“I love the stuff with fire. I would say like over 90 percent of the fire-work that we’ve done has been practical. If there’s fire and Daimon’s standing by it then I’m standing by it. Which has been quite nice shooting outdoors because it’s cold here.” Helstrom represents plenty of firsts for the Marvel TV universe. It will be the first time a Marvel series has shot in Canada and the first time a Marvel show has been chiefly classified as horror....

After telling in It: Chapter One the simultaneously terrifying and sweet-natured story of the Losers Club, seven kids who faced down a malevolent, shape-shifting monster in the town of Derry in the summer of 1989, Dauberman and Muschietti have now followed up with the rest of King’s tale. Here the Losers Club are now adults, each achieving a certain amount of success in their lives, but still haunted in some ways by the past — even if all but one of them have forgotten the events of 1989....

But what’s most striking about Jujutsu Kaisen are its fight scenes. Even the show’s detractors will agree that, through clever action cinematography, the series showed us how well-executed sequences can elevate the otherwise simple premise of a boy who gets possessed by a demon. Less remarked upon, however, is how those same fight scenes utilize Jujutsu Kaisen’s female characters. Jujutsu Kaisen’s portrayal of its female characters has won the series many fans....

Mario being a plumber is one of those facts that has become so common over the years that many of us probably never stopped to ask, “Wait, why is Mario a plumber in the first place?” The answer to that question is actually quite odd and requires you to take a trip back to a time when Mario wasn’t a plumber. Yes, I’m talking about Mario’s debut in the 1981 Donkey Kong arcade game....

Granted, that’s a bold statement. After all, it’s not like fan backlash was a new concept at the time that Metal Gear Solid 2 was released to a…divided reception in 2001. Just look at what happened to The Phantom Menace just two years before. The idea of fans of a franchise (or a creator, or a concept, or what have you) rising up against a certain piece of work in intense ways is about as old as entertainment itself....

Akiva Goldsman, who juggles work as executive producer on both Star Trek: Picard and the upcoming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (after previously working on Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Short Treks) describes the process of working alongside the other currently airing Trek shows as sometimes being akin to dealing with traffic cops. Thankfully however that process has smoothed out, with the other Trek showrunners reading each other’s scripts and having meetings to talk out what they’re planning....

The Outlander Season 5 finale was much more self-referential than most episodes of this TV show, as we delve into Claire’s subconscious as she dissociates to avoid the reality of her abduction and abuse at the hands of Lionel Brown. Instead of staying in the present, her mind brings her to a 20th century home filled with her 18th century family celebrating American Thanksgiving. The modern house is populated with references to things we have seen Claire experience in previous seasons of this show....

Winter’s Orbit, a healing and action-packed queer romance space opera that hits bookshelves next week, began life as an original work on Archive of Our Own (AO3), where it gained an enthusiastic following. Now, British author Everina Maxwell, is hoping to find a broader, commercial audience for her story about two space princes in an arranged marriage on which the political stability of their solar system rests. The story of Winter’s Orbit path from original work on AO3 to published book is a fascinating one, and one that is emblematic of the increasingly candid impact the world of transformative fandom is having on the book industry and other spheres of the commercial entertainment world....

While we wait for Wynonna Earp to return from its COVID-instigated midseason hiatus, it seems like the perfect time to dig into one of the show’s most complicated and rich topics: The layered relationship between Wynonna Earp and Doc Holliday, and the ways in which the show has committed to telling a love story that goes beyond whether a particular pairing will get together in the end. Far too many TV series – genre or otherwise – waste far too much screen time delaying the organic progression of their two leads’ romantic relationship....

With its list of new releases for January 2022, Hulu is raiding CBS’s closet and premiering How I Met Your Father, a continuation of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Complaints about unnecessary rebooting aside, perhaps its worth giving the Hillary Duff starring series a chance. If nothing else, telling a story about 2022 from a future perspective might play well. Aside from HIMYF, there aren’t any other Hulu original series to speak of....

How odd that in the span of a couple days it seems like everyone is debating the virtues of professional guardianships and what it means to become a legal conservator. Only a week ago, Hulu and The New York Times debuted its social media lightning rod of a documentary, Framing Britney Spears, and now barely more than seven days later, Netflix is debuting J Blakeson’s I Care a Lot, a baroque comedy (or tragedy?...

Den of Geek was given a chance to view the first 20 minutes of the film and speak afterward with Docter, co-writer Kemp Powers, and producer Dana Murray about what may be Pixar’s most unabashedly gorgeous and advanced animated film to date. Soul stars Jamie Foxx as the voice of Joe Gardner, a New York City middle school teacher whose dream of becoming a professional jazz musician seems to end prematurely when an accident sends him to The Great Before....

Johansson has starred in eight blockbuster Marvel Cinematic Universe entries as Natasha Romanoff – a former Russian spy who has defected to fight for the US government – including her final solo film in the franchise, which saw its release delayed several times during the pandemic. The actress has a successful career outside of her various Marvel Studios projects, and revealed she was done playing the character during a press tour for Black Widow earlier this month....

The first chapter of AMC’s series adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire closed on unsubtle ambiguities. The season 1 finale took a turn from the novel, paying respect to the beloved New Orleans setting with a Mardi Gras going-away party to die for, and an almost equally lethal night cap. Vampire family dysfunction overtook the pleasures of piercing flesh throughout the opening season, but blood ties proved tortuously gruesome on their own....

If you’re eager to jump into Cold War on Thursday and have already pre-ordered the PlayStation version of the game, you’ll be able to get early access to the beta on Oct. 8-9 and play all throughout the first beta period, which ends on Oct. 12. PS4 fans who haven’t pre-ordered the game will be able to jump into the open beta on Oct. 10-12 and then again on Oct....

Through two seasons, Prime Video’s Jack Ryan has covered some well-trodden topics for CIA spy thrillers. Jack Ryan season 1 found Tom Clancy’s titular CIA analyst on the case of an Islamic extremist’s curious bank statements. Season 2 moved the action to South America, where Jack tried to ensure the democratic legitimacy of a Venezuelan election (a welcome change of pace for the CIA). While both of those seasons were reasonable successes for the series, Jack Ryan was still missing a prevalent element from Tom Clancy’s writings and spy thrillers in general....

The Other Side Of The Door is a ghost story about loss and the devotion to family, which has an unusual and welcome amount of heart for a horror movie, spending enough time with the tragically damaged relationships to really invest audiences in the characters. That said there’s still plenty of terror in the film and enough scares to make even a jaded horror fan like myself levitate a few inches out of my seat....

Featuring a glimpse of 10-year-old SpongeBob SquarePants, pal Patrick Star (wearing a very fetching camp uniform) and brace-faced Sandy Cheeks, while also offering looks at younger versions of Squidward, Mr. Krabbs, and Plankton in what appear to be camp staff roles, this first image shows off the bright, CG-created underwater world that fans can expect when the series debuts in 2021. Produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studio, Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years will showcase the first interactions between our beloved characters as they “spend their summer building underwater campfires, catching wild jellyfish, and swimming in Lake Yuckymuck at the craziest camp in the kelp forest, Kamp Koral....

Supergirl Season 6 Episode 12 Out of all the Arrowverse shows, Supergirl has always been the most upfront and open about its politics. From explicitly positioning Kara Zor-El as a refugee in the expository narration that opens each episode to telling stories about immigration, police brutality, and LGBTQ rights, this is a show that takes the promise of hope, help, and compassion for all very seriously. Unafraid to tackle potentially difficult or uncomfortable topics head-on, Supergirl frequently challenges the hearts and minds of its viewers with thorny big-picture questions about what being a hero really means and what the concept of universal justice should look like....

Indeed, that film’s director Kevin Reynolds recently confirmed during an interview that one of the reasons he was signed on to the project was in order to lure Costner away from a different Robin Hood movie that the star was then circling over at 20th Century Fox, and which would’ve been directed by no less than Die Hard and Predator’s John McTiernan! While doing a career deep dive with the podcast Indie Film Hustle, Reynolds got candid about the strange mercurial nature of Hollywood moviemaking, particularly in the rarified air of blockbusters in the late 20th century....