Television and movie writers soured by Hollywood’s low pay in the streaming era went on strike for the first time in 15 years on Tuesday, meaning late-night and variety shows would be the first programs to go dark.
The labor dispute could have a cascading effect on TV and film productions depending on how long the strike lasts, and it comes as streaming services are under growing pressure from Wall Street to show profits.
The Writers Guild of America’s 11,500 unionized screenwriters prepared to picket after negotiations with studios, which began in March, failed by Monday’s deadline to yield a new contract. All script writing is to immediately cease, the guild informed its members.
The guild is seeking higher minimum pay, less thinly staffed writing rooms, shorter exclusive contracts and a reworking of residual pay — all conditions the WGA says have been diminished in the content boom driven by streaming.
“The companies’ behaviour has created a gig economy inside a union workforce, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing,” the WGA said in a statement.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the trade association that bargains on behalf of studios and production companies, said it presented an offer with “generous increases in compensation for writers as well as improvements in streaming residuals.”
In a statement, the trade association said that it was prepared to improve its offer “but was unwilling to do so because of the magnitude of other proposals still on the table that the guild continues to insist upon.”
A shutdown has been widely forecast for months due to the scope of the discord. The writers last month voted overwhelming to authorize a strike, with 98% of membership in support.
At issue is how writers are compensated in an industry where streaming has changed the rules of Hollywood economics. Writers say they aren’t being paid enough, TV writer rooms have shrunk too much and the old calculus for how residuals are paid out needs to be redrawn.
“The survival of our profession is at stake,” the guild has said.
Streaming has exploded the number of series and films that are annually made, meaning more jobs for writers. But WGA members say they’re making much less money and working under more strained conditions. Showrunners on streaming series receive just 46% of the pay that showrunners on broadcast series receive, the WGA claims.
The guild is seeking more compensation on the front-end of deals. Many of the back-end payments writers have historically profited by – like syndication and international licensing – have been largely phased out by the onset of streaming. More writers — roughly half — are being paid minimum rates, an increase of 16% over the last decade. The use of so-called mini-writers rooms has soared.
Hollywood’s trade association said Monday that the primary sticking points to a deal revolved around those mini-rooms — the guild is seeking a minimum number of scribes per writer room — and duration of employment restrictions. The guild has said more flexibility for writers is needed when they’re contracted for series that have tended to be more limited and short-lived than the once-standard 20-plus episode broadcast season.
Many studios and production companies are slashing spending. The Walt Disney Co. is eliminating 7,000 jobs. Warner Bros. Discovery is cutting costs to lessen its debt. Netflix has pumped the breaks on spending growth.
When Hollywood writers have gone on strike, it’s often been lengthy. In 1988, a WGA strike lasted 153 days. The last WGA strike went for 100 days, beginning in 2007 and ending in 2008.
The most immediate effect of the strike viewers are likely to notice will be on late-night shows and “Saturday Night Live”. All are expected to immediately go dark. During the 2007 strike, late-night hosts eventually returned to the air and improvised material. Jay Leno wrote his own monologues, a move that angered union leadership.
On Friday’s episode of “Late Night”, Seth Meyers, a WGA member who said he supported the union’s demands, prepared viewers for re-runs while lamenting the hardship a strike entails.
“It doesn’t just affect the writers, it affects all the incredible non-writing staff on these shows,” Meyers said. “And it would really be a miserable thing for people to have to go through, especially considering we’re on the heels of that awful pandemic that affected, not just show business, but all of us.”
Scripted series and films will take longer to be affected. But if a strike persisted through the summer, fall schedules could be upended. And in the meantime, not having writers available for rewrites can have a dramatic effect on quality. The James Bond film “Quantum of Solace” was one of many films rushed into production during the 2007-2008 strike with what Daniel Craig called “the bare bones of a script.”
“Then there was a writers’ strike and there was nothing we could do,” Craig later recounted. “We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, ‘Never again’, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes — and a writer I am not.”
With a walkout long expected, writers have rushed to get scripts in and studios have sought to prepare their pipelines to keep churning out content for at least the short term.
“We’re assuming the worst from a business perspective,” David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, said last month. “We’ve got ourselves ready. We’ve had a lot of content that’s been produced.”
Overseas series could also fill some of the void. “If there is one, we have a large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-chief executive, on the company’s earnings call in April.
Yet the WGA strike may only be the beginning. Contracts for both the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the actors union, expire in June. Some of the same issues around the business model of streaming will factor into those bargaining sessions. The DGA is set to begin negotiations with AMPTP on May 10.
The cost of the WGA’s last strike cost Southern California $2.1 billion, according to the Milken Institute. How painful this strike is remains to be seen. But as of late Monday evening, laptops were being closed shut all over Hollywood.
“Pencils down,” said “Halt and Catch Fire” showrunner and co-creator Christopher Cantwell on Twitter shortly after the strike announcement. “Don’t even type in the document.”
At the first public screening of The Flash, which stars Ezra Miller as DC’s speedster hero, filmmaker Andy Muschietti addressed the chaotic behavior and mental breakdown that hit the actor after filming was completed. Miller has been arrested numerous times for disorderly conduct, assault and a break-in, and engaged in other chaotic, disruptive and unsettling behaviors over the past year and a half.
In August, the actor—who identifies as non-binary and prefers they/them pronouns—released an apology “to everyone that I have alarmed and upset with my past behavior” and said they were “suffering complex mental health issues.” Since then, the 30-year-old Perks of Being a Wallflower and Justice League actor has remained largely out of sight as the legal issues played out, issuing as a guilty plea to trespassing that ended the break-in charges.
Muschietti, the director of the It movies, spoke out publicly about Miller’s conduct and condition at an early screening of the June 16 movie on the Warner Bros. studio lot. “Ezra is well now. We’re all hoping that they get better,” said Muschietti. (During his remarks, the filmmaker, who is Argentinian and speaks English as a second language, apologized for occasionally using the “he” pronoun for the actor. “It’s not that I don’t want to, I just get mixed up. I spent an entire year with them, and still to this day…” He shrugged. “It’s my fault.”)
“[They’re] taking the steps to recovery, [they’re] dealing with mental health issues, but [they’re] well. We talked to them not too long ago, and [they’re] very committed to get better,” Muschietti said.
The filmmaker’s sister and producing partner, Barbara Muschietti, also weighed in to praise the actor’s work in the film. The Flash stars Miller as two versions of the high-speed hero Barry Allen, brought together by the character’s ability to puncture through time and into parallel universes. Miller appears in some capacity in nearly every scene in the film. “I have to say, during our shoot, during principal photography, their commitment to the role was something like we’ve never seen, and the discipline, the work, the willingness, physical, mental, and just wanting to go beyond the pale,” Barbara said. “It was just amazing.”
“Ezra is an extraordinary actor,” Andy added. “[They] was probably one of my… Not probably, [they’re] one of my best experiences working with an actor—ever. [They’re] brilliant. [Their] contributions are constant, and also, [they] likes to play and do more takes than I do, which is a lot. So, take 24, I’m like, ‘I think we’re done.’ They say, “Can we do one more?’ ‘Yeah, of course.’”
The primary version of The Flash that Ezra Miller plays is the character who was introduced in Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and appeared as a supporting character in the two alternate versions of the Justice League film. The character has also turned up for a brief role in the TV version of The Flash that stars Grant Gustin as the hero. (In multiple universe storytelling, these kinds of crossovers happen.)
Maul is one of the best and most famous cosplayers on the planet, a man whose work we’ve featured here for everything from God of War to Assassin’s Creed to, repeatedly, The Witcher. His latest shoot, however, might well be his best yet.
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To commemorate the anniversary of Superman’s comics debut back in 1938, Maul took to the skies above Cologne/Köln (home of GamesCom!) to pay tribute to a character who “is my absolute hero”. With a crane, some cables, harnesses and no small amount of bravery, Maul and Emilija Wellrock—playing Lois Lane—were hoisted above the city to hold up a van, a helicopter and each other.
Photo: Maul Cosplay | Jun Kim | eosAndy
To pull it off of course required a whole team of folks working behind the scenes. Firstly, it should be noted, Maul—who has stuntman training—didn’t just wake up one day and bankroll this whole thing from his billionaire cosplay holdings; the shoot was sponsored by Pringles, as many big-budget cosplay features are these days.
All that organisation and work was more than worth it, though, when you see the results. Maul and Wellrock ended up getting hoisted 70 metres (230 feet) into the air above the city for most of the shots:
Photo: Maul Cosplay | Jun Kim | eosAndy
With the exception being this one taken on the ground, with Maul (and a crane) holding up a van:
Photo: Maul Cosplay | Jun Kim | eosAndy
And yes, OK, there had to be a little bit of editing required to get rid of the wires, but that doesn’t count.
You can see the full gallery of shots at Maul’s Facebook page, and below is the first of two short videos showing some of the preparation work that went into it all:
And here’s a clip uploaded by Wellrock showing the pair taking off:
Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. is suing Paramount Global, saying its competitor aired new episodes of the popular animated comedy series “South Park” after Warner paid for exclusive rights.
Warner says it signed a contract in 2019 paying more than $500 million for the rights to existing and new episodes of the irreverent show, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in New York State Supreme Court.
HBO Max, Warner’s streaming platform, was scheduled to receive the first episodes of a new “South Park” season in 2020. But the company was informed the pandemic halted production, the lawsuit says.
In spite of Warner’s exclusive rights to the show until 2025, the company alleges South Park Digital Studios, which produces the shows and is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, offered two pandemic-themed specials to Paramount, which aired them in September 2020 and March 2021.
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The lawsuit claims the pandemic specials should have been offered to Warner under the initial contract. The move, called “verbal trickery” in the lawsuit, drove the show’s fans to the competing Paramount platform. Nearly all South Park episodes premiere on Comedy Central, one of Paramount’s cable channels, the lawsuit says.
Show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who launched the show in 1997 and oversee the franchise, were not named in the lawsuit.
Carolyn tours Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood
Gaining streaming rights to “South Park” is a competitive process because of the potentially lucrative market attracting more subscribers, advertisers and a loyal fan base that Warner’s lawsuit says consists mostly of young adults.
The 24-page court filing also cites a $900 million deal in 2021 between a Paramount subsidiary and South Park Digital Studios for exclusive content on the Paramount Plus streaming service, which launched the same year.
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Warner claims the deal was a deliberate “scheme” between Paramount, its subsidiary MTV Entertainment Studios and South Park Digital Studios to “divert as much of the new South Park content as possible to Paramount Plus in order to boost that nascent streaming platform.”
Warner paid $1,687,500 per episode and alleges it has not yet received all episodes covered by the contract, resulting in damages of more than $200 million.
Paramount Global did not immediately respond to emails from The Associated Press seeking comment on the lawsuit.
Last year, AI generated art finally broke through the mainstream—but not without significant public controversy. The rampant art theft required to build an AI’s dataset and the resulting forgeries eventually led to a class action lawsuit against AI generators. Yet that hasn’t stopped developers from using the technology to generate images, narrative, music and voice acting for their commercial video games. Some game developers see the technology as the future, but caution against over-selling its benefits and present capabilities.
AI has been making headlines lately for the wrong reasons. Netflix Japan was blasted by professional artists for using AI to make background art—while leaving the human painter uncredited. Around mid-February, gaming and anime voice actors spoke out about the “pirate” websites that hosted AI versions of their voices without their consent. AI seems to be everywhere. One procedurally generated game has already sold millions of copies.
The promise of user-generated gaming experiences
A few years ago, Ubisoft Toronto, known for games like Far Cry 6 and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, was not only using AI in its development process—it created an entire design system that heavily relied on procedural generation. “In the future — potentially as soon as 2032 — the process of making digital nouns beautifully will be fully automated,” Ubisoft director Clint Hocking wrote in a Polygon op-ed that claimed that within a decade, players would use AI prompts to build their games. Think “a side-scroller where I am an ostrich in a tuxedo trying to escape a robot uprising,”as Hocking put it. This futuristic vision of games would work in the same way you might tell AI image generator Midjourney to produce new images based on text descriptions.
Despite the eyebrow-raising boldness of his claim, the industry has already seen some strides. Watch Dogs: Legion, Ubisoft’s open world action-adventure game, seemed impressive for what it was: A blockbuster title that randomly generated NPCs in every playthrough and promised to allow players to “play as anyone.” While reviewers did encounter “repetitive loops” in the quest system, Legion seemed like a solid first step in the future of procedurally generated gameplay.
“10 years [to create an AI game] is insane, as it takes 5 to 10 years to make a standard AAA game,” said Raj Patel, former product manager on Watch Dogs: Legion. He was wary of how designing non-linear games incurred an additional layer of labor-intensive complexity. He told Kotaku over messages that he didn’t think that AI games could be “wholly original, bespoke, [and] from scratch with the same quality” as existing AAA games. “There is certainly potential [in machine generated games], but Star Citizen has been in development for 10 years so far,” he said of a space sim MMO that boasts of procedurally generated planets. The game has raised nearly $400 million, but has not been released since it was first announced in 2010.
If Ubisoft’s forays into NFTs and web3 are any indication, the company has been quick to jump on trends that sound buzzy to investors. But that didn’t mean that they were necessarily pushing the technology forward.
Game designer and AI researcher Younès Rabii felt that integrating AI with these expensive processes was more about “hype” than a technological inevitability. “There’s always a 15 to 20 year gap between what academia has produced in terms of [AI] advances and what the industry actually uses,” Rabii told Kotaku over Zoom. They had strong feelings about how Watch Dogs: Legion seemed to fall short in being the public face of what AI games could be. “This is because it’s way too long to train [developers] to use [advanced AI]. It’s not worth the risk. It doesn’t bring enough money to the table.” Ubisoft told investors that the game’s predecessors have sold around ten million each, but never publicly released the sales data for Legion beyond its launch period. They felt that Ubisoft had taken the risk with Legion as a marketing hook. “It’s not that interesting… they have a series of simple nouns and properties, and they behave according to it.”
Image: Ubisoft
Reviewers seemed to agree with him. One critic noted that “there’s not much of a human element” to the Londoners in the game, and that they “don’t meaningfully interact with each other.” Another struggled with “repetitive” missions. Kotaku panned the campaign for being “empty and soulless,” but praised the more interesting DLC for ditching the procedurally generated recruitment altogether.
Hocking himself admitted in a Washington Post interview that “reinventing open world design” during Legion’s development had been “uncertain,” “difficult,” and “scary. Being able to play as any character in the game was an idea that Ubisoft had never experimented with before.” Human designers had to manually account for every single possibility that the players could choose—it wasn’t a computer that could understand how human players would emotionally respond to randomly generated scenarios. Hocking had been much less optimistic about the possibility of creating a gameplay experience that didn’t feel entirely samey. “There isn’t infinite diversity,” Hocking said in the interview. “You’re still going to encounter, ‘Oh, yeah. I recognize that voice. I recognize that person. Or, this is one of the people who has the technician fighting style. They fight in a certain way, [similar to] that other person.’ But it still blurs the lines quite a bit.”
Artificial intelligence has always been a part of game development
Florence Smith Nicholls, story tech at the award-winning indie studio behind Mutazione, also had a more muted perspective of AI. They told Kotaku over video call that AI was already being used extensively in AAA development, like in Fortnite. “When people [say] it’s going to completely revolutionize gaming, it feels kind of similar to what we’ve had with discussions around NFTs and the blockchain.” They pointed to the chess playing program Deep Blue as an example of artificial intelligence in gaming.
Screenshot: Epic Games
Mostly, though, we’ve seen a wide range of applications for AI in games when it comes to automation–but how we define such a thing can get confusing for the average person. Because of popular generators such as Midjourney and Chat GPT, most people associate them with neural networks that create text or images based on a dataset that it scrapes from the internet. Researchers have very broad definitions of AI. “If you showed someone Google Maps in 1990 and showed that you could plot a route between any two points on the planet… that would be considered a hard AI problem,” said Cook. “Now people just think of that as something that your phone does. It’s the same thing in games. As [technology] becomes more normal, they no longer look like AI to us.”
“We talk about AI when it doesn’t work,” said Alan Zucoconi, a director of AI game development at the University of London. “When it works, it’s invisible and seamless.” He acknowledged that artists and programmers don’t see eye-to-eye on the technology. “There is friction [with AI], especially for artists… Those same artists are using AI every day, they just don’t call it AI,” said Zucconi. “Tools like the select all regions tool in Photoshop, smudging colors… tools we take for granted are not seen as AI… so I find it very fascinating when people think that these are something new. It’s not.”
“The real utility [of AI] in the short term is helping with more discrete tasks in the process of producing work,” Patel wrote, recounting his experiences with working on Ubisoft games. “In one game, we had AI testing the open world… It would log the framerate and any clipping issues. The machines would be left running moving through the world and note areas where things had issues. That helped us find areas to check without having real people have to do that otherwise tedious work. Real people could focus on checking, verifying, and figuring out details.” Rather than risking whether or not a player might be able to tell if something was AI-generated, “[AI] let our QA staff not do the tedious parts and focus their time more efficiently on problem areas.”
Automated development often sounds incredibly sinister when coming out of the mouth of a gaming executive who doesn’t sound adequately troubled about the plight of crunching developers. But testing has been automated for years, and QA professionals are calling for studios to ditch fully manual testing. Despite the popular image of QA as low-skilled work, AI experience is often a necessary prerequisite to being a games tester, because automated testing is often a key aspect of a studio’s workflow. And it’s not just testing—automation is a shipped feature of AAA video games too.
Mike Cook is an AI researcher and game designer at King’s College London. He told Kotaku over a Zoom call that games such as Minecraft are procedurally generated by AI, and blockbuster games such as Assassin’s Creed makes use of AI for certain mechanics. “When your character places their hands and legs in unusual places to climb up the side of a building, that’s not a handmade animation,” he said. “There’s an AI that’s helping figure out where your body’s limbs should go to make it look normal.” He noted that online matchmaking and improving connectivity were both aspects of games that were supported by AI.
Limitations and ethical challenges of AI and procedural generation
Despite the possibilities, Nicholls said that procedurally generated content was only really useful for “very specific tasks.” They cited examples such as changing the weather or generating foliage in Fortnite. AI would need to be able to handle several different tasks in order to be considered a game-changing force in development.
However, they had concerns about which developers would benefit from extensive automation. They pointed out that in the case of art outsourcing (the practice in which studios pay cheaper studios to create low-level assets), the “main” studios were doing more “intellectual work” such as design. They thought that AI could similarly create an underclass of artists whose work is less valued.
Sneha Deo, an AI ethicist from Microsoft, draws the connection more overtly. “I would say a lot of the undercutting of [tech labor] value that happens today is due to differences in the value of currency.” It’s cheaper to hire developers from a country with a less powerful currency, rather than paying developers from the U.S. or western Europe. She also attributed the devaluation of human labor to the last mile effect. “Humans trick themselves into thinking if a machine can do it, then the [labor] that the humans are adding to it isn’t as valuable because most of it is automated.” So even if AI created new ‘AI design’ jobs, those jobs might not necessarily pay a reasonable amount.
While he’s normally exuberant about the possibilities of machine learning, Zucconi seemed uncomfortable when asked about whether or not AI would devalue the labor of voice actors. When directly pressed about the possibility of paying actors for using their voices in AI (as Hocking raises in his op-ed), he said: “Licensing voices is probably going to happen. We’re very close to having that technology… I’m hopeful that this is a good future because it means that people can have more work opportunities.” The ability to commercially profit from one’s own “likeness” is enshrined in state publicity laws. Celebrities have been licensing their likeness to third parties for years—the most famous recent example being Donald Trump’s embarrassing foray into NFTs.
Jennifer Hale, voice actor for female Shepherd, tweeted that AI voices created without consent were “harming voice actors,” Screenshot: Electronic Arts
Despite his optimism, it seemed that professional voice actors felt differently. Voice actors for popular franchises such as Cowboy Bebop and Mass Effect both spoke out against AI versions of their voices being falsified and used without consent. Some bad actors had even used AI-generated voices to dox people. It’s reminiscent of how decades ago, Jet Li turned down a role for TheMatrix because he was concerned about Warner Bros. reusing his motion-captured movements after he collected his last check.
“I think what matters is not any specific deal,” Cook said in regards to compensation and AI-generated art. “I don’t know if licenses are better than labor. What does matter is that the people who are actually doing this job are the ones that get to decide what should be happening,” he said. “And the problem is that in most of these creative jobs, the power dynamic isn’t there to allow people to have that voice.” He also noted that it was easy for artists to accidentally sign away their rights in perpetuity.
Unlike blockchain technology, developers can see clear benefits to adopting automation more broadly in game development. One indie developer told Games Industry that AI development could help smaller studios stay competitive. Failure rates are incredibly high, especially for developers who don’t have massive AAA-sized budgets. No Man’s Sky used machine-generated content to create expansive worlds, only to have a disastrous launch–and it took five years for the game to eventually become a success story.
Deo saw AI as one method of bridging the resource gap between the global north and south. “What’s the rightness or wrongness around using these models to generate art or narrative or text if that’s not your strength? I think about game design as this collaborative process that favors people who already have strong networks,” she said over Zoom video. “[These people] can tap their friends or their networks to come in and do that manual work, [which] is democratized by the replacement of human labor by AI art.”
Image: Latitude
Deo acknowledged that AI art could undercut junior artists who were trying to break into the industry, but thought that it wasn’t an ethical quandary that should rest on independent creators. “It’s not a black and white thing. I think at larger studios, that’s a place where there’s an ethical issue of: ‘How does this undercut labor that’s already undervalued?”
It was a convenient way to think about AI in a positive light. But AAA games like Fortnite have already taken “inspiration” from indie games such as Among Us. That was just for a game mode. It didn’t feel like a logical leap to think that big studios could borrow development methods too.
Could machine-generated games be fun?
And there’s another major stakeholder that’s critical to the success of AI games: the players. Right now, the average person still thinks that “human” and “machine” generated art have inherent differences. “There’s a sense of difficulty in knowing the authorship of certain artwork,” said Nicholls. While games are often attributed to leads in more public-facing roles, they are products of entire teams–and AI only complicates the idea of authorship. Especially when generators such as Midjourney are raising legal and ethical questions on who owns the art that the machine produces. “I wonder if now there’s more unease around AI because people fear that they won’t be able to tell if something is AI generated or not.” Before AI became a prominent image-making tool, it would be reasonable to assume that any painting had some kind of human element. Now, even Bungie community moderators struggle to differentiate between AI and human art.
But Cook thinks that these machines we call “video games” contain a complexity that can only be built by humans. “Maybe it’s possible for AI to generate games but the games that left an impact on us… they’re boundary breaking. Concept breaking. Those are things we can’t necessarily predict with enough data or computer power… If we wanted infinite Grand Theft Auto campaigns or Star Trek episodes, then they would start to feel samey.”
Nevertheless, games such as Minecraft and No Man’s Sky are immensely popular. Although the popular image of artificial intelligence is associated with perfection, that’s not what Cook thinks that gamers necessarily want.
“Players like to be surprised. They actually like it when the AI breaks…Some of the most memorable things that people pull out of these AI systems is when they’ve gone wrong a bit. But I think something that’s really important is that they like to be able to share and talk about these things,” he said. “Although Minecraft or Spelunky 2 has an infinite number of levels and worlds in it, that infinity isn’t really important. What’s important is the one world that you have, or the one thing that you shared with other people. So in the Valheim world, the Valheim world generator is not important. What’s important is the server that you built with your friends.“
While The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is one of the most hotly-anticipated video game sequels of all time, that’s not the only reason it’s notable this week. It is also, sadly, the first Nintendo game to hit the $70 threshold.
While physical copies of the game have previously been available for preorder at places like GameStop for $60, Nintendo’s press release for the game following tonight’s Direct confirms that the cheapest version will be selling for $70. Preorders for the game at that $60 pricepoint suddenly stopped being accepted by retailers on Tuesday night.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: An epic adventure across the land and skies of Hyrule awaits. In this sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you’ll decide your own path through the sprawling landscapes of Hyrule and the mysterious islands floating in the vast skies above. Can you harness the power of Link’s new abilities to fight back against the malevolent forces that threaten the kingdom? In addition to the standard version, which will be available at a suggested retail price of $69.99, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Collector’s Edition will release on launch day at a suggested retail price of $129.99, and includes a physical version of the game, an artbook with concept art, a Steelbook case, an Iconart steel poster and a set of four pin badges.
That would make it the first ever Nintendo game to hit that $70 threshold, at least as a recommended retail price, which is a bummer for us as consumers (since wages aren’t increasing in line with the inflated cost of…everything) but also expected from a business (because all their costs have gone up). This is why it’s called an inflation crisis, baby!
Back in November, Nintendo responded to Sony’s decision to increase the price of the PS5 by saying “it won’t take such actions at this moment, but will continue monitoring situation and carefully consider (whether we need to take the option).”
While that Switch hardware increase hasn’t materialised—yet—maybe recouping an extra $10 per copy of a game expected to sell millions will help Nintendo’s bottom line, especially since the company just saw its share prices tumble after analysts predicted the aging Switch is “rushing to end of its lifecycle at a faster-than-expected pace,” and that without news of replacement hardware on the horizon things might just get worse.
Everything in the DC Universe is kind of up in the air right now. Fortunately, that doesn’t include the follow-up to Matt Reeves’ highly-praised The Batman. Despite the massive restructuring going on after the merger between Warner Bros. and Discovery, it seems like this franchise is safe.
One couldn’t be blamed for being a bit worried, after major projects like Wonder Woman 3 were shelved. Ever since James Gunn took over the helm at DC, shakeups have been happening left and right. Henry Cavill won’t be returning as Superman, and Black Adam is no longer the central figure that the DC Universe will be built around. They’re working with a new 10-year plan.
The Batman was an immediate hit, bringing in about $770 million dollars worldwide. It also laid the foundation for a new Batman franchise, once again taking place in a grounded and gritty universe. Luckily, it felt fresh enough to bring people out to the theaters in droves. But what of a sequel?
Reeves and others have been working on a few different spin-offs, none of which have come to fruition first. First of all, is a spinoff TV series about the Penguin starring Colin Farrell. The second is a spinoff which was initially about the Gotham City Police Department, although recently, it may have morphed into a show about Arkham Asylum. But none of these are really sequels involving Batman himself.
While he was pretty tight-lipped about plot details or a release timeline, Matt Reeves recently spoke with a writer at Collider. When asked if he was shooting any films this year, he replied, almost hesitant to reveal much…
I’m not going to answer that question, but we are working on a movie. I’ll put it to you that way. We’re deep in it and my partner and I are writing, Mattson [Tomlin] and I are writing, and it’s really exciting, and I’m really excited about what we’re doing.
He also shared his admiration for his lead actor, Robert Pattinson, saying: that he was “really excited to be doing that with Rob, because I just think he’s such a special person and actor.”
The next DC movie, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, opens in theaters on March 17.
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Our beloved childhood friend and icon – Barbie – is coming to life. The first teaser trailer of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was released today…and I already feel a surge of tremendous excitement
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Expect a star-studded cast featuring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, Michael Cera, and Will Ferrell. From there, it’s all up to Greta – the groundbreaking director who gave us stellar films like Ladybird and Little Women.
This romantic comedy has been years in the making. It was originally reported that a Barbie movie was in the works way back in 2009. Then a decade later, we heard that the lovely Margot Robbie would play Barbie…and it wasn’t revealed until 2022 that Ryan Gosling was playing Ken and who the rest of the cast would be. Thankfully, the movie will finally premiere on July 21, 2023 to Barbie lovers and cinema fans the world over.
The teaser reveals a cluster of little girls – wearing old-fashioned pinafores and drab frocks. They’re having a tea party with their baby dolls in the hills and valleys of a vast orange desert. Richard Strauss’ Thus Sprach Zarathustra provides an ominous soundscape. It is one truly creepy mise-en-scène and a clear reference to 2001: Space Odyssey.
Then the monolithic Barbie is revealed. She stands 20-feet tall, towering above the kids and winking cheekily. And the girls go insane – they smash their babydolls’ skulls in, slam themagainst an outcropping of rocks, destroying their once-cherished dollies. And then we flip to the magical, mesmerizing world of Barbie. Thus demonstrating that Gerwig will take this film far beyond our expectations.
Rumors of Dua Lipa’s involvement in the film have started to swirl…after reports that the singer would be in the film months ago, it appears the official Barbie movie Instagram account has followed her in the recent hours. A new beau in Jack Harlow and a film debut? It really is Dua’s world.
This movie’s already inspired the hot pink Barbie-core trend and it’s not even out yet…the cultural impact is about to shift our cosmos. Brace yourselves, it’s about to become Barbie’s world.
Hogwarts Legacy is just a couple months away and if you haven’t been paying attention, the Harry Potter spin-off isn’t messing around. The game will let players learn the series’ infamous unspeakable curses and even use them on students. A new gameplay reveal ups the ante even further though, showing off the game’s Dark Arts Battle Arena where $10 extra bucks nets you the opportunity to instantly murder goblins and wizards.
Avalanche Studios’ second gameplay showcase for Hogwarts Legacy aired earlier today, showing off flight on broomsticks and hippogriffs, as well as the game’s customization options and Room of Requirement home base. As IGN points out, however, the most eye-catching part was a trip to the Dark Arts Battle Arena where, playing as a young Hogwarts student, the developers instantly melted some rando using the Avada Kedavra curse.
The developers explain that battle arenas allow players to test out abilities early to see whether they want to invest in unlocking them. Completing combat challenges there also unlocks new outfits and other cosmetics. The Dark Arts Battle Arena is unique, however, in being exclusive to the Deluxe Edition which costs $10 extra, and allowing early access to dark arts abilities like the Avada Kedavra curse. In the gameplay demo the student is shown ripping through waves of “loyalist” goblins, presumably dark wizards, and other enemies.
Gif: Avalanche Studios / Kotaku
For those unfamiliar with the world of Harry Potter, the Avada Kedavra is one of a number of illegal curses that kill and torture. It’s also the one that Voldemort used to murder the titular character’s parents. Hogwarts Legacy takes place roughly a hundred years before the books, which might explain the seemingly blase attitude of the in-universe characters to child torture and underage battle arenas.
The jarring juxtaposition is par for the course with Hogwarts Legacy. Caught in the shadow of author J.K. Rowling’s transphobic crusade and the royalties she continues to earn from all Harry Potter adaptations, the game’s very existence is controversial. It’s also continued to be delayed. Previously expected this fall, Hogwarts Legacy is now slated to release in February. Yesterday, however, Warner Bros. announced that the Xbox One and PS4 versions wouldn’t be out until April, with the Nintendo Switch version coming even later in June.
In the meantime, the game appears poised to test players’ morale compasses in more ways than one. As my fellow writer Sisi Jiang joked earlier today, “You know the good thing about trans people presumably excluded at hogwarts is that they don’t have to experience the trauma of murdering another human for blood sport.”
Walter Hamada, who has been the head of DC Films at Warner Bros. since 2008, has left the company. Hamada began his career at TriStar as an assistant, before moving to Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema division in 2007. While there, he served as a producer on some really big films, such as The Conjuring series and It. He was largely involved in horror films from that time.
After Justice League came out and bombed at the box office, Hamada stepped in to lead the DC department at Warner Bros. He made a lot of the bigger DC films of recent history possible, from Aquaman to Joker, which is the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time. Hamada was reportedly ready to leave his position after the new leadership at Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the HBO Max movie of Batgirl, but he remained on the job through the release of this week’s Black Adam, starring Dwayne Johnson as the DC antihero.
Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav has stated publicly that the studio is going to model their ten-year plan for DC movies after the MCU, and weirdly enough, it seems like they’ve already tried that, and it hasn’t quite panned out. Trying to emulate the success of Marvel doesn’t really seem like a sustainable business model. There’s only one Kevin Feige after all.
Despite Hamada’s departure, Warners has not yet found a replacement to take charge of its DC Films unit. Although there were reports that The LEGO Movie producer Dan Lin was in line assume command of the division, those articles turned out to be premature, and Lin has since dropped out of contention for the job.
Actors Who Turned Down DC Roles
These major stars could have played some of your favorite DC Comics’ heroes onscreen. But they all said no for one reason or another.
The whole production cycle of DC‘sThe Flash has been complicated and shrouded in mystery. Luckily, Saoirse-Monica Jackson has shed just a little bit of light. We still don’t know exactly who she is yet, but we do have a few hints as to her character’s temperament. Apparently, Warner Bros. is still trying to keep as much of this project under wraps as possible.
“I’m so scared of Warner Bros. I’m just so delighted that I got the part that I’m so scared to even speak about it in case I get fired. So I can’t tell you anything at the moment, but I’m really delighted about playing her. She’s a really fun, interesting character and a very different character from things I’ve played in the past. I’ve worked with some amazing people and I just loved the experience.”
It’s not much to go on, but knowing what we already know about the movie, there are a few options. First of all, it could be any character mentioned in the DCEU chronology so far. Secondly, she could be anyone from the Tim BurtonBatman universe, since we know Michael Keaton‘s Batman is going to be a pretty big part of the movie. She could be Catwoman, Poison Ivy, or really a ton of other people from Batman’s rogues’ gallery.
It could also be characters from the universe of Barry Allen himself, leading some people to speculate that she could be portraying The Golden Glider. She’s a supervillain, who actually already showed up in seasons one and two of The CW‘sThe Flash. The Golden Glider is an Olympic-level figure skater, who has skates that allow her to travel quickly on any surface, including in mid-air. She also employs an arsenal of deadly gadgets.
Only time will tell who Jackson ends up portraying, and since she wasn’t in any of the trailers, it’s likely that we’ll just have to wait until the movie’s release. After a good few delays, it seems that the final release date has landed on June 23, 2023.
Every DC Comics Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best
From Superman and the Mole Men to The Suicide Squad, we ranked every movie based on DC comics.
Collectibles manufacturer Factory Entertainment is adding to its prop replicas range with a line of limited-edition replicas from The Batman.
Press Release –
Feb 15, 2022
CONCORD, Calif., February 15, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– Pop culture collectibles manufacturer Factory Entertainment is adding to its wide range of high-end movie prop replicas with a line of limited-edition replicas from the highly anticipated Warner Bros. and DC motion picture The Batman. The first release, which is now available to pre-order, is the Batarang™.
Product developers at Factory Entertainment were provided with digital assets of the Batarang™ prop directly from the production team of The Batman. This allowed the company to produce a full-size, screen-accurate replica featuring all of the fine detail of the original prop. Each replica features a hand-weathered finish replicating the on-screen appearance of the prop.
To enhance and exhibit the beauty of the replica, Factory Entertainment has included a museum-quality presentation box with a piano-black finish and acrylic window, allowing collectors to showcase this exquisite piece to maximum effect. Also included is a metal plaque with a unique limited-edition number and a certificate of authenticity.
“We’re very excited to unveil our first of many collectibles from The Batman,” said Jordan Schwartz, President and CEO of Factory Entertainment. “The Batarang™ is an essential piece of The Dark Knight’s arsenal, and we thought this would be the perfect prop replica to start with. We’re also well into development of full-size replicas of The Batman’s cowl and his grapple launcher, and fans can expect further announcements on those, along with offerings in our other collectibles lines, very soon.”
In 2022 and 2023 fans can also look forward to more offerings in Factory Entertainment’s full-sized and scaled prop replica lines from other current and upcoming DC hits, including, among others, Peacemaker, Justice League, The Flash, Black Adam and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
“We’re thrilled to be continuing to expand our commitment to producing top-tier collectibles from Warner Bros. and DC properties. The passionate DC collector community is one we are honored to serve with the kind of high-end collectibles that create the greatest emotional connection between fans and the characters they love,” continued Schwartz. “Over the last decade, we’ve particularly established ourselves as the leader in the prop replica category. When people ask, ‘where does he get all those wonderful toys,’ the answer is Factory Entertainment.”
The Batman Batarang™ Limited Edition Prop Replica is available to pre-order now at FactoryEnt.com.
