Much like Poso says, I too have read Heinlein. I do think that right-wing people are now much more literate than the left, who seem to only draw their information from what other people say on social media.

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Jack Posobiec posted this week on a clip of the classroom scene from Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 Starship Troopers, where Johnny Rico asks his teacher Mr. Rasczak whether he should join the Federal Service despite his parents’ objections. Posobiec’s comment: “The libs will never understand Starship Troopers. The right understood it at first glance.”

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Another account on the thread noted the specific irony: “It’s funny the teacher in Starship Troopers said something that not even the most liberal teacher would say to a student now.”

The line in question comes from Rico telling Rasczak he wants to join up, that his parents are against it, and asking what Rasczak would do in his position. Rasczak’s answer: “Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom. Make up your own mind, Rico.”

In 2026, that line is a culture war artifact. A teacher in an American public school who told a student to figure things out for themselves rather than defer to authority would face scrutiny from the same progressive education establishment that has spent twenty years building mandatory affirmation practices, preferred pronoun policies, and social-emotional learning frameworks into the curriculum. The irony is the point. The most conservative sentiment in the film is expressed by a teacher in a classroom, and the left cannot claim it without acknowledging what it actually means.

Verhoeven intended Starship Troopers as a savage satire of militarism, fascism, and the kind of civic mythology he associated with American nationalism. He grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands and explicitly designed the film’s aesthetic to echo Third Reich propaganda aesthetics with the uniforms, the rallies, the cheerful newsreel framing. The satirical intent is real and documented. In multiple interviews Verhoeven confirmed he wanted the film to expose the fascist underpinnings of Robert Heinlein’s source novel by making the fascism glamorous and then asking the audience to notice they had been seduced by it.

The plan failed for a reason captured perfectly in another tweet in the Posobiec thread: “We were lucky Paul Verhoeven didn’t know how to direct a satire movie properly so most of Starship Troopers comes off as a straight action flick instead of a comedy.”

Verhoeven made the fascism look cool and forgot to make it look bad. The bugs are genuinely terrifying. The Mobile Infantry are genuinely heroic. Neil Patrick Harris in a black SS-style uniform reading Bug minds at the end is unsettling but the film does not contextualize it as horror — it frames it as victory. The audience Verhoeven wanted to disturb walked out of the theater wanting to join the Mobile Infantry.

The deeper problem for Verhoeven’s project is that Heinlein’s novel is not what he thought it was. Robert Heinlein was a libertarian who spent his career resisting the political simplifications others imposed on his work. The novel’s central philosophical argument, delivered through the character of Rasczak across multiple classroom lectures, is that moral sense is not innate, but rather it is acquired through training, experience, and hard mental effort. The book argues for civic virtue built on personal sacrifice and earned responsibility rather than entitlement. The franchise’s central question of what is the difference between a citizen and a civilian is answered in the film with the same precision as the novel.

“Rico, what’s the moral difference, if any, between a civilian and a citizen?” Rasczak asks in the film. Rico answers: “A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic, defending it with his life. A civilian does not.” Rasczak’s response: “The exact words of the text. But do you understand it? Do you believe it?”

That exchange is not fascism. It is the philosophical tradition of civic republicanism that runs from the Roman Republic through the American founding. The idea that full participation in the governance of a society should come with demonstrated commitment to its defense is older than the Third Reich by two thousand years. Verhoeven read it as proto-Nazi because he brought that interpretive lens to the material. The right read it as common sense because they brought a different lens.

Heinlein was a complicated political figure who resisted categorization throughout his life. He began as a New Deal Democrat, shifted toward libertarianism in the 1950s, and ended his career with works like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough for Love that defied any single political taxonomy. But Starship Troopers specifically, published in 1959, is a book about duty, sacrifice, personal responsibility, and the moral foundations of civic life, values the American right has consistently identified as its own and the progressive left has spent the last two decades actively dismantling in education, media, and culture.

Posobiec’s observation is correct: the right understood the film at first glance because the film’s actual values are legible to the right in a way they are not to the left. Verhoeven’s satire required the audience to recognize the heroism as fake and the ideology as dangerous. The right watched the same film and recognized the heroism as real and the ideology as familiar. The satire bounced off.

What is your read on Starship Troopers? Let us know in the comments.

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If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

NEXT: Which Sci-Fi Giant Has The Best Chance Of Survival?

Pride Month starts today and Book Riot primed the sadness as their movement dwindles in cultural relevancy. They put out an article declaring that queer books and authors “are at a breaking point” and calls on readers to join the fight. What the article documents, stripped of its framing, is a market that rejected a product category being pushed on children and the industry now paying the price for that overreach.

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Andrew Rannells voiced William Clockwell in every episode of Invincible across its first three seasons. William is Mark Grayson’s best friend, inserted into the show and comics as an openly gay character, and one of the show’s consistent human anchors through increasingly cosmic storylines. Rannells played him with a grounded normalcy that made William one of the more relatable characters in a show full of superpowered beings, as they were clearly trying to propagandize that homosexuality is normal.

In Season 4, William is voiced by comedian Brandon Scott Jones, replacing the original version. Jones has a more flamboyant texture to the voice, which is leading fans to believe that Prime Video wants the character to sound more stereotypically gay.

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Rannells told The Direct on the red carpet of a separate film: “I’m not exactly sure why. I think there was maybe a little restructuring and they... I was a guest star, and there were a lot of guest stars that didn’t end up coming back for the fourth season. So I’m not exactly sure why, but I was happy to be a part of the first three.”

The fan response was immediate. Viewers said Jones’ portrayal lacked Rannells’ personality and warmth. Others went further, arguing that the replacement voice sounds more over-the-top and stereotypically gay than the character had ever been portrayed across three seasons of grounded characterization.

The irony here is that Invincible is Robert Kirkman’s show. Kirkman’s stated creative priorities include authentic representation and characters who feel like real people rather than types, only to work hard to change the show to hit checkbox demographics as it went along. William worked as a character specifically because Rannells played him as a person first, which is why many accepted the character. The replacement is being criticized by the show’s own audience for moving in exactly the opposite direction.

Rannells was not the only significant recast in Season 4. Zachary Quinto was replaced by Ross Marquand as Robot, and Jonathan Groff did not return as Rick Sheridan. The season’s restructuring clearly affected multiple roles simultaneously, and one wonders whether a lot of this may be due to cost cutting as people were outraged at the last season because of its heavy political messagings and dropped the show. Whether the William recasting was a scheduling conflict, a budget decision, or a creative choice has not been explained by Kirkman, the showrunner, or Amazon Prime Video.

What it produced is a character the audience recognized for three seasons as one of the show’s best, now sounding flamboyant enough that viewers report being pulled out of otherwise serious scenes the moment he speaks.

Does the William recast change how you feel about Invincible Season 4? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: The Man Who Built Star Wars Fandom Shares What the Opening Crawl Actually Said in 1977

Bungie announced the final content update for Destiny 2 on June 9, 2026. Active development ends that day. No Destiny 3 is planned. The studio is pivoting entirely to Marathon, its new PvP extraction shooter, which launched in March 2026 to approximately 12,000 concurrent Steam users at peak.

The anger from the Destiny 2 community is the story.

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Players are flooding Marathon’s Steam page with negative reviews as a direct protest against Bungie’s decision to kill Destiny 2 while redirecting the studio’s resources to a game the community did not ask for. One review read: “Destiny Series is better.” Another: “Destiny Died for this game to fail.”

Destiny 2 launched in September 2017 and ran for nearly nine years. The final update, called “Moment of Triumph,” is styled as a love letter to the playerbase. After June 9, the game enters maintenance mode: no new story content, no seasonal activities, no crossovers. Servers remain online indefinitely in a legacy state similar to the original Destiny, which still runs today.

Sony Interactive Entertainment recorded a $765 million impairment loss related to Bungie assets. No Destiny 3 is in development. Staff who worked on Destiny 2 have no confirmed new project to move to. Sources told Bloomberg that some developers pitched new concepts and received no green light.

The trajectory of Bungie under Sony ownership is the fuller context. Sony acquired Bungie in 2022 for $3.6 billion, valuing it on the strength of Destiny 2’s live service revenue and the studio’s ability to produce future titles. Sony has not disclosed Marathon’s sales figures since its March 2026 launch, which is not the behavior of a company proud of its numbers. The $765 million impairment loss is a formal accounting acknowledgment that Sony paid significantly more for Bungie than the studio turned out to be worth.

The Destiny 2 players bearing the cost of that corporate miscalculation are the ones who spent years grinding raids, purchasing seasonal content, and building characters in a game that vaulted content they had already paid for when it no longer served the engagement model. Bungie’s 2023 content vault removed entire paid expansions from the game’s playable catalog, reducing the game’s content without reducing the price of admission. The players who stayed through all of it are now watching the studio kill their game to fund an extraction shooter that peaked at 12,000 concurrent players.

A petition calling for Destiny 3 has gathered over 285,000 signatures. Sources say there is no chance of reversing the shutdown or initiating a sequel.

The review bombing of Marathon is not a productive act. It will not change Bungie’s decision, and it punishes a product for the business decisions of its parent studio. But it is an accurate expression of what happens when a live service game spends years training its audience to invest time and money into an ecosystem, then dismantles that ecosystem to fund a replacement the audience rejected.

What do you think Bungie should have done differently to preserve the Destiny community’s trust? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Gaming’s Biggest Annual Event Has a Gayming Pride Parade This Year

Summer Game Fest 2026 runs June 5 through 8, broadcasting from the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Around 40 games are expected at the main showcase on June 5, with confirmed or rumored appearances including GTA 6, Marvel’s Wolverine gameplay, Gears of War: E-Day, Phantom Blade Zero, The Witcher 4, Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Blood of the Dawnwalker, and Lara Croft: Legacy of Atlantis. The main broadcast will run approximately two hours, hosted by Geoff Keighley and Lucy James.

The games being shown are the games the audience came for. The programming architecture built around them is a different conversation.

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The full Summer Game Fest weekend schedule includes: Black Voices in Gaming on June 2, PlayStation State of Play on June 2, Women-Led Games Showcase on June 4, Latin American Games Showcase on June 4, Access-Ability Summer Showcase on June 5, Day of the Devs on June 5, Southeast Asian Games Showcase on June 6, Wholesome Direct on June 6, Story Rich Showcase on June 6, Green Games Showcase on June 6, Gayming Pride Parade on June 6, Future Games Show on June 6, and the Xbox Games Showcase on June 7.

The Gayming Pride Parade is described as “a virtual experience featuring LGBTQ+ games and the talented people behind them,” produced by the Gayming Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to uplifting LGBTQ+ workers and communities in the games industry. Robin Gray, Executive Director of the Gayming Foundation, described the showcase’s purpose: “At a time when LGBTQ+ causes and arts organizations across the country are seeing support and funding disappear, it’s more important than ever to uplift queer voices and creativity.”

The timing of that statement is worth noting. Gray’s framing explicitly positions the Gayming Pride Parade as a response to what she describes as disappearing LGBTQ+ funding support, suggesting the showcase carries a political argument alongside its game announcements. The Gayming Foundation is also partnering with the Gayming Awards on June 8, creating what the organization calls “a full week-long celebration of LGBTQ+ excellence in gaming” wrapped around the industry’s biggest annual event.

None of the identity-segmented showcases are the main event. They are the programming surrounding the main event. But their presence as official SGF programming, growing in number year over year, reflects how the gaming industry has structured its public-facing infrastructure. The showcase that shows players GTA 6 and Marvel’s Wolverine is also the showcase that treats identity-based programming blocks as standard operating procedure for its surrounding weekend.

The contrast with what players are actually waiting to see is not subtle. GTA 6 leads the most-anticipated reveals. Gears of War: E-Day has its own dedicated Xbox Direct. Marvel’s Wolverine is the confirmed PlayStation State of Play headliner. These are games built around violence, action, and masculine protagonists that have driven gaming’s commercial engine for decades. The showcase wraps them in a week of identity programming and calls the combination a celebration of the industry’s diversity.

The gaming audience knows what it came for. The question is how long the industry’s events infrastructure keeps treating the audience’s actual interests as a delivery mechanism for messaging the audience did not ask for.

What are you most hoping to see at Summer Game Fest? Let us know in the comments.

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Return to the World of John Carter with this pulpy action epic by Batman writer Chuck Dixon. What happens to Barsoom a thousand years after John Carter? Find out by reading today.

NEXT: 007 First Light: When 88 Metacritic Isn’t Enough

J. Michael Straczynski learned he was not invited to Amazing Spider-Man #1000 the same way everyone else did: by reading the solicitation.

When the announcement came out listing the contributing writers for September’s Amazing Spider-Man #36 (Legacy #1000), Straczynski posted on Bluesky: “It was kind of a surprise, but it’s their call to make.” When someone suggested Marvel might be saving him for Amazing Spider-Man #2000, he replied: “I’m busy that day.”

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The irony is sharpened by the fact that Marvel simultaneously has Straczynski writing Mary Jane: Face It, Tiger, a 60th anniversary one-shot celebrating Mary Jane Watson. He is good enough to write MJ’s anniversary special, but not good enough to write the anniversary issue of the comic he defined for six years.

The lineup Marvel chose for #1000 includes Dan Slott, Brian Michael Bendis, Frank Miller, J.M. DeMatteis, Joe Kelly, and Noah Hawley, a television writer who has never written a comic book in his life. Hawley’s credit on the page lists his television work, Legion and Fargo, as his qualification. Straczynski created Babylon 5. He wrote Peter Parker for six years. He is absent.

J. Michael Straczynski wrote The Amazing Spider-Man from 2001 to 2007. He introduced Ezekiel and Morlun, added a mystical totemic dimension to Spider-Man’s powers, made Aunt May discover Peter’s secret identity, rebuilt the Peter and Mary Jane relationship, and guided the book through Civil War, including Peter Parker’s public unmasking as part of the New Avengers.

He also did two things the Spider-Man fanbase has not forgiven.

The first was Sins Past in 2004, the storyline revealing that Gwen Stacy had a secret affair with Norman Osborn before her death and conceived twin children who aged rapidly due to the Osborn formula. Gwen Stacy was the defining innocent of Spider-Man’s mythos, the character whose death marked the end of the Silver Age. The revelation turned her into Norman Osborn’s mistress and retroactively poisoned every memory of her. Reader backlash was immediate and sustained. The story has never been formally retconned despite decades of requests from the fanbase.

The second was One More Day, the 2007 storyline closing his run in which Aunt May is shot as a consequence of Peter Parker’s public identity reveal, and Peter makes a bargain with the demon Mephisto, sacrificing his marriage to Mary Jane to restore Aunt May’s life and erase the public knowledge of his identity. Straczynski publicly distanced himself from the story’s conclusion, stating that editorial overrode his preferences and that he had asked to have his name removed from the final two issues. The request was denied. His name sits on the issues regardless.

Whatever the internal dispute, One More Day happened on his watch and under his name. Seventeen years later, Marvel has still not restored the Peter and Mary Jane marriage. The most beloved relationship in Spider-Man’s history remains erased because of a story whose own writer tried to disown it.

The pattern of Straczynski’s post-2007 Marvel work confirms that his best years were already behind him. His Thor run beginning in 2007 started strong, reintroducing Thor and Asgard to Broxton, Oklahoma and building a compelling new mythology around the character’s return. Then he walked off mid-story. Thor #600 to #603 had to be finished by other writers when Straczynski departed for DC. His Fantastic Four run with artist Olivier Coipel followed the same trajectory, building toward a story about the Thing and then exiting before it concluded.

At DC he wrote Superman: Grounded, a storyline in which Superman walks across America to reconnect with ordinary people. The concept drew mockery from readers and critics for its plodding pacing. He left that run unfinished as well, with Chris Roberson completing the story. His Wonder Woman run introduced a new costume and a retconned origin that were reversed by the next creative team.

His return to Marvel produced The Twelve, a prestige miniseries about Golden Age Marvel heroes revived in the modern era, which ran from 2008 to 2012 because of delays between issues. Red Circle launched four DC/Red Circle character revamps in 2009, most of which dissolved within a year. His Thor: The Mighty Avenger mini, his Brave and the Bold run, his Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl entries all came and went without lasting impact.

His most recent Marvel work was Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty, a 2022 series with artist Jesus Saiz that was canceled at issue #12 after failing to sustain its early sales. The book’s premise, that Steve Rogers’ entire Captain America identity was built by a secret organization called the Invaders, drew negative reactions from fans who saw it as an attack on the character’s foundational mythology.

Marvel considers him worth a Mary Jane anniversary one-shot. Not worth a slot in the 1000th issue of the title he wrote for six years. The line between those two decisions is the entire story of what JMS did to Spider-Man and what the character has been trying to recover from ever since.

Was leaving JMS off Amazing Spider-Man #1000 the right call? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Which Sci-Fi Giant Has The Best Chance Of Survival?

Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Star Trek all bet on the same progressive formula over the past few years, and the ratings punished every one of them. The real question for fans isn’t which show is struggling. All three are. The question is which brand still has a road back, and which one is already past saving.

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Star Wars carries the largest name and the softest political damage of the three, yet it just posted the worst theatrical opening of the Disney era. The Mandalorian and Grogu landed at $82 million for its three-day debut and $102 million across the four-day Memorial Day weekend, below the inflation-adjusted start of 2018’s Solo, the previous low. Disney spun the A-minus CinemaScore as a win, but opening night skewed 63 percent male and 75 percent over 25. The crowd that showed up was the existing fanbase, not a new generation. That matches the streaming collapse. Star Wars shows fell from roughly 25 percent of Disney+ viewership in 2020 to 15 percent in 2024, and the $180 million Acolyte got axed after one season once its audience cratered 75 percent across the run.

The deeper wound isn’t ideology. Lucasfilm went lighter on the messaging than its rivals, and the property still posts the highest rewatch rate of the three at 48 percent. The problem is structural. The Skywalker saga ended in 2019, and it ended as a finished story. Audiences got the full arc, so every new project has to answer a question the old films never faced: why should anyone care what happens next? Ryan Gosling’s Starfighter arrives in May 2027 to test whether an answer exists.

Star Trek looks worse on paper and stronger underneath. The 2025 Section 31 movie with Michelle Yeoh went straight to Paramount+ and sits at a 3.8 on IMDb, one of the lowest-rated entries the franchise has ever produced. Starfleet Academy premiered in January 2026, never once cracked Nielsen’s top ten streaming chart, lost half its audience between the second and third episodes, and got cancelled after two seasons with the second already in the can. Independent rewatchability data pegs the Kurtzman-era shows at 8 percent against 35 to 40 percent for the classic TNG-era series. Almost nobody goes back to Discovery or Picard.

Here is why Trek still holds the best odds anyway. Strange New Worlds proved the brand works when the writing respects it. Its third season pulled a franchise-record 471 million viewing minutes in a single July week and stood as the only Paramount+ original in the Nielsen top ten that week, with critics scoring it near 90 percent. Trek is a setting rather than a single story, which lets the studio swap eras and casts without contradicting anything that came before. The Skydance-Paramount merger has now made Star Trek a film-division priority, with multiple movies in development. The recovery path is clear. The one obstacle is the creative leadership that produced that 8 percent rewatch number.

Doctor Who is the franchise with nowhere good to go. The Ncuti Gatwa era drove ratings to lows the series had never seen. “Lucky Day” drew just 1.5 million overnight viewers, and the 2025 season averaged 3.8 million on Barb’s 28-day figures, down a full million from Gatwa’s first year and far under Jodie Whittaker’s already-soft 5.2 million finale in 2021. In the United States, the season failed to chart on Nielsen at all. Disney weighed the ballooning budget against the falling numbers and the backlash to a Doctor who shared an on-screen gay kiss, then walked away from the co-production deal.

Then came the regeneration. Rather than reset cleanly, the show wrote Gatwa out and turned the Doctor into Billie Piper, a former companion, in a finale rebuilt through reshoots. Russell T. Davies has admitted the series may go on “pause.” Star Trek can introduce a new captain and a new ship and start fresh. Doctor Who built its recent identity around politics its core audience rejected, and it has no big-screen rescue waiting.

So here is the ranking. Star Wars sits in the middle, hampered by a finished story rather than a poisoned one, and still able to sell tickets to the faithful. Doctor Who is in the worst shape. Its numbers are collapsing, Disney has walked, and it dug its own creative hole on purpose. Star Trek took the uglier individual hits, yet it holds the best position to recover, because it is a universe instead of a single tale and because Strange New Worlds already showed the old formula still works. The brand most people would write off first is the one with the clearest way home.

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If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

NEXT: The Man Who Built Star Wars Fandom Shares What the Opening Crawl Actually Said in 1977

May 25, 1977. Star Wars opened in 32 theaters across the United States. Nobody knew what was about to happen.

Craig Miller knew it before almost anyone. He was Lucasfilm’s original Director of Fan Relations, working on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back from the very beginning. He wrote press material, created and ran the Official Star Wars Fan Club, oversaw the staff that opened and responded to mountains of fan mail, worked with licensees, created an 800-number telephone hotline for The Empire Strikes Back that accidentally shut down the state of Illinois’ phone system, operated R2-D2 on episodes of Sesame Street, and spent weeks on the set of The Empire Strikes Back. He is called the godfather of Star Wars fandom, the man who worked with George Lucas to connect the franchise to the audience that made it what it became before the internet existed and before anyone had a template for what franchise fandom could look like.

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He documented all of it in Star Wars Memories: My Time in the Death Star Trenches, published in 2019, and followed it with More Movie Memories in 2024, covering the rest of his nearly fifty-year Hollywood career after Lucasfilm.

On May 25, 2026, Miller posted a reflection online that settled one of the franchise’s longest-running fan debates:

“It’s May 25th. Astonishingly, it’s been 49 years since ‘Star Wars’ debuted in 32 theaters around the U.S. Over the next several weeks, the number of theaters increased and increased until it was playing on over 1,000 screens. (I don’t know how it can be 49 years. I’m barely that old now.)

This has been an unusually busy week and I’ll talk about it today or tomorrow. But, in honor of the anniversary of the initial release of ‘Star Wars’, here’s a short excerpt from ‘Star Wars Memories’. Perhaps more Star Wars-related stuff later.

A NEW HOPE

‘Star Wars’ famously opens with a crawl, setting the scene, telling us what has gone before.

‘It is a period of civil war, Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire....’

For years, Star Wars fans have been debating whether or not that crawl started with ‘Episode IV’ or ‘A New Hope’. Or both. People insist they saw it when they saw the movie during the film’s opening days.

It didn’t say it.

Neither of them. And definitely not both.

‘Episode IV’ and ‘A New Hope’ were added for the 1981 re-release of ‘Star Wars’, so the film would now match the format of the opening crawl of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’.

Those phrases have been in place ever since.

But in 1977, they weren’t there.”

This is a detail that matters. The opening crawl debate has run for decades, with fans adamant that they saw “Episode IV: A New Hope” in the theater in 1977. Memory is not a perfect record of film history, and in this case the record is clear: the titles were added in 1981. The crawl audiences sat with in 1977 opened directly on “It is a period of civil war” without episode number or subtitle. The mythology was already forming even before the episode designation existed.

Star Wars opened to $1.5 million in its opening weekend across 32 theaters in May 1977. By the end of its first run it had crossed $307 million domestically, becoming the highest-grossing film in history at that point. It expanded from those 32 screens to over 1,000 as word of mouth drove demand that distributors and exhibitors had not anticipated. Fox had so little confidence in the film that they required theater owners to book the Lucasfilm documentary The Other Side of Midnight as a condition of getting Star Wars at all — several exhibitors took the deal specifically because they wanted the documentary.

Forty-nine years later, The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $82 million domestic over Memorial Day weekend, the lowest opening in Disney-era Star Wars history. It tracked below Solo: A Star Wars Story. The director told a reporter he was not entirely sure why his film was chosen as the franchise’s theatrical comeback. A film that debuted in 32 theaters and became a cultural phenomenon by force of sheer audience enthusiasm is now a franchise whose theatrical return opened below the film considered its worst modern failure.

The distance between those two data points is the story of what the franchise became under corporate management. Craig Miller was present at the creation of something that did not need marketing to become a phenomenon. It needed thirty-two screens and a crawl that did not yet know it would be called Episode IV.

What is your earliest Star Wars memory? Let us know in the comments.

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Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!

NEXT: Nolan’s Odyssey Tracking Shows Interest Dropping In Chirsopher Nolan’s Modern Film

A YouTuber running the #DCSoWhite campaign announced Phase Two this week: DC Blackout, a full boycott of DC Comics including clearing his Absolute pull list, over what he describes as 1,200 days without a Black character-led ongoing series in DC’s main continuity.

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Getting ready for the weekend! It’s been a busy one over here and wrapped up my reread of The Lord Of The Rings today, which I’ve combined with Christopher Tolkien’s "History of Lord of the Rings” a 4 volume set where he curated notes, drafts, and outlines of his father’s work. This made it a lot less enjoyable of a read to go through but on the flip side I feel like I have a better understanding of Tolkien than ever before. Hope you’re having a good read this weekend.

For now, you can read these articles from today and please know that Fandom Pulse needs your support! We do this full time and it’s a lot of work and only $5.99 for a subscription to help keep us going:

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Russell T Davies appeared on James O’Brien’s Full Disclosure podcast this week. Toward the end of the interview, O’Brien asked what Davies was doing next.

“I don’t actually know,” Davies began, before mentioning a dance stage show planned for 2027 based on his television series It’s a Sin. “I’m having a nice time. I’m kind of not rushing to write the next thing. I’m going to start now. The Tip Toe, we finished work on that next week and I’ll start right on the next one. So, that script will take a few months then we’ll start talking to people about it. So, I won’t be back filming anything until next year, really.”

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He did not mention the Doctor Who Christmas Special.

This is the showrunner who told BBC Newsbeat in December 2025 that after sharing his plans for the Christmas special with BBC bosses, it left them “with jaws agape, loving it.” The man who described the special in those terms did not name it when asked what he was doing next, and then stated he would not be filming anything until 2027.

Three possibilities follow from that statement: Davies is not executive-producing the special and will not be involved with the filming. He is only referring to projects he has not yet written. Or the 2026 Doctor Who Christmas special is not going to be filmed.

Every piece of publicly available information points toward the third option.

The Sun reported earlier this month that the Christmas special was in danger of being scrapped or pushed to Easter 2027 because the BBC could not find a new lead actor. Radio Times followed with the same read. The BBC declined to comment when Radio Times contacted them. When Radio Times reached out to the BBC to comment on the rumours regarding the current state of the Christmas special, the BBC “declined to comment.”

Prior sourcing indicated the original Christmas special script collapsed after both Billie Piper and David Tennant became unavailable, forcing Davies to rebuild from scratch around an uncast Doctor. Composer Murray Gold confirmed in February that Davies had written multiple versions of the script “depending on certain outcomes” — the language of a production that does not know who is in the lead role. BBC Studios CEO Zai Bennett told the press in February: “We’ve got the Christmas special coming. After that, it’s time for us all to work on it.” That statement described the Christmas special as the only confirmed future the show had.

The accumulated picture is now difficult to read as anything other than a production in genuine collapse. Davies completed two full seasons of the show under the Disney co-production deal. Disney exited after Season 2 because the streaming numbers did not justify the cost. Season 15 averaged 3.8 million viewers on 28-day UK figures, below Jodie Whittaker’s final season, once considered the franchise’s creative nadir. Ncuti Gatwa hosted SNL UK in May and opened his monologue by saying approximately twelve people watched him in Doctor Who and that he does not understand his own regeneration into Billie Piper. The outgoing Doctor addressed his own exit as a punchline because there was nothing else to say.

AMC Global Media picked up the 2005-2022 revival seasons for US streaming after Disney’s exit, thirteen seasons from Eccleston through Whittaker, 176 episodes. The pre-Gatwa library is now on cable television. The current era has no confirmed future beyond a Christmas special whose showrunner just said he will not be filming anything until next year.

Davies not feeling rushed to “write the next thing” may also indicate he is not involved with potential future series of Doctor Who at all. The show could continue without him under new creative leadership. It could be rebooted with AMC involvement, which would represent a complete reset of the Disney era. It could simply end with the Christmas special, however and whenever that finally films.

Doctor Who has aired a Christmas special in twenty of the last twenty-one years. The one year it missed the Christmas slot was 2009, the year of David Tennant’s regeneration into Matt Smith. If the 2026 special slides to Easter, the franchise will have missed the Christmas window for only the second time since the revival began, and this time the reason is not a planned regeneration but a production that cannot find a Doctor to put in the TARDIS.

Davies told the BBC his Christmas special would leave them with jaws agape. He did not mention it when asked what he was doing next. Seven months before Christmas, the BBC will not comment, the showrunner is not filming until 2027, and nobody has been cast.

What do you think is actually happening with Doctor Who? Let us know in the comments.

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If the golden age of Trek and Babylon 5 left a hole in your sci-fi diet, The Stars Entwined fills it — interstellar espionage between two civilizations on the brink of war. Read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

NEXT: Amazon Is Spending $340 Million on Rings of Power Season 4 Nobody Asked For

Phil Spencer retired from Microsoft Gaming on February 23, 2026, after 38 years at the company. Sarah Bond, his President of Xbox and the person widely considered his heir apparent, resigned the same day. The person Microsoft chose to replace them both is Asha Sharma, who had spent her career at Meta, Instacart, and Microsoft’s CoreAI division working on GitHub Copilot and developer tools.

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Sharma had no professional experience in the video game industry prior to her appointment. Her selection passed over Bond, who had spent years inside the Xbox organization and understood the platform’s operations. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made the call, pulling Sharma directly from leading Microsoft’s AI product division.

Sharma acknowledged her gaming background: “I don’t pretend to be the best gamer. My focus is to make Xbox the best place to play, return to our roots, ship great things, and become stronger.”

The gaming community’s reaction was immediate and pointed. The central complaint was not about Sharma personally but about what her appointment signals. Microsoft tapped an AI executive to run a gaming division that has been struggling with hardware sales, exclusive game output, and subscriber retention — and the gaming community noticed that the person now in charge of Xbox had never shipped a video game.

This week Sharma sent an internal memo to Xbox staff, obtained by The Verge, warning that more changes are coming. “We are building a stronger XBOX. That means making hard choices about what we build, where we invest, and what kind of company we need to be going forward. That is part of what you are starting to see in the shift from Xbox to XBOX,” she wrote. The memo also confirmed that last year’s Game Pass price increases had damaged the service: “Growth slowed down and subscriber loss accelerated after the pricing and SKU changes last year. Since our price reduction we have seen acquisitions grow and retention improve, which is a good first step.”

The price hike that hurt Game Pass was one of Phil Spencer’s final strategic decisions. Sharma is now reversing it while using the reversal as evidence of forward momentum.

The “hard choices” language arriving nine days before Xbox’s June 7 Games Showcase is not reassuring context. The last round of devastating Xbox cuts, which happened less than a year ago, saw promising projects canceled including a long-in-development Perfect Dark reboot that wowed fans in its 2024 showcase appearance. Xbox’s new Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball has described Xbox’s situation in terms of a platform fighting diluted consumer attention, competition from social media, and AI hyperscalers destroying the memory market. The hardware situation is reportedly so constrained that Microsoft has teams working around the clock to source memory components for its gaming products.

The structural Xbox problem predates Sharma. The platform has not had a system-selling exclusive since Halo Infinite in 2021, and that game’s multiplayer component launched incomplete and lost its player base within months. The $68.7 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition was supposed to solve the content problem by adding Call of Duty, Diablo, and Overwatch to the Xbox ecosystem. Sharma’s first significant content decision was pulling Modern Warfare 4 from day-one Game Pass availability, reversing the strategy that made the Activision acquisition’s gaming value proposition legible to subscribers.

The rebranding of Xbox to XBOX in all capitals is the aesthetic layer on top of all of this. Sharma became the first executive in recent memory to try to explain the meaning of an all-caps brand change in an internal memo.

Xbox faces real competition from PlayStation, which has a deep exclusive library, and from PC gaming, which offers the same Microsoft-published titles without the need for a console. The argument for owning an Xbox in 2026 is not obvious. Sharma’s answer is a process answer to a product problem.

An AI executive’s skillset is not irrelevant to running a platform business. Distribution, subscriber growth, data-driven product decision are areas where Sharma’s background at Instacart and CoreAI applies. Whether they apply to the question Xbox actually needs answered, which is what exclusive game is worth buying a console for, is a different matter.

What would it take for you to buy an Xbox in 2026? Let us know in the comments.

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Return to the World of John Carter with this pulpy action epic by Batman writer Chuck Dixon. What happens to Barsoom a thousand years after John Carter? Find out by reading today.

NEXT: 007 First Light: When 88 Metacritic Isn’t Enough

Mike Mayhew spent the last week of May detonating a grenade inside the comics creator community.

Mayhew is a photo-realistic cover artist with over thirty years of credits across Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Star Wars, Batman, Justice League, and Vampirella. He runs Mike Mayhew Studio out of Glendale, California, producing exclusive variant covers, signed editions, original art, and CGC-graded comics that he sells direct to collectors without a middleman. He is not at San Diego Comic-Con this year. He will not be at any convention.

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On Wednesday he posted a Summer 2026 Comic Con Manifesto on Instagram explaining why, and told every other creator in the industry to follow him:

“Fellow comic creators!! Stop giving away equity in your future and your brand! You don’t need these half-ass, part-time, tourists who call themselves stores! Half of them can’t handle it and crash into a wall from greed and stupidity and take us with them. Their interests are not in your best interest! You have wings that are being clipped! When you are exhausted after convention season, 60% of your energy will have been wasted on accommodating stores and fans. It’s unnecessary. Think of the art you could have made in the meantime. You are the proven innovator. You have extraordinary talent. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you need others to justify your success! And double your prices godammit! Your talent and your signature isn’t gasoline. You are not a commodity that should be available to everyone. You are special, and all those things ‘They’ll never sell’ will be on eBay tomorrow! Running a business is an art that can ignite your art in ways you never imagined! I will not be at any cons. I will be in the comfort of my own home with my family and traveling with loved ones for pleasure, while designing and scaling a creative brand with total freedom to do whatever I want. Take heed. Time is running out.”

Mark Brooks, another photo-realistic cover artist who runs his own studio with a similar business model, pushed back directly. Brooks is 53, has a teenage son, owns multiple properties, and says he is on track to retire in five years. He reads Mayhew’s position as ego dressed up as strategy:

“My job is singular and solitary which I like. But conventions are how I recharge. I make plenty of money at home doing my thing but the money doesn’t buy camaraderie or the motivation I get when I meet the fans face to face that appreciate my work. A successful sale can fill my wallet for another month but it can’t fill my spirit. The bond with my peers and fans isn’t something I can buy my way into. Likewise, I love my representation and what they do for me. They handle logistics, customer service, and all the stuff that goes along with a successful online sale so I can focus on art. They earn every penny they get paid so I can feel stress free drawing and hanging out with my peers and fans. By doing that I produce more work that I’m paid for. It’s a win-win all the way around. Every artist in this business should do what works best for them so I won’t ever fault you for your decisions. The least you could do is do the same for your peers.”

Mayhew responded with context he had not initially offered, revealing the financial pressure behind the manifesto:

“I have extenuating circumstances in my life which prohibits or make it value proposition of whether I go to cons or whether I pursue this other really important part of my life that is not public. I’m 56 years old I’ve been in this industry for 33 years. I have two teenage children and I’m trying to pay for college, get ready for retirement, etc. Raising capital is a primary concern. I have invested $1 million printing Comics over the last eight years to have a message for my fellow comic artists. That was the nature of my post. I love going to conventions. I love meeting fans. There are decades of stories of me having warm encounters with fans. I love seeing and talking to other creators. I always make a point to tell them how much I appreciate their work. But the reality is that I’m gonna smoke all you guys by orders of magnitude on revenue. I think that’s something to think about. Because the convention experience trade-off is going to cost you an insane amount of money.”

Brooks responded:

“Trust me, I’ve been reading your replies. I get the exhaustion. I am doing things very differently than you, quite the opposite in fact. I’m on track to beat your year last year by loving my fans, getting out to see them, and producing work I love. I’ve also been fiscally minded since the day I began this job. I own multiple properties. I can retire fully in the next 5 years. Quite honestly, I’m exhausted by the cynicism of some of my peers that have grown grizzled and hard by a job that’s supposed to be fun. I’m 53. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I have a teenage son I’m putting through college. Welcome to life. I too am constantly trying to earn, save, and protect my future. I do better every year, year after year. I think I’ll stick with what I’m doing. You’re welcome to do whatever it is you think you’re doing. Which at this point seems to be pissing off your fans and turning off your peers. You’re a hell of an artist but all of this is really confusing. If you do have a real message I think it’s getting lost in a lot of bad messaging and ego. But you don’t seem in the mindset to see that. Have fun with it I guess.”

Mitch Gerads, the Batman and Mister Miracle artist, kept his answer short: “I love cons. I love meeting new fans. I love seeing longtime fans. I love getting to hang out with my colleagues and friends. It’s a whole vibe and almost nothing fuels me creatively more than it.”

Dan Panosian, a penciller and inker with credits from Marvel, early Image, and creator-owned series including Slots, Canary, and Black Tape, was more open to Mayhew’s argument. He started skeptical:

“I personally love the conventions because it’s a great way to connect with the fans and honestly the whole vibe is inspiring. But you gotta find what works for you. For me, the conventions are a blast.”

Mayhew came back at him with specifics:

“I bet if you stayed home for one out of those six cons and did nothing but sketch covers, producing maybe 30 over 4 or 5 days, and sent those into CGC Signature Series and got the artist rate of $18, you would have made four times more money than going to that con. If you sold 30 9.8 sketch covers at $1k a piece that’s $30k. You can order as many sketch covers as you want through Lunar for $2-3 each. You don’t need a store to arrange all of this for you. You could put whatever you want on them. You could do 30 Absolute Batman sketch covers and they would probably go for $2000 apiece. I’m pretty sure that is game changing. We both live in LA. This shit is expensive. Traditional business would fantasize about an increase in revenue like that. You could promote them all month and then do one Whatnot stream or maybe two a month. It’s the same as having a Zoom meeting. Food for thought my friend.”

Panosian’s response shifted: “I’ve never tried something like that — but I don’t see why you couldn’t do both. I’ll definitely look into it. I still enjoy the conventions and seeing the fans and the other writers and artists. This is a very solitary job and it’s nice to see how the work is resonating with the readers and the other people in the business. But I’ll give the blank covers a go!”

Retailer Dennis Barger had no reservations at all: “You are the new comic book Jesus, go into the temple flip those f’in tables and chase out the middlemen who need creators more than they need them!!! Viva la revolution!”

Mayhew took the conversation somewhere broader in his final post, describing what he sees as a broken labor psychology unique to the comics industry:

“This is the mentality I’m trying to break. Damien Hirst isn’t doing anything for the people. Jeff Koons isn’t doing anything for the people. Takashi Murakami isn’t doing anything for the people. But in the comic book industry, comic creators and especially artists are conditioned that they’re lucky they’re even working in Comics and their gratitude should be on display and overflowing at all times. I think it’s a disproportionate expectation on this particular creative segment than you would find in any other creative field. Rock stars aren’t writing songs for you. Film directors aren’t putting you in a movie. Yet, comic book artists are supposed to give away free drawings and sign as many books as you want. I’m speaking in extremes to make a point. The farther I run away from this mentality, the more creative I can be, the more great collectibles I can produce and the more happiness I exchange with people. This is my truth. The language and the perspective surrounding the commerce of Comics and artists in the comic book industry is severely broken. Just like the gallery system in the fine art world is widely regarded to be a broken, failing system. In the art world a gallery takes a whopping 50% of the top of any art sold. Artists allow themselves to be taken advantage of for decades and then it’s too late.”

Mayhew is not being contrarian. He is making a business case in real numbers. Thirty Absolute Batman sketch covers at $2,000 each is $60,000 gross. An artist spending a weekend at a convention pays for travel, hotel, table fees, and opportunity cost on production time, and hand-sells to whoever walks by. Mayhew’s argument is that the same artist, staying home with a mailing list and a Whatnot stream, can generate multiples of that revenue while retaining full control over pricing, inventory, and the customer relationship.

He is also describing something the independent publishing community has been learning through hard experience: the convention and direct market retail infrastructure does not serve creators as well as it serves itself. The same dynamic that has creators waiting for a comic shop to order their book, or an online retailer to commission their cover variant, can be cut entirely with a direct relationship to the collector. The crowdfunding wave that built ComicsGate, Rippaverse, Ghost Machine, and dozens of smaller creator-owned operations in the last decade runs on exactly the logic Mayhew is articulating. Build a mailing list. Sell direct. Price according to the actual market value of your work, not according to what a con floor or a retailer will tolerate.

A livestream on Whatnot or YouTube is not a replacement for the creative energy of a convention floor, and Brooks and Gerads are not wrong that face-to-face time with fans does something that no digital interaction fully replicates. But as a pure revenue model, Mayhew’s math is hard to argue with. He has $1 million in inventory, a customer base built over thirty years, and zero need for a middleman to move product. He is 56. College tuitions are real. Retirement is real. The con floor is not the mechanism that solves either.

Is Mayhew right that comic artists should build direct and skip the conventions? Let us know in the comments.

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450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: IndieGoGo Is Still Refusing to Approve Indie Comic Creators: Joe Sonntag Is the Latest

Joe Sonntag, creator of Reaper Destroyer, raised over $75,000 on IndieGoGo for his first issue. The campaign fulfilled. Backers got their books. By every commercial and ethical measure, it was a success.

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Now Sonntag is trying to launch Reaper Destroyer #2 on the same platform, and the approval queue has been running for more than two weeks with no explanation.

On May 13, Sonntag posted an update to his pre-launch page:

“Where can you back?! The day is almost here! May 15th is approaching fast and I am excited to launch! One problem though. There may be an issue delaying the IGG page for backing. As you know the new IGG is kind of clunky and a lot of hoops to jump through to get this campaign approved for launch. The pre launch page was already approved but we have to go through the process again. Why you ask? Well you would have to ask IGG about that. So what do we do? On May 15th, if this page is not ready to go, you can find all of the same tiers on my company’s website superiorpresscomics.com.”

May 15 came and went. On May 23, eight days after the planned launch, Sonntag posted again:

“I am still waiting for approval on the Reaper Destroyer #2 Campaign. Hopefully this will happen soon and then I’ll set an actual date for the IGG launch. If you don’t want to wait for IGG you can also go right now and pre-order the book on my companies at superiorpresscomics.com.”

No explanation from IndieGoGo. No stated violation. The platform where Sonntag previously raised $75,000 and delivered every reward to every backer cannot produce a reason to approve his sequel.

Reaper Destroyer is a dark science fiction action comic about a man imprisoned in supernatural armor, tormented by the Spirit of Death, and fighting for his soul. It is exactly the kind of 90s-inflected dark hero work that built Image Comics. Nothing in IndieGoGo’s stated terms of service applies to it.

The pattern behind this delay has a long paper trail.

IndieGoGo’s history with ComicsGate and conservative comic creators stretches back to 2018. In October of that year, the platform shut down the Alt-Hero: Q campaign written by Chuck Dixon and published by Arkhaven Comics. The campaign had already raised over $100,000 and was in post-campaign store mode when the Trust and Safety team refunded all pledges, citing a terms of service violation without specifying what it was. Dixon is one of the most accomplished comic writers in the industry’s history, responsible for definitive runs on Batman, Robin, Nightwing, and Punisher across decades at DC and Marvel.

By 2022, multiple ComicsGate creators including Mike Baron, Ethan Van Sciver, and Shane Davis had discovered their campaigns were shadowbanned: hidden from search results, blocked from Google, accessible only via direct link. IndieGoGo’s own help center confirmed the practice, stating campaigns are not guaranteed to appear in search and offering no appeal process. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression documented the broader pattern, noting that in multiple cases the platform retroactively decided campaigns violated its terms after they had already gone live and raised thousands of dollars. In 2024, Cecil Jones was banned from crowdfunding his Cash Grab 2 comic on the platform with no explanation.

IndieGoGo’s terms of service grant the company complete legal cover: “We have the right to monitor, terminate, suspend, or delete any User Account at any time for any reason, or no reason. It is our policy not to comment on any reasons for termination and we have no obligation to provide you with a reason for termination.” That clause applies to every user on the platform. The documented pattern of its application runs in one direction.

When Gamefound acquired IndieGoGo in late 2024, the hope in the independent comics community was that new ownership might mean a genuine reset. Asked directly whether old bans would be upheld, the company said new projects would be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Sonntag’s case has been under review for more than two weeks.

His situation sits inside a crowdfunding infrastructure that is becoming broadly hostile to independent creators regardless of political affiliation. Last month Kickstarter suspended multiple funded campaigns after its payment processor Stripe flagged mature content, including one that had already raised over $10,000 from 198 backers. Kickstarter later reversed the policy and publicly admitted the crackdown was driven entirely by Stripe’s requirements, while conceding that Stripe can still freeze campaigns at any time under its own rules. BackerKit’s Trust and Safety team has left applications without response for weeks. Crowdfundr has absorbed some of the displaced traffic. Gamefound is now the presumed serious alternative for tabletop and comics crowdfunding, but has not yet demonstrated whether its moderation culture differs from IndieGoGo’s in practice.

Sonntag found his workaround. He is selling directly through superiorpresscomics.com. Reaper Destroyer #2 features cover art by Jon Malin, Ethan Van Sciver, Brett Booth, and Oliver Isabedra alongside Sonntag’s own cover. His audience is waiting. They should not have to navigate platform politics to buy a comic.

Direct-to-creator is the cleanest model available to independent publishers right now, or going to free-speech sites like IndieCrowdFund. The corporate crowdfunding platforms add discoverability and payment infrastructure. They also add gatekeepers who can delay or remove campaigns with no stated reason and no recourse.

Sonntag’s backers proved once that they would show up in numbers. The platform that collected its fees from that campaign’s success has spent two weeks deciding whether to let him come back.

Have you backed Reaper Destroyer or other independent campaigns and run into platform problems? Let us know in the comments.

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450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.

NEXT: Dark Horse Workers Unionize: The Letter That Tells You Everything About What Embracer Did to This Company

DaVaun Sanders, publisher and executive editor of FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, announced on Bluesky on May 21 that the magazine is going on indefinite hiatus after issue #40. His full statement:

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It’s been a busy couple of days over here at Fandom Pulse. Ran out of time to do the Daily Brief yesterday, so I apologize. We’re at the halfway point of the Flying Sparks Omnibus campaign on IndieCrowdfund. I’m loving this site and all the bells and whistles they offer. Don’t miss this, as it’s going to be a wonderful thick book like you never see in indie comics. Sign up to get your copy.

If you don’t have a paid subscription, sign up and help keep us going:

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The Japanese A Wild Sheep’s Chase, published in 1982, is the third novel by a young man who had already written two short, strange books and was not sure yet what kind of writer he was going to be. You can feel him deciding inside the sentences. The famous Murakami voice, the cool, slightly bemused first-person, the lists of records and brand names, the women who appear and dissolve, the well that opens under the floor of an ordinary life, is present here in a recognizable form for the first time. Pinball, 1973 had pieces of it. A Wild Sheep’s Chase has the whole assembled instrument. He picks it up. He plays a tune on it.

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The tune is a detective story that is not really a detective story, about a thirty-year-old advertising copywriter who is sent on an absurd errand by a mysterious right-wing power broker to find a sheep with a star on its back. The sheep, it turns out, is something more than a sheep. The hero’s friend, called only the Rat in the earlier books, has gone north and stopped writing letters. Hokkaidō appears at the halfway point and the novel changes climate. There is the girlfriend with the beautiful ears. There is a Sheep Man. There is an empty mountain villa where a record plays through the floorboards.

What I love about this book is that it commits to its own absurdity without ever raising its voice. The narrator’s tone is so even, so unsurprised by the increasingly unhinged things happening around him, that the reader simply enters the dream alongside him. This is Murakami’s favorite trick, and A Wild Sheep’s Chase is where he masters it. The sentence rhythm does the work. He writes a calm sentence about cooking spaghetti, then a calm sentence about a sheep with a star on its back trying to take over the consciousness of Japan, and the two sentences have the same temperature. The horror enters by the same door as the spaghetti. You don’t notice you’ve crossed a border until you’re well across.

The girlfriend, who is given no name, is the part of the book I find most difficult to defend, and I am going to defend her anyway, because the alternative is to pretend I don’t love this book, and I do. She exists only for the narrator. She has the ears, she has the gift, she has the extraordinary perceptions, and then on Hokkaidō she vanishes from the novel without ceremony, and we are not invited to grieve her. This is a real flaw. It is a flaw I have come to terms with. Murakami in 1982 did not yet know how to write women who exist independently of the men they appear to, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle eleven years later is partly the book of a writer who learned. Kumiko in Wind-Up Bird is not the girlfriend in Sheep. The girlfriend in Sheep is closer to a function than a person.

What rescues her, slightly, is the moment with the ears. The scene where the narrator first sees them uncovered, in the restaurant, the way the world reorganizes around them, the way she becomes briefly the most powerful person in the novel, is one of the small exquisite moments of Murakami’s finest writing. It is the kind of moment he kept getting better at over time. The girlfriend disappears, but that scene does not.

The Hokkaidō half is the more interesting material. The Dolphin Hotel, the chauffeur who prays to his car, the empty pasture, the snow coming. Murakami had been to that landscape and knew what its silence sounded like. The chapters in the mountain villa, alone with the snow and the fireplace and the records, are doing something his earlier novels could not do, they are sustaining mood across long pages without action. He had figured out by 1982 that you could write a Japanese novel in which nothing visible happens for forty pages and the reader stays in the room. This is harder than it looks.

Now I have to talk about the translation, and I am going to be careful, because the Birnbaum English of this novel is the version most readers in the world have read, and many of them love it, and for many readers it is Murakami. I understand why. It is propulsive. It is fun. It moves. Birnbaum was the translator who introduced Murakami to the English-speaking world in the late 1980s, and he was working under conditions that included an editor at Kodansha International cutting whole passages of the Japanese to fit a length the publisher wanted. Some of what feels brisk in the English is actually just missing.

But even setting aside the cuts, the translation makes a choice on every page that I think a reader who has only read the English would not necessarily detect. Birnbaum’s narrator sounds like an American hardboiled detective. He is wisecracking, faintly cynical, quick with a comeback, possessed of a kind of Chandler-derived cool. The Japanese boku is not this person. The Japanese boku is more diffident, more passive, more puzzled by his own life. He drifts. He does not deliver one-liners. He notices things and leaves them be.

The most compact way to demonstrate this is to point at the conversation in chapter eight where the narrator and his business partner discuss the dissolution of their advertising agency. In Japanese, the narrator’s responses are shorter than his partner’s, hesitant, slightly deflective. There is a faint sadness underneath that the prose does not name. In English, the narrator returns volleys. He has the better lines. The asymmetry is gone. A passive man has been converted into an active one. This makes the book more enjoyable to read in English; it also slightly mistranslates who the narrator is. The whole point of this character is that he is being moved through events by forces he does not control. A wisecracking version of him is a different character.

The other thing the English does is smooth out the strangeness. Murakami in Japanese often writes sentences that are mildly awkward, slightly off, deliberately flat — there is a famous quality of his prose that Japanese readers describe as 翻訳調 (translation-style), as if he were writing Japanese already half-translated from English. Birnbaum’s English does not preserve this. It writes confident, idiomatic American sentences. The reader does not feel the slight strangeness that is part of what makes Murakami sound like Murakami in his own language. This is a difficult thing to translate — you would have to write English that sounded faintly like translated English without being bad — and I am not sure anyone could have done it well in 1989. But the loss is real, and a reader who later picks up Jay Rubin’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle will sometimes be surprised by how different the prose feels. It is not just that Rubin and Birnbaum are different translators. It is that Rubin is closer to the actual Japanese and Birnbaum is making a Murakami the English market could understand quickly.

I rate the translation 6 because it is a professional, energetic, readable rendering that has lost the thing that mattered most: the temperature of the narrator. The book it produces is fun. But it is not quite the book Murakami wrote.

A Wild Sheep’s Chase is not the Murakami book I love most — that is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — but it is the book where you can watch him become himself. Hear the Wind Sing is a sketch. Pinball, 1973 is a more ambitious sketch. A Wild Sheep’s Chase is the first finished room in the house he was going to build. The sheep, the well, the woman who vanishes, the friend gone north, the snow coming, the strange calm voice that walks into the dream and does not panic — all of it is here, assembled, working.

I would rather read it in Japanese. But the English is how most of the world met him, and most of the world was right to fall in love. They were just falling in love with a slightly different narrator than I did.

Book: 4/5

Translation: 6/10

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The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.

NEXT: Review: The Memory Police By Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens July 17. It carries a $250 million production budget and was positioned as one of the two centerpiece theatrical events of summer 2026 alongside Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Three weeks before its first trailer dropped, industry forecasters were projecting anywhere from $700 million to $1.5 billion worldwide. The studio was talking Oppenheimer comparisons. The latest Quorum data published this week tells a different story.

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Audience interest in The Odyssey has dropped eight points in recent weeks, falling from 54 to 46. Awareness dropped from 42 to 40. For a $250 million IMAX epic from one of Hollywood’s most commercially reliable directors, those are numbers that require explanation.

The Odyssey is now tracking at the same interest level as Disclosure Day and Supergirl, both of which are themselves considered underperforming in pre-release tracking. Scary Movie 6 beats all three of them, sitting at 55. A Nolan film tracking below a Scary Movie sequel in audience interest is not where Universal expected to be in late May.

The context is not complicated. The casting controversy has been running for six weeks. The drop follows that controversy directly, with the Quorum data suggesting the online backlash is translating into general audience perception.

The YouTube dislike count on the trailer, roughly 74,000, the most of any Nolan trailer, is a secondary data point. It is the tracking number that matters. Dislikes on a trailer measure the engaged segment of the internet. Quorum data measures broader audience intent. An eight-point interest drop in a few weeks on a film with this budget and director is a commercial signal, not an internet argument.

The counterargument exists. World of Reel reported this week that a source told them tomorrow’s tracking data may contradict Quorum’s read entirely and place The Odyssey ahead of Oppenheimer‘s pre-release pace. Quorum methodology is not perfectly correlated to box office performance. Films with controversial pre-release periods have recovered. Batman v Superman opened to $166 million despite sustained critical backlash before release. The tracking drop is a warning, not a verdict.

But the comparison with Oppenheimer is the one that cuts deepest. That film opened to $82 million domestic in its first weekend, an extraordinary number for a three-hour R-rated film about nuclear physics with no franchise attachment. It ran for months. It crossed $952 million worldwide. The reason it worked was that the audience for it was genuinely curious about the story, the director, and the historical subject matter. Nothing about the pre-release coverage made people feel the film was being made for a different audience than the one that wanted to see it.

The Odyssey has spent its pre-release period generating a different feeling. The cast selection, the press quotes from the lead actresses, the Greeks’ open letter, the tracking drop, together they are communicating to the mainstream audience that this film’s creative priorities are not oriented toward people who love Homer, love mythology, or love the idea of a $250 million Nolan epic about Odysseus trying to get home. The audience that would have made this film Oppenheimer is being given reasons not to show up.

Seven weeks remain before opening day. The tracking can recover. Reviews can reset the conversation. The film’s actual quality will matter once people see it. None of that changes what the numbers are saying right now.

Does the Quorum tracking drop change your plans for The Odyssey? Let us know in the comments.

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: Amazon Is Spending $340 Million on Rings of Power Season 4 Nobody Asked For

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed this week that The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 4 is moving into pre-production this fall, with cameras expected to roll in early 2027. Season 3 premieres November 11, 2026 on Prime Video. The formal Season 4 greenlight has not been issued, but the production timeline is underway regardless. Amazon is building a fourth season of a show whose second season lost 60% of its first season’s audience.

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Amazon paid $250 million for the initial rights deal with the Tolkien estate, HarperCollins, and New Line Cinema in 2018. Season 1 alone cost north of $465 million to produce, at roughly $58 million per episode, making it the most expensive television series ever made. The total investment across rights, production, and marketing for the full run is estimated to reach approximately $1 billion.

Production costs dropped significantly after Season 1 when the show relocated from New Zealand to the United Kingdom, capturing British tax incentives. Season 2 and Season 3 budgets have not been officially disclosed, but industry estimates place them at roughly $100 million and $80 million respectively. Season 4 is currently tracking toward an estimated $340 million total investment across all seasons at current projections, with Season 5 still to follow.

The audience for this investment is in freefall. A Luminate year-end report published in January 2025 found that Season 2 saw a 60% drop in total minutes watched compared to Season 1. Amazon disputed the framing while confirming the headline numbers. Third-party data from Samba TV showed only about half as many US households watched the Season 2 premiere as watched the Season 1 opener over their first three days. An independent analysis of Nielsen data estimated approximately four million US viewers for Season 2’s debut week, compared to roughly ten million for Season 1’s premiere. Season 1 itself had already lost the audience partway through its run: only 37% of US viewers who started the show finished the season.

Amazon head Jennifer Salke touted 55 million global viewers for Season 2 in the month after launch. The number is rendered meaningless by the company’s refusal to define what constitutes a view. Amazon does not divide total viewing time by running time, meaning their figure is not comparable to any other platform’s reported viewership.

Season 3 introduces a significant creative pivot. The showrunners confirmed a major time skip between Season 2 and Season 3, with co-showrunner J.D. Payne describing Seasons 1 and 2 as “almost one roaring train” and expressing the aspiration for “big gaps in time later.” The time skip arrives after two seasons of compressed, non-canonical storytelling that collapsed Tolkien’s Second Age timeline from thousands of years into what felt like a single decade. The pivot suggests the showrunners recognize the pacing failed. It does not address the foundational problem, which is that the show invented characters, relationships, and plot lines with no basis in Tolkien’s actual writing.

Tolkien spent decades building the mythology of the Second Age in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the appendices to The Return of the King. Amazon purchased the rights to adapt material from those appendices, not The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales, which are owned separately. The showrunners built a five-season arc using Tolkien’s names and locations while inventing the connective tissue from scratch. Galadriel became a warrior protagonist hunting Sauron. Sauron spent a season disguised as a human character named Halbrand. The Harfoots were threaded through the central narrative for audience relatability. Tolkien fans recognized what was happening from the first episode.

The reason Amazon cannot simply cut its losses comes down to the kill fee. Amazon’s deal with the Tolkien estate includes a $20 million per-season penalty for any unproduced season of the originally committed five-season run. Canceling now, with two seasons remaining, costs $40 million before a single frame is shot. According to The Ankler, Jeff Bezos has maintained personal backing for the series beyond standard business metrics, with a source describing the show as being “under Bezos’ magical halo” and “protected for its run.” Amazon TV head Peter Friedlander reportedly visited the production to reassure the creative team they would be allowed to finish the story.

The math on cutting the cord is straightforward: $40 million in kill fees versus two more seasons of production at an estimated $80-100 million each, plus marketing and distribution costs, serving an audience that has halved twice in two seasons. The financially rational decision is to pay the $40 million, close the production, and redeploy that budget toward content that can actually grow an audience. Amazon is not making the financially rational decision because Bezos wants the show to exist.

The audience has been consistent on this show since 2022. The casting of Sophia Nomvete as Disa, a dwarf princess presented with no beard despite Tolkien’s explicit description of dwarf women, was a statement of intent. Arondir, an invented Black elf with no basis in Tolkien’s lore, was another. The collapse of the Second Age timeline to produce a watchable prestige drama was a third. None of it was what Tolkien wrote. All of it was framed in press coverage as an improvement.

Season 3 premieres November 11. Pre-production on Season 4 begins this fall. Season 5 follows. Amazon will spend what it costs to get to the end of the commitment, and Tolkien’s estate will collect its fees regardless of whether anyone watches.

The fans who wanted a faithful adaptation of The Silmarillion are still waiting. They will be waiting past Season 5.

What would it take for you to watch Rings of Power Season 3? Let us know in the comments.

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Epic Fantasy hasn’t been this hard-hitting since Tolkien. In a world where humanity is akin to a Roman legion, a great darkness arises. Read A Throne Of Bones today.

NEXT: Reclaiming The Shire Part 9: The Tolkien Estate and the Amazon Problem