We all love a nostalgic return to some old classics. Whether it’s simply a childhood favorite or massive cinema blockbusters, finding comfort in these hits is a sure way to start a feelgood afternoon.
If you’re looking to top up your current 4K Blu-ray collection, it’s your lucky day. Currently, Best Buy has a sale on this selection of brilliant films is available with up to 25% off the retail price, including discounts on the likes of the Jurassic Park 5-film collection, The Mummy trilogy, or even cult-classic Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.
You can see the whole trilogy through to the bitter (or lager) end, as the Three Flavours set features Edgar Wright’s complete trilogy, with The World’s End, Hot Fuzz, and Shaun of the Dead all included.
If you’re looking for even more incredible 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray deals, you should also check out the new Back to the Future 35th Anniversary set, even featuring a radical working hoverboard.
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Robert Anderson is a Commerce Writer for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21
Here’s a sentence we never could have predicted writing, but which makes perfect sense in 2020: Xbox boss Phil Spencer will be interviewed inside Animal Crossing by the writer of a Star Wars movie.
Spencer will appear on the August 12 episode of Animal Talking, the interview show run by Star Wars: Rogue One writer Gary Whitta that is held inside the world of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Given that Microsoft is in the midst of a very important year with the launch of the Xbox Series X, xCloud, and Halo Infinite, this seems like it could be a great interview.
Spencer will appear on the show alongside actor Dylan Sprouse and musical guest Lisa Loeb.
Whitta started Animal Talking earlier this year, and it’s taken off in a big way. Some of his previous guests included other popular people in the gaming world like Laura Bailey, Ashley Johnson, Cory Barlog, and Cliff Bleszinski, as well as singers Selena Gomez and Sting, just to name a few. Actor Danny Trejo also has a recurring segment on the show where he shows off his Animal Crossing island.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a mega-hit for Nintendo. The game has sold a breathtaking 22.4 million copies to become the second best-selling Nintendo Switch game ever, only trailing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (26.74 million copies sold).
As for Whitta, he is the former editor-in-chief of PC Gamer magazine. Before he worked on Rogue One, Whitta wrote the Denzel Washington movie The Book of Eli and the Will Smith film After Earth. In addition to Animal Talking, Whitta recently sold one of his scripts for a “big” new movie.
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A recent Red Dead Redemption 2 Online update added the Naturalist specialty–an animal-focused role that gives players more ways to interact with the game’s wildlife. However, some players are claiming that since the new update was added, their own horses have been behaving a little… strangely.
Some of the complaints involve obvious bugs like the latter, with horses disappearing, ignoring calls, and straight-up flying through the air. Others are less perceptible, however, with players taking to Reddit to check if their horse was really acting dumber than usual, or if they were just unlucky.
These players have reported their horses bolting at the slightest provocation, tripping and throwing riders on minor obstacles, and generally being difficult to control–even on horses they’ve had for a long time, and achieved full bonds with.
Other players have reported problems with wagons, as well as horse cores draining faster than usual.
Though the apparently bugged update has been live for over a week, the issue hasn’t been acknowledged by Rockstar’s Support account. Players may yet be stuck with dumb horses until the next update arrives.
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Microsoft only just started publishing tracks from Halo Infinite‘s OST, but the Halo community is already getting creative with it.
Developer 343’s latest Spotlight blog post highlights a guitar cover of Gareth Coker’s song, “Set A Fire In Your Heart” by chicken alexander bonez on YouTube. This guitar cover really turns things up to 11 and provides a much more metal spin on the normally orchestral track. Check it out below.
The Halo community over the years has proven to be very committed and creative. Halo 5‘s Forge mode spawned all manner of great and unique content like Star Wars podracing and beer pong.
“Set A Fire In Your Heart” is the second track from Halo Infinite’s OST that has been released so far. The other one is “Reverie,” by the game’s other composer, Curtis Schweitzer. Presumably it will only be a matter of time before someone publishes a guitar cover of this song, too.
Martin Scorsese’s next movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, was originally meant to film this past March. Now, the film has set new production dates after delaying due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Osage News is reporting that the film, which will film in Osage County, Oklahoma, is now set to begin filming in February 2021.
According to Geoffrey Standing Bear, the principal chief of Osage, the film will be shot over 16 weeks. The film is expected to create a lot of work for local residents. Chad Renfro and Addie Roanhorse are serving as Osage Nation ambassadors for the film, which is an adaptation of David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name.
“With safety for all being of greatest concern, once the industry protocol has been established and it is safe to embark on this important project, they will reach back out to us,” Renfro said in a statement.
The film is set to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in starring roles. DiCaprio has previously worked with Scorsese on The Departed, Shutter Island, and The Wolf of Wall Street, whereas this will be De Niro and Scorsese’s 10th film together.
Another (much smaller) part will be played by the auction winner who scored a walk-on role in the film.
Despite The Fellowship Of The Ring being almost 20 years old, Lord Of The Rings is the film trilogy that keeps on giving–at least as far as physical releases are concerned. In 2016, the Middle Earth Collection included The Hobbit trilogy and LOTR together for the first time–and now, that collection will be re-released in 4K.
While it’s been reported that the 4K remasters would release in October this year, a new report from The Digital Bits suggest that date may be a little ambitious. While Warner Bros’ internal databases have pointed toward the October/Q4 date, internal sources cited by The Bits suggest the remaster is only half done at this point, making an October release unlikely.
The remaster is being handled by Weta Digital in New Zealand, the studio that handled the original digital effects for the Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. The Bits has concluded that the 4K collection will most likely launch next year, though it’s not impossible for it to release by the end of the year.
The Lord Of The Rings trilogy was shot on 35mm film, while The Hobbit was shot digitally in 48fps, up to 5K resolution. The 4K release should include both the theatrical editions and the extended editions of all six films.
Actor John Rhys-Davies pulled double duty for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings series. He portrayed the dwarf warrior Gimli while also voicing the ancient Ent named Treebeard.
In a new interview with Comicbookmovie, Rhys-Davies said Treebeard was especially difficult to perform because he had to find a way to give a voice to a character who has no lungs.
“Treebeard is one of the very few parts that I’ve had that I wake up in a sweat at night thinking, ‘I don’t know how to play this,'” he explained. “The hardest part I’ve ever done. I don’t know how to play it, and it’s not right. It’s not the way it is in the book … I could find no way … how the hell do you voice something that has no lungs?”
“When you read it on the page of the book you can imagine the slowness of it, but your eye is moving quickly. In film, you just have to get a move on,” Rhys-Davies said. “The more I worried about it, I started losing sleep over it.”
Rhys-Davies said he experimented with all different kinds of voices for Treebeard, including slowing it down so much that he was basically making whale noises. He also worked on a version of Treebeard that was a combination of various tree-like elements such as the tree-rattle of leaves and the suction sound of roots coming out of the ground. However, this approach didn’t work out either, and he went on and on and got nowhere, Rhys-Davies said.
In the end, Rhys-Davies settled on a voice for Treebeard that came across as gentle and old, while also communicating an element of power and strength. He’s still not satisfied.
“Of all the parts I’ve ever done, I think that was probably the least successful one. I don’t think I got that right. And I don’t know how I could have got it better,” Rhys-Davies said.
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Disney’s 1996 animated adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is now regarded as a classic, but new stories about the film’s casting prove it could have turned out completely differently. For one–Meat Loaf, aka Michael Lee Aday, was almost cast as the titular hunchback Quasimodo, according to a recent Collider interview.
Collider talked to the directors of Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who revealed that they were closer to a Meat Loaf casting than you would expect. “The first person that was actually cast as Quasimodo was Meat Loaf,” Wise said, though Trousdale corrected him with, “he wasn’t cast, he read for it. He was almost cast. It was an almost kind of thing. I don’t think we actually put pen to paper.”
“There was never a signed contract,” Wise agreed. “But we got so far as to meet with Meat Loaf at a recording studio off Santa Monica Blvd. We talked with Meat Loaf. He ran through ‘Out There,’ Quasimodo’s song a few times.”
“He was really good,” Trousdale said. “It was pretty far along in the process. Like almost cast. To the point where Kirk and I were asking each other on the way to the car, ‘Do we call him Meat? Or Mr. Loaf?'”
Other near-castings included Cyndi Lauper, who at one point was cast as one of Quasimodo’s gargoyle friends, though she was released from the role. More infamously, Mandy Patinkin went for a disastrous audition for Quasimodo, which saw him bring his own arrangement of the song to perform for the original composer and lyricist. You can check out the full rundown of the so-called “Patinkin Incident” on Collider.
The Hunchback Of Notre Dame is one of the Disney movies said to be in the queue for a live-action reboot, with the most recent news indicating Josh Gad was signed on to produce.
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Illustrator John Howe is known for his beautiful depictions of Tolkien’s works, having served as an artist on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, as well as illustrating maps for various editions of the books. Howe was one of the earliest names known to be attached to both Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and Amazon’s new TV show. In an interview with Swissinfo.ch, translated from French, Howe has talked about how he became a go-to artist for Tolkien’s work.
Howe says he has been fascinated by J. R. R. Tolkien since he was 14 years old. “He is one of those authors whose visual evocation is extremely strong: what he describes triggers visions,” Howe told Swissinfo. “Things that are unknown are the most interesting. They are full of decisions to be made, challenges that have to be mastered. Heroic fantasy, when written well, answers questions every generation is asking.”
The illustrator lives and works in Switzerland, a country whose beautiful mountainous landscape inspired many of Tolkien’s magical locations. However the version of Middle-earth Howe is currently working on, for the Amazon Lord of the Rings TV show, is returning to New Zealand where Peter Jackson’s two trilogies were filmed. Unfortunately the interview doesn’t offer much in the way of details on the still-mysterious TV project.
One of Microsoft’s worst-kept next-gen secrets is the rumored second Xbox model, which is believed to be called the Xbox Series S. Now, even more evidence of the console has emerged in the wild thanks to a controller that seemingly went on sale too early.
The Verge has confirmed that the leaked images making the rounds today of a white next-gen Xbox controller are indeed real. The text on the packaging mentions that the controller works with the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S consoles, the latter of which has not been announced. The controller will also work on the standard Xbox One and PC, as well as iOS and Android for xCloud streaming.
The enduring rumor is that the Series S console is the cheaper next-gen Xbox model, the one known popularly by its “Lockhart” codename. This system is rumored to have 4 teraflops of GPU performance and 7.5 GB of usable RAM. It will reportedly have the same CPU as the Series X.
The latest rumor is that Microsoft will officially announce the Series S during an event in August, so it may not be long until we know more about it. There are also rumors that the Series S will not have a disc drive, which would put it more in line with the disc-free PS5 that’s on the way.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer told GameSpot that it might release additional next-gen Xbox SKUs, and Lockhart is expected to be one of them. “Obviously, in the name ‘Series X,’ it gives us freedom to do other things with that name so that we can create descriptors when we need to,” Spencer said in December 2019, all but confirming multiple next-gen Xbox consoles are coming.
For more on Microsoft’s next-gen strategy, check out GameSpot’s editorial below.