Month: October 2019

Marvel TV head Jeph Loeb, the man behind shows like Agents of SHIELD, is reportedly exiting his position and the company in the coming weeks.

After almost a decade with the company, Loeb is planning his exit according to Variety, which broke the news Tuesday morning. Reports state that it’s expected he will leave Marvel in the upcoming weeks, looking to make a deal with a new company.

Loeb got his start as the writer for movies like Teen Wolf and Commando before a transition into comic book writing, with his most notable story being Batman: The Long Halloween. From there, Loeb became an executive producer on many Marvel TV shows such as Runaways, Daredevil, Legion, and plenty of the Marvel animated series.

The writer/producer has left his mark on Marvel TV as a whole, even if said shows didn’t have a larger tie to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With Disney+ coming down the road–which includes numerous original series that exist within the MCU–this news may come as a bit of a disappointment to fans who know Loeb’s work at the company.

Nintendo Switch has gotten GameCube controller support via third-party imitators and even an official adapter, but a new controller option lets you use a button layout similar to the classic system without giving up the Switch’s unique controller features.

The Sades Joy-Con takes the familiar GameCube button layout–complete with giant A button in the middle–and makes them detachable just like regular Joy-Con controllers. It’s available for purchase on Amazon for $60, and is currently expected to ship sometime in November or early December.

See SADES Joy-Con at Amazon

The Sades design takes a few other liberties as well. The controllers are slightly curved for ergonomics unlike the fairly flat standard Joy-Cons, which also helps it appear more like the classic GameCube controller. They’re also wireless and include the NFC functionality for Amiibo support, unlike a GameCube controller. And like regular Joy-Cons, they can be attached to the system, used independently, or attached to a Joy-Con Grip.

It’s a neat design and a nice concept, but user reviews for the new controller are sparse. Sades’ other Nintendo Switch accessories include a headset and carrying case.

The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors. GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

With Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising one of his most iconic roles in Terminator: Dark Fate, fans of the franchise are in for a treat. It’s not every day that the stars of genre-defining films get together to do it all over again in a new entry decades later, but this is Terminator we’re talking about–there’s time travel, alternate futures, genocidal computers, and killer robots. Anything can happen.

That said, Schwarzenegger’s return to the series does raise one nagging question: Why would a Terminator age? In hunting for an answer, we chatted with Terminator creator and Dark Fate producer and co-writer James Cameron, and it turns out the answer was under our noses all along–or at least, under someone’s nose.

“Look, it’s all in the first film,” Cameron told journalists in Los Angeles, video-chatting in from the set of his Avatar sequels in New Zealand. “Sweat, bad breath, everything–he’s a cyborg. The ‘org’ part is ‘organic.’ There’s flesh over the outside.”

“The bigger question is how something that’s got some kind of synthetic material that’s not flesh can come through the time field, but that’s another geek-out story for another time,” Cameron added as an aside.

“He’s organic on the outside,” the filmmaker continued. “He’s got to eat to support the organic part of his body. It might only be 30% of him by weight, but he definitely has human flesh. The science behind that is complete bulls***, but it’s a cool idea, right?”

So what about that “under our noses” joke? Well, Cameron pointed out that in the original Terminator, there’s a scene in which someone comments on the T-800’s major stank. “In the first movie, he’s actually got sort of gangrene and his wounds are kind of rotting by the end of the film,” Cameron explained. “When the guy pounds on the door and says, ‘Hey buddy, you got a dead cat in there?’ It’s like, he’s rotting. His human flesh is dying before it all gets burned off. All biological systems are subject to age unless you were to specifically genetically tinker that out, which obviously they didn’t do. So his outer form ages.”

In T2, the T-800 says his metal endoskeleton can run for 120 years, even after its semi-organic outer layer has rotted and sloughed off. And Dark Fate shows that that process just happens to look exactly like normal human aging. “The flesh will die and fall off eventually, and then he’ll just be the endoskeleton walking around,” Cameron said. “A little harder to blend in at that point.”

So the next time we see a T-800 in a Terminator movie, will it be a shiny CG endoskeleton walking around? That’s a possible route they could take should Dark Fate prove to be Schwarzenegger’s final appearance in the franchise–but Cameron also said to not rule out the possibility that the Governator might be back yet again after this.

“It’s an interesting point. I mean, I think that you could make a strong case that there was probably a rack of Arnold-based T-800s up in the Skynet version of the future, and some or all of them were dispersed through time to targeted places,” he teased. “I wouldn’t rule out ever seeing Arnold again in a Terminator movie. Look, if we make a s*** ton of money with this film and the cards say that they like Arnold, I think Arnold can come back. I’m a writer. I can think of scenarios. We don’t have a plan for that right now, let me put it that way. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of goodwill for that character in the audience.”

Terminator: Dark Fate hits theaters Friday, November 1. In the meantime, early reactions so far are positive, and James Cameron has revealed that he’s already planned out two Dark Fate sequels.

Terminator: Dark Fate is unique in the world of big budget, blockbuster film franchises–it’s a sort of soft reboot that resets the series back 30 years, but not all the way to the beginning. Dark Fate serves as a direct sequel to 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and it pretends every other Terminator movie that’s been released since then doesn’t exist. It continues the story of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor and the T-800 Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and introduces new characters played by Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, and Gabriel Luna.

And if Terminator creator and Dark Fate producer James Cameron has his way, this movie will prove to be the beginning of a new chapter in the Terminator story.

Dark Fate is in fact the first Terminator movie since T2 with which Cameron is involved, and he helped develop the story from the beginning, the legendary producer told journalists during a recent interview in Los Angeles (Cameron video-chatted in from the set of his Avatar sequels in New Zealand). That story includes not just this movie, but multiple sequels–provided Dark Fate is well-received.

“I feel like one of my major motivations on coming back to the, hopefully, franchise was to explore the human relationship with artificial intelligence,” Cameron said. “I don’t feel we did that in Dark Fate. I feel that we set the stage or we set the table for that exploration, and that exploration would take place in a second film and a third film. And we know exactly where we’re going to take that idea.”

Dark Fate sees future-history repeating itself, despite Sarah Connor’s success destroying Cyberdyne Systems and averting Judgment Day at the end of T2. In Dark Fate, a new kind of Terminator (Gabrielle Luna’s REV-9) travels back to a new present to hunt down a different person (Natalia Reyes’s Dani, being protected by Mackenzie Davis’s future-soldier Grace). Clearly, Sarah Connor’s future–and Grace’s past–isn’t all that changed after all.

“What we wanted to get in the first movie was this idea that it’s just going to keep happening,” Cameron explained. “The names will change, but the basic conflict is going to continue to take place until it gets resolved one way or the other. And so I believe we’ve set that table–and if, like I said, if we get the opportunity, we know where to take the story…I think you start simple and then you elaborate, and you can elaborate over a series of films. If they’re made by the same people with the same intentions and the same philosophy, then there can be a kind of a story arc across multiple films.”

The filmmaker clarified that he believes Dark Fate works well as a standalone film, but continued to emphasize that he and his collaborators (presumably including Dark Fate director Tim Miller, as well as the movie’s several other credited writers) have an entire trilogy planned, with Dark Fate as the first entry.

“The story credits for the movie are a little weird, because you’ve also got [Charles] ‘Chic’ Eglee and Josh Friedman in the story credits, because we sat in the room and we broke story across three movies before we focused down onto the first of the proposed three, which is Dark Fate,” Cameron revealed. “So there’s really a plotline that runs all the way out through a third film, if we get to that stage. And the reason for that is you spend a couple of weeks to future-proof yourself so you don’t paint yourself into a corner and you could still do the things that you want to do.”

Cameron said the trilogy’s “innate conflict” will involve stopping the rise of an “artificial super intelligence” once and for all–not a specific one, like T2’s Skynet, but the general one that Dark Fate posits is humanity’s ultimate foe.

“Sarah has had to adjust to the fact that there’s probably a kind of inevitability, like a great kind of forcing factor that always tends to see the rise of an artificial super intelligence–that it’s just the direction that the universe is heading. This is a collision that the human race is on,” Cameron said. “What Sarah had done [in T2] was she kicked the can down the road, but she’s just going to have the same fight again, and have it again, and have it again, until there’s a resolution. So in our grand scheme, what we came up with is, there is a resolution. Kick the can as many times as you want, but there has to be a resolution.”

What about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s iconic, genre-defining character? Is this the Governator’s final appearance in the franchise? Cameron suggested maybe not.

“It’s an interesting point. I mean, I think that you could make a strong case that there was probably a rack of Arnold-based T-800s up in the Skynet version of the future, and some or all of them were dispersed through time to targeted places,” he teased. “I wouldn’t rule out ever seeing Arnold again in a Terminator movie. Look, if we make a s*** ton of money with this film and the cards say that they like Arnold, I think Arnold can come back. I’m a writer. I can think of scenarios. We don’t have a plan for that right now, let me put it that way. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s a lot of goodwill for that character in the audience.”

Based on the early reactions to Terminator: Dark Fate so far, it seems there’s a decent chance these sequels might really happen. If that’s the case, Terminator fans are in for a wild ride.

Terminator: Dark Fate hits theaters Friday, November 1. In related news, Cameron also explained why Schwarzenegger’s T-800 appears to have aged like a human.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.