Stories, especially beloved stories, have a tendency to bleed past their borders and escape their original bodies. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is among many well-loved works that have long since taken on new shapes, shifting forms constantly. The epistolary tale of vampires has hundreds upon hundreds of adaptations, with one domineering throughline: Stoker’s lasting characterization of the elegant, verbose, vampiric count himself.
Given the breadth and variety of the landscape, it can be difficult, at this point, to iterate on Dracula in a way that feels fresh — which is why Dimension 20’s Coffin Run was, and continues to be, such a delight.
Coffin Run, a Dungeons & Dragons actual-play series, premiered in the summer of 2022. The six-episode run, described on Dropout’s website as “a tale as old as many lifetimes,” was helmed by storyteller and game master Jasmine Bhullar and starred Zac Oyama, Erika Ishii, Isabella Roland, and Carlos Luna. Coffin Run emerged from Bhullar’s love of Stoker’s novel, she told CBR in 2022, as well as comedic source material like Young Frankenstein and What We Do in the Shadows.
The cast of the series shines as archetypical members of Dracula’s retinue, brought together to ferry the Count (who sustains undeath-threatening injuries at the top of the series) home to Castle Dracula in his coffin. Oyama plays Squing, a Nosferatu-like vampire who is Dracula’s “firstborn,” turned as a child and preserved forever. Roland plays Dr. Aleksandr Astrovsky, a brash, invigorated mad scientist figure. Luna plays Wetzel, a young human who lives as Dracula’s plaything in hope of becoming a vampire himself. And Ishii plays May Wong, one of Dracula’s vampire brides, who used to be an actress in New York.
Image: Dropout
Coffin Run unfolds as a love letter to Dracula, both the form of the novel and the vampire himself. The story roots itself in Stoker’s work from the start, anchoring the narrative in the epistolary form. It’s letters all the way down, really (and not just inside Squing, who has a tendency to eat them). The series opens on Dracula himself standing over a writing desk, penning a letter to Squing. The letter takes a journey across the sea before it arrives at the Gold Crona Inn — much like Jonathan Harker at the outset of Dracula. From there, letters guide the narrative, arriving for the players at key moments.
Letters, as a kind of delivery system for the story, are adeptly wielded by Bhullar — because of the fickle nature of their author, Dracula, when heartfelt sentiments are poured out in the letters there’s a lingering sense of unease, perpetuated by the arrival of letters that reveal that the Count’s feelings for his coffin-bearing friends and family might not be what they seem. Wetzel, for example, becomes disillusioned with the Count as the series goes on, slowly beginning to distrust him, while May realizes that her own adoration for Dracula may be more one-sided.
Materially, Coffin Run pays beautiful homage to the Gothic lushness of Dracula. When players are handed letters, they receive actual letters at the table, passed along with a glowing candlestick. In the final fight, Dracula’s vitality is measured by vials of “blood” poured into a crystal goblet by Bhullar and then consumed as the vampire comes back to himself. Black-and-white film adaptations get a nod in the grayscale miniatures and the monochromatic set. The special effects all come together to create a world that feels incredibly familiar to horror fans as well as uniquely new — Rick Perry, production designer and creative producer for Dropout, gets heaps of nods throughout the series for his work on the sets and miniatures, as do the crew in a talkback episode post-series.
Image: Dropout
From the Scooby-Doo-like title sequence to the performances, the crew and cast of Coffin Run perfectly hone in on the comedic influences Bhullar cited for the series, as well as the inherent ironies of the source material. May, the classically gorgeous vampire bride, is played by Ishii with a gleeful, over-the-top accent, as is Roland’s Dr. Astrovsky. Squing, as Dracula’s firstborn, is constantly baffled by modern technology, referring to the train that delivers Dracula’s coffin as a “metal tube.” Seemingly, his lack of understanding stems from apathy, rather than access. Castle Dracula, when the story eventually arrives there, is similarly frozen in time, preserved by caretakers who eventually end up ceding the castle to antiquers and “Lairbnb” opportunists.
So much of vampiric representation in pop culture is rooted in Dracula’s particular brand of allure. Even Dungeons & Dragons has its own storied distillation of Stoker’s Transylvania and the titular count in the enigmatic Strahd von Zarovich and the land of Ravenloft. The cast and crew of Coffin Run do a fantastic job of preserving the larger-than-life presence of Dracula in the story, from adding a silhouetted batwing shadow over Bhullar when she speaks to characters as Dracula to character arcs that nod at the ubiquity of the Count and his story. In discussing his place with Dracula at the end of the tale, Wetzel says, “It’s like everyone in [Castle Dracula], they’re just gonna be in there for a while, you know? It’s like the same thing over and over again. Same stuff.”
No adaptation is perfect — with Dracula in the public domain and vampires back in the zeitgeist (hello, Interview with the Vampire, and the resurgence of Twilight, and a million other fanged options), there will likely be hundreds more distillations in the future. Coffin Run takes a pile of well-known, over-offered ingredients — Dracula, the undying bogs of Transylvania, letters, a carriage ride through wolf-stalked trees — and makes something wonderfully new from them.
At the very least, it’s worth sinking your teeth into.
A couple of significant things happened in the world of online gaming over the first weekend of November. At its BlizzCon convention in California, Blizzard devoted quite a lot of time to World of Warcraft Classic — the nostalgic, retro version of its 19-year-old massively multiplayer game — and revealed surprisingly ambitious plans for Classic’s future. At the same time, Fortnite’s servers were melting under the load of its biggest day ever, which was all down to the launch of Fortnite OG, a special season bringing back the game’s original map and 2018 gameplay.
All of a sudden, in the proudly impermanent world of online gaming — where change is always good, and if it’s not, never mind, because here comes more change — winding back the clock is big business. It’s a kind of paradox: Because online games are always evolving, a sense of scarcity and intense nostalgia forms around the way they used to be. If you can find a way to bring that feeling back, especially for an audience that’s getting jaded, then you’re on to something.
Blizzard initially seemed reluctant to get on board with a growing movement in WoW’s community that wanted to go back to the way things were in 2004-2005. It squashed unofficial “vanilla” servers and prevaricated over creating an official alternative for years. In a way, it’s understandable: If you have spent many years of effort on (in your eyes) modernizing and improving your game, why would you want to indulge this rose-tinted exercise? Isn’t World of Warcraft just better now?
Of course, that’s a value judgment — but what’s undeniable is that WoW is now extremely different from how it used to be. And that’s exactly what makes Classic a viable and interesting, if slightly old-fashioned, alternative. After Classic arrived in 2019, included in a standard WoW subscription, it became a roaring success, partly because of the strong contrast between it and the two unloved expansions (Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands) it launched between.
But what’s really fascinating about Classic is where Blizzard is taking it next — because Classic is an online game, and no online game can stand still, even a throwback. It began as a relatively faithful version of the original MMO with smart tweaks: It moved through content patches at an accelerated rate, while locking to a single iteration of game design and balance. Then it bifurcated, with some servers moving forward through classic expansions, while others stayed in the “vanilla” era. This year, it acquired a third track, something completely new that WoW had never had before: a permadeath Hardcore mode, which turned out to be a game-reviving innovation that was quite brilliant in its simplicity.
From its showing at BlizzCon, Blizzard is doubling down on morphing WoW Classic into its own game. The expansion servers are moving on to Cataclysm, which is probably the point at which “classic” becomes a misnomer: Whatever your feelings about this divisive expansion, its sweeping rewrite of the “old world” questing experience is the point at which original WoW died, and is still represented in the game today. Blizzard is going even further than it has before in tweaking and fixing this expansion for Classic, accelerating leveling, adding quality-of-life features, and throwing in new dungeon difficulties and loot.
World of Wacraft Classic’s Season of Discovery seeds the well-explored world of Azeroth with secrets.Image: Blizzard Entertainment
But that isn’t even the headline. Blizzard — drawing inspiration from sister series Diablo, as it did for the Hardcore mode — is also introducing a fourth track to the WoW Classic servers that seasonally remixes the original “vanilla” game. Season of Discovery, which launches on Nov. 30, seeds entirely new content across the original world of Azeroth in the form of Discoveries, which producer Josh Greenfield said at BlizzCon were a way to disrupt the “solved nature” of original WoW and restore a “feeling of adventure and exploration.” It also offers a Rune Engraving system that endows classes with entirely new abilities, even allowing them to switch archetypes (you’ll be able to create a tank Warlock or a healer Mage, to name a couple).
The game is furthermore being broken up into level-banded phases — the initial level cap will be only 25 — and interpolated with all-new endgames, one for each phase. The first of these reworks the classic leveling dungeon Blackfathom Deeps as a 10-player raid, but Blizzard is also teasing adding unfinished or cut content, and even all-new dungeons, to Season of Discovery. It’s not just a new way to think about classic WoW — it’s a new approach to structuring MMOs, borrowing liberally from across the online gaming landscape. It’s pretty exciting.
That Blizzard is going to all this effort shows that WoW Classic is working both for the business and for the WoW community. It also demonstrates that for an online gaming nostalgia mode to succeed in the long term, it needs to evolve away from being an emulation or restoration of a bygone experience, and become a (sort of) fresh game in its own right. (Or, in Classic’s case, four games.)
Tilted Towers has returned in Fortnite OG.Image: Epic Games
Currently, Epic has no plans to keep Fortnite OG going past its current monthlong season, which sprints through six seasons of the game’s Chapter 1 in a matter of weeks instead of months. The branding clearly allows for OG to return and revisit later chapters, but given the enormous surge in interest, Epic would be foolish not to be considering ways to keep some of these new or returning players in the fold permanently.
It’s true that WoW and Fortnite are very different games with, crucially, different business models. Splitting the game’s audience might be more of a worry for Epic than it is for Blizzard, which is presumably happy as long as all those players stay within the one subscription-paying bucket. But WoW has proven that a big online game — especially one with a history — can support a family of sub-communities enjoying different flavors of the same game. Indeed, that might be the healthiest way forward for a game of that sort, certainly one approaching its 20th anniversary.
More importantly, perhaps, what WoW Classic and Fortnite OGdemonstrate is that the history of online games doesn’t have to be consigned to the scrapheap of memory. There’s a genuine hunger from players to turn back the clock, which, when met by an inventive studio that understands what was special about what it created but is willing to take some risks with it, can create something vibrant and sustainable in the long term — a kind of multiverse of paths not taken for your favorite old multiplayer games. What’s next, Vault of Glass in modern Destiny 2? Sign me up.
I got out of prison 4 months ago. I’ve been living with my grandma (God bless her) so I’ve been able to save up some money and this is the first car I’ve ever bought! Just wanted to say to y’all to keep your heads up and trust that your effort will pay off in the end. I was riding my bike 15 miles a day to and from work and I was able to pay cash for this car. It was $1200 to get my license reinstated after a federal drug indictment and the car was $3800 after taxes. Don’t ever give up! Don’t ever lose hope!
A collaboration between Rocket League, the video game where you play soccer but as a car, and Disney and Pixar’s Cars franchise is such an obvious match that it’s strange it took till now to happen. But better late than never, and now Lightning McQueen himself is racing into Rocket League. Kachow!
The Lightning McQueen cosmetic bundle hits the game on Nov. 7. The McQueen car body will be the very first in the game to come with dynamic expression. This means that the Lightning McQueen car’s eyes will move and blink and change depending on what’s going on in the game. He wouldn’t be lightning without that cocky smile, after all!
There are also three new decals to mix up Lightning’s look: the classic racetrack red, the spruced up shiny deep crimson, and a Dinoco Blue fit. There are also new wheels to choose from, including the iconic whitewall wheels promoted by Radiator Springs residents Luigi and Guido.
The bundle also includes a Ka-chow Goal Explosion, a Lightning McQueen Player Banner. and a “Life Is A Highway” Player Anthem by Rascal Flatts. It’ll be available for 2500 credits.
About a quarter past 4 p.m. on Thursday, roughly an hour after jurors in United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried had been sent off to deliberate the seven counts of fraud and conspiracy charged to cryptocurrency faux-impresario Sam Bankman-Fried, the court read aloud a note from the jury. “We want cars,” it said.
Earlier that day, Judge Lewis Kaplan had offered jurors free dinner and rides home—care of the American taxpayer, he pointed out—if they wanted to stay at the courthouse as late as 8 p.m. to hash out a verdict. The note meant that they at least wanted to try.
Over the next few hours, reporters and onlookers loitered around the courthouse, doing crosswords and eating pizza and drawing one another in the manner of sketch artists, waiting to see if the monthlong trial would reach a conclusion before the clock struck 8. I wasn’t sure it would, considering it had taken Kaplan several hours to simply instruct the jury about the nuances of all the different charges against Bankman-Fried. There were two counts of wire fraud, and five counts of conspiracy that ranged from commodities fraud to laundering money. There were three different sets of victims to consider: customers of FTX (the online crypto exchange that Bankman-Fried founded and then used as a gigantic piggy bank), lenders to Alameda Research (the prop trading firm, also owned by Bankman-Fried, whose balance sheets and account settings were constantly being favorably fiddled with), and outside investors.
And there were reams of evidence that had been introduced over the course of the trial that showed how Bankman-Fried solicited, accessed, misrepresented, and spent some $10 billion of other people’s money. Spreadsheets! Google Docs! Signal messages! Testimony from three different once-trusted colleagues and friends who’d already pleaded guilty and who spoke under cooperation agreements with the government! Even if the jurors were to find themselves in agreement right from the start of deliberations, it seemed as though getting the verdict organized might still be a time-consuming logistical/bureaucratic lift.
By a little bit after 7:30, we had seen juror notes requesting highlighters and Post-Its and transcripts of investor witness testimony. We had run out of blank crossword squares; we were strategizing Monday arrival times in the increasingly likely event that deliberations lasted into the next scheduled court session.
And then, the judge’s deputy clerk indicated that we had one more note from the jury. By the top of the hour, Bankman-Fried was officially found guilty of all seven counts against him.
Between being dismissed and returning with a verdict, the jury only deliberated for a little more than four hours, a span of time that included eating dinner. For a month, they’d been prohibited from discussing the case, even among themselves. But once they were able to, they seemed to have all come to the same conclusion. Their brisk decisiveness was fitting for the trial of a man whose rise and fall always felt like a crime speedrun. In the defense team’s closing arguments on Wednesday—in an attempt to argue that his busy client didn’t realize the extent of his worsening situation until it was too late—attorney Mark Cohen quoted Ernest Hemingway’s line from The Sun Also Rises about how a character went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” But there was never anything particularly gradual about the trajectory of Bankman-Fried and FTX.
Fewer than three and a half years went by between when Bankman-Fried cofounded FTX in April 2019 and when the whole operation collapsed into where’d-the-money-go bankruptcy last November. During that span, the company reached valuations of $32 billion and $worthless. Bankman-Fried was compared to both tycoon J.P. Morgan and Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. Splashy FTX ads featuring Tom Brady and Larry David in 2022 gave way to civil class action lawsuits against the company’s celebrity endorsers later that year. Bankman-Fried went from flying in private planes between the Bahamas, Hong Kong, and Teterboro, New Jersey, to violating the terms of his housebound arrest and being remanded to jail. He spoke before Congress about the importance of keeping customer assets safe and transparent; then he clammed up on the witness stand at his criminal trial when asked why he didn’t follow those practices in his own business. He talked a big game about the importance of philanthropy and political contributions to the planet, but the real gag was the way he could embezzle billions in order to improve his place in the world.
On November 2, 2022, the trade publication CoinDesk published a story raising concerns about a hectic Alameda Research balance sheet it had acquired—a story that highlighted troubling conflicts of interest and financial entanglements between Bankman-Fried’s two businesses and set into motion the collapse and bankruptcy of FTX. Now, a year to the day later, the jury was determining the new reality of Bankman-Fried himself.
As the forewoman prepared to recite the verdict, Bankman-Fried’s parents clutched each other in the second row of seats. A courtroom artist one row in front of them turned around and sized them up for a portrait. In the back of the room, a member of the public in a HUNTER BIDEN 2024 tee pulled a sherbet-colored I AM KENOUGH sweatshirt over his head and leaned eagerly in.
Bankman-Fried himself wore a gray suit and purple tie. He stood facing the nine women and three men on the jury, listening as they declared him guilty on all seven counts. His father dropped his head into his hands as low as it would go. His mother gazed up at the ceiling. The jurors mostly kept their eyes fixed on the judge, who thanked them for serving. “You learned a whole new industry,” Kaplan said. He set a sentencing date for late March. (Bankman-Fried, who may also face additional charges next spring, will likely earn decades in prison.)
In a recent Lithub interview, Bankman-Fried’s biographer, Michael Lewis, recalled flying down to the Bahamas last November to see his subject. Bankman-Fried had just signed the FTX bankruptcy documents and all his financial sandcastles had collapsed. “The first thing he says,” Lewis said, “is: ‘You know what’s weird to think about? Saturday. On Saturday, everything was normal.’”
Bankman-Fried was a guy who long felt entitled to backdate his documents; he was arrogant enough to believe he had the power to manipulate time. But this Thursday, there was no going back to any Saturdays, no wriggling out of a big problem with a small flourish of a pen. Instead, as the marshals walked his shaky and pale form out of the courtroom, Bankman-Fried turned around, gave his parents a small head nod, and was gradually, suddenly gone.
Outside the courthouse, writers and news crews and livestreamers and paparazzi converged at a barricade near an exit, eager for anyone to walk out that door. Standing there, I remembered how three weeks ago, I had watched Caroline Ellison and her lawyers skulk through that same gauntlet following her testimony. (The three of them regrettably got into the wrong black SUV at first and had to get out and cross the street; we’ve all been there.) I remembered how, on one of my first mornings lining up there to get a seat at the trial, a passerby with a boombox had walked by in the wee hours and yelled out, astutely: “Which rich white person did something now?” And back in the present, I overheard a CNBC correspondent who was working on a live shot exclaim that “they broke into Shark Tank” with the SBF verdict news, and “that’s when you know it’s big!” When a defense attorney appeared at one point, someone in the crowd hollered at him, about Bankman-Fried: “WHY DID HE TESTIFY?!”
Eventually, a long line of government prosecutors and law enforcement officers walked out before us with straight-set faces and gathered behind U.S. Attorney Damian Williams as he delivered a statement. United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried, Williams said, should be “a warning to every fraudster who thinks they’re untouchable, that their crimes are too complex for us to catch, that they are too powerful to prosecute, or that they are clever enough to talk their way out of it if caught. Those folks should think again, and cut it out.” (Somehow, he didn’t punctuate that last line with finger-scissors.)
Later in the evening, Attorney General Merrick Garland—for whom Williams once clerked—weighed in with a similar sentiment of his own. “This case should send a clear message to anyone who tries to hide their crimes behind a shiny new thing they claim no one else is smart enough to understand,” Garland wrote. What’s also clear is that this won’t be the last shiny new thing to get keyed up a bit by the government. Alex Mashinsky, the founder of the crypto company Celsius, will face trial next fall for fraud. And the New York attorney general recently sued several crypto businesses, also for fraud.
Williams, who was appointed to lead the Southern District of New York as U.S. attorney two years ago, added that the “lightning speed” movement of Bankman-Fried’s case from arrest to conviction—a marked contrast to the lugubrious way that high-profile cases tend to trudge through the system—“was not a coincidence; that was a choice.” The phrase reminded me of something that prosecutor Danielle Sassoon had argued earlier on Thursday during her final rebuttal summation. Pointing out that Bankman-Fried had claimed that his single biggest mistake over the years was that he didn’t hire a risk officer, Sassoon scoffed. “That’s not a defense. That was a strategy,” she said. “If you’re deleting messages and backdating documents and embezzling customer money, of course you’re not going to hire a risk officer.”
Throughout the trial, Bankman-Fried and his lawyers contended there was never any strategy, framing the missing billions—and the bespoke back-office mechanisms that enabled them—as nothing but coincidence. “I made a number of big mistakes and small mistakes,” said Bankman-Fried when he took the stand, a truly wan simulacrum of a remorseful admission. Prosecutor Nicolas Roos framed it another, more precise way in the government’s closing arguments: “He lied about big things, and he lied about little things.” And in the end, when the jurors had to decide whether to believe Bankman-Fried’s stories over their own lyin’ eyes, it was a quick and unanimous choice.
Marvel comics, TV shows, and especially movies seem to have a requirement to emphasize the “what’s next” of it all, where the end of everything is also a tease for something else. Well, folks, Insomniac Games took that assignment, ran with it, and took a few extra laps just for good measure.
Spider-Man 2, the triumphant sequel of one of the best games of 2018, is packed with teases and Easter eggs, all of which could be spun off into new games, half-sequels, or the ultimate finale of Spider-Man 3. We’ve got evil brothers hidden in plain sight, a mysterious bartender rendered in PlayStation 1-style graphics, and more symbiote threats than we initially thought. Let’s tuck into it.
[Ed. note: This post contains major spoilers for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. If you haven’t beaten the campaign of the PlayStation 5 game and cleared every side mission, you will probably be spoiled by something in here.]
Spider-Man 2 sequel teases
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
There are a lot of teases for the future of Insomniac’s Marvel games, and several of them come at the very end of side missions or are a bit obscure if you’re not a comics reader.
Otto’s plan for the final chapter
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via ScereBro PSNU/YouTube
In one of the post-credits scenes for Spider-Man 2, Norman Osborn visits his old frenemy Otto Octavius. Otto is, of course, imprisoned in the Raft penitentiary because of all those crimes he committed as Doctor Octopus back in the first game.
Norman wants Otto to tell him the identity of the Spider-Mans so that he can seek revenge against them for putting Harry in a coma. Otto, who used to be lab partners with Norman but now hates his guts, revels in Osborn’s suffering and refuses to help, and he just keeps working on his manifesto. When Norman asks what Octavius is writing, he simply responds, “The final chapter,” as he limps toward the camera.
The tease here is really just that Otto is clearly going to be back in some capacity in a potential Spider-Man 3. Although with his physical condition worsening (it’s established in Marvel’s Spider-Man that Otto has some kind of degenerative brain disorder that’s causing him to lose his fine motor skills), it’s unclear whether he’ll be fighting on the front lines or playing the role of master tactician.
Miles, meet Cindy and Albert Moon
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Dan Allen Gaming/YouTube
After Miles’ mom, Rio, spends the entire game asking him to meet her new boyfriend, Miles finally opens the door to meet Albert in one of the post-credits scenes. But Albert isn’t really the tease here, as it’s quickly revealed that Albert has brought his daughter Cindy with him to the family dinner.
Cindy Moon is better known as Silk, yet another Spider-person who fights baddies and protects New York. In some versions she has a rather traumatic upbringing and isn’t particularly close with her father. Insomniac is clearly looking to twist this origin, although we’re not quite sure how just yet.
Norman wants the ‘G-Serum’
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Dan Allen Gaming/YouTube
After the Spider-Mans and MJ defeat him, Venom reverts back to Harry, who, as we said earlier, is in a coma. In a fit of rage over his son’s condition, Norman calls someone to ask for the G-Serum.
Now, it’s never explicitly stated, but this is about as on the nose as you can get for a Green Goblin tease. In the moment, it seems like Norman wants the G-Serum for Harry, but we have no doubt it’ll end up in the disgraced former mayor eventually.
Wait, isn’t that Knull’s symbol?
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Zanar Aesthetics/YouTube
During the campaign, it’s revealed that the symbiote came to Earth via a meteor, and that meteor has a big, red spiral on the front of it, which is most often associated with Knull, aka the King in Black, the tyrant god of symbiotes.
Interestingly, the game never mentions Knull by name, or even really alludes to an additional cosmic presence outside of the meteor itself, which Miles, Pete, and MJ destroy at the end of the story. This could be just a nod to comics fans, but it could also be a seed that might blossom into a full symbiote invasion led by the king himself.
Cletus Kasady is in possession of a symbiote
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via HD Playground/YouTube
Peter works to take down a cult called The Flame over the course of Spider-Man 2, And in the final quest, Insomniac reveals the cult’s leader to be none other than Cletus Kasady, everyone’s favorite serial murderer.
Cletus is the symbiote host for Carnage, the red-tinged symbiote villain who has given both Venom and Peter a lot of trouble over the years. With Kasady uncaptured at the end of Spider-Man 2 and in possession of a healthy symbiote, the rise of Carnage is all but assured.
The Chameleon is thriving in NYC
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via GameClips/YouTube
After chasing down all of Kraven’s drones, the two Spider-Mans eventually stumble upon a beautiful penthouse apartment with a secret basement. Turns out this place belongs to Chameleon, a master of disguise. (Fun fact: He was the first villain Spider-Man ever faced in the original comics.) Oh, and the Chameleon is also Kraven’s brother.
As the Spider-Mans swing away from the apartment, we see a man in disguise looking toward the rooftops, indicating that the Chameleon was watching as the heroes ransacked his apartment. Chameleon has clearly been set up in the city for a while, and this tease seems to indicate that he’ll appear in a Spider-Man sequel.
Miguel O’Hara and the Bar with No Name
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via PerfectParadox/YouTube
Once you’ve collected all the Spider-Bots in the game, you’ll get a signal that leads you to an alleyway. When you get there, a portal opens, and you see a bartender named Delilah standing behind a bar. Delilah is the operator of the Bar With No Name, a secret bar for villains in the Marvel universe. After a cryptic chat, she opens a box and steals all the Spider-Bots you spent so long collecting. She then name-drops Miguel (O’Hara) before shutting the portal.
This is a weird little Easter egg that doesn’t exactly have a clear tease. But with the nature of the Spider-Bots all being based on Spider-Man characters and villains from other universes, and Delilah’s style being that of a PlayStation 1 game, this seems to be teasing a multiversal story or some kind of crossover. It’s very unclear what this could be leading to or what it has to do with Miguel O’Hara, aka Spider-Man 2099.
Spider-Man no more?
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via DVESF/YouTube
Pete hangs up his tights at the end of Spider-Man 2, letting Miles handle the city while the original Spider-Man gets a well-earned break. But this seems more like a Spidey-hiatus than full-on Spidey-retirement. We’d wager we’ll see a decent time skip between Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, and that Pete will be married and potentially a father before he dons the suit again.
Are we getting another half-sequel?
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020)Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment
Spider-Man: Miles Morales was a big hit with fans, and took the massive, sprawling Marvel’s Spider-Man and condensed it down to just a handful of hours. It told a great little tale, introduced us more completely to Miles as a hero, and, crucially, did a lot of legwork to set up Spider-Man 2.
Based on the reception of Miles Morales, it seems extremely unlikely that we won’t see another half-sequel that bridges the gap between Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3. The real question, then, is whothat half-sequel will be about. We have a handful of ideas on that.
Venom
Venom is the clear candidate for a spinoff game. Not only is he briefly playable in Spider-Man 2 already (we’re not game designers, but we have to imagine at least some of that hard dev work will transfer over to a new game), but it seems like Insomniac’s developers have at least thought about it.
In a recent interview, Spider-Man 2’s narrative director, Jon Paquette, told Insider that the team is waiting to see how fans react and what they want before committing to any spinoffs. This was in direct response to a question about a Venom game, so most people (ourselves included) are taking this as at least soft confirmation that Insomniac is toying with a Venom spinoff, and that the answer basically amounts to “we’re not not making a Venom game (*wink*).”
But you may be asking yourself, “Wait, isn’t Harry in a coma, and wasn’t the Venom symbiote destroyed?” The answer to both of those questions is technically yes, but there’s a Venom-sized “but” that follows. Spider-Man 2 very clearly establishes that symbiotes remain inactive inside the host even after they’ve separated themselves from the original parasite.
Just like how Mister Negative was able to harness Pete’s latent symbiote to turn him into Anti-Venom, it seems very easy to explain how someone with a very powerful connection to their symbiote (like Harry) could have their alter ego reawaken despite the host symbiote being “dead.” This could be especially fun with Harry’s current predicament, as it means we could spend the first bit of a Venom game piloting around a comatose Harry, wreaking havoc and getting into scrapes with Miles.
Silk
Silk is another strong possibility for a spinoff, as it’s essentially the same setup that led from Spider-Man into Miles Morales. However, Miles plays a major role in the first Spider-Man before getting any powers. All we see of Cindy is the back of her head, and we learn nothing about her character in Spider-Man 2.
With Silk just being a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tease, it seems much more likely that she’ll feature heavily in whatever half-sequel we end up getting before being playable in Spider-Man 3.
Miles Morales 2
Our final guess for a half-sequel is just a straight-up sequel to Miles Morales. This makes some sense, but is also just boring in comparison to the other two options — no offense to Miles, but we already have two full games where we can play as him whenever we want!
Still, a Miles sequel would allow Insomniac to explore a New York where Miles is the only Spider-Man, and even bring Cindy in as his trainee. This would be a poetic handoff after the tutelage Miles received from Peter in Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2, and a great setup for a third game. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear Pete refer to himself as Silk’s “Spider-Grandpa”?
But a Miles Morales sequel in that fashion is still retread ground, and Insomniac seems hell-bent on delivering new experiences each time it puts out a Spidey product.
So where does that leave Spider-Man 3?
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
Insomniac Games has clearly left itself a lot of wiggle room when it comes to the future of its Spider-Man. Will Carnage show up in Spider-Man 3, or will he take center stage in a Venom game? Is that Miguel teaser an offhand tease of another spinoff we don’t know about, or just another side activity in a sequel that’s probably five years off? We don’t know the answers to either of those questions, and it’s entirely possible that Insomniac doesn’t have them 100% pinned down yet, either.
So what do we know for sure about the next game? Well, Norman’s Green Goblin will be a pretty big deal. That’s a very safe bet — the free space on all your Spider-Man 3 bingo cards at home. We also know that Otto will play some kind of role as well, likely as a third party warring against both Green Goblin and Spider-Man.
And we know we’ll have no shortage of heroes for us to embody, with Miles, Cindy, Peter, and (probably) Harry all on the bench and ready to take on whatever Insomniac has in store for New York.
We’re still at least two or three years (and a whole-ass Wolverine game) away from learning what’s next for Insomniac’s New York. But the studio has certainly given us plenty to ponder in our time away from the web-head and his crew of friends and enemies.
It only took a couple of minutes for Alan Wake 2 to make me jump. From the very beginning, Remedy Entertainment’s new sci-fi thriller has a lot of scares to offer — and I’m talking about classic jump scares, not just the moody atmosphere that pervades the entire Twin Peaks-esque setting. I didn’t expect this game to be as scary as it is, so let me issue a warning: Alan Wake 2 is freakin’ creepy, y’all!
[Ed. note: This article contains minor spoilers for Alan Wake 2.]
First things first: Horror is subjective, what scares me might not scare you, blah blah blah. You’re here because you want to know about the jump scares, so let’s get to it.
Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing
Alan Wake 2 kicks off with a very creepy scene, not least because you have absolutely no clue what’s going on. You start playing as a heavyset older white man who doesn’t look anything like Alan Wake and looks even less like Saga Anderson, the Black female FBI agent who’s the co-protagonist of Alan Wake 2. I guess I left out the most important part which is that this guy is naked. And he is trudging — and later, running — through a gloomy, foggy forest.
Perhaps the creepiest part to me was that Alan Wake 2 wouldn’t let me look at this guy’s face. I kept trying to turn the camera around to see him, but he kept turning away from me, like the guy in the corner at the end of Blair Witch. Turns out, that’s how the Alan Wake 2 camera works with almost every playable character — but in this opening scene, it’s even more restrictive against showing you the character’s face, probably to delay the reveal of this man’s identity. He turns out to be Robert Nightingale, the FBI agent who had it out for Alan Wake in the first game.
While poor naked Nightingale runs through the woods, you’ll get your first of several jump scares. Complete with flashing lights (the game does open with a seizure warning) and super-loud music stings, you’ll see a flash of Alan Wake’s face, lit up like he’s holding a flashlight next to it for dramatic effect or something. Alan’s face is not scary in a vacuum, obviously, but the loud noise and flashing lights are jump-inducing. Those moments of surprise will keep happening as Nightingale keeps on meandering through the woods, his journey culminating in his gruesome death at the hands of a death cult.
Image: Remedy Entertainment/Epic Games Publishing via Polygon
That death cult — and the murder of Nightingale — is what you’ll be investigating once you take on the role of Saga Anderson, whose story is where the game jumps to next. Saga’s sections involve exploring the exact same creepy woods, but unlike with Nightingale, there aren’t jump scares for Saga. Of course, that didn’t stop me from thinking there would be.
You won’t get another big scare until you get to the town morgue. This is when the game introduces the central mechanic for its supernatural enemies: If you’re standing in a lit area, they can’t see you. But if you tread into the darkness — as you must do, periodically, to escape or strafe around these opponents — they’ll be able to see you, grab you, and kill you instantly.
Personally, I find the fight scenes to be less scary than wandering around the woods in the dark between the altercations. The world of Alan Wake 2 is so bizarre that you just never know what to expect. But once I can actually see an enemy, even if they look scary or unusual, I’m fine — I just need a pistol in my hand, because apparently bullets still work on supernatural entities (thank goodness?).
My usual tips for making a video game less scary might not be very effective in Alan Wake 2. There isn’t much you can do about a basic jump scare of a big face suddenly filling your screen, accompanied by a loud noise. But there are still some options if you want to play this (amazing, thrilling) game and not be quite as stressed out by it. I recommend turning off the orchestral score, while leaving the dialogue and sound effects on; the score is beautiful, but it also does a lot to heighten the game’s tense moments. Do remember to turn the music back on when you feel calm again so that you don’t miss out on the many original songs in the game, though.
My other big tip? Just take your headphones off entirely, as needed. I turned on the subtitle option that includes character names, since Alan Wake 2 involves a lot of unnerving voiceover from unpictured characters. If you’re feeling overstimulated, you can always just read the game for a little bit, using the subtitles and character markers as a guide. I usually would only do this for a few seconds before recovering, resetting, and wanting to head back into the full audio immersion of the world.
As somebody who’s made it through plenty of great horror movies and scary games, despite my irritation at the way my body reacts to horror, you’ve got this. Alan Wake 2 is absolutely worth experiencing, so give it your best go.
Kingdom opens ominously, with two attendants walking across a Joseon-era Korean palace’s courtyard to bring the king his meal. Once inside, the older attendant warns his young companion not to look into the king’s bedchambers while passing the food underneath the curtain. The young attendant can’t resist, and when he opens his eyes he’s dragged under the curtain by a snarling beast. It’s a dread-filled scene that grabs your attention, but Kingdom also uses that moment to set itself apart. Most zombie shows are centered around characters thrust into survival mode without knowing what caused the outbreak in the first place. In Kingdom, the original zombie is not just a known entity, he’s also being tended to by a royal staff.
The rest of the intro reveals a lot of information in a short amount of time. A group of scholars has been posting flyers that the king is dead and it’s time for Crown Prince Lee Chang to ascend to the throne. But there’s an issue: Prince Chang’s mother was a concubine, and his current stepmother, Queen Consort Cho, is very pregnant. Her family has seized power with their new royal status, and they’ve rounded up and tortured these scholars to find out who’s behind their support of the prince. Meanwhile, Prince Chang has grown suspicious, and decides to find out the truth about his father’s mysterious recovery from smallpox.
If that sounds more like a Game of Thrones plot than a zombie show, well, you’re right. Kingdom is really, at its core, a political thriller set in medieval times. The zombie stuff, well, that’s just part of the politics — until, you know, it isn’t.
Photo: Juhan Noh/Netflix
The brilliance of Kingdom is that it doesn’t rely on twists and aggressive plot machinations to drive the show forward. The core conflict is laid out in 15 minutes flat: The king is a zombie, the queen is pregnant with his baby, and the queen’s family has seized power that would be threatened if the crown prince were anointed as the new king.
It doesn’t take much to realize who’s behind the zombification of the region’s ruler — but knowing the truth isn’t the same as proving it. Kingdom follows Prince Chang as he tries to collect evidence that he’s the rightful heir while avoiding the Cho clan’s guards, who are actively pursuing him. That alone would make for an exciting show. And then, of course, there are the zombies. As Prince Chang leaves the palace to find the doctor who treated his father, he discovers something even more terrifying: The king bit one of the doctor’s young assistants. We all know how that goes.
With a tight two-season story written and directed by Kim Eun-hee, Kingdom plays out its political games in conjunction with a growing zombie threat. It’s gripping, smart, and subtle, pacing its story in snippets of dialogue for viewers to stitch together. It’s also full of incredible action, painful suspense (characters in the daytime walking over dormant nocturnal zombies under floorboards, etc.), and truly terrifying horror: Victim by victim falls to brutal isolated zombie attacks, until a proper horde grows big enough to assault the entire royal city. Kingdom is truly an equal mashup of two different genres, and the fact that it’s done so well feels like a miracle. Just be prepared for things to get gnarly — two guards are beheaded in the opening sequence for being traitors, and if that’s the sort of violence that’s unleashed in a human-to-human conflict, just wait until the undead come into the picture.
Early on in Martin Scorsese’s historical drama Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s a quiet moment between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the woman he will eventually marry, Osage heiress Molly (Lily Gladstone). The absorbing way Scorsese stages the drama makes it clear that this relationship will not end well, but the soundtrack is strangely twinkling, as if this were the start of a grand romance. Then the lyrics kicked in:
…karma is my boyfriend Karma is a god Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend Karma’s a relaxing thought Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?
I was not, in fact, hearing the late, great Robbie Robertson’s score for Killers of the Flower Moon — I was getting sound bleed from Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour playing next door. And I would continue to get that bleed throughout Killers, because while “Karma” marks the end of The Eras Tour’s set list, the film immediately started running again. At 169 minutes long, it’s only 37 minutes shorter than Scorsese’s epic, one of the few currently playing movies that get anywhere near the drama’s 206-minute run time.
Through conversations with friends and colleagues, posts on social media, and collected observations of theater layouts and showtimes, I learned that I am far from alone. The sonic power of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is bleeding into Martin Scorsese’s meditative masterpiece in a number of multiplexes, creating a miasma of cinematic emotion that neither artist could anticipate.
Image via X
On the one hand, this is extremely annoying. Part of the reason we go to the theater is because it supposedly allows us to experience movies the way the filmmakers intended, optimally presented in a space that’s free of distractions. Killers of the Flower Moon wrestles with a horrifying true chapter of American history. It’s a quiet and mannered film, perhaps more so than Scorsese fans might expect. Hearing “Blank Space” while the Osage people are getting systematically murdered can feel disrespectful at worst, incongruously funny at best.
And the sonic overlap itself is kind of amusing. Two wildly different reasons to go to the movies are running together, as “Wildest Dreams” is faintly heard over wide-angle shots of the Oklahoma plains. It’s an offline version of the online media environment, where context collapse is normal, and random juxtaposition can yield darkly comedic results.
I didn’t particularly love watching Killers of the Flower Moon this way, but I didn’t hate it, either. It was like a series of intrusive thoughts I learned to tune out while contemplating something I found engaging and worthwhile. There I was, ruminating on the parasitic nature of white entrepreneurs on Native lands, and unbidden, I would think of that one YouTube video where a guy who did a viral Gollum voice covered “I Knew You Were Trouble,” because I heard a few bars of the song leaking in from the theater next to me during a quieter moment. But I also grew up in a noisy home, so I can rely on muscle memory here.
I don’t think anyone should deliberately try to see Killers of the Flower Moon this way. I don’t believe I got any insight from this aural serendipity that I wouldn’t have gotten had I watched each movie in a more soundproof environment. Someone else might! There could be real TheDark Side of the Rainbow/Another Brick in the WALL-E potential here. Maybe when both movies are available digitally, someone will make a “Killers of the Taylor Moon” cut. Accidentally, in theaters, though? Not ideal.
But I don’t think it’s a reason to stay home. Like The Eras Tour, Killers of the Flower Moon deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible. The minor inconvenience of occasionally overhearing a track from 1989 (or, God forbid, Reputation) is worth the trade-off.
Perhaps theater managers who read this piece — feel free to pass it along if you know any — will take this kind of sound-bleed issue into account, and work to make it less of a normal occurrence. Exhibitors, please take Taylor’s words into account: You need to calm down. You’re being too loud.
Sean and Amanda discuss Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour epicKillers of the Flower Moon and everything that it entails. They explore the adaptation of the David Grann book and how Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth shifted the perspective in the film (10:00), Leonardo DiCaprio’s and Robert De Niro’s repeated collaborations with Scorsese (23:00), the spellbinding performance of Lily Gladstone (48:00), the ways the film reflects on themes Scorsese has explored repeatedly (38:00), how it slots into the late Scorsese oeuvre (1:27:00), its chances at the Oscars (1:30:00), and more.
Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner
Just in time for Pride, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse moviegoers think the summer box-office phenomenon offers some pretty compelling evidence that one of its heroes, Gwen Stacy, is trans.
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While the film never explicitly raises the issue of whether or not Gwen Stacy is trans over the course of its two-hour and twenty-minute runtime, some Spider-Verse viewers feel that her character arc, which includes a painful coming-out of sorts to her father, functions as a trans allegory. And the visual motifs that the film employs during this pivotal scene only serve to drive home that interpretation.
Throughout the film, the watercolors lending their hues to the background of Gwen’s universe shift to match the emotions she’s feeling. It lends her whole world a similar look to that of Robbi Rodriguez’s cover art for her 2015 comic book, Radioactive Spider-Gwen.
However, during a pivotal scene where Gwen reveals to her father, Captain George Stacy, that she’s Spider-Woman, the entire backdrop of the Stacy household is awash in white, blue, and pink watercolors: the same colors that make up the trans pride flag. The tri-color art direction during Gwen’s anguished confession about an aspect of her identity she fears her father won’t accept underscore a conflict that resonated with many trans viewers.
“I truly thought the ‘Gwen is trans’ stuff in ATSV was just Twitter doing its usual thing but no it’s AGGRESSIVELY loud about it,” Twitter user Blankzilla wrote. “Being draped in the trans colors while giving a speech about having to hide half of yourself from the people you love is as subtle as a brick.”
“Thinking about Trans Gwen Stacy and her entire plot being about centered around her father’s struggle to believe her and accept her identity,” tori_af said.
“Mfs be like ‘gwen stacy isn’t trans’ and then they have a four minute sequence in the movie where she’s just the trans flag colors,” Moshy_Maybe wrote.
Aside from Gwen’s confessional with her father feeling akin to a trans person coming out to their family for the first time, eagle-eyed Spider-Verse viewers also spotted a bunch of items scattered about her house as evidence supporting their ongoing fan theory. For example, one Twitter user pointed out that Gwen has a trans pride pin on her jacket and a “Protect Trans Kids” sticker on her wall, and her dad has a trans pride flag on his police uniform.
Kotaku reached out to director Kemp Thompson and producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller for comment.
Sony Pictures Animation
Gwen Stacy’s visual motif is like a ‘mood ring’
Spider-Verse fan theories about Gwen Stacy being trans might not be entirely off the mark. In an interview with Cinema Blend, Gwen Stacy actress Hailee Steinfeld revealed that Spider-Verse director Kemp Thompson and producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller described the watercolors of Gwen’s world as “like a mood ring.”
“It will visually change as her circumstances change, and the emotions she feels we will feel in the audience on screen,” Steinfield told Cinema Blend, adding, “I’m biased, but Gwen’s world is pretty beautiful.”
If the filmmakers had the wherewithal to drop a visual hint that Miles altered his fate from becoming Prowler back in Into The Spider-Verse, who’s to say they didn’t also deliberately drop the most obvious artistic clue that Gwen is trans in Across The Spider-Verse?
Whether or not Gwen is trans, Twitter user RawbertBeef perfectly encapsulates what Spider-Gwen means to the trans community by saying, “even if the movies never outright confirm it…if she can make somebody feel represented, who are you to tell them they’re wrong?”
Is there anything more simultaneously terrifying and hot than being balls deep in your woman and she wraps her legs around your back and begs for you to be the father of her children? Thank God for birth control because I have not got the strength to pull out of a vixen.
An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants are separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle, commonly known as a “death spiral” because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion.
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