The Rings of Power is set to begin “thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings” novels, during a time of relative peace for the realm. The series is not based on its own novel, but rather on the Appendices found in Tolkien’s work, giving showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay more freedom to expand this world while still staying true to the source material....
A few well-known characters from other parts of the Star Wars saga have already appeared in The Mandalorian season 2, including infamous bounty hunter Boba Fett and Timothy Olyphant’s Tatooine marshal Cobb Vanth. Next up is Bo-Katan Kryze, the character voiced by Battlestar Galactica star Katee Sackhoff in The Clone Wars and Rebels, who reveals in the episode “The Heiress” that she’s on a mission to take back Mandalore from what’s left of the Empire....
The film opens on a jarring and unexpected note, which is reminiscent of the classic film Sunset Boulevard: It is narrated by a dead person. The character is a beloved figure in the series, his voice is unmistakable, and he will be born during the course of the film. Christopher Moltisanti, voiced by Michael Imperiole, is the last in a series of voices emanating from gravestones in a cemetery. David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos and co-author of the screenplay, revels in this kind of surrealistic twist....
Then there’s Lambert Wilson’s elusive Merovingian, the grimy information broker and crime boss who was obsessed with cause and effect in The Matrix Reloaded and threw a hell of a bondage party in Revolutions. Warner Bros. has kept the villain’s return very close to the chest, but a new teaser announcing the advance ticket sales date finally lifts the curtain on a Merovingian who’s 20 years older and has clearly seen better days....
The Northman takes much the same direction, only in the most epic scale that Eggers has worked with yet. Set in 10th-century Scandinavia and Iceland, the film is truly breathtaking in its scope, its detail, and, again, its completely immersive quality. You don’t doubt for a second that you are anywhere but the time and place in which the film is set. And like its predecessors, The Northman also suggests that any barrier between the real world and the realms beyond was much more porous back then....
According to the documentary, Sparks was the “best British group to ever come out of America.” You can look them up on Wikipedia and learn nothing. Everyone thinks they’re identical twins, but they weren’t even born in the same sunny California town. Sparks was so ahead of their time they were accused of ripping off artists from the future when they went retro. Ron Mael didn’t even know what a computer was when he wrote the song “Computer Girl” in 1966....
AMC probably would have preferred it do so as it’s one of the network’s biggest-ever hits. But some casting turnover and the lack of new adaptation material from Robert Kirkman’s original comic series finally spelled the end for the show after 11 seasons. Even though The Walking Dead as a TV show may be shuffling off its mortal coil, The Walking Dead franchise isn’t going anywhere any time soon. It’s almost as if it’s some kind of…reanimated corpse or something?...
The Walking Dead Season 10 Episode 19 Walking from point to point on the map, looking for desperately needed food and supplies, all Aaron (Ross Marquand) and Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) have done is kill zombies and wear the leather off their shoes. At this point, The Walking Dead is also the walking living, as the two are without car, bicycle, cart, or horse. Every spot on the map marked by Maggie has been a dud, from the freshly burned-down house to the boarded-up mini-mart....
One of the issues with the collection of bonus bottle episodes rolled out at the end of Season 10 of The Walking Dead is that they were constructed in such a way that they didn’t especially matter to the overall narrative. Sure, they were fun. They had some great character moments to help explain just how our survivors ended up the people they are, and what sort of adventures they might have been up to in between seasons, but they haven’t exactly carried a lot of narrative weight this far in season 11....
The White Lotus Season 2 Episode 7 Creating a season finale for an anthology is often a lot more difficult than for a serial. The last episode of an anthology resembles the makings of a series finale of other shows. The writers must choose whether these characters that we’ll never see again will go out in a fantastic, clear-cut path of explosives, or decide to ambiguously float ideas around in a swimming pool of possibilities, the only certainty being the dead body that washes up on the shore of the beach in the case of The White Lotus....
There are two tracks to being a comic collector. The first is to be a comics reader: someone who likes the stories and buys the books to read and enjoy them, and just happens to accumulate them over time. The other is to take that love for comics, have a look at the media landscape, and make a little money on the side. There has always been some money in comics collecting....
What’s on the piece of paper? Why exactly do Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult want this Connor kid dead so badly? The ending of Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead is purposefully vague about what all this killing was about. But as a news crew approaches the young lad, played by Finn Little, it becomes clear he is going to tell a story that a lot of shadowy people wanted to keep hidden....
Titans Episode 4 The nerve of Titans. No, seriously. Who just drops a backdoor pilot for another series in its fourth ever episode? There is no Titans team yet. We’ve barely seen them fight crime at all, let alone do anything as a unit, and here they are introducing a whole other set of legendary DC Comics characters. What kind of show does that?!? Well, a good one, to be honest....
For fans from the Philippines and of the Filipino diaspora, the inspiration for the show’s setting and worldbuilding will be familiar and nostalgic. For other viewers, it may be fresh and unique. In fact, for many people, Trese may be the first series they’ve ever watched that’s set in the Philippines and that features elements from the country’s rich folklore. Speaking of which, if you’re interested in learning more about the Filipino folklore featured in Trese, don’t worry....
Last season of Voltron Legendary Defender completely changed the status quo for the series, not only setting up Keith as the new leader but also bringing in Allura as a Paladin. While the forced reintroduction of Shiro caused the series to stumble it seemed everything was right. Then this season changed the status quo again with Keith quickly departing the team in the first episode with Shiro resuming command. This change is indicative of a season wide problem....
The internet is full of places to go and thrash it out with likeminded overthinkers if you become obsessed with a particular TV show. Lost, Breaking Bad, Twin Peaks and Game of Thrones all boasted thriving fan communities who had a blast dreaming up theories about where their series’ story was heading. Now, Marvel’s WandaVision has tapped into the natural curiosity of viewers with its wall-to-wall Easter eggs and mysterious MCU nods, and people have gone full ‘It’s Always Sunny red string meme’ over them....
“I had done the whole thing,” she says proudly. “Before I met with Michael [Giacchino, director] for this project, I had watched most of the MCU projects. Then obviously after I got the part, I went and watched all the ones I’d missed. I’ve always been a big fan.” But Donnelly’s fandom doesn’t end there: she’s also deeply into the genre that Werewolf by Night is steeped in. “I’ve always been a big fan of old horror movies,” she adds....
It’s easy to forget a lot of the events of Westworld season 3. Westworld is a…let’s say “busy” show at even its clearest and most coherent. But the show’s third season, which ended more than two years ago, was particularly dense. You may not recall, for instance, that Dolores met her untimely end in the final episode of Westworld season 3. Or at least we think she did. It’s hard to kill a host that is able to remotely upload its consciousness to seemingly any hard drive....
In retrospect, this is probably not the version of the Caped Crusader fans expected to find after The Dark Knight’s thrilling finale. At the close of what many still consider to be the high water mark for superhero movies, Batman has agreed to take on the burden of Harvey Dent’s sins, framing himself as a murderer and saving Gotham City from cynicism through a veil of lies. Yet it’s not really a sad ending....
An adaptation of a graphic novel that its mastermind and co-creator, Alan Moore, essentially called unfilmable, Watchmen arrived perhaps a decade too early, offering a vast and pensive deconstruction of the comic book conventions surrounding superhero stories—conventions which were only just beginning to sink their hooks into the broader pop culture landscape thanks to Marvel and, soon enough, Snyder’s own masked epics based on DC Comics characters. However, even during the San Diego Comic-Con rollout of Watchmen, Snyder already had Batman on the brain....
