Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie reboot has already been covered here for what it changed. What’s worth a second look is how showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine talks about those changes, because she isn’t playing defense. Across three separate interviews in the past week, with TheWrap, Variety, and ComingSoon, she’s made the case that turning Little House “woke” wasn’t an accident she’s explaining away. It was the plan.

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Start with the word itself. Megyn Kelly warned Netflix in January that if the show got “woke-ified,” she’d “make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.” Sonnenshine’s answer wasn’t to distance herself from the label. It was to reclaim it. “The standard definition of ‘woke,’ as it had been for many years, was to be aware of social justice and inequality, I think that is a good thing,” she told TheWrap. “Any show that I would ever do would have those feelings, because I believe that those are important human qualities that we should all aspire to.” That’s not a showrunner insisting the criticism is unfounded. That’s a showrunner confirming the criticism is correct and telling you she considers it a compliment.

She went further with Variety, framing the entire backlash as something beneath her to take seriously. “I’m not even sure what ‘woke’ means to people anymore, to be honest,” she said, adding that if it just means caring about injustice and prejudice, she doesn’t understand why anyone would be upset by it. Per Variety’s reporting, she’s characterized the objections as not really political at all, but rooted in people being scared their childhood is changing into something they don’t recognize. She’s repeated some version of “people are worried for no reason” more than once, and told the outlet she’s noticed conservative viewers tend to enjoy the Native American storylines once they actually sit down and watch, a line that treats her own audience’s objections as something they’ll grow out of once she’s had a chance to correct them.

The clearest admission came back in TheWrap, and the word choice itself is worth sitting with. Asked about reworking material from Wilder’s books, Sonnenshine didn’t call it modernization or expansion. She called it correction, using a specific word that shows up constantly in these conversations for a reason: “problematic” isn’t a neutral description, it’s activist shorthand for “content that needs to be flagged, contextualized, or removed before an audience can be trusted with it.” “It’s 2026, it’s time to reckon with some of the things that are in the books that have been problematic for people,” Sonnenshine said. “I don’t want people to throw away these books... They’re amazing books. It’s OK to reckon with them a little bit and also tell a really good story about people being able to change... changing your mind is a good thing.” She’s not the only one on the production reaching for that exact word. Producer Joy Gorman Wettels told Vulture separately that the show’s entire intent was “to face the problematic nature of the historical text head-on,” which means this isn’t Sonnenshine improvising a defense in one interview. It’s the show’s actual internal talking point, repeated by two different people, about a set of childhood novels most of America grew up reading without anyone flagging them for reeducation.

She extended that same logic to the American frontier as a concept. Sonnenshine told TheWrap she wanted to spotlight the “myth of America” the government used to sell westward expansion, and said the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” individualism at the center of Wilder’s books doesn’t “cut it” for the real dangers of pioneer life, adding she doesn’t think Wilder believed that either, a claim about the author’s own intent that Wilder never made and can’t confirm or deny. Even Caroline Ingalls’ character arc got the same framing. Sonnenshine confirmed Caroline’s initial wariness toward the Osage family is faithful to the books, but says the show exists specifically to let her “change,” turning a supporting character’s private growth into the show’s explicit thesis statement.

None of this is a showrunner caught off guard by a culture war she didn’t ask for. It’s a showrunner who picked the fight in her own words, called her critics confused about a term she’s confident she understands better than they do, and told two separate outlets in the same week that the books she loved as a child needed her generation’s correction before they were fit to air. Fans spent January bracing for a show that might quietly lean left. What they got instead is a showrunner who’s spent July explaining, on the record, exactly why she thinks that was the right call.

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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: Netflix’s Little House On The Prairie Premiere Plays It Safer Than Advertised, But Slower Too

The Odyssey opens July 17, and with three days left before release, its two most talked-about supporting cast members have doubled down instead of dialing back.

Elliot Page, a woman who pretends to be a man, escalated first. In a June 24 Democracy Now interview that resurfaced this week as Breitbart reported on it July 14, Page went beyond defending his casting and argued against the concept of binary gender itself. “In terms of looking at nature as if it’s some sort of cis hetero patriarchal structure is absurd, and that this, you know, gender binary that we’ve created is nothing but a quaint little myth,” Page said. She went further, telling the same interview that traditional teachings about “men being superior, women being inferior... it being this heterosexual existence is just completely false,” and that this view has been “suppressed” from wider acceptance. Page plays Sinon, a Greek soldier, and also narrates the film.

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Lupita Nyong’o kept pace on a different track. In a new interview published July 15, an interviewer told her “the women run this,” and Nyong’o agreed with a simple “Yeah,” before adding that Nolan “chooses to linger with them and tells the story also from their perspective,” giving audiences “a whole new appreciation” of the epic. It’s at least the third time she’s made a version of this argument in the weeks before release. She previously said Homer spent “very little time” on women’s perspectives and joked about wanting to confront the poet directly and ask, “Remember us?” Geeks + Gamers noted the obvious rebuttal: Penelope anchors the entire emotional structure of the poem, Athena drives the plot from the first page to the last, and Circe and Calypso each reroute Odysseus’ entire journey. Women aren’t absent from Homer’s Odyssey. They’re driving it.

What makes both campaigns strange is that neither actor is playing a role built for this kind of spotlight. Nyong’o described her own parts in the film, plural, as “small in terms of how much screen time I have,” telling Collider, “They’re small but mighty.” Page’s role as Sinon is similarly minor, enough that most of the pre-release confusion over her casting came from a single short clip in the trailer rather than any substantial role reveal. Two performers with limited screen time have become the two most quoted voices of the entire press tour, while actors in the film’s largest roles, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, have stayed almost entirely out of the ideological conversation.

That imbalance is the real story here. A three-hour, IMAX-format retelling of one of the oldest stories in Western literature is entering theaters with its cultural conversation dominated not by its leads or its director’s filmmaking, but by two supporting actors relitigating gender theory and feminist reinterpretation days before anyone outside a premiere audience has seen the finished film. Nolan has called the surrounding backlash “irrelevant” and says viewers can’t judge a film they haven’t seen. Fair enough. But if the film’s own supporting cast keeps making the case that gender is a myth and Homer shortchanged women before a single ticket sells, audiences aren’t being given much choice about what conversation they’re walking into.

Why are the actors with the least screen time doing the most to define what this movie is supposed to be about?

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: Moana Got Cultural Consultants, Yet The Odyssey Got Mocked For Fans Wanting Greek Actors

Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie premiered July 9 with an eight-episode first season already renewed for a second, and the opening episode spends its hour on the Ingalls family’s wagon journey from Wisconsin to Kansas. This review covers episode one only. A lot of the ideological content that critics have flagged in advance coverage of the series simply isn’t here yet.

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Showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine, previously a writer and executive producer on Eric Kripke’s The Boys, opens with a detail the original 1974 NBC series never touched: the Ingalls family didn’t just decide to move west, they burned bridges with friends and family back in Wisconsin badly enough that going back isn’t an option. That’s new. The old version framed the move as opportunity. This one frames it as a family with nowhere else to go.

The journey itself carries the episode’s best material. A river crossing turns into the hour’s central set piece, the wagon gets stuck, and there’s a real threat of drowning as the family fights the current. Genre-savvy viewers will clock the Oregon Trail echoes immediately. In the middle of the chaos, the family dog jumps out of the wagon and disappears downriver, a beat that exists purely to make the audience worry about a family pet in danger, a trope so common in prestige TV at this point that it barely needs the tension it’s reaching for.

Once the family reaches Kansas, the episode settles into its real conflict: the promised land isn’t one. Money is tight, the town thinks the Ingalls were foolish to arrive without family or friends already established to help them build, wolves are a real threat, and a Kansas winter can kill people who aren’t ready for it. Charles Ingalls spends the back half of the episode searching for someone to help him raise a cabin before the cold sets in. He finds a man who lost his own daughter, and the conversation goes badly, the man doesn’t want to be reminded of his loss and the two end up in a fight. He comes back at the end to apologize, offers to help build the cabin, and brings the family dog back with him. That’s the whole arc: hope restored through another person’s willingness to show up.

The show reaches for faith as a companion theme without fully committing to it. There’s a brief shot of Laura appearing to pray as wolves close in, and word is the series leans further into faith elements as it continues. Given how much weight the episode puts on hope as the explicit moral, faith and prayer would have made a more grounded anchor for that theme than they currently do.

The wolves themselves are a problem. The animal CGI is bad enough to pull the viewer out of what is otherwise a fairly grounded, realistic frontier setting, and the show leans on those effects at exactly the moments it’s trying hardest to build tension. Combined with long stretches of slow, melodramatic back-and-forth about whether the family even wants to be in Kansas, the episode has real pacing problems. Caroline’s pregnancy announcement, paired with the reveal that she’s lost previous pregnancies, reads like a modern prestige-drama device grafted onto a story that didn’t need it to generate stakes.

The episode does lay groundwork for a bigger conflict to come. The cabin sits on land that will put the family in direct conflict with the Osage, and the episode gestures at that tension without saying much about it directly. Reports on the season suggest that storyline, along with the feminist themes, the marriage friction, and an emasculated father figure that advance coverage has flagged, escalates significantly as the season progresses. None of it is prominent in episode one. Neither is the “white settlers as villains” framing some critics expected going in.

For a single episode judged on its own, this lands as a 5 out of 10. The dog-in-peril trope and the modern-melodrama pregnancy reveal feel imported from a different kind of show, the CGI wolves undercut the tension they’re supposed to build, and the pacing drags through most of the middle. The apology and cabin-building setup at the end at least gives the season somewhere to go.

Given that Sonnenshine’s other credit is The Boys, does the restraint in episode one hold, or is this the calm before the show leans into everything its advance press promised?

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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: Little House On The Prairie Returns To Netflix, And The Real Story Isn’t The One Critics Are Selling

Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery hit its biggest legal obstacle yet on July 13, when a coalition of 12 state attorneys general filed suit to block the merger before it closes. California Attorney General Rob Bonta led the filing, joined by Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.

Every one of those 12 states voted Democrat in the last presidential election.

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The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues the merger would let a combined Paramount-Warner Bros. control nearly a third of wide-release theatrical film distribution and nearly a third of basic cable programming. Bonta’s office says the deal would leave three distributors controlling 75 percent of theatrical films nationwide. The states asked Paramount and Warner Bros. to pause the deal voluntarily while the case proceeds. If the companies refuse, the coalition says it will seek a temporary restraining order.

Here’s the part that undercuts the “we’re just enforcing the law” framing: the U.S. Department of Justice, under the Trump administration, already reviewed and cleared this merger. So did multiple foreign regulators. Bonta’s lawsuit isn’t stepping into a regulatory vacuum. It’s trying to override a decision the federal government already made.

Bonta made the political angle explicit himself at a press conference near the Hollywood sign. “Antitrust enforcement is a check on billionaires currying favor with the president so he’ll do their bidding,” he said. He also repeatedly cited the Ellison family’s ties to President Trump, noting that Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address and that his father, Larry Ellison, has donated tens of millions of dollars to pro-Trump groups.

Paramount’s response was blunt. A company spokesperson said the lawsuit “in the most generous light, reflects a fundamentally flawed application of the antitrust laws and is wrong on both the facts and the law.”

This fight has been running since last year. Warner Bros. Discovery originally had a competing, all-cash merger agreement with Netflix, amended in January to sweeten the terms after Paramount’s unsolicited bid put pressure on the board. Paramount ultimately won out. Now Netflix, having lost the bidding war, is reportedly exploring adding live TV channels to shore up its own declining viewership, a retreat toward the linear-cable model streaming was supposed to replace.

The financial stakes for Paramount are steep regardless of how the lawsuit plays out. The company has agreed to pay shareholders a 25-cent-per-share “ticking fee,” roughly $650 million per quarter, if the deal doesn’t close by its self-imposed September 30 deadline. A federal judge granting even a temporary restraining order could push the timeline past that date.

For a publication that covers what happens to DC Comics, HBO, and Warner IP, the outcome of this case determines who is actually setting creative direction at Warner Bros. for the next decade. Twelve Democrat attorneys general are asking a federal court to reverse a merger decision the Trump DOJ already made. If they win, on what legal theory do 12 state officials override a federal antitrust clearance, and what happens to Paramount’s deal with Warner Bros. shareholders if they do?

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: Moana Got Cultural Consultants, Yet The Odyssey Got Mocked For Fans Wanting Greek Actors

Disney’s live-action “Moana” arrived in theaters with a team of Polynesian consultants attached to nearly every department. Dr. Grant Muāgututiʻa led the effort as lead consultant for the Cultural Trust, working alongside choreographer and associate producer Tiana Nonosina Liufau and songwriter Opetaia Foaʻi. The consultants worked to ensure the tradition of respect within the culture was accurately reflected, down to how the film’s heroine walks into a room, addresses her father, and serves her elders. Every department head answered to the Cultural Trust before a scene made it to screen.

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Variety framed the arrangement as a triumph of representation. Countless artisans, consultants, experts, advisors, and department heads worked closely with the Cultural Trust to make sure Māori tribal tattoos, dance, and generations of Polynesian tradition were handled with authenticity. Cast member Owen made the standard explicit: every person on screen needed to be of Polynesian descent, and she credited Dwayne Johnson’s Samoan heritage with opening the door for the rest of the cast.

Compare that standard to Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” a $250 million adaptation of the foundational Greek epic, opening July 17. Not one lead actor in the cast is of Greek or Mediterranean descent. Lupita Nyong’o plays both Helen of Troy and her half sister Clytemnestra. Elliot Page plays the soldier Sinon. Travis Scott, a rapper with two acting credits, plays a bard. Fans have pointed out repeatedly that no actor of Greek or Mediterranean descent was cast in the film at all.

Nolan has an explanation for the Scott casting, at least. He told Time magazine he wanted to pay tribute to the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, comparing that tradition to rap. When Musk and other critics pushed on the broader casting pattern, Nyong’o dismissed the backlash by calling the Odyssey a mythological story and describing the cast as representative of the world. She added that she wasn’t spending her time on a defense because the criticism would exist whether she engaged with it or not.

That is the opposite of how Variety covered “Moana.” There, matching the cast to the culture was the entire point, and getting it wrong would have been treated as a betrayal of the people the story belongs to. Here, matching the cast to the culture gets treated as an outdated demand from people who supposedly don’t understand mythology. Outkick laid out the contradiction directly: Variety ran a feature celebrating the “Moana” consultant process the same month one of its own columnists labeled Musk and his followers “trolls” for raising the identical concern about “The Odyssey.”

The historical liberties don’t stop at casting. Critics have flagged Nolan’s armor design, which some viewers compared to Batman’s suit, along with the modern American dialogue, including Tom Holland’s Telemachus calling Odysseus “dad.” Nolan defended the armor by pointing to blackened bronze Mycenaean daggers as precedent, and defended the dialogue as an attempt to give the language emotional rather than intellectual weight for a modern audience.

None of that controversy has slowed ticket sales. Tickets for opening weekend IMAX 70mm screenings went on sale a full year before release, an unprecedented move for a major distributor, and several theaters sold out within twelve hours. Tracking data placed the film ahead of “Oppenheimer” as the first choice among male audiences over 25, with projections putting the opening between eighty and one hundred million dollars.

“Moana” got no such benefit of the doubt, despite doing everything Hollywood claims it wants from a cultural adaptation. The live-action remake opened to $43 million domestically against a $250 million budget, a global weekend haul of just $95 million, and projections that Disney will lose roughly $100 million on the film by the end of its run. The 2016 animated original opened bigger. “Moana 2” outgrossed the live-action remake’s entire opening weekend three times over in a single Thanksgiving frame two years earlier.

The two films share a budget, a summer release window, and a year of pre-release cultural commentary. What they don’t share is a media standard. One production spent years being praised for cultural fidelity and still flopped at the box office. The other spent a year being mocked in the press for casting decisions its own critics called ahistorical, and it’s tracking toward the biggest opening of Nolan’s career. What does that gap say about how much cultural authenticity actually drives ticket sales, versus how much of it is a story the trade press tells itself?

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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: The Odyssey’s Press Tour Has Become A Political Campaign, And Elliot Page Just Escalated It

Disney’s live-action “Moana” opened to $43 million domestically and $95 million worldwide this past weekend, a number that barely clears the $42.2 million domestic and $87.3 million global debut of last year’s “Snow White” bomb. Against a reported $250 million production budget before marketing, the film is now projected to lose Disney roughly $100 million by the end of its theatrical run. The original 2016 animated “Moana” opened bigger. “Moana 2” outgrossed this entire opening weekend in a single day of its Thanksgiving debut two years ago.

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“Moana” did not fail in isolation. It capped a summer where nearly every big-budget franchise title aimed at nostalgia or brand recognition collapsed at the box office.

Warner Bros.’ “Supergirl” opened June 26 to $37.1 million domestically and $62 to $68 million worldwide, well under its own $55 million tracking projection. Against a production budget reported between $170 and $186 million, plus a $120 million marketing spend, the film needed roughly $300 million in theatrical revenue just to break even. It never got close. The second weekend brought a 74 to 77 percent drop to under $9 million domestic, one of the steepest falloffs in superhero movie history, leaving the DC Universe’s second theatrical entry stalled around $100 to $107 million worldwide and projected losses between $85 million and $125 million.

Amazon MGM’s “Masters of the Universe” opened June 5 to $29.3 million domestic and $54 million worldwide on a budget reported between $170 and $200 million. The film needed three full weekends just to crawl past the $100 million global mark, a fraction of what a movie at that budget requires to turn a profit.

Disney’s own “The Mandalorian and Grogu” fared little better over Memorial Day weekend, opening to $82 million domestic on a $165 million budget. The film cleared its production cost in the opening frame, then fell 70 to 72 percent in its second weekend to roughly $24 million, a collapse steep enough that it got outgrossed domestically by two microbudget horror films directed by YouTubers within weeks of its release.

None of this is new. Disney’s live-action “Snow White” bombed the same way in spring 2025, opening to $42.2 million domestic and finishing at just $205.6 million worldwide against its own $250 million budget. Even “The Little Mermaid” in 2023, often cited as a modest success with a $569.6 million global total, actually lost Disney money once the true production cost, revealed in later filings to have ballooned past $355 million before marketing, got factored in. The pattern spans three straight years of nostalgia remakes and legacy franchise sequels landing short of their budgets, regardless of studio.

The films that did work this summer share nothing with “Moana,” “Supergirl,” or “Masters of the Universe” except a release calendar. “Obsession,” a $750,000 horror film from 26-year-old YouTuber and TikTok creator Curry Barker, opened to $26.4 million and has since crossed $206 million worldwide. “Backrooms,” a $10 million film from 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, opened to $81.4 million, nearly matching “The Mandalorian and Grogu’s” opening weekend on a budget less than one-sixteenth the size, and has since topped $168 million. Universal and Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters” held steady through its run on an $85 million budget, crossing $280 million worldwide without the benefit of a single recognizable movie star.

The gap is not about audiences rejecting big spectacle. It is about audiences rejecting the same handful of studios recycling the same IP with the same visual template and calling it a release slate. Two first-time YouTube directors made films for less combined than the marketing budget alone on “Supergirl,” and both films outearned or nearly matched films that cost twenty to thirty times as much.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opens July 17 into this exact environment, carrying a $250 million budget, a cast already at war with critics over its treatment of Homer’s source material, and IMAX exclusivity that has driven a year of advance ticket sales. Universal is betting that the pre-sale numbers and Nolan’s box office track record insulate the film from the pattern above. Given what happened to Moana, Supergirl, and Masters of the Universe this summer, is a $250 million budget and a built-in fanbase enough to guarantee “The Odyssey” avoids the same fate, or has that formula already stopped working?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Little House On The Prairie Returns To Netflix, And The Real Story Isn’t The One Critics Are Selling

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens July 17, and its cast has spent the weeks before release turning promotional interviews into a sustained defense of the film’s politics rather than its story.

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Elliot Page, a woman pretending to be a man, plays the Greek soldier Sinon in the film, just gave the clearest example. In a June 24 interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, discussing his broader work and public role rather than the film specifically, Page addressed critics of transgender identity directly. “I hope for anyone who’s sort of, you know, struggling in this time, and the headlines, and just to know, like, that you’re, you know, not alone, and loved and celebrated by so many, and try and block out the noise from, you know, absolute vile losers, who must just be so profoundly uncomfortable with themselves, they can’t handle that someone could get to a place that, I think, you know, that, you know, trans people do get to, which is a level of self-acceptance and understanding that I think is really beautiful and profound.” Page has spent the weeks before The Odyssey’s release describing her transition in similar terms across multiple platforms, telling Out magazine there is “absolutely nothing wrong with you” for anyone struggling with their identity. The interview predates the film’s premiere by three weeks, but outlets covering The Odyssey’s press cycle have folded it into the same conversation, since Page’s presence in the cast is itself one of the film’s most-discussed casting choices.

Nolan has been just as direct about his own intentions, if less combative in tone. Speaking to Channel 4 News, he explained why the film swaps Homer’s language for contemporary English. “When you look at the ancient world, people tend to view the ancient world in weird ways and there’s a lot of cultural prejudice, elevating it just because it’s old,” Nolan said. “When you go to the poem, what you find is something that’s really earthy, grounded and accessible. So, for me, in building the world of the film, what I talk to all the actors about is, I want to center it on that and make it feel very fresh for modern audiences and do away with some of those assumptions.” Nolan has confirmed the film draws on Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey, a version explicitly marketed as using contemporary language to strip away what its publisher calls “archaic, patriarchal interpretations” of the original text. Nolan calling the backlash “irrelevant” in a separate Telegraph interview did not stop him from building the film’s entire linguistic approach around a translation chosen specifically for its break from the poem’s traditional reading.

Lupita Nyong’o, who plays both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, rounded out the pattern days before the London premiere. Asked on the YouTube channel Jake’s Takes what she would say to Homer if she could watch the film beside him, Nyong’o answered: “So, Homer, how do you feel about the screen time given to these women, considering how little you spent with them?” She expanded on the same point to DC Film Girl, saying Nolan’s film “takes time to really consider things from the female perspective” in contrast to a story she says is “told from a very masculine side of things.” Nyong’o has separately said she “went in quite blind” on the material, telling Elle in May that she “had no idea what the Odyssey was” before joining the production and used the film as a “crash course” in the mythology.

When it comes to three interviews, it becomes a pattern with one consistent message: the frontier being defended isn’t Homer’s text. It’s the idea that the text needed correcting before a modern audience could be trusted with it. Nolan frames the ancient world as a place full of “cultural prejudice” his film exists to strip away. Nyong’o frames Homer himself as a source that shortchanged its women and needs her generation to answer for it. Page frames anyone questioning the cultural moment around gender identity as too “uncomfortable with themselves” to be worth engaging.

None of these figures are simply doing press for a movie. They’re each making the same argument in different registers, that the original material and the audience raised on it got something wrong, and that this adaptation exists to fix it.

This is an uncanny correlation to how Supergirl just conducted its press tour, leaning heavily into feminism and identity politics, even though it wasn’t as heavily present in the film as this one appears to be. Supergirl bombed, but we’ve yet to see the impact on The Odyssey.

Homer’s epic has survived nearly three thousand years without needing that kind of defense. The question worth asking as the film opens is whether audiences are being sold Homer’s story, or a corrective to it.

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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: Little House On The Prairie Returns To Netflix, And The Real Story Isn’t The One Critics Are Selling

Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie reboot isn’t just adding characters absent from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. It’s building an entire moral framework around the idea that the frontier’s traditional values were the actual problem, and showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has said as much herself, repeatedly, on the record.

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Start with what the critics got wrong, because it matters for what comes next. Slate’s Rebecca Onion wrote that Netflix “did indeed woke-ify” the show, citing a Black doctor and storekeeper among the Ingalls family’s new friends as evidence. Comic writer G. Willow Wilson called that specific claim out directly. “Somebody (Rebecca Onion) didn’t read the books,” Wilson wrote. “If they read the books, they would know the Black doctor is in the books. He nurses the Ingalls family through malaria. He’s based on a real Black doctor who lived near the Ingalls family in Independence, KS.” Wilson is right. Doctor George Tann appears in Wilder’s original 1935 novel, where a six-year-old Laura describes waking from malaria to “a black hand” holding a cup to her mouth. Tann was a real practitioner of eclectic medicine who lived about a mile from the Ingalls’ cabin, and the 1974 NBC series told a version of his story too, in a 1981 episode where a Black doctor named Caleb LeDoux faces prejudice in Walnut Grove. Complaining about a Black doctor character in Little House means complaining about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s own book.

The faith content deserves the same fairness. Melbourne Catholic’s review, drawing on an OSV News interview, highlights something most coverage skipped past: the show leans into the Ingalls family’s Christian faith, their hymns, their church-building, and ties the Osage family’s beliefs to real Jesuit missionary history through Father John Schoenmakers, who ran an actual mission school for the Osage in the 1800s. Sonnenshine calls the books “very important” to her personally and says she read them roughly 100 times growing up.

But a close side-by-side of the book and the show, however, shows the reframing goes well beyond fair historical corrections. The site counts ten major characters invented for the series with no basis in Wilder’s novel at all: Good Eagle, White Sun, William Mitchell, Emily Henderson, Caleb, Lacey, Jemma James, Eli James, Russell Kind, and Governor Joe. That’s nearly the entire supporting cast surrounding the Ingalls family, built from nothing to carry the show’s new priorities.

Caroline Ingalls gets the clearest feminist rewrite. In the book, she’s presented through young Laura’s eyes as a steady, dependable mother holding the family together. The series gives her an entirely new arc: she challenges the town’s Women’s Society, searches for paid work outside the home, clashes openly with Charles over major decisions, and keeps secrets from him. As The Viewer’s Perspective puts it, these additions make the Ingalls “feel more like a modern television couple.” That’s not a small tonal shift. It’s a direct rewrite of the marriage at the emotional center of the book, built to model a companionate, adversarial-then-resolved 2026 partnership rather than the quieter, unified frontier marriage Wilder actually wrote. It lines up exactly with what Sonnenshine told Deadline about wanting to show Caroline and a new character named White Sun as “women who are in interesting marriages of equality,” and with her comment at Bentonville that the show deliberately avoids “tropes of sort of masculinity.”

The Osage storyline gets a similar treatment, and here the show actually erases something sharper than what it adds. In Wilder’s novel, the land legally remains Osage territory throughout the entire book. The Ingalls family leaves because government soldiers are coming to remove settlers who never had a legal claim to be there in the first place, a plain admission, in a children’s book from 1935, that Charles Ingalls was squatting on land that wasn’t his. The series replaces that ending with an invented treaty-negotiation storyline, complete with a new Osage leader named Governor Joe, and folds the family’s departure into a financial crisis over debt and a failed land sale that doesn’t exist in the book. The government’s illegal removal becomes a negotiated, mutual, economically-softened parting. The show adds Osage characters and dialogue the book never gave them, but it also quietly removes the one detail in Wilder’s own text that most starkly indicts the settlers’ legal position.

The show pairs all of this with a brand-new character named Lacey, a French, trouser-wearing widowed saloon owner who multiple critics note “practices free love,” invented specifically to model sexual independence to a nine-year-old Laura, and a new antagonist family, the Jameses, whose entire identity, per Slate, is “hierarchy, respectability, a church, a school.” The show’s villains are defined by the church they attend and the order they want to build; the family the audience is meant to root for keeps its distance from both.

Even critics sympathetic to the reboot’s politics can’t help but notice the tension. RogerEbert.com calls the show “aggressively wholesome” while noting it “attempts to modernize the source material,” landing on a verdict that it feels “designed in a lab to appeal to the broadest possible swath of viewers.” TheWrap states outright that the series is “injecting some deciding modern sensibilities” into a story that didn’t originally carry them.

Sonnenshine hasn’t denied any of this so much as reframed the question, telling Variety she isn’t sure “woke” means anything anymore. But her own words across three separate interviews, plus a scene-by-scene accounting of what got added and what got quietly dropped, point the same direction: this is a writer who read Little House on the Prairie and decided the frontier family’s actual marriage, its actual legal reckoning with the Osage, and its actual traditional order needed rewriting for a 2026 audience, credit for the parts she got right included.

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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: Jonathan Majors’ New Film Looks Like Exactly What the Conservative Entertainment Space Needs

Patrick Stewart contractually blocked a Next Generation reunion when he first signed on for Star Trek: Picard, and now, in a new interview with TV Insider marking Star Trek’s 60th anniversary, he says he’s glad the writers talked him out of it.

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Stewart wrote in his 2023 memoir, Making It So, that reuniting the TNG cast was never part of his plan for the character. “For Season Three, our last, Terry Matalas, by then Picard’s showrunner, told me that the studio wanted a full ‘Next Generation’ reunion,” Stewart wrote. “Ugh, just what I had firmly said I didn’t want. But that had been three years ago. Now I was less resistant, having enjoyed working with Jonathan, Brent, Marina, John, and Whoopi. As an executive producer, I had a say in how we might go about achieving such a reunion. I told Terry, ‘I like the idea, provided that we don’t bring them all back at once.’”

He’d made the no-reunion stipulation a condition of his return in the first place, telling Variety back in 2022 that the idea felt like it “would be paying too much attention to the fan appreciations of what Next Generation had meant to them” rather than moving the character forward. The first two seasons of Picard largely honored that instinct, keeping Stewart’s Jean-Luc surrounded by a new cast instead of his old crew, and both seasons underperformed with critics and fans alike.

By the time Picard reached its third and final season, Stewart had changed his mind. “I’m so glad I listened to the writers and producers of Picard,” he told TV Insider. “Having the whole cast involved in that final season made for an absolutely joyous and satisfying experience. They’re all such dear friends, but also exceptionally talented artists.”

Stewart also addressed the wider anniversary moment, calling the overlap of Star Trek’s 60th, The Next Generation’s 40th, and Picard’s sixth “wildly surreal” and saying he still remembers his first day driving onto the Paramount lot “like it was yesterday.” Asked about retirement rumors, Stewart, who turns 86 this month, said he continues to receive interesting offers and can’t imagine officially retiring.

The reunion he resisted turned out to define his Star Trek legacy. Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, and LeVar Burton have all since described how visibly it revived Stewart on set, with Burton recalling that the exhausted actor was “glad to have us with him” once the old cast reassembled on a recreation of the Enterprise-D bridge. Stewart called Jean-Luc “the most significant role of my career” and said he’ll be “forever grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of what is now such a historic franchise.”

None of that nostalgia changes what’s happening around him at the studio level. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was canceled after two seasons. Discovery, Prodigy, and Lower Decks have all ended. Strange New Worlds is heading into an abbreviated final season. Star Trek: Legacy, the reunion series fans have pushed for since Picard ended in 2023, remains a non-starter, and Star Trek: Year One died when Paramount struck the Enterprise sets it would have used.

Behind all of it is Alex Kurtzman, whose deal with Secret Hideout has controlled Star Trek television since 2017 and is set to expire at the end of 2026. Kurtzman told TrekMovie he’s had conversations with Paramount Skydance about the franchise’s future and received “nothing but support,” but admitted he’s “truly at the beginning of the conversation” and has “nothing to report yet.” He pointed to the scale of the merger as the holdup, telling TrekMovie there’s “an unbelievable amount of organizational things to decide” now that Skydance is also absorbing Warner Bros. Discovery.

Fans are exhausted from the treatment of characters in both Picard’s early seasons and Starfleet Academy, with Strange New Worlds looking to be not that much better. They’re ready for this whole era to be over, and Paramount on Trek’s 60th anniversary seems to agree that it’s time to put all of what Kurtzman has done to rest.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Starfleet Academy’s Gay Klingon Pushed for More Gay Content in Season 2

A new rumor is casting doubt on Amazon’s decision to cancel Stargate, the streamer’s planned revival of the science fiction franchise that was scrapped in June after a 20-week writers room, a full series order, and active pre-production in the UK. The claim comes from a podcast called Tachyon Pulse, which Stargate fans have followed closely since the cancellation was announced.

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How It Happened

Amazon MGM acquired the Stargate franchise when it purchased MGM in 2022. For years, fans waited while the studio figured out what to do with it. Then, in November 2025, the announcement came: a new Stargate series, written and executive produced by Martin Gero, a veteran of Stargate: Atlantis, with franchise legends Brad Wright and Joseph Mallozzi on board as consulting producers. A writers room formed. Pre-production began in the UK. After fifteen years of silence since Stargate Universe ended, it was finally happening.

Then, in June 2026, Amazon pulled the plug.

The reported reason, per Variety, was that Amazon executives believed Gero’s vision would not have “broad appeal beyond the franchise’s already dedicated fanbase.” Mallozzi publicly disputed the characterization, saying the show had been designed as an accessible entry point for new viewers while respecting canon. The Save Stargate petition, started by The Popcast Brothers on Change.org, put it plainly:

“Canceling a Stargate show because it might ‘only’ appeal to the dedicated Stargate fanbase is absurd. That isn’t a problem, it’s a foundation... The idea that a franchise revival must immediately appeal to everyone on Earth before it is allowed to exist is exactly how studios end up making bland, flavorless content that appeals passionately to no one.”

What the Fandom Did Next

The Stargate community did not go quietly.

The Change.org petition targeting Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Prime Video head Mike Hopkins, and Amazon MGM Television chief Peter Friedlander has crossed 113,000 verified signatures and is still climbing. CBR covered the petition as it surged past 100,000. A dedicated site, savestargate.com, went live to centralize the campaign. On social media, coordinated #SaveStargate tweet storms hit X hard enough that genre media took notice, with fans from the SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe communities organizing globally.

Michael Shanks, Daniel Jackson himself, shared the campaign on Facebook. The people who made the show want it back too.

SG-1 ran ten seasons. Atlantis ran five. Universe ran two. The franchise spawned films, spinoffs, conventions, novels, games. Its fanbase never left. It just ran out of new material.

The Rumor

Into this walks Tachyon Pulse. The host was careful about the nature of what he was reporting. “I am underlining [that this is a] rumor, putting it in big flashing lights, in neon, at the top of a mountain where it can be seen from 100 miles,” he said, “because if true, it’s incredibly exciting.”

The information comes from a source at one of the larger talent agencies in California. That source had a client who was approached about a new project, a representative pitching an opportunity while knowing Stargate had been canceled. The response wasn’t what they expected.

As Tachyon Pulse described it: “The person said, ‘Oh, thank you so much. That’s lovely of you to think of me, but actually, I’m busy with Stargate.’”

That’s the data point. It’s a loaded one.

Tachyon Pulse’s source pushed on it immediately. If the show is canceled, the talent’s contract would normally be bought out, freeing them to at least consider what comes next, even if they couldn’t commit. The fact that this person wasn’t even willing to have the conversation suggested something else going on. “It doesn’t make any sense that they were not even willing to talk about it,” the source told Tachyon Pulse.

The likely explanations are narrow. Either Amazon is keeping certain talent on retainer while internal conversations continue, or, as the host put it, “we’ve won.”

Tachyon Pulse’s source, who previously told him a Martin Gero Stargate announcement was coming before Christmas last year (a tip that proved accurate), leaned toward optimism. “His instinct is that Stargate is going to get un-canceled. He suspects the person they’ve been speaking to is not talking about an ex-project because they know something they’re not sharing.”

Why This Isn’t Impossible

Amazon’s public position is that it remains interested in developing Stargate in some form, just not Gero’s version. But the fan campaign didn’t fade after the initial news cycle. It kept generating coverage for weeks, and that may be changing the calculus inside the studio.

Tachyon Pulse raised the possibility that MGM Plus had interest in acquiring the project before the cancellation was announced. Netflix reportedly inquired about taking on Stargate, only for Amazon to decline the conversation. Amazon saying no to outside interest may itself suggest internal ambivalence rather than a clean decision.

“All we really needed to do was give Amazon bosses an excuse to actually go, ‘We’ve listened to you. We love the fans,’” the host said. “And if we gave them that opportunity to turn and change their minds because of the fan reaction and then allowed them to spin it so that they made out it was just because of the customers that they adore, they could change their minds.”

The one ticking clock, he noted, is talent. Once Martin Gero moves on to another project, once the VFX houses, the writers, the cast attached start filling their schedules elsewhere, that window closes. The fact that at least one attached talent still considers themselves committed to Stargate, rather than moving on, is the signal worth watching.

Where Things Stand

Nothing is confirmed. The host was disciplined about that throughout. “I’m so far into the country of rumor that I can’t see the border,” he said. “If I took a missile and shot it towards the country of fact, I would get nowhere bloody near it.”

But the numbers back up the pressure campaign: 113,000 signatures, sustained coverage from genre outlets, and cast members lending their own platforms to the cause. And now there’s a data point from inside the industry suggesting Amazon hasn’t fully closed the door.

Sign the petition at change.org/p/save-stargate-with-martin-gero and follow the campaign at savestargate.com.

If Amazon reverses course here, does it set a precedent other canceled franchises can point to, or is Stargate simply a special case with a uniquely loud fanbase?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Marvel Returns To Hall H While DC Studios Has Nothing To Show

Marvel Studios is coming back to Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con after skipping the room entirely last year, and the studio’s timing makes DC’s silence look worse by the day. Marvel confirmed a Saturday, July 25 presentation built around Avengers: Doomsday, five months ahead of the film’s December release, with Kevin Feige promising “special guests from across the Marvel Cinematic Universe” and a fresh look at what comes next.

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DC has also released its full Comic-Con lineup. Nowhere on it is a Hall H panel for Clayface or Man of Tomorrow, the two projects James Gunn’s DC Studios currently has in active production. DCComicBooks.com flagged the gap directly: DC Studios “won’t be bringing the DCU to the event, despite highly anticipated titles like Clayface and Man of Tomorrow being on the way.” The SDCC Unofficial Blog’s own panel tracker confirms it. DC’s only Hall H slot goes to Lanterns, an HBO Max television series, not a Gunn-produced film.

Clayface hits theaters October 23. Man of Tomorrow starts production this month. Both would ordinarily be textbook Hall H material: a horror-adjacent Batman spinoff with a built-in genre audience, and a Superman sequel that could use the room to reset momentum after Supergirl. Neither got a slot.

DC Comics still has plenty planned for the con floor. The publisher’s booth leans on Silver Age nostalgia, with a free MAD Magazine #1 facsimile, a Jim Lee panel, and Absolute Universe foil exclusives. Comics can fill a booth. A film division that’s supposedly ramping up a shared universe needs Hall H, and DC Studios chose not to show up.

This isn’t the first time Gunn has kept his distance from a promotional stage this year. He skipped Warner Bros.’ CinemaCon 2026 panel in person, sending a video message instead while Milly Alcock and Jason Momoa worked the room for Supergirl. Gunn’s stated reason was that Man of Tomorrow was days from rolling cameras. Film pundit John Rocha noted at the time that Gunn didn’t thank anyone for Superman’s box office run in that video, nor did he tease anything about the DCU’s future, two things that would have come naturally if he planned to stick around.

The absence lands during a stretch that hasn’t been kind to DC Studios. Supergirl opened to $62.6 million worldwide against a $170 million budget and collapsed 74% in its second weekend, a run some trade reporters have already called the worst box office result of 2026. Peacemaker Season 2 has reportedly slid from HBO Max’s biggest show to a ratings disappointment, and Christopher Cantwell’s attachment to a potential Season 3 is contingent on how Season 1 of Lanterns performs this fall. Gunn’s contract runs through 2027, the same window in which Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery is expected to close.

Marvel spent a year rebuilding goodwill after its own post-Endgame stumble, and it chose Hall H to make that case in person. DC Studios had two films on the calendar and the biggest stage in fandom sitting empty. If the DCU is ramping up the way Gunn and Peter Safran keep insisting, why did they let Marvel take the room without a fight?

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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: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Supernatural Star Matt Cohen Talks His New Film “Exes”

Exes just dropped on Prime Video, your feature directorial debut after years of acting work, a season fifteen Supernatural directing credit, and your award-winning short Mama Bear. Where did the core idea come from, and what made you and Lee Ehlers know this was the one to build a feature around?

Honestly, the entertainment industry's bottom has kind of fallen out for a journeyman actor Director like me. There was no other choice but to make a movie with friends and family and provide jobs for the people who need them. Exes is a fun, minimal location date night movie that says all the things you would never say to your spouse! We just wanted to make some fun entertainment so audiences wouldn’t have to sit through a three-hour feature film or watch another remake, sequel, or prequel. Lee Ehlers and I have been collaborating on projects for about 15 years. We understand each other’s tone of creation, and we like to stay in the fun, action, comedy world! Exes seemed like something that was attainable, and that we could entertain audiences with something fresh.

The “exes forced to work together to survive” premise is fertile ground and reminds me of great films like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, True Lies, and The War of the Roses. What did you want Exes to do that those movies didn’t?

We wanted to say the things that those movies would never say! And we did just that! We allowed the relationship between Brieanna and myself to stem from our convention circuit life together over the last 10 years. We like to talk trash! And that’s what this movie does!

Lee Ehlers has been your collaborator going back to Mama Bear and earlier shorts like Hard Crime and Trigger. What does that long creative partnership give you that you couldn’t get pulling in a different writer for a project of this scale?

Trust, to put it simply. I’ve tried to collaborate with many producers and writers, and it always seems to be that when push comes to shove, I’m the only one working. Lea is an ex-Detroit, Michigan police officer, and I grew up as a blue-collar mechanic's kid in Hollywood, Florida. We’re not afraid to get dirty and get the job done. We’re extremely hard workers, and we recognize that in each other. Not only did I direct and act in this movie, but Lea and I both produced and executive produced it. I personally did craft service myself, Lea and I swept the floors, and wrapped out our production warehouse when the film was complete. There’s no job we won’t do, and I have a partner in crime who’s willing to get his hands dirty; it’s a great feeling.

The cast list reads like a superstar convention guest lineup: Briana Buckmaster, Mark Sheppard, Ruth Connell, Adam Fergus, Felicia Day, plus your wife Mandy Musgrave. And Ricky Whittle from American Gods in there too. How much of Exes is built on the relationships you’ve spent twenty years building in that family? Any stories on how this all came together?

When you’re making an independent feature film, you need the best actors possible to show up and do their best acting as fast as possible! I didn’t have time to get to know any new actors. I needed people who were going to show up, take some bumps and bruises, and keep going when things got tough. Every single person in this film is a friend and/or family. I want to make movies with people who give a shit about each other and truly care. There is no other option but to pick up the phone and go through every phone number I had stored from my 20 years in Hollywood. I asked everybody I knew to help out. People who wanted to make something creative and fun!

Mark Sheppard is famously sharp, has very strong opinions, and is a working-class craftsman type who knows exactly what he wants. What’s it like directing him versus being on a set with him as solely a fellow actor?

Mark Sheppard is one of the most brilliant actors working and has been in just about every damn thing you can imagine! He’s a seasoned professional, a great Director, and even more, one of the best mentors and friends I’ve ever had in my life. We both have stories, and we’ve shared them amongst ourselves. Stories that tie and bind men together forever. I know what he’s been through, and he knows what I’ve been through. That’s the type of friend who shows up and delivers for you. I didn’t bother directing him very much, other than that I wanted him to have an American dialect. Sitting across a table and acting with Mark Sheppard is really a master class in the craft.

I trusted him not to let me screw it up. He told me when I was, and we adjusted and moved forward. He’s more than a brother to me.

You came up with Robert Singer to direct Supernatural 15.15 Gimme Shelter. He's been a guiding hand for that show since season one. What did directing under his eye on Supernatural prepare you for as a feature director, and what didn't translate?

To be honest, Bob Singer is the reason I was able to direct SUPERNATURAL. I have a lot of friends there, and a lot of people were pulling for me, but I sent him my proof of concept film, MAMA BEAR, and he made it all happen for me. Having Bob and his wife on site for the first few days of me directing my first episode of Supernatural was terrifying; they're icons in the business. The way that man ran SUPERNATURAL made it great! Spending 16 days in prep and production on that show taught me a lifetime of lessons about how to show up prepared and get the damn job done! There’s always gonna be problems. It’s a director’s job to overcome them and make sure everybody feels good about it. There was nothing Exes could throw at me that I wasn’t prepared for after shooting and directing SUPERNATURAL.

You spent fifteen years as a working actor in everything from network procedurals to daytime soaps to genre television. Most actors who move into directing say it changes how they watch performances forever. What's the biggest blind spot you discovered you had as an actor that you can now see from the director's side?

That’s a good question. I think just visualizing scenes from a director's eye allows you to dial in your acting performance far better. If you can direct it and imagine how cool it would look with your direction, you can become the actor you need to attain that vision. It’s really a cheat code..

You're not just directing…

You nailed it! It is a massive undertaking. I would’ve never even attempted it had one of my best friends, Richard Speight Junior, not directed an episode of Supernatural, where he played three characters and directed himself. Richard is the reason I became a Director. I watched him go through the Warner Brothers school of directing with iconic teacher Bethany Rooney, who directed my wife and me on our very first TV show. I was inspired to see one of my favorite character actors flip the script and jump behind the camera, and do it seamlessly and with incredible drive, and when it came to Exes, I called Richard Speight. I said I can’t make this movie unless your eyes are on the monitor and you tell me when I can move forward and when I can’t. We had a 15-day shoot, and we lost three days to fires. There is nobody in Hollywood who’s pulling off feature films in the action-comedy genre in under 15 days; if it weren’t for Richard Spade Junior, being one of the best creative producers in the business, Exes would’ve tanked, and it all would’ve fallen apart.

…You've built something a lot of working actors talk about wanting and almost none actually pull off, a parallel directing career that uses the relationships from the acting career as a launching pad. What's the advice you'd give an actor who wants to start moving behind the camera but doesn't know where to start?

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The teaser trailer for Run Hide Fight: Infidels arrived this week on DailyWire+, and it does what a teaser is supposed to do: it makes you want to see the film.

Jonathan Majors plays a Delta Force veteran who finds himself in the middle of a campus siege when radical terrorists seize a liberal college and attempt to impose brutal control over the students inside. An unlikely group of survivors fights back rather than waiting for help. The film is directed by Kyle Rankin, who made the original Run Hide Fight in 2020 — a DailyWire action film following a teenage girl who uses her survival skills to fight back during a school shooting. That film found a genuine audience on the platform. Infidels appears to be swinging considerably larger, with Majors serving as executive producer alongside his starring role.

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The premise is described as an anthology sequel built in the tradition of 1980s and 1990s action films — Red Dawn, Toy Soldiers — where ordinary people, or in this case a veteran with extraordinary skills, refuse to be victims. That framing is exactly the counter-programming the conservative entertainment space has been building toward. Young Washington proved three weeks ago that the audience for this kind of content shows up when the film is made well. Angel Studios has demonstrated it consistently. DailyWire+ has its own track record with Run Hide Fight, The Daily Wire film that punched above its weight with its target audience.

Majors brings a level of dramatic credibility to this kind of project that most action casting does not. Before his departure from Marvel, he was being positioned as one of the franchise’s next central figures. His physical presence and his ability to carry genuine emotional weight in a scene put him in a category above what an action franchise sequel would normally attract. For DailyWire+ this is a significant acquisition. For Majors it is a road back.

Hollywood dropped him fast. The speed and completeness of the cancellation, before any appeals process ran its course, before the full picture emerged, was the industry doing what it does to anyone who becomes a liability. Whatever the full truth of the situation, the mechanism that produced his exit from the MCU was the same mechanism that has been used against conservative creators, Christian figures, and anyone who runs afoul of the progressive consensus that governs entertainment industry employment. Majors is not a conservative — by any available evidence his politics run the other way — but the cancel culture apparatus does not limit itself to ideological enemies. It takes out anyone useful to take out, for whatever reason is available. He is on the receiving end of the same machine that has been used against figures FP has covered consistently.

The film’s production had a turbulent run. Majors and a co-star fell through an unsecured glass window during a stunt that went wrong. The IATSE crew walked out in late March over safety concerns. The production company’s response to the union, “we don’t negotiate with communists,” was a line that became its own story. The teaser suggests they finished the film anyway.

No release date has been announced. DailyWire+ will confirm the premiere date alongside the full trailer. If the finished product delivers on what the teaser promises, it will be one of the more interesting comeback stories in recent Hollywood history.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: The Odyssey Has Elon Musk Calling Tom Holland a “Cuck” And Lupita Nyong’o Lecturing a 3,000-Year-Old Poet

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has wrapped production on its second and final season. Paramount+ confirmed the show will not return after Season 2. Karim Diané, who plays Jay-Den Kraag, the franchise’s first openly gay Klingon, gave an interview at Trek Talks this week that tells you quite a bit about why the show is ending.

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Diané plays a Klingon who is a pacifist, a healer, gay, soft-spoken, and gentle, the opposite of what Klingons are traditionally portrayed as in order to make identity politics commentary. He is, by the actor’s own description in a prior Metro Weekly interview, “Ferdinand the Bull.” He works as a go-go dancer at a Brooklyn club called House of Yes when not on set. The character was designed from the ground up as propaganda for gay representation, and Diané has been open about that throughout the show’s run.

The Trek Talks interview covers the physical demands of playing a Klingon, including the hand-painted contacts that are dangerous to wear past four hours, the muscle suit with a built-in cooling system, and the voice that showrunner Alex Kurtzman called him about two weeks before filming began.

“Alex called, and he’s like… ‘I think we’re gonna drop your voice for this…. We want you to learn how to speak lower.’”

He explains playing the character as a moment of anxiety: “I had anxiety the whole first season, I’m not gonna lie to you, the whole time. Because I have never done this before… Now I can do it. I can swing back and forth pretty easily now, but in season 1, I was still trying to figure it out. So on top of everything else I was going through physically, the voice was just another layer that like… I just gotta trust… It’s above me now. But I’m so happy that they made that change.”

He also talked about the mentorship of Michael Dorn, who played Worf across 174 episodes of The Next Generation, 98 of Deep Space Nine, four feature films, and a guest role in Picard. Dorn met Diané on the Star Trek float at the Rose Bowl Parade.

“He gave me a lot of really good advice about how to deal with prosthetics and how to interact with the fandom and stuff like that. He warned me that there was gonna be people coming for me, that kind of thing. And even back then, he was dealing with it.”

On meeting Dorn in person: “He actually came out on his own time. And it was so cool, because sometimes you meet people and you take a second to get into it. But immediately, he was like, ‘I’m gonna make it for you.’ And we immediately just started talking about the makeup, and he was talking for like an hour about the process. He told me it hasn’t changed much since…. it’s just as hard now as it was back then. But I don’t even hold a candle to him… they had how many episodes a season? For how many seasons?”

As with usual when these people turn a show into propaganda, when it’s met with cirticism, they play the “harassment” card. His statement though fails to address the core problem, which is not that the Trek fanbase is full of fools who hate gay people. The core problem is that Trek fans wanted Star Trek, the specific storytelling tradition, the moral philosophy, the character-driven science fiction, and got a show whose stars were publicly joking about pushing the production to add more gay content between seasons. It treats the audience poorly even in the framing of his commentary.

But it doesn’t stop there, he talks about the show’s trajectory and we see the core problems. After a Season 1 screening, Diané and co-star Kerrice Brooks went to showrunner Noga Landau with a request.

“Sandro and Zoe have a lot of… there’s like a lot of straight sex here, they’re like…Oh my god this is great. Love this, can we have gay things too? We wanted more, and we were kind of joking. We were like — with Noga, like, ‘Let’s be more gay. Like, are you guys homophobic, what’s going on?’ Me and Kerrice were joking with them, but they took me seriously. When I came to work the next day, I remember a producer came to me. He was like, ‘I just want you to know we’re obviously not homophobic.’ ‘As you know, we were totally kidding.’ But, like, while we’re here… let’s do more gay things. And so season 2, there’s gay things, guys.”

The result was not a joke. The producers took it seriously. Season 2 has more gay content, per Diané’s own announcement to the Trek Talks audience. The show that couldn’t find enough viewers for a third season is ending with a second season that leaned further into the identity content the actors pushed for.

Starfleet Academy premiered January 15, 2026, to the lowest debut in Paramount+ history for a Star Trek series. NerdRotic’s livestream of a Spock action figure sitting in an empty chair beat the show’s YouTube premiere peak viewership in under three minutes. Paramount+ made the premiere video private after the embarrassment. The show never recovered its standing with the Trek fanbase, which had spent years watching the Kurtzman era systematically degrade the franchise’s storytelling in favor of progressive identity content. Starfleet Academy was, in many ways, the fullest expression of that project: a Star Trek show whose central premise was a diverse group of young cadets navigating identity and belonging, set so far in the future that no prior character or established lore could anchor it.

When Diané was asked about online hostility, he called Star Trek fans fools, “Whenever a fool approaches you and they’re yelling in your face looking for an argument, and you respond like this, from afar, you can’t tell which is the fool. So I learned that whenever fools are arguing with me, in person or on the internet, to respond with love, because that is my purpose and that’s what I want to spread.”

With him calling fans fools, and Picardo calling fans “trolls,” it’s pretty obvious why the fanbase turned so hostile against this show. Even if it was a better production, which it was not, that kind of entitled attitude would make even the most patient person sour.

The show’s ending was announced before Season 2 airs. When asked what he imagined for Jay-Den had the series continued, Diané said: “What I imagined for the future? Wait and see because it happened. It’s easy too, actually. So there that goes. What I want for him is what you will see in the second season.”

Season 2 will have more gay content, by the star’s own description. It will also be the last season after poor ratings. Those two facts don’t require editorial commentary to make the point.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Axanar: The Gathering Storm Finally Arrives, And It’s a Win for Fan Films

The Odyssey opens July 17. The press tour has produced two moments in the last 48 hours that have overtaken every other entertainment story online, and neither of them involves the film itself.

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Elijah Wood gave an interview this week while promoting his animated show Among Us, and The Direct asked him about his IMDb listing as part of The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of the Past — the new film Warner Bros. has in development with Stephen Colbert co-writing. Wood’s answer was careful and inconclusive.

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“Okay. Well, it hasn’t.. We’re not there yet… But listen, I think the implication is that the stories that Stephen wants to tell, which are the six chapters that were not committed to film in Fellowship of the Ring, largely because they would have slowed the process of the journey down, because when he leaves Bag End and the Shire, and he has to get to Bree, if it had gone the meandering way that it does in the books, it just would have taken a long time to get to Bree, and… it would have killed momentum.”

Jackson made that call correctly. Tolkien’s journey from Bag End to Bree includes the encounter with Gildor and the wandering Elves, a terrifying night at the Barrow-downs where the hobbits are captured by a Barrow-wight, and the chapters involving Tom Bombadil, the ancient singing figure who predates the naming of the world and cannot be corrupted by the Ring. Jackson dropped him entirely. Fans have argued about that decision for twenty-five years.

Wood continued: “But I think the idea of telling the story of what happens in those six chapters is really exciting, and I think really exciting for fans, and I think what Stephen and his son have crafted and what they’re working through is really rich and interesting, and it certainly includes all those characters. So, a script has to be written, we have to go through a process and read it, and it has to get a green light and all those things, but certainly in theory, yeah. And I’m beyond thrilled that it’s Stephen and his son doing it. It’s in the best Tolkien scholarly hands.”

Calling Stephen Colbert “the best Tolkien scholarly hands” is laughable. But the project’s framing is where things get complicated. Shadows of the Past is set 14 years after Frodo’s passing. Sam, Merry, and Pippin retrace the first steps of their journey while Sam’s daughter Elanor discovers a long-buried secret about how close the War of the Ring came to being lost before it began.

The chapters Colbert wants to film would work outside of this because they resist that kind of dramatic retrofitting. The Old Forest is menacing without explanation. Tom Bombadil sings in dactylic rhythm and resists all critical interpretation. Tolkien himself said he deliberately made Bombadil an enigma, a reminder that some things in the world exist outside the War of the Ring entirely. The Barrow-downs is a ghost story set in an ancient burial ground where the hobbits nearly dissolve into a forgotten evil. These chapters work because Tolkien wrote them unhurried, weird, rooted in Old English and Norse myth. Delivering them through a framing device where Elanor discovers buried secrets fourteen years after her father’s death asks them to function as backstory. They were never backstory.

Tom Bombadil in a thirty-minute extended sequence inserted between Bag End and Bree would be extraordinary. What he becomes inside a sequel about Elanor uncovering conspiracy is a different question with no obvious answer.

When Colbert announced the project in March, fans were not generous. One wrote: “There are bad ideas. And then there is whatever this is. Writing a sequel to ROTK is INSANE. Absolutely insane.” Reddit user PhysicsEagle noted: “Has Colbert ever written anything aside from television sketches? Also, how in the world are they turning Fog on the Barrow-Downs into a feature-length film? We thought Hunt for Gollum was reaching for scraps.” Another fan posted: “So it’s going to be War of the Rohirrim all over again. You could do all kinds of stories from the appendix, and do them accurately. One that I’ve said would be really suitable for adaptation would be Balin’s failed expedition to Moria. But nah. Let’s just turn Sam’s daughter…”

Cinema Tweets asked: “Why is Stephen Colbert given the responsibility to write a new Lord of the Rings film? What am I missing — how is this happening? I have no opinion about Colbert on a personal level, I’m neutral, but what qualifies him to write this? Because he’s a massive LOTR fan? That’s it?”

Colbert was asked that exact question by The Hollywood Reporter. “I mean, there’s no reason to,” he said when asked why fans should trust him. “And there’s no value in me addressing that because all you can do as — I’ll use a loaded term here — an artist is follow your heart and the craft that you have learned to try to turn this into something that is not fandom but drama. And, luckily, I don’t have to do this alone. I have a great Sherpa in Philippa Boyens, who cares about it in the same way I do. And I will just say that every moment has been a joy so far.”

Boyens co-wrote all six Jackson films, but in recent years she’s caused errors with The War of the Rohirrim and what looks to be a big leap in The Hunt for Gollum.

The script has not been written. No green light exists for this film as of yet. Wood’s “certainly in theory” is doing considerable work. If the Elanor framing device places Frodo only in flashbacks or memory, Wood’s qualifier becomes even more accurate than it sounds on first read.

Do you trust Stephen Colbert to handle this?

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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.

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Moana opens Thursday. The domestic opening projection sits at $45-60 million on a reported $200 million budget. Global Box Office reported on X: “MOANA live-action remake, starring Dwayne Johnson, has pre-sales bombing harder than expected. The projection for its domestic opening weekend is now down to $45M-$60M. With a budget of ~$200M, it is on track to become one of Disney’s biggest bombs.” That Park Place

Simultaneously, Disney is already in discussions about Moana 3.

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The original animated Moana opened in November 2016. Moana 2 opened in November 2024 and crossed one billion dollars worldwide. The live-action remake arrives July 10, 2026 — eighteen months after the sequel. In a short period of time, audiences will have received the original Moana, Moana 2, the live-action remake, and potentially Moana 3.

The franchise overexposure is one problem. The deeper problem is that Moana is arriving in the middle of a sustained Hollywood box office collapse that Disney contributed to and has not corrected.

The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $81.7 million on a $165 million budget in March — the lowest Star Wars theatrical gross in franchise history. Brendan Wayne, one of the suit performers, called the fans who stayed home “toxic” during the same week. Masters of the Universe opened to $29.3 million on a $170-200 million budget in June, while a $10 million YouTube horror film beat it in its same opening weekend. Supergirl spent $170 million to open at $37.1 million and is projected to lose over $100 million theatrically. These are not coincidences spread across competing studios. Three of the four biggest Hollywood underperformers of 2026 came from the same entertainment infrastructure that is now releasing Moana.

The Snow White comparison is the one Disney does not want made. Snow White became a major financial disappointment after years of controversy and audience skepticism, earning just $205.7 million worldwide during its run. The Little Mermaid before it drew 73% dislikes on its trailer and earned $570 million worldwide on a budget that required considerably more. Both properties have something in common with Moana: they arrived with pre-existing audience skepticism, casting controversies that dominated the news cycle, and trailers that generated more negative reaction than positive. Disney watched both films underperform and then announced a live-action Moana remake while Moana 2 was still on screens.

The biggest question may not be whether audiences like Moana. But nostalgia requires distance. Lilo and Stitch worked in 2025 with a 30-year gap. Moana’s gap is ten years, and Moana 2 cut that in half.

Dwayne Johnson, who voiced Maui in both animated films, returns in the live-action version and has been one of its most active promoters. The Maui comparisons to T-Mobile commercials and SNL parody characters have run since the first trailer dropped. Johnson stood outside Trump Tower in a photo posted to social media this week and said nothing about Moana — a notable contrast with the months of promotional activity he committed to around Black Adam, which opened to $67 million and finished its global run at $393 million on a $200 million budget.

The tracking numbers are moving in the wrong direction with three days until opening. The latest update represents another troubling sign for the film, as Global Box Office was one of the first trackers to dramatically lower expectations for the remake. If Moana opens at $50 million, it needs a 4x domestic multiple and exceptional international legs just to approach breakeven. The audience that made Moana 2 a billion-dollar global film watched that sequel come out eighteen months ago. They have seen this story twice. The question Disney has not answered is why they need to see it a third time before Moana 3 is ready.

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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: Celia Rose Gooding Turns Trek Long Island Into a Political Rally: Joy, Resistance, and “The Powers That Be”

Tomi Adeyemi co-wrote the screenplay for Paramount’s upcoming adaptation of her bestselling YA fantasy novel Children of Blood and Bone. She served as executive producer. The film releases January 15, 2027, a month the industry uses to bury projects studios have given up on.

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Warner Bros. Animation, DC, and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced Batman: Knightfall, a multi-part animated event bringing to life one of the most iconic and beloved runs in the rich history of Batman comics. Part One premiered at Annecy in June 2026 to thunderous applause. The animated Batman: Knightfall film series is officially R-rated. Anson Mount voices Batman, Michael Mando plays Bane, and Pablo Schreiber voices Jean-Paul Valley. Jeff Wamester directs the first film from a screenplay by Jeremy Adams. The second and third films, covering Knightquest and KnightsEnd, follow after.

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Chuck Dixon posted a meme this week acknowledging both the Knightfall announcement and Tartakovsky’s Conan animated series, noting he gets paid either way. That is about as cheerful as a comic book creator gets in 2026.

He has earned the cheerfulness. Dixon is one of the most prolific and underappreciated writers in DC Comics history, and Knightfall is the work that should have cemented his legacy decades ago. The industry’s treatment of him since has been a different story — but the adaptation is happening, and the source material is worth understanding fully before Part 1 arrives later this year.

Knightfall is a 1993-1994 Batman story arc published by DC Comics. It consists of a trilogy of storylines that ran across Knightfall, Knightquest, and KnightsEnd. The story takes place over approximately six months. Bruce Wayne suffers burnout and is systematically assaulted and crippled by a super steroid-enhanced genius named Bane. Bruce is replaced as Batman by an apprentice named Jean-Paul Valley, who becomes increasingly violent and unstable, tarnishing Batman’s reputation. Eventually, Bruce is healed through paranormal means and reclaims his role as Batman.

The architecture of the story is what makes it work as more than a stunt. Bane does not simply fight Batman. He studies him. He studies Gotham. He frees every prisoner in Arkham Asylum and forces Batman to hunt them all down one by one, across weeks, with no rest. By the time the two actually meet, Bruce Wayne is not the Batman who fought the Joker or Ra’s al Ghul. He is a man running on reflex and willpower who cannot win. Bane, introduced in Batman: Vengeance of Bane #1 by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan, was an orphan born and raised in a Central American island prison, self-taught and ruthless, who underwent an involuntary experimental operation to become a new type of supersoldier before breaking free and deciding to take Gotham City from its king, Batman

The back-breaking scene is the moment every reader who experienced it remembers. Batman comes home to Wayne Manor, depleted, and Bane is waiting. The fight is not a contest. It ends with Bane lifting Bruce over his head and driving his spine across his knee. It was the most shocking moment DC had published since the death of Jason Todd, and unlike Jason Todd’s death, it was the opening move of a three-act story rather than a conclusion.

The second act, Knightquest, is the most interesting part structurally. Jean-Paul Valley, a former assassin-monk who had been training alongside Batman, takes up the cowl. He is not a bad man. He is a damaged one, and the programming his religious order installed in him since childhood surfaces when he puts on the costume. His Batman is brutal, effective, and frightening. He crosses lines Bruce Wayne would not cross. He lets a killer die when he could have saved him. He modifies the suit until it looks nothing like Batman. Knightfall resulted in long-term ramifications for the Batman continuity, as Batman’s trust from the police, the public, and his fellow superheroes had to be rebuilt due to Azrael’s violence. The city’s relationship with Batman had to be rebuilt from nothing.

KnightsEnd is Bruce’s return. It is not triumphant in the conventional sense. He has to defeat a man wearing his own symbol, in front of a city that has watched that symbol commit atrocities, and then spend years earning back what Azrael spent.

The complete story is about what a hero owes to the symbol he carries, what happens when that symbol gets separated from the person who built it, and what it costs to reclaim both. It is the deepest sustained examination of the Batman mythology that DC’s main continuity has produced.

Dixon never typed the words “Batman and Robin” without getting goosebumps, by his own account. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he has said.

Born in West Philadelphia in 1954, Dixon came up through independent comics before Dennis O’Neil brought him to DC in the early 1990s to write a Robin miniseries featuring Tim Drake. The series proved popular enough to spawn two sequels, and Dixon eventually wrote Robin for 100 issues. He worked on Detective Comics from 1992 to 1999, going through Knightfall, KnightsEnd, Contagion, Legacy, Cataclysm, and No Man’s Land, creating Bane alongside Graham Nolan and creating Stephanie Brown alongside Tom Lyle. He also wrote Nightwing for 70 issues and created Birds of Prey with Jordan B. Gorfinkel. That is a body of DC work that shaped the Bat-family mythology for a decade and still reads as the definitive take on those characters.

His celebrated run with DC eventually ran its course, in part due to the industry’s progressive transition. The editors he worked with earlier in his career eventually left the business, replaced by those he says were “indifferent to comics.” “I didn’t have as much value to them,” he has said. It didn’t help that his conservative views clashed with those of some of his colleagues.

He has never hidden those views. “I’d have Batman give the most passionate arguments against guns, and I’m a lifelong NRA member,” he has said. “I put a Hillary Clinton joke in a ‘Birds of Prey’ title. That’s as far as I went.” Dixon’s political views never entered his superhero writing because he understood the difference between what he believed and what served the character. Batman opposes guns because Batman opposes guns, and Dixon wrote that conviction without qualification regardless of his own position on the Second Amendment. That is what professional craft looks like.

DC parted ways with him on June 10, 2008. His 12-volume Levon Cade vigilante book series drew Sylvester Stallone’s attention. The two collaborated on The Expendables Go to Hell graphic novel and eventually on Lionsgate’s 2025 action film A Working Man starring Jason Statham as Levon Cade, which earned $89 million worldwide. He has also adapted The Hobbit into a New York Times bestselling graphic novel and contributed to Rippaverse Comics.

DC Animation, for its part, has spent years proving it can honor source material in ways the live-action division frequently cannot. The Death of Superman and Reign of the Supermen two-parter, the Batman: Hush adaptation, The Long Halloween two-parter, and the Crisis on Infinite Earths trilogy have all served their source material better than any theatrical equivalent. The first trailer leans on the more gothic and exaggerated designs of Kelley Jones, who worked on the original comics, with glimpses of the Joker, Mister Freeze, Scarecrow, and the Riddler. The R rating suggests nobody is softening the back-breaking moment or what comes after it.

Dixon gets paid for the Conan animated series too, which he mentioned with the equanimity of a man who has seen enough of the industry to appreciate a royalty check without irony. The Knightfall trilogy is a better reason to be cheerful. Thirty years after the original run, the story is finally getting the adaptation it deserved, with an R rating and a creative team that appears to be taking the material seriously.

The fans who read those issues in 1993 and 1994 are now in their forties and fifties. Their kids have grown up on animated DC films. Knightfall serves both audiences simultaneously, which is exactly what the best Batman stories have always done.

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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.

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Apple TV+’s “Silo” returned for a third season on July 3 with an episode titled “Who Are You?”, and the premiere skips past the one scene the show owed its audience for two years running.

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“Silo,” adapted from Hugh Howey’s novel trilogy, follows the last 10,000 people on Earth living inside a underground bunker stretching 144 levels beneath a poisoned surface, cut off from any memory of how the world ended up this way. Season 2 closed with Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) trapped in the silo’s incinerator chamber with Bernard as the doors sealed and the fire closed in, then cut without warning to a flashback of Washington, D.C., centuries earlier, where a “dirty bomb” attack gets pinned on Iran and a freshman congressman gets pulled into the fallout. That cliffhanger promised two things: Juliette clawing her way out of a burning room, and answers about how a nuclear standoff with Iran turned into 10,000 people living in a hole in the ground.

Episode 1 delivers neither. The premiere jumps three months past the fire and drops the audience straight into Juliette already installed as mayor, already voted in during her recovery, with her memory of the incinerator and everything before it wiped clean. The rescue, the political fight to seat her, the reaction of a silo that just watched its hero walk back through the airlock: all of it happens off screen, between seasons, reduced to characters explaining what already occurred instead of the audience watching it happen.

That’s the swap at the center of this review. A show with the budget and cast to stage Juliette getting pulled from a burning incinerator chamber chose instead to manufacture a new mystery box: why is she back, why is she mayor, and why can’t she remember any of it. Camille Sims (Alexandria Riley) hovers over her at all times, “reassuring” her in a way that plays more like handling than comfort. Robert Sims (Common) runs council meetings under the banner of democracy while stripping out the surveillance cameras that used to keep tabs on everyone else. A masked group hangs a banner reading “The display is a lie” and pushes to get the whole population back outside. None of it moves the plot. All of it stalls for time.

Three seasons in, that stalling is the pattern, not the exception. Season 1 asked what was outside the silo. Season 2 answered that question and immediately replaced it with a new one. Season 3 opens by taking away the one character who could answer anything, wiping her memory so the show can spend another ten episodes doling out fragments instead of resolution. The Washington, D.C. timeline follows the same rulebook: Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman), his sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay), and journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick) circle the Iran dirty bomb story from last season’s finale without landing on a single hard answer about what actually happened.

Streaming has run this play before. A show sets up a central mystery, strings it out across seasons because the mystery is the only thing keeping subscribers paying month to month, and by the time an answer finally arrives it can’t possibly satisfy the years of buildup that preceded it. “Lost” is the reference point every critic reaches for and for good reason: audiences waited six seasons for answers that didn’t hold up once delivered. “Silo” is now three seasons into the same bet, betting that memory loss and a new resistance cell will feel fresh enough to cover for the fact that the show still hasn’t told anyone why the silos exist.

The frustrating part is that “Who Are You?” had the material for a strong hour of television and chose not to use it. Juliette getting hauled out of that incinerator chamber, badly burned, disoriented, fighting to survive the same fire that killed Bernard: that’s a cold open. Her getting sworn in as mayor in front of a silo that doesn’t know whether to treat her as a hero or a threat: that’s a first act. Instead the premiere tells the audience both things happened and spends its runtime on procedural scenes of Juliette relearning her own life one supervised conversation at a time.

This one lands at a 5 out of 10. A season premiere needs to earn its slow burn, and “Who Are You?” spends its entire hour setting a table it should have already set two finales ago.

At what point does a mystery box show owe its audience an actual answer instead of a new question to replace the old one?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Angel Studios Opened Young Washington to $20.8 Million on July 4th Weekend, And Hollywood Should Take Notes