The team behind director Takashi Yamazaki’s new film created their kaiju roars by setting up speakers on top of an outdoor dam. The people walking by weren’t prepared for what they heard.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil adaptation is currently in theaters, but another smaller adaptation is also arriving this month from a former Walking Dead star.
Chandler Riggs Stars As Ethan Winters in Biohazard Short Film
and here we go. my short film BIOHAZARD hits youtube this wednesday, 10/14. can’t wait for y’all to see it. check out my exclusive interview with @IGN from the link in my bio for all the info.
Chandler Riggs has grown up quite a bit since his long run as Carl on The Walking Dead came to a close, but now the actor is attaching himself to another beloved franchise.
Riggs has been working on a short film called Biohazard that adapts some of the most iconic moments from the open hours of Resident Evil: Biohazard. The short film runs roughly 20 minutes and debuts on YouTube this week.
Riggs plays Ethan Winters in the unofficial short film and will offer Resident Evil fans a closer look at the characters face than they got during the original game, which was almost entirely in the first-person from Ethan’s perspective, aside from a few segments.
According to Riggs the short film was aiming to release before Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil adaptation hit theaters, but things didn’t quite come together in time to hit that goal. Instead, the short film debuts on October 14.
Riggs spoke with IGN about the project and shared details about the process around deciding to show Ethan’s face and how to handle that aspect of the adaptation:
“We’re trying to do so much else super faithful and true to the game, but this is a huge aspect that we are breaking from it. But there isn’t really another good way to tell [the story] in a live-action format. I was going back and forth like ‘Okay, could we do first person the whole time? Could we avoid getting his face in or anything?’ But the more we went back and forth on it, the more I was like, ‘I mean, if we are going to do this and are going to appeal to a wider audience — more than just the people who played the games — then we’re going to have to break those rules. It was very intimidating. Hopefully people are okay with it.”
The teaser trailer is definitely high-quality and it looks like a faithful adaptation with strong acting and a good sense of building suspense. It should be very exciting to watch the whole short film later this week and see how film and gaming fans react to the this take on the franchise.
Be sure to check back soon for lots more Resident Evil and video game movie news and updates.
The Biohazard short film will be available on YouTube starting October 14, 2026.
2005’s The Amityville Horror is the second film adaptation of the controversial 1977 book of the same name, written by Jay Anson. The movie, like the book, revolves around George and Kathy Lutz (as played by Ryan Reynolds and Melissa George), who, along with their three children, move into a house in Amityville, New York, where multiple murders took place. The previous owner, Ronald DeFeo Jr., had actually killed six of his relatives in the house depicted in the film on November 13, 1974.
As you can imagine, making a movie inspired by such grisly events is creepy in and of itself, but the eerie things that happened while the Reynolds version was in production didn’t help ease any of the tension on set, that’s for sure. To begin with, the real Kathy Lutz died right after shooting commenced in August 2004. As if that wasn’t strange enough, Reynolds said that a lot of the people working on the film kept waking up at 3:15 in the morning, which was the precise time DeFeo murdered his family. “I think a lot of people make that stuff up to sell their movie,” Reynolds told MovieWeb in 2005, “but there was some weird stuff that happened.”
That weird stuff apparently included a corpse popping up near one of the filming locations, by the way. While speaking with Radio Free Entertainment ahead of the movie’s release, Melissa George claimed that the police showed up as they were shooting a boathouse scene. “They were on the water there, and they said that they found a dead body that had floated to the surface,” she recalled. “We were like, ‘Awesome! That’s making everything much more comfortable in this movie!’”
Reynolds backed up George’s story during an interview with that same publication, telling them, “I know nothing about it, and we certainly didn’t treat the situation cavalierly.” He went on to say, “This was a densely populated lake area as well. I mean, it wasn’t like a secluded pond, and this Mafia member floated up or something.” In the end, Reynolds chalked the person’s death up to a “legitimate accident,” but very little information has come to light since.
Mark Hamill will forever be remembered for playing Luke Skywalker, the main protagonist from 1977’s Star Wars, but according to him, the character came very close to being known by another name. As Hamill revealed in a tweet from 2020, George Lucas actually had to reshoot the scene in which Luke rescues Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) because he’d originally introduced himself as Luke Starkiller:
May The 24 Be My Age When We Had To Reshoot The Imprisoned Princess Scene In #StarWars Because The First Time We Filmed It I Said: "I'm Luke Starkiller, I'm Here To Rescue You."#TrueStorypic.twitter.com/FVJiwxpONL
After HuffPost picked up the story and erroneously reported that Hamill botched the line, Hamill clarified that the scene was redone on account of Luke’s name getting changed at the last minute:
This article states we reshot the rescue of Leia scene because I "botched" my line. In fact, we had to redo it weeks later, because my name was changed to Skywalker AFTER we did it the 1st time (when my name was still Starkiller). #TrueFunFacthttps://t.co/ubcWztJs47
As for the reason Lucas made an adjustment like that so far into production, the director had previously addressed the issue himself in J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film. “That I did because I thought a lot of people were confusing [Luke] with someone like Charles Manson,” said Lucas. “It had very unpleasant connotations.”
If you’re not clear on why Lucas would’ve felt that way, Manson was responsible for orchestrating the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969, which resulted in the deaths of seven people, including actress Sharon Tate. Then, less than a year before principal photography began on Star Wars, Manson Family member “Squeaky” Fromme was arrested for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford.
For his part, Hamill wasn’t thrilled with the name change initially, mainly due to the fact that Skywalker sounded a bit too close to “flyswatter.” “I was so used to Starkiller, which had a little macho in it, which I thought the character could use,” he explained.
It’s audition day at New Jersey’s Brook Arts Center, and everyone is a bundle of nerves. Actors dot the lobby, doing vocal warm-ups between mini panic attacks and greeting old friends from past shows. This year’s production is “Nosy Neighbors,” a forgotten musical about a New York apartment building and its kooky tenants, including its superintendent, Miss Danielle — a dreamer who, despite repairing clogged toilets and collecting rent for a living, hasn’t let the city spit her out. The role is a bit part, but features a showstopping centerpiece number, the kind of song musical theater performers eat, sleep and breathe. But for mousy housewife Mona Friedman (Julianne Moore), the size of the part or the strength of the song don’t matter. Miss Danielle seems like the right choice to audition for because the role is age-appropriate, and Mona wants to be included however she can be.
And though this might be New Jersey community theater, the standards are just as high as on Broadway. Renowned local director Jerry Blankenbuehler (Paul Giamatti) demands perfection; anything less than excellence won’t touch his stage. Mona, of course, has no way of knowing this. She’s an interloper among established thespians, a woman in her late 50s who has only just begun listening to the little voice inside her, the one begging her to step outside her comfort zone. She’s up against seasoned actors and singers who know what they’re doing, whose every step, gesture and note resonates effortlessly. Yet, somehow, that doesn’t stop her. Despite her nerves, she stands in the spotlight and sings Miss Danielle’s big number. It doesn’t matter how timidly the words might’ve come out; what’s important is that Mona did it.
(A24) Julianne Moore in “The Debut”
Mona transforms before our eyes from a diffident mother of two in an unhappy marriage into the star she always could be, though not without a few bumps in the road. It’s these obstacles that make Eisenberg’s film feel all the more realistic, accurately representing how much work it takes to find oneself, an arduous process that must be experienced over and over in different ways.
This is the brilliant way writer-director Jesse Eisenberg thrusts us into his third — and best — feature, “The Debut,” screening at this year’s New York Film Festival and premiering in theaters December 11. We meet Mona in media res, nervously tapping her shoes on the carpeted lobby floor and fretting over her audition. But instead of the traditional cutthroat audition setting, where every actor silently sizes up the competition, the Brook Arts Center fosters a warm environment. Fellow actors Stef (Halle Bailey) and Trish (Bonnie Milligan) assure Mona she’ll be wonderful. And though Mona’s audition might be far from it, that little spark of community and care is all she needs to feel like she’s right where she should be.
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Finding this sense of contentment isn’t easy. Some go their whole lives searching for it, aching to find where they belong, or what gives them purpose. The longing is what makes life beautiful and also impossible. We’re so often told in childhood that we can be anything and anyone we want to be, dazzled by illustrations of astronauts smiling through their helmets while floating in space, or ballerinas gracefully twirling while dancing “The Nutcracker.” But just as often, these turn out to be children’s fantasies — wide-eyed dreams of imaginary futures, tempered by real life. Bills must be paid. Kids have to eat. We have to survive. And in the pursuit of survival, there’s rarely time for side quests.
That’s precisely why “The Debut” is such a brilliant revelation. There’s no shortage of cinematic depictions of people getting their groove back, but seldom is the search for the self portrayed with as much tender empathy as Eisenberg and Moore have for Mona — an instant all-timer in Moore’s stacked repertoire. Over the film’s blissful 105 minutes, in which Moore appears in every scene, Mona transforms before our eyes from a diffident mother of two in an unhappy marriage into the star she always could be, though not without a few bumps in the road. It’s these obstacles that make Eisenberg’s film feel all the more realistic, accurately representing how much work it takes to find oneself, an arduous process that must be experienced over and over in different ways. As Mona discovers, the stumbles are as important as the triumphs. There is no greatness without embarrassment.
(A24) Paul Giamatti and Julianne Moore in “The Debut”
But to be embarrassed, one must first get the chance to be embarrassed. The role of Miss Danielle is Mona’s to lose, and lose she does to local legend Serena Cherry (a wonderful cameo by Bernadette Peters), who gives Mona’s big song all of the polished oomph of the Great White Way. But competition isn’t any concern of Mona’s. She’s more interested in what simply auditioning made her feel, how she came alive, if only for a brief few moments until Jerry cut her off. On a double date with her husband and their best friends, Mona, beaming, tells the group that she’s auditioned for “a musical show.” Her inadvertent gaffes with industry terminology might make her seem silly and out of her depth. But they also indicate an eagerness to learn, a will that makes Mona’s eventual callback after Serena Cherry drops out of the show seem almost like manifestation.
And, really, that’s all achieving anything in this life is: manifestation. While the word has been co-opted and corrupted by vision-board romantics and TikTok gurus, it’s still the key to making what we want happen. Manifestation doesn’t mean something we want pops out of thin air just because we think about it; it means hard work and relentless effort. And if struggling is how Mona will mold herself for the theater — stretching and shaping her performance into something worthy of the greater New Jersey area’s most prolific stage — so be it.
It takes immense skill for a great actor to convincingly play a novice performer. And because Moore is so talented — so uniquely proficient at finding the human depth at the core of all her characters — she can make Mona unforgettable. Here, Moore shows reverence not only for her own craft, but for all the hopeful idealists who pine to know what it feels like to lose yourself in someone, or something, else. As Mona goes deeper into Miss Danielle, turning a minor role into something far bigger and more unwieldy than anything she or Jerry prepared for, Moore reminds us why we lie awake at night, convincing ourselves there might be more to life. We don’t just search for something that fulfills us because we want to know what it feels like to be happy in our work or hobbies; we do it to make sense out of a nonsensical life, to understand what being a human is all about.
To say I can relate would be an understatement. I rarely find myself both crying with laughter and crying through my laughter in the span of the same film. It moved me deeply to be tossed headlong into Mona’s life, to sit beside someone who, one day, decided that she wanted something else for herself. I saw reflections and heard echoes of all of the reservations I had about becoming a writer, telling myself that I’d never be able to conjure the commitment it takes to write consistently, afraid that everyone else had sharper, smarter worldviews than mine — that they could see things I’d never be able to. I’d convinced myself that it would take too much time to start over, and that it wasn’t worth trying.
Moore reminds us why we lie awake at night, convincing ourselves there might be more to life. We don’t just search for something that fulfills us because we want to know what it feels like to be happy in our work or hobbies; we do it to make sense out of a nonsensical life, to understand what being a human is all about.
But, like Mona and her fond memories of childhood church choir, I couldn’t let the urge go. It wasn’t enough to simply watch films; I needed an outlet for all the ways they made me feel and all the ideas they inspired. My life didn’t feel complete just watching other people’s art. I wanted to make my own, too. And, again, like Mona, accepting that dream as a potential reality can shift your self-perception entirely. I’m not the same person I was when I first started this, and I often feel like I don’t recognize the person who first put finger to keyboard. Getting here now — typing away while I sniffle with a cold, a life I wouldn’t change for the world — required carefully deflating a rapidly overblown ego.
There’s a tendency to think that, because one has had any success at all, be it a musical callback or a greenlit freelance piece or a short story selected for publication, that they know best. But that’s never the case, at least not in the arts. And as Eisenberg continues to remind us that this is not Mona’s musical — that everyone in the cast and crew is just as important as she is — “The Debut” starts to sing even more beautifully than it already had.
But “The Debut” is not only for those in, or interested in, the arts. It’s a film for anyone who has put aside their desires and told themselves it’s too late or too scary to try something new. Be it gardening, ceramics, hang gliding, mountain climbing, swimming, competitive hot dog eating (well . . . consult your doctor), photography, skeet shooting, upholstery, or even just journaling, trying anything and everything to be closer to your happiest self is worthwhile. You may crash and burn, sure. But you might also come to understand your reason for living. Either result will paint a fuller picture, widening the spotlight little by little, until everything begins to glow.
Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride wasn’t a box-office success when it first hit theaters in 1987, but thanks to home video and TV airings, it went on to have quite an impact. For example, Reiner once had a chilling run-in with a henchman of John Gotti’s, who quoted the famous “Prepare to die!” line from the movie to him outside of a restaurant. And then there’s that video of Ted Cruz reenacting a Princess Bride scene during his 2016 presidential campaign:
According to Reiner, the film can also be credited with saving a few lives. As the director explained to Varietyin 2017, he was out to lunch with his co-producer, Andrew Scheinman, and a friend who’d worked on Fletch when he found out. “We were talking about people quoting The Princess Bride all the time, and it was just going into profits after all those years,” Reiner recalled. “You know, I produced this movie Fletch, and people tell me in colleges that they quote it all the time,” said his friend at one point.
When the friend left, a young woman who’d overheard the conversation approached Reiner and Scheinman with an interesting story. “I am an extreme skier,” she told them, “and The Princess Bride saved my life.” From there, the girl recounted how an avalanche trapped her and a few other skiers she was with years earlier. As a huge fan of Reiner’s film, she’d memorized the whole thing, and decided to act it out for the sake of survival.
“When we were freezing, I did the entire movie to keep everybody occupied and to keep everybody up, happy and listening,” the woman continued. “I am not exaggerating,” Reiner insisted. “Then she said, ‘You know, because Fletch just wouldn’t do.’” The filmmaker went on to say, “That was the best line I ever got: ‘The Princess Bride saved my life.’”
Though writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” fancies itself a journalism thriller, the film offers only a handful of real thrills. Fans of the subgenre, known and loved for its depiction of journalism’s slow yet effective behind-the-scenes processes, might see this as a fatal flaw. After all, isn’t a journalism thriller without tension just a drama? Perhaps. But in the case of Sorkin’s latest — billed as a companion piece to the massively successful, defining 2010 film “The Social Network,” which he also penned — the lack of twists and revelations is a feature, not a bug.
Set between 2019 and 2021, Sorkin’s film stares down the dawn of a new decade, preparing for the birth of our current web of chaos, cruelty and thinly veiled deceit. Fifteen years after Facebook first took the web by storm, the company has now grown into a conglomerate whose arms shuffle politics, culture and social mores around the world’s face like pieces on a game board. Facebook’s users are being radicalized at alarming rates thanks to algorithms that feed them extremist groups and all of their content. Facing problems everyone else turns a blind eye to, Facebook civic integrity team member Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) reluctantly begins a working relationship with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). At the risk of losing her job and being indicted for violating her NDA, Frances provides information droplets that eventually become the Journal’s “Facebook Files” series, exposing a deluge of damning, ethically dubious information against the company. In other words: The perfect material for someone like Sorkin.
(Sony Pictures Entertainment) Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) in Columbia Pictures’ “The Social Reckoning.”
Of course “The Social Reckoning” arrives too late to feel revolutionary; it would be late even if it depicted something that happened last week. Wedged in the tiny space between irrelevancy and timeliness, Sorkin’s companion piece doesn’t need to say anything new to do its job. The film only has to persuade us to pay attention to its shouts.
Between “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” Sorkin’s indulgent forays into the sociopolitical have long been criticized for their hubris. But despite his work being a bastion of Hollywood’s overwrought liberal optimism, “The Social Reckoning” presents a similar but discernibly different picture from the ones Sorkin’s already painted. Here, Sorkin funnels his penchant for self-important sanctimoniousness through the journalism thriller’s always-intriguing lens. And though the result is sometimes stale, the banality creates an eerie dissonance between the film’s subject matter and the world outside the cinema, pitting the snail’s pace that good investigative journalism requires against an external culture that moves at 5x that speed. This same discrepancy has made the journalism thriller itself feel somewhat archaic. If audiences already know the intimate details of how a very real public leak, whistle-blow, or scandal came together, what’s left for them to learn by fictionalizing it all?
The answer, unfortunately, is very little. But just because the viewer might not learn something new by watching “The Social Reckoning,” doesn’t mean that they won’t understand something better. Sorkin’s film highlights the conflict between slow-moving reporting and the light-speed pace of modern culture, a velocity enhanced by the very tech the film has in its crosshairs. The movie isn’t so much about the Facebook leaks as it is about an era when bone-chilling data revealing a company’s malevolence isn’t enough to stop evil machinations in their tracks. Of course “The Social Reckoning” arrives too late to feel revolutionary; it would be late even if it depicted something that happened last week. Wedged in the tiny space between irrelevancy and timeliness, Sorkin’s companion piece doesn’t need to say anything new to do its job; it only has to persuade us to pay attention to its shouts.
And persuade it does — for the most part, anyway. While “The Social Reckoning” might stand in the shadow of its formative predecessor, the film confidently asserts its own merit. It’s a well-oiled machine, moving at a perfectly amiable pace thanks to Madison and White’s lead performances alongside a host of quippy, Sorkin-style side characters. (Few things in the film are more enjoyable than Betty Gilpin’s wise-cracking Wall Street Journal bureau chief.) Granted, much of this pleasantness relies on watching the movie anytime before sunset. This is a matinee coffee film, not a popcorn feature, lest anyone expect edge-of-your-seat tension.
Because, really, what’s ultimately compelling about a movie peering into Facebook’s impropriety? That’s like asking someone if they know that violence is bad, or puppies are cute. The funny thing is, though, that nowadays, surveying 10 people about those questions could easily return 10 different answers, or responses rife with caveats and asterisks. That intentional confusion and misdirection is exactly what Sorkin gestures to in vignettes of Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), intercut throughout the film, preparing for a civil hearing about Facebook refusing to fact-check political ads on its platform. Zuckerberg is a spin artist, skilled at worming his way out of trouble by tailoring the world around him to suit the beast he created. Facebook feeds a culture where up is down and left is right, and vice versa. Sorkin’s depiction of Zuckerberg as a sniveling coward might be smug, but it’s not inaccurate. The intention is not to show the audience who Zuckerberg is — Sorkin spent one film doing that already; it’s to assess the trickle-down effect of his spinelessness.
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Zuckerberg and his cronies have the upper hand. They can change things in the blink of an eye, so imperceptibly that users will barely notice a change if at all. Journalism can’t move at that pace — not good, well-sourced, fact-checked, influential journalism, that is.
To do this, Sorkin compares Facebook’s reluctance to fact-check political advertising with its enthusiasm for spinning the truth to get engagement. Naturally, these two things are the same, but their effects eventually diverge, meaning that political ads are only one metric for inciting engagement. The most frightening aspect of mining engagement — the part we might not always think about — is how the tools and algorithms designed for it must change as users age out of different platforms. How do Facebook, Instagram and all of Zuck’s other spawn remain integral parts of our lives until we die if users eventually get weary enough to figure out their existence is better off without them? For publicly traded companies like these, declining engagement results in lost value.
This is the crux of Frances and Jeff’s concerns. (And, by extension, Sorkin’s film.) They want to expose the obscure operations, to implore users to reconsider their relationship with these platforms. The problem is that Zuckerberg and his cronies have the upper hand. They can change things in the blink of an eye, so imperceptibly that users will barely notice a change if at all. Journalism can’t move at that pace — not good, well-sourced, fact-checked, influential journalism, that is. When Frances hands Jeff documents that confirm Facebook knows all about Instagram’s negative impact on teenagers, she urges him, “Get it out there, before they start marketing Instagram Kids.”
The line chills not because something like Instagram Kids feels plausible, but because it’s already a reality. Impressionable people of all ages around the globe have direct access to the platforms that exacerbate rage and depression for monetary gain and immeasurable power. They had that access before “The Facebook Files,” and they have it today, years after those stories ran. So, what’s the point of all this?
I’d wager the film’s purpose is not to explain, but to appeal. “The Social Reckoning” exists to make what we already know compelling again, reminding — perhaps even convincing — viewers that journalism is not only worthwhile, but critically important. So, too, are the movies that depict journalism’s procedures and how arduous and exhausting they are. Everyone’s mileage will vary, but I find the film’s matter-of-fact formal structure more convincing than not. “Spotlight” won the best picture trophy only a decade ago. And while that film far exceeds “The Social Reckoning,” I wonder whether the reaction would be entirely the same today. Haugen and Horwitz battled similarly daunting foes, and the rot they uncovered was just as systemic and frightening as the reporting. The primary difference is that the corruption Sorkin points to is unique to the digital age, where everything is ephemeral — trumped by the next headline. Maybe, he posits, we shouldn’t forget so easily.
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about thrillers that aren’t entirely what they seem
Only a few days ago, I noted that we're entering another golden age of video game adaptations after the 90s put us off the whole idea for a while. I love when I'm proven right almost immediately.
Unlike The Finals or ARC Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077's biggest strength is arguably its world and story: the game is an adaptation of a tabletop roleplaying universe that's been running since the 80s, and its revised version of that world has spawned spinoffs of its own. — Read the rest
A bizarre incident in Saratov, Russia, is spreading online and has even been picked up by foreign television. An elderly woman mistook a benign little sculpture of Dobby’s head from Harry Potter for her beloved Putin while taking a stroll.
In a slightly longer version of the video than is typically posted, we see the vigilant babushka, rocking a long coat and a troll-green hat, inside the café with the apparently provocative object. She summons a blonde representative of the establishment outside, where Dobby is visible in the window.
The apparent barista, draped in a gray leopard cardigan, obliges so that she can address the other woman’s concerns. The adorable babushka points out the likeness and exclaims that it’s Putin’s birthday. Standing up straight, she tries to explain that it’s unacceptable to laugh at people (meaning Putin), and that we must treat everyone with respect. (How nice!)
Refusing to be corrected, our babushka of honor keeps insisting on the resemblance and even threatens to call the police in order to tell them that the café has a depiction that insults Russia’s leader.
Woman Accuses Café of Mocking Putin With a Dobby Statue. Seriously.
The barista, who remains calm during the interaction (though there is some laughter in the background, probably from the person filming), eventually suggests that if the woman sees Putin in Dobby, perhaps she’s the one insulting Putin.
This is far from the first time that Putin has been compared to Dobby—offended Russian lawyers even famously tried to take action against Warner Bros., convinced the latter was based on the former. So, the babushka can be forgiven for her misjudgment. On the bright side for Putin, posts have circulated comparing his distinctive visage to Hailey Bieber’s.
I’m personally outraged by this story, and I want to know one thing: Why didn’t anyone give the watchful little lady a hug? It might sound cliché, but that’s what she really needed… along with a nice conversation and some snacks inside. Is she concerned about respect because those around her have deprived her of it? Let this remind us to treat the elderly kindly.
In the end, the fuzzy-hatted baddie did teach us that we must be more mindful of human dignity.
Ben Affleck is going viral for his deep knowledge of AI, from neural networks and transformers to open weights. The actor, who sold his AI filmmaking startup to Netflix earlier this year, is proving he's more than just a Hollywood star.
Do me a favor: Picture Charles Bronson. Black moptop over a face lined like a well-traveled map, and a jacket with the collar turned up against the perennial winter of cinematic 1970s New York City. His hand’s in the coat pocket, resting on the only argument anyone he encounters will listen to. He turns to the camera and gives a rapid-fire lecture on the declining birth rates of white Americans and the need to read classical philosophers and reject post-modern thought.
Ridiculous, right? Bronson’s aggrieved architect in the classic “Death Wish” films didn’t have a guiding philosophy. All he had was a gun and the bad luck to run into nearly every petty criminal on the island of Manhattan, and he sure wasn’t trying to convince the audience of the correctness of his conservative worldview. He wasn’t a debate club member. He was a hammer meeting a nail, traveling to the run down parts of towns all over America to shore things up — to entertain rather than win over audiences. If moviegoers came away thinking that cities were hellholes full of criminals who need to be tried by 12 or carried by six, so much the better.
It’s a lesson that the team of writers, directors and producers at The Daily Wire failed to learn. The film studio arm of the conservative commentary empire created in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, who left the company in 2025, is pushing out films that double as lectures on how America went wrong by going woke. The latest offering, a campus action film titled “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” delivers on the hectoring and little else.
From its first original film in 2016, the studio made clear its political orientation — and intentions. “Shut In” features a protagonist, who was a recovering addict and single mother, fighting off a home invasion from a crazed pedophile, and it heavily implies that her former drug use is to blame for the current trouble. She escapes her fate by forcing her ex-boyfriend to overdose and lives happily ever after as an apple-butter-making tradwife. The Daily Wire kept the hits coming in 2020 by making director-writer Kyle Rankin’s “Run Hide Fight,” a paper-thin good-guy-with-a-gun parable that follows a 17-year-old girl whose school is under attack from a squadron of active shooters. (The title comes from a common safety protocol for everyday citizens who find themselves being shot at.) Two years later, Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh fronted “What Is a Woman?”, a street harassment documentary centered on attacking non-traditional gender identities and transgender issues.
“Infidels,” though, sees the studio outdoing itself in centering reactionary politics. Starring disgraced Marvel star Jonathan Majors, the film takes the school-shooting premise and injects it into the campus culture wars. Under the guise of pro-Palestinian protests, terrorists take over a small liberal arts college, and a group of college students, with the help of Majors’ “protect Western civilization”-spouting veteran, fight to take back their campus.
“Infidels” spouts arguments familiar to any Daily Wire watcher at a blistering pace. College students are either misinformed about the reality of Israel’s war on Gaza, or they are completely oblivious to it.
“Infidels” spouts arguments familiar to any Daily Wire watcher at a blistering pace. College students are either misinformed about the reality of Israel’s war on Gaza, or they are completely oblivious to it. The campus protest organizer, a literal blue-haired college student in a keffiyeh, is unwittingly working for a splinter cell of murderous terrorists. In contrast to the actual police crackdown on campus protests across the country, the college’s trustees and president sit on their hands for fear of causing offense. The town’s mayor refuses to call in the SWAT team because of bad optics. Graffiti primes right-wing watchers to fume with a laundry list of leftist slogans. Land acknowledgements statements, agnosticism, the utility of college education and mixed-race families in commercials all get a moment in the over-stuffed script by Kyle Rankin.
If hearing the arguments of Shapiro, who acts as a producer, in the mouths of supposed twentysomethings doesn’t give the game away, the baffling characterizations in the film do. The students’ tastes veer almost embarrassingly close to those of suburban middle-aged men. They drink (unaged) whiskey that one student distills in his dorm room while listening to ‘90s butt-rockers Seven Mary Three. One character is introduced swinging a sword in his pajamas while chomping a cigar and quoting Rudyard Kipling. If you have been unfortunate to see a Daily Wire hang session, then you will know that Shapiro and Company aren’t setting up a spate of undergraduate methanol blindness. They genuinely think these kids are cool.
Focusing on the cast of college kids uncovers the core problem of the film. You’re meant to root against villains who, outside of their devotion to a radical strain of Islam, believe everything The Daily Wire’s average opinionator believes. For the logic of this siege thriller to make any sense, you have to want those college kids, who spend the first hour taking over quads and discussing polyamory, to get away unscathed. Rankin clearly doesn’t; he luxuriates in the deaths of the blue-haired activist and her gay right-hand man. The former has her throat slit in a startlingly graphic manner, and the latter is thrown from a roof in a literal interpretation of a common counterargument against LGBTQ+ supporters of Palestine. The shot of the student falling from a roof to his death is drawn out and examined from several gleeful angles.
On the opposite side, the audience is meant to root for Majors’ character, who warns that Islam is coming for “the wombs of our women” and that the U.S. will be undermined by a strict devotion to the rights of citizens. That sword-swinging cigar chomper calls a dying Egyptian dorm neighbor a common ethnic epithet before rushing off to save the day, which in turn serves to highlight a larger issue that The Daily Wire runs into each time they sit down to hammer out a script. When they try to sneak their liberal bogeymen into a film, their debate team muscles kick in. Soon, the film is more “well, actually” than action.
In a vacuum, Bronson’s “Death Wish” vigilante was just as unlikeable. For four films, the actor played a grief-crazed man looking for trouble and shooting anyone who looked at him crossways. But Bronson wasn’t one for speechifying; he never turned to the camera and explained how the big-city carnage was all Jimmy Carter’s fault. He certainly never decided that his late wife, who had been killed by gang members, deserved her fate because of his household’s liberal views at the series’ outset. In the hands of The Daily Wire’s would-be auteurs, the criminals would have spent the opening hour of “Death Wish” hopping subway turnstiles and taking free classes at City University of New York.
The problem of unlikeable heroes is also evident in the leaked script of the studio’s upcoming pro-ICE thriller. With a working title of “Pawn Shop,” the film is set to follow a pair of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents facing down a mob of supposed antifa counterprotestors and members of the gang MS-13 as they attempt to take a suspect into custody. There is even a showdown with a Renee Good stand-in, who is shot by one of the film’s hero agents. From a draft script shared by The Bulwark:
The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.
The inclusion of the mask might make The Daily Wire’s supposedly small-government audience feel less sympathy for an unarmed woman who was killed. But asking audiences who haven’t already bought into Shapiro’s schtick to root for her killer across the next few hours of action and culture war arguments is a heavy load no Daily Wire film has shown they can lift.
UPDATE: This column has been updated to clarify the departure of Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing from the company in 2025.
From family-friendly flicks like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, to pulse-pounding offerings like Iron Lung and Return to Silent Hill, video games have been jumping from the joystick to the big screen. And the trend is far from over – here are some upcoming movies hitting theaters in 2026 and beyond.
1. Street Fighter – October 16, 2026
Starring: Jason Momoa, Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Calliana Li
The first Street Fighter game hit arcades in 1987, introducing players to characters like Chun Li, Gouken, and the main character, Ryu. Despite what the name suggests, very few fights actually take place in the streets. Instead, Ryu faces off against a wide variety of opponents, typically either in martial arts tournaments or in training for one. Street Fighter made the move from arcades to home consoles in 1991 with Street Fighter 2020: The Final Fight, which was released on the NES – and now the series is making the move to theater.
Featuring Andrew Koji as Ryu and Noah Centineo as his American counterpart, Ken Masters, the Street Fighter film brings the two characters together – along with familiar names like Chun Li (Calliana Li), M. Bison (David Dastmalchian), and Blanka (Jason Momoa) – to face off in a tournament. Produced by Paramount Pictures, the movie will hit U.S. theaters on October 16th.
For anyone who wants to experience Street Fighter before the movie comes out, the Street Fighter 30th Collection, which includes the original Street Fighter, Street Fighter II, and more, is available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. Street Fighter 6 is also available on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.
2. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 – March 19, 2027
Starring: Ben Schwartz, Jim Carrey, Kristen Bell, Idris Elba
Even if you aren’t familiar with video games, Sonic the Hedgehog is probably a familiar character. The little blue hedgehog with the need for speed has been a pop culture mainstay since 1991, when the first Sonic game was released on the SEGA Genesis. The Sonic games pit Sonic and his friends Amy, Tails, and Knuckles against evil scientist Dr. Robotnik, who – like many an evil scientist before and after – aims to take over the world. Since his first platformer, Sonic has spawned a wealth of other media, from animated TV shows and movies to comic books.
Sonic the Hedgehog 4 reunites Ben Schwartz, who voices Sonic, Idris Elba as the red echidna Knuckles, Jim Carrey as their nemesis Dr. Robotnik, and James Marsden as Tom, Sonic’s adoptive father and his friends’ dad. The film introduces Amy in her first main character role, voiced by Kristen Bell. With Amy joining the crew, they will face off against a new adversary, Metal Sonic, whose voice actor remains under wraps. The film is slated to come out March 19, 2027.
It’s fortunate audiences have plenty of time before the new film releases, because a wide range of games is available to explore, including original platformers like Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or modern releases like Sonic Frontiers (2022) and Shadow Generations (2024). Titles are available on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.
3. The Legend of Zelda – April 30, 2027
Starring: Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, Bo Bragason, Uli Latukefu, Dichen Lachman
Though the main character, Link, doesn’t have much to say out loud beyond grunts, yells, and the occasional “Come on!”, Link, Princess Zelda, and their world of Hyrule have captured the imagination of gamers for decades. Throughout the franchise, various incarnations of Link and Zelda must fight darkness encroaching on Hyrule, driven by the monstrous sorcerer Ganondorf. The first game was released in 1986 on the NES and has since been followed by 20 mainline games, with the most recent being Echoes of Wisdom in 2024. The remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is coming out in November of this year.
The Legend of Zelda movie offers an original story, though it looks like it will follow familiar beats: Link and Zelda team up to protect Hyrule from Ganon, who seeks to use the powerful relic called the Triforce to take over the kingdom. Link will be brought to life by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, who audiences may recognize as Daeron Targaryen from HBO’s House of the Dragon, while Bo Bragason of Renegade Nell will play Princess Zelda. The film also features a posthumous performance from veteran actor Sam Neill.
Anyone looking to explore Hyrule before it hits the big screen should turn to Nintendo consoles, with 14 mainline games available on the Nintendo Switch.
An activist protests the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery in Hollywood on September 22, 2026. | Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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The Trumpy tech billionaire Larry Ellison has wrapped his tentacles around the US branch of TikTok, an entire Hawaiian island — and now, officially, a very large share of the world’s news and entertainment production.
The merger combines a sprawling collection of brands, including HBO, CBS, and Paramount Pictures under one rebranded umbrella. It also concentrates much of the US film and television business in the hands of just five companies. Unions, theater owners, media watchdogs, and several state attorneys general were accordingly concerned: Combining two major competitors in any industry inherently concentrates power over what gets made, what consumers pay, and what workers earn.
Critics of this deal argued that, in the media industry, the fallout could be particularly intense. In addition to layoffs, opponents warned the new company could produce fewer, more boring movies, raise subscription prices for its combined streaming services, and inject political bias into news programs on CBS and CNN. (We’ll review the evidence for some of these claims in a minute.)
The new company agreed to address some of these concerns in a September 21 settlement agreement with 12 state attorneys general, which let the merger proceed. A group of consumers also launched a last-minute bid to block the deal, but the Supreme Court declined their emergency request on Monday.
One of the conditions of that September AG settlement was a minimum film guarantee: The merged company agreed to release at least 30 films a year for the first two years after the merger, then 32 films a year for three years after that. The requirement was designed to address one of the major fears around the deal: namely, that mergers can result in fewer films.
Recent history, and the basic economics of acquisitions, help explain the concern. Debt-financed acquisitions, like this one, can leave companies under pressure to cut costs. There are a few ways to do that, such as producing fewer new films or cancelling unreleased films that they don’t want to promote. According to Cinema United, a theater industry group, Disney and 21st Century Fox put out about half as many theatrical releases after their 2019 merger as they did before it, excluding 2020 and 2021.
But that doesn’t mean the new Paramount/Warner Brothers (formally rebranded Skydance) would do the same thing. Disney, for instance, makes a lot of its money from properties and products that aren’t movies. When the European Commission took up the question of whether this new merger would reduce output earlier this year, it concluded that Paramount and Warner were comparatively more dependent on film revenue. In other words, cutting back the number of movies they make post-merger “would not make economic sense” the way it did for Disney after its acquisition.
Still, consolidation could certainly change which movies get produced. Critics argue that fewer studios mean fewer opportunities for Hollywood creatives and less pressure on the remaining players to take creative risks.
In a report released over the summer, academics with the Media and Consolidation Research Organization at UC San Diego warned this particular deal would likely result in less diverse and more formulaic films. I, for one, won’t be holding my breath for a Larry Ellison biopic.
One link for later
➨ Resist the temptation of the Prime Day “deal.” Today marks the start of Amazon’s twice-yearly discount days, which have spilled over to many other retailers. But before you load up your cart, double-check that the sale is actually a good one…and that you truly want or need the item in question. The psychological rush of scoring a deal is so strong that it can lead you to buy things you never planned to purchase.
Before you go…
Did you know…that Hollywood (and communism) brought the Reagans together? The pair met when Ronald was the president of the Screen Actors Guild and Nancy was a young actress trying to prove she wasn’t a communist sympathizer.
Today’s trivia: What is the 24th and final letter of the Greek alphabet? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the Indian Ocean island where the UK displaced inhabitants roughly 55 years ago. That would be Diego Garcia, which was forcibly cleared to make way for a joint US-UK naval base.
From their dorky parties to their weird walks, the movie holds OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other stakeholders with contempt, while demonstrating their recklessness.
If you’ve ever seen a movie produced by MGM, chances are you’re familiar with the company’s mascot, Leo the Lion, who roars at the screen just before each of their films begins. Originally appearing ahead of the 1917 silent drama Polly of the Circus, “Leo” has been played by eight different lions to date and has preceded the opening credits of countless movies, from The Wizard of Oz to Tom and Jerry cartoons to the latest James Bond releases. Only one of those lions was actually named Leo, though, and he’s the one you’re most likely to have caught at some point, considering that it’s his image they’ve been using since 1957:
Strangely, nearly a century after the iconic mascot made his big-screen debut, the first Leo—played by a lion named Slats—suddenly became the subject of a wild internet rumor. If the story’s to be taken at face value, OG Leo once ran into a couple of burglars who would rob banks and stash the money in the warehouse where Leo’s famous roar was set to be filmed. On this particular occasion, Leo was said to have caught the crooks in the act and mauled one of them to death. The accomplice supposedly then ran away and got hit by a police car on its way to the bank they’d just knocked off.
MGM’s Famous Lion Was Blamed for Multiple Deaths That Never Happened
And if that doesn’t sound bad enough, another tale about ol’ Slats started circulating a little while later, and according to this one, he actually killed his own trainer, along with two assistants. However, as Snopes helpfully pointed out in 2012, both of these stories are completely bogus, having evidently been spread by a number of websites looking to pass off nonsense as factual information, for whatever reason. In fact, not only did Slats not kill his trainer (whose name was Volney Phifer, by the way), but the trainer outlived Slats by decades.
People feeling the need to spin yarns about the MGM lion, of all things, is especially weird because there are some legitimately interesting real stories they could be telling instead. The third Leo, who was named Jackie, for example, miraculously survived a plane crash in the 1920s. Jackie managed to stay alive for four days in the Arizona desert prior to getting rescued. This was reportedly one of several accidents Jackie lived through that earned him the nickname “Leo the Lucky.”
Interviews with Justine Wilson and Ashley St. Clair in the nearly four-hour-long Musk paint the world’s richest man as capricious and cruel even toward those closest to him.
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