“Earlier today, Gilbert Gottfried’s family announced in a statement that the iconic comedian with a penchant for filthy jokes and a screeching voice had died ‘after a long illness at the age of 67. Naturally, other famous people and members of the comedy community have been paying their respects to Gottfried, reminiscing about their favorite comedy bits and noting—as Kathy Griffin did—that he would’ve been the first to make a dark joke about his death....

Loki Episode 6 If you thought Marvel’s Disney+ shows were done with Contact homages after Monica Rambeau’s transformation sequence in WandaVision, you thought wrong. The Loki season finale, “For All Time. Always.” opened with another one. We heard iconic dialogue from other MCU films, including Vision’s “What is grief, if not love persevering?” – which went from a heartbreaking utterance to an instant meme earlier this year – as we pulled out from Earth and its blistering sun and outward toward the Citadel at the End of Time where He Who Remains aka Very Old Kang resides, but not before we were joined by the likes of Neil Armstrong, Greta Thunberg, and Nelson Mandela....

The little guy appears around the 35-second mark and he immediately joins the canon of Marvel’s greatest characters. Does he have a name? Not yet. Does he have a purpose? Unclear. Is he a cutie? You better believe it, bud. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has always operated under the mantra of giving people what they want. For the first decade of its existence that meant introducing dozens of iconic Marvel comic characters and having them crossover in one another’s movies, creating an exciting and comprehensive cinematic universe....

Or does it? It’s true that the movie takes some time to wrap up the story after the climactic showdown at Mount Doom (with Frodo, Sam, and Gollum) and at the Black Gate (with nearly everyone else). But we’d argue that as the culmination of more than nine hours of story-telling, the audience needs that. We need time to say goodbye to these beloved characters; we need to see the full conclusions to their stories; and we need the film to give us a sense of closure....

Today in Hall H, roughly 6,500 fans were treated to 90 revealing minutes of The Rings of Power‘s massive SDCC panel. Late Show host and Tolkien super fan Stephen Colbert served as master of ceremonies as showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay and 21 members of the show’s ensemble cast discussed the new series, set to premiere on Sept. 2, 2022. There were plenty of tidbits dropped, sneak peeks revealed, and even the presence of the show’s composer Bear McCreary, who provided the audience with an orchestral performance of the show’s score....

Watch the Eternals trailer here if you haven’t already…then we’ll get to talking about who all these cool new characters are! And here’s the official synopsis, courtesy of Marvel Studios: So who are all these cool new characters joining the MCU? We’ve got a breakdown for you here. Richard Madden as Ikaris Eternals is going to give us a veritable Game of Thrones reunion with Richard Madden as Ikaris, the most famous member of the Eternals....

Yet, there are times when Midnight Suns doesn’t even feel like a 2022 game. It feels like a game from a bygone era in ways that often infuriated and delighted me in equal measure. That’s the thing about Midnight Suns. It’s the kind of game that makes us confront the current state of gaming, what we’ve lost along the way, and how certain innovations and improvements have become irreplaceable standards that just might be more valuable than we’d sometimes like to believe....

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales ends in notably epic fashion considering the deeply personal story at its heart. Most of the game focuses on the conflict between Miles Morales and his best friend Phin Mason, whom he discovers is the villain known as the Tinkerer, the leader of a terrorist group known as the Undeground that has been waging war against the shady Roxxon Energy corporation on New York’s City streets....

Wandavision has arrived, and with it, a whole slew of new Marvel characters join the MCU. Probably the most interesting, and the one with the most implications for the story of the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is Wanda and Vizh’s neighbor, Agnes (Kathryn Hahn). The strange couple’s next door neighbor is actually Agatha Harkness, and her presence here bodes ill for Wanda’s mental health. Harkness has a somewhat complicated history [editor’s note: she’s old enough to remember Atlantis sinking, go on with “complicated”], par for the course for anyone mentoring a reality manipulator....

WandaVision episode 4 ditches the sitcom format in favor of something that gives us a much clearer picture of what’s happening in the “real” MCU. Primarily functioning as a Monica Rambeau origin story, and one that gives us a better look at the inner working of SWORD (and puts FBI Agent Jimmy Woo front and center!), this week’s WandaVision also answers some big questions about what’s going on in Westview....

Granted, the Mass Effect franchise sometimes struggled to achieve that lofty goal, but many of the best moments in Mass Effect history come down to a tough choice that leaves you staring at the screen wondering what to do. In many cases, there is indeed no “right” decision. The trouble comes when you try to look far enough ahead to see all the possible angles and decide which decision is the right one for you....

“I ran into my master out on the streets of New York a few years after I graduated,” Diallo explains now, referring to how faculty who live in the residential dormitories with Yale undergraduates are called ‘masters’ of their charges. “And I greeted him the way I always had,” Diallo continues, “which starts with the title ‘Master.’ And in the streets of New York City that’s a weird thing to call an older white man, and it became immediately clear to me that I had unknowingly taken on this very, very strange dynamic, this kind of bizarre title and relationship to a person....

The promotion is, on paper, rather simple. Various McDonald’s stores have recently started serving Happy Meals in special Pikachu containers. The container is cute enough, but the real prize is the pack of Pokémon TCG cards located inside. Each pack contains four of 50 cards (which includes base cards and their “holographic” variants) that feature starter Pokémon from various generations. The cards are specially marked and feature some other (relatively minor) differences, but for the most part, they resemble the real deal....

“There’s two bits of imagery that are used and used again,” Garland says about recurring stone figures in Men. “One is called the Green Man and one is called Sheela na gig, and they’re bits of imagery you find in many churches but they predate medieval times, and they’re all over Europe and in fact stretch beyond Europe, and they’re interesting because they’re powerful bits of iconography and they provoke a response in one form or another....

Before we get started, I should point out that this list is not intended to be a comprehensive listing of Superman actors (sorry John Rockwell and Bob Holiday…I’ll get to you in future articles, I promise). Instead, these are the guys who made the most impact in the cape. A list of Superman voice actors would be far too long for this piece, too, but I had to make an exception for one guy (our first entry!...

Millennium debuted in 1996, with Lance Henriksen starring in the role that was written with him in mind. His character was Frank Black, a retired FBI profiler who joined a private criminal consulting outfit named The Millennium Group. While possessing some psychic abilities, Frank’s story is very much familial as he tried to insulate his family from outside dangers and horrors, much of them stemming from the fast-approaching new millennium....

But the hardness of Monster, which speaks to the very dehumanizing nature of its title, comes from where we’re first introduced to Steve as played by a riveting Kelvin Harrison Jr.: He’s a teenager, terrified by a criminal justice system that has vilified him as the proverbial monster from the minute he was charged with felony murder. If we’re asked to see the world as Steve does, through tears in a dimly lit jail cell, then the young character’s movie can become as bleak and narrow as the personality that the DA’s office attempts to hang on him....

Moon Knight Episode 3 The third episode of Marvel’s Moon Knight, “The Friendly Type”, winds up feeling like a puzzle-solving diversion for the most part, and that’s a bit frustrating considering there are only six of these bad boys in total and we’re halfway through them by the end of it, but we do get to learn some key information about Marc Spector and Layla El-Faouly during the events that play out, so it’s not a total loss....

Marvel’s Moon Knight isn’t lacking in story. Arguably, it has too much story for its own good. In the first three episodes alone we were introduced to a mentally unwell ex-mercenary with a murky past estranged from a wife he’s been lying to for years. Inside him is at least one identity (with another on the way) created to fill a role that the main identity is unable to. We’ve also been told that the central identity is in fact the earthly avatar of the moon god Khonshu....

“This is torture, in the form of baseball.” There have previously been six Original Video Animations (OVA) bonus installments over the course of My Hero Academia’s previous five seasons. Each has been used in creative ways, whether it’s superfluous Quirk showcases, valuable training exercises, or compelling backstories and origins for popular supporting characters. There’s even been a gratuitous zombie installment that feels like Halloween-themed DLC for the series. All of this is to say that My Hero Academia has had fun with its OVAs, but they’ve always been opportunities for fun experiments rather than epic storytelling....