Legendary is reportedly developing a new Buck Rogers movie to potentially serve as a launching pad for a multi-platform sci-fi franchise.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Legendary, the production company behind the upcoming Dune movie reboot, is planning to develop a new Buck Rogers project with Transformers producer Don Murphy and his wife Susan Montford, whose credits include Shoot ‘Em Up and Real Steel. The studio is said to be “putting the final pieces” together on a deal for the screen rights to the classic sci-fi character.
After years-long negotiations over the rights to the franchise, sources claim that the team behind the Buck Rogers project are wanting to branch the property out across multiple platforms, starting with “a big-screen take that would pave the way for a prestige television series as well as an anime series, giving audiences a 360-look at heroics sets in the 25th century.”
Buck Rogers is the spaceman protagonist of Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D., published in a 1928 issue of the Amazing Stories magazine. The novella opens with Rogers trapped inside a coal mine, where he falls into a state of suspended animation and wakes up almost 500 years into the future. The character rose to further prominence when he appeared in a 1929 John F. Dille comic strip.
Over the years, the stories of Buck Rogers have appeared in a variety of formats, including comics, movies, radio, and television. The developing project at Legendary could lead to many more adventures with the celebrated comic-strip spaceman, as Hollywood continues to revisit past properties. For more reboots and revivals, check out our rundown of the quickest movie franchise reboots.
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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.
PlayStation 5 users will be able to record voice chats and send them to moderators.
The news was revealed alongside the latest system software update for the PlayStation 4, version 8.00. PS4 users have been reporting seeing a notification in party chats where they are told that “voice chats may be recorded for moderation.”
According to the PlayStation Blog, this is a pre-emptive measure for the upcoming feature, which will launch alongside the PS5. “Voice chat recording for moderation is a feature that will be available on PS5 when it launches, and will enable users to record their voice chats on PS5 and submit them for moderation review,” explained Sid Shuman, Senior Director at SIE Content Communications.
“The pop up you’re seeing on PS4 right now is to let you know that when you participate in a chat with a PS5 user (post-launch), they may submit those recordings from their PS5 console to SIE,” he added.
It’s not clear just yet what the ramifications of this new system will be: will it be a means for Sony to find and ban users who break the code of conduct in voice chats, as reported by other players? The rest of the Version 8.00 update offers small tweaks to the PS4 UI, likely to bring it in line with features coming to the next-generation console and to mitigate cross-play issues. Version 8.00 includes new avatars, a means to mute all microphones from the quick menu and enhanced 2-step verification. It also removes the ability to create or access events.
Shortly after being cast as Furiosa in the upcoming Mad Max prequel, Anya Taylor-Joy has “already started dreaming” of the Fury Road heroine according to a recent interview.
Now, Miller’s found his leading lady and she couldn’t be more excited to take up the challenge and make the character her own. “The level of commitment that has been shown before me, I endeavor to match that,” Taylor-Joy said. “And that makes me really excited.”
“I fell in love with Furiosa, the way that Charlize presented her,” Taylor-Joy said. “She did such an incredible job and it was so beautiful and I can’t even think about trying to step [into her shoes]. It has to be something different, because it just can’t be done.”
Anya Taylor-Joy is known most recently for her work in The New Mutants as well as Emma and The Witch.
Mad Max Furiosa will begin filming in 2021 and is expected to launch in 2022. Actors Chris Hemsworth and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II will star alongside Anya Taylor-Joy.
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Matthew Adler is a Features, News, Previews, and Reviews writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @MatthewAdler and watch him stream on Twitch.
According to a synopsis from Disney, in this adventure, “after stopping a break-in at Scrooge’s St. Canard Lab, Darkwing gains an unlikely sidekick, Gosalyn, as he uncovers a dark conspiracy tied to the Missing Mysteries and one of Scrooge’s employees.”
IGN can exclusively reveal a clip featuring Darkwing Duck himself in the video below (or watch it at the top of the page):
In an exclusive interview with DuckTales executive producer Matt Youngberg and co-executive producer/story editor Francisco Angones, IGN learned why the creators decided to bring Darkwing Duck back.
“Darkwing Duck was one of the most iconic series of our childhoods,” Youngberg told IGN. “The original series’ blend of broad slapstick, clever wordplay, superheroic action, and genuine heart had a profound influence on us creatively as kids, and there is a lot of that influence cooked into the DNA of our new DuckTales series. It is hands down Frank’s favorite cartoon of all time.”
Angones spoke about how the episode is “an exciting opportunity to explore Darkwing’s legacy as well specifically what kind of hero the purple protector of the persecuted wants to be. He’s new to the gig, he’s got the cool gadgets and costumes, the high-tech hidden lair, an endless supply of catchphrases, everything he needs to fight crime. But when Gosalyn crashes into his life, Darkwing will discover who he’s actually fighting for.”
When we first heard whispers of a Monster Hunter movie, we assumed it would involve monsters fighting in our modern world, like in this early (leaked) tech demo. In actuality, the Monster Hunter movie set to release this year takes place almost entirely in Monster Hunter’s fantasy world, though that wasn’t always the case.
Check out the first Monster Hunter movie trailer below:
Fans have been vocally concerned about the blend of our world’s military into the more fantastical Monster Hunter setting since those early looks first hit the web, and those reactions were high of mind for director Paul W.S. Anderson when I visited the Monster Hunter movie set in South Africa in December 2018. At the time, Anderson recalled fans’ initial reactions after actor Diego Boneta posted a picture of his character in military clothing holding an assault rifle.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=85%20percent%20of%20the%20Monster%20Hunter%20movie%20takes%20place%20in%20its%20fantasy%20world.”]“All everyone saw was like soldier outfits, and I know there was, ‘What the hell is this? This isn’t Monster Hunter,’ reaction. But that’s only a fraction of what the movie is, that was just the first image that went out, because it was really the first week of shooting. The bulk of the movie is this,” W.S. Anderson explained, motioning to the larger-than-life sand ship we stood on and the surrounding sets outside, very much grounded in fantasy.
Producer Jeremy Bolt clarified further, stating that 85 percent of the Monster Hunter movie takes place in its fantasy world, which includes set pieces and allusions to lore from a variety of Monster Hunter games – even Monster Hunter Frontier, which never officially released stateside. Anderson explained the Monster Hunter movie takes place on a new continent and chronologically after Monster Hunter World. He said they worked with Capcom to carve out a corner of the preexisting Monster Hunter world specifically for the movie.
The Monster Hunter video game series is firmly set in the fantasy genre, where technology is limited to some steam-fueled mechanics, and scattered villages very much rely on bonafide monster hunters to keep meddling monsters at bay. There are hints of an ancient civilization that may have had technology far more advanced than is currently available, but the rise and fall of those peoples is mysterious at best. Overall, Monster Hunter’s unnamed world is a setting much different than anything our modern world could offer.
That’s not to say there weren’t versions of the script that had the story of a Monster Hunter movie taking place primarily in our world. Anderson and Bolt have been trying to pitch a Monster Hunter movie since 2009, and that leaked demo footage — which showed two Monster Hunter monsters (a Rathalos and a Gore Magala) dueling inside a shopping mall — was based on one of those iterations. Prior to the most recent adaptation pitch being greenlit, at least three other scripts were written and scrapped. The demo scene was adapted from one of these scripts, which followed a “bullied, quite clumsy” 16-year-old boy named Lucas as its lead character.
In a nutshell, Bolt explained, this version was a kind of teenage Matrix version where characters from the Monster Hunter world come to our world in search of “The One” who would end up being Lucas. Back then, they had thought to leverage the then-exceptionally popular young adult genre to get the movie made due to the popularity of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and Twilight. Producer Robert Kulzer added that this version referenced the many myths about monsters and dragons that appear in each culture. These coincidences would be explained as the creatures from the Monster Hunter realm encroaching into our world. Every time, a hero would emerge and dispatch the creatures, in this case, the main character Lucas.[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Anderson%20and%20Bolt%20have%20been%20trying%20to%20pitch%20a%20Monster%20Hunter%20movie%20since%202009″]
As the audience appetite for big-screen fantasy stories evolved to more adult fare, the vision for a Monster Hunter movie changed with it. Anderson explained, “By the time I came back to Monster Hunter, ‘young adult’ was kind of buried six feet underground with a stake through its heart. Nobody wanted to make young adult. The days of Twilight were over. It’s like, ‘No, no more young adults,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, well, I better change that then.’” The script that ultimately got greenlit is instead inspired by James Cameron’s Avatar and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones.
The movie’s plot follows Captain Artemis (Milla Jovovich) and her soldiers who are transported from our modern world to the Monster Hunter world through mysterious means. There, Artemis teams up with the Hunter (Tony Jaa) and other recognizable Monster Hunter World characters like the Admiral (Ron Perlman), to take on the monsters they encounter as they set to uncover the mystery behind the ancient civilization and how, exactly, she and her comrades ended up there in the first place.
The only part of our world we know will appear in the fully developed Monster Hunter movie will be a Middle Eastern desert known to appear in the opening moments; from there, a portal opens into the Monster Hunter world, where the bulk of the film takes place. And though the monsters have to be CG, those fantastical video game settings don’t have to be, which is why W.S. Anderson wanted to shoot on location, rather than use a greenscreen. Check out a behind-the-scenes look at how the Monster Hunter movie adapted its titular monsters from the game:
“It’s one of the video game’s strengths, these amazing, amazing settings,” W.S. Anderson said. “So we have like, lost jungle [sic], we have deserts, we have kind of rocky — I mean, everything you would recognize from Monster Hunter World. We have areas that resemble the Rotten Vale. I think Monster Hunter fans will really appreciate the efforts we’ve gone to to capture these landscapes and then put the actors in them.”
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is one of the biggest games coming this fall, a spin-off sequel to the incredibly successful 2018 Marvel’s Spider-Man from Insomniac. While Miles was a secondary character with some civilian-stealth segments in the previous game, this time he takes center-stage with his own set of Spidey powers, his own suits, and new villains to deal with.
Below you can find everything you need to know about Insomniac’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Be sure to check back often in the weeks ahead as the game’s launch approaches, as we’ll be updating this feature with all the latest details as they get announced.
Release Date and Versions
Spider-Man: Miles Morales will release for PS4 and PS5 on November 12, right alongside the launch of the PlayStation 5. While it’s ostensibly being treated like a PS5 launch title, it’s coming to PS4 as well. But don’t worry, you can get the PS4 version and be secure in the knowledge that if you upgrade to a PS5 later, you can play that version for free and your save will transfer.
The standard edition of Spider-Man: Miles Morales will be $50 USD across PS4 and PS5. A separate “Ultimate Edition” is also available for $70. That version is only available for PS5 and includes a voucher code for Spider-Man Remastered, an improved next-gen version of the 2018 game.
Preorders and Bonuses
Across both PS4 and PS5, preordering Spider-Man: Miles Morales will get you some bonus items. Those include three extra skill points to start customizing Miles’ abilities right away, and an early unlock for the Gravity Well gadget. You’ll also get two alternate costumes: the TRACK Suit with an unlockable “Untrackable Suit Mod” and another suit, to be announced. You can find more details in our Spider-Man: Miles Morales preorder guide.
2018’s Spider-Man: A Primer (Contains Spoilers)
Insomniac has primarily released PlayStation-exclusive games for years, but Marvel’s Spider-Man was an unprecedented success. It was a huge financial boon for Sony and may have played a role in the company’s decision to acquire the developer shortly after Spider-Man launched.
In creating the in-game world, Insomniac envisioned a whole new continuity for Spider-Man, allowing the developer to take some liberties with the Marvel property and its characters. This has been dubbed Earth-1048 in the Marvel multiverse and has gotten continuity-crossing references in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the Spider-geddon comic book arc. Each time, the Easter egg was clearly identifiable by Insomniac’s iconic Spidey-suit design, which sports a white spider across the chest along with Peter Parker’s usual red-and-blue coloring.
This Spider-Man game established a new Peter Parker–an experienced web-slinger and the scientific protege of the kindly Dr. Otto Octavius–as well as Miles Morales. It used Peter’s already-established superheroics to introduce a new backstory for Miles. While some elements from the comics remained the same, like Miles’ police officer father and biracial heritage, it made some significant changes. Peter and Miles befriended each other working together at a homeless shelter, whereas in the comics Miles was inspired by Spider-Man’s death without having personally known Peter. Miles’ father, Jefferson Davis, died protecting civilians, while in the comics Jefferson is still alive and well. Miles was ultimately bitten by a genetically-engineered spider that Mary Jane unwittingly carried back with her from Oscorp. A brief ending scene featured Miles showing his newfound Spider-powers to Peter, and Peter revealing to Miles that he’s Spider-Man.
The Ultimate Edition of Spider-Man: Miles Morales includes a voucher code for Spider-Man Remastered, an improved next-gen version of the 2018 game.
Meanwhile, several plot threads have either wrapped up or been left ambiguous for further exploration in a sequel. Peter and Mary Jane have rekindled their relationship. Aunt May passed away from a deadly virus, knowing that her heroic nephew would do the right thing and distribute the life-saving cure to the entire city. Dr. Octavius, who learned Spider-Man’s secret identity and became the villainous Doc Ock, has been apprehended and sits in a cell without his mechanical arms. And Norman Osborne is watching over what may be his son, Harry, who was often referenced but never seen in the game.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales Story
Spider-Man: Miles Morales picks up one year after The City That Never Sleeps, the post-story DLC for the 2018 Spider-Man. Miles has been training under Peter to embrace his Spidey powers, and he’s looking to be the hero that Harlem and NYC at large need, while also supporting his mother’s campaign for City Council. But a gang war is brewing between Roxxon Energy and a high-tech gang of criminals called The Underground, led by the villain the Tinkerer.
Roxxon has been referenced or utilized by dozens of comics, largely as a stand-in for real-world petro conglomerates like BP or Exxon. It has also had ties to both SHIELD and Hydra, and it has been behind some large-scale infrastructure projects in the Marvel universe. It’s unknown what its role will be in this game, but if it’s being targeted by a band of criminals, chances are the conflict won’t be so black-and-white.
In the comics, The Tinkerer is a brilliant inventor and usually portrayed as an elderly man. He isn’t often a threat himself, but he creates some of the high-tech suits and weapons used by Spidey’s most notorious foes. In this version, The Tinkerer is a woman who appears to be taking on Spider-Man herself in a superpowered suit. It’s possible this iteration is a younger version of the Ultimate variation of the character (The Tinkerer who fights Miles in the comics), or perhaps her suit is just a feat of design that lets her act sprier than her actual age.
Days before Spider-Man: Miles Morales hits stores, a prequel novel is coming out that could shed more light on the story. Spider-Man: Miles Morales – Wings of Fury will pit Miles against The Vulture–who appeared in 2018’s Spider-Man as a member of the Sinister Six–and his granddaughter, Starling. Those high-tech villains will help Miles come to terms with what kind of hero he wants to be. On a thematic level, they’re technology-based villains similar to The Tinkerer, and Vulture is similarly elderly.
New Miles, New Peter
One aspect that was immediately apparent from the debut trailer was that Miles has gotten a new look for this sequel. He looks much more like his comic book counterpart now, with a darker skin tone and shorter hair.
Less apparent was that Peter would be getting a facelift too. That detail wasn’t announced until well after the game had been, with word that Insomniac had replaced the face model for Peter in Spider-Man Remastered. The new Peter looks notably younger and more like the current Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Spider-Man, Tom Holland. Insomniac says this is to make his face a better match for the facial capture performance from actor Yuri Lowenthal, who also provides Peter’s voice. Lowenthal lightheartedly tweeted that it’s the fault of his “stupid stupid bones.”
Some fans have been critical of the change, suggesting the new look doesn’t appear as if Peter has been Spider-Man for eight years by this point. While it hasn’t been confirmed that Peter will make an appearance in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, it would make sense as Peter is acting as Miles’ mentor. If he does show up, it will probably be with the new face model, not the old one.
Miles’ Unique Powers
Though Miles Morales is a Spider-Man, he has a few unique powers that differentiate him from the familiar Peter Parker version of Spider-Man. Miles can web-sling and wall-crawl just like Pete, and he has similarly enhanced speed, agility, reflexes, and durability. He has a Spider-sense, but canonically it’s not as acute as Peter’s. Miles has two unique powers of his own, though: a cloaking ability that lets him render himself (and his suit) essentially invisible, and a “venom strike” electrokinetic shock.
We’ve already seen some of these powers in action during the debut trailer and subsequent gameplay trailers. His venom strike power in the comics has often been relatively limited, but in the game it appears to be much broader electricity powers that play into a wide suite of abilities. His Spider-sense also appears to be on-par with Peter’s in terms of gameplay, where it is used to warn you of impending attacks. On the PS5, this ability will make use of the DualSense controller. The haptic feedback will give you cues for which direction an attack comes from, and you’ll be able to feel the crackle of Miles’ Venom Punch.
Miles Morales has a few unique powers that differentiate him from the familiar Peter Parker version of Spider-Man.
“The haptic feedback precision allows us to do all sorts of new things,” Brian Horton, creative director on Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales explained. “We’ll be hinting to players which direction attacks are coming from by providing haptic feedback from the appropriate direction on the DualSense wireless controller. Because of the high resolution of DualSense wireless controller’s haptics system, we can really push the dimensionality of the feedback. As you hold down Square to do a Venom Punch, you feel Spider-Man’s bio-electricity crackle across from the left side of the controller, culminating in the right side on impact.”
The story will show itself in Miles’ abilities too. Since he’s a less experienced Spider-Man, his animations and moves are said to be a little less refined than Peter Parker’s. He’ll also be the only playable character, a change from the 2018 game that featured story sequences with Miles and Mary Jane. A teaser also showed Miles wearing one of Peter’s suits with a hoodie, a possible reference to the character’s iconic look from Into the Spider-Verse.
Next-Gen Power: Performance vs. Fidelity
On PlayStation 5, you’ll be able to choose from Performance Mode and Fidelity Mode in Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Performance gives the game a smooth 60 FPS in Dynamic 4K, while Fidelity Mode runs at 30 FPS in 4K and includes visual enhancements like ray tracing. The PS5 version is also said to run without loading screens, even when using fast-travel, thanks to the new hardware’s SSD.
Disney+ has announced an expanded voice cast for its LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special, which is set to premiere on the streaming service this November.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian), and Kelly Marie Tran (Rose Tico) have signed on to reprise their fan-favourite roles in the upcoming Holiday Special, alongside Star Wars: The Clone Wars vets Matt Lanter (Anakin Skywalker), Tom Kane (Yoda, Qui-Gon Jinn), James Arnold Taylor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), and Dee Bradley Baker (Clone Troopers).
Check out the first official poster for the LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special below:
Image credit: Disney
The all-new animated special will follow the events of The Rise of Skywalker, with Rey setting off on a quest to gain a deeper knowledge of the Force ahead of Life Day. While visiting a mysterious Jedi Temple, she will be hurled into a cross-timeline adventure that sees her come into contact with Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Yoda, Obi-Wan, and other iconic heroes and villains from the saga.
The latest casting news has confirmed that Lando Calrissian and C-3PO will also play a role in that adventure. Speaking about the returning franchise stars, executive producer James Waugh told EW: “Williams had such great, positive energy around the whole project and, of course, we couldn’t do C-3PO without Anthony Daniels and he brought his magic to the character.”
Kelly Marie Tran, who starred as Rose Tico in the sequel trilogy, will also play a significant part in the story, which is split into two parts. The first part will take place on Kashyyyk where Rey, Poe, Rose, and Finn are all preparing for the galaxy’s most cheerful and magical holiday, while the second part will follow Rey’s escapades at the Jedi Temple.
“[Rose] has a really prominent role throughout the story,” Waugh explained. “Rose’s role in this it [sic] to really takes charge she basically saves the day, in many ways. We wanted to make sure we got a lot of Kelly in as Rose was going to be an essential part of whatever [the Resistance heroes’] future was going to be after Episode IX and she was a blast to work with.”
The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special is a production of Atomic Cartoons, the LEGO Group, and Lucasfilm. It is directed by Ken Cunningham and written by David Shayne, who is also co-executive producer. Waugh, Josh Rimes, Jason Cosler, Jacqui Lopez, Jill Wilfert, and Keith Malone are attached as additional executive producers on the project.
The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special hits Disney+ on November 17, the same day that the original Star Wars holiday special aired on CBS in 1978.
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Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.
In true CD Projekt Red fashion, episode 4 of Night City Wire was announced last week, where the devs will share more updates and details about Cyberpunk 2077.
For the fourth episode, the game’s official Twitter account said it will, “go into details about the looks, sounds, and specs of #Cyberpunk2077 vehicles. As usual, you can expect new gameplay footage, announcements, and more!”
A clip that was literally one-second long was shared as well, showing one of the vehicles spinning off in slow motion.
Night City Wire episode 4 will take place on Thursday, October 15 and will start at 9 am PT, 12 pm ET, and 5 pm BST. If you’re watching from Australia, you can stay up late and tune in on Friday, October 16 at 2 am AEST. The episode is expected to be around 25 minutes long, similar to the previous three episodes.
How to Watch Night City Wire Episode 4
We’ll be hosting the Cyberpunk 2077 livestream on our channels across a variety of platforms including YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and Twitter. Here’s the full list of places you can watch Night City Wire Episode 4:
All we know about this upcoming episode is what the devs revealed on their official Twitter account. We can expect to see a close look at the vehicles in the game, including the, “looks, sounds, and specs” of them. CD Projekt Red also revealed they will be releasing more new gameplay footage and announcements.
After seven years, 2D, anime fighting game Phantom Breaker: Extra is getting a massive update. Titled, Phantom Breaker: Omnia, and it marks the fighting game’s debut in the west.
Phantom Breaker is a fighting game series developed by Mages, the Japanese studio behind visual novels like Steins;Gate. Phantom Breaker is set in Tokyo when a mysterious man known as “Phantom” appears and grants “Fu-mension Artifacts” to fighters he manipulates into fighting one another. The winner of the Phantom’s game will be granted a wish, but the use of the Fu-mension Artifacts threatens to destroy the very fabric of reality.
Check out IGN’s exclusive gameplay in the video below.
Phantom Breaker: Omnia boasts a roster of 20 playable characters and guest characters, including Makise Kurisu from the Steins;Gate series. Mages is also introducing two brand new characters created for Omnia.
The battle system lets fighters choose between three different fighting styles: Quick, Hard, and Omnia, each with a unique focus that changes how a character plays, and whether their moves focus on speed, power, or mechanics.
New publisher Rocket Panda Games is handling bringing Phantom Breaker: Omnia to the west. It’s slated to be released in 2021 digitally for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PC via Steam. A physical edition for PS4 and Switch is planned in partnership with Limited Run Games.
Big changes are brewing for DC Comics in the months ahead, both in terms of the stories being published and in the company’s response to recent layoffs and editorial restructuring. With many ongoing comics wrapping up over the next several months and the massive Dark Nights: Death Metal crossover steering toward its climax in January, it’s clear DC has something big planned for early 2021. That’s where Future State comes in.
Future State is a two-month event wherein most of DC’s regular monthly comics will be temporarily replaced by a new lineup of limited series and one-shot specials. There’s no one, core Future State comic. Instead, the entire event allows creators to explore the future of the DC Universe, with stories set anywhere from 2030 all the way till the end of time as we know it. And once Future State concludes at the end of February, DC’s ongoing plans for its comic book line will become clear.
While it’s too early to say what’s coming in March, we can shed much more light on the premise of Future State and the various comics involved. Read on to learn more and get the full scoop on how the Superman franchise factors prominently in this event, with plenty of insight from newly promoted Superman Group Editor Jamie S. Rich.
Future State can basically be summed up as the bridge connecting Dark Nights: Death Metal and DC’s more long-term plans for 2021. Death Metal has been exploring the Justice League’s final battle with Perpetua, the dark goddess who birthed the DC multiverse. It’s probably safe to assume Diana and friends will ultimately triumph over Perpetua and her minion The Batman Who Laughs, and that the multiverse will be restored. As writer Scott Snyder discussed at NYCC, the goal of Death Metal isn’t to reboot DC continuity in the vein of previous Crisis events, but to highlight how all of DC’s history matters and carries weight.
That will continue to be DC’s guiding philosophy as the company moves forward from Death Metal. Though before readers see exactly what state the DC Universe is in post-Death Metal, DC is jumping ahead and exploring its future. Future State is a series of interconnected stories – many of them set in the year 2030 but some even further down the DC timeline – that shows us the more long-term ramifications of Death Metal. Again, there’s no one book forming the backbone of Future State. Readers are free to pick and choose which titles or creative teams interest them, but taken as a whole it forms a larger examination of what happens when a newer generation of heroes step up to replace Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.
Future State will reveal which heroes inherit the mantles of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman in the year 2030.
If that sounds familiar, that was also the basic premise of DC’s much-rumored but never formally announced 5G initiative. DC Publisher Jim Lee recently confirmed 5G has been canceled. As far as we can tell (DC declined to comment on this subject), many of those 5G stories and ideas have been repurposed for Future State. But while 5G was reportedly a permanent shift in focus to a new generation of heroes, Future State is a temporary flash-forward storyline. All of the books involved will span anywhere from one to four issues over the course of January and February. That doesn’t necessarily mean these stories and new characters won’t have a direct bearing on DC’s long-term publishing plans.
“There’s so much to do going forward, and so we want to give the readers a couple of months where you will see all these potential possibilities, all of these stories that could evolve out of the current DCU with the familiar characters getting older, finding themselves in new situations or new versions of the same characters as the DC legacy continues to evolve,” Rich told IGN. “It’s really just two months of us letting our creators go wild and be imaginative, while also laying some seeds and some groundwork for what you’re going to see coming.”
The Three Pillars of Future State
The larger Future State event is being divided into three core pillars – Superman Family, Batman Family and Justice League Family. The Superman Family books will deal primarily with Superman’s self-imposed exile from Earth following a disastrous international incident. While the Man of Steel joins forces with a ragtag band of New Gods and other heroes to liberate Warworld, his son Jon takes up the mantle of Superman on Earth. Wonder Woman is also included as part of the Superman Family line, with Future State focusing both on a new Wonder Woman named Yara Flor and returning Amazon heroine Nubia.
The Batman Family books will explore Bruce Wayne’s lasting legacy. Bruce himself is apparently dead in the era of Future State, with Gotham now ruled by a villain named The Magistrate and his vast surveillance network. Future State will introduce a new heir to the Batman name, one who rises up to rally Gotham’s heroes against this new foe. The previously announced Batman series from 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley and Doom Patrol artist Nic Derington is among the stories included in the Batman Family lineup.
Bruce Wayne is gone, but Batman never dies.
Finally, the Justice League Family will take a wider look at the DCU of the near and far future. Readers will be introduced to a new Justice League whose members maintain secret identities even from each other, along with new incarnations of the Teen Titans, Suicide Squad and Justice League Dark. Characters like Black Adam, Swamp Thing, Aquaman and the Green Lanterns will also have their own Future State books.
Future State seems similar to 2015’s Convergence crossover in that it’s a self-contained crossover that allows DC to collectively regroup and prepare for upcoming new storylines and launches. While the Future State lineup will feature some familiar DC creators like Brian Michael Bendis, Gene Luen Yang, Joëlle Jones, Joshua Williamson and Nicola Scott, DC has also tapped a number of indie creators and movie/TV writers who don’t normally dabble in the DC comic book universe. In addition to the Ridley/Derington Batman story (which is one of five tales serialized in the anthology book Future State: The Next Batman), fans can also expect work from Meghan Fitzmartin (Supernatural), Brandon Easton (Transformers: War for Cybertron), Alitha Martinez (It’s A Bird!), L.L. McKinney (Nubia: Real One), Paula Sevenbergen (Stargirl), Siya Oum (Lola XOXO) and Jen Bartel (Blackbird).
You can check out the slideshow gallery below for a full breakdown of the books that make up Future State:
While Future State isn’t necessarily intended to be any more or less dark than the present-day DCU (a pointed change from most future timelines featured in superhero comics), it does seem as though the future isn’t terribly kind to Kal-El. For reasons that won’t be immediately revealed, Superman has fallen out of favor with the people of Earth, causing him to leave his adopted home behind and begin a new mission in the stars. The exact reasons for his departure and his newfound mission on Warworld will be revealed over the course of Future State, though Rich was clear all of this builds directly on what writer Brian Michael Bendis has been crafting in the pages of Superman and Action Comics. As he explained, the events of Future State are basically the inevitable result of Superman’s decision to reveal his secret identity and his shift towards defending the universe as a whole rather than just Metropolis or Earth.
“We’re looking at what Bendis has been doing on his books and Superman revealing who he is and starting to extrapolate – what does that mean?” said Rich. “In Future State, you won’t know exactly how Superman ended up on Warworld, but the story in Superman: Worlds of War that Phillip Kennedy Johnson is writing kind of balances that. So you will also see, on Earth, what it means to people to have him gone… does he create a space that inspires people?”
“The childish thing to do with Superman that every boy who wants to tear the wings off flies would do is try to tear him down or make him evil,” said Rich, revealing that some of the ideas being explored here were inspired by conversations with All-Star Superman writer Grant Morrison. “We want to just show that the symbol is greater than any one place or any one populace. Actually, that’s probably a good point to make too. We’re not imagining Future State as this horrible dystopian, ‘everything goes wrong’ [timeline]. Certainly there are books where things are bad and stuff has taken a turn for the worst cause that’s dramatic, but there’s also a lot of hope in this.”
With Superman now a pariah who’s left Earth behind, you might think Lex Luthor would be having the time of his life in the year 2030. But Rich teased that won’t quite be the case.
“We’re actually dealing with that in the Superman vs. Imperious Lex miniseries that Mark Russell and Steve Pugh are doing, who people know as the great team behind The Flintstones,” said Rich. “That has more of a satirical tone, more of a lighthearted tone as Lex Luthor. I don’t know if you remember back in the ’60s and ’70s, Lex Luthor had a planet called Lexor where he would go and hang out because people thought he was a hero there and he’d managed to con them into thinking that Superman was a villain. Now you see the future where Lex is trying to get Lexor into the United Planets and Lois Lane is now representing Earth, and she’s trying to stop him in and how Superman gets in the middle.”
Head to page 2 for plenty more on the strange landscape of Future State, including what happens when Jon Kent takes up the mantle of Superman.
