SQUID GAME S2 THE ELECTRIC STATE MICKEY 17 MORE DEADLY CONTESTS IN THE HIT KOREAN SHOW
THE RUSSO BROTHERS REWRITE THE '90S AS A TECH DYSTOPIA
ROBERT PATTINSON IN BONG JOON-HO'S LATEST
IN THE DEN WITH STEVEN SODERBERGH JAMES GUNN’S CREATURE COMMANDOS PADDINGTON IN PERU
THE SAGA RETURNS TO ITS ‘80S ROOTS WITH THE GREATEST ADVENTURE IN THE GALAXY.
PLUS: JASON BLUM HAS PLENTY TO HOWL ABOUT IN HIS 2025 FILM SLATE, STARTING WITH WOLF MAN...
Blumhouse horror head honcho has a busy year ahead with a full slate of chillers and thrillers including, among others, original properties (Drop), fresh takes on classics (Wolf Man), and franchise sequels (M3GAN 2.0). Blum visited our studio for an exclusive photoshoot and in-depth interview. PG. 46
Ahead of the release of his high-concept chiller Presence, we sat down with the auteur director to talk through his prolific and varied career. From Sex, Lies, and Videotape, to the Ocean’s films, Magic Mike, Erin Brockovich, and more, he’s done it all. PG. 54
Everyone’s favorite marmalademuncher is back for a third installment, and this time he’s traveling back to his home country of Peru. We chat with director Dougal Wilson about the challenges of working with the bear himself. PG. 12
Kicking off the next phase of James Gunn’s DC Universe is the anarchic animation Creature Commandos, which assembles a Task Force X-style gang of anti-heroes. We talk to Gunn and cast. PG. 42
Creators Christopher Ford and Jon Watts guide us into the universe of Skeleton Crew, a youthful, retro romp starring Jude Law as the enigmatic Jod Na Nawood. PG. 30
The saga of Middle-earth expands with this animated feature which tells the story of the King of Rohan, Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox), and his battle to defend his kingdom. We speak to cast and crew. PG. 50
Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt star in the Russo Brothers’ The Electric State, set in an alternate version of the ’90s where sentient animatronics and humans have engaged in a war. We chat with Joe Russo and co-star Stanley Tucci about their sci-fi fable. PG. 36
A new season, a new set of games, in the second season of Korean phenomenon Squid Game. Winner Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is back, as is writerdirector Hwang Dong-hyuk, who says he wanted to hold a mirror to an increasingly capitalist society. PG. 40
We’ve rounded up some of the best sci-fi books of the year, spanning ecofiction, multiverses, aliens, space opera, and more. Our list includes several exciting debuts, as well as new works from familiar names, including Calypso (below), a novel written in verse. PG. 22
It’s the last issue of Den of Geek magazine in 2024, and we are celebrating all things sci-fi. Adorning our cover is Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, the most purely joyful Star Wars spinoff we have encountered in some time. Is it any wonder? After all, this comes from Christopher Ford and Jon Watts, who cowrote the youthful Spider-Man: Homecoming, which Watts also directed. Leading the cast is Jude Law, who plays the mysterious Jod Na Nawood. We catch up with all three inside. Elsewhere, the issue is packed with exclusives including the Russo Brothers’ The Electric State, James Gunn’s Creature Commandos, The Lord of the Rings animation, The War of the Rohirrim, a glimpse into the future of horror with Jason Blum, and our flagship in-depth interview with the prolific, eclectic auteur Steven Soderbergh. Oh, and Paddington in Peru makes an appearance too in case you were in need of some fuzzy holiday cheer. Enjoy the issue!
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As Paddington Bear heads to cinemas for a third time, we learn about bringing Peru to a studio set in England, making a sequel to a beloved classic, and what it’s like working with the bear himself…
BY CHRIS FARNELL
OCCASIONALLY THERE
is a movie where the plot, the direction, and the special-effects magic all fall by the wayside, and people have just one question: “What was it like working with the star?”
It is one of our first questions.
“Well, he’s very demanding,” begins the film’s director, Dougal Wilson. Then, perhaps fearing retaliation, he corrects himself. “No, he’s very reasonable, very hardworking, and very professional.”
He is talking about Paddington Bear, the star of Paddington, Paddington 2, and, of course, the video of him drinking tea with Queen Elizabeth for her platinum jubilee. Wilson is directing Paddington’s next movie outing, Paddington in Peru
Meeting the Brown Family (Again)
As well as the bear himself, across all three films, the Paddington series has showcased a stellar cast, including Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters,
Madeleine Harris, Samuel Joslin, and Ben Whishaw (although we’ve not spotted his face in any of the films, so far), but Wilson himself is new to the series, as its regular director, Paul King, was busy making Wonka
In coming to Paddington, Wilson brought experience from another British institution—directing the John Lewis Christmas adverts that annually take British social media by storm.
“I like that they don’t ram the sentiment down your throat,” Wilson explains. “They also have a certain
do anything about. So we decided to just not say anything and, hopefully, if audiences enjoy the story, they’ll go with it,” Wilson says.
British quality and a certain understated humor—at least that’s what I was endeavoring to find— and the Paddington films have a lot of similarities.”
Wilson was not the only new addition to the film, with Sally Hawkins, who played Mary Brown for the first two films, opting not to return. This time, the character is played by Emily Mortimer.
“Mrs. Brown is the emotional core of the Brown family,” Wilson points out. “She’s the one with the deepest emotional connection to Paddington. Emily seemed to have that similar demeanor and felt like she was connected emotionally to Paddington without having to express it verbally too much.”
One of the big debates during the film’s production was whether to reference the recasting in the story.
“We debated whether we should acknowledge it but thought that it just drew attention to something we can’t
Paddington in Peru sees Paddington go back to his homeland to reunite with his Aunt Lucy, getting embroiled in a treasure hunt along the way.
“It was the decision of [Paddington and Paddington 2 director and writer] Paul King, Simon Farnaby, and Mark Burton [a screenwriter who provided additional material for Paddington 2], and they liked the idea of a circular feeling to the story, with Paddington returning to the origins established in the first film,” Wilson says. “We are continuing the themes of home and being an immigrant and coming back to where you are officially from and how you feel when you get there.”
To research the film, Wilson spent two months traveling around South America, looking at locations while the script was being developed. At the same time, the budget for the film was being planned out, and Wilson quickly realized that a bit of creativity would be necessary.
“We worked out we just couldn’t economically take the main unit and the actors to Peru,” Wilson recalls.
“What we could do was take a second unit to Peru and shoot a lot of environments, especially because it would be easier to put [digital character] Paddington into those backdrops, but for the rest of the cast, it was more of a technical challenge.”
After precisely plotting out the story and shooting the necessary locations in South America, the human cast was shot on sets and exterior locations in the UK, carefully matched to the on-location footage by visual effects house Framestore.
“I think it’s in the tradition of British films shot in the UK like Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, which was shot on very art-directed stages in the UK, and then the Himalayas were put in using matte paintings afterward. It has this wonderful stylized feel. With our film, there wasn’t any other way of doing it budgetarily, so we embraced it stylistically.”
The second unit film crew took 360-degree cameras down rivers in Peru and Colombia, and those backdrops were used for the boat set in the UK, mounted on a big rig that was able to match the river’s real movements.
“We shot in Peru, but not with the actors,” Wilson says. He then adds:
“But Paddington went to Peru. We took him there in his special trailer.”
But while Wilson is quick to sing the praises of his starring bear, the production also used some ingenious special effects to bring him back to the screen.
“We have various techniques for how Paddington is filmed and this was established in the first two films,” Wilson says. “We have a brilliant animation director, Pablo Grillo, who works for Framestore, and created Paddington for the first two films. We also had a brilliant actor who plays Paddington on set, Lauren Barrand, and she wears Paddington’s hat and coat and acts in the scenes as Paddington with the actors for the first couple of takes.”
As well as Barrand, the film also makes use of another performer to handle Paddington’s more physical stunts, Javier Marzan.
“He worked with us in prep as well to devise some of the physical scenes and slapstick scenes. For example, for the photobooth scene, we set up a little photobooth in our studio when we were in prep and would workshop it with Javier, Pablo, and myself, and
I WAS FLATTERED, BUT THEN THAT WAS OVERTAKEN BY TERROR BECAUSE IT WAS A VERY TALL ORDER TO FOLLOW THAT SECOND FILM.”
DOUGAL WILSON, DIRECTOR
we would come up with the small details. We had the gist of what was going to happen written and developed the scene with them,” Wilson says. “When we actually shot scenes like that or the chase scene with Antonio Banderas towards the end of act three, often Javier would be running around the set. Obviously, he’s a bit bigger than Paddington, so we’d stick a Paddington face onto him at waist height on both sides, and that would give us some indication as to where Paddington was.”
After the first few takes are complete, Paddington’s human substitute is taken out of the scene and the other actors have to use their imagination to picture where Paddington is. “It helps that the actors are great performers,”
says Wilson. “For example, when Olivia Colman is talking to Paddington, she delivers the performance in a way that you really believe she’s speaking to someone.”
As it arrives in theaters, Paddington in Peru has a lot to live up to. After all, it is the sequel to a film that Nicolas Cage accepts as one of the greatest films ever made in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
“I was approached with this opportunity [to direct], and I had mixed emotions,” Wilson admits. “My first feeling was that I was flattered, then it was overtaken by terror and anxiety and extreme apprehension because it was a very tall order to follow that second film and some would say only a fool would attempt it. But I thought, God, if I don’t try, then I definitely won’t succeed!”
But with a combination of special effects and great performances, Wilson and his cast and crew have brought Paddington in Peru to life.
“And sometimes Paddington is genuinely there,” Wilson adds. “When he comes out of the trailer, he’s great.”
Paddington in Peru opens in theaters Jan. 17.
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BY THERESA DELUCCI
IF THE PAST TELLS a story about the present, American Primeval suggests that surviving America’s inherent violence is an endurance sport. Netflix’s new six-part limited series from director Peter Berg (Painkiller, Friday Night Lights) delves into who came before the cowboys, the beginning of the end of the Indian Wars, and the benefits of filming on location even if it means suffering for one’s art. A lot.
Taylor Kitsch (Lone Survivor, The Terminal List) stars as Isaac, a lonely frontiersman who begrudgingly guides a vulnerable settler woman and her son across 1857 southern Utah to reach their final destination in the very wild West. To make it there, Isaac and Sara (GLOW’s Betty Gilpin) must fight, trade, and evade clashing pockets of civilization, including militiamen, bounty hunters, Paiute and renegade Shoshone tribes, and the Mormon army.
Viewers are warned early and often that civilization doesn’t mean civilized.
“I don’t know if I had dreamed of being in a Western before, but certainly a period piece,” Gilpin says. “I think when I dreamed about it, I was thinking more like Pride and Prejudice, not, you know, people’s throats being ripped out.”
A real-life tragedy provides the inciting event that connects American Primeval’s large cast. Some 150 white settlers were killed during the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which historians claim was instigated or outright ordered by Mormon leader Brigham Young, who was fighting Indigenous tribes and the American government for his flock’s piece of
land. Kim Coates plays the elected prophet and army commander with an intensity that was obvious even in Coates’ audition tape, in which the Sons of Anarchy star dressed as Young and delivered a sermon while kneeling in a cornfield.
Coates was eager to play such a controversial historical figure. “Win or lose—and he refused to lose at that time—the Mormon religion survived because of Brigham Young and the tenacity and love for faith that his flock had at that time,” Coates says.
Tenacity was often asked of Berg’s flock as well, particularly from the lead actors, who had to endure a month of “cowboy camp” in the wintry mountains of Arizona. There, actors adjusted to cold, frequent night shoots, weapons training, and worked
with horses, the most unpredictable scene partners of all.
Kitsch, who has collaborated with Berg on multiple projects, already enjoyed the outdoors as a recent Montana transplant. “There’s just an incredible energy when you’re out there and you’re in the middle of nowhere, and you can hear nothing,” he says. “I gravitated towards that.”
When asked what he feels when Berg approaches him with a new idea, Kitsch is quick to answer. “I have no choice,” he smiles. “There’s just a brotherhood that’s there. And a trust.”
There were no soundstages or motion-capture suits for CG additions; authenticity was paramount, especially when audiences have already seen it in frontier stories like Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight and Iñárritu’s The
Revenant, which was also written by American Primeval screenwriter Mark L. Smith. Indigenous consultant Julie O’Keefe was on set, working closely with the cast to sensitively portray Indigenous language, customs, and the spiritual outlook of distinct tribes at a time of brutal upheaval.
Derek Hinkey, who is himself Paiute-Shoshone, plays Crow leader Red Feather, head of a renegade Shoshone tribe. Having grown up on a reservation and already a skilled horseman, the recent Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 actor had different challenges—and rewards —working on the series.
“I know my traditions, religion, culture,” Hinkey says. “I fell in love with the rawness, the realness, and the truth the show is going to speak.”
Beyond the gore of scalped men and arrow-riddled innocents, American Primeval aims to showcase a rawness of emotion motivating every character, whether it’s Young’s clear-eyed faith, Sarah’s resilience, or Isaac’s grief. In present-day America, times can feel dark, perhaps too dark for a show that portrays unflinching violence.
Peter Berg doesn’t see it that way.
“These very different human beings come together to help each other, to look out for each other, to love and care for each other and keep each other safe through some pretty treacherous terrain,” says Berg. “I think at the end of the day, American Primeval is a love story.”
American Primeval premieres on Netflix on Jan. 9.
SAM STONE |
PHOTOGRAPHY BY
NICK MORGULIS
1
Cristin Milioti was born and raised in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and discovered her love of acting at Long Lake Camp for the Arts in New York during middle school. Interested in music, fueled by her father’s job as a recording studio engineer, Milioti sang in various bands throughout high school and performed in school plays. Steve Buscemi cast Milioti in the The Sopranos for three episodes, the first of which he directed, helping launch Milioti’s acting career.
2
By the time Milioti starred as the titular mother in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, she had built an impressive resume of stage performances. Milioti was nominated for a Tony Award in 2012 for the musical Once, earning a Grammy the following year. Relocating to LA to film HIMYM, Milioti had to acclimate to local traffic, getting four parking tickets in her first week.
3 Milioti is a self-professed “huge Batman fan.” In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Milioti recalled that she “used to pretend to be Batman villains” growing up. In getting to play Sofia Falcone in The Penguin, Milioti finally fulfilled a long-standing dream.
4 With Sofia Falcone being a cunning and calculating figure, Milioti thinks she could “absolutely” take on The Batman. “She’s so smart, and she’s also so instinctual,” Milioti tells Den of Geek. “She operates on that level and is surrounded by people who aren’t in touch with that.”
5
Milioti’s gateway into Batman was seeing Batman Returns, going out and buying a Catwoman costume, and repeatedly watching the 1989 Batman on home video. When Batman Forever was released, Milioti saw it in theaters six times. Milioti hopes to reprise her role as Sofia Falcone in a future project, as her “wildest dream.”
Secret Level producers Tim Miller and Dave Wilson dish about making a video game show unlike any you’ve ever seen.
BY SAM STONE
FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS of the acclaimed Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots, Tim Miller and Blur Studio, the animation company that he co-founded, are next tackling a very different kind of animated anthology series on Prime Video: the video game show Secret Level. Each episode of the show, which Miller created and produced with longtime collaborator Dave Wilson, adapts a different video game property, from recent hits such as The Outer Worlds and Sifu to established classics like Mega Man and Dungeons & Dragons. Given Blur’s extensive history creating trailers and cutscenes for some of the
biggest video games ever, opening the door for the studio to work on more video game worlds than ever before was a no-brainer for all involved.
“Our bread and butter has always been these three-to-five minute trailers. The anthology format really started there,” Wilson tells Den of Geek. “It’s very much a part of Blur’s DNA, the short-form storytelling of it. It’s a little trickier on Secret Level. There is so much lore to pull from, whether it’s D&D or Warhammer; there are 40 or 50 years of that. The trick is figuring out what’s important, what fans want to see, and we try to fit that into what we have to work with.”
But if you know anything about how territorial the games industry can be, you might be wondering how the heck Amazon got publishers as big as Capcom, PlayStation, Epic Games, and Bandai Namco to all lend properties to the same show. Working with all the different studios was no easy task, but Wilson credits the reputation that he, Miller, and Blur Studio have earned over the years in helping them win the trust of the publishers to license their properties for Secret Level. Miller notes it also helped that Amazon was not only very open to collaborating with the publishers on the project, but also
didn’t seek to acquire any of the franchises it adapted for the series. This turned what could’ve been an absolute licensing nightmare into something much more manageable.
“It took Amazon having the vision to say, ‘We don’t need to do a land grab to make a show like this,’” Miller says. “Everybody knows Hollywood is a very acquisitive place; they want to own and control everything if they’re going to invest money in it. Amazon said, ‘We understand these are huge games that exist in their own right.
We’re just borrowing them for a while.’ They made the deal-making easy.”
The first season of Secret Level is slated to run for 15 episodes, which will be released two per week, with stories ranging from five to 10 minutes each. Secret Level also boasts an all-star cast, including Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Claudia Doumit, Kevin Hart, and many more. Tonally, the episodes run the gamut of styles and genres, ranging from an epic sci-fi saga based on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 to a screwball action adventure based on Sony’s short-lived online game Concord. The episode based on the former actually serves as a sequel to the critically acclaimed game, and this isn’t the only game story getting an expansion from Secret Level. For the episode based on Unreal Tournament, Blur worked closely with Epic Games to bring the expansive sci-fi world to life and weave a previously untold story into the franchise’s lore.
“We got into a room with Epic to figure it out,” Wilson recalls, with the Unreal Tournament episode telling the rise of its gladiatorial antagonist, Xan. “One of the things we wanted to do in Secret Level is to tell the story that you’re not familiar with in the game. We don’t want to just retread the same ground.”
These close collaborations make each and every episode of Secret Level not only rewarding for longtime fans of a given video game property but
also welcoming and accessible to newcomers. Each story is meant to be representative of the larger property but not necessarily beholden to it.
“For the uninitiated, they can sit back and let it wash over them,” Miller says. “It’s not exposition-heavy, but you don’t feel lost if you haven’t invested years of your life in the franchise.”
And while there are plenty of video games that potential future seasons of Secret Level could adapt, Miller hopes
THERE IS SO MUCH LORE TO PULL FROM. THE TRICK IS FIGURING OUT WHAT’S IMPORTANT AND WHAT FANS WANT TO SEE.”
DAVE WILSON
to expand the scope of the show to cover other forms of gaming.
“If I had my way, we’d do board games in the show,” Miller says. “It’s really about what the community enjoys. Video games are great, but all of gaming is valuable. The community that plays video games also does all these other things.”
Secret Level premieres Dec. 10 on Prime Video.
Ecofiction, space opera, multiverse, and novel-in-verse are just some of the treats.
Emet North’s trippy debut reads like a short story collection, each chapter a tweaked retelling of physicist Raffi’s life and loves. Discontent with their present, Raffi obsesses over multiverses: an alternate adolescence in which they are wrapped up in an obsessive, first-love friendship with Britt; post-apocalyptic wedded bliss with Kay, who taxidermies people; and a surreal reality in which people fracture into “motherhordes.” Raffi’s journeys challenge the limits of time, space, and gender.
BY N ATA LIE ZUT TER
K. LANGMEAD (TITAN BOOKS)
A generation ship novel told in verse, Oliver K. Langmead’s ambitious work opens “in medias res” for protagonist Rochelle: she awakens partway through a long space voyage to find the ship transformed, more resembling a forest than an ark. The lyrical poetry sets the otherworldly tone, as Rochelle meets Catherine, an entirely new lifeform who can communicate with the ship Calypso, and learns why its descendants treat Rochelle like a saint.
JAMES S.A. COREY (ORBIT BOOKS)
The opening salvo to The Expanse author duo’s new space opera series is appropriately epic: a team of brilliant human scientists is kidnapped by the alien Carryx and reduced to prisoners in a massive conflict raging for centuries. Their academic achievements on the planet Anjiin will be of little use in their new, humble roles until a research assistant realizes that the path to survival is servitude and maybe betraying all of humankind.
SIERRA GREER (MARINER BOOKS)
The eponymous Annie is a pleasure bot whose settings range from Abigail (homemaker) to Nanny (self-explanatory), but whose human boyfriend-slash-owner Doug most often prefers her in Cuddle Bunny mode. Her obsessive calculations on how to keep Doug satisfied eventually give way to increased sentience as Annie begins to question her own programming limitations and how to grant herself the authority he has over her.
KALIANE BRADLEY (AVID READER PRESS)
In near-future Britain, an unnamed civil servant takes a job at a time travel agency, acting as a “bridge” for historical figures plucked out of the past. Intending to help Arctic explorer Graham Gore adjust to the 21st century, the bridge instead finds herself falling in love and uncovering the sinister plot behind the Ministry of Time. This debut blends sci-fi thriller and time travel romantic comedy into an audacious romp.
AUGUST CLARKE (EREWHON BOOKS)
One of two genderbent sci-fi retellings of The Count of Monte Cristo on this list: former child factory worker Marney Honeycutt swears revenge on industrialist Yann Chauncey after her family is gunned down while striking dangerous conditions at his ichorite factory. She’ll do so by reinventing herself as an aristocrat and courting Gossamer Chauncey right under her father’s nose. But ichorite, the titular metal from heaven, might wind up being Marney’s secret weapon.
BRENDA PEYNADO (TORDOTCOM PUBLISHING)
Part ecofiction cautionary tale, part tragic marriage story, Brenda Peynado’s debut explores how easy it is to get trapped in a pocket universe. When a mistake lands archaeologist Raquel and her wife in a pendant-sized world, it costs them 40 years to emerge—only to discover their world ravaged by civil war. Can Raquel discover the fabled Universe Two and forge a future?
YUME KITASEI (FLATIRON BOOKS)
An anthropology grad student with a past life as an alien art thief, Maya Hoshimoto upends her peaceful work on Earth to chase after the stardust grail. This living artifact promises to restore the Frenro, an alien race that includes her beloved crewmate Auncle. Joining their quest to the edges of civilization and back are Wil, an ex-soldier tending deep battle scars beneath her armor, and Medix, a murderous robot who just wants to feel like humans do.
(ECW
Like The Count of Monte Cristo’s Edmond Dantès, Virika Sameroo is working on a merchant marine ship when she is framed for a murder she did not commit, altering the course of her hard-earned career for the Æcerbot Empire. But for Virika’s reinvention and revenge, Suzan Palumbo drew upon influences ranging from Star Trek, for the novella’s rapid-fire pace, to Caribbean history for a triumphant anti-colonial adventure.
What begins as a cure for cancer impacts the evolution of humanity itself in translator Anton Hur’s imaginative and far-reaching tale. Dr. Mali Beeko, whose mother pioneered the procedure in which nanites entirely replace human cells, observes as her patients become functionally immortal. What the cellist and the poet do with their extended lifespans has ripple effects for future generations as they create new life forms. But is a nanodroid that retains the patient’s memories still that person or someone new?
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Quotes of the month from Den of Geek exclusive interviews.
“IT’S SORT OF CASABLANCA IN A WAY, ISN’T IT? THEY FINALLY DECIDED TO BE TOGETHER, AND THEY CAN’T BECAUSE THE WORLD WILL END.”
Venom: The Last Dance director Kelly Marcel on the ending.
“WHAT I’M NOTICING IS THAT PEOPLE ARE STARTING TO SEE WHAT THEY FEEL IS A DIFFERENT IDEA AND, TO A DEGREE, THE IDEATION OF THE CHARACTER THAT THEY ENVISION IN THEIR HEAD WHEN THEY READ THE BOOKS.”
— Aldis Hodge on how his Alex Cross portrayal in Cross differs from earlier adaptations.
SOMETIMES I WATCH THESE EPISODES AND
I’M LIKE ‘YOU GIANT MONSTER.’ I LOOK LIKE GANDALF.”
— Jason Segel on acting opposite shorter
“Chevy has a strange way of giving a compliment. He goes, ‘Well you should be embarrassed!’ [But] that’s like a 10.”
“I love the movie Joe Dirt with David Spade. But if somebody came up to me and said, ‘I know that Joe Dirt is the greatest movie in the history of cinema,’ I would be terrified of that person.”
Heretic director Bryan Woods on the danger of certainty.
“I actually was not aware that I had largerthan-normal eyes until I stupidly, at 18 years old, read the reviews from Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.”
— Ella Purnell on the physicality of acting.
“It was a lot more unsettling seeing Hugh [Grant] do the scenes than how I imagined it in my head… Hugh is such a charming guy in real life. So if anything, I’m secondguessing my early conversations with him.”
— Chloe East on making Heretic
BY SAM STONE ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHLOE LEWIS
DeathAdder Essential Gaming
Mouse Razer’s long-standing reputation for quality gaming peripherals includes its mice, and the DeathAdder Essential Gaming Mouse is a standout. With a 6400 DPI optical sensor and five programmable buttons, the DeathAdder is slick, comfortable, and easy to use. The leading gaming peripherals brand in America, the DeathAdder continues Razer’s commitment to excellence.
Xbox Elite Wireless
Controller Series 2 While there are plenty of Xbox-compatible controllers, the Xbox Elite Series 2 is among the best on the market. These controllers come in a variety of colors and feature customizable thumbsticks and rubberized grips. Providing up to 40 hours of wireless use, the Elite Series 2 puts the power in the players’ hands.
PlayStation PULSE 3D
Headset The official PlayStation headset is the PULSE 3D, compatible with both the PS4 and PS5. Providing noise-canceling sound, the headset comes with rechargeable batteries that support up to 12 hours of wireless use. These are designed specifically for the PS5’s 3D sound capabilities, immersing players in the action.
55” Class Samsung Neo QLED 4K QNX1D Samsung has been the global leader in televisions for 18 years. The 55-inch Class Samsung Neo QLED 4K QNX1D provides the highquality picture and sound that makes Samsung TVs stand out. And the TV’s gaming hub not only interfaces with major devices but offers top-tier games to play, no console required.
With the holiday season here, now’s the perfect time to treat your gaming geek loved ones or level up your own game. Whether it’s PC or console gaming, Den of Geek has you covered with the hottest peripherals and games. Here are this season’s must-have gaming goodies.
BlackShark V2 X Gaming Headset No matter how good your speakers are, headsets give the best audio edge to hear what’s happening around you. Razer’s BlackShark V2 X Gaming Headset is compatible with PC and modern consoles and comes in a variety of colors. With passive noise-canceling and the HyperClear Cardioid mic, the BlackShark is a gaming essential.
iBUYPOWER Slate 8 MESH Gaming PC iBUYPOWER produces top-of-the-line PCs for a variety of purposes, including high-performance gaming and editing. The Slate MESH Gaming PC boasts an Intel Core i7 processor, a 2TB NVMe solid state drive, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card. To play games at maximum performance, iBUYPOWER has got players covered.
The new video game podcast from Den of Geek, featuring exclusive interviews, reviews, and coverage of the biggest gaming events of the year! Watch all episodes on denofgeek.com, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Mayflash F300 Arcade Fight Stick Fighting game purists prefer fight sticks over controllers, and the market is full of them. Mayflash’s F300 is compatible with Xbox consoles, PS4, Switch, and PC, with customizable inputs and speeds. For those looking to take fighting games to the next level, Mayflash has a whole line of products to choose from.
Switch Games Organizer Station With so many games and accessories, it can be tough to keep one’s Nintendo Switch collection well organized. Fortunately, Kytok has released an all-in-one organizer that can hold up to 28 games, 2 Pro Controllers, and a charging station for four Joycons. The Kytok organizer keeps all things Switch powered and easy to access.
BlackWidow V4 Pro Keyboard
Razer has managed to level up its already impressive line of gaming keyboards with the BlackWidow V4 Pro Keyboard. The V4 offers a 4K Hz wireless and Bluetooth 5.1 technology, allowing users to toggle between three Bluetooth devices. Coupled with the BlackWidow’s customization options and advanced ergonomics, the V4 is Razer’s ultimate keyboard.
Silent Hill 2 Vinyl Soundtrack Horror games rely heavily on atmosphere, often fueled by ambient soundtracks, especially Silent Hill 2. Composed by Akira Yamaoka, the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack has since received a double-disc vinyl limited edition release. With its haunting piano melodies and evocative arrangements, Silent Hill 2 ’s music transcends its medium and genre.
Kirby Plush Kirby is easily one of the cutest and cuddliest Nintendo characters, and gamers can have their own Kirby to hold themselves. Produced by Little Buddy, the Kirby plush faithfully recreates the Nintendo icon’s friendly appearance and round design. Standing at nine inches, this Kirby is the perfect small pillow or stress reliever.
Nintendo Sound Clock
Alarmo Start the day off with Nintendo thanks to the Sound Clock Alarmo, an alarm clock with programmable music and sound effects from Nintendo’s extensive game library. The clock also has motion sensors, with users activating its snooze feature or turning off the alarm with a wave as they begin their day right.
Resident Evil Nemesis
Replica Statue One of the most iconic monsters in gaming is Nemesis, who hunts Jill Valentine throughout Resident Evil 3. The hulking behemoth has received a highly detailed and hand-painted replica statue, recreating its look in Resident Evil 3 Remake. Crafted by Numskull Designs, this statue is a must-have for any Resident Evil fan.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard The Dragon Age franchise is back in a big way with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It maintains the ambitious continuity of preceding games, but feels like a fresh start, refining the action RPG gameplay. It wisely leans into the party character dynamics for an epic yet intimate fantasy adventure.
Super Mario Party Jamboree Mario Party is back with its biggest playable roster yet in Super Mario Party Jamboree Jamboree brings a whole new wave of game boards, minigames, and gameplay mechanics, keeping the Mario Party experience fresh. With a wealth of game modes, Super Mario Party Jamboree is the ultimate Switch party game.
Astro Bot 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of PlayStation, and Sony celebrated this milestone with Astro Bot. The game’s lovable protagonist, Astro, reassembles his PlayStation 5 mothership and rescues his fellow bots, representing classic franchises across PS history. A love letter to the PlayStation legacy, Astro Bot is also the best platformer in years.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
It’s been four years since the acclaimed Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Square Enix has returned with the PS5 sequel, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Rebirth offers a modern take on the classic RPG, expanding it to an openworld adventure. A game of the year contender, Rebirth is Final Fantasy at its very best.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle One of the most anticipated games since it was announced is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, released for Xbox Series X|S and PC this year. This first-person adventure puts players in Indy’s shoes as the timeless hero makes his globe-trotting return to keep an artifact from enemy hands.
The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Legend of Zelda fans received the first mainline game in the series where they could play as Princess Zelda. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is a puzzlecentric adventure as Zelda moves to save Hyrule. Echoes of Wisdom is the perfect blend of classic Zelda and a subversion of the formula.
Silent Hill 2 Remake
There were high expectations surrounding this chilling remake, and, fortunately, it is worthy of the original’s legacy. The landmark horror game has been revamped for the PS5, keeping its unsettling atmosphere and haunting story. A delight for longtime fans and new players alike
Skeleton Crew reveals the unseen corners of the Star Wars galaxy— but don’t call it a kids’ show.
BY RYAN BRITT
of Skeleton Crew, young Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) encounters a barrier with his speeder bike, and so has to get off the bike and haul it up with his hands. Sure, this is a fictional ride with anti-gravity of some kind, but even this bike has its limits. Any latchkey kid from the ’80s or
’90s can relate, which is the brilliance of the newest Disney+ Star Wars series; it makes you feel like a kid again. Lucky for Wim and three other galactic kiddos —certified mean girl Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), pseudo-cyborg KB (Kyriana Kratter), and blue elephant alien Neel (Robert Timothy Smith)—their mode of transport gets a serious upgrade by the end of the first episode. Hint: Did you ever dream of finding a wrecked starship in your backyard?
“As a kid, you’d just go off on an adventure and just hope that you’d end up in Star Wars somehow,” Skeleton Crew
paperback fantasy novel and a slick ’80s movie best enjoyed with a heavy dose of Twizzlers and Reese’s Pieces.
“If we’re talking about ’80s movies, I feel like every single one of them is somehow the inspiration,” Watts says of the ’80s vibe in Skeleton Crew. “We were so immersed in that world that you can’t help it. We’re never consciously referencing any of that stuff. It just is part of our DNA.”
Best known to genre fans as the director of the last three Spider-Man films for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Watts clearly gets what makes a geek heart beat faster but also what simply makes good stories work. Along with Christopher Ford—the screenwriter on Spider-Man: Homecoming—the pair aimed to do what anyone tries to do with a new Star Wars project these days: make it seem different, yet familiar.
Haters have bemoaned for years now that new Star Wars products either rely too much on nostalgia or, paradoxically, don’t have enough respect for the original movies. Skeleton Crew smartly sidesteps much of these conversations simply because a ton of its nostalgia fuel doesn’t come from obvious sources.
co-creator Jon Watts tells Den of Geek. “That’s all I did growing up.”
Because the opening episode of Skeleton Crew leans heavily on the trope of kids encountering something weird in a field (Stephen King is smiling somewhere), it’s tempting to think of the show as the in-universe Star Wars answer to the first season of Stranger Things. But, it turns out, that’s just the setup. Skeleton Crew is playing a longer game. On the surface, the new series looks like a sweet coming-of-age story that just happens to be set inside of the Star Wars galaxy. But, in truth, it’s a narrative chimera: part-pirate story, part-space opera, and best of all, a fantasy mystery that feels like a beautiful mash-up of a beat-up
While some of the early press around Skeleton Crew has focused on the movie being a Goonies-style adventure set in the faraway Star Wars galaxy, Ford is quick to point out that some deeper cuts, like the 1985 film Explorers, were equally influential on Skeleton Crew, and that’s because of the pure love of the fantasy they tried to craft. In short, the demographic for Skeleton Crew is, in their minds, themselves.
“We didn’t go into this trying to write an AI prompt of combining cool things,” Ford says. “We just were trying
to write a good story, and these are the things that have been drummed into our imaginations.”
Among their cinematic influences for Skeleton Crew, Watts and Ford cite various films produced by Amblin in the ’80s—the studio most famous for E.T. the ExtraTerrestrial, but perhaps more relevantly, The Goonies, Gremlins, and Young Sherlock Holmes. But just because the show focuses on children, that doesn’t mean the stakes are low. If anything, the innocence and naiveté of the kids make the tension even greater. In the second episode, when the gang finds itself on what can only be described as a pirate spaceport, you’re genuinely concerned that something horrible is going to happen.
“You’re still going to get the jeopardy,” series star Jude Law explains. “Which Jon turns way up; he makes the threat very real. In this show, life and death mean life and death. But you still have the innocence.”
Hardcore Star Wars fans know a lot about characters glimpsed in the background, and in many ways, Skeleton Crew is a show built on that subculture within fandom. In the 1990s, there were short story anthologies like Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina and Tales from Jabba’s Palace, which tell stories about the many characters who exist in the periphery of the film saga. Accordingly, stepping into Skeleton Crew is like stepping into a rich, live-action version of those ’90s books and comics. In the first
episode, one of the first characters we see is the pirate Brutus (Fred Tatasciore), a menacing Shistavanen— better known as a “wolfman” alien—first glimpsed in the theatrical cut of Star Wars, chilling at the bar, looking scary as hell.
“We’re interested in these kinds of characters because our heroes, these kids, aren’t going to blow up the Death Star,” Ford says. “But we wanted our story to be steeped in that world, and that’s why we have those deep cuts.”
These details aren’t just there for the sake of being dorky Easter eggs. Skeleton Crew has a method to its madness. For one thing, The Mandalorian has just spent the past five years establishing a very dangerous and detailed post-Return of the Jedi underworld, and Skeleton Crew is set in that same continuity and at that same point in the timeline.
In fact, Mando stans will recognize the hench-pirate known as Vane (Marti Matulis)—a character who
previously appeared in The Mandalorian. “Vane was supposed to die in Mando,” Ford reveals. “But they loved him, and they let him live, and then we took him.”
More than anything, Watts wants to make it clear that Skeleton Crew isn’t looking to distract viewers with massive surprises or references to other Star Wars stories. “I don’t want people to think that there’s going to be some insane cameo in the middle of the show,” he says firmly. And then, Ford adds, “Yeah, not to rule anything out, but Jude isn’t really Palpatine or anything like that.”
By the end of the second episode, the kids meet a mysterious adult ally in the form of shadowy Force-user Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law), who may or may not be a Jedi, a former pirate captain, a con artist, or all of the above. As Law points out, the tone of Skeleton Crew will feel decidedly closer to something you can imagine watching with the whole family rather than, say, the more adult grittiness of Andor. And yet, this is still the Star Wars universe, and as Ford insists, the duplicitous character of Jod fits in perfectly with the back-stabbing wretched hives of scum and villainy that comprise a surprisingly large part of the Star Wars mythos.
“Well, Jude’s character could totally be in Andor,” Ford points out, to which Watts adds, “We didn’t want this to feel like a kids’ show. It still has to be an adult world that they’re in.”
Part of the shift in Skeleton Crew comes from a basic point-of-view change. Yes, we happen to be in the same time frame as The Mandalorian, but certain revelations in the show’s first few episodes make it clear that the background of these children and their specific planet creates a unique opportunity to bring characters into the Star Wars galaxy slowly. This isn’t a reboot or a new timeline at all. It’s just the people who are different.
As Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke in Return of the Jedi, the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. The fascinating thing about Skeleton Crew is that it truly does shift that point of view in a way that we’ve never quite seen before.
“I think it changes the perspective without changing the world,” Watts explains. “It’s the first time where [Star Wars] is really told through the eyes of four 10-year-old kids. And by doing that, I think it just automatically gives it a new feeling without changing the parts of Star Wars that we already know and love.”
So, you can call Skeleton Crew the Stranger Things version of Star Wars or even “Goonies in Space.” But, the advantage this show has over any of the other new Star Wars shows is that the characters themselves don’t really understand the nuances and intricacies of this complex galaxy. And for that simple reason, by shifting the pointof-view, Skeleton Crew might pull off the impossible and create a truly brand-new Star Wars adventure.
Jude Law is Jod Na Nawood. Or is he Crimson Jack?
As one of the great actors of our time, Jude Law contains multitudes. From his brilliant turn as Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes films to stunning dramas from Closer and Cold Mountain to Gattaca and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Law is the rare performer who can use his Jedi mind trick of acting to convince us that he can be anyone.
As Skeleton Crew prepares for launch, we caught up with Law about his love of Star Wars, how he crafted his new role, and whether or not we can really trust Jod Na Nawood.
Seems like you’ve been primed for Star Wars since you did Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in 2004. Have you been wanting to do Star Wars for a long time? Yes, I suppose so! I grew up watching these films, and in fact, on reflection, it defined my experience of cinemagoing because I was, prior to this, prior to seeing Star Wars, I was probably only watching 101 Dalmatians, The Rescuers, the animated Disney films, and then Star Wars came, and no one had seen anything like it. So, it had a profound effect, certainly on the youth of that time, and therefore sits in a very, very warm place, really in my memory and my heart.
There’s something almost classic and literary about your pirate character. For you, was this like stepping into The Count of Monte Cristo? Or Treasure Island? Yeah, definitely. And those themes are there in the sort of piratical tone of the whole piece. This is why Star Wars is such a unique universe. You can layer all of those influences, and it somehow manages to sustain it. You look at the different varieties that have been [in Star Wars], the concepts that have been applied, and it just somehow always manages to absorb them and say, “Yeah, this holds.” That’s because, I think, in essence, it’s got this sort of fable at its heart, this purity. And, of course, the aesthetic is so
LIFE IS STILL INNOCENT OR FULL OF FEAR, AND YET AWE-INSPIRING. THIS SHOW IS WHAT YOUTH IS AND WHAT ONE HOPES YOUTH IS FULL OF.
robust. It’s an aesthetic that we all recognize and we all love and nerd out on. But again, it can hold a lot.
How much of Jude is in Jod?
I was taken by this idea of him being a different person to different people. He’s a survivor in a very desperate world, and he’s good at it. He’s quick-witted, and that leaves a lot to play with.
But I always do this thing of going back and writing my own backstory. Where did he come from? Who is he? Just to give the character a sense of authenticity in my mind. So, I filled all of those blanks in and gave them to Jon and Chris, and they were like, “Yep, that fits.” And then, as we progressed, I got more confident in his skin. It was more a case of just nudging it a little further here and there. I think we were all on the same page pretty quickly. It was wonderful; he was full of such potential.
Can we trust this guy?
Which of his names are real? I can’t say. Not yet.
How long will you stay in the Star Wars universe? Will it be forever?
I mean, the ball’s in their court. It’s always about how one is perceived and taken, and I know they have all sorts of ideas. They’re incredibly creative teams. But, of course, I would come back. I would love that. I would love to step back into Jod’s boots.
This seems like the kind of Star Wars show that is rooted in the Star Wars you grew up with. Is that right? This is very much a show for the whole family. That’s totally the hope. The concept is so smart, and it’s got those great ’80s influences, but there’s a lot of cross-pollination going on. The thing is, it’s really creating an authentic world. The kids are believable in that some have homes, and some have unhappy homes. Some are good at school, some are bad at school. And you know, they don’t all get on. Nonetheless, life is still innocent or full of fear, and yet awe-inspiring. This show is what youth is and what one hopes youth is full of. And then to take that and blast that into Star Wars, it’s just brilliant. I really hope parents who love this world get to sit alongside their kids and watch them discover it and enjoy it.
How hard is it to get that Force-hand gesture just right? That’s the funny thing. So many elements of this world were so deeply familiar. To me, it was like second nature. I realized I’d been rehearsing for 40 years.
The Russo Brothers’ new movie is set in the ‘90s, but not as we know it.
BY CHRIS FARNELL
memories is from the 1964 World’s Fair.
“I remember very clearly going to the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens when they built that whole thing,” Tucci tells Den of Geek in an exclusive interview. “I was three, seeing this robot talking, and I remember thinking, ‘That’s incredible, that is the future. I have it so clearly in my mind.”
Those animatronics, made by Walt Disney, are a matter of public record. However, there are events following that World’s Fair that Tucci does not recall.
“His animatronics became sentient at some point and were commercialized and sold and moved into a service industry role,” director Joe Russo tells us. “People bought them with their very shiny pleasing appearance, and then those sentient robots got angry with us and felt mistreated and that is where the post-war dystopia came from.”
Of course, there is a very good reason that Stanley Tucci doesn’t remember any of that—it never happened. Russo is describing the chain of events that led to the alternate 1990s of his and Anthony Russo’s new movie, The Electric State, coming to Netflix next year.
The film is a story of sentient robots and virtual reality systems, and yet, based on the work of retrofuturist artist and writer Simon Stålenhag, it is grounded firmly in an imaginary version of 30 years ago.
“The ’90s is the right period for what the story was,” says Russo. You’re starting to get into compact discs and DVDs, the advent of cell phones, you’re starting to get into
the interconnected era, and so it felt like the right period for the tech to plausibly sit in this fantasy space.”
The alternate-history setting also helped prevent the story from feeling too preachy. “Period is really important when you’re talking about topical themes because everyone hears every day how bad their phones are for them, how bad screentime is for them, and we don’t want to shove that down their throat,” Russo explains.
This theme was one of the things that attracted Tucci to the project in the first place. “I’m fascinated by technology because I don’t know anything about it, and I’m very bad at using it,” he says. “But how it has changed over my lifetime is so significant, and we are, at times, ruled by it, which is a frightening thing.”
Russo adds: “We’re trying to tell a story in a way that asks some thoughtful questions, but this is all coded in fantasy and science, so it feels like a fable.”
It is an approach that, in many ways, draws on the Russos’ experience directing Dan Harmon’s Community
“On Community, we played with a lot of extreme satire and cultural commentary, and there’s a very fine line between satire becoming intellectual and distancing, and satire that keeps you in the story,” Russo says.
One aspect of The Electric State’s satire could be seen as dangerously on the nose—that the robots of this world were created by Disney. Not only is Disney a big corporation with a keen interest in preserving its own IP, but it is also the Russos’ former and future employer.
“I mean, we didn’t ask them!” Russo laughs. “While we were coming up with the story, we said, ‘How could you have ended up in this alternate 1990s? What could have changed? Who were the innovators of the time who could have led you here?’”
Walt Disney and the Disney animatronics of the 1960s seemed an obvious candidate.
Tucci plays tech billionaire Ethan Skate (which Tucci describes as “very ironic” given his discomfort with
technology). Not as recognizable as Disney, but ask someone to identify a tech billionaire, and it’s a short list.
“Those guys, they are incredibly charming, although they then become uncharming later. They’re almost sociopathic in their ability to win people over and convince people that what they need to do is what they need them to do,” Tucci says.
Those ideas started with Stålenhag’s graphic novel, The Electric State, which attracted the Russos’ interest when it was still on Kickstarter. While that book is a languid, almost Kerouacian road trip, the Russos’ movie strikes a different tone.
“It’s filling the blanks, really. There’s a big world there,” Russo says. “You have to take some of the story that is not in the book and put that on camera in order to tell the complete story. That’s what drew us to the level of immersion, creativity, and commentary in the artwork.”
While the story might have new material, working with production designer Dennis Gassner, the Russos have brought that imagery to the screen.
“When I saw it, I said that I had never seen a movie like that before,” Tucci says. “I had never seen a movie look like that before. Your brain almost can’t reconcile it, the enormity of the robots and the strangeness of them and how clearly they are so themselves. They’re funny looking and extreme but also incredibly moving.”
2
The mysterious series returns with a story of hope and community more relevant than ever.
BY BRYNNA ARENS
DYSTOPIAS CONTINUE to be a popular sci-fi subgenre, despite how much the real world itself feels more and more like it’s pulled from the page or screen of one of these stories. Maybe it’s because we see ourselves in these characters more than we used to, or relate to their struggles more deeply. Or maybe it’s because, despite often insurmountable odds, they find a way to hold on to hope.
Based on the book Wool and its sequels by Hugh Howey, the Apple TV+ series Silo follows the last surviving vestiges of humanity, relegated to living in massive underground silos because the outside world has become too toxic. Asking to go outside, or, really, asking anything about the world before, is forbidden. Anyone who does is given their request and sent out to clean the sensors that show the rest of the silo the desolate wasteland that surrounds them. For everyone who has ventured out to clean thus far, it has been a death sentence.
Season two begins right where we left off, with Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) having been sent out to clean by her silo’s leader, Bernard (Tim Robbins), making it further into the outside world than anyone before her ever has and stumbling upon a silo that appears to have been long abandoned. But what she doesn’t realize is that in doing so, she becomes a symbol of hope to the people she’s left behind, inspiring them to ask questions about their existence and the lies that have been told to them.
While Juliette fights to survive in Silo 17, a rebellion starts brewing in Silo 18. Juliette’s friends on the mechanical level see her survival as proof that the higher-ups have been lying to the people and demand that the truth be spread.
“You get that sense that things are a little different down there, and I think that they are sort of a persecuted class
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and that, historically, we find out they’ve always been blamed for the rebellions, even if they had nothing to do with it,” showrunner Graham Yost says of why mechanical feels different from the rest of the Silo. “They’ve got people that are trying to divide them and trying to divide the Silo, and their answer is, hold together.”
One of those people looking to sow division in the name of returning order is the leader of Silo 18. “This is the tragedy of someone like Bernard,” Tim Robbins says of his character. “We see these people throughout history, where they feel that in order to achieve what they believe is best for society, they have to disobey the laws of society or basic human decency.”
Just like in the real world, there are so many people this season that truly believe they are fighting for the good of the Silo, for the good of their fellow man. We’ll just have to see if their hope for a better future comes to pass, or if the line between order and oppression continues to blur.
Remakes of 1980s movies are a dime a dozen nowadays. And those based on Stephen King tales are just as common. Yet when you hear that genre auteur Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) is taking a stab at The Running Man, you sit up and take notice. It doesn’t hurt that the man doing the running on a dystopian sci-fi reality show is sexy Glen Powell. DC
Kyle Mooney still vividly remembers New Year’s Eve 1999. At age 15, he was sitting on his couch with a friend watching MTV and waiting (hoping?) for the world to end. It didn’t. Looking back, the SNL alum even smirks it was a bit like “the opposite of Covid-19.” Nonetheless, the memory of Y2K panic, when folks were confident the end was nigh because of the “millennium bug” in computers, stayed with him.
And now he is getting to set things right with Y2K, a sci-fi absurdist comedy that imagines an alternate history where high school scrubs (Jaeden Martell and Julian Dennison) actually go out to their senior class’ NYE party, and hang out with dream girl Laura (Rachel Zegler)—only to find it really is the end of the world as they know it.
“I think there is probably a species-wide collective death drive,” muses Evan Winter, who co-wrote Y2K. “It’s something that you don’t want to live through in real life, so you [try to] get a fix of it in a story.”
The story in the film draws on a lot of movies Winter and Mooney grew up with, including 10 Things I Hate About You and Can’t Hardly Wait, before it takes a turn: one which brings Y2K hysteria to a new generation. — David Crow
As one of the most fascinating filmmakers of this century, Bong Joon-ho blossomed in world cinema by making heavily allegorical genre classics like The Host and Snowpiercer. He then achieved rarefied prestige by stepping away from genre and becoming the first filmmaker to win the Best Picture Oscar for a foreign-language movie: Parasite. How marvelous, then, that for his follow-up he went straight back to sci-fi weirdness, right down to getting Hollywood’s favorite weirdo of the moment. Robert Pattinson stars in Mickey 17 as the titular Mickey. He also plays Mickeys 1 through 18 (and maybe more?). They’re all derived from the same sadsack who in the future agrees to become a “disposable employee” (read: enslaved cannon fodder) for The Company’s attempts to colonize an ice world. After he dies, his body is cloned with most of the previous Mickey’s memories intact in the new iteration. But what happens when Mickey 17 doesn’t die as expected, and lives long enough to meet Mickey 18? Something hilarious, we’d wager. DC
OPENS ON APRIL 18
Doctor Who “Joy to the World”
Now that the Doctor has solved the mystery of Ruby Sunday, he’s onto the next adventure. That’s festive special “Joy to the World,” written by former showrunner Steven Moffat, and gueststarring Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan as Joy. Expect a time-traveling hotel, a Silurian, a villainous weapons manufacturer, a T. rex, and a grilled ham and cheese sandwich—all the classics. Then in 2025, we’ll have eight brand new season two episodes, with Millie Gibson’s Ruby along with Varada Sethu’s new companion, plus five-part spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea — Louisa Mellor
Lee Jung-jae’s Gi-hun is back and ready to take on a new set of challenges.
BY KAYTI BURT
IN LATE 2021, as wealth inequality inched ever higher globally, Squid Game hit Netflix. The Koreanlanguage drama about a group of desperate people who take part in a deadly competition for the slim chance to win roughly $35 million struck a deep chord with viewers around the world, including in the U.S., where one in four tuned in. “I wanted to hold a mirror to the current society that we live in through Squid Game,” writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk told press at Lucca, Italy’s annual comics and gaming convention in November 2024, as Netflix geared up its promotional machine for the series’ second season. “Squid Game is a series through which I hoped to show how the current contemporary capitalist society and its limitless competition and competitive system has led to an exacerbated wealth gap, as well as created numerous numbers of so-called ‘losers’ of the game.”
Three years later, Squid Game remains Netflix’s mostwatched TV series ever, and capitalism is still a thing. A
There are plenty more sci-fi treats on the way in 2025. Here are the ones to look out for...
second season of Hwang’s story will be released on Netflix on Dec. 26, just as the Christmas cheer is fading, with the hopes that global viewers are still interested in Squid Game’s specific flavor of media catharsis. “If season one was about the story of Seong Gi-hun [played by The Acolyte’s Lee Jung-jae], or Player Number 456, entering Squid Game for the first time, and about how he survives and leaves the game as a winner,” teased Hwang, “[then] season two is going to be that Gi-hun, based with his memories of the first game and the experiences, is going through a new realization and an awakening and returning once again in order to stop this unjust game.”
As before, Gi-hun will not be alone in the game. With most of the first season’s ensemble killed off, viewers will
⊲ Marvel is back in force in 2025, starting with Captain America: Brave New World in February. Anti-hero team up Thunderbolts* follows in May. Marvel’s big summer movie is The Fantastic Four, and from camp DC don’t miss James Gunn’s Superman, out July.
⊲ Four big sci-fi franchises are back. 28 Years Later revisits the zombie series in June, Jurassic World Rebirth kicks off a new phase of dino-shenanigans in July, and Tron: Ares casts Jared Leto as a program made real in October. Then in December is Avatar: Fire and Ash
be introduced to a bevy of new characters played by a cast recognizable to fans of Korean pop culture. K-pop idols Jo Yu-ri (Iz*One) and T.O.P (BIGBANG) will appear alongside actors like Park Gyu-young and Lee Jin-uk, who both appeared in Sweet Home, the first K-drama to make it into the U.S. Netflix Top Ten. “With each episode, you’ll be able to meet characters with different backstories,” said Lee of season two, “and you will find yourself rooting for these characters and wanting to really understand them and relate to them.”
Wi Ha-jun’s (The Midnight Romance in Hagwon) detective, Hwang Jun-ho, will also return in season two. When last we saw him, Jun-ho had been shot by his long-lost brother, In-ho (the G.I. Joe franchise’s Lee Byung-hun), after Jun-ho
went undercover as a game guard to find him. As part of the climactic betrayal, In-ho was revealed to be the Front Man, a former winner who now leads the game’s staff. Wi teased of Jun-ho’s season two arc: “He quite literally turns away from the gates of death in order to find his brother and to chase those cruel ones behind the game.” Lee’s Front Man will be back and was seen continuing to stoically oversee the games in an official trailer.
With a third and final season planned for release in 2025, Hwang hopes Squid Game will continue to raise questions like, “What kind of society are we living in?” and, “What kind of world is the future world going to be like, and is there any way we can put a stop to it?” Thematically, there is a deeper warning at the heart of Squid Game’s diverting story: “If we neglect the weak [classes] that have been created through this current system,” says Hwang, “those who have benefited from the labor… of the weak will no longer be able to live [in this] status quo.”
⊲ Over on TV, science fiction will once again loom large in 2025 with season 2 of Apple TV+’s trippy workplace thriller, Severance premiering in January, followed by fresh outings for The Last of Us, Andor, The Rig, and the final season of Netflix’s epic Stranger Things
⊲ Another hot pick is The Bride, coming in September. Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, this is a Bride of Frankenstein retelling starring Christian Bale as the monster and Jesse Buckley as his bride. It’s a musical featuring big dance numbers. Sold.
⊲ Of late, director Yorgos Lanthimos is “on one” and we are there for it. So learning that Bugonia, starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, is a sci-fi comedy about conspiracy theorists who kidnap a CEO thinking she’s a deadly alien is a win. Coming in November.
James Gunn launches the new DC Universe with a band of complex monsters in Creature Commandos. We speak with Gunn and his cast of oddballs about surprising sympathies, playing evil, and, of course, killing Nazis.
BY JOE GEORGE
but Creature Commandos delivers a humdinger of a supervillains vs. superheroes battle in its third installment. Unlike the standard superhero fare, in which Superman or Spider-Man detains the baddie and leaves them for the authorities, Creature Commandos roars past good taste for a brutal execution of an evildoer.
So horrific is the attack that team leader Rick Flag Sr. (voiced by Frank Grillo) cannot find the words to make them stop.
“You wanted monsters,” sneers the Bride (Indira Varma) as she takes her place next to Flag. “You’ve got monsters.”
Flag’s shocked look may capture the audience’s feeling of disgust at the attack, but the Bride’s rejoinder raises a question. Did we want monsters? After all, the first major project of the new DC Universe that James Gunn and Peter Safran have created is 2025’s Superman, a film that promises
all the awe and wholesome wonder of a bygone era. Why is Gunn starting Gods and Monsters, the first chapter of his and Safran’s tenure as the co-heads of DC Studios, with a bloody adult animation series about monsters working for the U.S. government?
For Gunn, the reason is simple. “It was written,” he tells Den of Geek with a self-deprecating laugh.
But there’s more to the placement of Creature Commandos, as Gunn’s group of misunderstood monsters points the way for a hopeful DC Universe, even for the strange and outcast.
Anyone familiar with Gunn’s previous work in the DC Universe will find Creature Commandos familiar, and not just because it picks up on the events of The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. Congress’ ban on the use of metahumans has put an end to Task Force X, so Amanda Waller (voiced by a returning Viola Davis) constructs Task Force M, a team of monsters she can use for black ops missions.
Alongside The Suicide Squad survivor Weasel (Sean Gunn), Task Force M features the Bride, acidic mad scientist Doctor Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk), kind-hearted sea creature Nina Mazursky (Zoë Chao), and G.I. Robot, a decommissioned Nazi-killing android from World War II (also Sean Gunn).
The team’s first mission sends them to the fictional European nation of Pokolistan, where the witch Circe (Anya Chalotra) has sent an army of men’s rights activists called the Sons of Themyscira to attack ruler Princess Ilana Rostovic (Maria Bakalova).
To fight a witch, Waller sends monsters, and Gunn’s cast relished the chance to play the villains.
“I like being straight-up evil,” quips Tudyk, whose Doctor Phosphorus gleefully delivers Mortal Kombat-style kills.
“In animation, murdering people is pretty fun. It isn’t a long day and you’re not covered in blood. I can burn so many faces and then go have lunch.”
“In animation, murdering people is pretty fun. You’re not covered in blood. I can burn so many faces then go have lunch.”
–Alan Tudyk
“I love to play like a supervillain,” agrees Sean Gunn, but he has a very different take on both of his Creature Commandos characters. “I don’t think either G.I. Robot or Weasel has an ounce of evil in them.” That last one is a bit of a shock, given that Waller described the man-sized rodent as a child killer in The Suicide Squad. Gunn doesn’t agree. “Weasel’s just big and lovable…” he begins to say but cuts himself off. “Well, we’ll learn more about Weasel.”
In fact, we learn more about all the members of Task Force M. Creature Commandos’ A-plot focuses on the team’s mission in Pokolistan, but each episode’s B-plot reveals a character’s brutal backstory. For example, the Bride’s dripping sarcasm stems from a tragic event involving the man for whom she was created, Eric Frankenstein (David Harbour). G.I. Robot is “literally a robot, so he’s been programmed to just kill Nazis, which he loves doing,” explains Sean Gunn, who somehow plays the pathos in a machine who no longer gets to kill Nazis with his pal Sgt. Rock.
Each of these backstories adds depth to the show’s characters, making them more than the bloody monsters they initially seem to be. Even Tudyk teases that “the origin story for my character is heartbreaking.”
The one exception here is merwoman Nina Mazursky, the sweetheart of the show. “Her origin story also has a lot of adversity, but she remains this open, caring being,” enthuses Chao. “I think that’s her real superpower.” That ability to care in the face of adversity also makes Nina a key member of the Creature Commandos, even if her teammates don’t quite see it.
“So many of these underdogs and outcasts are just lonely, and Nina’s life has been marked by loneliness,” she explains. “She’s finally found her tribe in this motley crew of monsters.”
Monsters might get the headlines, but they’re not the only surprising figures in Creature Commandos. Humans such as Flag and Princess Ilana could also fall into the flat stereotypes of a grizzled trooper or a damsel in distress. But Frank Grillo and Maria Bakalova follow their co-stars’ lead by finding human notes in the characters.
Grillo approaches the challenge with a soldier’s sobriety. “You just absorb the circumstance and you go with it. If you put anything on it—if you try to be funny, if you try to be sad, if you try to imagine that this animated character isn’t you—it’ll be a problem,” he says. “But if you approach an animated character the same way you approach every other character, it comes out as authentic.”
The same is true of Bakalova’s Ilana, who is “the hardest character to play in the show,” claims Gunn. “We’re never telegraphing what to think about that character. We don’t explain her intentions, whether they’re good or bad. Maria had to bring to life someone totally different from herself with no clear motivations, and she really hit it home.”
Bakalova takes the compliment but turns it right back around on Gunn, saying, “I had a great person to guide me, so it’s not that challenging.” However, Bakalova is playing the one primary character who has no comic-book forerunner, someone created for the series. “Ilana doesn’t exist before we see her on screen,” Bakalova says with a smile. “So you have no way of knowing if she’s telling the
“And if anyone has a problem with it, they can tap me on the shoulder,” offers the muscular Grillo, perhaps unhelpfully. “We’ll have a conversation.”
The DC Universe certainly hasn’t lacked for conversation ever since Gunn and Safran took over with a pseudorelaunch. The duo has announced an ambitious slate of projects over the next few years, which run the gamut from the expected big names such as Superman and Batman: The Brave and the Bold to deeper pulls, including a Booster Gold film.
truth or lying or manipulating.”
That unknown nature really challenges Flag, who still mourns the death of his son Rick Flag Jr. (played by Joel Kinnaman in Suicide Squad and The Suicide Squad). “Maybe she just needs Rick’s help, and yet she’s like, ‘I’m bold and I’m feminine and blah, blah, blah,’” jokes Bakalova, undercutting her character’s apparent bravery. “What is it actually?”
Bakalova has the freedom to create her character—a privilege that her castmates do not share. That’s fine for Grillo, who has already portrayed a beloved comic-book character with Brock Rumlow, aka Crossbones, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “I know that no matter what you do, there’s going to be a group of people that disagree with it. My job is to make what’s on the page great and make this guy here [gestures at James Gunn] happy.”
“The scripts were just so good, with so much texture and world-building in them,” agrees Chao, whose character, Nina Mazursky, has appeared in just a handful of comics. “It’s also a relief that I didn’t have to go outside the script to piece together Nina.”
As the man who turned characters like Groot and Rocket Raccoon into household names, James Gunn has already proven his love for crazy comicbook lore. “James always found it hilarious that there was this comic-book character called the Weasel who just looks like a big weasel and doesn’t have any powers,” recalls his brother Sean Gunn. That love shows in Creature Commandos, which features odd, comics-inspired touches such as the Question’s home base, Hub City, the Atomic Knights, and Dr. Will Magnus of the Metal Men.
To fill out his new weird, wonderful world, James Gunn chose Dean Lorey to be Creature Commandos’ showrunner. A veteran of shows such as Harley Quinn and Kite-Man: Hell Yeah!, Lorey knows how to work an obscure oddity into a big-budget series. However, while Creature Commandos certainly has humor, it’s far less goofy than Lorey’s previous projects. “This show has a great deal more gravity to it. It’s at heart a drama and it’s really the first taste of James’ vision of the DCU,” he says.
For his part, Gunn doesn’t see the show as anything so grand. “Every project from DC Studios is going to have its own feeling and tone. Creature Commandos is completely different from Superman,” he tells us, relieving those worried about Clark Kent eviscerating his enemies.
“And those are just the things I’m working on. When you get to Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow or Lanterns, those are completely other things. Every story in the DCU is completely different.”
From that perspective, Creature Commandos may be the perfect series to begin the new DC Universe. Because the monsters of Task Force M are nothing if not different, and that difference allows them to be heroes—just, sometimes, very nasty-looking heroes.
Creature Commandos premieres on Max on Dec. 5.
Jason Blum takes us inside his production company to look at Blumhouse’s 2025 film slate and the larger horror landscape. BY DAVID CROW
If the past year has proven anything, it’s that folks in the film industry can grow accustomed to waiting on tenterhooks. After all, 2024 has been a good news/bad news situation for studios and theater owners who spent 12 months recovering from last year’s production delays and the pressures they placed on the release schedule.
Yet while much of Hollywood can cautiously breathe a sigh of relief after the past summer slump shrank by August, much of the horror genre has proven far more resilient in its own little corner. There are still doom-and-gloom prophecies stirred in the trades every few months about audience fatigue every time a new release stumbles, but as seen in the back half of this year, such proclamations are shortly followed by breakout indie sensations or durable studio franchise hits in the genre.
That might also be why Jason Blum, the founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions and perhaps the most influential horror producer in this century, only smiles when we ask him to give us a state of the union for his genre of choice.
“Speaking as horror’s commander-in-chief,” Blum says with a little smile, “I have to say the media landscape is generally quite bleak, but horror is a very bright spot in that rather bleak
landscape. People seem to love going to horror movies in groups. As we know, the box office is down a little bit this year, and it’s not totally recovered since Covid, but horror seems to really work in movie theaters. So I’m very glad to say that horror is alive and well.”
When we catch up with Blum inside the Den of Geek studio, spooky season is still in bloom, and not one but two horror movies have opened at number one at the box office in back-to-back weeks. The producer notes that this turn of events—including how the unrated indie of the pair, Terrifier 3, unseated Joker: Folie à Deux in its first weekend—defies conventional industry wisdom. But he considers audiences embracing the purely monstrous thrills of Art the Clown or a smile demon as a harbinger of good, wicked things to come.
“It looks like there is a real appetite out there for horror, and it seems like at the moment what fans are really looking for is old-fashioned horror,” Blum considers. “They don’t want deviations; they want old-fashioned, tough, gritty, scary, gory horror.”
Which makes it fortuitous that the next Blumhouse title, which will arrive in cinemas in January, will be a gory and gritty throwback to the most old-fashioned of movie monsters: the
Wolf Man. Blum seems to have the magic touch that Universal Pictures has been searching for with regard to their Universal Monsters legacy. To date, 2020’s The Invisible Man remains the only reinvention of one of those characters to have really popped with critics and moviegoers in the last 25 years.
Still, when we chat, Blum notes that it’s not a Blumhouse mission to remake every Universal Monster property.
“I don’t really know what we would do with it; it’s kind of a case-by-case basis,” Blum says. He even reveals that he took a hard look at doing a modern riff on Bride of Frankenstein but that he could never find a way into the material that fits with Blumhouse’s M.O. “It was always sort of funny or always sort of campy, and I could never get a path to making it like a straight horror movie, and so we didn’t tackle it.”
However, Wolf Man proved more fruitful, particularly since it is a title that ended up being written and directed by Blumhouse stalwart Leigh Whannell, the mind behind the most recent Invisible Man
“It’s a project I’ve been passionate about for a very long time, since before we did Invisible Man with Leigh,” Blum explains. “I always thought if The Invisible Man worked, I’d love to try and tackle The Wolf Man and try to do with the Wolf Man what Leigh did with the Invisible Man. And I would describe that as taking the monster and [not] making it a four-quadrant movie for everybody, but returning to its roots, which is a straight horror movie.”
At this point, Blum is aware that he has developed a familiar stable of connections with respected filmmakers in the genre. Whannell and the producer have a history going back to the first Insidious, which Whannell wrote and starred in. But like Christopher Landon, who directed horror-comedies Happy Death Day and Freaky at Blumhouse, Blum has seen that quirky and sometimes comedic voice develop and mature into something more complex in later works.
“I think there are certain filmmakers, like Chris and Leigh, who can bring levity to a horror movie, which
makes the movie scarier because the audience kind of relaxes for a minute and starts to laugh. And when they’re relaxed, they’re easier to scare.” With that said, Blum and Landon’s next collaboration, April’s Drop, is deadly serious. The producer describes the movie as a “taut and super-intense” 92-minute techno-thriller wherein a single mother on a blind date (Meghann Fahy) discovers an anonymous stranger is AirDropping threats to her child and family over the phone.
“I wrote a movie a long time ago called Disturbia,” Landon says in a separate interview, “which is very much a Hitchcockian thriller. This is a return to something that I’ve always loved, [and] a break from the horrorcomedy world.” A movie that Landon describes as perfect for our current Twitter moment—“We will not call it X, no one calls it X!” he quips—Drop is a shot of original horror adrenaline.
However, Blumhouse is also keeping one foot in returning to titles that audiences already love, including follow-ups to genre breakouts such as M3GAN and The Black Phone. “I think the most important factor to creating a successful sequel is to have the people responsible for
“THE MEDIA LANDSCAPE IS GENERALLY QUITE BLEAK, BUT HORROR IS A VERY BRIGHT SPOT IN THAT RATHER BLEAK LANDSCAPE.”
– JASON
FOUNDER AND CEO OF BLUMHOUSE PRODUCTIONS
the original movie back,” Blum muses. “Hollywood doesn’t do that a lot, but on almost all the sequels we’ve done—not all, but almost all the sequels we’ve done—we have the original people back. There’s a tone and a magic dust in a movie that connects with the culture.”
In the case of M3GAN 2.0, that means director Gerard Johnstone, writer Akela Cooper, and stars Allison Williams and Violet McGraw—and, of course, M3GAN herself (voiced by Jenna Davis).
“It extends on that theme,” Blum says of the first film’s focus on parenting in a world filled with 21st-century technology. “I don’t think we’re tackling new social issues, but we’re getting deeper into who M3GAN is, what makes her tick, and how lethal she can actually be.”
Blum is coy as to whether he’s seen any dailies of sequences as TikTok-friendly as the first film’s dance and singing beats, but he certainly hopes to tap back into that vein since M3GAN is a personal favorite in the Blum household.
“Little M3GAN is very lovable, and my daughter’s going to be M3GAN for Halloween this year,” he says. “That’s the first time she’s ever worn a Blumhouse costume, so clearly the movie affected the culture.”
The first Black Phone obviously also had a major impact, which Blum largely credits to director Scott Derrickson, who has been instrumental in reinventing it for a sequel. Remember, the first film’s villain (Ethan Hawke as the ghastly “Grabber”) is no longer on this mortal coil.
“Scott Derrickson doesn’t come back to do a sequel unless there’s a real reason for it to be told besides we’re trying to take everybody’s money again,” says Blum. And while he is taciturn about what that exact reason is, he says they found a way to continue marrying the first film’s blend of supernatural terror with something decidedly more realistic. “It definitely explores new themes, but I think in terms of the supernatural, it’s similar to the first movie.”
There is also, of course, one more sequel in 2025— and a follow-up to Blumhouse’s biggest opening weekend to date—Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. While that December
2025 release still hasn’t gone before cameras, Blum seems particularly confident in what he and Scott Cawthon, the creator of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game franchise, have come up with.
“We worked very hard on the script for this movie,” Blum says. “We didn’t have as many drafts of the script of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 as we did on [the first movie]. On that, we had about 14 different versions; on this, we had about four or five different versions.” Blum credits Cawthon as being one of the most intuitive collaborators he has ever seen pick up the tricks of moviemaking. Blum also notes that the blending of the Five Nights brand between cinema and gaming is reflective of horror’s current moment.
“I think people will continue to find horror in movies and on television; people are finding horror in short form; people are finding horror on YouTube; and obviously horror games have been popular for a long, long time,” Blum posits. “And I don’t want to expand the company by doing other kinds of movies or other kinds of TV shows. I want to expand by scaring people in different ways. I want to scare people in games, in live events, and in movies and TV shows. In any way I possibly can.” If he achieves that, the state of the union will stay quite strong.
Additional reporting by Aaron Sagers.
We talk to Philippa Boyens, co-writer and co-producer on Peter Jackson’s Tolkien movies, and the cast and crew behind new anime feature
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
BY JULIETTE HARRISSON
Nobody could forget the Battle of Helm’s Deep, the doomed bloodbath that became a surprise victory in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. But who remembers the king who gave the setting its name?
King Helm Hammerhand was a legendary ruler of the horse-loving kingdom of Rohan, whose story was outlined briefly in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings
This December’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim casts Succession’s Brian Cox as King Helm’s voice and tells his tale through the eyes of his daughter, Hèra (Gaia Wise), who must fight to defend her people after a diplomatic meeting goes seriously wrong.
For writer and producer Philippa Boyens, it was an exciting chance to tell a new story set in Tolkien’s world. “We could bring some fresh characters to the storytelling that fans of Tolkien wouldn’t have come across before,” Boyens tells Den of Geek when we chat via Zoom, “and delve into their stories. Even though it’s quite a gritty story, [director Kenji] Kamiyama was not afraid, because he’s a storyteller. The story gets very claustrophobic; you think you’re in
one tale, and then it becomes something quite different. And it comes down to these very human emotions of obsession and love that have turned to hate.”
We’ve seen Tolkien’s Middle-earth in animated form before, but this will be the first time that we see it transformed into Japanese anime. “We’d been looking at animated films,” Boyens explains, “and we said, ‘What about anime?’ I thought, ‘There is a story that could work really well.’ There’s something about the Rohirrim that speaks to that great tradition of Japanese storytelling.”
The new film is very clearly and intentionally set in the same version of Tolkien’s world as the two epic film trilogies Boyens co-wrote and
co-produced with Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, and the style of Japanese anime was a particularly good fit for that. “Great Japanese films can touch on the fantastical,” Boyens says, “but they also [have] an otherworldly quality without losing any feeling of realness and grittiness. There’s a magical quality to it that elevates it. It also allowed us to bring Kenji Kamiyama to the world of it. And he’s such a masterful director.”
Kamiyama has an extensive background in anime television shows, including Blade Runner: Black Lotus and Star Wars: Visions. For him, Jackson’s films were the key to entering Tolkien’s world. The book was “such a dense translation into Japanese,” he tells us. But Jackson’s films made him “realize what kind of story this was.” So he delved back into the text and became a huge fan, appreciating the work that Tolkien put into building his universe.
The design of the film clearly references Jackson’s trilogies while also putting its own stamp on the material. “We were given open access to everything they had,” Kamiyama says. “The concept artists John Howe and Alan Lee also came on board. But at the same time, it had to be redesigned [in a way] that fits into the world of animation.” The aim
was to keep the lines of the live-action films’ designs while also creating beautiful artwork that would fit into an anime production.
The process of creating an animated film is, of course, quite different from filmmaking in live-action. For Brian Cox, playing Helm Hammerhand was a welcome return to radio acting. “I’m a passionate lover of the radio,” he tells us, “I love radio acting. I love it for selfish reasons. You don’t have to wear makeup, you don’t have to wear costumes, but it’s all about the script and your relationship to that script.” He also worked closely with Boyens, who “was incredible and really helpful, and she gave me a lot of free rein in the role.”
For Gaia Wise and Luke Pasqualino, playing Hèra and Dunlending prince Wulf, the process was surprisingly physical. “When you read ‘fight noises’
on a page,” Wise says, “you go, ‘Can you elaborate slightly? The first time I did it, I had a tiny sword and a tiny shield in the booth, and I was pretending I was stabbing. But you can’t make the motion fully because [the microphone] can pick up the click of your shoulder. And then towards the end, when we were in the larger rooms, I was jumping about and running around, and getting on and off horses was just a lot of me climbing off of chairs.”
Pasqualino had the benefit of some prior sword-fighting experience to draw on in the BBC’s The Musketeers. “I think I did draw on my Musketeers experience for a little bit of fight stuff, but it’s never quite the same,” he says. “And then as the animation side of it developed, we actually could see the fight scenes, and you have to hone it a little bit and tweak it, but it was nice
Hèra with father Helm (Brian Cox) and brothers Haleth (Benjamin Wainwright) and Háma (Yazdan Qafouri).
to have that experience up here somewhere and draw upon it as and when needed.” The physical action may have been less strenuous, but according to Pasqualino, both actors still suffered for their art. “We both choked ourselves,” he says, “and I lost my voice. But it was the very final take of my very final recording. So at least that happened then and not before!”
With fight noises nailed, it was up to Kamiyama to create epic battle scenes to stand alongside their live-action counterparts. Much of the action of the movie takes place at Helm’s Deep, or more specifically, the Hornburg, the stronghold at the front of the canyon
of Helm’s Deep; it was a source of great annoyance to Tolkien that people kept mixing them up. This was the site of one of the most epic and fondly remembered battle sequences in Jackson’s The Two Towers, so this adaptation has a lot to live up to.
“It was casually thrown around, [numbers] like 2,000 horses or 3,000 horses,” Kamiyama says. “But they had to move, and they don’t just move. They have to be in a battle. And then you have the intricacies of detail in terms of armor and then the clothes.”
Kamiyama’s solution was to use a combination of techniques, including CG animation and motion capture, as
Tolkien’s brief outline of the story of Helm Hammerhand is kicked off by a request for Helm’s daughter’s hand in marriage. But Tolkien did not name the daughter, and she quickly disappeared from his narrative. To find her untold story, the writers looked to history instead.
Tolkien acknowledged the influence of the Anglo-Saxons on the development of the Rohirrim, so it was to the Anglo-Saxons the writers turned for inspiration and to Aethelflaed, the daughter of English king Alfred the Great, in particular. As Philippa Boyens explains: “Her father dies, her husband dies, her brother is besieged, and she holds her people, the Mercians, together. Not as a ruler; she’s never given a crown. They follow her because they trust her and because of her smarts and courage.” Aethelflaed was, like the newly-named Hèra, responsible for organizing the defenses of her people, “and so she was a natural inspiration. She did what she did because there was no one else and because these were her people, and she had made that commitment to them.” Ultimately, though, the character is still firmly rooted in the women Tolkien himself wrote. “She is the ancestor of Éowyn, you know!” Boyens reminds us.
well as traditional hand-drawn elements. “Human movements and horse movements were provided as a guide to the animators to hand draw it—not to trace it, but to interpret it. If you trace it, it becomes a rotoscope. Then it becomes a human movement, so you might as well do it as a liveaction movie.”
Boyens is enthusiastic about the process of making an animated Lord of the Rings movie, and there may be more to come in the future. “I feel like I’ve fallen in love with animation,” she says. “There’s a ton of really brilliant stories that I think are left to be told, and some that are most perfectly suited to animation.”
In the meantime, though, The Hunt for Gollum is on! Peter Jackson is producing, and Andy Serkis is directing the next live-action film in the franchise, slated for a 2026 release. “The Hunt for Gollum is going brilliantly,” Boyens tells us. “I had forgotten how much story there is— he must be one of the most brilliant characters Tolkien ever wrote.”
As excited as we are to see the team behind the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy return to live-action, we’re also very happy to see the franchise branch out into new formats, and anime and Tolkien look like they are going to be a pretty good match.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim opens in theaters Dec. 13.
He’s made some of the most iconic films of the past 35 years, and now the prolific director is returning to his indie roots with experimental horror Presence. We sit down with Hollywood’s most versatile auteur.
BY MAX EVRY
“Ilike to have fun, you know?” Steven Soderbergh has clearly been having a ball directing over 30 feature films (averaging one per year) since his auspicious 1989 Palme d’Or-winning debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. That body of work has been anything but predictable, from pulpy crime movies (Out of Sight, The Limey) to sci-fi (Solaris) to comedies (Let Them All Talk) to sports flicks (High Flying Bird) to eccentric biopics (Che, Behind the Candelabra). Arguably, the only genres he hasn’t tackled are Westerns and children’s movies.
“There’s a larger chance of me doing a pure kids’ film than me doing a Western,” Soderbergh admits.
He’s responsible for two wildly successful commercial trilogies—Ocean’s Eleven and Magic Mike—while also prone to experimentation, as with his new film Presence. Ostensibly a horror movie, Presence breaks the mold via the brilliant conceit of having the entire story shot from the POV of a ghost haunting a suburban family’s home.
Shot in sequence over 11 days (with the director filming the ghost POV himself while wearing quiet slippers), Presence was the toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it sold to distributor Neon for $5 million. When it opens this January, it will be a test of Soderbergh’s latest
creative bet, but as someone who works constantly by treating filmmaking “like a sport,” that bet has already paid off. “I’ve never made anything I wouldn’t have made for free,” Soderbergh tells us while finishing his spy movie Black Bag in London. “If I’m not excited to be there, then I’m not going to be there.”
Soderbergh is not only cognizant of keeping himself on his toes creatively, but he’s also savvy about the business. This partially stems from the period after Sex, Lies, and Videotape, when he made three massive box-office failures in a row: Kafka, King of the Hill, and The Underneath. It forced him to rethink his approach, which led to an eventual reversal of fortunes in 2000, having two big hits in one year, Erin Brockovich and Traffic. The latter netted him the Best Director Oscar. Since then, he has deftly alternated between smaller esoteric films and bigger commercial ventures in true “one for them, one for me” style… even though he claims “they’re all for me.”
“Sometimes you need the juice of a hit to talk somebody into something that doesn’t look down the middle,” he
explains. “You have to be strategic about that because too many weird ones in a row begin to affect your ability to get more commercial jobs.”
Presence may be the perfect combination of indie spirit with commercial appeal, especially with a screenplay by Steven Spielberg’s go-to closer, David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds). Having previously collaborated on the thriller Kimi (partly inspired by Koepp’s work on David Fincher’s Panic Room), Soderbergh and Koepp’s history in the horror/thriller genre as well as with each other goes back to the start of their careers.
At one point, you and David Koepp were working on a remake of The Uninvited, a classic gothic ghost tale that shares a lot of notes with Presence, including a brother-sister dynamic.
I’ve known David a long time. We both had movies at Sundance in 1989. He had a very close relationship with Universal, so it must have been his idea, initially, to tackle The Uninvited. We were making real progress and had come up with some interesting/weird stuff, then got hung up on the “Harold the Explainer” scene. I didn’t want to do one. He was like, “You have to do one.” I said, “But they always suck.” He’s like, “You have to explain why this is happening.” So we walked away but stayed friendly. Many years go by, and we had this incident and backstory connected to a house in Los Angeles where my wife and I stay. I wrote eight pages of an opening for Presence and sent it to David. He said, “I know exactly what to do with this.”
I read an unproduced script Koepp wrote about a supercollider. Having no association with a finished film, you could see how airtight/precise his scripts are. Your naturalism tends to mask a lot of those script mechanics in a complementary way.
That’s one of the reasons our collaboration has gone so well. I trust his extremely high level of craft and gift with the architecture of pure movie storytelling. The few notes I end up having with David involve that nine percent of the project where we don’t overlap perfectly. One example on Presence would be the original version of the scene where the psychic visits the family, which was more traditionally theatrical. My mother was a parapsychologist, so I pushed for something naturalistic: this woman has a day job at Home
“[PRESENCE’S POV CONCEPT] WAS A DIRECTORIAL GIMMICK THAT WAS EXCITING. IF IT DOESN’T WORK, YOU’RE SCREWED.”
Depot and doesn’t do this as a business. She has this gift and is convinced to come to the house. The audience doesn’t view her as a kook or a flake. That’s me wanting to keep it from being too caricatured.
A stealth “Harold the Explainer” scene… Exactly. She does a lot of heavy lifting, but it’s disguised well and allowed me to directorially do something interesting with her looking into the camera from the moment she walks through the door and is confronted with the presence, constantly keeping her eye on it.
Terry Gilliam said he doesn’t like shaky handheld shots because they don’t present the way our eyes perceive things. He prefers Steadicams or cranes or static wide angles. How much were you thinking about the way human perception works while shooting Presence? Technically, he’s correct. Our brains and our eyes have the world’s best stabilization technology. It’s an open question amongst directors whether or not all point-of-view shots should be done in studio mode as opposed to handheld. I’ve come to the conclusion that studio mode is the way to go, even though I have shot POV off the shoulder. The case here
Fun facts and trivia about the prolific director.
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Since the beginning, Soderbergh has acted as his own editor on almost all his movies, often working under the pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard (his mother’s maiden name). From Traffic (2000) onwards, he has also lensed his own movies as the director of photography using the nom de plume Peter Andrews. Mary Ann won an Emmy for “her” work on Behind the Candelabra
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A film version of John Kennedy
Toole’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces was nearly made in the early 2000s, penned by Soderbergh and Scott Kramer. David Gordon Green was directing, and Will Ferrell was set to star as 300-lb Ignatius J. Reilly, but it fell apart. Soderbergh doubts it would get made in today’s climate: “You’d have to be prepared for some real blowback.”
in Presence was pretty straightforward, laid out in those eight pages I sent David, where I described exactly how the point of view worked. During prep, I experimented with different cameras and stabilization devices. We ended up with the Sony A7 camera and one of the Ronins, which is pretty small, a U-shaped thing you hold in front of you with each hand, very light. Going up and down stairs was tricky, but I really enjoyed the demands that approach required. Every scene was a single shot, scheduled in chronological order as much as possible because it was important you felt the presence evolve in the way it looks at things. There were a couple of long takes where we would be almost all the way through, and somebody would get up and move. Because I’d seen the scene before, I instinctively anticipated it. I would have to go, “Cut, my fault. I fucked that up.” It was fun, but it was tricky.
When you were threatening to retire about a decade and nine films ago, according to Matt Damon, you said, “If I see another over-the-shoulder shot, I’m going to blow
my brains out.” This POV concept gave you a great excuse not to do any conventional coverage. Was that part of the appeal?
Yeah. In this case, it really was a directorial gimmick that I’d never employed to this extent, and it was exciting. At the same time, there’s no plan B. If it doesn’t work, you’re screwed. There’s no alternative way to shoot it. I had to believe the normal reaction to seeing first-person narratives, which is a desperate desire to see a reverse—to look into the eyes of the protagonist—would be mitigated by the fact that they know there’s nothing to cut to…. The protagonist doesn’t have any eyes.
You keep not only the visual perspective of the ghost but the aural perspective. All the dialogue stays at the same volume, whether the living person’s in the room right next to the ghost or in the driveway outside as the ghost looks through the window—it’s all the same pitch. I talked to the sound team about that a lot. It doesn’t make any literal sense, but to be naturalistic about the sonic
3 Soderbergh doesn’t actually consider his new film Presence to be a “horror movie” in the traditional sense, even though it is (naturally) being marketed as one. “If you’re a parent of a teenager, it’s a horror film; it’s the scariest thing that you’ve ever seen,” the director says. “There’s no blood to speak of, no jump scares. It’s more like Repulsion than it is like Longlegs.”
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Even though he frequently works in the studio system, Soderbergh has partially self-financed some of his films, owning the negatives to several of them.
“I’ve made movies for free, and lost my own money on them,” he admits. This self-financed model has also been practiced of late by M. Night Shyamalan, with a much greater track record of profitability.
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His commercial breakthrough, Out of Sight, was one of three successful Elmore Leonard crime novel adaptations over a three-year period—the other two being Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Soderbergh’s film connects both since it is from the same screenwriter and producers as Get Shorty and sees Michael Keaton return as Jackie Brown’s Ray Nicolette.
aspect of the film just seemed boring. A practical reason for that is your only understanding of the story is backfilling based on what people are saying. The audience should never be struggling to hear this dialogue.
Your abandoned version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. with Scott Burns sounded really cool, this race to hunt down lost nuclear bombs. Now that you’re finishing up Black Bag, back to the realm of the spy thriller, have you been able to resurrect any of the stylistic ideas you had for U.N.C.L.E.?
Not really. There was a very specific take on that material. Visually, I was going to be a lot trickier than I am on Black Bag. Ours was a period piece; this is contemporary. While it had some demands, directorially, that kept me up at night, ultimately, Black Bag required a form of directing that is invisible. If you’re a filmmaker and you get to the end of this 12-page dinner scene that occurs early in the film, you’ll go, “Wow, 12 pages of people sitting at a table, not moving. That’s hard to make cinematic.” That was one of the scenes worrying me, but for an audience, it’s not a case of me waving my hands at them. It didn’t feel like that kind of movie. Whatever game I was building for that version of Man From U.N.C.L.E. got left by the side of the road. I like to not waste things. Some of those ideas may show up in something because there were a couple of technical things I was thinking about in terms of action sequences I was going to try.
Every entry in the Ocean’s trilogy has this quality of, “We’re gonna have fun and that’s going to translate to the audience.”
The feeling that comes across between the characters is legitimate. That was a uniquely wonderful cast, and they had a great time together. They were harder films for me than they were for them because no one person has to carry the whole movie. If you ask George what was fun about those movies, he goes, “My job every day was to give the scene away to somebody else.” He’s a real leader in life, the way Danny is in the movies. That’s legit. I viewed Ocean’s as these Lichtenstein panels, almost graphic novels where I got to use big, bold, colorful imagery—operatic, Baroque —and that’s not always appropriate. No guns to speak of. Nobody dies. They’re not violent, except for a little language. Your family can watch these. I was really proud of those. We were able to do three of them in six years and keep everybody together… that’s hard to do.
One of the reasons you did the initial movies you did after Sex, Lies, and Videotape was you didn’t want to be pigeonholed. The Underneath was a nadir—as you’ve said—except you did wind up making at least seven heist movies. Do you think Underneath was such a low point that you’ve subconsciously been trying to get it right in all these other heist films?
You make a good case. I don’t think so, only because I was so disconnected from myself while I was doing it that it’s hard for me to ascribe any conscious intention to it. It was taking me down a path that really didn’t play to my core. I was in danger of becoming a formalist and I didn’t want to be that, which is why I hatched a plan during shooting to go back to Baton Rouge to make Schizopolis with the people I grew up with. I reached out to Richard Lester, whose films had the kind of energy I wanted to reconnect with. The Underneath was one of the most important things I ever did because it forced me into teardown mode. Schizopolis is like my “second first film” in that it was designed to annihilate everything that had come before it, and it did.
Do you think Sex, Lies, and Videotape predicted the insular, onanistic sexuality of the internet age in the sense that what Graham (James Spader) is doing would not be considered taboo anymore in the OnlyFans era? Oh my god, yeah. It feels like a Jane Austen novel compared to what’s going on now. It seems quaint, but it’s operating from a position of technology being used as a way to avoid connection, as opposed to creating it. The ability we have now to re-experience and regurgitate something over and over again. He keeps revisiting these “conversations” he’s had with these women, as opposed to being out in the actual world. That impulse is understandable; I was just amplifying it. It’s a sensation I have felt at times, “Wouldn’t it be easier
and safer to stay in this bubble?” The funny thing was the assumption that stuff in the movie happened to me. While it was personal insofar as the issues it was grappling with, nothing in that movie actually happened to me.
There are very few genres that you haven’t tackled, but would you consider doing a children’s movie someday?
Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever done a pure… I mean, King of the Hill is certainly something young people could watch, although it’s a little harrowing at times. But yeah, that would be interesting…. I think you have still gotta be tapped into that ability to see the world in those terms. What makes Spike Jonze’s movies—or anything he does—so fantastic is there’s something childlike about the way Spike sees things that is not a pose. What’s that line from Six Degrees of Separation? Where he’s talking about going into this children’s art class, all four or five years old, and he goes, “Everything these kids are drawing is a Kandinsky because it’s pure”? They don’t even know what any concept of art is, and they’re just making this brilliant thing. Spike’s able to do that. It’s a real gift.
You’ve talked about how when directors get together, inevitably, the idea of being in decline comes up. A lot of early films by male directors are about older men in decline. Even your second film, Kafka, is about a dying artist in his 40s. You made that in your late 20s. Is legacy an idea that gets into a director’s head from the start? Part of your education is to study the careers—and, by extension, the lives—of filmmakers you admire and who you’re stealing from. With few exceptions, there tends to be a drop-off. The earliest indicator is when a male director makes a movie about the restorative powers of a young woman. The factor that seems most common is an inability to evolve combined with an attempt to recapture what they thought people liked earlier. I’ve tried to sidestep that as best I can by consciously looking for challenges, different stories, and different ways of telling them so that the thing I’m working on destroys the thing that came before it. My natural restlessness and the fact that I get bored easily help in that effort to keep chasing something instead of trying to recreate something from before. I want to be scared. There’s got to be something about whatever it is that scares me because it keeps me alert.
Presence opens in theaters on Jan. 24 2025.
The Collector’s Digest powered by
We’ve partnered with eBay to bring you a look at this year’s must-have collectibles.
BY RYAN BRITT, LEE PARHAM, JOSHUA YEHL
1 Umbreon VMAX Alternate Art Secret
Rare Pokémon Card
The eye-catching Umbreon VMAX Alternate Art Secret Rare card from Evolving Skies, showing a giant version of the Pokémon reaching for the moon, is one of the most in-demand cards on the market, years after its release in 2021. Currently, the card goes for about a grand and the crazy part is that the value is still going up.
2 Scarlet & Violet— Surging Sparks Booster Box
The latest expansion set for the Pokémon TCG is Surging Sparks. It contains over 250 new cards and puts an emphasis on Lightningtype Pokémon. Even before release, collectors hyped up the new Pikachu ex card featuring Pikachu in its sparkly Terastallized form. This card has a whopping four different versions, including a special illustration version and a shiny gold version. There are also some important cards for the more competitive-minded Pokémon players, such as Latios ex and Magneton.
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3 McFarlane House of the Dragon 2024 Meleys Dragon Figure
Red dragon Meleys can be yours to own, assuming you’re not worried about getting burned. Actually, there’s no fire included with this House of the Dragon replica, but you will feel burning mad if it sells out and you don’t own one. Winter is coming, and you need a dragon to keep you warm. We can keep going with these heat jokes, but we’ll stop there.
4 Yu-Gi-Oh! Quarter Century Bonanza Booster Box
Konami is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Yu-Gi-Oh! with the Quarter Century Bonanza. It’s pretty much a collector’s dream— not only because the series includes both classic favorites and modern meta contenders, but because it also features secret rare cards of the special new “Quarter Century” rarity. The card pool includes everything from the fan favorite Dark Magician and Jinzo to the competitive Sky Striker Mobilize – Engage! and S:P Little Knight. Basically, you can get some of the best cards in the game in a new secret rare design that’ll only be available for a limited time. Each pack contains five cards, and one is guaranteed to have a Quarter Century or Platinum secret rare.
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5 LEGO The Legend of Zelda 77092: Great Deku Tree 2-in-1
Sometimes, dreams do come true. Fans of both LEGO and the Nintendo series The Legend of Zelda have been clamoring for a collaboration between the two brands for years, and their wish finally came to fruition in 2024 with the release of 77092: Great Deku Tree 2-in-1. With the ability to build both the versions from Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild, this set has something for everyone. The first-ever Zelda minifigures are also spectacular, giving us LEGO Link, Zelda, and many of the franchise’s colorful creatures. Fans will continue to yearn for more LEGO Zelda, but for the holiday season of 2024, this is a fabulous start.
6 1990 Bruce Wayne Quick Change Action Figure (Kenner)
For this action figure, Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) wears a ridiculous turtleneck, complete with a requisite ’80s/’90s red little squiggle line. But, because he comes with a Batman suit, you can pop him into that with relative ease.
7 McFarlane Christopher Reeve Superman Figure
The greatest Superman actor there ever was has been immortalized in an incredible action figure. Even if you’re not an ’80s or ’90s kid, the face of Superman, on some level, will always be Christopher Reeve. This figure is so accurate, it will make you believe a man can fly, and that fully grown adults can cry just looking at a toy.
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Star Wars: The Acolyte “The Stranger” Helmet
While there might not be a season two of The Acolyte coming, our memories of The Stranger—AKA Manny Jacinto as Qimir—will live on forever. Easily one of the coolest aspects of the show was this Dark Side warrior, particularly his sensory deprivation helmet. Easily cooler than Kylo Ren’s headgear, this Star Wars costume piece was an instant classic.
The biggest movie of the year also produced some of the best toys of the year. These oversized versions of Logan and Wade are essential for any serious Marvel fan. But also, a great way to create your own universe, populated with your own personal Wolverine and Deadpool variants. Who says the adventures you create aren’t MCU canon, somewhere in the multiverse. 9
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Mego Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Spock (2024)
Ethan Peck’s version of Spock on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has managed to conquer skeptical Trekkie hearts across the universe. This Mego, large-sized Spock combines the new style of Peck’s iconic Vulcan in Strange New Worlds, but the style of the figure is the same as the retro Mego figures, back when Spock was played by Leonard Nimoy. This toy is a beautiful blend of retro packaging and new Trek hotness. A highly logical gift.
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2023 Magic: The Gathering Secret Lair, Lord of the Rings Foil Cards (Wizards of the Coast)
In 2023, you might have missed the fact that as a part of The Lord of the Rings cards for Magic: The Gathering, there were some limited edition “Secret Lair” cards with art taken directly from the most obscure and weirdest version of TLotR ever. These cards sported art from the 1978 Ralph Bakshi version of TLotR.
The most devastating Transformer of them all is Unicron, the planet eater! Portrayed in various different versions of Transformers, this deluxe Unicron figure recalls the design from the classic 1986 animated feature, The Transformers: The Movie. You’ve got the power! (To buy this Unicron for yourself or someone you love.)
13 Pokémon TCG: Trainer’s Toolkit 2024
If someone wants to learn how to play the Pokemon TCG on a more competitive level so they can attend official tournaments, then this is a great gift practically tailor-made for them. The 2024 Pokémon TCG: Trainer’s Toolkit contains everything a player needs to start building powerful decks, as well as a guide on how to build one of your very own. In addition to some TCG accessories, such as card sleeves and damage counters, it has more than 50 cards that are commonly seen in the best decks used at the tournament level. There are two copies of each competitive card. The beauty is that the likes of Squawkabilly ex, Iono, and Ultra Ball can be used in a wide range of decks, so this one purchase offers an incredible level of value.
14 Star Wars: Unlimited TCG Spark of Rebellion TwoPlayer Starter
Launched in 2024, the Star Wars: Unlimited trading card game has players choose an iconic Star Wars character as their leader and then assemble ground forces and a space fleet to see who can destroy the opposing base first. The game has been wellreceived by fans for its brisk back-and-forth gameplay as well as its excellent use of the many characters, creatures, troopers, and spaceships of the Star Wars universe. Everything you need for two players to jump right into playing is a Two-Player Starter. The only thing left to decide is who gets to be Luke Skywalker and who is Darth Vader.
Last year, Konami reprinted the first five Yu-Gi-Oh! sets so that longtime fans could recreate their fondest early memories of the game and newer players could see what it was like cracking packs back at the beginning. Of the five sets released (Legend of Blue Eyes White Dragon, Metal Raiders, Spell Ruler, Pharaoh’s Servant, Invasion of Chaos) Legend of Blue Eyes White Dragon is easily the most popular. It’s not only the first ever Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG set but it also contains iconic cards such as Blue-Eyes White Dragon and Dark Magician. It would cost an obscene amount of money to acquire an actual box of the original printing of one of these sets, so this is a fun way to have this classic experience without breaking the bank.
Scan the QR code
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Test your wits in our sci-fi movie & TV quiz. BY
LOUISA MELLOR
▲ Jared Leto will play a sentient AI named Ares in the third Tron film. Ares is the Greek God of what?
Fairies
Method Acting War Rams
2
James Cameron’s next Avatar film, due out in December 2025, has what subtitle?
Fire and Ash
Fire and Pikachu
Fire and Bulbasaur
Fire and Eevee
3
Fans of which sci-fi book series have carried a towel with them every May 25, aka “Towel Day,” since 2001?
The Hunger Games Foundation
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Three-Body Problem
Live-action TV series sequel Blade Runner 2099 is currently filming. What is the name of the test used in the films to check if a character is a replicant?
The Voight-Kampff test
Kobayashi Maru
The Turing Test
The Imitation Game
Which Best Actress Oscar-winner, who once rode a motorcycle onto a moving train, plays Captain Georgiou of the USS Shenzhou in Star Trek: Discovery and upcoming spinoff film Section 31?
Marion Cotillard
Olivia Colman
Halle Berry
Michelle Yeoh
6
Which one of these is NOT a hybrid dinosaur from the Jurassic World movie & TV franchise?
Indoraptor
Barneyosaurus Indominus rex Spinoceratops
7 Danny Boyle’s zombie apocalypse sequel 28 Years Later is due out in 2025. How many years will it be between its release and that of the original film 28 Days Later? 28
8
Noah Hawley, the showrunner of 2025’s live-action Alien: Earth prequel TV series, also created which television show based on a 1990s film?
12 Monkeys
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Blade
Fargo
9 Director Bong Joon-ho’s first film after 2019 Oscar-winner Parasite will be sci-fi Mickey 17. What’s the title of the Edward Ashton novel on which it’s based?
Mickey7
Oh, Mickey, You’re
So Fine
Takin’ the Mickey The Mousetrap
10
2025 will mark 20 years since Doctor Who returned to TV with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper as the Doctor and his companion in which episode?
“Daisy”
“Lily”
“Rose”
“Daffodil”
11 Apple TV+ is adapting William Gibson’s Neuromancer for TV. Which term, first coined in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome,” did Gibson make famous in that novel?
Email Hypertext
Internet Cyberspace
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▲ Cult sci-fi musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show turns 50 in 2025. What do theater audiences traditionally yell out whenever the character of Brad Majors is mentioned?
me, Seymour!
