursor. It deserves credit for doing so, and hopefully as the Oswald series comes closer to fruition—it's set to debut sometime in 2027—Disney will make an effort to ensure Junction Point gets it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resident Evil is set to hit screens on September 18.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hour one: Matt Damon tries to operate a loom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hour three: Matt Damon makes tea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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