The latest trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder begins with Korg (director Taika Waititi) telling the story of the space viking, Thor Odinson (Chris Hemsworth), and while Korg’s story gets off track real quick, it is, for the brief moment it happens, perfection. Can Korg narrate the whole film? We need his take on the first appearance of Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale).
Gorr’s fine, though. Let’s talk about Jane.
First, Peter S. Beagle got the rights to his work back. Then news broke that new live-action and musical versions of The Last Unicorn are in the works. And now there’s something equally exciting on the way: new fiction set in the world of The Last Unicorn. Next spring, Ace Books will publish Beagle’s The Way Home, a collection containing two novellas set in the world of his beloved story.
Should you want to refresh your memory of that story, though, you can pick up an updated edition of The Last Unicorn, with the author’s preferred text and an introduction from Patrick Rothfuss. This edition—which also marks the first time the novel is available as an ebook—will be out this July.
Netflix has been teasing this for an entire year. The incredibly expensive fourth season of the streaming hit Stranger Things premieres this Friday, and they really don’t want you to forget. So here’s one! more! trailer—a quick minute of doom, gloom, and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) intoning, “Never tell me the odds.”
Is there a whiff of plot in this trailer? Do we care? Tom Cruise runs! Tom Cruise drives a tiny yellow car! Tom Cruise rides a motorbike off a cliff! These are the things that matter in a Mission: Impossible movie, and the extremely early trailer for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One has all of them in great and entertaining quantities.
It’s been 20 years since Holly Black published Tithe, the first of her Modern Faerie Tale series. Since then, Black has written a lot of things—the beautifully eerie middle-grade novel Doll Bones; The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, the vampire book that made me love vampires again; the Folk of the Air series, which shifted her faerie style into a new key—but you can always tell a Holly Black book. It’s like walking into a certain kind of bar. There are young women who don’t always make the best decisions. There are men with secrets. And there’s a specific, netherworldly sense of place: Black’s stories often take place in in-between towns, not the country or the city, boundarylands where things and people cross over. “They were close enough to Springfield for light pollution to dull the night skies, but galaxies still spangled the air above them.” That kind of place.
Book of Night, Black’s first novel for adults, picks up in the kind of not-fully-a-college town where people order both shitty beers and shots of chartreuse in the local bar, and it feels like a homecoming. We’re obviously in a Holly Black story. Charlie Hall, bartender and thief and con artist, is about to face a dame who walks in and asks Charlie to do something. She should say no. She won’t.
It’s familiar territory and yet not, because Black sets this scene a little differently—with a short prologue that introduces the idea of a blood-sipping shadow. Peter Pan this is not.
If your Friday needs a little dollop of body horror, David Cronenberg (eXistenZ) has got you covered. The redband trailer for Crimes of the Future builds on the creepy promise of the first teaser, digging further into, well, the body. “We’ve all felt that the body was empty,” says a voice that is probably Léa Seydoux. “Empty of meaning. And we’ve wanted to confirm that. So that we could fill it with meaning.”
With meaning in the form of new organs, it looks like.
It’s official: The cast is set, the accelerator is warming up, and NBC’s Quantum Leap sequel has been ordered to series. The network also released a first image of star Raymond Lee (Kevin Can F—k Himself) as renowned physicist Dr. Ben Seong.
Along with Lee, the show stars Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters, The Crow) as Herbert “Magic” Williams, the head of the Quantum Leap project, and Caitlin Bassett as Addison, who uses high-tech means to keep in contact with time travelers. As Variety notes, this is “likely similar to how the original series saw Admiral Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell) communicate with Sam via hologram.”
With Loki‘s Natalie Holt on board, the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi is the first Star Wars project to have a female composer. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, the classically trained violinist talked about using unusual instruments for the show’s music, creating themes for planets (and Stormtroopers), bringing “a bit of modernity” to the sound—and about the piece of music she didn’t write: Obi-Wan Kenobi’s theme. That theme, and the title suite, is all John Williams.
There’s a new teaser trailer for House of the Dragon and it looks… very familiar. By which I mean it’s dark as heck and no one is having the slightest bit of fun. Unlike the last teaser, though, this one actually includes a bit of dialogue—all of it very portentous and dire!
Peacemaker, the John Cena-starring spinoff of The Suicide Squad, may get its own spinoff. Variety reports that Viola Davis is in talks to return to the role of Amanda Waller in a series focused on the character. According to Variety, the series would “build off of” Waller’s appearance at the end of the first season of Peacemaker.
Happy Star Wars Day! The Force is with us in the shape of a new trailer for Obi-Wan Kenobi—one that has only a little more to show us than the first teaser did. What it does have is our first look at a familiar suit. It’s been a while, Ani.
Are we entering a new era of supernatural beings? Vampires are dead (just kidding; the Anne Rice adaptations are about to bring them back), so long live werewolves? There’s going to be a Marvel Halloween special with werewolves, and now Deadline brings word that yet another werewolf tale is about to begin howling at the moon—er, the production schedule. Starring Katrina Law (Arrow‘s Nyssa al Ghul, above) and Frank Grillo (the MCU’s Crossbones), the awkwardly titled Year 2 features werewolves loose in a small town.
This is in no way related to Werewolves Within, which was also set in a small town, but was based on a game.
Sadly, it turns out, Legends can die. Or at least their TV shows can. The CW took an axe to its lineup of DC Comics shows on Friday, whittling the list down to three shows standing. The Flash and Superman & Lois have been renewed; Stargirl has yet to air its third season.
But Batwoman and Legends of Tomorrow have aired their last.
Next week, we get to head out with Captain Pike and the crew of the USS Enterprise when Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres. But Paramount isn’t done offering little teases of the show, the latest of which are the space-tacular opening titles. No cast members are on view here: just the ship, the galaxy, and what looks like a futuristic city. And the voice of Captain Pike (Anson Mount) reciting some familiar words.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is an odd duck—a prequel to the bestselling Hunger Games, but one that focuses Coriolanus Snow, the man who will grow up to be Katniss Everdeen’s nemesis and the fascist president of Panem. But, as Mahvesh Murad wrote in her review, it’s not just about Snow: “It’s also about the evolution of the Games themselves.”
It’ll be interesting to see which aspect of the novel the movie version—from the Catching Fire team of director Francis Lawrence and writer Michael Arndt—leans into more. Though no one’s seen a single frame of the film, it now has a release date: November 17, 2023.
