The tale of the Second Age is only beginning in The Rings of Power. When we join Galadriel, Elrond, Durin, and the little Harfoots, the events of The Lord of the Rings in the Third Age are still many years away. Sauron’s plan for world domination is in its early phases, and by season’s end, only the first three Rings of Power have been forged by Celebrimbor and his Elven smiths....

To a certain generation of Spider-Man fans, one Goblin stands above all others. It’s not Norman Osborn. It’s not Harry Osborn. Hell, it’s not even a Green Goblin at all. It’s the Hobgoblin, the scene-stealer had captivated readers of The Amazing Spider-Man in the ‘80s and ‘90s with the mystery of his true identity, his unpredictable and violent nature (ah, but when talking about Goblins, aren’t they all?) and his spooky costume design....

Ah, Christmas in New York City. Not just Christmas in New York, but Christmas in the MCU’s New York City! Marvel’s Hawkeye has arrived on Disney+ with a dose of holiday cheer, an appropriate amount of violence, and a scruffy, one-eyed dog to warm our hearts…and possibly warm them with a Molotov cocktail if the Tracksuit Mafia have their way. Is the above paragraph just a random assortment of words to you?...

Back in the first episode of Marvel’s Loki, viewers get a helpful expositional rundown about the Time Variance Authority from Miss Minutes (Tara Strong), a friendly cartoon clock. In a ‘50s style orientation video, Miss Minutes described how the Time Keepers created the TVA and all the employees within it to maintain the Sacred Timeline and avert temporal chaos. Makes sense! But in this week’s episode, “Lamentis”, we are provided some information that appears to be at odds with the “official” founding myth of the TVA....

At first glance, it would appear that Star Wars takes the top spot, as The Mandalorian has proven to be the most popular show on Disney+. In 2021, 14.5 billion minutes of the show were watched by subscribers, mostly during season two’s eight-week run. Not even the highest-ranking MCU show could come close to that, with the Thor spin-off Loki drawing only 5.23 billion minutes of viewing time last year....

Given the vagueness of certain things about the Morbius and Venom movies, the post-credits scenes in this weekend’s superhero release are kind of funny. It was already pretty jarring in the first place that Michael Keaton’s Vulture, who was such a memorable villain in Spider-Man: Homecoming, would be teleported for no discernable reason into the universe where Jared Leto’s Morbius, the Living Vampire, exists. Stranger still is how unfazed Keaton’s Adrian Toomes is about never seeing his wife and daughter again....

One moment that audience members tend to dread when they pop along to a movie screening attended by a cast and crew brave and willing enough to field questions from an audience occurs when the mic is finally passed to an eager beaver and “hi, yeah, this is more of a comment than a question…” is the first thing that spills from their mouth. Feeling trapped in your seat, you know damn well you’re about to hear either the worst opinion of all time or, if you’re incredibly lucky, a lengthy story only vaguely related to the movie in question....

Mr. Robot Season 3 Episode 7 “They’re actually going to get away with this,” Dom whispers to herself at the end of “Fredrick & Tanya.” She’s right. The Dark Army is going to get away with it. Whiterose has gotten her precious annexation of the Congo. 71 E Corp buildings have been destroyed, along with at least 4,000 people dead. Elliot and Mr. Robot are defeated, their people’s revolution is torn to ribbons, each one of those ribbons picked up to be co-opted by yet another 1% puppet master....

But Sandberg has always been a savvy social media user, knows how to tease fans just enough, and also when to give them what they want. So with Shazam 2 doing some outdoor filming in Atlanta, and with the knowledge that folks were likely to snap photos of Zachary Levi’s new suit, the director decided to go one better and just drop the first footage (of sorts) from the movie himself… Check it out… OK, so…as Levi’s Shazam points out, this is pretty dark and there’s not much in the way of details we can see on the new suit just yet....

“We find Obi-Wan at the beginning of our story rather broken, and faithless, and beaten, somewhat given up,” McGregor told EW. How broken? Well, according to new photos revealed by the outlet, the Jedi Master now lives in a cave… He’s so beaten down that he hasn’t even bothered to find himself an actual place to live. It’s been a decade, Ben! But we know something will eventually draw out Obi-Wan from his extremely humble abode so that he can embark on the mission that will see him once again cross paths with his former apprentice who has become the evil Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen)....

Don’t worry, Night Teeth is a younger-skewing horror film, so the more salacious distinctions are shrouded in wordplay, but this works to the film’s benefit. Because it is aimed at a teenage demographic, the cleverest of the dark insinuations are handled with care, while the carnage drips out deliciously. The film also goes through a chorus line of interesting secondary characters, who you miss when their curtains call. The premise is fairly simple....

“Mister, I was made for it,” versus “Mister, I was born for it,” sums up the major psychological distinction between the 1947 Nightmare Alley and Guillermo del Toro’s 2021 remake. Neither line from the end of their respective movies is in the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham. That book concludes just short of the revelation or confession (depending on the actor who says it). Bradley Cooper’s Stan Carlisle finds it downright hilarious that he is about to become a geek....

Outlander Season 3 Episode 8 Well, I suppose there are probably worse ways to find out about your husband’s other wife, but not many. The other shoe dropped on tonight’s episode of Outlander, and it made for some emotionally-riveting television. After last week’s installment, which felt like phoning it in for this character-driven drama, Outlander delved deeper into the complications of reuniting with someone you love after two decades apart. “First Wife” wasn’t always pretty, but it was always true....

At the end of every Peaky Blinders episode comes the expected fiction disclaimer declaring that its names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. The usual next line about “any resemblance to persons living or dead” being purely coincidental isn’t included, for the obvious reason that several of the show’s characters don’t just bear a resemblance to persons living or dead, they’re unequivocally them....

Despite efforts on the part of both Coscarelli and Romero to break away and make some very different films (like Martin and Knightriders in Romero’s case, The Beastmaster and bubba Ho-Tep in Coscarelli’s), for one reason or another both were forced back into feeding the franchise. Both filmmakers, for the most part, spent their careers working independently with very small budgets, but while Romero’s Dead films grew smaller, repetitive, and, let’s be honest, pretty shabby and tired, the wild imagination that gave birth to the original Phantasm only expanded and grew wilder over the next four decades, with the continuing storyline leaping back and forth between universes and dimensions....

Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Episode 8 Being trapped in the year 2024 hasn’t prevented Star Trek: Picard from connecting to all corners of the Trek franchise. In some ways, this part of Earth’s history is the most pivotal for the formation of the rest of the timeline. And so, it makes sense that as the series warps towards its impending finale, the rest of the canon is honored and somehow referenced....

Yes, it’s one of those things that’s just too weird to exist. Once upon a time, Welles was tasked with recording lines for a peas commercial and things started to go off the rails. He and the directors didn’t see eye-to-eye, he didn’t appreciate any notes about his delivery, and eventually, he stormed out of the session, claiming that no money was worth this. Somehow, the audio was bootlegged and the situation became a ridiculous moment of legend....

Power Rangers Beast Morphers Episode 1 The premiere of Beast Morphers had to do so much more than simply setting up a new season of Power Rangers. It was carrying the weight of being the start of the Hasbro era. After eight years of more or less the same, there was a ton of expectations on this episode. Would we get something better? Different? More of the same? WORSE?! It’s not fair to any episode of television to shoulder those kinds of expectations but that’s what it had to do....

For over twenty years, rumors of a canceled project known simply as Resident Evil: DASH have divided the Resident Evil fanbase. For some, it’s the ultimate missing part of Resident Evil‘s legacy. To others, it’s one of the longest-lasting urban legends in video game history and a rumor that, much like a Resident Evil zombie, never seems to die. What’s the true story of Resident Evil: DASH, though? That’s what we’ll try to uncover today as we dive into the fascinating history of this nearly mythical game....

The season 6 finale of Rick and Morty “Ricktional Mortpoon’s Rickmas Mortcation” was another festive episode that saw Morty (Justin Roiland) get to live out his dreams of being a Jedi for a brief moment before his functional lightsaber threatens the planet and almost ruins Christmas. As he tries to stop his lightsaber from reaching the Earth’s core, Morty discovers that Rick (also Justin Roiland) replaced himself with a robot in order to continue his search for Rick Prime, the Rick that killed his family and Morty’s true grandpa....