Month: May 2020

Val Kilmer taken on some huge roles in his time, including Jim Morrison in The Doors and Doc Holliday in Tombstone, but there’s one major role he took that perhaps did him more harm than good. Val Kilmer played Batman in 1995’s somewhat ironically titled Batman Forever, and dropped out before Batman and Robin. The reviews were not kind–and neither was director Joel Schumacher, who has not been particularly charitable when talking about the actor.

Now, in a lengthy (and excellent) deep-dive into his career and current life with The New York Times, Kilmer–who has difficulty speaking now after receiving a tracheostomy for throat cancer–has opened up about the role. Although he has previously cited scheduling conflicts as the reason for stepping away, it turns out that Kilmer just outright did not enjoy playing Batman, and that a set visit led to a realization for him.

In the piece, Kilmer recalls that Warren Buffett and his grandchildren visited the set to meet Batman, and that he stayed around in the suit for their sake. However, once the kids arrived, it became clear that they didn’t actually care about meeting Batman, and wanted to play with his gadgets instead. “That’s why it’s so easy to have five or six Batmans,” he told the reporter. “It’s not about Batman. There is no Batman.” On top of this, the suit was extremely uncomfortable to wear.

The article also shows off a weird trinket from Kilmer’s home–a big, detailed Batman statue, with Batman’s head removed and replaced with the head of Mark Twain.

Val Kilmer is set to appear in Top Gun Maverick on December 23, reprising the role of Iceman.

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The professional golf game The Golf Club 2019 Featuring PGA Tour is now free on Xbox One and PC, but only for a limited time. You can grab the game for free right now on either platform’s store.

Once downloaded, you can play as much as you want until May 13 on Xbox One and through May 14 on Steam. You can find download links here: Xbox One, Steam. More specifically, the free play period ends at 11:59 PM PT for Xbox One on May 13 and 9:59 AM PT on May 14 for PC.

Progress carries forward for those who decide to buy the game after the free promo period.

Developed by HB Studios, The Golf Club 2019 Featuring PGA Tour is a sequel to The Golf Club 2 that features the PGA Tour license for the first time. This brings a number of real-world Tour courses to the game, including TPC Boston and TPC Sawgrass, while the game has a course-editor, too. There are no player likenesses, however, so you can’t tee it up as Tiger Woods or any other real-world player.

The Golf Club 2019 Featuring PGA Tour scored an 8/10 in GameSpot’s review. Other reviews were mostly positive as well, but you should know that this is a challenging golf sim, not an arcade game. 2K is offering up the game for free as part of its Give Back Project.

The series is published by 2K, and the franchise will continue with a new installment called PGA Tour 2K21. 2K recently released a teaser trailer for this game, while the full reveal is coming on May 14.

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The Nintendo Switch is currently going through a shortage of stock, with the current COVID-19 pandemic slowing down the production of units in factories around the world. Thankfully, it seems that this shortage is going to be over soon, with figures from the Nintendo financial results release indicating that Nintendo believes the impact of production will be over by this Summer.

David Gibson, who works for the research company Astris Advisory Japan KK, live-tweeted and translated the release of the financial results as they released. The Switch is only halfway through its lifecycle, with no plans for a Nintendo Switch 2 anytime soon, so the continued sales of the console are key to the success of the system.

The sales of the Nintendo Switch are currently on track to overtake the Wii’s total sales figures even with the setback in production. The sales on games during this period for the Switch have remained strong as well, with Animal Crossing: New Horizons selling 13.41 million copies since launch, with 50% off those as digital sales.

For the time being, the Nintendo Switch is still sold out across the world and online. While the Nintendo Switch Lite has come back in stock periodically, each time the stock has sold out once again.

Tokyo Game Show is the latest 2020 event to be cancelled, at least in its usual form. The show’s organizers have announced in a press release, shared on Twitter by user Wario 64, that the physical event will not go ahead this year. Instead, it’ll be entirely digital.

The event, which will be held between September 24 and 27, will now take place entirely online. “Due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) on a global scale and the situation remains unpredictable in Japan as well, the organizer and co-organizers have reached this decision after a long consideration to place the utmost priority on the health and safety of visitors, exhibitors, and stakeholders,” the press release reads.

You can read it in its entirety below.

Tokyo Game Show is, generally, a big show for many publishers–last year Sony used it to show off Death Stranding in-depth ahead of its release. In 2018, close to 300,000 people attended the show.

This is far from the first major games event cancelled in 2020. Paris Games Week will not go ahead, E3 will not happen this year, and GDC will be digital only.

With the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 on the way this year, Tokyo Game Show likely would have been used to showcase the next generation of games–that could still happen, but don’t expect hands-on reports.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated when more details emerge of what Tokyo Game Show will look like, and how it will operate, as a digital event.

The American rock band Weezer is coming to The Simpsons. The band will be featured in the end-credits sequence for this Sunday’s episode, performing the show’s theme music in a heavier manner.

The clip was posted to YouTube ahead of this weekend’s Season 31 episode, and it rocks. The group is captured faithfully, it seems, with lead singer Rivers Cuomo’s character model looking particularly authentic-looking. The clip also shows Moe Szyslak in attendance at the concert, throwing up the flying W sign as he enjoys the gig. You can check out the clip further down the page.

This is just the latest musical outro for The Simpsons in recent years. A 2019 episode of the show featured a music video for the song “White Wine Spritzer” by the Ned Flanders-themed metal band, Okilly Dokilly–and it was truly a sight to behold. Before that, the band Green Day was featured in The Simpsons Movie, performing the show’s theme and trying to tell the crowd to be more environmentally responsible. Earlier on, Fall Out Boy performed The Simpsons theme for the outro segment in Season 20, Episode 9, “Lisa The Drama Queen.”

In other news, The Simpsons has predicted the future once again. Fans recently noticed that Season 4, Episode 21, “Marge In Chains,” features a sequence where members of Springfield are demanding a cure for a virus, only to get attacked by killer bees.

Disney is producing a live-action Hercules movie, and the Hollywood giant has recruited The Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo to produce it. In a new interview, the brothers spoke about their long-running fandom of Hercules and offered some teases for what to expect from the new movie.

Anthony Russo told Collider that he and his brother are “Hercules fanatics.” When they caught wind that Disney was interested in making a live-action film, they made the case to executives that they were the right partners to produce it. “And here we are,” Anthony Russo said.

The film is only in the earliest stages of development, the brothers said. Right now, they aren’t even sure if it will be a musical like the 1997 animated movie it’s based on.

“We can’t say one way or the other,” Anthony said, immediately thereafter confirming that “music will certainly be a part of it” in some capacity.

What the brothers did confirm, however, is that their new live-action Hercules will not be a “literal translation” of the animated movie. They are keen to bring “something new to the table” with the movie.

“We’re going to give you a different story. I think we’ll do something that’s in the vein of the original and inspired by it, but we also bring some new elements to the table.”

According to reports, Disney has hired Godzilla and Wonder Woman 1984 writer Dave Calla ham to work on the script for the new Hercules movie. The original movie featured the voice of Tate Donovan as Hercules, with Danny DeVito playing Phil and James Woods voicing Hades. There is no word yet on who will star in the new film, who will direct it, and when it will release.

The next live-action Disney remake will be Mulan. The film was set to be released in March, but the COVID-19 pandemic led it to be delayed until July. Other Disney live-action movies on the way include the 101 Dalmatians spin-off Cruella, which is currently set for a May 2021 release, as well as films based on The Little Mermaid, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, and Bambi.

The Russo brothers’ latest production, the action thriller Extraction, arrived on Netflix in April. Check out GameSpot’s Extraction review here. The movie is getting a new instalment, but we don’t know yet if it will be a prequel or a sequel.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a film that we loved, as did many others. Producer Christopher Miller recently participated in a watch-along on Twitter, tweeting out facts and observations about the movie to give fans additional insight into how it was made. Among some great insights was one particular reveal of a scene that was not allowed in the film–one we’d very much like to see for the sequel.

During the watch-along, one fan asked Miller about a rumored cameo from Tom Holland, who plays Spider-Man in the current Marvel Cinematic Universe. He says that Holland’s cameo was planned alongside two other former Spider-Man actors–Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man 1-3) and Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man 1 and 2).

Miller says that they pitched the idea to Sony, but were told that it was “too soon.” It’s unclear how the three actors would have been used–and even whether they would have all played Spider-Man–but in any case, it did not happen.

A sequel is coming–it was originally scheduled for April 8, 2022, but has since been delayed until October 7. Considering how much time will have passed by the date of its release–and how well-received the current cinematic run of Spider-Man is–perhaps we’ll see this idea revisited.

Tom Holland will next play Spider-Man in a third MCU film, which is due to start shooting in July–although whether that actually happens is up in the air right now due to COVID-19.