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According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony has turned to Tomb Raider’s Evan Daugherty to write the screenplay. THR’s sources are specifically describing the film as a “reimagining” of the original concept rather than a sequel or remake.
Their sources point to the 2018 Jason Statham movie The Meg as a model for the new Anaconda, suggesting a more action-oriented approach this time — and maybe even a much bigger serpent this time around.
The original Anaconda hit theaters in 1997. Starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, and Jon Voight, the film follows a documentary crew who venture into the Amazon rainforest only to run afoul of a gigantic, man-eating snake. Despite generally negative reviews, Anaconda inspired three sequels and the 2015 crossover movie Lake Placid vs. Anaconda.
The original movie was also the source of a 2014 RiffTrax Live special, with co-host Michael J. Nelson referring to Anaconda as “indisputably the best digital snake movie of 1997.” We can’t argue with him there.
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This news comes as we’re also learning about another big Hollywood remake. Disney is redoing 1942’s Bambi in the vein of 2019’s The Lion King, with a photorealistic, CG-animated approach.
For more remake mania, check out our picks for 14 movie remakes that are better than the originals. Will the new Anaconda earn a place on that list? Only time will tell.
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
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The WWE Royal Rumble match is defined by its winner–the man or woman who goes on to main event WrestleMania and compete for the WWE Championship. But due to the Rumble’s structure, the person who works the hardest and the person who wins it are not always one and the same.
This gallery is for the standout WWE Superstars in Royal Rumble history: who lasted longest, eliminated the most competitors, or did both. Lasting long is a distinction that carries cachet; traditionally, the role is assigned to a veteran, who can direct traffic and call audibles from inside the ring. There’s a lot of moving parts to a Royal Rumble. For it to go down the way it was scripted backstage requires a ton of communication and coordination.
Make sure to tune in on Sunday, January 26, to watch the 2020 WWE Royal Rumble live on pay-per-view and the WWE Network. And if you liked this gallery, be sure to check out our gallery on the most shocking eliminations in Royal Rumble history.
In October of 2016 the world lost one of the greatest platforms for short-form comedy of all time. The app that gave us masterpiece skits such as ‘Chris, Is That A Weed?,’ ‘And They Were Roommates,’ ‘Um, I Never Went To Oovoo Javer,’ and ‘Fre Sh A Vacado’ was cruelly taken away from us. In its wake, the world mourned and, if we’re honest, we never got over that loss. To this day, Vine lovers spend hours reliving the glory years. Like a person sadly scrolling back through their ex’s Instagram thinking about what went wrong and how it could have been different, we latch onto compilations like Vines That Keep Me From Ending it All, Vines That Butter My Croissant, Vines That Give My Depression A Suppression, and Vines That Are Cleaner Than Your Grandma’s Kitchen on YouTube to recapture some of the glory.
Fans were given hope when Vine co-creator Dom Hofmann announced he was creating a successor called Byte and, despite some doubt as to whether it would be realized, the app has launched on iOS and Android. Designed for the modern age of social media, Byte allows users to shoot six-second videos and upload them, which others can share (ReByte).
In a Twitter post announcing its launch, Hofmann described Byte as “both familiar and new” and said the team behind it hopes it will “resonate with people who feel something’s been missing.” If you’re wondering whether that’s you, take a look at the image below and if you know who that lad is going to see, it is.
The next step for Byte, and what distinguishes it from many other social video platforms, is its partner program, which will be implemented to pay creators. “Byte celebrates creativity and community, and compensating creators is one important way we can support both,” reads a tweet from the Byte Twitter account. As of yet, details on the partner program have not been provided.
While getting a Vine successor from one of the original creators is certainly a big deal, whether it succeeds remains to be seen. Byte joins a competitive landscape–one that is very much built on the successes of Vine. Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram all offer users a way to deliver bite-sized videos to their followers and have additional social networking hooks. TikTok is perhaps the most direct competitor to Byte and its where much of the same kind of content is now being produced. (Read: TikTok has big Vine energy). Stars are being created on TikTok daily, and major celebrities have a presence there. Global corporations are also recognizing its marketing capabilities and potential to reach a massive audience. TikTok is very much having its moment right now, and it may be difficult for Byte to draw attention away from it.
Nevertheless, a new video platform that evokes the heyday of Vine is certainly exciting. Plans to compensate its creators give it an edge in theory, and if it can execute could be just enough to make Byte competitive.
Mat: Everything is pointing to Lesnar winning the match, which leads me to believe there will be a unification of both Raw and Smackdown’s main event championships. There is nothing I want less than Lesnar to win, but with the build up to the match, that’s where it seems to be headed.
However, this would be a great time for WWE to pull of something really cool like giving Drew McIntyre a big push. At the end of the Rumble, it could come down to McIntyre and Lesnar, and McIntyre could eliminate the beast, becoming this year’s Rumble winner. Ultimately, he would then challenge Lesnar for the title at Wrestlemania, already setting up a nice story between the two.
Note: This prediction was featured in the match card article.
Chris: I just… I don’t know, man. Brock being in this does absolutely nothing for me. I’m sure it’ll set up a rematch with Cain Velasquez at Wrestlemania, which also does nothing for me. I don’t think either man will win. The winner is going to be Roman Reigns, who will go on to challenge The Fiend at Wrestlemania. I’d love to be wrong and have something exciting and fresh happen–like Mat’s suggestion of Drew McIntyre winning. Let’s be honest, though. Roman is winning.
Chris Pereira: I’ve fallen out of watching wrestling in recent years, but I did spend a Sunday night last January watching what I thought was the 2019 Royal Rumble. The new PPV was, in fact, happening the following Sunday, and I was watching a replay of 2015’s main event. Based on what I gleaned from this experience, I think Sin Cara has a real shot this year.
Editor’s note: No one tell Chris P. that Sin Cara isn’t with WWE anymore. We don’t want to break his heart.
An ARG, or Alternate Reality Game, can be considered a treasure hunt of sorts where internet detectives can follow clues that might lead to some kind of bigger reveal or secret. Fans have already discovered two mysterious YouTube videos that may reveal some things about Frictional Games’ next project.
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As previously reported, Frictional Games recently updated its website to host an animated image of some kind of pulsating white circle. But also on the website is a mysterious eyeball icon under Frictional’s “Follow us” panel which includes links to the company’s social media accounts.
The eyeball icon doesn’t lead anywhere, but hovering over it reveals a partial URL that can be copy and pasted to YouTube. The result is this mysterious video titled “Box 52, Tape 16.”
The video only shows some rocks recorded on an old video recorder. But the video has a close up on one rock with a mysterious eye symbol drawn on it. The video description says the footage is from a video cassette “marked Shetpe, KSSR.” The KSSR is short for the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, the former name of the country of Kazakhstan when it was part of the Soviet Union. Shetpe is the name of a city in that region.
Frictional fans are on the company’s Discord server trying to figure out if there are any other clues. A second video was uncovered after investigating the Frictional website’s CSS which hid another YouTube video link.
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This video, titled “Box 7 Reel 2, Partial Success” doesn’t have any footage. Instead, it’s an audio-only video where you can hear some pretty nasty noises including what sounds like the screams of a monster.
The description for the second video says the audio is from a video marked “Triple Crown.” On a Google Doc compiling the ARG clues, there’s speculation that the Triple Crown is a reference to the Egyptian Hemhem Crown worn by Pharos. Hemhem also apparently means “scream” and there are three screams heard in the video.
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Frictional Games previously hosted an ARG to tease its last horror game, Soma. So this is par for the course for the developers. The last time Frictional’s ARG was solved, it revealed a gameplay trailer, so perhaps there’s a big reveal hidden under all these clues.
Check out IGN’s review of Soma here and our list of top 25 scariest games for more on Frictional Games.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the 1942 animated film is being revisited. THR’s sources indicate the Bambi remake will be similar to 2019’s The Lion King in that it will use CG animation to create a photorealistic style, even if it’s not technically a “live-action” movie. Disney’s hired Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Lindsey Beer (Chaos Walking) to pen the screenplay. Production company Depth of Field (The Farewell) is also attached to the project. No director or cast have been revealed yet.
We’ll be interested to see how a photorealistic Bambi movie handles *that* infamous death scene. We’re guessing it won’t be anything like Saturday Night Live’s hilarious live-action Bambi spoof, which features Dwayne Johnson as a musclebound Bambi and Taran Killam impersonating Vin Diesel as Thumper.
Grim subject matter notwithstanding, it’s not hard to understand why Disney would be interested in adding Bambi to its ever-growing list of live-action remakes. Disney became the first studio to surpass $10 billion at the box office in 2019, thanks in no small part to the success of remakes like The Lion King ($1.656B) and Aladdin ($1.051B).
Next up on the live-action remake front is Mulan, which stars Yifei Liu as the titular heroine and is scheduled to hit theaters on March 27, 2020. It’s one of many big movies we’re looking forward to watch in 2020.
Disney is also developing a remake of The Little Mermaid, with Halle Bailey starring as Ariel and reports indicating Javier Bardem is in talks to play King Triton and Melissa McCarthy is in talks to play Ursula. You can check out all the latest Disney remakes in the slideshow below:
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Will you watch a photorealistic Bambi movie? Let us know in the comments below.
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
McGregor spoke to IGN at a Birds of Prey media event, saying that these delays and holds happen all the time on projects, but it shouldn’t impact when fans around the galaxy will see the Obi-Wan Kenobi series debut on Disney+.
“It’s just slid to next year, that’s all. The scripts were really good. Now that Episode IX came out and everyone at Lucasfilm has got more time to spend on the writing, they felt they wanted more time to write the episodes.” McGregor said. “I’ve read about eighty, ninety percent of what they’ve written so far, and it’s really, really good. Instead of shooting this August, they just want to start shooting in January, that’s all. Nothing more dramatic then that. It often happens in projects, they just wanted to push it to next year. It will have the same release date, I don’t think it will affect the release date. They are still shooting towards having the film release when it was going to be originally.”
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Developing…
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Now that Star Trek: Picard is out in the world, Trekkies (c’est moi) are scrambling to discuss the new wrinkles in the Star Trek universe that the show has now introduced, and are eager to dissect how said wrinkles may or may not connect to the fabric of the franchise’s history at large. And, boy howdy, has there been a lot to discuss.
There are new questions about Data’s android lineage (!), the state of the Borg, the operational ethos of Starfleet, and where AI technology might be 18 years after we last saw the Next Generation crew in action. Let’s dig into the biggest spoiler topics from the Picard premiere episode (read our review!) and how they’ve changed the world of Star Trek already.
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Brent Spiner, reprising his role as Data, appears in Star Trek: Picard in dream sequences. In the first episode, Picard (Patrick Stewart) imagines himself to be playing poker with the android, discussing art, and having conversations like the ones they used to have decades previous. In those dreams, Data appears to be giving Picard clues as to the mysterious tenacity of his positronic brain, even after death, and the true nature of Dahj (Isa Briones), a mysterious young woman who may or may not be a synthetic life form herself.
While Data died in Star Trek: Nemesis (2002), it was implied in that film that his legacy was to live on in the form of B-4 (also Spiner), a rudimentary prototype made by Data’s creator. B-4 also appears in the Picard premiere, seen as body parts in a drawer. A clever android scientist (Alison Pill) explains that, while Data’s memories and brain functions were uploaded into B-4’s brain (as explained in Nemesis), the information didn’t really take, and B-4 did not succeed Data. And, because of a mysterious attack on Mars by rogue androids (called Synths in Picard), all synthetic life forms have been banned by Starfleet. This may be a difficult ban to enforce in the world of Star Trek, seeing as Data and Geordi once created a sentient hologram of Moriarity from Sherlock Holmes entirely by accident.
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But the ban is in place, meaning there are no artificial beings in the time of Star Trek: Picard in quite the same way as we’ve seen in the past. The fate of Voyager’s EMH has yet to be discussed, but we do know that holograms like him are now programmed to behave more like machines, as is demonstrated in the scene wherein Picard visits his archive; the Index hologram is cold and robotic and talks about how “humor” is a relatively recent addition to its programming.
Data, however, will continue to loom large over Star Trek: Picard, as Dahj is something like Data’s daughter. This is, no doubt, a direct allusion to Lal, the android daughter Data attempted to build in the Next Generation episode “The Offspring.” We don’t know yet who created Dahj or why, but we do know, as of this episode, that only a tiny piece of Data’s positronic brain needed to survive in order to replicate the technology that, essentially, made him alive. Evidently, android technology is such that only a single android “cell” is needed in order to “clone” an android. And Dahj has memories of Picard, too… somehow. So while Data may not play a direct role in Star Trek: Picard, he now may finally have the daughter he always wanted.
This goes to a larger theme of the show when it comes to the relationship the human body and the life sciences have to artificial intelligence. It’s revealed at the very end of Star Trek: Picard’s premiere that a mysterious cadre of Romulans has salvaged a Borg ship, and has been enacting a mysterious plot from deep within it. One supposes it wasn’t going to be long before Star Trek: Picard was to address the Borg, and the show’s creators went for broke in the very first episode. Picard, as we all likely know, was once assimilated by those cybernetic villains, and had their parasite-like technology working its way into his body and his brain. Picard, then, was once technically partly machine.
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Data was a machine that longed to be human and Picard was a human that was forced to be a machine. Dahj is as close to human as a machine has yet become in Star Trek (from what we know; we don’t spend a lot of time with Dahj before her assassination), so, from a thematic viewpoint, it makes perfect sense that Picard and Data — both somewhere between humanity and the mechanical — should be the ones to explore who she is.
The last time we saw the Borg proper in the Trek series timeline (that is; not Seven of Nine, who will also appear in Star Trek: Picard) was in “Endgame,” the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager. In that episode a future version of Captain Janeway infected the Borg with a pathogen that essentially wiped out the entire species (and, yes, technically Janeway commits genocide). The remnants and debris of the Borg was not addressed, so it’s entirely possible that defunct Borg ships are adrift everywhere in the Delta quadrant, ready to be picked up and repurposed by anyone enterprising enough to find and repair them. And, if Borg drones can be revived in a shadowy plot to cause an android uprising, you can bet that Star Trek: Picard will go there.
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And what about those Romulans? In the opening scenes of Star Trek: Picard, we see that Picard has been living with a pair of Romulan citizens (Orla Brady and Jamie McShane). These Romulans are without a home, as Star Trek: Picard is following an event seen in Star Trek 2009 (which, technically overlaps the Kelvin timeline of the reboot movies and the original Trek canon): the destruction of the Romulan homeworld by a supernova. It’s explained in a news interview that Picard participates in that he was the one to aid in the rescue and relocation of some 900 million Romulans, having left command of the Enterprise in order to do so. Soon thereafter, however — and partly because of the Synth attack on Mars which destroyed the ships that would’ve been used in the Dunkirk-like rescue operation — the Federation changed their minds and ordered Picard to abandon the effort, as the Romulans were the organization’s oldest enemy. Picard, objecting to the Federation’s cold rejection of humanitarianism (Romulanitarianism?), bitterly retired.
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There’s not enough space here to explore the full history of the Romulan Empire. Needless to say, the last time we saw them, the Empire was not in the best shape, having crumbled after Shinzon’s uprising in Nemesis, and then their sun going supernova. This means that all the Romulans we’ll see on Star Trek: Picard are struggling refugees which Picard himself aims to protect. No points for recognizing the modern-day parallels to many 2020 governments’ treatment of refugees. This is classic Trek, using sci-fi to explore sticky modern politics, and it will play directly into who Picard is as a character.
It also points to a dark downturn for the Federation, though. The Federation has traditionally lived by an ethos of inclusion and diplomacy. Even when faced with singular rogue enemies, Starfleet captains have always erred on the side of protecting and caring for them. Alliances and cultural exchange has always been more valuable to Starfleet than combat and power and domination. In turning their back on Romulan refugees, the Federation seems to have become more self-protecting. More selfish. Perhaps less diplomatic. You can be sure these themes will be explored in later episodes of Star Trek: Picard.
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As a declaration of intent, the premiere of Star Trek: Picard seems focused and cohesive. Fans have only had one episode to get used to the new ideas above, but the show is well-anchored by Stewart’s dignified performance and shows promise. Some are eager to see where this will go.
What do you think of all of these revelations? Let’s discuss in the comments!