The leaked trailer, which reportedly saw an unfinished version of several of these shorts, also happened to reveal the project's cast. That's now been confirmed in official channels, as per a New York Comic Con panel (via Variety). Here's the full roster:

• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Kevin Hart
• Keanu Reeves
• Temuera Morrison
• Ariana Greenblatt
• Heaven Hart
• Emily Swallow
• Gabriel Luna
• Ricky Whittle
• Patrick Schwarzenegger
• Merle Dandridge
• Claudia Doumit
• Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
• Clive Standen
• Laura Bailey
• Michael Beach

The list is chock-a-block, dare I say star-studded. Keanu Reeves, already a known videogame presence via Cyberpunk 2077, is making an appearance—and Kevin Hart apparently seems determined to grind his way into the gaming industry, not too traumatised by the Borderlands movie to give it another go. I'm not sure how I feel about the lack of actual voice actors (beyond Laura Bailey) but it sure is impressive.

Most fascinating is Arnold Schwarzenegger's appearance—we all know him as the Terminator, and while he's made some movie videogame appearances before (mostly movie tie-in games, which he was likely obligated via contract to do) his relationship with the medium's been turbulent, to say the least.

Granted, this was almost 20 years ago, but while Schwarzenegger was serving as California's governor in 2005, he attempted to sign into existence a bill that would stop minors being sold or rented violent videogames—though that bill was watered down by the time it came into effect. Rather than $1,000 fines for violators, stores simply had to signpost their violent games properly.

Anyway, one can presumably consider his attitude mellowed, given the satanic-panic style fretting over violent videogames corrupting the youth hasn't exactly manifested—Call of Duty lobbies notwithstanding. While the whole exercise of Secret Level seems a bit corporate and big-budget in nature, I'm genuinely excited to see exactly who Arnie's voicing, as well as that Concord episode, which I'm sure won't be awkward for anybody at Sony.

I'm hardly alone in that estimation, of course. It felt like the whole world was raving about the show when it aired back in April, and it's currently sitting pretty with a covetable 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. No wonder, then, that Amazon and Bethesda want to make hay while the sun shines: Filming for season 2 begins next month (via Screen Rant).

Fallout's second season was greenlit barely a week after the show dropped on Prime and, per a chat Screen Rant had with Leslie Uggams—who plays Vault 33's new Overseer Betty Pearson after Kyle MacLachlan goes missing—they're getting right into it. "We start [shooting in] November," she told Screen Rant. "I'm excited about it."

Which is a much faster turnaround than the first season got, naturally. That one took two years to start filming after it was officially announced all the way back in July 2020, but of course it's probably easier to get all your ducks in a row to shoot a TV series when you already have a load of props, a cast, and there isn't a series of pandemic lockdowns across the entire planet.

Anyway, don't get too optimistic about a release date. Sure, it's a fast turnaround on shooting, but we live in an era where shows seem to take year-long hiatuses (hiatii?) as a matter of course. Think of shows like House of the Dragon, which aired first in 2022, took a break in 2023, then came back with a strangely foreshortened series earlier this year (writers' strikes, admittedly, likely did not help that one in particular). Even Fallout's first season took two years to hit our screen after it began shooting in 2022.

So don't book your 2025 time off just yet, is all I'm saying. As for what Fallout season 2 will actually be about? Well, judging from the way the writers have been talking (and from the events at the end of the first season), it seems incredibly likely that New Vegas will put in some kind of appearance, which will give all of us New Vegas stans a great new opportunity to start crafting conspiracy theories about how Bethesda hates that game again. Plus, Uggams says her character has "some things up her sleeve," so we can expect more Vault 33 shenanigans. Apart from that? My forecast is rapidly changing conditions.

If you don't care about spoilers, though, let me catch you up to speed. The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated series based on a livestreamed campaign of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons that ran from 2015 to 2017 over the course of 115 episodes, going under the title Critical Role, which starred a handful of super prominent voice actors in gaming. It's still going today, on its third campaign, but the series is based on that 100+ episode debut.

In the TTRPG space, Critical Role is credited—pretty fairly—with causing a bit of a renaissance, easily on par with Stranger Things in terms of getting people into rolling dice. To put it in perspective, when the now-bigboy company asked for Kickstarter help to fund The Legend of Vox Machina, it broke $1 million in the first hour, then proceeded to rake in $11.3 million of funding total. They've got enough money to produce and distribute their own TTRPG systems: People like this thing.

Which means that the animated series' departures from the livestream story last week are very bloody brave—in the literal sense of the adjective. Two character deaths rocked the boat hard enough that water's getting in through the cracks, and I'm finding myself in the position of a sicko yelling "yes, yes!" through the window.

First up, Percival de Rolo—voiced by Taliesin Jaffe—has bit the bullet after Anna Ripley, who is supposed to get coup de grâce'd by a set of very pissed off adventurers (but doesn't), shoots him through the chest. The death itself isn't the interesting bit here, it's the permanency.

D&D 5e is generally pretty lax with resurrection rules, to the point where DM Matthew Mercer had to devise a homebrew resurrection ritual to keep character deaths meaningful back in 2015. The Legend of Vox Machina's in-universe rules are a lot less lax. Percy, who was originally resurrected not soon after Ripley killed him, is left dead as a doornail in a stone coffin. He gets a funeral scene and everything and, at the time I'm writing, is considered donezo by everyone involved.

His soul hasn't passed into the beyond—his toxic ex-demon, Orthax, eats the souls of gun victims, it's a whole thing—which means that his future resurrection is very likely. It does, however, change the tone of the entire rest of the season, as several beats from the livestream are now missing one white-haired goth nobleman.

Then there's Kashaw Vesh, a guest character from the livestream portrayed by Will Friedle, who gets turned to paste.

While Percy's death seemed like a brave, interesting departure from the source material, turning a pretty well-loved side character into a Red Dragon pancake is like stabbing a knife through it. Especially because I'm a lot less certain that dude's coming back—chosen oomfie of the goddess of death, Vax'ildan, watches him go into the Raven Queen's embrace. Which is the spiritual equivalent of taking a bow before backflipping into traffic, while on fire. It's not something you generally survive—Kashaw willingly went to that farm upstate.

The series hasn't been a stranger to narrative departures from its source material, obviously, but those changes have mostly been in the service of efficiency. After all, your average D&D session lasts around four hours, which is way too much runtime to condense into a show. Comparatively, these changes are huge—and as someone who sat down and watched all 115 episodes of the dang thing, bawling my eyes out live in 2017, I'm here for it.

These changes ensure that long-time fans like me aren't just sat here crossing off entries on a bingo card. I'd be gently entertained, but otherwise non-responsive, to the dramatic stakes of these final battles if that were the case. Now, Critical Role and the folks at Titmouse have made a statement that no-one is exactly safe—main cast members like Percy'll probably come back with an appropriate amount of gravitas, but side-characters? There's every chance they can get blown up for good.

As for the wider fan response, Matthew Mercer popped up on X with a tentative "So… how are we all doing this morning?" after the episodes dropped. I'm not going to go deep into quote tweets but suffice to say, it's not so good. I guess we'll just have to wait for a Critical Role videogame to make it to market so I can defend Kashaw Vesh with my own two gamer hands.

The showrunner and executive producer for the show, Rafe Judkins, along with executive producers Hawk Ostby and Mark Fergus, have left the project (via Deadline). It's also reported that the trio had completed multiple scripts for the first season but that Sony and Amazon are now looking to go in a new creative direction, which includes hiring a new writers' room.

It doesn't seem like there was any bad blood between Sony, Amazon, and the trio, as one source told Deadline that the studios praised the group's writing. Judkins is still the showrunner on Amazon's Wheel of Time series, which was renewed for a third season back in '22, while also working with Sony to focus on new developments.

When we first heard about the show, we also found out that it would pretty much be a straight retelling of the story from God of War 2018: "When his beloved wife dies, Kratos sets off on a dangerous journey with his estranged son Atreus to spread her ashes from the highest peak—his wife's final wish." It's not exactly anything inspired, but God of War 2018 had a fantastic story, so it's certainly not a bad thing to stick to what you know will work. But now Amazon and Sony have announced that new showrunners will likely take the series in another creative direction there's no telling how the story may unfold.

It seems like videogame adaptations are all the rage right now. There was the atrocious Borderlands movie, which managed to set a new low for videogame movies, as well as an upcoming Minecraft movie, which honestly keeps looking worse the more I look at it—that blocky sheep haunts me. But on the other hand, there are some adaptations that I'm actually excited to see. Arcane Season 2 is getting closer and closer, and after watching the official trailer, it's hard not to get excited about it. There's also a couple of episodes I'm excited to see from Amazon's Secret Level series—the Warhammer 40k episode looks sick, and it'll be interesting to see how the Concord episode shapes up after its failed launch.

That's all via The Hollywood Reporter, which had the Cavill scoop, along with the announcement of co-star Daniel Quinn-Toye, a relatively unknown talent who understudied Spider-Man himself Tom Holland in theater productions.

We don't know squat about Thurber's vision for a live action Voltron movie, but if I had to guess from his previous work, I'd expect loads of quips matched only the number of buildings falling down around the main stars. This is Cavill's first time working with Thurber, who spent the last eight years directing action vehicles for Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, and Ryan Reynolds. Cavill's buttoned-up demeanor and resting grumpy face make him a different beast than Thurber's usual leading man. The Amazon pairing makes more sense, given Cavill's existing partnership with the company to get a Warhammer 40,000 cinematic universe up and running at some point.

Hollywood has gone full open season on reviving lesser-known nerdom with big television budgets, though recent live-action anime adaptations have been inconsistent. That Netflix Cowboy Bebop show was a travesty, but the One Piece show was better. Speaking of Netflix, it was actually the home of the most recent Voltron revival, Voltron: Legendary Defender, an animated show that ran for three seasons between 2016 and 2018. That show was surprisingly great. I have less faith in this movie.

The Voltron movie, which has no release date yet, is set to film this fall in Australia. 

Not just that, obviously, but generally speaking a perspective on the legendary Japanese crime syndicate that doesn't take itself entirely seriously. Violent crime and all the attendant unpleasantness, yes, but also karaoke, trivia games, good times with good buds, and all-around weirdness, much of it relatively light-hearted.

The live-action Like a Dragon: Yakuza series coming to Prime does not look light-hearted. Weird? Sure, a little, but very darkly so. Nobody in this video seems like they'd be inclined to do sambuca shots and belt out their favorite Meat Loaf track in front of a crowd of strangers.

Like a Dragon: Yakuza unfolds across two "intersecting timelines," 1995 and 2005 and promises a descent into "the dark underworld of the yakuza, exploring the universal theme of family not only through bloodline but also through ties between yakuza bosses and their underlings, orphans and their caretakers, as well as mentors and students."

Here's the back-of-box blurb: "In 1995, eager to escape their restrictive lives, Kiryu and his friends, Nishiki, Yumi, and Miho plan a heist at a local arcade. However, the arcade is under the control of the Dojima Family, a powerful yakuza organization that rules Kamurocho. They dive into the yakuza-controlled underworld of 1995 Kamurocho. Meanwhile, in 2005, Kiryu is set to be released from prison. He learns from Detective Date that his friends are in danger and decides to return to Kamurocho to protect them. However, their friendship has deteriorated, as tensions between the Tojo Clan and the Omi Alliance are at a boiling point."

Amidst all that drama, the Demon of Shinjuku is slicing people up, some guy gets a close-up face full of automatic gunfire, at least one car drops from the sky, and there's absolutely no reference to Guitar Hero-style rhythm games anywhere. 

I suppose it makes sense. A live-action Yakuza series that goes all-in on Like a Dragon as we know the game might be too baffling for mainstream audiences, but a dark, stylish retelling of Yakuza 1? That could fly. It's a more conventional approach than that of the highly regarded Fallout live-action series, also on Prime, which successfully balances the grit and humor of the Fallout games, but it's also more conventional subject matter, at least to those completely unfamiliar with the games, and so playing it straight be the right way to go.

Speaking strictly for myself, though, I'd be a lot more inclined to watch a series that rolled like this:

Like a Dragon: Yakuza is set to debut on October 24, and will be available exclusively on Prime.

The first official teaser for HBO's The Last of Us season 2 is here, giving us a melancholy look at life years after the events of the first season.

I won't spoil anything for you: If you're already familiar with The Last of Us Part 2 then you'll have a pretty good idea of what's coming, and if not, Wikipedia can help if you just can't wait to find out. Suffice it to say that life in the wake of the Cordyceps pandemic has returned to a kind of normalcy, or at least stability, although just like the real world, some days are better than others. And those less-better days, boy, they are really not good.

Joel is clearly struggling (you know what you did) and his relationship with Ellie is equally strained—that's drama, baby—but the trailer also pointedly features plenty of rampaging zombies, gunfire, implied torture, and kinetic bad news all around. I have to guess the goal is to address up-front the common complaint that the first season, while narratively brilliant, was a little lacking in the action department.

It also seems our guess that Catherine O'Hara's "undisclosed role" being that of a therapist of some sort was correct: The timer at the start of the trailer is a dead giveaway that this isn't just idle chit-chat over a couple of room-temperature Lone Stars.

It's worth noting for the record that familiarity with The Last of Us Part 2 does not guarantee spot-on insights into The Last of Us season 2. Showrunner Craig Mazin said in 2023 that HBO's take on the game will be different where and when it needs to be, sometimes "radically" so—although I very much doubt that will have much impact on, y'know, the whole Joel business. (No spoilers! I'm just saying.)

A previously released teaser (which has since been taken down) said The Last of Us season 2 would be out sometime in 2024-25, but the first part of that number is now off the table. A precise release date hasn't been announced, but today's trailer confirmed that it won't be out until sometime in 2025.

Original story: The internet's collective head is on a swivel these days for even the slightest whiff of AI intervention in art, and for good reason: Apparently not even big-budget productions from Marvel are immune to dodgy-looking art seeing official use, as evidenced by a new poster for the Thunderbolts that at first glance appears to feature a character with six fingers on one hand. 

Yep, look there on the bottom left: sure looks like a dude with six fingers, and as Gamespot points out, that character (Bob) has five fingers in a teaser for the film.

Assuming Marvel isn't teasing a third act twist where this one particular Thunderbolt sprouts a new digit, the poster shared by the official Marvel Twitter and Instagram accounts today appears altered from its intended appearance. Interestingly, that version is the only version with the error. A more narrow version of the poster that cuts off before the apparent sixth finger appeared in Marvel's official blog post alongside the new teaser.

As weird as the bonus finger is, it does seem to be some sort of unintended optical illusion, possibly down to some re-sizing around the digits. A possible explanation is that someone's done a dodgy Photoshop while resizing the standard poster for other formats, but it seems unlikely this is the work of generative AI.

The posters with the possible phantom finger remain online at the time of writing with no comment from Marvel as of yet. You can watch the teaser trailer for Thunderbolts* below (wow, that asterisk is actually part of the title).

The Splinter Cell remake we were promised three years ago is still nowhere to be seen, but Sam Fisher is making a comeback of sorts on Netflix, in a new animated series called Deathwatch.

There's not much to see, really. Sam Fisher, now rocking a grandfatherly beard, is sinking in the drink, although he seems remarkably unfussed by the situation. The flashback to the funeral of his old pal Doug Shetland, though, suggests he may be subconsciously grappling with regret, for reasons I will not spoil here.

Despite the dearth of information in the trailer, there is one little bit of it I take issue with:

Because no. No, he's not. Liev Schreiber is a great actor, seems like a cool guy, but Michael Ironside is Sam Fisher.

The gravel. The gravitas. Ironside is still so perfect, which makes Schreiber's casting all the stranger. This isn't one of those situations where the game character's actor primarily does videogame work, and therefore wouldn't fit in an animated project. Ironside was a Hollywood veteran long before becoming Sam Fisher, playing memorable roles in films like Top Gun, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers.

And, for the record, Michael Ironside is still alive and still active. You might recall that he had to step away from acting for a time while battling cancer, which is why he couldn't return for 2013's Splinter Cell Blacklist, but he did reprise the role in Ghost Recon Wildlands later. 

Which leads me to wonder, why did Ubisoft not opt to bring him back for Deathwatch? I suppose Schreiber might be more recognizable to mainstream audiences, but he's not exactly a household name; neither is Ironside, fair enough (although a small but insistent part of me wants to argue that yes he is), but I feel like his presence would at least fire up the long-suffering Splinter Cell fan base, which would in itself be an attention-getting win for the series.

It's possible I'm being weird about this, but it also makes me worry that Ironside will also be excluded from the Splinter Cell remake, assuming it ever actually happens. That would be a much more serious transgression. For now, I'm calming myself by assuming that Ironside didn't do the Netflix series because he's too busy working on the next game. That makes sense, right?

Splinter Cell: Deathwatch is being co-directed by Guillaume Dousse and Félicien Colmet-Daage, while Derek Kolstad, who wrote the original John Wick, is serving as head writer and co-executive producer, along with Helene Juguet, Hugo Revon and Gerard Guillemot. A release date hasn't been announced, but it's "coming soon."

I've reached out to Netflix and Ubisoft to ask about this egregious Ironside oversight, and will update if I receive a reply.

While we've known CD Projekt's been keen to do another round of heart-wrenching stories in the setting, there's a difference between "expect to see more for sure" and, well, knowing we're getting more stuff very soon. You can watch the teaser below, though it's one of those frustrating trailer-for-a-trailers that doesn't reveal much. You'll get the same amount of information drawing a big N on some yellow paper with a red marker and staring at it for 30 seconds.

I can, however, extrapolate a few things about it through the sheer power of common sense and remembering stuff. Firstly, it's almost definitely not going to be more Edgerunners—I'm not going to spoil the ending of that particular anime, but it's a told story. Case closed, open and shut.

Despite it having a special place in my heart—existential crises aside—I'm honestly glad that's the case. I prefer it when a story is allowed to, you know, end, rather than being wrung for all of its narrative juices.

Secondly, this thing probably isn't being produced by Studio Trigger. In the announcement tweet, Netflix says it's a joint venture between Netflix Animation and CD Projekt Red and, to be honest, if Trigger was involved, I think they probably would've let fans know to generate hype.

That's not necessarily a disappointment, though. Netflix Animation Studios typically partners with other studios for its series, and it's got a few wins under its belt so far. For example, it worked with Titmouse for The Midnight Gospel, Sketchshark Productions for Centaurworld, and Blue Spirit for Blue Eye Samurai. The latter of which I'll recommend to you up and down, because it freaking rules.

In other words, how good this thing's gonna look depends entirely on who Netflix snags for it. Though, given the popularity of Edgerunners, I don't think Netflix is going to do this on a shoestring budget. As for when we'll get more details? "Soon." I just cashed in my last free prophecy with the oracles of Delphi, so I think we're all just going to sit tight for now.