Den of Geek Quarterly Magazine Issue 4 - The Big 2022 Preview! by Den of Geek

INSIDE: WONDER WOMAN AND ARCHIE COMICS TURN 80

D A E H A R A E Y E H T O T E D I U , S G W E O H T S A V T MI G

N T I L M O U C P R U YOU FEATURING THE BEST OKS, AND COMICS! O B , S E M A G , FILMS

WESLEY SNIPES

ON THE ORIGINAL BLADE AND HIS WILD NEW NETFLIX SHOW

THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS

MEET THE NEWEST MEMBER OF NEO’S GANG

THE WITCHER

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH HENRY CAVILL ON SEASON TWO

From Dusk Till Dawn

When all you want for Christmas is action, Plex marks the spot.

Watch Free Now Only God Forgives

Fist of Fury

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE

BY EXPERTS. FOR FANS.

2022 PREVIEW

Our massive preview of the biggest movies, television shows, games, books, and comics to watch out for in 2022 is so stuffed to the brim, we literally had to add more pages to our magazine! PG. 41

It goes without saying that Hollywood had a backlog of projects that have been waiting to see the light of day after the last two years. Our cover reflects what a seismic year of new releases is ahead of us in 2022. From hotly anticipated genre TV and blockbuster films, to big games, books, and comics releases, we couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come. It was a challenge to fit it all on the cover. So we enlisted the help of artist Neil Jamieson, who composed this photo illustration that might be one of our favorite covers yet! COVER PHOTO CREDITS: AMAZON STUDIOS / AMC / BANDAI NAMCO / BBC / BBC AMERICA / COLUMBIA PICTURES / DC / DISNEY / HBO / LIONSGATE / MARVEL / NETFLIX / PARAMOUNT / PIXAR / SONY / UNIVERSAL / WARNER BROS/ CARYN MANDABACH PRODUCTIONS

ISSUE 4 | WINTER 2021

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JESSICA HENWICK

The Iron Fist and Game of Thrones star dishes the dirt on her costume, moves and her kick-ass new role as a “captain, leader and true beliver in the legend of Neo,” Bugs, in The Matrix Resurrections. PG. 20

WONDER WOMAN

The next generation of Wonder Woman voices, Marie Javins and Stephanie Williams, look back on 80 years of the iconic DC Comics superheroine and preview new tales to come. PG. 26

IMAGE CREDITS: DC COMICS, PEACOCK, CARYN MANDABACH PRODUCTIONS, NETFLIX/ SUSIE ALLNUT

ON THE COVER

SPIDEY & STRANGE

Ahead of Spider-Man: No Way Home, we revisit some of the exciting and controversial crossovers between the wallcrawler and Doctor Strange in the comic books’ lengthy and rich history. PG. 24

WESLEY SNIPES

MACGRUBER

Co-creator Jorma Taccone reveals the sometimes X-rated set details of the new Peacock series. PG. 12

ARCHIE COMICS

The publishing house which inspired Riverdale and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina turns 80. We celebrate “America’s Typical Teenager.” PG. 30

THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT

The longtime Star Wars fanfavorite finally gets his solo treatment with his upcoming show. PG. 18

One of his generation’s finest talents on his new Netflix series, True Story, and his illustrious career. PG. 62

THE WITCHER

Netflix’s uber popular fantasy epic returns for a boundary-pushing second season, and we go behindthe-scenes with exclusive interviews with stars Henry Cavill, Freya Allan, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and more! PG. 34 DEN OF GEEK

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Action role-playing game Starfield is just one of the many things we’re looking forward to in 2022. It really is a packed year ahead!

LOOKING AHEAD... WELCOME TO A VERY different

issue of Den of Geek! When our print editor, Rosie Fletcher, suggested that we ditch our usual singlesubject deep-dive cover story in favor of a massive 2022 preview, it got us all thinking. 2022 looks like the entertainment year that we had hoped 2021 would be, and with any luck, the “real world” year that we’ve all been waiting for after over 18 months of lockdowns, delays, and misery. But this cover story isn’t just a preview of everything we have to watch, read, and play next year. It’s also our roadmap to an absolutely packed entertainment calendar; one that will have us hustling, day and night, to bring you the very best coverage. This was our first year bringing the magazine to comic shops 8

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and subscribers, and we have even bigger plans for Den of Geek—in print, online, and in the actual, physical world—in 2022. To every DoG reader, we can’t thank all of you enough for joining us on this journey, engaging with your favorite cool stuff with us, and pushing us to do better. To the comic shop owners who have put this magazine on your shelves, thanks for making this kid who used to (and still does) haunt your aisles extra happy. And to the subscribers who took a chance on DoG, we hope you’ll stick around and continue to live your fandom alongside us. Mike Cecchini, Editor-in-Chief

PHOTO CREDITS: HBO/BETHESDA GAME STUDIOS

We don’t want to jinx anything, but 2022 looks like it could be the year we hoped the last two years would be.

Renew Den of Geek Magazine For 2022!

MAG AZ I N E Editor-in-Chief Mike Cecchini Editorial Director Chris Longo Print Editor Rosie Fletcher Creative Director Lucy Quintanilla Art Director Jessica Koynock Copy Editor Sarah Litt Production Manager Kyle Christine Darnell

If you’ve been receiving Den of Geek free in your mailbox this year, please consider renewing your subscription at the special rate of $8.99 (U.S. only, international charges vary). We love bringing the best coverage of movies, TV, games, books, and comics to you, and your support will help make that happen!

DENOFGEEK.COM Editor-in-Chief Mike Cecchini Director of Editorial and Partnerships Chris Longo Managing Editor John Saavedra UK Editor Rosie Fletcher

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NEW RELEASES

NEVER STOP DYIN’ HARD Erstwhile SNL action parody MacGruber returns to where it all began: television. BY ALEC BOJALAD

YOU CAN’T HAVE A NAKED performer use a flamethrower. This is what MacGruber co-creators Jorma Taccone, John Solomon, and Will Forte were told by the fun-killing higher-ups, in no uncertain terms, when they set out to adapt their popular Saturday Night Live sketchturned-feature-film into a TV series at Peacock. “We kept having these meetings where people would be like, ‘You know you can’t do this, right?’” 12

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Taccone says. “We were just like, ‘Yeah, but… we’re going to do it.’” Being told to not do something and then doing it anyway is fitting for both petulant action hero MacGruber (played by Forte) and the unlikely franchise he sweatily birthed. The parody of problem-solving TV icon MacGyver was first conceived as a series of SNL sketches by writers Solomon, Taccone, and cast member Forte back in 2007. Each of the 10 sketches stars

Forte as MacGruber, the woefully underprepared special agent, who intends to use common household objects to defuse a ticking bomb and save his friends. Each and every time, however, he fails–the bomb detonates and everyone is killed. Still, MacGruber and his partner Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) somehow always return to try to defuse another bomb, usually accompanied by that respective episode’s guest host (some notable players include Betty White, Seth Rogen, Josh Brolin, Jonah Hill, and Charles Barkley). MacGruber was a popular enough character to be spun off into a series of Pepsi commercials that featured original MacGyver star Richard Dean Anderson. MacGruber then returned for his titular 2010 film. Directed by Taccone, MacGruber was a love letter to action movies, comedy, and just general absurdity. Like many other SNL adaptations, it was a massive box office failure, but became something of a cult hit. None other than

IMAGE CREDITS: JORDYN GELB (NBCUNIVERSAL)

Will Forte returns as MacGruber, an allAmerican problem solver who loves vests and eviscerating his enemies.

Kristen Wiig returns as MacGruber’s former wife and sidekick Vicki St. Elmo. She’s also got a lovely singing voice.

Christopher Nolan (yes, as in Dark Knight Christopher Nolan) counts himself as a MacGruber superfan. More than 11 years have passed since MacGruber last graced the pop culture landscape. And yet, the mulletted action hero’s creators couldn’t quite forget him. Taccone, Solomon, and Forte have been passing around a Google Doc for the better part of a decade sharing funny ideas for the character’s next outing. “We had so many ideas for a sequel that it was just exciting to sort of put the pieces around and see where things fit based on dumb little oneoff ideas that we had highlighted,” Taccone says. “Will (Forte) added triple asterisks to the phrase ‘Whoever smelt it, dealt it.’ It had to be in there somewhere.” Now the final result of all that brainstorming is set to come to fruition in a sequel: not in the form of a movie, but a TV series. After rotting in prison for a decade (for the petty crime of beating his nemesis,

Dieter Von Cunth, to near-death, then firing a rocket launcher at him, throwing him off a cliff, and pissing on his corpse), MacGruber is sprung loose by an American government

WHATEVER IS THE FUNNIEST VERSION OF SOMETHING, HE’LL DO IT. OFTENTIMES THAT MEANS GETTING NAKED AND HAVING HIS TESTICLES EXPOSED.” — JO RM A TAC C O N E

desperate for his help. MacGruber assembles his old team from the film, Vicki St. Elmo (Wiig) and Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe), to take down a mysterious villain from his past:

Brigadier Commander Enos Queeth (Billy Zane). “‘Queeth’ was a name that we had from the very beginning because we just wanted to say, ‘It smells like Queeth in here,’” Taccone says, before adding that their dream was realized by getting the line into episode six. Like the film before it, which starred Val Kilmer and Powers Boothe in supporting roles, the TV series brings in some major dramatic star power to earnestly read some very silly lines. Zane follows in Kilmer’s footsteps by embodying a goofily-named villain with some surprising pathos. “Billy, at one point, was like, ‘This is one of the hardest roles I’ve ever had.’ And it is that. It’s hard to get the tone of having to say the dumbest shit. Even saying his name is stupid,” Taccone says. “Billy brought this realness to these things. We would have these real actor conversations like, ‘Why do I feel this empty?’ Because it’s the fucking worst day of your life. And you feel it on screen.” DEN OF GEEK

NEW RELEASES Laurence Fishburne joins the MacGruber franchise (and steals Mac’s woman) as General Barrett Fasoose.

Meanwhile, Laurence Fishburne and Sam Elliott contribute with major roles as well to expand the MacGruber family. Fishburne plays General Barrett Fasoose, a highlydecorated military official who now just happens to be married to MacGruber’s ex-wife, Vicki. Elliott is Perry, MacGruber’s father, who has a fractured relationship with his son. “It’s still crazy to me the amount of times I’d ask Laurence why he was doing this,” Taccone says. “With all these guys, they’re actually reading what it is and understanding what the tone is and believing in what we’re trying to do. Which is a very specific needle we’re threading, of a real action movie, but it’s an idiot as your main character and trying to get it all real enough so that it’s funny.” Having the right actors to buy into MacGruber’s tone is crucial, as the series walks a fine line between sophomoric joke-telling and almost unspeakable violence. Many villains who come across MacGruber suffer a similar fate to Dieter Von Cunth– or worse. “We were going to have MacGruber’s new move be skinning people alive. And then we were like, ‘That’s too dark,’” Taccone says. Taccone might be misremembering things as MacGruber does, in fact, 14

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Brigadier Commander Enos Queeth (Billy Zane) takes over as MacGruber’s archnemesis from Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer).

skin at least one character alive (or possibly posthumously) offscreen within the show’s first three episodes. He also frequently gets very naked and then stays naked, sometimes for as long as an entire episode’s runtime. “(Will) has no shame as a performer,” Taccone says. “Whatever is the funniest version of something, he’ll do it. He is just always giving 150%, and oftentimes that means getting naked and having his testicles exposed, that have to be removed with CG later.” To temper things a bit, MacGruber borrows a page from seasonal action movies like Die Hard, setting its story during Christmas. Like the movie, the TV series was filmed in Albuquerque so there is no snow to speak of, but the holiday cheer is present all the

same, even as MacGruber crushes a henchman’s face in with a boulder until it’s nothing but a pile of bone, blood, and brains. According to Taccone, he and the show’s producers always knew they wanted the series to take place at Christmas, continuing the tradition started by Lethal Weapon. Funnily enough, the show will premiere the day after the penultimate episode of another streaming action series set during Christmas. “We’re just trying to go up against Hawkeye,” Taccone says. “So you tell (Jeremy Renner), you tell him, ‘We’re fucking coming for you.’” MacGruber premieres its eight-episode first season on NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock on Dec. 16, 2021.

Stories both

VILLAINOUS & MARVELLOUS New from “Sublime prose, top-notch world-building, delightfully queer.”

“Funny, sharp, queer… It might dent your heart a little, but it’s good fun.”

—TJ KLUNE,

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The House in the Cerulean Sea

—NPR

HARDCOVER, EBOOK, AND MACMILLAN AUDIO

“A fun, twisty ride through a world full of spells and family secrets.”

“This generation’s Le Guin.” —ANDREW SEAN GREER,

—KENDARE BLAKE,

#1 New York Times bestselling author of the Three Dark Crowns series

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less

HARDCOVER, EBOOK, AND MACMILLAN AUDIO

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FIVE THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT…

PAUL SUN-HYUNG LEE The Last Airbender has found its Uncle Iroh with the Kim’s Convenience star. BY JOHN KIRK

Watching TV was a struggle for the Canadian-raised actor growing up. Whether it was Star Trek, Space: 1999, or Looney Tunes, Lee had to persuade his dad to give up Hockey Night in Canada... “It was a three-hour block! But he always wound up giving in. He literally took one for the team.”

Lee’s first break was playing the character of Randy Ko on the Global TV show Train 48. There he learned it was fun to play a nerd. “That show connected to a lot of people,” he says. “I listened to my scene partners and I learned the power of the nerd! So many people found Randy to be a part of them.”

16 DEN 16 DENOFOF GEEK GEEK

IS C U R R EN T P R O D U C T IOLY IN FO R N ET FL N IX

Before Kim’s Convenience became a TV hit, Lee originated the role of Appa, the lovable immigrant Korean shop owner, on stage. He was the only actor not to audition for the small-screen version, on which he became Canada’s favorite dad. “[The show] was the source of so many blessings,” he says.

When Lee was cast as Captain Carson Teva on The Mandalorian, his experience as a member of Star Wars costuming group the 501st Legion gave him enough knowledge to advise the show’s wardrobe team about his New Republic flight suit—as he puts it, a “dream come true” for a cosplayer.

Being cast as Uncle Iroh in Netflix‘s live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender allowed Lee to follow in the footsteps of the late, great actor Mako, who voiced Iroh in the animated series. “It’s big shoes to fill,” he says. “It’s something I don’t take lightly; there has to be love for this role.”

IMAGE CREDITS: JONATHAN ELLUL

AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER

NEW RELEASES

BOBA FETT: HOW TO BUILD AN ICON ON DEC. 29, STAR WARS FANS will finally get something they could only fantasize about in 1983: the further on-screen adventures of Boba Fett. It’s a Disney+ show almost 40 years in the making, and not just because the pre-Disney canon had already established that Boba survived the sarlacc pit, but because the villain always seemed destined for something 18

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bigger than his six-ish minutes of screen time and four lines of dialogue in the original trilogy. Boba is a great example of the kind of zeitgeist-grabbing myth-making that has made Lucasfilm such a successful movie studio over the last 50 years. As with other memorable Lucasfilm icons, including Indiana Jones, the studio put a lot of time

into designing the bounty hunter. In fact, the creation of Boba Fett is emblematic of Lucasfilm’s signature approach to character building and the massive success of that process. Before 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, there was already Boba Fett. While he made his on-screen debut in the animated segment of 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special as a bounty

IMAGE CREDITS: DISNEY / LUCASFILM

From bit-part baddie to fan favorite, Boba Fett finally has his own show—a testament to Lucasfilm’s expert myth-making. BY JOHN SAAVEDRA

Temuera Morrison as Boba Fett and Ming-Na Wen as Fennec Shand in The Book of Boba Fett.

hunter, Boba was actually born as a new kind of stormtrooper in the concept art of the legendary Ralph McQuarrie and art director Joe Johnston. The design for an Imperial armor equipped with a jetpack, rocket launcher, and middle ages-inspired helmet soon jumped off the page and onto a Lucasfilm lot. The first prototype of the suit was worn by assistant film editor Duwayne Dunham during an internal reveal of the character at the studio, when the character’s makeshift cape was just a Star Wars towel. But when it was decided that there wasn’t enough money to make multiple versions of the prototype for Empire, Star Wars creator George Lucas once again turned to film history and the storytelling formula that had brought him blockbuster success in 1977. As with Darth Vader,

Luke, Leia, and Han Solo, Lucas cherry-picked a specific archetype and movie influence for his mysterious bounty hunter to not only establish his backstory but imbue him with a familiarity that communicated who this character was on a visceral level. Even if you didn’t know anything about Boba, you could understand the film language. He was the galaxy’s version of the “Man With No Name”—a cold, brooding Clint Eastwood in space, right down to his spurs and old-timey blaster. Boba Fett’s first real public debut was at the San Anselmo Country Fair parade in California on Sept. 24, 1978, months before Star Wars Holiday Special aired and before anyone knew a single thing about the character. But the genius of Star Wars at the time was that it could introduce plenty of mysteries—the Force, the Jedi, an entire lived-in galaxy—without having to spend hours addressing all of the mumbo jumbo head on. The fun of the galaxy far, far away was the insinuation of deeper lore that you ultimately made up yourself while playing Star Wars in the schoolyard with your friends. Lucasfilm’s youngest fans have always been key to the studio’s success. Falling in love with the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s, Lucas learned firsthand of the lasting impression movies could have on children—and not just through their playground years. The right story could stick with the viewer forever. It’s why Lucas envisioned Star Wars as a series of morality tales that taught kids about “friendships, trust, doing the right thing, living on the right side, and avoiding the dark side.” It’s perhaps also why Boba Fett made his on-screen debut in Star Wars Holiday Special, an extravaganza once again aimed at the kids. Cynics might argue that Boba was introduced on national primetime television to create hype for the Kenner action figure that was also coming out in 1978 (and that’s undoubtedly true), but the platform was also perfect for building the legend of the character itself.

Introducing “the next big thing” in Star Wars directly to children on a special night in November would soon turn into kids playing with their Boba Fett toys and costumes, imagining what adventures the bounty hunter might go on next. Decades later, those kids are parents taking their own children to see Star Wars in theaters and buying them Boba Halloween costumes. Boba, like the other Star Wars characters you know by heart, has been immortalized because Lucasfilm knew who they were making these movies for.

WE MOUNTED A PROTEST. BUT THEY THREW HIM IN… AND AS YOU KNOW, FANS HAVE NEVER LET HIM DIE.” — D U WAY N E D U N H AM

Duwayne Dunham reveals in the recent Boba Fett making-of documentary, Under the Helmet, that the only reason he was chosen to wear the prototype was because he was the right size. The bounty hunter was later brought to the big screen by actor Jeremy Bulloch, who wore the suit in Empire and Return of the Jedi, but he didn’t voice the character. That was Jason Wingreen, before Boba’s voice was retconned to sound like Temuera Morrison in later remasters of the original trilogy. The character will next be played by Morrison in The Book of Boba Fett on Disney+. But it’s Dunham, the first man to wear the iconic armor, who remembers the anxiety among some at Lucasfilm when Lucas decided that it was time to kill off Boba, telling StarWars.com, “We kinda mounted a protest saying ‘You can’t do that to Boba Fett! He’s deserving of more!’ But they threw him in… and as you know, fans have never let him die.” Episode one of The Book of Boba Fett arrives on Disney+ on Dec. 29. DEN OF GEEK

NEW RELEASES

SCI-FI HEROINE, REBOOTED

Jessica Henwick gives us behind-the-scenes insight on The Matrix Resurrections, the franchise’s much-anticipated return to cinemas. IF YOU DON’T KNOW Jessica Henwick from her turns as Colleen Wing in Iron Fist, Nymeria Sand in Game of Thrones, or X-wing pilot Jessika Pava in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you will know her soon. Next month, she will appear as Bugs in The Matrix Resurrections. We talked to the English actress about her part in this iconic franchise.

remember I would have nightmares about the small machine going into my belly button and my mouth stitching up. The imagery is so iconic and striking, and it really did stay with me. Even though I probably didn’t watch it again for another five or six years after that, I could have told you scene for scene what happened.

Do you remember the first time you watched The Matrix?

What was your first day on set like for The Matrix Resurrections?

I was 12 or 13, and it was probably on VHS. I loved it, but it scared me. I 20

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My first day on set was in San Francisco, and it was almost the

entire cast. Priyanka [Chopra] had this 10-page monologue of thick, very technical Matrix dialogue. And bless her, she killed it. Then at the end of the scene, Keanu [Reeves] had one line. The line was like, “Will it work?” Or something like that. I remember looking around at the entire cast, and everyone’s facial muscles started to twitch because we all wanted to break at the exact moment. Because we were like, “That’s so cool. It’s Keanu. And he’s in his Neo costume, and he’s using the voice, and he’s just... Oh, we’re here. We’re in it.”

IMAGE CREDITS: WARNER BROS. PICTURES/MURRAY CLOSE

BY KAYTI BURT

sunglasses we wore, because I must have tried on 30 or 40 sunglasses. And the ones that I got were just so cool. In terms of the hair, that was definitely more of a discussion. When I auditioned, straightaway Lana said, “Would you be willing to shave your head entirely bald?” And of course you have to say yes, otherwise you don’t get the role. So, I did say yes, but once I got the role, I eased off of that idea because it has symbolism within the Matrix world. If you have no hair on your head, you probably are recently free and so I didn’t want there to be any sort of confusion about how long she’d actually been awake for. So, that’s why we moved in the direction of having the blue hair and, obviously, Lana has her reasons there.

Jessica Henwick showcases her amazing physical skills in this scene from The Matrix Resurrections.

Jessica Henwick as Bugs and Toby Onwumere as Sequoia on a rooftop mission.

How was the character of Bugs first presented to you?

All they told me was a very short description of her being a captain, and a leader, and a true believer in the legend of Neo. Yeah, that was it. It was pretty minimal.

How did your look for this film come together, and how much, if any input, did you have in it?

In terms of costume, I didn’t have much input, though I did ask them. I begged them for sunglasses and leather. I had a bit of a say in which

What was it like to work with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss?

It was so wonderful to work with them, honestly. I don’t have a bad thing to say. Keanu really is everything you’ve heard. I mean, it’s not news for me to say he’s the nicest actor in Hollywood. Everyone knows that. Very kind. Very generous. Very, very shy. Very intelligent. There was no small talk with Keanu. It was always just like, “What do you think is at the bottom of the ocean?” We would have these really esoteric discussions between takes. It was a highlight of my day, honestly Carrie-Anne has kids, and we were going through the process of filming during Covid, and none of us had our support systems there. None of us were able to fly our families out. And so she kind of became a mother, especially to me. I found it really difficult at times, filming in Covid. And I remember she would just call me to come round and she would just be like, “Okay. Sit down. I’m making you toast.”... She’s so wonderful and inspiring and really strong. She was a real rock for me during filming. What is Lana Wachowski’s directing style like?

Her directing style is very different. It’s intuitive, and fluid, and it’s very DEN OF GEEK

NEW RELEASES What are you most excited for fans to see in The Matrix Resurrections?

It’s the nostalgia and seeing Keanu and Carrie-Anne on screen; it’s magical to see these two absolute Hollywood heavyweights returning to the characters that made them famous. As a fan, I loved it. I would often go to set on days where I wasn’t filming just to watch those two act.

Do you know what was supposed to happen with Colleen Wing after the Iron Fist season two finale? Was a Misty Knight-Colleen spinoff ever discussed?

Bugs with a new-look Morpheus, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

much how she feels on the day, on set… She doesn’t stand by the monitor. She’s standing right next to our camera operator, holding the camera, pulling focus. She will, in the middle of a scene, just turn him around. So she’ll be filming Keanu, and Keanu will be talking, and halfway through his line, you’ll just feel this camera turn around, and suddenly you’re on. And you’d better be on and you better know your line because there’s a camera pointing in your face, and you only get two shots. She’ll just run like that. She doesn’t really cut. So it’s 20 minutes of just pure acting, which I do really like… As an actor, it makes you feel like you get into it more. The rhythm is faster. Sometimes on film, especially coming from a theater background and theater training, sometimes film can just feel so slow. And it’s start. Stop. Start. Stop. And you never get into it. Lana’s process is, I would say, actor-friendly. 22

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Does Bugs have a specific fighting style?

No, it was pretty fluid. What I loved about coming onto this was that I’ve trained with so many different people at this stage, and in so many different styles. Colleen [Wing on Iron Fist] was heavily Aikido. Then in the second season, we moved it away and we did a

SHE’S A CAPTAIN, AND A LEADER, AND A TRUE BELIEVER IN THE LEGEND OF NEO.” little bit of Taekwondo. In my personal life, I’ve trained in Hapkido, but then I’ve also, for fun, trained in Wushu. This was a beautiful fusion of all of them coming together and just going, “Okay. I now know what my body can do and what my body can’t do, and what looks good and what doesn’t.”

Season three would’ve been a split narrative between [Danny and Colleen, with us going] hardcore on the “Daughters of the Dragon” element. But beyond that, I don’t know. I don’t think anything was discussed that heavily because we knew that the deals would change. We knew that Disney+ was happening, so we knew there was little reason for them to keep making a show for an enemy streamer, so we saw it coming. So yes, there were light discussions about it, but I think all of us knew it would probably close quickly. It is what it is. I feel very lucky and proud of Colleen Wing, and I’m happy with where we left it. We left her in a really good place. She’s happy. What was it like to work with Rian Johnson on Knives Out 2?

He’s so lovely. He’s very quiet. He’s very calm. He’s very kind. Even though I didn’t see a single storyboard during production, I know that he knew everything he wanted down to a T. I mean, he’s a genius. He writes those scripts so quickly, and the quality of dialogue and characterization is amazing. And really what makes his films so unique is how wonderful his characterization is. If I didn’t know better, I would think that he came from an acting background. The Matrix Resurrections is in cinemas and on HBO Max on Dec. 22.

BY EXPERTS. FOR FANS. DEN OF GEEK.

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WHEN SPIDEY MET STRANGE

The wall-crawler and the Sorcerer Supreme have partnered so many times they might as well live together. We take a look at some of their biggest and best team-ups ahead of their next outing in Spider-Man: No Way Home. BY JIM DANDENEAU ONE IS YOUR FRIENDLY neighborhood wall-crawler, a kid from Queens trying to juggle his life and his duty to help others. The other is the grand protector of our dimension, fighting mystical threats from throughout the multiverse. They’re the perfect complement, right? Believe it or not, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange actually work really well together. It’s fairly common to see the two of them teaming up–their paths cross pretty frequently on the streets of New York, and Spidey is the type to always (inadvertently or not) stick his nose in other heroes’ business. And with them showing up on the big screen together in Spider-Man: No Way Home, we figured it was worth looking back at some of their comic book team ups.

use it to resurrect his beloved Melinda Morrison. This starts off as a fairly stock story about thugs hypnotized by Xandu and tricked into trying to steal the wand. But it’s the first time Spidey and Strange actually met, and it comes with some unbelievably stunning art from the co-creator of both characters, Steve Ditko.

Marvel Team-Up #21 Spidey and Strange’s most controversial pairing is also probably the biggest influence on No Way Home. Writer J. Michael Straczynski and artist Joe Quesada attempted to put the toothpaste back in the tube after Peter outed his own secret identity in the pages of Civil War. After Aunt May was shot by someone trying to hurt Peter, he went to Doctor Strange to ask him to make the world forget who he was. Strange helped him try to find an expert to undo his mistake, but after striking out with the likes of Mr. Fantastic, Doctor Doom, and the High Evolutionary, Peter eventually decides to go in a different direction and hooks up with Mephisto, lord of actual, literal Marvel Hell, and trades his marriage to Mary Jane Watson for his aunt’s life and his secret identity.

Untold Tales of Spider-Man: Strange Encounter 24

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Canonically their first team up, this 1998 retcon by Kurt Busiek, Roger Stern, and Neil Vokes has Doctor Strange using Spider-Man to help him find two of Baron Mordo’s thugs who have stolen the Lantern of Lantarr, a magical doohickey that contains dangerous power that will help Mordo control the world. It’s not an especially deep story, but it’s fun seeing this wild magical world through Peter’s extremely fresh eyes. We get a healthy dose of early Spider-Man supporting cast too, as J. Jonah Jameson, Flash Thompson, Betty Brant, and others are transported to a mystical dimension full of M.C. Escher twists and portals.

Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2

This is the first chapter of what would come to be known as “The Wand of Watoomb Saga,” which followed evil mage Xandu as he first tried to steal the Wand of Watoomb for power so he could use it, then he continued to

Len Wein and classic Spidey artist Sal Buscema continue “The Wand of Watoomb Saga.” This time, Xandu hypnotizes Peter into stealing the wand, and the two heroes briefly fight before Spidey snaps out of it and they defeat the evil mage. While in his hideout, they discover his reason for trying to get the wand back: he wants to resurrect Melinda, who he accidentally killed years ago, and he believes the Wand will give him the power to do it. Strange defeats him and throws the Wand away in the pocket dimension Xandu created for their battle.

Marvel Fanfare #6

Technically, this isn’t a Doctor Strange/ Spidey team up. It’s a Scarlet Witch/ Spider-Man one, with (yet again) stunning art from a titan of the comics industry, P. Craig Russell. In this one, Xandu uses his mystical powers to put the Scarlet Witch’s consciousness in Melinda’s preserved dead body, but he doesn’t have Melinda’s consciousness

IMAGE CREDITS: SONY PICTURES

Spider-Man: One More Day

Tom Holland’s Spider-Man and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange team up in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

to put in Wanda’s. This leads to an adventure with Wanda, Melinda, and Spider-Man battling demons in the Death Dimension to put everyone back where they belong. This story ends with Xandu inadvertently trading places with Melinda and staying in the Death Dimension.

Spider-Man/Dr. Strange: The Way to Dusty Death

Written by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, and featuring terrific artwork from Michael Bair, this story sees Xandu trying to ensorcel Melinda into

taking her own life so she can join him in the Death Dimension. In a possible callback from No Way Home, SpiderMan gets his astral self punched out of his body, which is taken over by Xandu and brought to the Death Dimension with Melinda, and Strange follows. A big fight breaks out, but everyone ends up in the correct bodies, Melinda and Xandu switch places on Earth and the Death Dimension again, and Strange blows up the Wand of Watoomb. Again.

to a close as Xandu decides enough with the place swapping already, and tries to merge Earth and the Death Dimension. Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange work together to try to stop the hostile takeover. There’s a big zombie fight, and Captain America gets to help out, but this one brings Xandu’s saga to an end and firmly installs Melinda Morrison as the true and rightful ruler of the Death Dimension.

Secret Defenders #6-8

Spider-Man: No Way Home opens in cinemas on Dec. 15 in the UK and Dec. 17 in the US.

“The Wand of Watoomb Saga” comes

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COMICS ANNIVERSARY

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Below: (Left to right) Artemis, Hippolyta, Yara Flor, Diana, and Nubia in the Trial of the Amazons crossover. Below left: The cover for the Wonder Woman 80th Anniversary special.

WHEN MARIE JAVINS WAS announced as Editor-in-Chief of DC Comics in 2020, the quote that accompanied her hiring stated: “As a young girl devouring comics of Wonder Woman, Nubia, and Supergirl, I never dreamed that decades later, I’d be at the helm of the mighty DC Comics.” A year later, on Wonder Woman’s 80th anniversary, the publisher is heading into an epic new age for Diana, Nubia, and the Amazons. Leading into 2022’s Trial of the Amazons—the first Wonder Woman crossover event in decades—DC Comics is ramping up a series of new stories centered on the all-female race of warriors. The core Wonder Woman title reintroduces Diana after her inter-dimensional adventures and brush with death in Dark Nights: Death Metal, while Nubia & the Amazons takes readers back to Themyscira, where Diana’s sister Nubia has taken the throne. It’s a huge moment for one of DC’s earliest Black superheroes and for the Wonder Woman family in general. “I wish that was my pitch. But I can’t take the credit for that because [DC Associate Editor] Brittany Holzherr was already all over that,” Javins laughs. That deep passion for Nubia and Diana is shared by the pair, and is shaping the future of the publisher. But for Javins it’s all about expanding what came before. “My whole agenda is to build on things. 26

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One common approach people have is to reinvent. I’m not reinventing. We’re just building on the past.” Nubia and Diana’s story in Robert Kanigher and Don Heck’s 1970s Wonder Woman series hooked Javins as a young comic book reader. The tale introduced Nubia, the sister of Diana, who at the time was also created from clay by Hippolyta. Though the arc was relatively short, it made a huge impact on Javins, who was drawn to the superhero story about sisterhood. “Diana had a sister! I followed that one really closely, I bought every issue. It felt like it went on forever,” says Javins. But as she realized later on, Nubia was only in a few issues. That’s a feeling that Nubia & the Amazons

writer Stephanie Williams could relate to. “I first heard about Nubia on the playground,” Williams recalls. “I found out that she was originally Diana’s sister and had been around since the 1970s. I thought, ‘There must be a ton of history for her, right?’ But I quickly discovered that was not the case.” Together, Javins, Holzherr, and Williams are changing that. Nubia & the Amazons boasts an all-star creative

As Wonder Woman turns 80, DC Comics Editor-In-Chief Marie Javins and Nubia & the Amazons writer Stephanie Williams explain their vision of a bold future for Diana, Nubia, and Themyscira. BY ROSIE KNIGHT

team, with Williams writing alongside Vita Ayala, and stunning visuals from veteran superhero artists Alitha Martinez, Mark Morales, Emilio Lopez, and Becca Carey. This talent roster is as powerful as the world it represents. The series establishes Nubia as the Queen of Themyscira, while giving readers insight to her new origin. With that, the first issue changes everything we know about Themyscira with the introduction of

the Well of Souls. “Shoutout to George Pérez!” Williams exclaims. “The Cavern of Souls was always a very interesting concept to me.” The Pérez invention created a space where the souls of women who died violent deaths could be transformed into new Amazons in Themyscira. It’s also where Williams first saw the inclusion of different kinds of Amazons. That was something she wanted to expand on in her Nubia

run. Enter the Well of Souls, which opens a direct gateway from the Cavern to Themyscira. “I thought that was just such a brilliant way to say on a divine level that everyone is welcome [in Themyscira]. So taking that idea and bringing it to 2021, it was important to both Vita and I that we include trans women in our Themyscira.” While this is the first time that readers have been introduced to DEN OF GEEK

COMICS ANNIVERSARY them, Javins says that trans Amazons have always been on Themyscira. “We are now focusing on stories of Amazons of color and trans Amazons in a world that is more ready to read about them,” Javins says. “But they have always been there.” It was both a natural and radical choice. Introducing Bia, the first trans Amazon we’ve met in DC Comics, was a huge moment for Williams. Bia belies the comic book tradition of using trans allegory as subtext and instead creates a canon precedent. “It was really exciting to me as a writer to be on the other side of the issue and see people pick up on that,” Williams shares. It also kicks down the doors for future creators. “Comics are strongest when people can pick up the pieces and keep the story moving. And this allows for a lot of writers to be able to do that.” Williams says that the Amazons represent a chance to explore ourselves as well as the fantastical world of Themyscira. “I see them as a community of women who get to thrive in a way that we unfortunately cannot in the real world without being hindered,” Williams says. “But also I see them as a chance to really talk amongst ourselves about some of our own pitfalls… because just as the patriarchy can be upheld by men, it can also be upheld by women and people in general.” Adapting and evolving the Amazons is key to the future of both Wonder Woman and Nubia. As Javins notes, there have been many interpretations but they’ve often been homogeneous and simplistic—they’re beautiful, they’re pacifists. Occasionally, though, creators diverge from that. “And whenever we diverge, things get very interesting,” Javins says. “So we are investigating the society on Themyscira, but the thing is there are other Amazons in the world.” And those “rogue Amazons” are set to be key to Trial of the Amazons. What does that event look like? While Javins doesn’t want to give too much away, she gives us a little insight into what we can expect. 28

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“There are occasionally different tribes, perhaps. Things are not all peace and happiness on Themyscira. There might be some conflicts. There might be people believing that they should run the global Amazon world.” It feels right for Nubia, Diana, and the Amazons to be center stage at DC as Wonder Woman celebrates her 80th birthday. But what is it about the hero that makes her resonate nearly a century later? “She’s aspirational, of course,” Javins tells us. “But Wonder Woman was created with an eye

toward human psychology. So she was created through the lens of the values of 1941, as a symbol of empowerment for women and an iconic ideal. She was complex at a time when heroes were traditionally very simple. She’s half goddess, but she’s got some very core human conflicts and values.” For Williams, it’s all about the Amazons as a whole and their magical homeworld. “We gravitate towards utopias,” Williams says. “We want to explore worlds where people are not limited by the things we’re limited by.

How can you not love these women who are over six feet tall, strong as hell, and can hold their own while managing to have this secluded society for so long?” There’s one conflict at the core of what makes the Amazons so timeless, and it’s one of the things that makes Williams so intrigued by Diana herself. “The way they go back and forth between whether they should help Man’s World or not, I think there’s something very alluring to that,” Williams says. “Diana’s an interesting character because why on Earth would you want to leave Themyscira to go to Man’s World?

WE ARE NOW FOCUSING ON STORIES OF AMAZONS OF COLOR AND TRANS AMAZONS IN A WORLD THAT IS MORE READY TO READ ABOUT THEM.” — M A RIE JAVI N S

Above: Three of the four variant covers for Nubia & The Amazons #1. Above left: The Well of Souls appears at the beginning of the story, “Paradise Lost.”

While it’s great that you can seclude yourself and thrive, it’s even better when you’re able to reach out.” It’s also something that is going to be key to the Wonder Woman books going forward. That vital contrast between the Amazons’ pacifist ideals and the reality of what upholding them really means is something that clearly inspires Javins. “If your first solution is always non-violence, and yet you’re a society where everyone is constantly training for prevention of violence, that’s a very interesting contrast,” Javins says. “Then you take Wonder Woman and put her into Man’s World where she has to react with violence all the time. That’s the core conflict that makes her and the Amazons so interesting.” The reason that Nubia & the Amazons—the current main Wonder

Woman title—and Trial of the Amazons feel so exciting right now is because this is one of DC’s oldest and most influential heroes once again taking the stage in an entirely new way. “My mission statement for Wonder Woman and the Amazons ties into my general approach to comics,” says Javins. “You can almost run a parallel of Themyscira with the comics industry. One of the talking points that I always go back to is that women have always been here. We are not new. And with Themyscira, it’s always been a complicated society. It’s not this sort of fantasy world that you might imagine. Themyscira is complicated, comic books are complicated, and the Amazons have always been a part of this history.” Building on that history is key. Collaborating with Alitha Martinez has clearly inspired Williams, who describes her first time receiving the pages back for Nubia as “mind blowing.” It’s no surprise, because Martinez has crafted an aesthetic for the book that straddles the line between traditional superheroes and mythology. There’s another juxtaposition that spoke to Williams. “I love the way Nubia and all the other Amazons are drawn because they may look strong, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have the emotional range or the vulnerability,” she says. “I feel like the art does a really great job of playing that balance, so that we can see their softness. And there’s something left for interpretation, which is even greater.” Aside from the obvious—more comics, animated and live-action movies, and a greater recognition of Nubia as a top-tier DC hero—Williams has an even more important dream. “I would just love it if the moment a small child walks into a comic shop or anywhere, when they see her or hear the name Nubia, they automatically know who she is.” Nubia & The Amazons #1 and Wonder Woman #780 are out now. DEN OF GEEK

COMICS ANNIVERSARY

AMERICAN BOY

Archie Comics turns 80 this year. We catch up with the architects of the Archieverse to celebrate “America’s Typical Teenager.” BY CHRIS CUMMINS

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by rock impresario Don Kirshner and featured on Filmation’s hit The Archie Show, had the number one song of the year with their eternal earworm “Sugar Sugar.”

IT’S A GOLDEN AGE TO BE AN ARCHIE COMICS FAN RIGHT NOW.” — A RC H IE C O MI C S P R E S I D E N T, M IK E PE L L E R I TO

Since 1987 Dan Parent has been writing and illustrating for Archie and he believes the “common sustaining thread through the entire history of Archie Comics has been that love triangle.” Indeed, the eternal Archie/ Betty/Veronica drama is such a strong narrative framework that thousands of stories have been built upon it–and everyone who is familiar with these characters has a strong opinion about who Archie should wind up with.

The 2010s saw Archie begin a series of daring moves that would establish the brand as an industry innovator, from the magazine Life with Archie: The Married Life to the introduction of Kevin Keller, Riverdale’s first openly gay resident, created by Parent. Then came the horror titles Afterlife with Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which paved the way for the television Archieverse. All of which is to say that Archie is experiencing a creative renaissance despite having recently turned 80. “The character archetypes are so flexible and work in so many different settings that you can throw them into anything and they would stand,” explains Archie Senior Director of Editorial and Betty and Veronica: Vixens creator/writer Jamie Lee Rotante. “No matter what genre, what time period, it just works because the characters are so well defined.” Director of Publicity and Social Media Ron Cacace credits Archie stories not getting bogged down in

IMAGE CREDITS: ARCHIE COMICS

“IT’S A GOLDEN AGE TO BE AN Archie Comics fan right now,” says company president Mike Pellerito with infectious enthusiasm, adding “I just can’t imagine a better time.” The declaration is more than accurate, as the independently owned publisher is celebrating its 80th anniversary with the massive CW hit Riverdale entering its sixth season (one that will bring on board Kiernan Shipka’s teenage witch from the late, lamented Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina as a guest star). Despite the TV success, comics are still Archie’s bread and butter, from the digest reprints that beg for impulse buys at the supermarket to a series of innovative titles that have seen Archie and his “pals and gals” become critical darlings. Some history: In December of 1941, MLJ Comics–a publisher then best known for its stable of superheroes like The Shield, a patriotic figure who predates Captain America–released Pep #22, featuring a backup story focusing on lovable klutz Archie Andrews. It was an instant success due to the humor and charm of its cast, which included lovely girl-nextdoor Betty Cooper and oddball pal Jughead Jones (Veronica Lodge was not yet part of the picture). Created by MLJ publisher John L. Goldwater and artist Bob Montana, Archie drew influence from the era’s youth-based Andy Hardy films and successfully predicted how teenage life would become the fulcrum for popular culture in the following decades. Indeed “America’s typical teenager” (as the tagline for Archie’s solo book claimed) became so beloved that MLJ renamed itself in his honor. The peak of Archiemania was 1969, when the cartoon group The Archies, created

their own mythology as a key reason for their ongoing success. “They’re not, for the most part, these long, ongoing dramas like you may have in superhero stories,” he explains. “You can pick up any Archie issue, any Archie digest, and immediately within five pages get a grasp of who these characters are, what the situation is, what they’re going through, and you just want to read the next one.” The past 80 years have seen Archie rocking out with the likes of The B52’s and Kiss, getting killed, fighting zombies, serving in World War II, etc. Yet at his core he remains “America’s typical teenager,” a fact that Pellerito attributes to the longevity of these characters. “This is a fun group of kids to hang out with that you want to have as friends,” he says. “And I think what makes Archie [characters] special is they always earnestly try their best, even if it turns into a comedic disaster.” It’s a recipe for success that has been working for 80 years, even if Archie still looks the same as ever. Riverdale airs Wednesday nights on The CW. The Best of Archie Comics: 80 Years, 80 Stories is available now.

Archie Gets Weird

ARCHIE HAS PUBLISHED ITS FAIR SHARE OF ODDITIES OVER THE YEARS. HERE ARE OUR FAVORITES.

JUGHEAD’S DINER

Publishing titles like Archie 3000 and Jughead’s Time Police, Archie Comics went through a fascinating experimental phase in the early 1990s. A fan favorite from this era was Jughead’s Diner, which had our everhungry hero interacting with the wacky denizens of an interdimensional eatery.

SPIRE CHRISTIAN COMICS

In the 1970s, Archie writer/ artist Al Hartley infamously convinced the company to license its characters to Spire Christian Comics, to be sold in religious bookstores. With titles like Archie’s Sonshine, they featured off-brand takes on the characters that must be read to be believed.

LIFE WITH ARCHIE

From mindcontrolling teddy bears to Deliverance homages, the 1970s run of Life with Archie thrust the gang into unbelievable storylines that were as implausible as they were entertaining. For anyone who thinks Riverdale is the first time that Archie got weird, we point them at this comic.

LITTLE ARCHIE

Created by writer/artist Bob Bolling in 1956, Little Archie was an early example of juvenile versions of popular characters. Tonally shifting between humor, whimsy, and excitement— aliens and monsters were commonplace—these stories also had a melancholy edge that still make them essential. DEN OF GEEK

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Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) is prepared for battle with his silver sword.

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The cast and creator of Netflix’s The Witcher on how season 2 is pushing the boundaries of fantasy TV BY Lacy Baugher

ETFLIX’S THE WITCHER

is one of the streamer’s most popular offerings, an epic fantasy teeming with magic, monsters, and complex characters with weighty, potentially worldsaving destinies shared between them. Its first season featured thrilling fight sequences, a banger of a folk ballad about our titular monster-slaying hero, and a non-linear timeline that is occasionally as frustrating as it is fun to unravel. And though things will reportedly become a bit more chronological in the show’s second season, the interconnected stakes have never been higher for our favorite characters. Emotional richness sets The Witcher apart from many of the other big-name fantasy properties that have come to our screens. At first glance, The Witcher seems like exactly

the sort of show that gives fantasy a reputation for being exclusionary in its genre conventions: a pseudo-medieval setting full of dark creatures, hulking warriors, big swords, and a pretty blonde girl in distress. Yet, in actuality, The Witcher contains surprising multitudes: rich character arcs, dense internal mythology, complex politics, and a heartwarming found family at the core of its narrative –it just also happens to be set in a world populated by monsters. Season one not only introduced mainstream viewers everywhere to Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill)–a magically enhanced monster hunter known as a Witcher–but also to the powerful sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya DEN OF GEEK 35

AT HEART, HE IS A PURE AND GOOD MAN WHO TRIES TO DO HIS BEST. I WANTED TO MAKE SURE THAT HE CAME ACROSS AS THE WISE MAN THAT HE IS. HE’S NOT JUST A GRUNTER.” — HENRY CAVILL Chalotra), and Cirilla (Freya Allan), the young princess of Cintra who secretly possesses powerful magic of her own. Though all are major players in Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski’s interconnected series of novels and short stories, they are not initially introduced with equal weight –a fact that showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich was determined to change. “In the books, Ciri and Yen are introduced through Geralt. We meet him first, we establish him first, we learn about his world [first],” Hissrich says. “And then these women kind of come in from the side. And no matter how strong they are, [they] still feel like secondary characters.” Determined to “show all three were equally important,” Hissrich deliberately structured the first season of The Witcher to “change the lens with which we view these characters,” allowing all their stories to carry equal significance and weight. In doing so, her vision has not only helped make The Witcher more inclusive and fulfilling to watch as a singular TV show, it is redefining what sorts of stories we expect these big blockbuster fantasy series to be. For example, what’s most interesting about Geralt isn’t his magical day job, but the way his character subverts common tropes about what a fantasy hero is supposed to be and do. On paper, it would be so easy to simply cast the show’s titular Witcher as a blunt, sword-wielding beefcake, The cursed nobleman Nivellen (Kristofer Hivju) is not as monstrous as he looks.

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an avatar of toxic masculinity, or some uncomfortable combination of both. Instead, both showrunner Hissrich and star Cavill have worked hard to craft a threedimensional leading man with surprising, and often hidden, depths. “That was a very important piece to me, that I represented that side of Geralt,” Cavill says. “At heart, he is a pure and good man who tries to do his best. I wanted to make sure that he came across as the wise man that he is. He’s not just a grunter.” According to Hissrich, season two will show us Geralt’s “softer side,” though Cavill says that the new season will simply allow viewers to see the “layers” that were always present in his character. “I would say we get to see more of his intellectual side, which was something I was keen to introduce,” he says. “Because season one was a particular choice–he was in the outside world and had a particular way of doing things. And [he] was without the luxury of opportunity for vast swathes of dialogue, which we often find in the books. I found it better to make him a listener and a watcher. Now that this second season has come around, he gets to be a bit more verbose.” In season two, as the Witchers begin to come together, it’s not just Geralt whose full character comes to light. As fans may have seen in the trailers, Geralt takes Ciri to the stronghold of Kaer Morhen in season two, where he and his mystical brethren trained in their youth. Cavill says he “really pushed” for the chance to portray the “softness” in the relationships between these men, who have shared so much in their lives together. “It can be very easy to slide down the road of just a trope-y, stereotypically male figure,” Cavill explains. “But that’s not what Sapkowski wrote when it came to The Witcher. He wrote these intellectual, very caring, and, yes, very dangerous individuals. It’s not just ‘ugh, ugh, we kill stuff’ and ‘cold beer’ every time we talk.” “He’s got a lot of soul,” Hissrich says, “And when he goes back with the people that he trusts most in the world, you get to see some of that vulnerability come out.” But while season two will give us new perspectives on all of our favorite characters, it will also introduce some new ones along the way. “Basically, we set the chessboard in season one,” Hissrich says. “In season two, the world is bigger. We are tracking a lot more groups of people this season. We have Geralt and

IMAGE CREDIT: NETFLIX/SUSIE ALLNUTT (JASKIER)

Jaskier (Joey Batey), The Witcher’s resident bard, belts out another banger.

Ciri and Yen, but we also have the elves and we’re sort of digging into their story.” The second season is also primed to introduce multiple characters and realms that fans of the franchise have been clamoring for, including a certain master spy. “We meet Dijkstra and we get into Redania’s story and Philippa who everyone cannot wait to [finally] see,” Hissrich says. “You have mages. You have Nilfgaard. You have the rest of the Northern kingdoms. There are all these players on the board now.” But, as many fans of The Witcher franchise are already aware, despite the increasingly complex political issues at work around the Continent, the biggest moments headed our way in the second season will be personal ones, as its three primary characters finally get to share a scene. “The real payoff to this season is Geralt and Ciri and Yennefer coming together,” Hissrich says. “So much of The Witcher is about the relationship between these three characters. It’s the promise of the series: they’re going to come together as a family. It’s one of those moments that has such great [emotional] impact.” In Hissrich’s mind, stories like The Witcher–sprawling, lore-rich fantasy series with a massive cast of characters–are “only interesting if you can dig in and care about a specific person or a specific relationship.” “I spoke a lot about this when I was doing press for season

one, but I wasn’t sure that I was fully qualified to [make The Witcher],” Hissrich says. “But when I dug into it and realized that this is a story about family, that is something I recognize and that I know how to do. I know how to do relationships.” And that’s a good thing because after a season spent searching, Geralt and Ciri have finally found one another and will have to face the question: what’s next for them? “We have this beautiful scene of them embracing at the end of season one; I found you, you found me. We are each other’s destiny, I will protect you and take care of you. We are now father and daughter. But that’s not how life works,” Hissrich says. Because although Ciri is forever connected to Geralt through the Law of Surprise, the two don’t actually know each other. As Hissrich explains, “they’re essentially strangers” when season two begins, and a big part of their journey together will necessarily involve them learning to trust one another. “You really get to see their relationship change,” Allan says. “Ciri has a lot of secrets to keep from him. She has gone through a lot, and she has a lack of trust in people. So it takes a while.” According to Cavill, his character’s approach to building a genuine bond with Ciri is primarily about giving her the space and agency Ciri’s life has often lacked. DEN OF GEEK 37

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THE STORY SO FAR… HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED TO GERALT AND THE GANG IN SEASON ONE. The first season of The Witcher introduced us to a medieval-inspired fantasy world where mages and monsters roam a landmass known as “the Continent.” The series follows three characters: Geralt of Rivia, Crown Princess Ciri, and the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg. In season one, each character’s storyline takes place across a different duration of time, with Yennefer’s story spanning 70 years, Geralt’s story spanning 20 years, and Ciri’s story spanning two weeks. Yennefer is a powerful mage who has traded her ability to have children for beauty, and has come to regret it. She shares a powerful attraction

IMAGE CREDITS: NETFLIX/JAY MAIDMENT

“It’s not that he doesn’t trust [her], it’s that he is watching and waiting for her to reveal herself to him,” Cavill explains. “She spent her last few months running from death–literally–and her home got burned to the ground and everyone she knew was killed. The last thing she needs is an inquisitor.” Instead, Cavill “really wanted to portray” Geralt as someone who was, finally, “just allowing [Ciri] space to be.” But just because his intentions are good ones doesn’t mean their relationship is automatically smooth sailing. “They have plenty of disagreements!” Allan laughs when asked about the evolution of their connection. “But what I think makes the relationship eventually so strong, is that feuding that they have at the start. Ciri wants to be a great fighter and [Geralt]’s restricting that and [it’s] frustrating,” Allan says. “But obviously, it’s ultimately coming out of a place of care.” In Hissrich’s view, Ciri and Geralt both have understandable reasons for their initial reactions to one another, which makes it even more necessary to show their bond evolving over time. “A really important [part] of the season is how their trust waxes and wanes. It’s not just an ‘Oh, something happens, and now we completely trust each other!’ thing. Because, again, life doesn’t work like that.” The key to their relationship is that Geralt “finally shows her over a period of time that she can trust him and that he is someone she can rely on,” which, as Cavill points out, is not something that Ciri has had much of in her young life. “Ultimately, they do become a real team because of what they go through together. And Ciri definitely gets to the point where Geralt is the person she trusts most in this world and they have a real love for each other,” Allan says. “It’s beautiful.” Of course, Ciri isn’t the only major relationship in Geralt’s life, though she may be the most important one at the moment (if only because, as season two begins, he believes that his on-again, off-again love Yennefer is dead, having sacrificed herself to win the Battle of Sodden). “Their relationship is complicated,” Chalotra laughs. “Again. Yet again. They’re both very independent people. And they don’t want to need each other. But they do.” The fact that Yen begins the season on her own as a “prisoner of war” means that her story is initially going to look quite different from Ciri and Geralt’s. It will involve making “unlikely alliances” in order to survive, though Chalotra is coy about whom precisely those connections will be with. “She has a lot to come to terms with this season,” Chalotra explains, “It changes her perspective and makes her grow.” Season two, to her, is “a more full exploration of this character and all the characters.” But although we “go deeper” into Yennefer’s mind than ever before in season two, Chalotra says that what fans “will really relish” is her character’s upcoming meeting with Ciri. “Their relationship is very exciting, and I’m really looking forward to seeing that dynamic play out,” Chalotra says. “From the books, we know how it ends up. But there’s a process to get there. And there are challenges they both

Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) is suffering in captivity at the start of the season.

Geralt sports a new armor design in The Witcher season two.

with Geralt, but the two have never been able to work things out. Meanwhile, Ciri has fled her own kingdom of Cintra after it falls to the Nilfgaardian army. She searches for Geralt, who has a duty to protect Ciri due to a custom known as the Law of Surprise, but ruthless Nilfgaardian commander Cahir is hot on her heels. All three timelines come together in the season’s final episode, “Much More,” which sees Ciri and Geralt reunited at a farm in the county, and Yennefer release her immense power in order to win the Battle of Sodden, stopping the Nilfgaardian forces from invading the rest of the Northern Kingdoms. —Kayti Burt

Freya Allan as Ciri. Season two of The Witcher sees Ciri unite with Henry Cavill’s Geralt to form a strong bond.

face to get there.” Chalotra is effusive in her praise of Allen’s “nuanced” performance, declaring that “watching Ciri’s journey play out” was her “favorite thing about season two.” Though the actress promises “tears and screams and many fights” in The Witcher’s second season, the heart of the show remains “the three core characters in this dysfunctional family that we have.” Which reinforces Hissrich’s assertion that season two is largely about what it means to be a family in the first place. “What does it mean to be a family member to someone when you’re not related by blood? What does it mean to go back home? [These are themes] we play around with a lot,” Hissrich says. “And [also] what does it mean to forge forward and start a new branch in your life?” These questions matter more than monsters or mages, but just because season two is about “really digging into these characters,” doesn’t mean this outing of The Witcher won’t have its share of thrilling twists. “I want even the most diehard fans to be surprised by the moves our characters [make] this season,” Hissrich says. “By how we take the book Blood of Elves and the tenets of that story and weave new stories into it. It’s more epic than ever.” The Witcher Season Two premieres on Netflix on Dec. 17. DEN OF GEEK 39

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AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM RELEASE DATE: DEC. 16

The first Aquaman was a visually stunning, weird and wild roller coaster of a film. Less superhero movie than adventure/quest film, its sequel also seems to be leaning into the latter. Jason Momoa is back as Arthur Curry, now the undisputed King of Atlantis. Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Temuera Morrison will all return.

THE BATMAN

THE FLASH

RELEASE DATE: NOV. 4

Five years after he first appeared as Barry Allen, Ezra Miller will finally headline a Flash solo movie. This flick will see Barry explore the DC multiverse, meeting an alternate version of himself, a mysterious Supergirl (Sasha Calle), and an older, wiser Batman, played by classic Dark Knight Michael Keaton.

BLACK ADAM

RELEASE DATE: JULY 29

Dwayne Johnson finally joins the DCEU as Black Adam, an ancient champion imbued with the power of Shazam who became corrupted in ancient times before returning to our modern world. The film will bring the legendary Justice Society of America to the big screen for the first time with Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate.

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EASILY THE MOST EAGERLY ANTICIPATED SUPERHERO FILM OF 2022, Matt Reeves’ star-studded combination of grim comic book action and film noir severs all ties to the DCEU and tells a complex tale situated in a young Caped Crusader’s second year on the job. Robert Pattinson stars as a deeply haunted Bruce Wayne/Dark Knight, battling underworld kingpins like Oswald Cobblepot (Colin Farrell) and Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), while tracking the macabre serial killer known as the Riddler (Paul Dano) and romancing a mysterious thief named Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz). Reeves’ vision of the Bat and Gotham City looks even darker and more streetlevel than Christopher Nolan’s at first glance, and it will be fascinating to see the underrated Pattinson inhabit such a mythic figure for the first time. We’re also excited by the prospect of new big-screen interpretations of classic baddies like the Penguin and the Riddler for the first time since Danny DeVito and Jim Carrey chewed up the scenery in the roles decades ago. The third version of Batman in 10 years—following Christian Bale’s reluctant hero and Ben Affleck’s rage-fueled squad leader—may prove to be that most elusive creature of all: the definitive one.

THE WHALE

RELEASE DATE: TBA Darren Aronofsky tackles the play about a 600-pound man who wants to reconnect with his teen daughter years after he abandoned her.

DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS

RELEASE DATE: MAY 20 John Krasinski will voice Superman and Dwayne Johnson will voice his dog in this CGI superhero comedy.

IMAGE CREDITS: WARNER BROS./LIONSGATE/DISNEY/COLUMBIA PICTURES, PREVIOUS PAGE: 2K GAMES / AMAZON STUDIOS / AMC / BANDAI NAMCO / BBC / BBC AMERICA / COLUMBIA PICTURES / DC / DEEP SILVER / DISNEY / HBO / LIONSGATE / MARVEL / NETFLIX / NINTENDO / PARAMOUNT / PIXAR / PLAYSTATION STUDIOS / SONY / UNIVERSAL / WARNER BROS

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UNCHARTED RELEASE DATE: FEB. 18 | Sony Pictures’ adaptation of the beloved PlayStation

action-adventure series has been a long time coming. After all, it’s been in the works since at least 2008, but now the wait is over. MCU star Tom Holland brings treasure hunter and explorer Nathan Drake to the big screen, teaming up with his “wisecracking” partner Sully (Mark Wahlberg) to find “the greatest treasure never found.” But gamers know uncovering the riches will be anything but easy. For years, PlayStation fans have fantasized about a big-screen adaptation of the series becoming the true successor to the Indiana Jones movies, and for good reason: there are plenty of dangerous dungeons, ancient mysteries, lots of shooting, and death defying stunts—plus Nathan gets beat up A LOT. Indy would be proud.

JOHN WICK 4

RELEASE DATE: FE B. 11

RELEASE DATE: MAY 27 | “Yeah,

I’m thinking I’m back.” Assassin John Wick’s declaration in the first movie set off a chain of events that are now spilling into a highly-anticipated fourth film, as the master of gun fu finds himself relentlessly hunted by the High Table itself. With the underworld becoming an even more dangerous place for the “excommunicated” hitman, he has very few allies left, and none of the resources to beat the most powerful criminal organization on the planet. But John has his guns and maybe that’s enough. Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, and Lance Reddick return for this sequel.

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 RELEASE DATE: APRIL 8 The Sonic the Hedgehog cinematic universe expands in this sequel which sees Sonic again facing off against Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik.

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DEATH ON THE NILE ANOTHER STARRY CAST, ANOTHER IMPOSSIBLY OPULENT journey, and another murder to solve for superstar detective Hercule Poirot in Kenneth Branagh’s Covid-delayed follow up to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express. This time the generously moustachioed Belgian is charged with tracking down a killer who has struck during a deluxe Egyptian cruise. Potential suspects—and indeed victims—include Annette Bening, Russell Brand, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Rose Leslie, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, Jennifer Saunders, and Letitia Wright. Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery, published in 1937, should provide plenty of twists and turns against some stunning backdrops—the movie was shot on locations in Aswan, Luxor, and Cairo—as Hercule attempts to unravel the killing of a newly wed during a luxury honeymoon vacation. Expect fabulous outfits, fancy accents, gorgeous cinematography and Branagh acting his socks off.

RELEASE DATE: NOV. 23 Michael B. Jordan makes his directorial debut and returns as Adonis Creed, Apollo’s son and a heavyweight boxing champion.

LIGHTYEAR

RELEASE DATE: JUNE 17 Buzz Lightyear—the fictional human astronaut, not the toy based on him—gets an origin story. Chris Evans voices Buzz in Angus MacLane’s debut.

BABYLON

RELEASE DATE: DEC. 25 Damien Chazelle is back with another Hollywood-centric period drama, set during the transition from silent film to synchronized sound.

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reboot, director David Gordon Green’s 2021 follow-up, Halloween Kills, met with a decidedly more polarized response while ending on a cliffhanger. Green has said that the final chapter in his trilogy, Halloween Ends, will be a “much more intimate” movie that celebrates Halloween creator John Carpenter’s “legendary body of work.” We hope, at least, that he can deliver the same kind of focused, character-driven horror that was sadly missing from his middle chapter.

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RELEASE DATE: OCT. 14 | After the wide acclaim for 2018’s Halloween

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THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER RELEASE DATE: JULY 8

RELEASE DATE: JAN . 14

Thor: Ragnarok is one of the most beloved entries in the MCU, thanks to the style and wit of director Taika Waititi, who injected a welcome jolt of Kirby-esque cosmic weirdness into the franchise. Waititi directs this sequel, which sees Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster become the Goddess of Thunder and Christian Bale as the terrifying Gorr, the God-Butcher.

DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS RELEASE DATE: MAY 6

SCREAM IMAGE CREDITS: PARAMOUNT PICTURES/WARNER BROS, MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES (ELVIS)

It’s taken almost six years to finally get a Doctor Strange sequel. Now, director Sam Raimi will fling the good doctor across multiple MCU-adjacent realities. WandaVision’s Elizabeth Olsen will also be on hand as the reality-bending Scarlet Witch, so anything is possible.

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER RELEASE DATE: NOV. 11

Director Ryan Coogler returns to the franchise that netted Marvel Studios a billion dollars, seven Oscar nominations, and was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Time will tell how the sequel will address the tragic loss of Chadwick Boseman.

AVATAR 2

RELEASE DATE: DEC. 16 Years ago, visionary filmmaker James Cameron promised several sequels to Avatar. In 2022, we’ll finally get the first. Sam Worthington returns.

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DISAPPOINTMENT BLVD

RELEASE DATE: TBA Hereditary and Midsommar director Ari Aster teams up with Joaquin Phoenix for this portrait of an entrepreneur.

ELVIS

RELEASE DATE: JUNE 24 This biopic from Baz Luhrmann chronicles the life of The King himself, from his Army days to music royalty. It stars Austin Butler as Elvis.

DON’T WORRY DARLING RELEASE DATE: SEPT. 23 | Olivia Wilde proved herself to be an enormously

talented director with her brilliant feature debut Booksmart in 2019, which makes her follow-up, Don’t Worry Darling, one of our most anticipated movies of 2022. It doesn’t hurt that the period piece stars Florence Pugh, one of the most interesting actors of her generation, opposite Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, and Harry Styles. It also has a killer premise: a 1950s housewife living in an experimental “utopian” community begins to suspect her husband’s company is hiding something nefarious. Intriguing.

DESPITE BEING SIMPLY TITLED SCREAM, THIS WILL ACTUALLY be the fifth installment in the cult horror series created by the late, great Wes Craven. Fortunately, this series has aged like fine wine. Set 25 years after the initial Ghostface murders, a new killer has donned the mask to stalk the town of Woodsboro, and a brand new cast of teens played by Melissa Barrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Mikey Madison, Dylan Minnette, Sonia Ammar, and Jasmin Savoy Brown. Fortunately, the kids have three Ghostface-hunting experts on their side this time around: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette return as Sidney, Gale, and Dewey, respectively. As Sidney says in the movie’s trailer, the three heroes will stop at nothing to catch this new Ghostface, but not all of the kids will make it out alive. While this is the first Scream film not helmed by Craven himself (the director passed in 2015), original Scream writer Kevin Williamson, who also penned I Know What You Did Last Summer, is on board as executive producer, while Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are picking up directing duties. The two have plenty of street cred when it comes to horror. After all, they’re two of the filmmakers behind fan-favorite shockers V/H/S and Ready or Not. Judging from what we’ve seen so far, expect many of the classic franchise scares but also a few modern twists akin to the recent Halloween.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

RELEASE DATE: TBA David Cronenberg is remaking his own 1970s sci-fi film about dermatology and skin care gone terribly wrong. As expected, this movie is not for the faint of heart.

MEN

RELEASE DATE: TBA Alex Garland is back for his latest work of horror. A young woman travels alone to the English countryside without knowing she’s in an A24 film.

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FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE SECRETS OF DUMBLEDORE

RELEASE DATE: APRIL 15 | There

might not be as many people clamoring for a third Fantastic Beasts movie as there would have been at the height of Harry Potter popularity, but it’s coming nonetheless. Following the worldshaking events of The Crimes of Grindelwald, The Secrets of Dumbledore is poised to center on Albus himself (Jude Law) as he moves to stop Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (a newly-arrived Mads Mikkelsen, replacing Johnny Depp) from securing control of the wizarding world. For obligatory reasons, Magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) will be there to help him, and someone (Dumbledore) has given him control of a team of witches and wizards to carry out an important mission. Look for more fantastical beasts to be shoe-horned into the plot, which marks the halfway point of this prequel series, with two more planned Fantastic Beasts installments on the way.

RELEASE DATE: SEPT. 9 This classic vampire tale from Stephen King finally comes to the big screen, thanks to writer-director Gary Dauberman.

THE KILLER

RELEASE DATE: TBA David Fincher returns to Netflix for this noir thriller from Se7en writer Andrew Kevin Walker. Michael Fassbender plays the titular killer.

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SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE 2 RELEASE DATE: OCT. 7

2018’s Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse wasn’t just an introduction to the Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) incarnation of Spider-Man, or a big budget animated exploration of the Spidey mythos, it was a beautiful, emotional, psychedelic trip. Hopefully the sequel will reunite the multiversal Spideys from the first movie and introduce us to some new ones.

RELEASE DATE: FEB. 4

Scott Derrickson’s return to horror after a sojourn in the MCU with Doctor Strange couldn’t come at a better time, especially since his new film is based on a short story by Joe Hill and features Ethan Hawke as a deranged child abductor. Word says this one’s as creepy as they come.

JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION RELEASE DATE: JUNE 10

The gang’s really all here for this sixth entry in the dinosaur franchise, as stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum return alongside Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. The dinos are roaming free in human civilization in Colin Trevorrow’s epic, which may or may not conclude the story started back in 1993.

THE NORTHMAN

RELEASE DATE: APRIL 22 Horror master Robert Eggers sets out to 10th-century Iceland for his Viking revenge tale starring Alexander Skarsgård and Nicole Kidman.

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THE LONG DELAYED SEQUEL TO THE ’80S CLASSIC IS FINALLY taking off in 2022. Tom Cruise returns as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, who, decades after his fateful encounter with enemy MiGs with Iceman and Goose, is still working as a flight instructor and test pilot at TOPGUN. No longer the young rebel at the academy, Maverick is now a relic of the past in the eyes of his superiors. But even if he’s on his way out, he still has a new generation of pilots to train, including Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), Goose’s son. Other new recruits include Glen Powell, Danny Ramirez, and Jay Ellis (pictured right). They are joined by Jennifer Connelly and Jon Hamm. Joseph Kosinski, who also helmed films Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, directs.

NOPE RELEASE DATE: JULY 22 | Do we

know much about Jordan Peele’s next horror movie? Nope. But are we excited anyway? Hell, yes! Though Peele has a habit of keeping his horror projects close to his chest, we haven’t been disappointed yet after his

MOONFALL

RELEASE DATE: FEB. 4 It’s a Roland Emmerich disaster movie about the moon hurtling towards Earth. It stars Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson. Enough said.

UNWELCOME

Oscar-winning Get Out and highly creepy twist on the home invasion movie Us. What we do know about Nope is that it’s got a cool title, and that it will feature his Get Out star, Daniel Kaluuya, as well as Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Barbie Ferreira, Brandon Perea, and Michael Wincott. The film will be released by Universal under

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 17 Hannah John-Kamen and Douglas Booth make the fatal mistake of leaving the city for a peaceful life in the country. Monsters welcome them.

SUPER MARIO BROS. RELEASE DATE: DEC. 21 Chris Pratt will voice Mario in this new animated movie. Fortunately, he won’t be attempting the Italian plumber’s heavy accent.

IMAGE CREDITS: PARAMOUNT PICTURES/ UNIVERSAL PICTURES

THE BLACK PHONE

TOP GUN: MAVERICK

RELEASE DATE: M A Y 2 7

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 7 RELEASE DATE: SEPT. 30 | Did anyone watch 1996’s Mission: Impossible

and guess that it would become one of Hollywood’s most durable action franchises? The plot and title of M:I 7 remain a secret for now, but Tom Cruise (of course), Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, and Ving Rhames are back, joined by Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, and—for the first time since the original film—Henry Czerny as former IMF director Eugene Kittridge. We were a little let down by Fallout (a.k.a. M:I 6) after the peak performance of Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation, but we still expect Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie to deliver the pulse-pounding goods.

RELEASE DATE: JAN. 7

THE 355 Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, and is written and directed by Peele. So far the only plot clues we have are a mysterious poster of a dodgy-looking cloud which appears to be trailing bunting, hovering above a mountain town, and the IMDb description saying it’s a “fantasy” as well as a horror and a thriller. Ominous.

TURNING RED

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 11 Pixar’s latest stars Rosalie Chiang as an angsty teen who not only has to navigate adolescence but also her transformation into a panda!

AFTER THE SUCCESS OF JAMES BOND’S LATEST ADVENTURE in theaters this year, Universal Pictures is dishing its own spy thriller with The 355, which stars Jessica Chastain as a CIA agent who must form her own international super team of secret agents to recover a weapon that threatens the planet. Together, these spies form a new faction called “355” that includes British, Chinese, Colombian, and German agents. Chastain came up with the idea for a female-led spy movie while working on X-Men flick Dark Phoenix with director Simon Kinberg, who is now helming this actioner. But this isn’t just a work of pure fantasy. The codename “355” is steeped in real-world history as it refers to the still-unidentified female spy who helped the Patriots during the American Revolution. She was a pivotal member of the Culper Ring, the spy network responsible for stealing information from the British Army’s NYC headquarters. Will The 355 all tie back to 1776 somehow? The movie’s starstudded cast also includes Lupita Nyong’o, Diane Kruger, Bingbing Fan, and Penelope Cruz. Sebastian Stan and Edgar Ramirez also co-star.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

RELEASE DATE: TBA This Western crime drama from Martin Scorsese features Leonardo DiCaprio and a series of grisly murders.

MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU

RELEASE DATE: JULY 1 Every villain needs an origin story, right? A 12-year-old Gru dreams of joining the bad guy elite but ends up becoming their target!

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JARED LETO STARS AS MARVEL’S LIVING VAMPIRE IN AN ORIGIN STORY WITH BITE. DEN OF GEEK VENTURES ON SET TO GET UNDER THE SKIN OF THIS TROUBLED ANTIHERO. BY RICH A RD JORDA N

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“IF YOU’RE GOING TO RUN, do it now…” In the depths of a South American rainforest, an unusually frail-looking Jared Leto stands at the towering mouth of a sinister-looking cave, propped up by two walking sticks, his long, stringy hair draped over a green overcoat that swallows his frame. A small group of mercenaries look on nervously, edging back towards the helicopter behind them. He takes a large knife and draws it across his palm, before holding his hand up towards the hi-tech cage positioned in front of him. Something is stirring from within the darkness. But there’s a problem… “The blood didn’t come out,” Leto says, looking off to the side. “Wanna go again?”

On any other production, that little practical-FX slip-up might have been ripe for the post-release blooper reel. But while Leto briefly breaks character to acknowledge the error, there’s no corpsing here–he remains focused, shuffling around on his crutches while the unit quickly sets up for another take. The second runout is more successful; this time, the knife opens up a big, bloody, creaturebaiting gash. As you might have guessed, this isn’t actually a South American rainforest. Den of Geek is currently on a soundstage at the old Fountain Studios in Wembley, North London– although the set design is so impressive, it feels like it could be the real thing (giant, 360-degree

IMAGE CREDITS: SONY PICTURES

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DIRECTOR : DANI EL ESP I NOSA STARRING: JARED LE T O, ADRI A ARJONA, MAT T SMI TH , TYRESE G I B SON RELEASE DATE: JANUARY 2 8, 2022

greenscreen notwithstanding). Crew members with water-tank backpacks spray mist over the rocky terrain and fake flora in between set-ups, maintaining the tropical illusion. The bloodless blunder we’ve just witnessed is funny, given that the movie currently being shot boasts the working title “Plasma” and has a plot that revolves around the red stuff… This is Morbius, the Covid-delayed third chapter in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (after 2018’s Venom and its sequel, Let There Be Carnage), starring Leto as the eponymous antihero. Leto’s Michael Morbius is a genius physician suffering from a rare blood disease, whose search for a cure leads him to self-experimentation–turning him into a “living vampire” with

supernatural abilities and a thirst for human blood. “The cave sequence that we’re shooting today is the one that opens the film,” explains producer Lucas Foster, as he shows us concept art and models that reveal the vast scale of the scene–much of which will be filled in with CGI during post-production. “Inside the cave are hundreds of thousands of a particular kind of bat, which Morbius is looking to collect and bring back to his lab. It’s a really cool sequence.” Morbius may be a high-concept comic book adaptation, but that doesn’t mean Leto is taking it any less seriously than his more grounded roles. He is famed for taking the immersive “Method” approach when

it comes to embodying characters, and Morbius is no exception (hence why Den of Geek has been invited only to “observe” his work). This is the final week of principal photography and yet, when we ask Leto’s co-star Adria Arjona about what he’s like to work with, she responds: “I’ve never met Jared… I’ve only met Michael Morbius.” Arjona is playing Martine Bancroft, a fellow scientist who has a “symbiotic” relationship with Morbius. “It was a challenge for me [at first] because it made me adapt to this new form of working,” she continues. “But it has been really special.” The film’s director, Daniel Espinosa, agrees. “It was truly astounding to see the amount of work he puts in to DEN OF GEEK

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physically transform to become this character,” he says. “It’s something I haven’t really seen before, this Method approach. It’s like when he’s using the crutches–sometimes it takes him a long time to come to the set…” He laughs. “But it’s been great.”

BLOOD LINES? YOU CAN SEE WHY LETO WAS attracted to the role–Morbius is a character with a lot of complexities to mine. Created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Gil Kane, Morbius first appeared as an enemy of SpiderMan in 1971, and later featured in his own comic series–developing into more of a brooding, tragically flawed antihero. Following in the great traditions of Spidey villains such as The Lizard, Morbius’ actions might not always be agreeable, but there is an understandable method to his madness. “As the movie begins, he’s close to death,” explains Foster. “And so he gets increasingly desperate to figure out a solution. But as an expert in medicine, he’s right at the edge of that ethical boundary.” And what of his vampiric bloodlust? “It’s a challenge for a guy who’s a doctor, someone who’s sworn to defend human life,” he says. “He resists it. In the comics, he comes to prey upon the guilty. But this is an origin story; we’re starting with the birth of the character, before he’s made that decision. We watch him wrestle with this dilemma.” For Scandinavian filmmaker Espinosa (Safe House, Child 44)–a self-confessed Marvel super-fan who executive producer Louise Rosner reveals is the “secondbiggest purchaser of comic books in Sweden”–the bad guys are often “more 50

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Jared Leto’s Michael Morbius and Adria Arjona’s Martine Bancroft sit down for a beverage and a serious chat.

interesting” than the good guys. “I’ve read almost everything that Marvel has published up until now, and I was always very close to this character,” the director explains of his personal connection to Morbius. “I liked the kind of ’90s version, which spoke to me as a teenager in the postmodern era. You had the Berlin Wall coming down and you had this character who was like the Kurt Cobain of the Marvel Universe, who told people to fuck off, and I enjoyed that. So when this came to me, it was almost too good to be true.” This might be Morbius’ film, but he isn’t the only fan-favorite character

that Espinosa gets to develop on screen. There’s Martine, Morbius’ partner who, in the comics at least, has a complex arc of her own. “She’s pretty fierce,” says Arjona. “She’s strong and has her own will and has almost like a motherly quality to her, taking care of the people that she loves. And she’s extremely smart. She’s a head-to-head scientist with Morbius. He’s the genius behind this cure, but she’s striving to be just like him.” The movie also introduces the Fast & Furious saga’s Tyrese Gibson as Simon Stroud–a special agent tasked with “pursuing superherotype characters that have gone awry,”

MORBIUS AND THE MCU SPOIL E R ALERT ! MORBIUS IS THE THIRD FILM IN SONY’S Spider-Man Universe (SSU), the series of Spidey spin-offs which, up until now, have been kept separate from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) thanks to a complicated rights-owning situation. But could Leto’s living vampire ever end up facing his webslinging nemesis on screen? At one point, it looked unlikely. But thanks to a

according to Foster–and Doctor Who’s Matt Smith as Loxias Crown, “kind of an amalgam of characters from the comics” and a childhood friend of Morbius’ who suffers from the same blood condition. “They have a complicated relationship,” says Foster, wary of giving away too many of the film’s secrets. “It gets more and more complicated as the movie goes on…”

VAMPED UP LETO’S COMMITMENT TO HIS characters often involves as much of a physical transformation as it does a mental one. To be truly convincing

as Morbius, whose bat-cure gifts him superhuman speed and strength, the actor had to pack on some serious muscle. “When he transitions, he’s super healthy,” explains Rosner. “Jared was working out like a fiend to get the bulk. And then for the scenes where he is shirtless, there’s a three- or four-day period where he really has to work at it. He goes on this incredibly difficult diet, where he can only drink distilled water and he has to eat so specifically at certain times. It becomes a whole other job for him, and that all has to be scheduled.” Today’s sequence is actually an anomaly–most of Leto’s early, prevamp scenes were filmed first, so that he could maintain the bulk for his second- and third-act super-antics (the oversized waterproof coat he’s wearing today is no doubt helping to cover up his biceps). Morbius’ initial “sick look” is created through some clever make-up effects, while Rosner reveals that his frame will be altered via a “sort of shrinking effect” by VFX company Lola–the technical wizards who created a weedy-looking Chris Evans in Captain America: The First Avenger–to “make him look even more fragile.” There’s one more transformation, though, that Marvel fans are most eager to see–that is, Morbius’ change into his monstrous vampiric form. Principal photography on the film might be nearing its end on the day of our visit, but Leto will be going straight into weeks of motion capture work, with even more detailed facial capture taking place later, once a

deal struck between Marvel chief Kevin Feige and Sony’s Spidey producer Amy Pascal, which enables Tom Holland’s hero to star in Sony’s non-Marvel Studios productions, all bets are now off. Morbius’ two trailers, the most recent of which landed in November 2021, have dropped some key hints that the movie is set in the same world as Holland’s SpiderMan films. Leto is seen walking past a poster of Spidey graffitied with the word “Murderer”–likely a reference to the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home, in which ol’ webhead is framed for the death of villain Mysterio (though it’s worth noting the spidey suit here looks conspicuously like Toby Maguire’s suit from the Sam Raimi

rough cut has been assembled. “I went through the comic book history of the character,” says Espinosa, recalling the process of recreating Morbius’ iconic visage. “He has been reinvented quite radically in the different books, so I just picked the one that I like best and that I hope fans will. It was purely an emotional, instinctual decision. I hope it’s going to be a big thrill to watch the transformation.” “We have a design that’s really great,” adds Rosner. “We’ve had a lot of concept artists working on it. You can’t be scared by this character, but you also have to be scared by him, so it’s finding that happy medium.” While the filmmakers are keen to stress that Morbius is very much a PG-13 take on the character (“We’re not trying to make some deeply dark movie,” says Foster), there’s no getting away from the fact that Marvel’s bloodsucking antihero is inspired by a much-loved creature from horror lore. There’s also the fact that Espinosa previously directed sci-fi horror Life (which some consider an unofficial Venom prequel thanks to its gooey space invaders) and champions Alien director Ridley Scott as “the master.” “I always thought it would be interesting to do a superhero movie that had all the enjoyment and wish fulfillment that you want,” he says, “but I wanted to add that layer that comes from the movies that I’ve done before, which are a bit edgier.” Whatever the result, there will be blood–eventually.

movies). The trailers also feature a brief appearance from Michael Keaton, seemingly reprising his role as Adrian Toomes/Vulture from Holland’s first Spidey solo outing, Spider-Man: Homecoming. There’s also the little issue of the “multiverse,” a concept that will be introduced in the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home–which will see villains from Sony’s previous Spidey franchises ported into the world of Holland’s Peter Parker. This huge event was teased in the post-credits scene of Venom sequel Let There Be Carnage, opening the door for Tom Hardy’s alien-powered antihero to finally meet the wallcrawler. Chances are Leto’s Morbius could follow him through it. DEN OF GEEK

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SHE-HULK

RELEASE DATE: TBA

MS. MARVEL RELEASE DATE: TBA

Meet Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a 16-year-old girl living in Jersey City... and perhaps the world’s biggest Captain Marvel fan. So what happens when she gets super powers of her own? The MCU will explore what happens when a genuine superhero fan becomes a superhero herself when Ms. Marvel makes her debut on Disney+ in Summer 2022.

MOON KNIGHT RELEASE DATE: TBA

Oscar Isaac stars as Marc Spector, a former mercenary hiding a secret. Several secrets, it turns out, as Spector suffers from dissociative identity disorder and has multiple personalities. He’s also the vigilante known as Moon Knight, the human avatar of an Egyptian god. Marc’s been chosen to enforce his will—with deadly results. 52

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THE BOYS S3 IF YOU THOUGHT THE LAST two seasons of The Boys were wild, strap yourselves in for a third season that will push the boundaries of shocking superhero satire to hitherto unforeseen levels of sex, betrayal, and ultraviolence. In season three, Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles will join the cast as Soldier Boy, a barelyconcealed take on Captain America who would trigger more than Steve Rogers’ objections to naughty language. We’ll also be rejoining the Boys’ and the Supes’ ongoing clashes following that season two finale, where Homelander (Antony Starr) lost his grip on his estranged son, his woeful PR, and his alreadyshaky sanity. You can expect him to seek major payback on Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and the gang for their transgressions against him. Oh, and if you’re a fan of the comics, you’ll be thrilled to learn that we’ll be witnessing Herogasm in live-action during the third season. It promises to be one of the most depraved episodes of television ever made. For a show like The Boys, that’s a selling point.

IMAGE CREDITS: AMAZON STUDIOS/ NETFLIX/ HBO/DISNEY

Ever wonder what the legal system looks like in a world full of superheroes and supervillains? Welcome to the world of She-Hulk, where lawyer Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) ends up with the power and strength of her green cousin, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). Other figures from Hulk lore will also appear, like Tim Roth’s Abomination.

STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS

THE SANDMAN RELEASE DATE: TBA | For over 30

years, fans have dreamed of a liveaction adaptation of The Sandman, DC’s original adult fantasy series from the mind of Neil Gaiman and a parade of some of the best artists to ever grace the comic book medium. After years of false starts on a Sandman movie, Netflix has finally done what everyone always hoped someone would have the good sense to do: adapt The Sandman as a TV series. The Sandman is a sprawling modern mythology about beings known as the Endless: Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destruction, and Sandman’s protagonist, Dream. Starring Tom Sturridge as Dream, The Sandman

RELEASE DATE: TBA | Welcome

boasts a cast that includes Gwendoline Christie, Boyd Holbrook, Charles Dance, Kirby HowellBaptiste, Jenna Coleman and many more, and between the character posters and first peeks at footage, it looks exactly as lush, beautiful, and nightmarish as this series deserves to be.

back to the bridge of the Enterprise! The new series takes us back to a time before Captain Kirk, when a slightly different crew was fulfilling their mission “to seek out new life and new civilizations.” Starring Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, Ethan Peck as Spock, and Celia Rose Gooding as Uhura, Strange New Worlds is a colorful return to some of the aesthetics of the original series and promises a more episodic approach than other modern Trek shows.

RELEASE DATE: TBA

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON THE SERIES FINALE of Game of Thrones was, let’s say, not wellreceived. That’s why when it came time to expand the franchise, HBO opted to look to Westeros’ past rather than its future. House of the Dragon will draw much of its inspiration from George R.R. Martin’s rich Thrones prequel text Fire & Blood. The story will take place more than 150 years

before the events of Game of Thrones. The Targaryen dynasty is five kings in and looking quite strong, with a stable full of dragons to support its claim over the Seven Kingdoms. It sure would be a shame then if some sort of petty family squabble of succession snowballed into an enormous, continent-shaking civil war… wouldn’t it? Paddy Considine, Matt

Smith, Emma D’Arcy, and many more make up a cast of Targaryens ready to dance with dragons. Showrunners are Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal, with Condal and George R.R. Martin as co-creators. Many more Thrones projects are on the way and House of the Dragon has a chance to set a positive precedent for them all going forward. DEN OF GEEK

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THE ORVILLE: NEW HORIZONS

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 10

It has been so long since the second season of The Orville concluded (no new episodes have aired since April 2019) that they just went and gave the third season a brand new name! The Orville: New Horizons is the long-awaited third season of Seth MacFarlane’s unlikely sci-fi comedy/ drama, which has turned out to be more than just a Star Trek send-up.

NAOMI RELEASE DATE: TBA

The third and final season of these adaptations of Philip Pullman’s celebrated books will be the story of The Amber Spyglass. Part three will take us to yet more new worlds, including the land of the dead where Lyra (Dafne Keen) and Will (Amir Wilson) face their biggest battle and hardest challenge yet.

ATLANTA S3

RELEASE DATE: TBA

If good things come to those who wait and great things come to those who wait very long, then season three of FX’s brilliant Atlanta is going to be really, really great. After Atlanta season two wrapped in 2018, showrunner and star Donald Glover is finally ready to tell more stories inside his fascinating “Twin Peaks with rappers” universe. 54

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UMBRELLA ACADEMY S3 RELEASE DATE: TBA | Superhero

shows are everywhere, but Netflix’s take on the comics by Gerard Way is one of the most interesting shows around. Featuring a constructed family of misfits with super-powers, previous seasons have seen the group hoping around in time in attempts to prevent an apocalypse. Now the gang is back at HQ, but something’s up. It appears to be “Sparrow Academy,” and Ben is still alive... Expect fireworks.

IMAGE CREDITS: NETFLIX/HBO/WARNER BROS./HBO MAX/AMAZON STUDIOS

HIS DARK MATERIALS S3

ONE OF DC’S NEWEST CHARACTERS, Naomi is “a cool, confident, comic book–loving teenager” who has a “hidden destiny” awaiting her. And if you’ve been following her in the pages of DC Comics, you’ll know that’s a superheroic destiny of her own. Created in the comics by Brian Michael Bendis, David Walker, and Jamal Campbell in 2019, Naomi (played by Kaci Walfall in the show) was quickly tapped to make the jump to the small screen in this series from Oscar nominee Ava Duvernay (who also wrote the first episode) and Jill Blankenship (Arrow). As for the title character’s destiny, the show promises that “as Naomi journeys to the heights of the Multiverse in search of answers, what she discovers will challenge everything we believe about our heroes.”

GOOD OMENS S2 RELEASE DATE: TBA | Praise Be! The follow-up to Amazon’s six-part series,

based on the book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, will descend upon us in 2022. Though only one book was published and Pratchett is no longer with us, he and Gaiman had planned various elements of the sequel, some of which we saw in part one, and which will be expanded more here. Michael Sheen and David Tennant star as Aziraphale and Crowley, an angel and a demon who have become firm friends over the centuries. Anyone who watched their brilliant lockdown comedy Staged (and of course season one of the show) will attest to their incredible chemistry. Other returning cast includes Paul Adeyefa, Michael McKean, Miranda Richardson, Maggie Service, Nina Sosanya, and Reece Shearsmith. The end of season one saw the pals averting the apocalypse. Season two no doubt spells trouble for mankind all over again.

PEACEMAKER RELEASE DATE: JAN. 13

THERE WAS A LOT TO LOVE about James Gunn’s raucous The Suicide Squad. And we mean a lot. A superstar cast of dozens, most of whom don’t survive the movie, presented in all of the famed DC Comics series’ head explode-y glory, tempered (if you can call it that) by a completely unfiltered and unfettered director who brought a hint of Troma gonzo and some Dirty Dozen-esque grit to the DCEU. And yes, it would be difficult to choose favorites from that cast of colorful, vulgar, charming super-rogues, but John Cena’s Peacemaker was a real standout. A primary-colored (and absurdly helmeted) superdickhead “who believes in peace at any cost, no matter how many people he has to kill to get it”—and who Cena was apparently instructed to play as “a douche-y, bro-y Captain America”—the character is nonetheless charming, hilarious, and a natural choice for a spin-off adventure. Which is how we have Peacemaker, an HBO Max series that will be as hard-R rated as The Suicide Squad, and written by Gunn (who also directs five episodes), bringing his same quirky and ultraviolent sensibilities to the small screen as audiences love him for in cinemas. It wasn’t the first HBO Max DCEU series we were expecting, but we’re sure glad to see it. DEN OF GEEK

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STAR TREK: PICARD S2 RELEASE DATE: FEB. 2022

Patrick Stewart returns as JeanLuc Picard, once again taking us beyond the events of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This season looks like it will explore more of what’s next for Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) and features the return of Picard’s greatest nemesis, the godlike Q (John de Lancie) who has once again returned to test Picard and his crew.

SUPERMAN & LOIS S2 RELEASE DATE: JAN. 11

The first season of Superman & Lois took a surprising approach to the Man of Steel: what if Lois Lane and Clark Kent left Metropolis to raise their two teenage boys back in Smallville? And then the show surprised everyone by telling a story that involved rogue Kryptonians, super-powered teenagers, fanfavorite characters from the comics... and even high school football. Let’s see what surprises season two has in store when it arrives early next year.

THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES S2

BRIDGERTON WATCH OUT, SQUID GAME, Bridgerton season two is on the way! Netflix’s period drama which debuted in December 2020 became the most watched show on the streaming service, surpassed only recently by the Korean series. But season two, which will focus on the relationship between Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony

Bridgerton and Simone Ashley’s Kate Sharma, could up the stakes once again—after all, season one saw Anthony declare his plans to marry without love after his painful breakup with opera singer Siena (Sabrina Bartlett). The first season was surprisingly raunchy, a move we hope the show will continue, while the

After the ubiquitous pandemic delay, this show, which follows the televangelist Gemstone family, is returning for a second season. Led by John Goodman’s patriarch, Eli Gemstone, this is a crime/comedy of God, greed, fame, and family— think Succession, but with fewer “fuck offs” and more “hallelujahs.” Danny McBride is the creator and showrunner of the series and also stars as Jesse Gemstone, the hopeful heir to his father’s network of megachurches. 56

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DISCOVERY OF WITCHES S3 RELEASE DATE: JAN. | The end is nigh for this polished, well-cast TV adaptation

of Deborah Harkness’ All Souls book trilogy. Season three brings Diana and Matthew back from Elizabethan England to the present day, where Peter Knox’s forces of evil are waiting to snatch the Book of Life and destroy the vampires for good. But watch out, Knox! Diana’s now a fully formed Weaver with a fiery dragon in her conjuring arsenal and a secret in her belly, so expect a fight. This seven-episode final season concludes the story, which has been leading up to an almighty showdown between tradition and modernity. Will vampires, witches, and demons be allowed to unite, or will bigotry and prejudice continue to keep them apart? Expect magical fireworks, sparkling SFX, ghosts from the past, tragedy, and romance.

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RELEASE DATE: JAN. 9

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THE LORD OF THE RINGS RELEASE DATE: SEPT. 2 | J.R.R. Tolkien’s incredible Middle-earth saga is best

known for the core trilogy of The Lord of the Rings novels, its beloved prequel, The Hobbit, and the six movies adapted from them. But Tolkien was a prolific writer, who laid out countless characters, histories, and tales that have yet to be explored on screen. Far from being a reboot, Amazon Studios’ The Lord of the Rings series takes place thousands of years before Tolkien’s most famous stories “and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness.”

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S2 scandals and machinations of the ‘ton’ during London’s social season, as reported on by the newsletters of the mysterious Lady Whistledown, whose identity we finally know, should make for more great TV. Just as well—the Shondaland show has been renewed for a third and a fourth season already.

PEAKY BLINDERS S6 LIKE THE SHELBY FAMILY leaping from the slums of Birmingham to stately homes, wealth, and power in a few bloody steps, Peaky Blinders went from humble beginnings to phenomenon in a few short seasons. Now approaching its sixth and final TV run (a feature film will follow), Steven Knight’s period gangster drama is a BBC flagship show and global Netflix headliner. Fans have had more than a two-year wait for season six, production of which was severely disrupted by the pandemic. Finally, it’s almost here, ready to resolve the cliffhanger left by the season five finale. Who betrayed Tommy’s plan?

Will he break ties with Sam Claflin’s Oswald Mosley? And what will be Tommy’s next step in the world of 1930s politics? Stephen Graham and Conrad Kahn will be joining the regular cast this season. Of course, Cillian Murphy’s enigmatic, troubled Tommy is the soul of Peaky Blinders, but the other members of the Shelby family are its heart: Paul Anderson as Arthur, Sophie Rundle as Ada, Natasha O’Keeffe as Lizzie, and Helen McCrory as formidable matriarch Aunt Polly. Helen McCrory was sadly lost to cancer in 2021, and this final season will doubtless be dedicated to her memory. DEN OF GEEK

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SAINTS ROW

RELEASE DATE: FEB. 25

GRAN TURISMO 7 RELEASE DATE: MARCH 4

One of the greatest racing game franchises ever returns from a long hiatus. Gran Turismo 7 may face increased genre competition, but this franchise’s emphasis on realism, visuals, and audio should make it one of the most impressive PS5 games yet.

HORIZON FORBIDDEN WEST HORIZON FORBIDDEN WEST, the sequel to 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn, continues the adventures of Aloy: a famed hunter who must explore a territory known as the Forbidden West in order to discover the origins of a plague that threatens the world. Along the way, she hopes to uncover more information about her mysterious past. This upcoming PlayStation exclusive is burdened with the daunting task of living up to (and perhaps surpassing) its beloved predecessor. Fortunately, everything

we’ve seen of Forbidden West suggests that developer Guerrilla Games is more than ready to deliver a stunning sequel. Enhanced navigation tools enable Aloy to explore dangerous and diverse new environments, while the sequel’s item upgrade system will allow Aloy to stand tall against new enemies who are also capable of controlling the dangerous machine creatures that stalk these lands. Of course, if Guerrilla Games is to be believed, then we haven’t even yet seen the biggest and best new tricks this sequel has up its sleeve.

SUICIDE SQUAD: KILL THE JUSTICE LEAGUE RELEASE DATE: TBA

After raising the bar for superhero games with the Batman: Arkham series, developer Rocksteady Studios returns to the DC Universe in this action/adventure title that pits the Suicide Squad against Superman, The Flash, and other brainwashed Justice League members. 58

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THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD 2 RELEASE DATE: TBA | This is the tentatively-titled follow-up to the 2017

Nintendo game that helped establish the Nintendo Switch. Breath of the Wild’s emphasis on exploration and lack of obvious objectives made it a breath of fresh air. Nintendo is keeping this sequel’s plot a secret, but rumors suggest this could be the darkest and most ambitious entry into the franchise yet.

IMAGE CREDITS: PLAYSTATION STUDIOS/NINTENDO/BETHESDA SOFTWORKS/BANDAI NAMCO/2K GAMES

This reboot of the Saints Row series features a new cast of characters, a new setting, and a new attitude, but this open-world game hopes to retain the wildly entertaining gameplay that has helped this franchise stand out since 2006.

GOTHAM KNIGHTS RELEASE DATE: TBA

Following the deaths of Batman and Commissioner Gordon, Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin, and Red Hood must step up and try to fill the Caped Crusader’s boots. Will one of them rise as the hero of Gotham, or will they all fall?

POKÉMON LEGENDS: ARCEUS

STARFIELD

RELEASE DATE JAN. 28

RELEASE DATE: NOV. 11 | With The Elder Scrolls series, and its take on the

Fallout franchise, Bethesda Game Studios greatly enhanced the scope of the RPG genre and helped turn new generations of gamers into adventurers. With Starfield, it’s taking its ambitious style of RPG design into the infinite reaches of space. This is Bethesda’s first new RPG franchise in over 25 years, and it feels like a return home for gamers who have been waiting for this studio’s next act.

RELEASE DATE: FEB . 2 5

This not only takes place thousands of years before any other Pokémon game but will look to shake up this franchise’s gameplay style by placing you in an open-world environment where you are able to freely capture and battle the wild Pokémon that roam the terrain. Fans have long dreamed of a more “open” Pokémon game that reimagines this franchise’s formula, and what everything we’ve seen of Arceus so far strongly suggests that it could be that game. Arceus may just become the future of this legendary franchise and it will certainly be an adventure worth taking.

ELDEN RING IN A YEAR OF MASSIVE NEW releases, Elden Ring may be the most anticipated game of 2022. Who wouldn’t be curious about a game that combines the forces of Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin and the director of Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Hidetaka Miyazaki? Elden Ring tells the story of a realm known as The Lands Between, ruled by Queen Marika and her demon offspring. When the fabled Elden Ring is destroyed, Marika sends her children to go recover the shattered pieces. That event triggers a great war. You enter the aftermath as one

of the Tarnished: a race that was once banished from The Lands Between. Can you find glory in this strange world, or has hope truly abandoned these lands? Elden Ring’s background story and myths (which were created by Martin with help from the FromSoftware team) are certainly intriguing, but it’s this title’s gameplay that has millions of gamers beyond excited. Essentially a combination of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the Dark Souls franchise, Elden Ring’s massive world promises to offer a nearly endless supply of intimidating foes and organic adventures.

MARVEL’S MIDNIGHT SUNS RELEASE DATE: TBA

Marvel’s Midnight Suns turns a somewhat obscure ’90s comic book storyline into a unique strategy experience from the X-COM: Enemy Unknown team. Midnight Suns puts you in control of a dream team of Marvel superheroes in the midst of a nightmare situation. DEN OF GEEK

PR E V I E

W M IES

S & C OM I C S

| GA M E S |T

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SAGA #55

FOR THE THRONE By Hannah Whitten (Publisher: Orbit Books)

FOR THE WOLF, WHITTEN’S DARK FANTASY RETELLING OF RED Riding Hood, saw Red and the Wolf ally to contain the Old Kings. But the prophecy says the Second Daughter is for the Wolf, the First Daughter is for the Throne—which means that Red’s sister Neve is trapped in the vicious Shadowlands... where the Old Kings are regaining their power. The only way to get her back is through a magic mirror and a rogue king.

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image Comics) JAN. 26

After a three-year hiatus, Saga kicks off its epic second half of Hazel’s journey with a special double issue. The daughter of star-crossed lovers Marko and Alana navigates grief, magic, and new members of her found family.

RELEASE DATE: JUN E 7

SQUIRE

By Nadia Shammas and Sara Alfageeh (Quill Tree Books) MARCH 8

This YA graphic novel set in alternate-history Middle East/Northern Africa riffs on the fantasy trope of a wannabe female squire by having Aiza hide not her gender, but her second-class citizen status, to fulfill her dream of becoming a Knight.

LORE OLYMPUS VOLUME TWO

Rachel Smythe (Del Rey) JULY 5

Smythe’s Eisnernominated webcomic reimagines the courtship of Persephone and Hades in stunningly chromatic, romantic hues. The second volume of this contemporary adaptation has the divine lovers addressing past traumas to plan their future. 60

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ECHO

Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Tor Nightfire) FEB. 8

Dutch horror writer Heuvelt gave witches a surveillance-tech spin with the masterfully spooky HEX. His latest strips away technology to grapple with natural scares and supernatural horrors at the summit of a terrifying mountain climb. Best friends Nick and Augustin attempt to reach a remote peak in the Swiss Alps, but only Nick comes back—and worse than his grief or his injuries is the creeping realization that he picked up something ancient and evil at the top.

SWEEP OF STARS

Maurice Broaddus (Tor Books) MARCH 29

The first installment of Broaddus’ epic space trilogy is Black Panther meets The Expanse: the peaceful Muungano empire, having long escaped its bloody, oppressive history on Old Earth, is forced to defend itself against a rising threat. As this utopia of city-states reexamines its capacity for violence in the name of defense, young leaders compete to guide the empire into its new era while a starship captain searches for answers about the Muungano people’s future.

WONDER WOMAN: TRIAL OF THE AMAZONS

By Becky Cloonan, Michael Conrad, Vita Ayala, Stephanie Williams, Joelle Jones, Jordie Bellaire and various artists (Publisher: DC Comics) 2022 TBA

Wonder Woman’s first crossover event in 30 years will span various series following the fracturing and uniting of Diana and mother Hippolyta; Themyscira’s new queen, Nubia; and Yara Flor, a.k.a. Wonder Girl. Read more in our feature on pg. 26.

HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow) JAN. 18

Drawing comparisons to Station Eleven and Cloud Atlas, Nagamatsu’s debut examines how humanity is reshaped by a devastating plague—this one ancient in origin and tied to climate change, released by melting Arctic ice. Its impact on society and culture is irrevocable, transforming every survivor’s relationship to death (with interludes set at funerary skyscrapers and theme parks for the terminally ill) and to life, as they search for new homes across the stars.

GOLIATH

Tochi Onyebuchi (Tordotcom Publishing) JAN. 25

Last year, Onyebuchi’s novella Riot Baby sparked realization of how dystopian the modern prison system is. Now, his adult novel debut reimagines the Biblical tale of David (who slew Goliath) and Jonathan (son of King Saul) through the sci-fi lens of humanity fleeing Earth in the 2050s. As the haves rebuild in space colonies using literal bricks stolen from the have-nots stuck on Earth, Onyebuchi explores struggles of race and gentrification on a solar system scale.

RELEASE DATE: JA N. 1 2

THE OLEANDER SWORD

Tasha Suri (Orbit Books) AUG. 18

The sequel to Suri’s sapphic fantasy romance The Jasmine Throne reunites Parijatdvipa’s rightful empress Malini and thrice-born priestess Priya, pulled apart by chosen paths but linked by long-prophesied destinies. Each wants to save the realm, but Priya’s endeavor to cleanse the land of its figurative and literal rot might clash with Malini’s quest to depose her despot brother. There’s also the matter of their hearts, as they struggle with secret yearning.

SEA OF TRANQUILITY Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf) APRIL 5

Early-2020 Covid Twitter had polarizing takes about Shakespeare writing King Lear during a quarantine, but Mandel literally wrote her latest novel during the pandemic. This time travel narrative spans from 1912 to a far-future moon colony, bringing together an exiled earl’s son, a pandemic novel author (a nod to Mandel’s Station Eleven) on book tour, and a present-day detective to solve a mystery across time.

SIREN QUEEN

Nghi Vo (Tordotcom Publishing) MAY 10

SHE-HULK #1 By Rainbow Rowell and Rogê Antônio (Publisher: Marvel Comics) Among Marvel’s new tentpole titles for 2022 is an unprecedented, incredibly challenging case for lawyer Jennifer Walters: her own image rehabilitation. Can she rebuild her legal career and reconnect with old friends, all while resisting the urge to She-Hulk out?

Movie starlet Luli Wei rejects stereotypical maid and delicateflower roles for Chinese-American actresses, in this tale set in pre-Hays Code Hollywood, but her willingness to play the monster may become literal: Luli may have to sacrifice her humanity for screen immortality. DEN OF GEEK

IN THE DEN WITH...

WESLEY SNIPES Wesley Snipes’ repertoire includes sportsmen and criminals, drag queens and vampires—and now he’s starring in the meta Netflix drama True Story. It’s just another bold move in a diverse career that can’t be boxed in. BY TONY SOKOL

to find the things that are challenging,” Snipes tells Den of Geek. “If I do a comedy, then I’ll look to do a drama. If I do a drama, then I’ll look to do action. If I do action, then I might look to do a comedy.” In the new Netflix miniseries, True Story, he’s on the bleeding edge again of the moviemaking industry in the 21st century: taking a risk on a project that could seemingly only find a home on a streaming service. Indeed, True Story is a risky project, one in which his co-star Kevin Hart plays The Kid, a larger-than-life comedian who winds up in a murder mystery that quickly spirals into a potentially career-killing cover-up conspiracy. Leading that hush-hush operation is the Kid’s older and less famous brother, Snipes’ Carlton—a man who loves his baby brother, but also becomes his slapdash fixer. Given Snipes’ own complicated history with authorities such as the IRS, some might speculate if any of the miniseries’

He’s a five-time black belt who showed off a fluid brutality in action films such as the Blade franchise; yet when he went to school, he was originally convinced his future and passion lay in performative dance. He’s a four-time winner of the NAACP Image Awards; he’s played villains, criminals, and that one bleached-blond fiend who wanted to blow up Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man. He’s worked with the likes of Denzel Washington, Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee in some of the auteur’s most seminal films, but his first big break was being the tough guy who taught Michael Jackson how to be “Bad” in that Martin Scorsese music video. It’s a singular career and one indicative of one of the brightest talents of his generation. “I’ve always kind of looked at my arc in the business as being diverse, and try 62

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IMAGE CREDITS: GABRIEL OLSEN / GETTY IMAGES

spite of its title, Netflix’s limited series True Story plays like an unbelievable tale of a celebrity crime with mindboggling consequences. But then again, star Wesley Snipes has experienced a strange and contradictory career path that’s wilder than any Netflix series.

Wesley Snipes at the Stan Lee tribute event “Excelsior!” at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre in January 2019.

alleged “true story” elements are drawn from Snipes’ own experiences. However, as Snipes notes, Hart commissioned this series, with this title, and in the context of a career quite similar to the Kid’s. “Man, you know something, I think there is a lot going on with Kevin,” Snipes whispers. “I mean, he tells [us] that the origin of the idea for this project was him calling [executive producer and writer] Eric Newman and telling him, ‘Hey man, I’m going to kill somebody. I need you to write something for me to kill somebody.’” Snipes adds: “I think this may be a therapy session for Kevin. The things that he wanted to say to a couple of people out there that he wasn’t able to say, or couldn’t say without being sued. So he put it in a movie.” The series, which premiered on Netflix last month, is Snipes’ latest foray into the realm of streaming and his first in the long-form format after contributing to his career renaissance with a scene-stealing role in 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name. In that Eddie Murphy-led picture, Snipes played an old school character actor who could (and would) brag about working with the likes of Roman Polanski… in a bit part as an elevator operator. The real Snipes has worked with legends of all stripes, in all mediums, and can be proudly old-school. Growing up in the Bronx, he attended Manhattan’s School of Performing Arts (now LaGuardia High School), which was featured in the film Fame. He’s been classically trained in dance, stage, and martial arts. And yet speaking with him reveals a thoughtful but enthusiastic reverence for all genres and mediums, and roles as eclectic as leading Lee’s interracial 64

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drama Jungle Fever (1991) and his star-making turn in the comedy Major League (1989). In the latter he plays Willie Mays Hayes, a ballplayer who can show up to spring training in his pajamas and still look cool as he rounds third base. “I like to mix it up like that, and keep my skill set [fresh],” Snipes admits. “I’m still stuck in that mid-’80s repertory theater mindset. How cool is it to do it in films though? That’s the cool part.” And despite his reputation, at times, for being a “Method” actor, Snipes is quick to note he has always been able to separate himself from the character he’s playing when the curtain comes down or the camera stops rolling. “I learned very early on to keep some separation [from my characters],” Snipes says. “When it’s time to go into work and to go to perform, we lock in and we load. But when it’s time to go home and relax, and be yourself, be the person, the family member that people recognize. And you let all of that stuff from the movies go.” One of his early teachers in this regard may have been De Niro. The two only worked together once, in The Fan, a film where Snipes played another ballpayer, this one oblivious that he had one fan (De Niro) whose passion was turning him into a full-fledged stalker. The film came out in 1996, and Snipes credits it as a learning experience. “Oh, man, I was a gooey-eyed girl working with De Niro on that project,” Snipes says with an appreciative laugh. “I was looking at him and watching his every move. When he left the set, when he came on the set. I was very much a student at that time.” And one of the best lessons turned

IMAGE CREDITS: COLUMBIA / TRISTAR / ADAM ROSE / NETFLIX / DAVID LEE / 40 ACRES & A MULE FILMWORKS / UNIVERSAL PICTURES / WARNER BROS/ PHOTOFEST

Snipes as baseball player Bobby Rayburn in Tony Scott’s 1996 thriller, The Fan.

Snipes as saxophonist Shadow Henderson in Spike Lee’s 1990 comedy-drama, Mo’ Better Blues.

out to be shared by complete accident: the ability to provide multiple line readings and inflections for the film editor an actor might never meet. “[De Niro] would do multiple reads of a particular line during a particular shot,” Snipes recalls. “And at that time I thought maybe he didn’t hear the other actors, or he didn’t hear me read my line to him. But that was a style, and it made a lot of sense when you think of how films are put together during the editing process. You give them multiple options and then let the arc of the character be built in the editing room.” Perhaps the biggest character that Snipes built is the beloved vampire-killing Daywalker, Blade. When the first movie in that series came out in 1998, New Line Cinema and even members of Snipes’ team felt inclined to hide its

Kevin Hart as Kid and Snipes as Carlton in Netflix’s True Story.

Wesley Snipes as Simon Phoenix in 1993 cult classic Demolition Man. DEN OF GEEK

True Story is streaming on Netflix now. 66

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GIMME FIVE

Five iconic roles from the Brooklyn-born thespian

BLADE (1998): Wesley Snipes wasn’t just a vampire in Stephen Norrington’s 1998 Marvel Comics film Blade, he was “something else.” The hybrid vamphuman martial arts master was the first Black superhero lead on the big screen, and he entered in style. Behind his long black leather coat and mysterious shades, he had a message: it was open season on all suckheads.

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME (2019): Playing real-life actor/director D’Urville Martin in Eddie Murphy’s biopic about 1970s comedian Rudy Ray Moore, Snipes captures the “cinemagical reality” of troubled filmmakers. He infuses his D’Urville with subtle camp as he swings from manic self-confidence to paranoid anguish, upstaging Murphy in some of the funniest bits.

IMAGE CREDITS: NEW LINE CINEMA / BRUCE W. TALAMON / UNIVERSAL PICTURES / LOREY SEBASTIAN / NETFLIX / PHOTOFEST / DAVID LEE / PARAMOUNT PICTURES

comic book movie origins. Now we look at Blade as the first successful superhero film inspired by Marvel Comics. But it came at a time when comic book movies were considered expensive toy commercials like Batman & Robin, or B-movie schlock like the Shaquille O’Neal-led Steel (both of which arrived one year before Blade), making it a notable risk. In fact, the way Snipes tells it, it was his intuition about the material and relating it to the Blaxploitation triumphs of his youth, especially those led by the Actors Studio and American Theatre Wing prodigy William Marshall, which inspired him to stick to his silver stakes and dust some bloodsuckers. “Blade came to me as a script,” Snipes says. “And against the advice of all of my representation at the time, I thought it was a cool opportunity to do something, a great opportunity to do something very cool. I remember William Marshall, the great thespian and great Shakespearean actor, played Blacula. And I said to myself, wow, if William Marshall could play Blacula, then to me, as a young thespian, it was fair game. Plus, it was an opportunity to put the martial arts in it. It was a no-brainer for me. Everybody else thought it was stupid. I was crazy for doing a comic book character.” With a reboot from Marvel on the way, featuring Mahershala Ali in the title role, appetite for more Blade action is huge, even though so far Ali’s version has only appeared as a voice off screen in a post-credits scene so far. That genuine excitement among fans of all backgrounds is inarguably down to the iconography that Snipes built, over the course of three films, around the previously littleknown characters. Not that the actor begrudges how things change. He has previously told us he had Ali’s back in reinterpreting the character “1,000 percent” and how he’s communicated to the actor to “go rock it, baby.” Plus, Snipes has always been one to nurture and support Black talent. He played the first major Black superhero in Blade, of course, and he was one of Spike Lee’s go-to performers in seminal films such as Mo’ Better Blues (1990), where he played Shadow Henderson (and the saxophone), as well as leading the aforementioned groundbreaker, Jungle Fever. Today, the actor is thrilled at what he sees is the spread of opportunities to hear more Black voices, and real Black stories, both in front of and behind the camera, in movies such as Judas and the Black Messiah and The United States vs. Billie Holiday. “Great-quality narratives, great-quality performances, transform people,” Snipes considers. “And when people are transformed, the culture, the society, the nation is transformed. So the better-quality performances, the betterquality narratives of storytelling that’s out there, the better quality of people we’ll have, and that will hopefully produce a better-quality society and quality of life.” And quality is something Snipes seems determined to live, both on-screen and off.

TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING! JULIE NEWMAR (1995): Inspired by anti-gay propaganda film The Gay Agenda, Beeban Kidron’s To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar is a hilarious gateway to transformation. 14 years before RuPaul’s Drag Race, Noxeema Jackson (Snipes) and Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze), took a princess (much younger than a queen), Chi-Chi (John Leguizamo), to Oz. “Too hairy” for a lead, Robin Williams took a bit part. Snipes has way too much fashion sense for one gender, bringing ’70s street flamboyance in furs fly enough for pimps and prostitutes.

JUNGLE FEVER (1991): Spike Lee’s movie came out in 1991 when interracial dating was relatively new on screens. But when it opened with a dedication to Yusuf K. Hawkins, the Black teenager murdered in Bensonhurst, it was clearly no rom-com. With a brutally honest script, Snipes and co-star Annabella Sciorra perform much of their roles without words—looks, gestures, and silences become dialogue.

MAJOR LEAGUE (1989): When Snipes showed up for his audition as ballplayer Willie Mays Hayes, fresh off a plane in boxing shoes, he barely rounded the bases. But he stole this baseball comedy from rising stars Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, and Corbin Bernsen with close-call slides and quippy asides. Hayes was loosely based on a Hall of Famer and Snipes’ performance designated him as MVP. DEN OF GEEK

The Collector’s Digest

We’ve partnered with eBay to bring you a look at this year’s must-have collectibles. BY CHRIS CUMMINS

Funko POP! Disney Santa Stitch With Scrump

Here comes Santa Stitch in this adorable holiday-themed Funko POP! version of everybody’s favorite genetic experiment that comes complete with an equally huggable Scrump.

2 Funko POP! Disney’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Santa Jack Skellington

Although his heart first belonged to Halloween, Jack Skellington really got into the Christmas spirit as this seasonal Funko POP! collectible can attest.

3 Transformers: Cyberverse Ultimate Class Optimus Prime From Hasbro’s Transformers: Cyberverse line comes this jaw-droppingly cool Ultimate Class Optimus Prime action figure that includes Energon Armor, so Decepticons better beware!

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4 Galaxy’s Edge Lightsabers Bring home the wonder of Disneyland and Disney World’s Galaxy’s Edge attraction with stunning lightsaber hilts in collectible packaging from your favorite Jedi and Sith Star Wars characters.

5 Dune: Imperium By drawing inspiration from both Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel as well as Denis Villeneuve’s acclaimed film adaptation, this card-driven game thrusts you into the intrigue and danger-packed universe of Dune.

6 Descent: Legends of the Dark Featuring heroic and monstrous miniatures, Asmodee’s Descent: Legends of the Dark is a fantasy tabletop game that is generating huge buzz.

7 Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Dominion

With 60 new Citadel miniatures and an exciting Warhammer environment to explore, Age of Sigmar: Dominion is shaping up to be a must-have tabletop experience this holiday season.

8 Marvel: The Heroic Age Avengers #1 Marvel’s company wide event for 2010 was the far-reaching The Heroic Age saga, which reunited many of the original Avengers lineup–making this comic a must-read!

9 Star Wars Galactic Snackin’ Grogu

With over 40 sound and motion combinations, this 9.25-inch animatronic Grogu will show off his snacking skills while stealing your heart. Chicken nuggies not included.

G.I. Joe Classified Series Profit Director Destro Action Figure As evil as Destro is, you’ve got to admit that he is one heck of a cool dresser– which is one of the many reasons why you’ll want to add this collectible action figure with custom package art from Hasbro to your collection.

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11 My Little Pony x Power Rangers Crossover Collection: Morphin’ Pink Pony

What happens when My Little Pony gets mashed up with Power Rangers? Collecting wonderment, that’s what!

12 Pokémon Fusion Strike The latest set in the Pokémon TCG line is Fusion Strike, and it’s shaping up to be one of the most indemand entries in the card phenomenon ever–in other words, now more than ever, you gotta catch ‘em all!

13 Transformers: Cyberverse Ultimate Class Shockwave This eye-popping new take on Decepticon legend Shockwave has us feeling, well, shocked by how cool this action figure is!

14 Warhammer 40,000: Black Templars Army Set

Prepare for intense battle and inspiring heroism with an assortment of new Warhammer miniatures that you can build and paint before utilizing them in your next campaign.

15 Lost Ruins of Arnak Board Game Czech Games’ Lost Ruins of Arnak transports players to a strange island where a thriving civilization once existed… and one whose mysteries result in a unique gaming experience.

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Ultimate Fallout #4 There’s no more compelling character in comics today than Miles Morales, and it started back in August of 2011 when he made his debut in this issue of Ultimate Fallout from writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sarah Pichelli.

17 Marvel TeamUp #78

Marvel Team-Up gave 1970s readers a double dose of comics action featuring their favorite characters–in this case Spidey and, in his first appearance, Captain Britain!

18 Marvel: Crisis Protocol - Core Set Asmodee presents this game set in the Marvel Universe in which players must utilize strategy and miniatures to ensure that good triumphs over evil.

19 Digimon Double Diamond Booster Series Double Diamond is the newest Digimon TCG booster series, one that promises the debut of several fan favorite characters that will increase this line’s impressive collectibility.

20 MetaZoo: Nightfall

The much buzzed about Nightfall expansion of the MetaZoo TCG is here, bringing with it creatures that will send your imagination soaring!

21 Marvel Legends Hologram Iron Man Action Figure Tony Stark’s computergenerated holographic avatar gets its own Marvel Legends 6-inch action figure from Hasbro that includes the head of the Ursa Major Build-A-Figure.

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22 Marvel Legends Rogue and Pyro Action Figure Two-Pack

Two X-Men favorites, Rogue and Pyro, are given the Hasbro Marvel Legends treatment with this 6-inch action figure two-pack that comes with interchangeable heads and hands.

23 Magic: The Gathering - Innistrad: Crimson Vow See what Gothic wonders await Magic: The Gathering fans in this new assortment of cards–the franchise’s 90th!

24 A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game - Stark vs. Lannister Starter Set

Return to Westeros with this starter set that allows you to control the destiny of the Starks and the Lannisters through intense miniature battles.

25 Star Wars: The Black Series: Garazeb “Zeb” Orrelios 6-Inch Action Figure Bring home the scenestealing Lasat from Star Wars: Rebels with this deluxe, highly collectible action figure from Hasbro.

26 Dune Silver Rounds Coin with Tin Gift Box The spice may be life, but these 1 oz. silver Dune pins available in House Atreides or House Harkonnen variants and packed in a collectible tin gift box are pretty darn sweet too.

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27 Yu-Gi-Oh!: Burst of Destiny

Marvel’s What If…? Funko POP!s

Marvel’s What If…? is the animation sensation of the year, so it makes sense that the Funko POP!s based on the show, including Captain Carter, T’Challa Star Lord, and many other characters from the series, are equally cool.

Now, um, bursting on the scene is the newest expansion to the unstoppable Yu-Gi-Oh! Official Card Game complete with an abundance of rare, musthave cards.

28 Star Wars: Legion - Clone Wars Core Set Return to a galaxy far, far away with this miniaturepacked tabletop game that has Jedi Knights and Clone Troopers fighting against Separtist forces.

30 Pac-Man Coins

It’s been 40 years since Pac-Man first munched his way into our hearts, and these incredible (and collectible) coins are an ideal way to celebrate this milestone anniversary!

31 Mickey and Minnie Gallery Wraps The magic of Disney combines with the artistry of “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade with your choice of eight 8x10 Mickey and Minnie Gallery Wraps depicting the characters in a variety of joyous surroundings.

32 The Amazing Spider-Man #299 Originally introduced as Spidey’s Alien Costume in 1984, Venom as we know him today had his first appearance in this highly collectible issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.

Star Wars: Legion - Core Set The original Star Wars trilogy is the backdrop for this exciting infantry-based miniatures battle game in which the Rebel Alliance squares off against the Empire.

Find links to these items and more

in our online eBay gift guide!

DEN OF GEEK

MOUNT GEEKMORE: THE TOP FOUR OF EVERYTHING, LITERALLY SET IN STONE.

SCREEN SANTAS Our festive favorites.

BY ALEC BOJALAD ILLUSTRATION BY JESSICA KOYNOCK

Kris Kringle Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

The Grinch The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (1966)

When it comes to iconic depictions of Santa Claus, images from the paintings of Norman Rockwell and Coca-Cola’s 1930s ads spring to mind. That’s why the Santa of 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street, played by Edmund Gwenn, is the film canon’s most impressive. He’s quite simply the 1930s Americana version of Kris Kringle put into motion. Perhaps no one has ever better looked the part. Or acted it, for that matter.

Misery is an important part of Christmas. For every person struck with a case of irrepressible holiday cheer, there is another who finds the whole exercise exhausting. Thankfully, these people have their forever avatar in the form of Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch. The Grinch is… well, a grinch about Christmas. By putting him in a Santa hat, the 1966 animation gives Christmas haters the Santa Claus they deserve.

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The Mean Girls Mean Girls (2004)

Willie Bad Santa (2003)

Is Santa Claus sexy? It’s a question that has haunted Western society ever since Daddy Christmas exclaimed his first “ho ho ho.” The “Jingle Bell Rock” winter talent show crew in Mean Girls, led by Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) seems to think he can be. But their depiction of Santa makes Mount Geekmore not due to titillation, but rather because it captures just how awkward wearing a slick red coat with a white puffball hat can be.

Billy Bob Thornton is iconic in just about everything, so it’s no surprise that his version of Santa would be influential enough to grace Mount Geekmore. Thornton’s Willie T. Soke is a mall Santa—and a professional thief. Instead of giving gifts to good boys and girls on Christmas, he robs malls to take them for himself. Despite what Bad Santa’s title may claim, that dichotomy actually makes Willie a very good pop culture Santa.

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On a quest for holiday cash? List your cards, tap into the big bucks, and gift yourself some new faves. Start selling at ebay.com/selling

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