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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A NEW HOPE

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

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

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

It didn’t say it.

Neither of them. And definitely not both.

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

Those phrases have been in place ever since.

But in 1977, they weren’t there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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He did not mention the Doctor Who Christmas Special.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Paramount+ announced Star Trek: Strange New Worlds back in 2021, the pitch was simple. We were finally going to spend serious time with Captain Christopher Pike, Number One, and a young Lieutenant Spock aboard the Enterprise in the years before James T. Kirk took the chair. Five years before The Original Series. A clean, episodic, planet-of-the-week show built around a captain we had only glimpsed in “The Cage” and “The Menagerie.” That was the promise.

Three seasons in, the show has quietly become something else. It has become a Kirk show with Pike features.

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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens July 17. It was shot across seven countries including Greece, over 91 days of principal photography, using over two million feet of IMAX film. Greece, Morocco, Italy, Scotland, Iceland, Western Sahara, and Malta all served as locations. The Greek government approved filming permits. Greek locations were central to the production.

Not one cast member is Greek.

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Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu hit theaters May 22, 2026, and the strongest impression it leaves is that this was almost certainly Season 4 of the Disney+ show before someone upstairs decided to put it on the big screen. The Mandalorian season 4 has transformed into The Mandalorian and Grogu, and you can feel it in every frame.

That isn’t a death sentence. The film is fun, light, and free of the cultural lecturing Star Wars audiences have come to brace for. It’s the most low-stakes installment of the franchise in years, for better and worse.

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The Plot Is a Video Game Mission List

Din Djarin now works contract jobs for the fledgling New Republic out of the Adelphi base, located in the Outer Rim, and is tasked with hunting down ex-Imperials and bringing them to justice. The opening sequence is pure John Wick in Mandalorian armor: Mando infiltrates an Imperial warlord’s mountain base on a snowy world, takes out snowtroopers, and brings down an AT-AT in dramatic fashion.

From there it slows down for some character beats, then picks up again. Colonel Ward, played by Sigourney Weaver, tasks the Mandalorian with apprehending Coyne, who she says many believe to be dead, and that it’s not even known what he looks like. The Hutts have the intel. Mando has to go get it.

So Mando and Grogu set off to retrieve Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White) and return him to his aunt and uncle, the leaders of a crime syndicate of their own. Mando gets in over his head, the Hutts grab him, and Grogu runs the rescue mission. Roll credits.

It’s a tabletop RPG session. Mando rolls initiative against ex-imperials, the GM hands him a side quest from the Hutts, the party gets captured, and the kid pulls off the rescue.

The Bigger Problem: Nothing Changes

Din and Grogu start the film as bounty hunters for the New Republic. They end the film as bounty hunters for the New Republic. The Republic isn’t measurably safer. The galaxy isn’t reshaped. Their relationship doesn’t deepen in any way that matters.

It’s filler. Premium-priced filler with a Ludwig Göransson score and IMAX framing, but still filler.

Compare this to what Star Wars theatrical releases used to do. Empire ends with Han in carbonite and Luke missing a hand. Even Rogue One ended with everyone dead and the Death Star plans changing hands. Here, the credits roll and you could slot the next Disney+ episode in seamlessly.

Rotta the Hutt Is the Worst Part

Rotta is a gladiator and while he’s got the slug body, he’s a much more muscular version than his late father, voiced by Jeremy Allen White doing a flat American accent. He complains about his father. He wants to be his own man. He’s a pit fighter who could die any night and he sounds like a sulking film school dropout.

The CGI on him is rough. It recalls the Special Edition Jabba scene where Han steps on his tail, that uncanny cartoon-pasted-into-reality quality. Some of the rest of the movie has the same problem at points, with effects that feel TV-budget rather than theatrical.

Kids in the audience didn’t seem to mind Rotta at all. They laughed at the right beats. But for any adult viewer, he yanks you out of the picture every time he opens his mouth.

Sigourney Weaver’s performance is the other notable misfire. She delivers her lines flat, almost phoned-in. For an actress of her caliber making her Star Wars debut, it’s a strange choice.

The Cameos and the Good Stuff

The fan service hits the right notes for franchise loyalists. The most prominent legacy character in the film, aside from Din Djarin and Grogu, is Rebels fan-favorite Zeb Orrelios (voiced by Steve Blum), alongside Embo the bounty hunter (from The Clone Wars) and the Hutt twins (from The Book of Boba Fett). Carson Teva and Trapper Wolf show up briefly.

Grogu gets paired with little monkey-like creatures that follow him around. It’s pure Lucas-era comic relief, the kind of beat that fits naturally alongside Willow, Labyrinth, and the Ewoks. They land well and the kids in the theater ate it up.

The soundtrack is the film’s standout. Göransson takes the Mandalorian themes and blasts them through orchestral horns in a way that feels properly epic, grander than anything on the TV show. If nothing else, this movie earned its theatrical mix.

Action is mostly solid throughout. Mando’s combat scenes are crisp. The AT-AT sequence pays off. The arena fight delivers.

The Verdict

The Mandalorian and Grogu is popcorn-level fun. It’s free of overt ideological content, which alone puts it above most modern Star Wars output. The themes hit, the action works, and Din and Grogu remain charming together.

But the scope is tiny, the plot doesn’t move their lives forward, and Rotta plus Weaver’s stiff line readings drag down what should have been the centerpiece sequences. As a Season 4 of the Disney+ series, this would have played as four solid episodes and fans would have loved it. As a theatrical event after seven years away from the big screen, it’s underwhelming.

8/10.

Did you catch The Mandalorian and Grogu in theaters? Does the Season 4 theory hold up for you, or are you more forgiving of the small scale? Let us know.

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

NEXT: Star Wars Just Had Its Worst Opening Weekend Under Disney And The Spin Won’t Change the Numbers

The Sun reported this weekend that the Doctor Who Christmas Special is in danger of being scrapped or pushed to Easter 2027 because the BBC cannot find a new lead actor. Radio Times followed up. Bleeding Cool published a lengthy opinion piece today calling on the BBC to say something. The story has broken into the mainstream entertainment press.

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Two weeks ago, a source approached us and indicated that original plans for the Christmas Special had collapsed because both Billie Piper and David Tennant were unavailable, forcing Russell T. Davies to scrap a completed script and rebuild the special around a recast Doctor. The Sun’s report that the BBC cannot find a new Doctor to anchor the special confirms that trajectory. The script has been written and rewritten. The production has no lead. The Christmas 2026 window is now in genuine doubt.

Bleeding Cool published a piece this morning noting that the BBC, Bad Wolf, BBC Studios, and Davies have created a media vacuum so large that it was only a matter of time before it drew in rumors and speculation, while acknowledging that the steaming pile of conjecture has now gained mainstream traction via Radio Times.

The vacuum is not accidental. The BBC has nothing to announce because the production has nothing locked down.

Composer Murray Gold, speaking on the Half the Picture podcast, confirmed that Davies has written multiple versions of the Christmas Special script “depending on certain outcomes,” adding: “I’m not sure I’m even supposed to know that.” Multiple scripts for a Christmas special airing seven months from now means the production does not know who is in the lead role. That is not a controlled spoiler-prevention strategy. It is a franchise operating without a plan.

BBC Studios CEO Zai Bennett, asked in February whether the corporation would cover the funding gap after the Disney deal ended, gave a non-answer: “We’re a big important part of Doctor Who and are all motivated to make sure Doctor Who has a long and flourishing life. We’ve got the Christmas special coming. After that, it’s time for us all to work on it.” That statement describes a Christmas special as the only confirmed future the show has, and even that is now in question.

The Disney deal collapsed after two seasons because the streaming numbers did not justify the cost. Season 15 of Doctor Who averaged 3.8 million viewers on 28-day Barb figures, down one million from the prior Gatwa season, and below Jodie Whittaker’s final season in 2021. The show that Disney was supposed to take global drew fewer viewers under its Disney partnership than it had in the era many fans considered a creative low point.

Ncuti Gatwa hosted SNL UK two weeks ago and opened his monologue by joking that about twelve people watched him in Doctor Who. He then said he does not understand his own regeneration into Billie Piper. Gatwa has said almost nothing publicly about his tenure since leaving the role, and the one time he addressed the audience response, he did it as a punchline.

The AMC Global Media deal announced last month gives the US streaming rights for the 2005-2022 revival back to a traditional cable network. Thirteen seasons and 176 episodes, Eccleston through Whittaker, now streaming on AMC. The framing in the announcement was routine licensing. The subtext is that Disney exited and AMC filled the gap for the pre-Gatwa library.

Rumors in the industry suggest the AMC deal could extend to new content if the BBC finds a workable production model. A reboot rather than a continuation is being discussed. Whether Davies would remain as showrunner for a fundamentally restructured version of the show, or whether the BBC would use the current chaos as a transition point to new creative leadership, is unknown. Nothing has been confirmed. But the BBC’s silence on everything beyond the Christmas special, combined with Murray Gold’s admission that multiple scripts exist and the Sun’s report that no new Doctor has been cast, paints a picture of a franchise in genuine structural uncertainty rather than routine between-season planning.

Doctor Who turns 63 this November. The BBC has aired a Christmas special in twenty of the last twenty-one years. If the 2026 special slides to Easter, it will be the first time the BBC has missed the Christmas slot since 2009, the year of David Tennant’s regeneration.

The franchise is in a worse position now than it was when it went off air in 1989. At least then, the audience knew it was over.

Does Doctor Who need a full reboot with new creative leadership, or can RTD salvage the current version of the show? Let us know in the comments.

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

NEXT: Star Wars Just Had Its Worst Opening Weekend Under Disney And The Spin Won’t Change the Numbers

The Odyssey casting controversy entered a new phase this weekend when critics surfaced Lupita Nyong’o’s past statements about cultural representation in Black Panther and placed them next to her defense of playing Helen of Troy.

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Nyong’o’s resurfaced comments came from her Black Panther promotional work, where she praised the film for pushing back against the misrepresentation of Africa. She noted that Wakanda speaks Xhosa, that the cast had to learn the language and get the accent right. She described Black Panther as helping challenge longstanding misconceptions about Africa by insisting on cultural specificity rather than treating the continent as one vague monolith.

This week, defending her casting as Helen of Troy in The Odyssey, Nyong’o told interviewers: “This is a mythological story. Our cast is representative of the world.” A post on X placing both sets of statements side by side drew over half a million views.

The contrast is precise. Nyong’o argued that Black Panther was obligated to treat African cultural identity with fidelity, to learn the specific language, to represent specific traditions, to resist the flattening of diverse cultures into one generic image. She then accepted a role as one of the most culturally specific figures in Western literature and defended it by saying mythology transcends origin.

It’s pretty clear that the Hollywood standards are double ones once again. When it comes to black culture, it must be revered; when it comes to white culture, it must be replaced.

Helen of Troy is not a mythological blank. She is a character from a specific civilization’s founding literature, described in Homer’s own text with specific physical characteristics, embedded in a specific set of cultural assumptions about beauty and identity that the ancient Greeks held as central to the story’s meaning. The argument that mythology belongs to all of humanity applies equally to the African traditions that informed Wakanda. If one requires specificity and the other permits substitution, the principle being applied is not universal.

Elon Musk posted this weekend: “Chris Nolan is an anti-White racist.” The mainstream press responded by framing the casting criticism as racist rather than engaging with the consistency argument.

Christopher Nolan described his casting rationale for Nyong’o by emphasizing “strength and poise.” Nyong’o responded to the physical description question by saying: “You can’t perform beauty.” Homer’s entire narrative architecture around Helen is built on her beauty being a specific, overwhelming, civilization-ending fact. Dismissing that as unperformable while accepting the role is a position, not a neutral observation.

Also confirmed this weekend: Travis Scott plays a bard in The Odyssey. Nolan’s explanation: “It’s about rap.”

The film opens July 17.

Does the standard Nyong’o applied to Black Panther apply equally to The Odyssey? Let us know in the comments.

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

NEXT: Nolan’s Odyssey Cast Explains What They Did To Homer And Imply Criticism Is Racism

The final box office numbers are in. The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to an estimated $81.9 million domestically over its three-day opening weekend and roughly $102 million over the extended four-day Memorial Day holiday frame, making it the lowest opening weekend for a Disney-era Star Wars theatrical release in North America

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Prior to this film, 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story held the record for the lowest Star Wars opening under Disney with $84 million over the weekend and $103 million through the Memorial Day holiday. Solo is remembered as a franchise catastrophe — the film that ended Disney’s standalone Star Wars strategy, triggered a creative reset at Lucasfilm, and effectively cost Disney hundreds of millions on a production that should have been a commercial layup.

Mando opened below it.

Globally the film took in approximately $165 million, which technically edges out Solo’s $148 million worldwide opening. But when adjusted for inflation, Solo’s worldwide opening translates to roughly $193-195 million in 2026 dollars, meaning Star Wars drew fewer actual moviegoers this weekend than it did for a film considered the franchise’s worst modern failure. Ticket prices are higher. Premium format screens account for a larger share of revenue. 41% of tickets sold were for IMAX or Dolby Cinema at an average of $19.43 per ticket. Strip that out and the actual headcount in theaters is lower than the raw dollar figure suggests.

Disney’s original target was a $160 million global opening. The global total came in at $165 million, technically exceeding the target, but only because international markets performed better than domestic. The American audience, which built the Star Wars franchise across fifty years, showed up at the lowest rate of any Disney-era release.

The trades are doing what they always do. Variety’s headline read: “Mandalorian and Grogu Lifts Off With $102 Million Over Memorial Day Holiday.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “Star Wars Box Office Rebound.” The framing of a franchise record low as a rebound and a liftoff is the industry press managing expectations on Disney’s behalf.

The context behind the number tells a longer story. Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4 billion. The sequel trilogy opened strong — The Force Awakens at $248 million domestically, Rogue One at $155 million, The Last Jedi at $220 million — then collapsed as audience confidence eroded. The Rise of Skywalker limped to $177 million in 2019 amid audience rejection of the sequel trilogy’s creative direction. Disney retreated to Disney+ content for five years: The Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, Ahsoka, The Acolyte. Several of those shows performed poorly. The Acolyte was canceled after one season. The Book of Boba Fett drew criticism for undercutting the Mando show itself. Kathleen Kennedy’s tenure as Lucasfilm president, which produced the sequel trilogy, the Disney+ era, and now this theatrical return, has been the defining creative and commercial arc of what Disney did with the franchise.

Pop culture analyst Nerdortic mocked the numbers on X this weekend, saying, “The Mandalorian and Grogu still might beat out Solo without adjusting for inflation. A flop that came out 8 years ago. Star Wars is BACK, chuds!”

Bob Iger’s decision to pivot Favreau’s television scripts into a theatrical event has not produced a theatrical event. The director of the film told press this week he was not exactly sure why he was asked to make the franchise’s theatrical comeback. “I suspect it was because these are characters that people, even who hadn’t seen Star Wars, may be aware of, especially Grogu. Baby Yoda was everywhere.” That is the creative rationale for the first Star Wars film in seven years: Baby Yoda was everywhere.

The next confirmed Star Wars theatrical release is Star Wars: Starfighter, slated for May 2027. Disney will point to Mando’s global total as a signal that the theatrical franchise is healthy. The domestic number, adjusted for inflation, compared to a film that ended a creative era in 2018, tells the actual story.

Does $102 million domestic on Memorial Day weekend represent a Star Wars comeback or a continuation of the franchise’s decline? Let us know in the comments.

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

NEXT: Nolan’s Odyssey Cast Explains What They Did To Homer And Imply Criticism Is Racism

Spartacus: House of Ashur has been canceled after one season at Starz. Lionsgate Television is reportedly shopping the series to other platforms, but Starz will not move forward with Season 2.

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The cancellation statement from Deadline contains the most honest sentence a studio has published about DEI-driven programming in recent memory. “The makeup of the followup’s audience did not quite align with Starz’s focus on women and underrepresented audiences,” Deadline reported.

The people who wanted a Spartacus show, the male-skewing fans who made the original a Starz signature series, showed up. They were not the audience Starz wanted. So the show was canceled.

The original Spartacus: Blood and Sand launched in 2010 and became one of cable television’s defining genre properties of its era, brutal, bloody, sexually explicit, and built around testosterone-soaked arena combat, slave rebellion, and Roman political intrigue. It made stars of Andy Whitfield and Liam McIntyre. It ran four seasons. It built a devoted male audience that had nowhere else to go for that kind of content.

House of Ashur brought back Steven S. DeKnight, who created the original series, and Nick Tarabay as Ashur in an alternate timeline. The premise was solid. Ashur didn’t die on Mount Vesuvius. He was rewarded for helping the Romans defeat Spartacus and given control of Batiatus’ ludus. The original’s DNA was there.

What was also there, inserted from the production’s first episode, was the new direction Starz demanded. The show was built around Achillia, played by Tenika Davis, an enslaved Nubian warrior whom Ashur recruits as his champion. Starz promoted her as the franchise’s first female gladiator, making her one of the show’s biggest departures from the original formula.

Pop Culture Analysis by Holte reviewed the series and described what that departure looked like in practice: “If you ever wanted to see an angry black woman literally rip a man’s penis right off with her bare hands, this is the show you’ve been waiting for. If, on the other hand, you’re insulted and fed up with the ‘130-lb woman beats ten bigger armed men’ trope that’s infected every single franchise in 2025 — skip this one, hard. Dead Lucretia resurrects Ashur in an alternate timeline where he actually killed Spartacus and got rewarded with his own ludus. Then his top gladiator loses to three dwarves — yes, really — so Ashur goes shopping for something unique. What does he find? A black female slave who single-handedly wrecks his entire guard squad, smashes a vase in his face, wraps a chain around his neck, and nearly kills him on the spot. Naturally, he immediately makes her his new champion. Immersion? Gone. Logic? Out the window. Because if one random slave woman can mop the floor with every trained male killer in the villa, why the hell has every ludus in Rome not been 100% female for the last 300 years? They took a franchise built on raw, brutal, testosterone-soaked action and turned it into yet another girlboss beats the patriarchy fanfic. Spartacus deserved better. We deserved better.”

This is the structural problem with the DEI programming model applied to legacy properties. The original Spartacus audience did not need to be told the show was for them. They showed up. The show Starz produced for House of Ashur was not built for that audience. It was built to attract the “women and underrepresented audiences” Starz identified as its strategic focus as an audience that had no particular reason to watch a Spartacus spinoff and did not show up in meaningful numbers regardless.

The audience that did show up was then told by Starz’s own cancellation language that their viewership was the wrong kind. The show failed to match the original’s numbers. The audience “did not align” with Starz’s focus. Translation: the people who remembered Spartacus and wanted more of it came back, and they were not the demographic the network was trying to serve.

This is the same pattern we’ve seen across franchises for years. An established property with an existing audience gets handed to a DEI-driven programming mandate. The existing audience is alienated by the changes. The new target audience does not materialize. The show fails commercially. The network cites viewership numbers without acknowledging that the audience they drove away was the one that had made the original viable.

The original Spartacus “could not be matched” in buzz and viewership by its own spinoff. The reasons are in Starz’s own cancellation statement. They built the wrong show for the wrong audience and then canceled it when the right audience showed up and found it unrecognizable.

Lionsgate is shopping the series to other platforms. If another network picks it up, the question is whether it gets the course correction it needs or continues the direction that killed it at Starz.

What would a genuine Spartacus continuation look like to you? Let us know in the comments.

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

NEXT: Nolan’s Odyssey Cast Explains What They Did To Homer And Imply Criticism Is Racism

Silo Season 3 premieres July 3 on Apple TV, with new episodes every Friday through September 4. That makes now the right time to catch up on the first two seasons, and the show is worth your time, despite some significant frustrations that keep it from reaching the heights of its premise.

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Silo is set in a future where humanity’s last survivors live in a massive underground structure, cut off from the outside world. Anyone who breaks the rules is sent to the surface to “clean” the sensors on the cameras that show residents the toxic wasteland beyond the silo walls. No one knows when or why the silo was built, and those who try to find out face fatal consequences.

The first two episodes play a smart trick, following earlier characters who go outside before the main story locks in. The series runs on the same kind of mystery-box premise that has become the dominant mode for prestige streaming sci-fi. Severance does it with corporate compartmentalization. Silo does it with a sealed underground society where every detail of history has been scrubbed and the outside world may or may not be what anyone believes. For people who enjoy that slow-reveal structure, the hook is immediate.

Rebecca Ferguson plays Juliette Nichols, the former sheriff of Silo 18 and an expert in all things mechanical. Ferguson previously appeared in Dune: Part Two as Lady Jessica. Casting an actress of her caliber as a reluctant sheriff who stumbles into conspiracy rather than seeking it out was the right call. Juliette doesn’t have a hero’s bearing. She’s an engineer who keeps the generator running and wants answers about the people she’s lost.

Tim Robbins plays Bernard, the head of IT and the silo’s mayor, a sinister figure who hides dirty secrets and will stop at nothing to prevent any form of rebellion. Robbins plays conspiracy and menace well, and Bernard works as an antagonist precisely because he’s not purely villainous. He believes in the system he’s protecting. Common appears as a security officer and brings credible authority to the role. Steve Zahn joined for Season 2 as Solo, a man Juliette finds locked away alone in a neighboring silo, delivering what reviewers described as a sad and heartwrenching portrayal of loneliness with a childlike wonder. The character reads like a direct line to Hurley from Lost, that same combination of comedic affect and buried tragedy, and the show eventually explains why he ended up that way. It’s one of the better character reveals in either season.

Season 1 builds its mystery well. Juliette eventually goes outside herself, the holographic screen concealing the real state of the world is revealed, and we learn there are other silos. Season 2 expands into those silos, Juliette connects with the rebellion forming back in Silo 18, and the season ends on another cliffhanger. Season 3 will continue the saga while also revealing an origin story set centuries earlier, and Juliette survives her forced cleaning but returns with memory loss as the silo recovers from rebellion and faces a dangerous new threat.

Now for the problems.

Silo suffers from what has become endemic to streaming television. Ten episodes per season stretched over material that a tighter network run would have cut to four. The pacing drags in both seasons, and the padding is visible. Subplots stall out. Episodes that should deliver forward momentum instead tread water. This is not a Silo problem specifically. It is an Apple TV problem. The platform’s output consistently over-extends its strongest concepts, and Silo is not immune.

Apple also continues its pattern of casting and character choices that feel less like storytelling decisions and more like demographic box-checking. The background lesbian relationship woven into the ensemble is there because it is always there on Apple originals, not because it serves the story. It doesn’t dominate the show the way similar content does on Netflix, but its presence as furniture is its own statement.

The writing also leans on a millennial dialogue tic that has infected too many prestige dramas: the word “fuck” deployed every few lines as a marker of emotional intensity. The effect is the opposite of what’s intended. When every character reaches for the same word under stress, the voices flatten into each other and the emphasis stops landing. The word loses weight through repetition, and the dialogue loses texture.

Despite all of it, Silo earns a qualified recommendation. The concept is strong enough to carry the pacing problems when the show is firing, and Juliette, Bernard, Common’s character, and Solo are compelling enough to make you want to see where the story goes. The show has been confirmed for four total seasons, with Season 3 serving as the penultimate run. If the writers use Season 3’s origin story structure to finally deliver the answers the mystery box has been withholding, this could be the season that retroactively justifies the patience the first two demanded.

7.5/10

Are you caught up on Silo ahead of the July 3 premiere, and do you think the show can tighten its pacing for the final stretch? Let us know in the comments.

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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: Brandon Sanderson’s Hollywood Machine Keeps Growing With New Skyward Adaptation In Development

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens July 17. The press cycle is underway, and the two biggest female cast members spent this week explaining how their characters differ from the source material while dismissing the audience that objects.

Anne Hathaway plays Penelope. In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope is the model of wifely virtue. She waits faithfully for her husband for twenty years, refuses the advances of 108 suitors, and maintains her household against sustained pressure through patience and loyalty. Homer presents her as Odysseus’ equal not because she is secretly furious, but because faithfulness and constancy are themselves heroic qualities in the world the epic describes. Penelope is admirable precisely because she does not explode. She endures. That is the point.

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Hathaway’s description of the character from Nolan’s script: “There’s this impression of Penelope that she’s kind of the picture of modesty. She’s the picture of patience. And I said, ‘Chris, if I’m not mistaken, you’ve written someone who is full of fury and you seem to be implying that she’s actually Odysseus’ equal.’ I found her to be this volcano of a human that was always simmering. It was really fun when she finally exploded.”

The framing here is worth examining. Hathaway describes patience and modesty as an “impression” — a surface misreading of a character who is secretly seething underneath. The fix Nolan provides is rage. The volcano. The explosion. Hollywood in 2026 cannot write a virtuous woman without converting her virtue into suppressed anger, because a woman who is simply faithful and patient is not a character the industry knows how to sell. Penelope’s loyalty to Odysseus is not a trauma waiting to detonate. It is a moral choice freely made and heroically sustained across two decades. Replacing it with fury is not a deeper reading of Homer. It is the industry’s standard operation applied to any female character whose defining quality is devotion rather than grievance.

Meanwhile Lupita Nyong’o, cast as Helen of Troy, addressed the sustained criticism of her casting this week in Elle. “This is a mythological story,” Nyong’o said. “I’m very supportive of Chris’s intention with it and with the version of this story that he is telling. Our cast is representative of the world. I’m not spending my time thinking of a defense.”

She added: “I can’t spend my time thinking about all the people who still don’t love me. You’ll find the representatives who believe in you, and you’ll get on with it. I want to believe I’m built to last.”

Nolan explained his casting rationale: “The strength and the poise were so important to the character of Helen. And Lupita makes it look effortless.” Asked about Helen being known for her beauty, Nyong’o said: “You can’t perform beauty.”

The “mythological story” defense is the standard response to casting criticism and it does not survive examination. Mythology is not a blank canvas onto which any culture can project itself. The Greek myths are the foundational literature of a specific civilization, produced by a specific people, describing their gods and heroes in their own cultural image. Helen is described by Homer as fair-skinned and golden-haired. She is the most celebrated beauty in Greek mythology specifically because she embodied the Greek ideal of female beauty. Nolan filmed on location at Acrocorinth, Pylos, and Methoni with over six million euros in Greek state funding. Greece funded the replacement of its own mythological heritage.

Elon Musk posted: “I agree that she is beautiful, but casting a Black woman to play a white woman in a foundational work of European literature is no more right than casting a white man to play Shaka Zulu.” The comparison is logically consistent. The press treated it as evidence of racism.

Nyong’o plays two roles: Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra. The full cast includes Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Circe, and Elliot Page reportedly as Achilles.

Two things are happening simultaneously in this film’s press cycle. The female characters are being remade to remove their traditional virtues where Penelope’s faithfulness becomes rage, Helen’s specific beauty becomes a casting abstraction, and the audience that notices is being labeled racist and retrograde for noticing. The film that took Greek funding to shoot on Greek soil opens in eight weeks. The Greeks whose mythology is being revised funded it themselves.

What do you think Nolan’s Odyssey will look like compared to the source material? Let us know in the comments.

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

NEXT: The Mandalorian and Grogu Opens to $12M Thursday Previews And Fans Are Divided

Star Wars returned to theaters Thursday night for the first time since 2019. The Mandalorian and Grogu pulled approximately $12 million in North American Thursday preview screenings. Solo: A Star Wars Story made $14.1 million in the same Thursday preview window in 2018, turning into an $84.4 million three-day and $103 million four-day Memorial Day opening that Disney considered a disaster. Mando opened below Solo’s preview number.

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The Rotten Tomatoes picture is now complete: 62% on the Tomatometer from 183 reviews, 88% on the Popcornmeter from 500-plus verified audience ratings. Critics are lukewarm. The people who actually paid for tickets are not. That 26-point gap between critics and audience is the first meaningful data point about what kind of film this actually is.

The reactions from FP’s own circles broke along lines worth examining.

Shadiversity: “The Mandalorian and Grogu is a truly retarded film, I mean brain breaking dumb with boring characters that can’t even emote or talk. It’s absolutely consistent with the quality we’ve come to expect from Disney Star Wars.”

Jeremy Griggs of Geeks and Gamers: “It’s boring as fuck and pointless. It has no reason to exist other than to prove, once again, that Disney Star Wars is completely dead. It’s just random quests and attempts to give Baby Yoda cute moments for social media reactions. Fuck this movie.”

Nerdrotic: “The Mandalorian and Grogu does explain how the First Order came to power. The New Republic is retarded.”

Matt Jarbo offered a more measured take: “The Mandalorian is essentially Indiana Jones for Star Wars. I would be very happy watching a ton of movies where a badass bounty hunter ends up getting in over his head and has to use his wits and skill to get out of it. There’s a great moment in this movie where a choice is made because it’s the only one that they’ve got, and it’s just really cool to realize that they are basically going to have to Butch and Sundance it in order to get through. Plus you get some great character work with Rotta, and don’t even get me started about the coolness of the Arena scene. Plus Zeb is back and he is the shit. I do wish it did have a bit more in regards to the larger universe and what’s happening at the time, but at the end of the day I’m happy with what we got.”

Rob Liefeld took the most straightforwardly positive position: “I won’t pretend to understand the backlash to Mandalorian. Backlashes aren’t logical, many agenda driven. Lights went down, I escaped into a galaxy far, far away. Looked good, action packed, hit all my buttons. If you are looking for a good time with the entire family, this will do it.”

The divisions here are real and they reflect something genuine about the film. The critics who disliked it and the fans who trashed it are responding to the same thing: a small-scale pulp adventure with no stakes for the broader Star Wars universe, structured like a long television episode, that does not feel like a theatrical event. The fans who liked it are responding to that same quality as a feature rather than a bug — Favreau building a serialized pulp adventure rather than a franchise-expanding mythology chapter.

The full opening weekend number arrives Sunday. The question is whether families show up Saturday and Sunday to push the four-day number above $100 million. Solo opened to $103 million on this same holiday weekend and is remembered as a franchise failure. Mando is tracking to open near or below that figure.

The 88% audience score tells one story. The $12 million Thursday preview number tells another. The full weekend will tell the third, and most important, one.

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

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

NEXT: EXCLUSIVE Interview: Science Fiction Legend C.J. Cherryh Talks Her Career

Tomorrow Studios, the production company behind Netflix’s One Piece, announced Wednesday it has optioned Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward novel series for television adaptation. Sanderson will write the pilot script alongside Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, the husband-and-wife team behind Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Tomorrow Studios CEO Marty Adelstein and President Becky Clements will executive produce alongside Sanderson, Whedon, and Tancharoen.

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Sanderson described the deal as “a dream come true,” noting he had been working on the Skyward series for nearly a decade.

The Skyward deal follows the existing Apple TV+ Mistborn adaptation, for which Sanderson has been providing regular weekly video updates on his YouTube channel. In this week’s update, Sanderson confirmed the screenplay is 80% complete, that production will stall for a few weeks while he travels to London for MCM Comic Con appearances, and that he is spending significant time on Hollywood business — something he said he warned his audience about. He also confirmed Ghost Bloods, scheduled for December 2028, needs to be turned in by December 2026, and that he will begin that revision around July.

The weekly update also revealed a new card game, Shards of Creation, developed with Brotherwise Games, featuring canonical art for all 16 Shards of Adonalsium including first-ever reveals of Devotion and Dominion from Elantris. The game goes on pre-order May 22. Meanwhile Sanderson is preparing a speech at Oxford on his London trip and signing appearances at Forbidden Planet.

The machine is enormous. Sanderson has sold more than 50 million books. The 2022 Kickstarter raised $41 million. The Cosmere is expanding into film and television on multiple fronts simultaneously. A Geiger television adaptation through Paramount TV is in development. The leather-bound Eye of the World project continues through Dragonsteel. By any commercial metric, Brandon Sanderson is the most successful independent author in genre fiction today.

What that commercial machinery is funding, and what Sanderson has increasingly traded away to build it, is a different conversation — one Fandom Pulse has covered twice in the past year.

In January 2025, Mormon science fiction author Brad Torgersen publicly called out Sanderson for posting on his website that he hopes the LDS Church will one day revise or set aside the central tenets of the Proclamation on the Family — the church’s foundational statement that marriage is between a man and a woman and that gender is an essential characteristic of eternal identity. Torgersen wrote that following Sanderson’s position would turn the Mormon Church into “just another Woke Jesus club.” Sanderson’s response was a lengthy post defending himself with appeals to nuance and calls to listen to LGBT+ people, which Torgersen and others read as a non-answer that avoided engaging with the doctrinal question directly.

The pattern in Sanderson’s published fiction reflects this trajectory. Gay romance and transgender characters have appeared across his recent Cosmere work in ways that sit in direct tension with the Family Proclamation, which the LDS Church holds as prophetic scripture. As one LDS commentator noted, it is difficult to square including such content with a document that explicitly states marriage between man and woman is ordained of God and that gender is an essential characteristic of individual eternal identity.

Sanderson has not left the LDS Church. He has not publicly renounced his membership or denied his faith. He continues to describe himself as a believing Mormon and maintains his church service. What he has done is carved out an increasingly public position that his fiction will reflect progressive ideology on sexuality and gender regardless of what his church teaches, while using nuance language to avoid the direct confrontation that would clarify exactly where he stands.

The Hollywood deals reward that positioning. The audience that made the $41 million Kickstarter happen skews progressive. The streaming platforms acquiring his adaptations are the same platforms that mandate diversity and inclusion in their productions. The co-writers on Skyward built their careers inside the Marvel television apparatus. Sanderson’s transition from independent Kickstarter author to Hollywood player runs through the same ideological corridors that produced the content FP covers critically every week.

The source material of Skyward is a young adult sci-fi series about a determined female pilot fighting for humanity’s survival. On its own terms it is not a politically weaponized work. But the author assembling the Hollywood infrastructure around his catalog has spent the last two years signaling to the industry that he is a safe pair of hands — safe meaning willing to subordinate his stated religious convictions to the requirements of the marketplace.

The Kickstarter was Brandon Sanderson telling Amazon to go to hell. The Skyward deal with Tomorrow Studios is Brandon Sanderson going back to ask if there is room for him at the table. There was always going to be room. There is always room for someone with 50 million books sold who has demonstrated he will not let his faith get in the way of the deal.

What do you think of Sanderson’s trajectory from Kickstarter independent to Hollywood player? Let us know in the comments.

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Quinta Brunson will star as Betty Boop in a feature film developed through her Fifth Chance Productions and Fleischer Studios, per a Variety exclusive published yesterday. The film will trace the origin and evolution of Betty Boop through the perspective of her creator, Max Fleischer.

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Betty Boop was created by Max Fleischer in 1930. She appeared in more than 100 cartoons during her original run, evolving from a poodle-like nightclub singer into the fully human Jazz Age icon recognized around the world today. She was the first cartoon character profiled by A&E’s Biography. She is white. She has always been white. Her visual identity, including the pale skin, the red lips, and the flapper-era aesthetic, is inseparable from the character’s Jazz Age origins and decades of cultural presence.

Brunson is Black. Nobody at Variety, Fifth Chance, or Fleischer Studios addressed this in the announcement. The trade press covered the casting as an uncomplicated celebration.

Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire responded on X: “There is only one reason to bring back an iconic piece of Americana just to race swap it like this. Even a faithful Betty Boop reboot probably wouldn’t sell many tickets. A race swapped Betty Boop has absolutely no chance of success. But they do it anyway out of spite. They aren’t even trying to make money. It’s just pure resentment.”

The account that broke the news, @DiscussingFilm, turned off replies and blocked Walsh.

Walsh then posted: “The account ‘Discussing Film’ turned off the comments and then blocked me. This is a pretty interesting way to have a discussion about film.”

@DiscussingFilm has 2.8 million followers and bills itself as “Your leading source for quick reliable news. Home for healthy and liberating discussion on all things pop culture.” Blocking critics of a casting announcement is the extent of the liberating discussion they offer. Fandom Pulse can confirm this pattern from direct experience: the account blocks outlets and individuals who cover Hollywood critically rather than as a promotional relay service. The name is ironic at this point.

The Betty Boop casting lands inside a well-documented trend. Hollywood has spent the last decade race-swapping established white characters with enough frequency that the pattern requires no elaboration. Ariel in The Little Mermaid. The Witches remake. The upcoming Odyssey from director Christopher Nolan casts Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, a character whose identity is built around the ancient Greek ideal of beauty. Anne Boleyn in a Channel 5 series. Snow White. Hermione in some stage adaptations. The list runs long.

The consistent feature of every announcement: the trade press treats the casting as progress and anyone who objects as a bigot. The consistent feature of the box office: these films underperform relative to their production investment, the audience that might have shown up for a faithful adaptation stays home, and the studio writes off the loss while preparing the next one.

Variety’s framing compared Brunson to Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie with Barbie, describing the project as “a formidable female creator-star reimagining a nearly century-old female character through a contemporary lens.” The Barbie comparison will not survive contact with the opening weekend numbers. Barbie worked because Margot Robbie is Barbie and the film leaned into the character’s existing visual identity rather than replacing it. This film will ask audiences to accept Quinta Brunson as a character whose entire iconography depends on a specific look she does not share, in a biopic framed through the perspective of a Jewish immigrant animator whose greatest creation she is replacing.

Brunson’s statement described Betty Boop as “pleasantly niche” and said there was “a much deeper story to tell” that “could be explored in a way that feels refreshing, subversive, and timeless.” Subversive means replacing what exists. The character described as having “a quiet but undeniable impact on culture for nearly a century” is being handed to a production company whose stated focus is “diverse voices,” which is industry language for a specific mandate.

Mark Fleischer, the creator’s grandson, blessed the arrangement. He said Brunson “so embodies Betty’s love of life, intelligence, humor, sassiness and compassion” that the relationship between the two “burst into life at its mere mention.” None of those qualities are race-specific. None of them require replacing the character’s visual identity. The endorsement from the Fleischer estate will be used to deflect criticism, and it does not answer the question nobody in the press is asking: why does this character need to be reimagined rather than played straight?

The answer Matt Walsh gave is the one the film’s own promotional framing supports. This is not a commercial calculation. Variety named no studio, no distributor, no release date, and no production start. The announcement is an announcement of intent, not a film. When the box office results arrive, assuming the film gets made, the same outlets that blocked critics of the casting will explain the underperformance using reasons unrelated to the casting.

What do you think of the Betty Boop casting? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: The Boys Finale Killed an Elon Musk Character, Elon Said “Pathetic,” and Kripke Called It the Best Review He’ll Ever Get

The Boys series finale aired Wednesday night, and Eric Kripke spent the week before release doing press interviews about how reality keeps catching up to his satire of Donald Trump. Then the finale aired, and reality caught up again, just not in the way Kripke intended.

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The episode introduces a character named Gunter Van Ellis, described by Oh Father as the world’s richest man with 17 children and an amateur astronaut background. Van Ellis arrives at the White House wearing a black hat reading “We Believe In Homelander” and immediately pitches Homelander on “white fertility rates.” Homelander’s response is to take him outside and fly him into space, leaving the punchline to land when Oh Father asks what happened: “He was an astronaut. I took him to space.”

The character is not a subtle allusion. The world’s richest man. Seventeen children. Amateur astronaut. Fertility rates. A MAGA-style hat with Homelander’s name on it. This is not satire. It is a name search away from a defamation filing.

On X, analyst and writer Kangmin Lee posted a thread on the finale: “The show writers turned Homelander into a Trump analogue, and this is how they choose to end The Boys. This entire show was just a deranged sexual humiliation fantasy projected onto Trump. They can’t even produce a decent superhero parody without injecting their twisted fetishes into every script.”

Elon Musk replied to the thread with one word: “Pathetic.”

That single word reached 1.7 million impressions.

Kripke then quote-tweeted Musk’s response to Lee’s thread and posted: “OMG this is his review of what @TheBoysTV did to Homelander. I’ll never get a better review ever. #TheBoys”

The showrunner celebrated Musk calling his finale pathetic as a marketing triumph. He is correct that it generates attention. He is incorrect if he believes that attention translates into the audience he lost over five seasons of increasingly narrow political targeting.

Kripke’s political commentary has been a documented feature of the show’s press strategy for years. In 2024, the Hollywood Reporter asked him directly about the Homelander-Trump parallel and he confirmed it without hesitation, describing the character as “an authoritarian proxy for Donald Trump.” After Trump won re-election in November 2024, Kripke gave an interview saying he was “bummed out” the final season had been written before the election, describing an upcoming plot point as “already happened” in real life and calling the experience “really f**king unsettling.” In April 2026, when Trump posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ on the same week Homelander declared himself a god on the show, Kripke told Polygon: “I am really tired and weary of the world reflecting the show before we get a chance to do it. I appreciate the marketing.”

That is the creative posture of a showrunner who has spent five seasons treating his show as political intervention and his audience as either fellow travelers or targets. The Garth Ennis comic that inspired The Boys was a savage satire of superhero culture and corporate corruption with no single political target. Kripke narrowed it to a Trump allegory, then a Trump-and-Musk allegory, and spent the press cycle for his finale marveling at his own prescience while Musk called the result pathetic to 1.7 million people.

This is the second time the Boys universe has gone after Musk. In Gen V Season 2, a goat named Elon was violently exploded on screen. Musk responded to that one with a joke about blowing up a hotdog named Jeff Bezos. This time he did not joke. “Pathetic” is a different register.

The finale’s Rotten Tomatoes audience score, the show’s viewership trajectory, and Amazon’s decision to cancel Gen V rather than continue the universe are all part of the same picture. The Boys built a devoted audience on sharp superhero satire. It ended as a political broadcast for an audience that already agreed with it, killed a thinly veiled version of the world’s most prominent figure in its final episode, and then celebrated when that figure called it pathetic.

Eric Kripke made the show he wanted to make. The question is whether he made the show the audience wanted to watch.

What do you think, did The Boys finale stick the landing or spend its last episode on political targets instead of story? Let us know in the comments.

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

NEXT: Milly Alcock Says Insulting the Audience Is A Marketing Strategy While Supergirl Tracks Toward a Weak Opening