Bloomberg reported that the amounts that Netflix and Tencent paid Riot less than half of the $250 million it cost to make the series. Bloomberg also claimed that four people who were familiar with Arcane's production said that Riot didn't have a plan to recoup the lost revenue.

Despite Riot firing 11% of its staff earlier this year, Riot's co-founder Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill says that as far as they are concerned, Arcane was a huge success:

"People who look at the world through a short-term, transactional, cynical lens really struggle to understand Riot. This has been true with various people trying to claim that high-quality free games won't work, that esports will never work, that our music was insane, and are now saying that Arcane wasn't awesome and worth it.

"These people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins when, in reality, we sell skins to make things like Arcane. Riot is a mission-driven company where Rioters are constantly striving to make it better to be a player. That is why we have successfully done that over and over again across multiple games and now multiple businesses/mediums—games, sports, music & animation. Do we get everything right? Nope. But we are not focused on the short-term extraction of profits—we are focused on delivering exceptional value to our audience over the long term, again and again and again. To be clear, Arcane crushed for players, and so it crushed for us."

Riot's renowned for its incredibly expensive skins. Earlier this year, it released a $500 Ahri skin and then later fired the artist responsible for making it, as well as announcing a new exalted skins tier list days after even more layoffs, which see players having to roll the dice for nicer skins. Considering how much money Arcane costs, it's not really that surprising that Riot is using its skins made for whales to fund creative projects like series.

However, Arcane couldn't have been that much of a car crash. Riot recently confirmed that it is looking into making more League of Legends-inspired shows that will explore three new regions: Noxus, Ionia, and Demacia. I think we'll probably see Noxus next after the Swain teaser at the end of the last Arcane episode, but honestly, after the superb quality of Arcane's second season, I would be happy with just about anything.

According to Variety, Amazon said that Secret Level's first week was its most-watched animated series debut of all time.

Aside from the announcement, though, there's no information on what games will be featured in Secret Level's second season, when it might debut, or how long it'll be. Unless it's already in-progress it'll take some time to coordinate all those licensing deals.

Season 1 of secret level had a lot of stars for what it was—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Hart, Keanu Reeves, Temuera Morrison, Emily Swallow, Merle Dandridge, Claudia Doumit, Clive Standen, and Laura Bailey, among others. It had episodes about Dungeons & Dragons, Sifu, New World, Unreal Tournament, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, Crossfire, Armored Core, The Outer Worlds, Mega Man, Exodus, Spelunky, Concord, Honor of Kings, Playtime, and one exceptionally weird one about Pac-Man.

For all that the PC Gamer team was... not impressed by the results. A mere five of the 15 episodes rated a 3/5 or better on PC Gamer's very informal round robin take on a Secret Level review.

Plus, there's a whole awkward episode dedicated to high-profile failure Concord, the very expensive and very public game that released this year before walking itself back into nothingness. PC Gamer's Tyler Wild said it was "like a message from a ghost whose unfinished business is creating a global multimedia franchise."

That's one hell of a team-up. Pacific Drive was my favorite survival game of this year, challenging you to make your way through a deadly anomalous exclusion zone in Washington State with only the help of a clunky old station wagon. It's hectic and scary and oozing with atmosphere, which feels like it's right in Wan's horror wheelhouse. Wan has also directed mainstream action blockbusters like Furious 7, so he's got plenty of car experience, and the Aquaman films, so he's got… I don't know, water experience? Let's go with that. It rains a lot in the Pacific Northwest.

I'd say the biggest challenge for a Pacific Drive show is coming up with a main character. In the game you're just a mute driver and your station wagon is the star of the show. There are characters who guide you through the world via radio, but it's mostly just you and a car, and the car has far, far more personality than you do. All those blanks are gonna have to be filled in, hopefully with an interesting and well-written character.

Atmospherically, I think it's a great choice for a series. The Pacific Northwest is a beautiful region and those thick forests and towering trees can already feel a bit unsettling in a sort of gorgeous way. The anomalies from the game varied from spooky to scary to downright terrifying, so there's plenty to work with for a horror show. Pacific Drive also trickles a lot of lore your way while you explore, so there's plenty to draw on from the source material.

According to Variety, Wan and Michael Clear (executive producer of recent horror show Teacup and the 2024 remake of Salem's Lot) will executive produce the Pacific Drive series. Atomic Monster has acquired the rights to develop the show, but we don't know when or where it will air yet: no streaming service or network partner has been announced.

With that said, the information we have on Fallout season 2 is next to none right now. We can draw a few conclusions going off what we know about returning characters and the ending of the first season, but for the most part it's a lot of speculation. At the end of season one, we got a huge hint toward the next season revolving around New Vegas. That alone gives us a reasonable amount of information to dissect and build an idea from. But for now, here's what we know about Fallout season 2.

Is there a Fallout season 2 release date?

There is no release date for Fallout season 2 yet. But we do know that the second season was greenlit in April 2024 after the first season aired, and filming for season 2 was scheduled to begin in November 2024. That makes a 2025 release date possible, but it's a bit of a stretch. So early to mid-2026 may be a more reasonable expectation. Since filming has just begun, I imagine we won't see a trailer for the season for a while yet. That would be the biggest indicator of the season wrapping up and a release date coming soon, but that also seems a significant way off currently.

Who's in the cast of Fallout season 2?

With so little information about the season as a whole, it's not really surprising that we still have so much to learn about the cast. We know that the three main characters will be returning with Purnell, Goggins, and Moten in their roles. Choudhury and Uggams have both made statements in interviews indicating that they'll be back for season 2 as well. Here's the full list of confirmed cast so far:

• Ella Purnell - Lucy MacLean
• Walton Goggins - The Ghoul / Cooper Howard
• Aaron Moten - Knight Maximus
• Sarita Choudhury - Moldaver
• Leslie Uggams - Overseer Betty
• Macaulay Culkin - unannounced

The one wild card so far is Macaulay Culkin, who's been confirmed cast but without a character name announced. According to Deadline's report, he'll be playing "a crazy genius-type character." That doesn't tell us much but I'd put my money on him being a weirdo who turns up in New Vegas during Lucy and The Ghoul's portion of the story rather than some Brotherhood of Steel scientist.

Though unconfirmed, there are several characters who seem highly likely to turn up in season 2. Lucy's father and brother both seem like shoe-ins, as does Hank's missing wife Barb. We've also seen Squire Thaddeus survive the wasteland so far and his new ghoulish properties mean he's likely to stagger into season 2 as a continued source of comedic relief and macguffin-ing. Here's our list of likely returning characters for Fallout season 2:

• Kyle MacLachlan – Hank MacLean
• Moisés Arias – Norm MacLean
• Frances Turner - Barb Howard
• Johnny Pemberton - Thaddeus

What's the plot for Fallout season 2?

Even though we don't know anything like a release date, we know that Fallout season 2 is going to have two things for certain: New Vegas and Deathclaws. Based on the ending of Fallout Season 1, we're expecting New Vegas to play a heavy role in Season 2 since it was the only city not destroyed by a nuclear blast. But, we don't know what this setting entails other than what we already know from Fallout: New Vegas.

New Vegas isn't the only iconic piece of Fallout history we imagine we'll see this season either. For example, co-showrunner Graham Wagner explained, “We wanted to get deathclaws, but we didn’t want to just throw it away. It’s such a monumental piece, we want to save something for season 2 to be able to do it properly, not just added onto the massive world-building we had to do already in season 1. So season 2, we’re very excited to finally tackle one of the most iconic elements of the games.”

This does make me curious to see what other iconic Fallout elements they will cram into the second season since the team was so conscious of overloading the season with all the good stuff and leaving nothing to build the world of its successor.

Deathclaws will be a significantly intimidating addition to the derelict landscape of New Vegas, and hopefully, we get a good look at them in the first trailer for season 2. But, for now, you'll have to let your imagination conjure up what you think they'll look like and how they'll fit into the world already constructed in Fallout.

After explaining that Fallout's showrunners weren't there to accept the award because they're working on Fallout season two ("Whoooo," came the audience response), Nolan thanked a number of people including Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins, the rest of the cast and crew, Amazon, and Kilter Films.

"I want to thank the fans of New Vegas for not burning my house to the ground," Nolan added, which drew another cheer. "You'll be very happy you didn't."

Nolan was referring to the uproar among dedicated fans when the show played fast and loose with the lore and timeline of the Fallout series, specifically, the most beloved Fallout of all: New Vegas. I won't recap the whole ordeal for you—because I already did it when the show aired.

Nolan also thanked Todd Howard, saying the team at Bethesda "were absolutely the most incredible collaborators you could possibly imagine."

Howard then stepped up to the mic to thank Nolan, as well as the cast and crew, and "everybody at Bethesda that I've worked with on Fallout for 20 years now, it's been incredible. We are so blessed with the best fans there are. Thank you for supporting everything we do."

You can watch the entire award segment below:

The episode, which I've seen in advance of the show's premiere, was supposed to come out in a world where Concord was, if not a Helldivers 2-level hit, a popular and well-liked game. In reality, Concord barely lasted a week. Sony quickly shut the competitive multiplayer game down due to lack of interest, and then shuttered developer Firewalk Studios, which it had acquired partway through Concord's development.

I played Concord and I thought it was fun enough, and it was technically sound, but its Bungie-influenced arena shooter stylings just didn't draw a crowd, and neither did its all-in commitment to building a Guardians of the Galaxy-like sci-fi universe with weekly cutscenes. They were going to follow the exploits of a crew of Freegunners—Concord's name for its roguish space mercenaries—whose realistically-rendered faces were a little uncanny.

The Secret Level episode portrays the most important moment in the history of the Freegunners, when a heroic crew of outlaws stole a map of navigation routes that allow free travel through the galaxy for enemies of The Guild, a powerful policing body.

At the end of the short adventure, we jump to a space pub in the present of Concord's timeline, where the legendary story has just been retold. There, we glimpse the arm of one of Concord's mascots—Lennox, the green guy—and of course we're supposed to think, 'Hey, I know that guy!' But no one does know much about the character, outside of his creators. What we got of Concord's story from the first trailers and cutscenes tell us that he's a daredevil who really loves hot sauce, but there were supposed to have been over a dozen more in-game cinematics by now.

The episode comes across like a transmission from a spirit that doesn't know it's dead yet, one that still believes everything went right for Concord and the new game studio. It's the 13th episode of the series—unlucky, eh?—and it'll drop on December 17, although I found its eerie context more notable than the short story itself.

Concord is far from the only multiplayer game—or game in general—to struggle or crater this year, although it was the most dramatic impact event. We just learned that Ubisoft isn't going to keep trying to build an audience for free-to-play shooter XDefiant, and it's been an unprecedented year for studio closures and layoffs. More than 300 developers lost their jobs just this week, and thousands more jobs were cut this year.

As for the rest of Secret Level, we watched and rated each episode and liked some of them, but on the whole, the animated shorts didn't charm us much.

The episodes are fairly short, running around 10-12 minutes each. It feels like brevity should be a virtue here—who wants an hour-long Pac-Man joke?—but they actually wind up feeling too slight in many cases.

We divvied up the episodes between us and watched 'em all. Below you'll find our quickie reviews plus a 1-5 rating on a scale befitting each episode. You can check out the show yourself when it begins streaming on Prime Video on December 10.

Episode 1: Dungeons & Dragons

This didn't quite work for me. I think the thing that made last year's D&D movie work so well was that it understood that D&D is fundamentally a bit silly. Get too self-serious with it, as this episode does, and you just end up with something that feels like an intro cutscene from a forgotten action-RPG.

There's lots of cool visuals on display, no doubt, but I think this episode was always going to need more than that. With properties like Warhammer 40k and Spelunky, there's a novelty just in seeing them represented in a big budget, cinematic way. But when it comes to fantasy adventurers, dragons, and magic, we've seen all that in shiny CG a million times before. It needed to really lean into what makes D&D unique and interesting to stand out, and a surprise at the end of this episode wasn't enough to achieve that.

There are some interesting characters in the party—the stoic dwarf monk is fun, and I'd have loved to see more of the episode's orc druid wildshaping in battle. But what an odd choice to devote most of the screentime to a stereotypically dour paladin—I'm guessing the creators didn't realise that the reason so many players pick that class is just for the overpowered smite attacks, not the dull piousness. —Robin Valentine, Senior Editor

Rating: 2/5 saving throws

Episode 2: Sifu

The best thing I can say about this episode is that it made me want to replay the game. It's a brief fight scene bookended by a bit of rumination on how we spend our lives, basically an ultra-condensed version of the game itself. The fight is quite true to Sifu's action movie-style martial arts combat, which is some of the best ever put in a game, but it's not the kind of thing I really want to watch someone else play. If you find yourself wanting to grab the imaginary controller out of the show's hands and do a better job beating up nightclub goons, then go play Sifu. —Tyler Wilde, US Editor-in Chief

Rating: 2/5 punches

Episode 3: New World

I'm tired of animated projects using the biggest movie stars they can get instead of hiring performers who are genuinely talented in voice acting, but it's hard to argue with the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a boastful, stupid, self-absorbed jackass of a king in the New World episode.

There are a lot of well-timed gags, fun references to respawning and NPC trainers, and even a nod to one of Arnold's memes as he's taught important lessons over and over and stubbornly refuses to learn from any of them. "You're pretty bad at doin' things," his servant says just before the king once again runs off to do more things, badly. –Christopher Livingston, Senior Editor

Rating: 4/5 choppas

Episode 4: Unreal Tournament

I have some truly fond memories of staying up all night playing Unreal Tournament, and I mean all night. Until the sun came up and I realized I had to go to work on absolutely no sleep. Secret Level's UT episode doesn't exactly rekindle those fires for me, but the action sequences (it is almost entirely action sequences) are good, and the two things I wanted to see most, my favorite weapon and one very special, utterly iconic map, both make an appearance. No complaints here. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 4/5 telefrags

Episode 5: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2

If this sequel to Space Marine 2 is trying to give us some insight into its protagonist, Titus, by flashing back to his childhood, it doesn't really work. He comes off as another stoic killing machine—just like the other marines—rather than the 40K equivalent of a rookie cop who breaks the rules but gets the job done, which is how he comes across in the games.

But that doesn't really matter, because it succeeds as a combat showcase full of gory deaths, and gives Chaos all the personality the Ultramarines lack. The cultists are straight out of Mad Max and look like they're having a great time right up until the second they get messily dispatched, and the mutated sorceress is super unsettling, especially the way her wing-like limbs fold away.

It doesn't really need to be connected to Space Marine 2 at all, and would have worked just as well without the videogame link. I haven't seen a 40K fight with this much grand guignol gusto and eerie oddness since the Astartes animation. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor

Rating:4/5 skulls

Episode 6: Pac-Man

Of all the episodes of Secret Level I've seen, this is by far the weirdest. And it's no accident: according to the show's creators, Bandai Namco said "We would like audiences to wonder what the f**k they did with Pac-Man." I daresay that goal has been achieved with an unusual and gruesome take on the iconic dot-gobbling circle. I don't really understand the episode and it seems barely connected to the game, but that's what I like about it. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 4/5 Clydes

Episode 7: Crossfire

Do you like badass operators saying badass things and all sharing the same personality: badass? They yell a lot of stuff like "Lost visual!" and refer to the person they're escorting as the "Package," that sorta thing? I don't know much about Crossfire except that it's a Counter-Strike-like, but this doesn't make me want to play it or even learn more about it. The episode is one of the longest in the series but mostly feels like a trailer for a direct-to-streaming action film starring, I dunno, Frank Grillo, that you never watch because you don't subscribe to Starz. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 1/5 Packages

Episode 8: Armored Core

It dawns on me that the problem with the nearly realistic style of imagery and animation in some of these episodes is that they are reminiscent of videogame cutscenes, and why would I want to spend more time watching videogame cutscenes than I already do? Anyway, Keanu Reeves is a hard-drinkin', hard-livin' rough and tumble burnout who grunts and growls and talks to a voice in his head, and it's hard not to feel like I've already seen him do that for about 30 hours in a game already. Because I have. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 1/5 Silverhands

Episode 9: The Outer Worlds

This episode works for a while, giving me the urge to dive back into the colorful and satirically corporate-run universe of The Outer Worlds. A lovelorn nobody submits to horrible product testing experiments in hopes of reuniting with a scientist he simps for, which is grimly entertaining, but then it takes a stab at sentimentality and misses. I blame Pixar for making everyone think they need to aim for the heartstrings when a simply entertaining story is plenty. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 3/5 saltunas

Episode 10: Mega Man

This one has that uncannily smooth, hyper-cute look that permeates ArtStation. Something weirder would've been welcome. The length of these episodes feels like more of a problem the more of them I watch. They're so slight—this one's just seven minutes—that they can wind up feeling like advertisements instead of short films. This one seems aimed at introducing kids to the concept of Mega Man rather than pleasing fans of the series, who are mostly probably in their 40s. —Tyler Wilde

Rating: 1/5 arm cannons

Episode 11: Exodus

Look, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this. It's an episode about a sci-fi game no one has played that bounces around so many planets and characters and factions it needs near-constant narration to keep up with, which ain't great for a 10 minute show. One guy has some kinda cyberbog leopard bodyguard, though. That was cool. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 1/5 large loyal cybercats

Episode 12: Spelunky

I guess Spelunky isn't a bad place to explore the concept of repeatedly dying and starting over and what that means to a character in a videogame. Why does it happen? How does it happen? After dozens or hundreds of deaths and rebirths, would it take a mental toll? But this segment fails to capture the hilarity and ruthlessness of Spelunky's systems, and worse, it attempts to craft a heartwarming message that feels completely incongruent to the game. Like me missing a jump in Spelunky, this episode falls flat. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 1/5 angry shopkeepers

Episode 13: Concord

I was hoping this episode would blow me away, just for the dramatic irony, but Concord's message from beyond the grave was clearly meant for an audience that's already in love with Concord's universe, which doesn't exist because the game was canned days after launch. —Tyler Wilde

Rating: 2/5 quirky aliens

Episode 14: Honor of Kings

I don't know much about Honor of Kings other than that it's a mobile MOBA, so I'm not sure how relevant to the game this episode is. I do love the idea of a massive living city controlled by an AI that appears to be breaking down, but the episode gets almost immediately bogged down with exposition, a bit of a problem since it's only 15 minutes long. —Christopher Livingston

Rating: 2/5 board games played to decide someone's fate

Episode 15: PlayStation

A bike courier is chased by Sony characters from another dimension: If you're trying to manufacture a PlayStation mascot team-up, it's not a bad premise. It still comes off as a long advertisement, and I expected to see some deeper cuts in a 10-minute parade of references. —Tyler Wilde

Rating: 2/5 PlayStation exclusives

In a chat this week with the creators of Secret Level, however, I really only wanted to ask about a single episode based on an iconic game character:

Pac-Man.

I'm not going to spoil anything about the Pac-Man episode of Secret Level, but I will say it's probably about the last thing you'd ever expect from an animated feature about a yellow circle that gobbles dots and gets chased by ghosts. The episode is weird and gruesome and a huge departure from the game itself. Turns out, Bandai Namco was totally into that.

"They challenged us from the jump," said Dave Wilson, Secret Level's supervising director and executive producer. "We got on the call with the developers at Bandai, and the translated mission statement was: 'We would like audiences to wonder what the fuck they did with Pac Man.' And so we were like, no problem."

Mission accomplished, I'd say. Again, no spoilers, but I definitely wound up wondering that exact thing while watching.

"They get script approval," Wilson said when I asked how involved the studio was. "They saw everything." Wilson thinks they only got a single note from Bandai Namco on the episode, about the placement of a logo. "Other than that, it was whatever we want to do."

I asked if other studios were just as willing to let Secret Level go completely ham on their beloved characters and game worlds.

"I think it runs the gamut from folks that really want to closely manage the process to folks who say, 'look, we trust you, just go with God," creator and executive producer Tim Miller said. "But our company, Blur [Studio], has been doing this for almost 30 years now, and primarily in the game industry. So we have a lot of trust built up with folks that we're going to handle their IP carefully, and we're not going to go off and do terrible things to it.

"I don't think the show would be possible without that [trust], because, honestly, many of them are busy making games," Miller said. "They don't have time to babysit us."

Secret Level begins airing on December 10 on Prime TV.

As someone with a passable knowledge of League of Legends lore, when I first started watching Arcane, I didn't think it would have much in the way of surprises. Sure, we'd get more of a window into these characters' backstory than ever before, but it was all just heading in the direction of the status quo in LoL and its various spin-offs, right?

Yeah… no. If anyone was still harbouring that belief by the end of season one, season two will certainly have sunk it, with its wild changes to a few key characters and handful of emotional deaths. In fact, the opposite has proven to be true—the canon of the show has overridden the canon of the games in many instances now, with season two in particular heralding a controversial redesign of champion Viktor from cyborg supervillain into magical prophet.

As it turns out, all bets were off right from the start, with Riot granting the creative team huge freedom over the story—and even allowing them to kill off anyone they liked. That's according to Amanda Overton, who wrote on the first season and returned as an executive story editor on the second.

"Riot embraced whatever story we wanted to tell with any of the characters," she told our good friends over at GamesRadar+. "We were like 'Can we kill Jayce and Viktor?' 'Yes'. There were no limits to what we could do to make a good story, which was, in my opinion, absolutely the right choice for them to do, because we are adapting a game into a different medium, into television, and you want to be able to be free to make that version the best it can possibly be."

Though longtime fans may resent some of the changes made as a result, it's hard to argue with the results—the show has been an enormous hit, and a large part of that is the depth invested in the characters.

"That support from [Riot's] side really allowed us to make characters like this—complicated, interesting, dark, vulnerable—that had fates that we needed to decide what would be the most satisfying for the show, and not worry about what may or may not be interesting for a different medium," she says.

And apparently it was always the plan for that to reflect back into the game itself. Overton points to how "mobile, and moving, and changeable" League of Legends is as a key difference between Arcane and other videogame adaptations.

"It's updating all the time, it changes, it's a very nimble, changing game. And so there isn't a lot of opportunity to have an adaptation of a game to then also be able to change the game or adapt the game. The Last of Us can't do that, The Witcher can't do that. Any game adaptation that we've seen recently doesn't have that relationship with League that Arcane does."

Given that the story of Arcane, right up to the end of season two, was apparently planned as early as six years ago, that means Viktor's League of Legends redesign has likely been on the agenda for almost as long, as well as the various major transformations and deaths in the show.

On the other hand… how many of those fates do we actually think will stick anyway? Particularly when it comes to deaths, it seemed to me that for almost all of them, the door was left wide open for the character to return (or revert) if Riot ever needs them again.

Still, it's certainly interesting to see a TV show leading the way so strongly for a connected videogame universe. I don't know if I'm entirely convinced that the company is successfully uniting all of its canon yet, as it promised last year, but it's certainly being bold with it, no matter how many Viktor mains it upsets along the way.

Namely, some fans felt that the season's finale was a mite rushed, being a mostly standard-length episode where everything gets tied up in a bow faster than fabric in a bow-making factory. This particular rumour mill hasn't been helped by interview asides made by co-creator Christian Linke, who has said in interviews that he'd have liked a bit more time to wrap up certain arcs.

I've been a medium amount of skeptical that anything nefarious went on behind the scenes, especially given Arcane had a very high budget (although still not too far above most animated movies in terms of watch-hours) for production and marketing both. Now, Linke's taken to Reddit to set the record straight (thanks, Gamesradar):

"Some theories are a bit too far out there," writes Linke, before having to come out and state that one conspiracy—that the showrunners asked Foritche for a feature-length finale and got rejected, is right out: "It's quite the opposite, our scripts are always shorter than what Fortiche ends up proposing in the story board phase. We wanna let them get inspired and roam free, so we can then reel it in while also allowing for the magical moments to find themselves. It's a tight creative collaboration, not some sort of 'alright vendor company, do your work, achieve the impossible, but do it quickly!'"

The corporate greed angle, Linke says, is also a heap of nothing: "Yes, there are always constraints, both in budget and time. That's part of our job as creatives, to work within those constraints. Constraints are NORMAL, and they were always generous, and I always had final say on anything creative. But they do exist. They also existed during Season 1."

I think that's fair enough—while the show's first season saw praise along the lines of 'this is what happens when you give artists all the time and money they want', fact of the matter is, if you're making anything for cash, it's gonna have a deadline. Sometimes it'll have a deadline even if you aren't getting paid, just because you'd like to finish the thing someday. Riot was generous by comparison, but its patience and budget isn't infinite, and, more to the point, neither was the patience of the people animating the show.

"It would have been great to have more time to work on this second season, or extra time to add to the episodes, but we didn't have it. For a number of reasons. Budget being one. We have been EXTREMELY lucky … NOBODY ELSE gets these types of budgets. Please don't forget that.

"Time being the other constraint … There's a release window that a massive amount of people work towards, not just at Fortiche, but also at Riot on different games, at Netflix, brand partners. Even key talent that works on the show that, simply put, is getting tired cranking away at this incredibly long season and project over multiple years."

In other words—nothing lasts forever, and no creative endeavour comes out perfect. That might leave a bit of a sting to those expecting some kind of transcendental storytelling nirvana out of Arcane's second season, but for me, my rotten little heart loves imperfect and wonky stories. I'm also glad Fortiche, a studio I want to see make other stuff, hasn't burned itself out completely in the pursuit of passion.

"It's not perfect. You don't take these types of hefty swings and expect that everything wraps up perfectly with a neat bow tie. It grows and evolves in its own way, and it becomes what it becomes." While I do appreciate Linke's transparency here, I do think now that he's said his piece it's time to log off for a minute—you categorically can't please everyone. Besides, it ain't over until the fatcats stop funding a big animated League of Legends universe. I think that's how the saying goes, anyway.

Statham is the celebrity star of this year's World of Tanks Holiday Ops event, and Wargaming offered us the opportunity to ask the actor a handful of questions by email, mediated by the developer. We slipped in a few non-tank-related inquiries, and along with telling us whether he could beat Santa in a fight (he thinks he could), Statham answered a couple questions about the Crank movies, which to my mind are the most memorable films he's appeared in—and to draw an admittedly loose connection to PC gaming, pretty videogame-like (you even used to be able to buy Crank 2 on Steam).

The first Crank, released in 2006, casts the action star as a hitman named Chev who has to give himself a constant adrenaline rush or die by synthetic poison. In the sequel, Crank 2: High Voltage, Chev has to shock himself to charge the internal battery of an artificial heart. They're like Speed with all responsibility to others stripped out—cynical, myopic, frantic.

Both movies were directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the duo that later made Gamer with Gerard Butler. I put to Statham that the Crank movies have some videogame-like features themselves.

"Yes, I agree. To me, the Crank films have some elements of videogames," wrote Statham. "First, there's Chev—this high-adrenaline character who's up against waves of enemies all at once. He's never stopping, throwing punches, dodging attacks, and using all sorts of skills to take down whoever gets in his way. He's 'leveling up' as he goes, figuring out new ways to fight, survive, and push forward.

"Second, if you think of it like a game, Crank is a movie about keeping that health bar full. Chev's gotta keep moving forward, like a shark, to keep his heart going strong and his health 'in the green.'"

A third Crank hasn't been confirmed, and Neveldine and Taylor haven't made a film together since Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, but the Crank-heads out there remain expectant. I asked Statham if he's got any ideas of his own for what premise might drive Chev forward if they ever made a Crank 3. He stayed on message by offering a tank-related scenario.

"There's really no idea too crazy to get tossed out," wrote Statham. "If Crank 3 ever happens, I'm both pumped and a bit wary about what they'll throw at me.

"Who knows? They could put me in a tank powered by a hybrid engine, generating energy as I roll through anything in my way. That's how they could keep Chev's heart beating faster. Honestly, I think Chev would be up for it."

Yeah, why not—I'm down. Staying on the topic of tanks, the World of Tanks Holiday Ops event will bring Statham into the game on December 6—you can find details on the official World of Tanks site.

"I aim to present a new dimension of cinematic adaptation that goes beyond merely turning a game into a live-action movie," Kojima says in an interview with Variety. I honestly have no idea how Kojima plans to go about this and what going beyond a videogame adaptation means.

Maybe the hope is that the Death Stranding movie is just more than a decent videogame flick, but I'm not sure that's a high bar anymore. Sure, the Borderlands film was a pretty irredeemable mess, and the latest trailers for the upcoming Minecraft movie don't look much better, but there have been some truly great adaptations this year when it comes to TV.

Just off the top of my head, the second season of Arcane and the recent Netflix series Castlevania: Nocturne were both absolutely stellar shows. Both of these are more than just videogame adaptations; they are, in their own right, fantastic series that don't rely on the novelty of their gaming roots to score points. I think that's probably what Kojima is going for, but then again, I'm not a genius seeking to reinvent cinema.

Although creating a live-action Death Stranding may not be too hard, as Kojima also admits he has a pretty solid foundation for making games with hours of cutscenes "My work is often regarded as being similar to a movie, but at the core, games are what I create." While the idea he just makes movies is a little harsh—Death Stranding is absolutely a videogame you can sit down and play—it's not entirely unfair, especially considering just how many Hollywood celebrities turn up in it with their own digitised faces.

"For 50 years, Shadow's been in a state of suspended animation," intones Reeves, solemnly, "he's coming out of it seeking revenge."

Jim Carrey—who plays Dr Robotnik—reckons Reeves is the perfect man for the role. "Shadow's got this brooding kind of darkness that Keanu has mastered so brilliantly," he says, of a character who is the evil twin of Sonic the Hedgehog with a gun.

It sounds like Reeves almost went method to get himself into the mindspace of gaming's most Byronic hedgehog. It was an "internal journey," says the actor, "to get to the anger and the emotion. It was intense."

I have to say, we see a few snippets of Reeves' performance in the video, and he sure sounds like Keanu Reeves. You could tell me these were clips left on CD Projekt Red's floor from his stint as Johnny Silverhand and I'd absolutely believe it. If Reeves had to go on a voyage to the centre of the self, or climb to the top of a mountain to consult the sages in order to properly inhabit the persona of Evil Sonic, I dunno that I could tell. I say this as a Keanu-liker, and someone who thinks he gets unfairly dinged for his acting.

You can tell he's actually a good actor because he's able to say "Sonic 3 and playing Shadow, it's really on another level" entirely without smirking. And look, I understand: these actors are promoting a movie. They're not gonna come out and say they're only there because they got offered an enormous paycheque—I, too, would have voiced Shadow the Hedgehog if Sega offered me more money than god has—but it is slightly surreal to watch people like Idris Elba and Keanu Reeves sit down and talk up the dramatic bona fides of the Sonic movie.

Anyway, it sounds like Reeves really got into it, so look out for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 to hit cinemas this December 20, where it will make 400 trillion dollars.

"I mean, the conceptual stage has various stages of advancement, so we're for sure further in than we were a year ago, but we're also not yet at the stage where we would be shopping around the concept to potential streamers or studios," Michal Nowakowski, CD Projekt joint CEO says (via VGC). "I'd say it's probably a similar window between here and now as was between when we announced it about a year ago and today, so within that window, I would expect we’re going to get to shopping [it] around."

That last part about how the project is at a similar window seems like something I'd say to a teacher at school after I forgot to hand in my homework. Even if this project is likely something that will eventually fall outside of CD Projekt's studios, as it'll be up to the production company to get the ball rolling, it doesn't sound like it's received a lot of attention.

On the other hand, we finally got word that The Witcher 4 is in full production during CD Projekt's latest financial update. "I'm pleased to announce that several weeks ago [Polaris] moved to full-scale production," chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said. "Of all our projects, this one is currently the most far along, and we're starting the most intensive phase of development. I wish to thank the team for its effort, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for further progress." See, that's how you get straight to the point.

Nielubowicz also confirmed during this update that CD Projekt will partner with Netflix to make a new Cyberpunk animated project. Although, this isn't major news as Netflix had previously teased another Cyberpunk collaboration with CD Projekt back in September, during Geeked Week.

All in all, CD Projekt definitely has its hands full for the foreseeable future. But even still, I can't help but hope for some more concrete evidence the Cyberpunk live-action adaptation is actually happening and not just something that'll get indefinitely pushed back as the years go on and other projects pile up.

While I'm of the opinion that Fortiche is the master of storytelling so dense it gets stuck in your teeth, co-creator Christian Linke hints at the idea that there were, indeed, words left unsaid or cut for time. That's as per what he says in Arcane's "Afterglow" series, featuring himself and fellow creator Alex Yee, as well as actors Hailee Steinfeld (Vi), Ella Purnell (Jinx), Reed Shannon (Ekko). Spoilers for Season 2 ahead.

As a quick recap, Jayce managed to convince his totally-platonic science pal Viktor that his glorious evolution was going a bit overboard, with the two vanishing into the ether. As Linke reveals, they're probably not coming back: "I would say that they have unfortunately disintegrated."

What's more, Linke would've loved to explore their relationship more, saying that "to me, the Jayce/Viktor ending—to a certain degree it feels unresolved, because even though there is an understanding for them in the end, I just always feel like more should be said, and they should experience more together. But we're not given the time."

While that might set off alarm bells in your head, I don't think this necessarily means that Linke and Yee were cut off from the story they wanted to tell, or anything. "Kill your darlings" is writing advice for a reason. Not every story needs every single idea you have for it, nor can it fit every idea you care about. It's entirely possible that Linke is simply speaking from a place of writer's woe, even if what was cut needed to be cut for the story to work.

Mind, a recent interview with Techradar does raise an eyebrow or two on my end. Linke notes that, in response to the season's detractors, "there's a specific pace and a specific way we did things in season one … we wanted to do things a little differently in season two. So, yeah, I understand that, I respect that, and I want to learn from that." Very curious indeed.

At the very least, it looks like fans aren't knee-deep in cope about Jinx's survival after all. When asked if she lived, Purnell adopts a ruinously poor poker face, says "um, we don't know" then hides behind the question card, adding "we're gonna leave that open to interpretation." Yeah, I think she made it, folks. I'm excited to see her again, whether it's just a quick cameo in whatever Fortiche is cooking next or not.

There's very little nuance in these spaces, either. Lukewarm criticisms become rallying cries for critique wars, clever soundbytes echo in on themselves, and before you know it people are hurling pitchforks like harpoons and spray-painting their teeth silver. Nonetheless, I’m of the opinion this finale deserves some full-throated celebration. I'm gonna get into spoiler territory from here on out, so go watch the show if you haven't already.

Arcane season two's ending was never going to please everybody, that much is for certain. When you get (rightfully) lauded as some of the best prestige TV animation that's graced the silver screen, the weight of expectation is going to rest heavily on your shoulders. However, I think Arcane ended in the only way it could've—loud, beautiful, and packed denser than a black hole.

Episode 7. That's it, that's the header

This episode has escaped the most criticism out of the season's third act (Netflix releases them in three-episode batches). It balances Ekko's heartbreaking journey through the 'good' timeline, where hextech was never invented, with Jayce's hilariously no-good terrible bad day in the hell dimension—all with its usual finesse. There's barely anything to critique here. The dialogue's tight, the visuals are breathtaking, and the stakes are reaching their peak.

However, this episode has two great examples of the kind of bastard (affectionate) behaviour Fortiche is known for, and it's why I think Arcane Season 2 is likely to improve in the eyes of its detractors over time, as long as they give it a second watch under a microscope.

First up, Ekko says: "I was playing with inversions on Jayce's acceleration rune" while drawing a big ol' chalk circle around the rune we see Jayce carrying on his wrist. The same rune he was given by the mysterious mage in his past, who turns out to be a regretful Viktor from Jayce's doomed dimension. This lays a whole heap of significance on episode 9's reveal—that being, Viktor gave a ton of different runes to Jayce at random, leading to a lot of doomed realities.

In the reality we're following, though, Jayce gets the acceleration rune, which leads to Ekko discovering time travel—letting him intervene in Episode 9, which buys Jayce enough time to convince his wayward Ultron boyfriend to not go all hivemind.

Secondly, Heimerdinger notes that the hexcore flung them all to different time periods—while he does theorise that Jayce might've ended up in a different timeline, there's no real confirmation of that. At the end of the episode, alt-universe Powder puts a blue rose necklace next to a bag of hexcore crystals.

This is where I wade, fearlessly, into headcanon territory: I don't think Jayce got sent to a different timeline at all, he just got sent way into the future. The crystals still exist, meaning Viktor can still eventually discover hextech and begin his glorious evolution. Moreover, blue roses often symbolise the unattainable. The necklace has both Powder and Ekko's faces on it.

In other words, a symbol of unattainable love between two characters is (despite the fact they're still alive and well in this timeline) placed right next to the very thing that eventually dooms all others. This is a studio that's meticulous about detail, and there are no accidental frames. I am shaking my fist ruefully at the sky and cursing Fortiche's name.

While I think episode 7 is definitely the strongest, it's also my opinion that all three of the last act's episodes are packed with little details that'll start taking root on second, third, and fourth watches. Let's start with the most obvious one.

She ain't dead

Jinx isn't dead—this might seem like cope, but I am 900% certain that's the case. While she gets her big sacrificial Disney death, we also see Caitlyn holding one of her bombs and smiling ruefully at a blueprint of the exact shaft she supposedly 'died' in, the camera even panning to a vent where she could've conceivably escaped.

We then see an exact shot-for-shot replica of an airship from episode one, season one—where Powder said: "One day, I'm gonna ride in one of those things." If that wasn't enough, we get a 'the end' stinger in Jinx's scratchy style, and you can even slow down the initial explosion frame-by-frame and see a pink line zipping away from it. I mean, c'mon.

I'm engaging in prophecy here, but as fans with more free time than me and a ravenous eye for secrets comb through this season frame by frame, I think we're going to see a lot of the bickering simmer down. Arcane's second season has been called rushed and poorly paced, and while I do think the pace is blistering, I think the issue is that there are so many damn details packed into every picosecond of this show that you might quite literally miss it if you blink.

And you know what? I think that's exactly in keeping with what Arcane is. To me, this show has always kept the tradition of 'show, don't tell' alive to an absurd degree—it's like a stress test for how much you can strain that particular art before audiences get fed up. This is a show with secrets scribbled into the margins, one where, as evidenced with Ekko's rune shenanigans, you literally won't get the full story on the first run through.

Season one might've done a slightly better job of tying its threads together in a digestible fashion, but I think we all forget that it managed to cover a heaping helping of ground in nine episodes. Episodes which have all had time to age like fine wine in the minds of their fans as they scrub through microexpressions, symbolism, and foreshadowing. This is a show that gets stuck in your teeth. You gotta spend some time picking it out, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

A screenshot was initially shared on X by eggbertith, who noticed some strangeness in Jinx's hand in a banner image. Suspicions of AI-generated content arose immediately and were effectively confirmed by Riot, which apparently wasn't any happier about it than the fans.

"Appreciate you bringing this to our attention," Riot brand manager Alex Shahmiri wrote on X (via GamesRadar). "We have a strict stance of no AI for anything relating to Arcane cause it's disrespectful to the incredible artists who worked on the show. This image was a mistake and has since been removed. TY again for calling it out."

By all appearances, this isn't Riot's whiff: It looks like someone at Netflix took an existing piece of Arcane art and extended it using Photoshop's "generative fill" tool (or something like it) to make it suitable for a banner.

This is the original image, which is still online:

And this is what came out of the machine—the resolution is lower, but the hand is very clearly mangled.

It's not really "AI-generated art," which I think mitigates the situation somewhat, but it is incredibly half-assed, and that's a problem in itself: Media companies who should know better seem to put so much faith into the magic of AI that nobody bothers to pay attention to the results to ensure it's not hacked-up garbage, which leaves us with—you guessed it—hacked up garbage. Either that, or there's a widely-held assumption that mass-media consumers won't notice or won't care that stuff like a promotional thumbnail for the most expensive animated series ever produced is made with the same attention to quality you'd expect from a 99-cent burger. Honestly, I'm not sure which is worse.

In fine "so you hate waffles" fashion, a handful of people pressed Shahmiri about his specific reference to Arcane, as though it somehow implied that Riot is fine with the use of generative AI in everything else it does. "I can only speak to what I work on," he replied to one such inquiry. "From a purely personal level, I'm not a fan of AI because what makes art so special is the human connection and feeling. Be it through art, music, or any creative medium—it's something I never want to see replaced by AI."

"Look, we knew this game represents so many different things to so many different people," Hess says (via IGN). "We knew that whatever we led out with, there was going to be strong opinions across the spectrum of what people were expecting, what they wanted it to be. Everybody brings their own special personal connection to the game. So we were ready for everything."

They are certainly spoilt for choice when it comes to getting creative inspiration from Minecraft, and I can sympathise with the problem of having too much choice. "We've taken an approach to ground it very firmly in what we all refer to as 'vanilla Minecraft,' like the unmodified Minecraft," Olafsson says. "The young character Henry enters the world and is kind of a creator and maker in the real world. And his character then represents the maker or the modder or the builder coming into this world. And as a result, we're going to see some really classic stuff, stuff that we want to see, some Beast Creepers, Endermen, and that kind of stuff. And then we're going to see some new stuff that Henry made."

At this point, I think that it's important to remember that those of us who grew up playing Minecraft during its initial boom are not necessarily the target audience of this film. Olafsson even says that some of the viewers "were not born when the first contracts and the first discussions [for this film] were had." So, I'm not expecting a mature, funny, and thoughtful interpretation of Minecraft, and I understand that it's probably just going to be a mid family-friendly film.

But it would be nice if A Minecraft Movie proved me wrong and turned out to be an alright watch. Apparently, the test screenings went really well, so that does give me a small glimmer of hope. "People are like, 'This is nothing like the trailer, this movie is awesome,'" Olafsson says. "I know people may go like, 'Wait, that's not in the game.' But anybody who's played Minecraft for a while has usually installed some sort of resource pack or mod or changed it in some way for themselves. And that's what this character is doing."

According to the film's director, Jared Hess (via IGN), Jack Black was "as method as it gets." Instead of sending dead spiders to his coworkers, Black decided to immerse himself in Minecraft at every spare moment.

"He was in his trailer anytime he had a break; he was just slaying it in the Overworld,” Hess says. "[The producer and Minecraft senior director Torfi Frans Olafsson] put together a special server just for the crew. Jack got obsessed with searching for lapis lazuli, as he calls it. I mean, every day, it was like, I'd pop in there to go over the scene in the morning, and he would be dressed as Steve playing the game. It was kind of a surreal thing to behold."

Lapis lazuli used to be classified as a rare ore pre-1.17’s Caves and Cliffs update, which changed the ore distribution. Now, the resource is classified as uncommon and can be found at levels -64 to 64, but is most easily found on layer -1. Jack, if you're reading this, try strip mining around there.

While I tend to like stockpiling iron, redstone, and netherite, lapis lazuli is useful for enchanting weapons, books, tools, and armour so it's definetly a great resource to hold onto. It can also be used to make blue dye and fireworks and change the sound under note blocks to make a bass drum noise. But Black isn't just fit for the role of Steve because he knows what ores to look out for.

"He's like an empty page you write your story on,” Frans Olafsson says. “But that was also an opportunity. So casting Jack Black as Steve, maybe you hadn't imagined Jack Black as Steve, but this is the Steve who is Jack Black, if you know what I mean. Because I'm Steve, and you're Steve, and Jared's Steve, and everybody has been Steve, and this one is the Jack Black Steve. For him, we felt that he should have the joy, curiosity, fun, and humor that we have seen in the Minecraft community over the years, like through YouTube videos and all of their creations.”

The official trailer for the upcoming Minecraft movie, creatively entitled A Minecraft Movie, has arrived, giving us a more detailed rundown of the story and a release date of April 4, 2025. It also continues to look very bad. But not as bad—take that for what it's worth.

The plot, as we've previously discussed, is essentially a reskinned Jumanji: Four misfits are pulled from their less-than-satisfying real-world lives into the Overworld, where they embark upon a quest with a local weirdo to save the realm from the forces of evil, discover the inner qualities that make them unique and beautiful, and are ultimately sent back home and given a second chance to break out of their shells and thrive.

Am I being cynical? Maybe, but I don't think it's entirely unfair. Because the film itself looks so cynical: The whole thing screams of design by committee, with that guy you like and that other guy who's a comfortable anchoring presence because he does the same thing in every role, and of course an origin story because heaven forbid we don't cram that in somewhere. Throw in some slapstick shenanigans and snarky asides leading into—I'm just guessing here, I haven't read the script or anything, but I'm pretty confident in staking this one out—forged bonds and a heroic arc in which everyone learns something about themselves and each other, and blammo, you've got the next big Hollywood hit—or at least a reliable moneymaker. Right?

Despite my misgivings, the reaction to this trailer seems to be much more positive than the response to the first. That's a low bar, yes—the first video currently wears more than 1.8 million dislikes, compared to just 730,000 likes—but there's also some genuine enthusiasm for some of the smaller details on display, like the reference to the "children yearn for the mines" meme and the use of music from the game.

None of which is any guarantee that A Minecraft Movie will be a good movie, but at least there's a small sense that the production team has an awareness of the game and culture surrounding it, and is injecting some aspect of that into the film. Coupled with the very on-the-nose "Minecraft trailer, take two" opening, it's pretty clear that Warner is going hard to turn things around after the catastrophe of the initial reveal.

To its credit, Warner has succeeded in elevating my own expectations: I am now open to the possibility that A Minecraft Movie won't be even worse than the Borderlands film. I still think it's going to be really bad, but a Rotten Tomatoes score in excess of 10% now seems doable. Hey, take what you can get.

A Minecraft Movie is set to arrive in theaters in North America on April 4, 2025, and will show up internationally two days earlier, on April 2. I am still hoping very much that we make Joshua Wolens watch it.

First things first: Yes indeed, a live-action Splinter Cell was in the works, to some extent. Don't feel bad if you either didn't know or had completely forgotten about it. The film was announced in 2012 with Tom Hardy in the lead as Sam Fisher, and not much else—a deal with a studio hadn't even been struck at that point—and that was pretty much the end of it.

Until today, that is, when producer Basil Iwanyk confirmed that it's not happening. "That movie would have been awesome," Iwanyk said. "Just couldn't get it right, script-wise, budget-wise. But it was going to be great. We had a million different versions of it, but it was going to be hardcore and awesome. That's one of the ones that got away, which is really sad."

It's unfortunate that an "awesome" and "great" film project couldn't overcome basic hurdles to make it across the finish line, but such is the way in the movie biz, I suppose. It also seems to be the way for Splinter Cell, which remains deeply snakebit: A remake of the original announced in 2021 remains MIA and a planned Splinter Cell VR game was cancelled in 2022. Netflix is moving ahead with a Splinter Cell animated series, which might seem like a decent consolation prize in lieu of the film, but Michael Ironside isn't in it so it might as well not even be happening.

Ironically, or however you want to describe it, the Watch Dogs film Ubisoft announced in 2013—after the announcement of the Splinter Cell movie, to be clear—is moving forward, so we're getting that instead. I really do not understand Hollywood.

During an earlier Q&A with press and influencers at Riot HQ last month—we'd just seen an early screening of Arcane season 2's first episode—Linke took a moment to specifically praise some of the "unsung heroes" from Fortiche who've worked on the show: the storyboard artists.

The imaginary cameras through which we view each animated scene are "only about clarity" for a lot of animators, Linke said, but "for Fortiche, it's about style"—using the camera to "hide things" from the viewer and to "make statements."

And it's storyboard artists, who compose shot-by-shot breakdowns of each scene, who are responsible for defining much of that camera work and storytelling before it's put into motion.

"You have to be a master of physics, camera work, and acting," to be a great storyboarder, Linke said. "No one will see their work, but they're masters."

(Other animation artists are arguably equally anonymous, because even if their work makes it to the screen it's not as if "Maxime did this" is scrawled directly across it, but I only say so because it's my nature to unhelpfully quibble over technicalities, not because I disagree that storyboarders deserve acknowledgement for their behind-the-scenes masterworks.)

Arcane's second season, which will be its final season, is dropping in three episode chunks throughout November—three more episodes air this weekend, and three more next.

Another animation-related tidbit that's come out of recent interviews regards a certain romantic scene in season 2: Linke said that animation director Barthelemy Maunoury told him that the team "wouldn't have been able to do it well" had it been written into the first season, because it wasn't as technically capable then. He didn't go into details, but I take it that it's hard to make lips behave like lips, no matter how talented the animation team.

Season 4 of Mythic Quest, starring Rob McElhenney, Charlotte Nicdao, David Hornsby, Ashly Burch, and Danny Pudi, will begin airing on Apple TV+ on January 29, continuing the cartoonish saga of the development of fictional MMORPG Raven's Banquet. Side Quest, a series that will focus on "the lives of employees, players, and fans" of the MMO, will start airing on March 26.

Side Quest will also star McElhenney—naturally the character he plays, Ian Grimm, is far too egotistical to not be involved in the spinoff—as well as feature actors Anna Konkle (PEN15), Derek Waters (Drunk History), William Stanford Davis (Abbott Elementary), and Bria Henderson (The Good Doctor).

While Mythic Quest will begin with a double dose of episodes, it will be aired weekly for the rest of the season. Side Quest, on the other hand, will drop all four episodes at once on March 26. So, take your time with the main series, but binge the spinoff? Works for me.

I'm admittedly a lapsed viewer of Mythic Quest, but I did enjoy the first couple seasons and it's hard not to love the cast and the subject matter. Not returning for season 4 is F. Murray Abraham, who was fired from the show due to sexual misconduct in 2023, according to Rolling Stone. The writers handled his departure from the show by having his character drive off a cliff. Fair enough!

[Minor spoilers ahead for Arcane season 2.]

It was pretty obvious that we were at the event horizon for a Caitlyn and Vi kiss after the first season of Arcane. The pair had spent most of their time together after the first act, and it was clear to most fans like myself that their relationship was only going to continue growing from that point onwards. Even still, I don't think I'm alone in asking why the hell it took so long to see these two characters finally respond to each other's feelings.

During a TechRadar interview, Arcane creators Christian Linke and Alex Yee Linke actually revealed that the choice to delay Vi and Caitlyn's kiss to season 2 was not just determined by the show's storytellers but that the animation studio Fortiche Production wasn't sure that it had the capability to do justice to such a beautiful scene back in the first season.

"Interesting tidbit: I actually spoke to Bart [Barthelemy Maunoury], our animation director, about the kiss last week," Christian Linke says. "He was asked the same question and he later told me if we'd written that last season, the animation team wouldn't have been able to do it well because they weren't technically capable yet.

"So, he thanked us for not doing that!" Linke says."He said, 'I don't think we would've done a good job. We couldn't have done it in season one', so it was interesting to hear that it wouldn't have been possible from a technical standpoint, even if we'd have wanted to do it."

Waiting until season 2 for such a crucial moment to take place between Vi and Caitlyn also made sense, narratively speaking. "They've both just lost something at the start of season 2," Linke says. "I think they're both very afraid of change, too, and they have that moment in episode 3 where they're still holding onto those things that have slipped away from them because they're starting to tread down this dark path [of seeking revenge on Jinx].

"In that moment, Vi is making a big commitment to Caitlyn by choosing her over Jinx," Yee adds. "And I think that's ultimately why Caitlyn takes the lead [in instigating the kiss]."

Despite that, its second season will be its last, and there's been some murmuring it's got something to do with the fact that it took over $250 million to make and market. That's a big, boggling number when written out like that, but it's actually less than it seems on first blush, which is something showrunners Christian Linke and Alex Yee told Gamesradar in an interview last week.

"That number does include marketing costs associated with the release," Linke says, "Which is not part of the budget of Arcane." That's not to say it wasn't pricey, though, as Linke adds: "Arcane is a really expensive animated series—which was the point. Our dream was to create an animated series that has the fidelity of what you see in animated movies."

It's at this point that Yee chimes in with a thought I'm discovering is more reasonable by the second: "If you compare us to animated movies, we are dirt cheap."

While $250 million might not seem "dirt cheap" unless you're Scrooge McDuck, when it comes to making anything at this scale and runtime, it's just above average—record-setting for an animated series, sure, but not even a chart topper when it comes to TV. For the sake of argument, let's assume that Arcane's marketing and distribution budget cost 50% of what it cost to make, which is typically what you'll spend on movies.

That thins the raw production heft of Arcane to around $166 million. It'll have around 18 episodes in total across its two seasons, which is $9.2 million per 40+ minute episode. While that's definitely up there, here are a few examples of recent big-hitter TV series that were reportedly more expensive to produce than Arcane:

• House of the Dragon, around $20 million per 50-70 minute episode.
• Stranger Things season 4, around $30 million per episode (though these tend to run about one and a half to two hours).
• Rings of Power, which apparently spent a whopping $60 million per 60-75 minute episode.

Let's compare Arcane to animated films as well, since that's the comparison Yee drew. Disney's Frozen 2 cost $150 million to produce one hour and 40 minutes of cinema-worthy animation. That's about 2.5 Arcane episodes in terms of length—which would cost Netflix $23 million before marketing costs. Not too shabby, especially considering I'd go to bat for Arcane and say it's an overall prettier piece of animation than Disney's crowd pleasers.

Even if we're less charitable, and thin the marketing cost out of that $250 million number to, say, 20% of the original budget, which'd be around $205 in total production costs, that's still only $11 million an episode. Costly, about as much as The Boys season 1's estimated budget, but not beyond all reason.

Lee also argues that, even though Arcane's cost is definitely a big swing, the product is worth the price: "You have voice actors, where we really tried to find great talent. You have artists who we wanted to have time to really be able to put in their touches and to have so many different disciplines in this really be able to do their best and show what they could do. In a lot of ways, the money is just a reflection of the amount of effort that was put into this."

And, you know what—they're right. Arcane's one of my favourite bits of animation, period, and it certainly looks appropriately pricey for the money that was poured into it. The budget is commendable and noteworthy, but only by comparison to other animated shows of its ilk—when it comes to TV and animated movies? "Dirt cheap" is actually kinda accurate.

Riot did not confirm the reported figure, but chief product officer Marc Merrill told Variety, "We’re more than comfortable with the spend it took to deliver a show that was worthy of our players’ time."

Arcane will comprise 18 episodes in total when its two-season run ends, meaning the overall spend works out to just shy of $14 million per episode. To put that into perspective, that's not much less than the per-episode cost of the final season of Game of Thrones; to use a show I find more relatable, you could make roughly seven episodes of Stargate SG-1 for what Riot spent to do one ep of Arcane. Only approximately 33 Hollywood films have cost more to produce, though Arcane is of course much longer—and considerably more acclaimed than many of the blockbusters on that list.

As for how Riot ended up spending so much money on what is, when you get down to it, a cartoon, Variety said the main issue was "inexperience" in the field, which led to profligate spending and frequent cost overruns. Riot also spent $60 million promoting the first season of Arcane, according to the report, which was far more than Netflix—where the series actually ran—spent on it.

The report goes deep into Riot's seemingly stalled aspirations to grow into an entertainment company beyond the boundaries of videogames. In 2020, for instance, Riot hired Avengers masterminds Anthony and Joe Russo to head up a film set in the League of Legends universe, but when it had second thoughts on the project it was forced to pay them $5 million to walk away from it. Former Netflix exec Shauna Spenley, who was hired in 2020 to head up Riot's new entertainment division, left the company in August, and the report says the division has been "essentially disbanded."

Despite the apparent shift in priorities, "[Riot's] ambitions in entertainment haven't changed," Merrill told Variety. "We were never intending to operate like a traditional studio with traditional timelines. What did change as we learned more was our expectations of ourselves: We realized that getting it right takes a lot more time than we’d originally expected, and so we recalibrated our development, output goals and teams with that in mind."

That change in thinking may be reflected in the two rounds of layoffs imposed at Riot earlier this one, which saw 530 people put out of work in January and another 27 in October. In an email sent to employees announcing the January cuts, Riot CEO Dylan Jadeja said the company has made "a number of big bets" since 2019 as it expanded into "a multi-game, multi-experience company," but admitted that "some of the significant investments we’ve made aren’t paying off the way we expected them to." The January layoffs also saw the closure of Riot Forge, the publishing initiative it launched in 2019 to make singleplayer League of Legends games like The Mageseeker and Ruined King with external studios.

So far, the front runners for the lead role are reportedly Sophie Turner, best known for her role as Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, and Lucy Boynton, who played Mary Austin in Bohemian Rhapsody (via Deadline). The series will also be helmed by Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Other actors may be in the running, and Deadline reports that Deadpool & Wolverine's Emma Corrin and Terminator: Dark Fate's Mackenzie Davis are also on the list. Apparently only Turner and Boynton are set to test for the part, however.

We've known about the upcoming Amazon Tomb Raider series since May, but it was first rumoured over a year ago: "With great IP, the possibilities are endless," Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann said. "The richness and depth of the fiction allows the Tomb Raider series from Prime Video and the videogame from Amazon Games to tell separate stories about Lara Croft's adventures. We're honored that Crystal Dynamics has entrusted Amazon with this iconic franchise, and we're looking forward to seeing where this collaboration takes us."

There have been loads of TV adaptations of videogames lately. After Netflix's Geeked Week, we got news of a new Cyberpunk series, a Splinter Cell animated series, and a Devil May Cry series, which will follow young Dante. I actually watched a couple of episodes of Netflix's animated Tomb Raider, and while it wasn't anything special, it was kind of fun.

However, I'm hoping that Amazon's live-action project will be a bit more exciting, especially since this has clearly been a bit of a passion project for executive producer Waller-Bridge, who hasn't shied away from talking about how much she loves Lara Croft: "Lara Croft means a lot to me, as she does to many, and I can't wait to go on this adventure, bats n' all."

Roy Lee, whose previous credits include It, Barbarian, Late Night With the Devil, and Strange Darling, is signed to head up the project, while John Thomas Petty, the writer on all the Outlast games, is also working on the screenplay. "Red Barrels has been pushing the limits of horror in games for more than a decade, and expanding the Outlast Universe into film is an incredible opportunity to dive deeper into the characters and killers we love," Petty said.

"As die-hard fans of horror across every medium, at Red Barrels we are great admirers of Roy Lee’s and Lionsgate’s work," Red Barrels co-founder and creative director David Chateauneuf said. "Horror movies old and new have had an undeniable impact on our franchise over the years, and to now have the opportunity to work on an Outlast film with true horror legends is a dream, or should I say, nightmare, come true."

The original Outlast is a pretty good horror game: Not quite up to the terrifying brilliance of the Amnesia games, perhaps but still providing "plenty of effective scares," as we said in our 2013 review. Outlast 2 offered similar gameplay while taking its themes "into extremely uncomfortable and surprising territory," and then The Outlast Trials shifted direction into one of the best co-op horror games to come along in a very long time.

It's good stuff across the board, then, but I do wonder, y'know, why? Horror/gore aficionados may disagree (vehemently, no doubt) but, painting with a broad brush here, Outlast is basically Saw—a point that more than a few people have made on various Reddit threads.

And who owns the rights to Saw? Lionsgate. So, I wonder, why not just make a new Saw movie? And the only answer I can come up with is, they can make a new Saw movie and an Outlast movie, and people who are into that sort of thing will likely go see both. Okay, yeah, I guess that would explain it.

First things first: There are actually numerous Oregon Trail videogames, going all the way back to the mid 1970s. It's a disparate lot, they do have one thing in common: Bad news.

Bad news

More bad news

Even more bad news

Guess what? The news, it is not good

And so it goes.

Having established that The Oregon Trail is not an especially upbeat take on pioneer life, it sounds like the movie won't necessarily hew too closely to that aspect of the source material. While everything is still in the very early stages, The Hollywood Reporter says the film will be an "action-comedy" with a bit of a musical bent "in the vein of Barbie." The screenplay is currently set to be written by The Lucas Brothers and Max Reisman, while Will Speck and Josh Gordon are on board to direct and produce.

This project is not to be confused with Organ Trail, which is in fact not based on the zombie game that's based on The Oregon Trail, but instead emerged from a simple typo.

Nor is there any connection to this Oregon Trail, which looks very true to the source material but is not a real film at all, just a bit of YouTube fun, although I would absolutely pay to see this.

To be honest, I'm unsure as to how this film—which, for the record, doesn't have any kind of release target at this point—will be based on The Oregon Trail videogame(s) specifically, rather than the infamous journey to the west itself, which has already been the subject of numerous film and television treatments. I suppose as long as someone dies of dysentery (or if they can at least work in a few fart jokes), you can say the job is done.

It's sort of the platonic ideal for anyone with a sufficiently advanced TTRPG game (and the accompanying brain worms) to imagine what their characters would look like rendered on the silver screen, but Critical Role's gone and done it twice. Fans have known that Mighty Nein, which adapts Critical Role's second campaign (which ran from 2018 to 2021 over the span of 141 episodes) has been in the works for some time now. Prime even put out a teaser for it back in July, which you can watch below.

Well, now we've got a status update, via a recent Polygon interview with Travis Willingham, Marisha Ray, and Liam O'Brien, all of whom are prolific videogame voice actors and the original cast members of the campaign being adapted.

Willingham, (voice of Grog Strongjaw, soon to be the voice of Fjord, and also CEO of the Critical Role company) told the site: "We have written all of Season 1. The storyboards are all being locked, if they haven't been already. So it's off to our overseas studio. We're getting animation tests back and seeing things come back in colour. We've designed all the characters. The magical spells and effects are being considered. We're talking about music, and how it's going to be different from Vox.

"So it's definitely more than halfway done, and I think everybody's going to be really thrilled with the way it's turning out."

Honestly, I've always thought that a Mighty Nein adaptation would be more suited to TV. Being chronically TTRPG-brained, I did in fact watch the entire thing almost episode-by-episode as it came out—and I always found the vicious fantasy politicking, dramatic twists, and more complex ethics to be more of a draw. Less gung-ho dragon slaying, more Game of Thrones with a surplus of terrible dads (except for Yeza Brenatto, my short king).

That's not to say that The Legend of Vox Machina has had a rough go of it—quite the opposite, it's getting a fourth season—but that OG campaign was developed off the back of a Pathfinder game the cast played at home. Because it was quite a few (but not all) of their first tries at the hobby, the Vox Machina crew is very classically trope-y. You've got your big dumb barbarian, you've got your feelings-focused (but still kickass) druid, you've got your edgy rogue, you've got your smutty bard—it works, don't get me wrong, but it's definitely playing the D&D hits.

The Mighty Nein, meanwhile, are a lot more complex. O'Brien's Caleb Widogast is a deeply troubled and haunted Wizard, Willingham's Fjord is a Texan-accented Warlock who keeps vomiting water, and Ray's Beau is a standoffish and severe monk with family problems, to name just a few. They're exactly the kind of characters a table makes once they've grown comfy with the rules and want to add a dash of spice to things.

Willingham notes that, for similar reasons, the campaign will delve deeper into its characters' pasts before they all get looped together. "It is not going to be the same tone as Vox Machina. In Vox, they start together. They're kind of a bunch of slap-dicks that are just making the best of their situation."

With the Mighty Nein, though, Willingham says they wanted to "back up even further, and start from what I think we would call a Session Zero perspective, which is meeting the characters individually, taking our time with how do they come together? and really letting people see the earliest parts of their journeys.

"Because as anyone that knows the Mighty Nein campaign would know, the characters don't even know if they're the good guys or the bad guys. That's something we're excited to explore." Ray adds, forebodingly: "Yeah, we did not start off as friends." I yearn for the heartache and the drama, so bring it on.

It's enjoyed a handful of twists from the source material, and while I'm mostly sold on all of them, there are a few moments I'm lamenting didn't get their moment in the sun. I won't get into everything now for fear of spoilers—besides, there's always room to work them back into the story, now that the company's announced it's just been greenlit for a fourth season.

"We have some amazing news to share," says Sam Riegel, player (and voice) of sensual maestro and bard Scanlan Shorthalt. "We've been picked up for a season four!"

I'm real excited—but also terrified in equal measure. Given the teaser at the end of Season 3 (spoilers from the original livestream, including who the big bad of Season 4's inevitably gonna be) it looks like we're going right into Vecna territory—which means one of D&D's biggest bads, so pervasive he made his way into Stranger Things (and Dead by Daylight, the lich's been busy), will be returning to the silver screen for a second time.

While Exandria is Matt Mercer's own homebrew setting, his take on Vecna's pretty recognisable to anyone familiar with D&D canon—big lich, scary powers, trying to ascend to godhood, lotta zombies. You know the score.

I won't get any further into the details, but for the uninitiated viewer, you sure are in for a ride. While Vox Machina's battle against the Chroma Conclave saw a few heart-wrenching changes, this next arc's got a hundred more knives to twist should the showrunners so choose.

"Show Amazon that you love us and we'll keep making more of these," says Marisha Ray, voice of the tempest (and, coincidentally, the druid Keyleth). Illustrious DM Matthew Mercer also chimed in on X with a victorious "SEASON 4, BABY!" a reaction I would probably have if my D&D campaign pulled in four whole seasons of animated television.

Season 4 doesn't have a release date just yet—but the wait might be a little longer than seasons 3 and 2, both of which were renewed way earlier in the production than this one. Being patient? I can certainly try.

The leaked trailer, which reportedly saw an unfinished version of several of these shorts, also happened to reveal the project's cast. That's now been confirmed in official channels, as per a New York Comic Con panel (via Variety). Here's the full roster:

• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Kevin Hart
• Keanu Reeves
• Temuera Morrison
• Ariana Greenblatt
• Heaven Hart
• Emily Swallow
• Gabriel Luna
• Ricky Whittle
• Patrick Schwarzenegger
• Merle Dandridge
• Claudia Doumit
• Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
• Clive Standen
• Laura Bailey
• Michael Beach

The list is chock-a-block, dare I say star-studded. Keanu Reeves, already a known videogame presence via Cyberpunk 2077, is making an appearance—and Kevin Hart apparently seems determined to grind his way into the gaming industry, not too traumatised by the Borderlands movie to give it another go. I'm not sure how I feel about the lack of actual voice actors (beyond Laura Bailey) but it sure is impressive.

Most fascinating is Arnold Schwarzenegger's appearance—we all know him as the Terminator, and while he's made some movie videogame appearances before (mostly movie tie-in games, which he was likely obligated via contract to do) his relationship with the medium's been turbulent, to say the least.

Granted, this was almost 20 years ago, but while Schwarzenegger was serving as California's governor in 2005, he attempted to sign into existence a bill that would stop minors being sold or rented violent videogames—though that bill was watered down by the time it came into effect. Rather than $1,000 fines for violators, stores simply had to signpost their violent games properly.

Anyway, one can presumably consider his attitude mellowed, given the satanic-panic style fretting over violent videogames corrupting the youth hasn't exactly manifested—Call of Duty lobbies notwithstanding. While the whole exercise of Secret Level seems a bit corporate and big-budget in nature, I'm genuinely excited to see exactly who Arnie's voicing, as well as that Concord episode, which I'm sure won't be awkward for anybody at Sony.

I'm hardly alone in that estimation, of course. It felt like the whole world was raving about the show when it aired back in April, and it's currently sitting pretty with a covetable 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. No wonder, then, that Amazon and Bethesda want to make hay while the sun shines: Filming for season 2 begins next month (via Screen Rant).

Fallout's second season was greenlit barely a week after the show dropped on Prime and, per a chat Screen Rant had with Leslie Uggams—who plays Vault 33's new Overseer Betty Pearson after Kyle MacLachlan goes missing—they're getting right into it. "We start [shooting in] November," she told Screen Rant. "I'm excited about it."

Which is a much faster turnaround than the first season got, naturally. That one took two years to start filming after it was officially announced all the way back in July 2020, but of course it's probably easier to get all your ducks in a row to shoot a TV series when you already have a load of props, a cast, and there isn't a series of pandemic lockdowns across the entire planet.

Anyway, don't get too optimistic about a release date. Sure, it's a fast turnaround on shooting, but we live in an era where shows seem to take year-long hiatuses (hiatii?) as a matter of course. Think of shows like House of the Dragon, which aired first in 2022, took a break in 2023, then came back with a strangely foreshortened series earlier this year (writers' strikes, admittedly, likely did not help that one in particular). Even Fallout's first season took two years to hit our screen after it began shooting in 2022.

So don't book your 2025 time off just yet, is all I'm saying. As for what Fallout season 2 will actually be about? Well, judging from the way the writers have been talking (and from the events at the end of the first season), it seems incredibly likely that New Vegas will put in some kind of appearance, which will give all of us New Vegas stans a great new opportunity to start crafting conspiracy theories about how Bethesda hates that game again. Plus, Uggams says her character has "some things up her sleeve," so we can expect more Vault 33 shenanigans. Apart from that? My forecast is rapidly changing conditions.

If you don't care about spoilers, though, let me catch you up to speed. The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated series based on a livestreamed campaign of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons that ran from 2015 to 2017 over the course of 115 episodes, going under the title Critical Role, which starred a handful of super prominent voice actors in gaming. It's still going today, on its third campaign, but the series is based on that 100+ episode debut.

In the TTRPG space, Critical Role is credited—pretty fairly—with causing a bit of a renaissance, easily on par with Stranger Things in terms of getting people into rolling dice. To put it in perspective, when the now-bigboy company asked for Kickstarter help to fund The Legend of Vox Machina, it broke $1 million in the first hour, then proceeded to rake in $11.3 million of funding total. They've got enough money to produce and distribute their own TTRPG systems: People like this thing.

Which means that the animated series' departures from the livestream story last week are very bloody brave—in the literal sense of the adjective. Two character deaths rocked the boat hard enough that water's getting in through the cracks, and I'm finding myself in the position of a sicko yelling "yes, yes!" through the window.

First up, Percival de Rolo—voiced by Taliesin Jaffe—has bit the bullet after Anna Ripley, who is supposed to get coup de grâce'd by a set of very pissed off adventurers (but doesn't), shoots him through the chest. The death itself isn't the interesting bit here, it's the permanency.

D&D 5e is generally pretty lax with resurrection rules, to the point where DM Matthew Mercer had to devise a homebrew resurrection ritual to keep character deaths meaningful back in 2015. The Legend of Vox Machina's in-universe rules are a lot less lax. Percy, who was originally resurrected not soon after Ripley killed him, is left dead as a doornail in a stone coffin. He gets a funeral scene and everything and, at the time I'm writing, is considered donezo by everyone involved.

His soul hasn't passed into the beyond—his toxic ex-demon, Orthax, eats the souls of gun victims, it's a whole thing—which means that his future resurrection is very likely. It does, however, change the tone of the entire rest of the season, as several beats from the livestream are now missing one white-haired goth nobleman.

Then there's Kashaw Vesh, a guest character from the livestream portrayed by Will Friedle, who gets turned to paste.

While Percy's death seemed like a brave, interesting departure from the source material, turning a pretty well-loved side character into a Red Dragon pancake is like stabbing a knife through it. Especially because I'm a lot less certain that dude's coming back—chosen oomfie of the goddess of death, Vax'ildan, watches him go into the Raven Queen's embrace. Which is the spiritual equivalent of taking a bow before backflipping into traffic, while on fire. It's not something you generally survive—Kashaw willingly went to that farm upstate.

The series hasn't been a stranger to narrative departures from its source material, obviously, but those changes have mostly been in the service of efficiency. After all, your average D&D session lasts around four hours, which is way too much runtime to condense into a show. Comparatively, these changes are huge—and as someone who sat down and watched all 115 episodes of the dang thing, bawling my eyes out live in 2017, I'm here for it.

These changes ensure that long-time fans like me aren't just sat here crossing off entries on a bingo card. I'd be gently entertained, but otherwise non-responsive, to the dramatic stakes of these final battles if that were the case. Now, Critical Role and the folks at Titmouse have made a statement that no-one is exactly safe—main cast members like Percy'll probably come back with an appropriate amount of gravitas, but side-characters? There's every chance they can get blown up for good.

As for the wider fan response, Matthew Mercer popped up on X with a tentative "So… how are we all doing this morning?" after the episodes dropped. I'm not going to go deep into quote tweets but suffice to say, it's not so good. I guess we'll just have to wait for a Critical Role videogame to make it to market so I can defend Kashaw Vesh with my own two gamer hands.

The showrunner and executive producer for the show, Rafe Judkins, along with executive producers Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus, have left the project (via Deadline). It's also reported that the trio had completed multiple scripts for the first season but that Sony and Amazon are now looking to go in a new creative direction, which includes hiring a new writers' room.

It doesn't seem like there was any bad blood between Sony, Amazon, and the trio, as one source told Deadline that the studios praised the group's writing. Judkins is still the showrunner on Amazon's Wheel of Time series, which was renewed for a third season back in '22, while also working with Sony to focus on new developments.

When we first heard about the show, we also found out that it would pretty much be a straight retelling of the story from God of War 2018: "When his beloved wife dies, Kratos sets off on a dangerous journey with his estranged son Atreus to spread her ashes from the highest peak—his wife's final wish." It's not exactly anything inspired, but God of War 2018 had a fantastic story, so it's certainly not a bad thing to stick to what you know will work. But now Amazon and Sony have announced that new showrunners will likely take the series in another creative direction there's no telling how the story may unfold.

It seems like videogame adaptations are all the rage right now. There was the atrocious Borderlands movie, which managed to set a new low for videogame movies, as well as an upcoming Minecraft movie, which honestly keeps looking worse the more I look at it—that blocky sheep haunts me. But on the other hand, there are some adaptations that I'm actually excited to see. Arcane Season 2 is getting closer and closer, and after watching the official trailer, it's hard not to get excited about it. There's also a couple of episodes I'm excited to see from Amazon's Secret Level series—the Warhammer 40k episode looks sick, and it'll be interesting to see how the Concord episode shapes up after its failed launch.

That's all via The Hollywood Reporter, which had the Cavill scoop, along with the announcement of co-star Daniel Quinn-Toye, a relatively unknown talent who understudied Spider-Man himself Tom Holland in theater productions.

We don't know squat about Thurber's vision for a live action Voltron movie, but if I had to guess from his previous work, I'd expect loads of quips matched only the number of buildings falling down around the main stars. This is Cavill's first time working with Thurber, who spent the last eight years directing action vehicles for Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, and Ryan Reynolds. Cavill's buttoned-up demeanor and resting grumpy face make him a different beast than Thurber's usual leading man. The Amazon pairing makes more sense, given Cavill's existing partnership with the company to get a Warhammer 40,000 cinematic universe up and running at some point.

Hollywood has gone full open season on reviving lesser-known nerdom with big television budgets, though recent live-action anime adaptations have been inconsistent. That Netflix Cowboy Bebop show was a travesty, but the One Piece show was better. Speaking of Netflix, it was actually the home of the most recent Voltron revival, Voltron: Legendary Defender, an animated show that ran for three seasons between 2016 and 2018. That show was surprisingly great. I have less faith in this movie.

The Voltron movie, which has no release date yet, is set to film this fall in Australia. 

Not just that, obviously, but generally speaking a perspective on the legendary Japanese crime syndicate that doesn't take itself entirely seriously. Violent crime and all the attendant unpleasantness, yes, but also karaoke, trivia games, good times with good buds, and all-around weirdness, much of it relatively light-hearted.

The live-action Like a Dragon: Yakuza series coming to Prime does not look light-hearted. Weird? Sure, a little, but very darkly so. Nobody in this video seems like they'd be inclined to do sambuca shots and belt out their favorite Meat Loaf track in front of a crowd of strangers.

Like a Dragon: Yakuza unfolds across two "intersecting timelines," 1995 and 2005 and promises a descent into "the dark underworld of the yakuza, exploring the universal theme of family not only through bloodline but also through ties between yakuza bosses and their underlings, orphans and their caretakers, as well as mentors and students."

Here's the back-of-box blurb: "In 1995, eager to escape their restrictive lives, Kiryu and his friends, Nishiki, Yumi, and Miho plan a heist at a local arcade. However, the arcade is under the control of the Dojima Family, a powerful yakuza organization that rules Kamurocho. They dive into the yakuza-controlled underworld of 1995 Kamurocho. Meanwhile, in 2005, Kiryu is set to be released from prison. He learns from Detective Date that his friends are in danger and decides to return to Kamurocho to protect them. However, their friendship has deteriorated, as tensions between the Tojo Clan and the Omi Alliance are at a boiling point."

Amidst all that drama, the Demon of Shinjuku is slicing people up, some guy gets a close-up face full of automatic gunfire, at least one car drops from the sky, and there's absolutely no reference to Guitar Hero-style rhythm games anywhere. 

I suppose it makes sense. A live-action Yakuza series that goes all-in on Like a Dragon as we know the game might be too baffling for mainstream audiences, but a dark, stylish retelling of Yakuza 1? That could fly. It's a more conventional approach than that of the highly regarded Fallout live-action series, also on Prime, which successfully balances the grit and humor of the Fallout games, but it's also more conventional subject matter, at least to those completely unfamiliar with the games, and so playing it straight be the right way to go.

Speaking strictly for myself, though, I'd be a lot more inclined to watch a series that rolled like this:

Like a Dragon: Yakuza is set to debut on October 24, and will be available exclusively on Prime.

The first official teaser for HBO's The Last of Us season 2 is here, giving us a melancholy look at life years after the events of the first season.

I won't spoil anything for you: If you're already familiar with The Last of Us Part 2 then you'll have a pretty good idea of what's coming, and if not, Wikipedia can help if you just can't wait to find out. Suffice it to say that life in the wake of the Cordyceps pandemic has returned to a kind of normalcy, or at least stability, although just like the real world, some days are better than others. And those less-better days, boy, they are really not good.

Joel is clearly struggling (you know what you did) and his relationship with Ellie is equally strained—that's drama, baby—but the trailer also pointedly features plenty of rampaging zombies, gunfire, implied torture, and kinetic bad news all around. I have to guess the goal is to address up-front the common complaint that the first season, while narratively brilliant, was a little lacking in the action department.

It also seems our guess that Catherine O'Hara's "undisclosed role" being that of a therapist of some sort was correct: The timer at the start of the trailer is a dead giveaway that this isn't just idle chit-chat over a couple of room-temperature Lone Stars.

It's worth noting for the record that familiarity with The Last of Us Part 2 does not guarantee spot-on insights into The Last of Us season 2. Showrunner Craig Mazin said in 2023 that HBO's take on the game will be different where and when it needs to be, sometimes "radically" so—although I very much doubt that will have much impact on, y'know, the whole Joel business. (No spoilers! I'm just saying.)

A previously released teaser (which has since been taken down) said The Last of Us season 2 would be out sometime in 2024-25, but the first part of that number is now off the table. A precise release date hasn't been announced, but today's trailer confirmed that it won't be out until sometime in 2025.

Original story: The internet's collective head is on a swivel these days for even the slightest whiff of AI intervention in art, and for good reason: Apparently not even big-budget productions from Marvel are immune to dodgy-looking art seeing official use, as evidenced by a new poster for the Thunderbolts that at first glance appears to feature a character with six fingers on one hand. 

Yep, look there on the bottom left: sure looks like a dude with six fingers, and as Gamespot points out, that character (Bob) has five fingers in a teaser for the film.

Assuming Marvel isn't teasing a third act twist where this one particular Thunderbolt sprouts a new digit, the poster shared by the official Marvel Twitter and Instagram accounts today appears altered from its intended appearance. Interestingly, that version is the only version with the error. A more narrow version of the poster that cuts off before the apparent sixth finger appeared in Marvel's official blog post alongside the new teaser.

As weird as the bonus finger is, it does seem to be some sort of unintended optical illusion, possibly down to some re-sizing around the digits. A possible explanation is that someone's done a dodgy Photoshop while resizing the standard poster for other formats, but it seems unlikely this is the work of generative AI.

The posters with the possible phantom finger remain online at the time of writing with no comment from Marvel as of yet. You can watch the teaser trailer for Thunderbolts* below (wow, that asterisk is actually part of the title).

The Splinter Cell remake we were promised three years ago is still nowhere to be seen, but Sam Fisher is making a comeback of sorts on Netflix, in a new animated series called Deathwatch.

There's not much to see, really. Sam Fisher, now rocking a grandfatherly beard, is sinking in the drink, although he seems remarkably unfussed by the situation. The flashback to the funeral of his old pal Doug Shetland, though, suggests he may be subconsciously grappling with regret, for reasons I will not spoil here.

Despite the dearth of information in the trailer, there is one little bit of it I take issue with:

Because no. No, he's not. Liev Schreiber is a great actor, seems like a cool guy, but Michael Ironside is Sam Fisher.

The gravel. The gravitas. Ironside is still so perfect, which makes Schreiber's casting all the stranger. This isn't one of those situations where the game character's actor primarily does videogame work, and therefore wouldn't fit in an animated project. Ironside was a Hollywood veteran long before becoming Sam Fisher, playing memorable roles in films like Top Gun, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers.

And, for the record, Michael Ironside is still alive and still active. You might recall that he had to step away from acting for a time while battling cancer, which is why he couldn't return for 2013's Splinter Cell Blacklist, but he did reprise the role in Ghost Recon Wildlands later. 

Which leads me to wonder, why did Ubisoft not opt to bring him back for Deathwatch? I suppose Schreiber might be more recognizable to mainstream audiences, but he's not exactly a household name; neither is Ironside, fair enough (although a small but insistent part of me wants to argue that yes he is), but I feel like his presence would at least fire up the long-suffering Splinter Cell fan base, which would in itself be an attention-getting win for the series.

It's possible I'm being weird about this, but it also makes me worry that Ironside will also be excluded from the Splinter Cell remake, assuming it ever actually happens. That would be a much more serious transgression. For now, I'm calming myself by assuming that Ironside didn't do the Netflix series because he's too busy working on the next game. That makes sense, right?

Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is being co-directed by Guillaume Dousse and Félicien Colmet-Daage, while Derek Kolstad, who wrote the original John Wick, is serving as head writer and co-executive producer, along with Helene Juguet, Hugo Revon and Gerard Guillemot. A release date hasn't been announced, but it's "coming soon."

I've reached out to Netflix and Ubisoft to ask about this egregious Ironside oversight, and will update if I receive a reply.

While we've known CD Projekt's been keen to do another round of heart-wrenching stories in the setting, there's a difference between "expect to see more for sure" and, well, knowing we're getting more stuff very soon. You can watch the teaser below, though it's one of those frustrating trailer-for-a-trailers that doesn't reveal much. You'll get the same amount of information drawing a big N on some yellow paper with a red marker and staring at it for 30 seconds.

I can, however, extrapolate a few things about it through the sheer power of common sense and remembering stuff. Firstly, it's almost definitely not going to be more Edgerunners—I'm not going to spoil the ending of that particular anime, but it's a told story. Case closed, open and shut.

Despite it having a special place in my heart—existential crises aside—I'm honestly glad that's the case. I prefer it when a story is allowed to, you know, end, rather than being wrung for all of its narrative juices.

Secondly, this thing probably isn't being produced by Studio Trigger. In the announcement tweet, Netflix says it's a joint venture between Netflix Animation and CD Projekt Red and, to be honest, if Trigger was involved, I think they probably would've let fans know to generate hype.

That's not necessarily a disappointment, though. Netflix Animation Studios typically partners with other studios for its series, and it's got a few wins under its belt so far. For example, it worked with Titmouse for The Midnight Gospel, Sketchshark Productions for Centaurworld, and Blue Spirit for Blue Eye Samurai. The latter of which I'll recommend to you up and down, because it freaking rules.

In other words, how good this thing's gonna look depends entirely on who Netflix snags for it. Though, given the popularity of Edgerunners, I don't think Netflix is going to do this on a shoestring budget. As for when we'll get more details? "Soon." I just cashed in my last free prophecy with the oracles of Delphi, so I think we're all just going to sit tight for now.

A rapid-fire history lesson for those uninitiated: Netflix's Magic: The Gathering was, in its 2019 concept, meant to be a landmark show headed up by the Russo brothers, architects of the MCU. It promised to "cross the genres of suspenseful thriller, horror, and drama". But the Russos left in 2021 over "creative differences".

The new lead voice actor of the show, Brandon Routh, then said in an interview this year that the series was no longer happening, and that its cancellation was "old news".

Well, here's some new news—Netflix's Magic: The Gathering is back on the menu, as announced during an avalanche of trailers via the streaming service's Geek Week: "It’s happening! Netflix’s MAGIC: THE GATHERING animated series is now in production from showrunner Terry Matalas in partnership with Hasbro Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast."

A further press release is light on the details, featuring some purple prose from the new showrunner, known most recently for heading up Star Trek: Picard: "Magic is the ultimate storytelling sandbox, brimming with iconic, complex characters, extraordinary mind-bending powers, and portals to every genre imaginable."

However, we can gather a decent batch of information from the teaser image. Namely, that the series has now pinballed back to being about Chandra, judging by the name drop of "Pyromancer’s Goggles" and, well, the lady holding an open flame in the palm of her hand.

I say pinballed because, back in 2019, the Russo Brothers said to "get excited" if you "love Jace and Chandra" when speaking with Polygon. The show would later pivot to focus on Gideon Jura (voiced by Routh). Now it's about Chandra again and, it seems, Ajani Goldmane—a rather large lion man who I'm sure the internet will be perfectly normal about. That is, assuming this thing does come out. Lining this up against Routh's statement, we can probably guess the show's not about Mr. Jura and his impractical whip gauntlet anymore.

I'm at least slightly optimistic about the whole thing, though fate has a cruel sense of humour, and considering this show's been through a long and arduous ordeal I won't be shocked if we're entering another drought of details. Re-announcing it now, though, at least shows that Netflix is reasonably certain it'll actually happen, fingers crossed.

The second season of animated League of Legends series Arcane will be its last, and Netflix apparently wants us to savor it. Rather than releasing the episodes all at once, the finale will be delivered in three "acts" that'll drop November 9, November 16, and November 23.

It isn't clear exactly what the nature of these three acts is, though a few episodes per act is a decent guess. All Netflix has to say is that more information on the acts is "to be announced." There's a new trailer embedded above, though, and during Netflix's Geeked Week festivities today, actors Hailee Steinfeld (Vi) and Ella Purnell (Jinx) also announced a new Arcane after show, called Afterglow. 

Although this'll be the end of Arcane, it won't be the end of League of Legends animated spin-offs.

"Arcane is just the beginning of our larger storytelling journey and partnership with the wonderful animation studio that is Fortiche," said Arcane co-creator Christian Linke a few months ago. "From the very beginning, since we started working on this project, we had a very specific ending in mind, which means the story of Arcane wraps up with this second season. But Arcane is just the first of many stories we want to tell in Runeterra."

We liked Arcane's first season quite a lot, calling it "one of the best TV series of the year" in our review back in 2022.

Just when you thought Netflix's Geeked Week couldn't possibly get any more geeky, we've finally got a proper trailer for the long-in-development Devil May Cry anime from Capcom and producer Adi Shankar. Shankar previously had some involvement with Castlevania, a show I'm on record as being extremely into, but I don't think DMC is making a great first impression.

Granted I've only got a scant minute to go on here, but I feel like Netflix's adaptation of Devil May Cry doesn't look cool enough—or, alternatively, stupid enough—to suit my fancy. Devil May Cry contains multitudes, fluctuating from moody gothic castles and otherworldly ruins to Dante's bachelor pad where he slays demons while simultaneously playing pool. In DMC5 he does a Michael Jackson dance while wearing a magic cowboy hat.

I'm not going to declare either of those extremes is the "real" Devil May Cry, but nothing in this brief reveal trailer reminds me of how genuinely creepy-moody the old games could feel or how funny it could actually be. All we've got here is Dante saying "jackpot!" and then shooting a bullet out of his gun with the word jackpot written on it to kill some random demon in an alley.

That does happen to be a recurring line in the series, but I dunno, it feels like this is an unearned jackpot to me. I want to see Dante beat a big nasty boss before trotting that one out. Hopefully this is not just a show full of empty references to the Devil May Cry games minus all their creativity.

There's a lot of generic action anime stuff in the trailer and a mix of demons with modern-day military, none of which makes me feel like this Devil May Cry adaptation is going to have a particularly strong identity as pure over-the-top, heart-on-its-sleeve goofery, or more moody immortal warrior adventuring. Maybe as soon as Vergil shows up it'll all fall into place, though. At least we finally know when it's coming out: April 2025.

Netflix also confirmed that we'll be getting a follow-up to a fan favorite episode from Season 6: USS Callister, which featured a deeply-unsettling performance from Jesse Plemons as a disgruntled game dev employee who acted through his psychosexual frustrations by commanding his simulated coworkers as the captain of an elaborate Star Trek VR roleplay. Netflix hasn't given any details on what the sequel episode will entail, but I'm sure it'll be unpleasant. But, you know, in a good way. Can't wait!

Revealed via a cryptic teaser that you can watch on Netflix's Tudum site—itself a callback to Black Mirror's Bandersnatch—the lead cast includes more notable names like Rashida Jones from The Office and Parks and Rec, Tracee Ellis Ross from Black-ish, The IT Crowd's Chris O'Dowd, and more. Here's the full lead cast list: 

• Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians, Jackpot)
• Milanka Brooks (Black Mirror, The Windsors)
• Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who, Criminal Record)
• Emma Corrin (The Crown, Deadpool & Wolverine)
• Patsy Ferran (Jamestown, Firebrand)
• Paul Giamatti (Billions, The Holdovers)
• Lewis Gribben (Blade Runner 2099, Somewhere Boy)
• Osy Ikhile (In the Heart of the Sea, Citadel)
• Rashida Jones (The Office, Parks and Rec)
• Siena Kelly (Adult Material, Domino Day)
• Billy Magnussen (Into the Woods, Road House)
• Rosy McEwen (The Alienist, Blue Jean)
• Cristin Milioti (How I Met Your Mother, The Penguin)
• Chris O’Dowd (The IT Crowd, Bridesmaids)
• Issa Rae (Barbie, Insecure)
• Paul G. Raymond (Wonka, Horrible Histories)
• Tracee Ellis Ross (Black-ish, Girlfriends)
• Jimmi Simpson (Westworld, House of Cards)
• Harriet Walter (Silo, Succession)

As for what the other episodes might feature, we can only guess. Who knows—maybe we'll see an echo of showrunner Charlie Brooker's prediction that Balatro on mobile will destroy global productivity.

Honestly? Figuring out just what the deal is with Momoa's character makes me vaguely tempted to go see the film, but at least one co-star might not share my feelings. In a chat with JasonTheWeen, YouTuber Rachell 'Valkyrae' Hofstetter—who boasts a cameo in the upcoming flick—said her experience working with the star was less than stellar.

Asked about her "worst celebrity or streamer experience," Valkyrae immediately leapt to her Minecraft cameo. "I would have to say Jason Momoa," she answered. "I just saw him, like, mistreat some of the crew and it was pretty disappointing."

According to Valkyrae, Momoa got "really mad" at the crew after "a very emotional scene, so maybe he was still in character." She says he was "really mad at them that they weren't doing something right, like setting up the shot and stuff. He was just angry, like really mad and, like, yelling.

"So I was like, man, this is not a good work environment. Like, I would not be happy working under these conditions… so yeah, I would probably have to say that was probably the worst, like, celebrity thing I've seen."

Which is certainly disappointing to hear. Still, it's worth noting that stories like these should be taken with a grain of salt. It could be that Valkyrae's time on-set for her cameo coincided with a bad time for Momoa, or maybe she's right and the emotional energy of a scene (which is a slightly baffling sentence to write about a Minecraft film) had gotten the better of him. 

Other actors, like Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke, have spoken positively about the experience of working with Momoa. That doesn't excuse bad behaviour, of course—it'd be horrible to be one of the crew caught up regardless of anyone else's prior experience—but it does mean we maybe shouldn't be quick to generalise. 

It's directed by Mathieu Turi and stars Sophie Wilde and Tom Blyth, with Markella Kavenagh, who played Nori Brandyfoot the harfoot hobbit in Rings of Power, recently joining the cast (via Deadline). Wilde and Kavenagh are Australians, but the odds of them both actually playing Australian characters seems pretty low given how often Australians double for English or Americans in big-budget movies.

As we said back when it was confirmed that a movie based on Watch Dogs was happening, we're not sure we want one. The Watch Dogs games don't exactly have the worldbuilding of the Assassin's Creed series, and it's hard to see what the license offers that you couldn't do in a generic hacker movie without it. 

That said, the Assassin's Creed movie was a bit of a dud, and when Ubisoft gave Werewolves Within to director Josh Ruben and seemingly said, "Just make a werewolf movie, we don't care if it has anything to do with the videogame," the results were actually great? (For real, if you like the idea of a daft horror-comedy werewolf movie and you've already seen Ginger Snaps, you should totally watch Werewolves Within.)

Look, in some contexts $31 million is a lot of money. If I had $31 million, for instance, someone else would be writing this story. But in the context of a Hollywood film starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Jamie Lee Curtis? That's something else entirely. 

Variety estimates the Borderlands flick had a production budget of roughly $115 million, and then cost another $30 million to promote and distribute. If accurate (and Variety is usually pretty good about these things) that means Borderlands earned just enough in theaters to cover its marketing budget.

So that's bad, yeah, but just how bad is it? With help from Google and The Numbers' movie comparison feature, I can tell you this: It's really bad. 

I present to you...

An Incomplete List of Shitty Videogame Movies That Made More Money Than Borderlands

(in no particular order)

• Warcraft ($439 million)
• Max Payne ($88 million)
• Doom ($59 million)
• Street Fighter ($99 million)
• Assassin's Creed ($241 million)
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time ($336 million)
• Hitman ($99 million)
• Mortal Kombat (but Mortal Kombat is actually good) ($122 million)
• Need for Speed ($194 million)
• Five Nights at Freddy's ($297 million)
• Uncharted ($401 million)

One big-budget, big(ish)-cast Hollywood film Borderlands managed to beat, which I bring up only because I paid good money to see it in theaters and I'm still sore about the whole thing, is Wing Commander, an utterly execrable celluloid waste of time and effort that bumbled to $11.5 million globally. Frankly I'm surprised it did that well.

There is some small solace for Borderlands amidst all this wailing and gnashing of box office receipts: It at least handily beat anything ever done by Uwe Boll, the infamously bad director of infamously bad videogame films who dunked on the film in August. Boll's House of the Dead, apparently his biggest success, earned just $14 million globally at the box office; on the other hand, its production budget was reportedly just $7 million. Perhaps a better example is his later flick, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, which somehow starred Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski, Ron Perlman, John Rhys-Davies, Claire Forlani, Matthew Lilard, Ray Liotta, and Burt Freakin' Reynolds, and pulled in just about the same amount of money at the box office as House of the Dead on a $60 million production. Win some, lose some.

In any event, our long national nightmare is over, and there's still a chance that Borderlands will recoup at least some of its budget on direct-to-home streaming services, which it was unceremoniously relegated to just three weeks after its theatrical debut. Enough to turn it into a money-maker? Well, no, but sometimes "slightly less awful than it could've been" is the best you're going to do.

At the time, it seemed like a no-brainer. As with League of Legends, Magic: The Gathering has a wealth of lore to draw on for its own yarns—it was even headed up by the Russo brothers of Marvel acclaim. Well, at least until 2021, where they left over "creative differences". Ah, that old chestnut.

Well, it's probably been binned, like so many card pack wrappers. That's according to one of the voice actors on the project—Brandon Routh, while speaking to Collider about sci-fi horror Ick, said that the series has been dead for a while now. And despite the fact that nobody at Netflix apparently thought to tell anybody about it, it's "old news." Here's the full quote:

"I'm not sure. I did do a voice for it. As far as I understand, nobody's put out a press release about it, but apparently it's not happening. That's kind of old news. I'm not sure why it's surfacing again."

Routh was set to voice Gideon Jura, a planeswalker and lawful good paladin type with a bend towards white mana—he also uses something called a sural, which is an armguard outfitted with ill-advised, OSHA-violating steel whips. Presumably upsetting for anyone to animate, though I'm sure that's not the primary reason the project was apparently cancelled.

Speaking of reasons, given the relative and all-consuming silence around the series, there's not much else to tell—it was, as per the original announcement, meant to "cross the genres of suspenseful thriller, horror, and drama". What that actually means we'll likely never know.

Not to give a glimmer of hope where it's undue—however, Routh is just one voice actor on the project, so there's still a dangling asterisk of Damocles swinging over the whole thing. It's entirely possible that a version of the script was scrapped, which is only really a sign that the series is going through some form of creative development hell.

Given the complete radio silence—and Netflix's increasingly cancel-happy attitude towards its shows, I wouldn't hold my breath. I'm in the process of reaching out to Wizards of the Coast and Netflix for a comment, and I'll update this article if I receive a response.

One man watching on from the sidelines with amusement and interest is Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft. Notch first released Minecraft in 2009, and oversaw its early years of development before, in 2014, selling the game and Mojang Studios to Microsoft in a deal worth $2.5 billion.

"Ok I'm in," says Notch of the trailer. "Wow this is a weird feeling." The programmer went on to call it "pretty surreal" seeing his old project becoming a Hollywood movie, and thinks it's "very cool they got Jack Black."

As for the trailer itself: "For a movie about a game with literally zero plot, it looks surprisingly fun," says Notch. "I laughed... I think twice. Yes, the sheep got me." One user opines that it just looks like an advert for the game starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa. "Well duh," replies Notch.

"I'm all for the spectacle" says Notch, discussing his feelings on Minecraft becoming a movie. "I probably would've even agreed to Uwe Boll making it. I don't have the same relationship to the game as the players do, for me it's more about seeing new weird takes on ideas that sometimes were just spur-of-the-moment things (like the creeper!)"

Speaking of the creeper, the furry style of it in the movie has not gone down well with some. But Notch says he's "Sort of used to it because of the plushies, so it works. In my original headcanon, they have more like a pile-of-leaf-like texture. Rustling, you know. But like I said, the plushies kinda rewired my brain, so furry's fine."

Reactions to the trailer have not been universally positive, shall we say, and Minecraft fan Kieran tells Notch "it looks absolutely horrible and nothing like the game you created." Notch says "that's kinda why I'm into it. But I get it's probably different for people who played the game instead of making it."

There are a few complaints about how the trailer and Jack Black represent Steve. "That just makes it funnier to me," says Notch, "but I have a different perspective than the people who actually played Minecraft instead of just worked on it." Oddly enough, someone asks if Jack Black was any kind of inspiration for Steve: "No, it was mostly inspired by a Quake 1 skin," says Notch. "No idea why."

The internet being the internet, soon enough someone stomps in to decry the characters as some "serious woke bullshit." Notch says he doesn't care what direction new characters go in: "Save that for when they're pushing it on existing lore. Who cares what the makeup is in a new story." Elsewhere he adds "I'm hoping for a lot of Jack Black over-acting. The plot can be whatever really, since I never really got to have that personal experience of playing the game."

Finally, Joey asks the question all Minecrafters want answered: "Okay, but do you think Herobrine's gonna show up in the post credits scene to kick off the MCU??"

"Haha," says Notch, "oh wow." Someone else speculates in the replies that the ultimate Easter egg would be a Notch cameo as Herobrine. Alas: "no guest appearance," says the man himself.

"Other than it being based on work I did ten years ago, I'm not connected to [the film] in any way," says Notch. "And, to me personally, that's fun, in a sort of trippy nostalgia way. Also I was expecting way worse."

Words to live by. Notch is currently working on a game called Levers and Chests, which doesn't have a release date. "I'll try to get something out as it's fun (or at least interesting) to play," says Notch. The Minecraft movie is due to release on 4 April, 2025.