Nickelodeon is establishing a new division dedicated entirely to creating content in the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise. Avatar Studios is being run by Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, creators of the original animated series. The duo will also serve as co-chief creative officers as the studio creates new animated series and movies set in the world of Avatar.
As reported by Deadline, Avatar Studios will produce content that will be aired on Nickelodeon, the home of the original series and its spin-off, The Legend of Korra. The content will also make its way to Paramount+, as well as third-party platforms. Theatrical releases are also expected for the movies.
An animated movie is the first project for Avatar Studios and will begin production later this year.
“Avatar The Last Airbender and [The Legend of Korra] have grown at least ten-fold in popularity since their original hit runs on Nickelodeon, and Ramsey Naito and I are incredibly excited to have Mike and Bryan’s genius talent on board to helm a studio devoted to expanding their characters and world into new content and formats for fans everywhere,” said ViacomCBS Kids & Family president Brian Robbins.
“Creator-driven stories and characters have long been the hallmarks of Nickelodeon, and Avatar Studios is a way to give Mike and Bryan the resources and runway to open up their imaginations even more and dive deeper into the action and mythology of Avatar as we simultaneously expand upon that world and the world of content available on Paramount+ and Nickelodeon.”
Beyond the two existing animated series, Avatar has branched out into comic books with some success. Less successful, however, was a live-action adaptation directed by M. Night Shyamalan, which was critically panned and is derided by fans. Netflix is currently working on an Avatar series, but the franchise’s original creators are no longer involved.
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Beavis and Butt-Head are finally making a return. The animated comedy duo will star in a new movie headed directly to the new streaming service Paramount+, announced today during the ViacomCBS investors day call.
Both Beavis and Butt-Head joined the call via Zoom to announce the project. Check out their cameo below.
News about the movie’s planned premiere, premise, and production schedule have been kept a mystery. The movie has no title as of yet and it is unclear of who the original creative team will be involved at this time. The animated Zoom call certainly sounded like the work of series creator Mike Judge, but his name was not mentioned in the presentation. This is the second Beavis and Butt-Head feature film, following the 1996 theatrical movie, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America.
The slices of the streaming pie are getting smaller and smaller, but ViacomCBS is working hard to grab its piece. Paramount+, recently rebranded from CBS All Access, is heading to its back catalog once again. The service announced a raft of new shows greenlit for Paramount+ this week, cherry-picking from films as far back as 1969.
Joining the previously-announced Grease prequel musical and Godfather documentary are five new shows based on films from Paramount’s library: The Italian Job, Fatal Attraction, Love Story, Flashdance, and The Parallax View.
Each show is taking a slightly different approach to updating its material. The Italian Job acts as a sequel to the original 1969 film–ignoring the 2003 remake. The show will focus on the grandchildren of Michael Caine‘s character, Charlie Croker, who inherit his safety deposit box and set out to find the Italian bullion from the movie. Hawaii Five-O writer Matt Wheeler is helping the show. Donald De Line, who produced that 2003 remake, is onboard as well.
Fatal Attraction released in 1987 starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close as a man stalked by a woman with whom he had a one night stand. The new series will update the material, according to Paramount Television Studios President Nicole Clemens, with modern attitudes toward things like personality disorders and stalking. Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, who produced the original film, are back on board to produce. Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin Hynes of Dirty John will write the script.
Also coming are Love Story, based on the 1970 film and produced by The O.C. and Gossip Girl masterminds Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage; Flashdance will bring the 1983 feature to life in a modern-day setting focusing on a Black woman in the ballet world; The Parallax View, about a journalist investigating a secretive organization called The Parallax Corporation, does not yet have a writer attached, though Paula Wagner (Mission: Impossible) will executive produce.
Paramount has not revealed premiere dates or time frames for any of these shows just yet, as most of them are in very early stages of pre-production.
The first footage of the highly anticipated Halo show has debuted–but you’re not allowed to see it. The footage was shown during ViacomCBS’s February 24 investor presentation, but as the company introduced whatever was shown, the screen faded to a blue screensaver for most of the people watching. It seems only the actual investors on the call got to see what the Halo show will look like.
No doubt Halo fans will find this to be a lackluster way for ViacomCBS to finally show off the Halo series. The footage was played directly after the company announced that the series won’t air on Showtime after all, but on the ViacomCBS streaming service Paramount+ (previously CBS All Access). That news came along with a ton of other Paramount+ news, like the announcement of a Beavis and Butt-Head movie and a Frasier revival.
The Halo show has been in the works for years, originally with Steven Spielberg attached. We still know very little about it, besides a handful of casting appointments (such as Orange is the New Blacks’ Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief and Jen Taylor, who played Cortana in the Halo games, reprising her role). We also know that the show has shot in Budapest.
Other than that, details about the Halo show are scarce–unless, of course, you’re a ViacomCBS investor who got to see the first footage from the series debut. So, yeah–if you know one, send them our way. In the meantime, look forward to Paramount+ debuting March 4, and the Halo show arriving sometime after that.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War‘s big new Season 2 update is officially out now, bringing with it a long list of new content, including one of the most substantial updates to Zombies to date.
The centerpiece of the new Zombies update is the large-scale Outbreak mode that gives fans of the fan-favorite mode yet another way to play and mow down zombies in a new setting.
We caught up with a handful of developers from Treyarch–including lead writer Craig Houston, game designer Kevin Drew, and studio creative director Corky Lehmkuhl–to discuss the new Outbreak mode and elaborate on some of the other changes coming to Zombies with the Season 2 update.
The full interview touches on things like the inspiration for the Outbreak mode, what players can expect in terms of Easter eggs and secrets, how the game keeps the mood feeling tense and scary in a more wide-open playspace, and how the new Crystals work. The developers also touch on the new investigation types and the open-ended nature of Outbreak in general.
The full interview follows further down the page, while you can check out more of GameSpot’s Black Ops Cold War/Warzone Season 2 stories below.
What was the inspiration for creating this new large-scale Outbreak mode for Zombies and how does it differentiate itself from the other Zombies offerings?
Studio Creative Director Corky Lehmkuhl: This is something that we’ve always wanted to do at the studio. We’ve talked about this since around Black Ops, this scale of the Zombies experience. But the technology hasn’t been there for us to be able to deliver this and we’re just all very grateful that this moment in time allowed us to see this thing come to life. I’ll just say that it’s a mode that will appeal to casual players that are new to Zombies, but it’s also compelling for hardcore players. I think it’s a really nice hybrid.
Zombies is known for its easter eggs and hidden secrets, so what can players expect in that department with Outbreak?
Lehmkuhl: On this project we’ve actually made it a mission to make Easter Eggs more accessible on what we call “the main quest”. There are some side easter eggs that are still somewhat obscure but you’ll have to find them yourselves.
We’ve seen some larger Zombies locations before, but Outbreak seems to be the biggest ever. How did you go about designing the encounters to still feel tense and scary when you’re not in a more confined space?
Game Designer Kevin Drew: It was a challenging problem filling a large vast space with some of our technical limitations, so what we ended up doing was we paired this idea of “hotzones” where we have populated enemies throughout the large spaces, and as you engage those pockets, more spawn around you. So, sometimes if you start combat from far away you can just snipe a couple of zombies and that’s it.
“It was a challenging problem filling a large vast space with some of our technical limitations” — Treyarch Game Designer Kevin Drew
But if you go into that area and you engage that group, suddenly there could be 15 or 20 more zombies that spawn around you. So you get caught off guard and feel like you’ve almost sprung a trap. So that’s how we increase that tension in the worldspace. And then objectives, the driving force of the mode, is where we’re really able to bring all the players into a set location that’s a lot tighter, and we can really ramp up the tension there and spawn a lot of zombies.
Along those lines, Outbreak doesn’t have any set paths from objective to objective, and there are no time limits. What kinds of possibilities do you think this will open up for players that they couldn’t do before in previous versions of Zombies?
Lehmkuhl: For me, I can just really focus on becoming powerful and planning for those later regions, because you can go at your own pace. For your first region, you could just spend 40 minutes just looting and killing zombies and gaining up resources to make the next region. You can get ahead of the curve a little bit, whereas in round-based, it’s almost like you’re just barely keeping up and sometimes you can’t get ahead of it.
Lead Writer Craig Houston: I think it definitely lets people strategize a little bit more about how they want to play and how they want to approach each of the different objectives and the world events that happen. I certainly need to spend a lot of time powering myself up if I’m going to survive through more than a couple of regions. I think even more so than round based zombies, this lets you have a little bit more freedom. And as Kevin said, control the pace of the game and how you’re going to progress.
Drew: Because of how much of how many random elements there are in the mode, it just leads itself to be so different every time you play it. I think that’s what’s exciting for me. It will kind of organically create a path for you as you enter a map and you get drawn to different areas because the objective is over in a certain direction and you’ll go heading in that direction. You’ll encounter things that will inform what you want to do next.
You might find a legendary wall buy, and all of a sudden now my goal is to farm this region until I have enough points to get this legendary gun before I go to that objective. Or you might open up a chest and find a really awesome gun and you’re happy and you want to go straight to the objective. So it’s that variety is what’s really engaging.
There are five main investigation types in Outbreak—Defend, Escort, Retrieve, Eliminate, and Holdout. What are these all about and do you expect players to gravitate toward any specific ones in particular?
Houston: They all have a different pace, that’s the thing that’s fun about them. When you go into each region, the particular objective you’re going to be given is randomized to keep the game fresh every time you play it. I think all of us probably have different favorite ones. One that might be your favorite when you’re doing your first objective might not be so fun once you’re onto your fifth, just because of the way that difficulty scales. I think they all have a different rhythm and a different feel to them. And that’s one of the things that makes the mode feel so fun. Again, the more you’re doing in a role, the more intense it becomes.
Drew: I think people will just gravitate towards different ones based on your own personal play styles. Some of them are a little bit more narrative heavy, for example, Hold Out has some interesting implications about what’s going on with the greater story, where others are a little bit more scientific and just kind of fun.
Houston: To pick up on what Kevin said there, our cast of Requiem advisors, Grey, Strauss, Weaver and Carver, they’re running some of these operations, for their own research in particular areas. They just have a very different atmosphere and different implications for the broader story, as Kevin said, because this is much about the Cold War arms race between Omega and Requiem to try and harness the power of the Dark Aether.
You’re introducing the new Crystals with Outbreak—can you walk me through what those are what they bring to the table?
Drew: We wanted the original Raw Aetherium crystal grind to be a more casual-friendly grind, the time target on that was around 24 hours. Now that we’re releasing the new types, the time to acquire those is intended to be longer, and we are also establishing a bit of skill level requirement to earn those things. You have to be able to progress to a certain round or objective to start earning those types of crystals. That being said, it’s still tuned so if you’re able to get to Round 20 and do the Round 20 playlist, or get to Objective 3, you could still be earning all those crystals. And they are used, all skills are going to be having Tier 4 and Tier 5.
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Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, an upcoming game by studio Team Reptile, isn’t shy about its inspirations. Between its colorful cel-shaded visuals, Hideki Naganuma soundtrack, and all the tagging, rail-grinding and dancing gameplay you could want, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is looking like Jet Set Radio Future spiritual successor of our dreams.
The Netherlands-based studio dropped its first official trailer today, after announcing the game with a short teaser last year. The game is described as “1 second per second of highly advanced funkstyle,” with a short synopsis of the game reading: “Start your own cypher and dance, paint, trick, face off with the cops and stake your claim to the extrusions and cavities of a sprawling metropolis in an alternate future set to the musical brainwaves of Hideki Naganuma.”
The music may sound familiar to fans of the original Jet Set Radio games, as Naganuma was the composer behind both Jet Set Radio and Jet Set Radio Future’s soundtracks. The Japanese composer will now be creating brand-new music for Bomb Rush Cyberfunk.
Initially intended to release this year, the team have now updated the game’s release window to 2022. The game’s Steam page is live now, while console releases are also likely, with Team Reptile stating “we aim to release the game on all relevant platforms.”
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Apex Legends has announced upcoming server maintenance where, instead of taking the game completely offline for the duration, Apex will temporarily reset to a state that’s basically Season 0. During the maintenance, players may lose access to their inventory, store, and cosmetic unlocks, and only the default characters will be available.
While the cast of Apex Legends has grown to 16 characters over the course ofeight seasons, the game initially launched its preseason, or Season 0, with just eight characters–six of whom were free to play and two requiring an unlock with Apex Coins or Legend Tokens. It’s unclear whether the “default” characters playable include the preseason’s full cast of eight, or only the six Legends who don’t need to be unlocked.
The maintenance will occur between 2:30 AM PT and finish by 5:30 AM PT on February 25, giving players a chance to experience the game as it hasn’t been since early 2019. Apex doesn’t normally have this kind of scheduled maintenance, leading players to hope that it may finally address some of the server issues that have been ongoing since the game’s launch, but particularly bad recently.
Other players in a Reddit thread about the maintenance have commented on the limited play that will be available during the downtime, with some hoping that it might lead to Apex introducing a proper LTM where only the game’s original characters are playable.
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With Rick and Morty well ahead of schedule, co-creator Justin Roiland has time to work on other projects. Solar Opposites feels like it could take place a few blocks from Morty’s house, though Rick probably wouldn’t abide aliens like the Schlorpians living on Earth. Hulu dropped a second trailer today for Solar Opposites Season 2 ahead of its March release.
In Solar Opposites Season 2, the team tries to escape Earth, only for their ship to fail, dropping them right back where they started. The trailer gives us an idea of what to expect. That includes timely jokes about Big D*** Energy, poking fun at wearing masks during the pandemic, and, of course, beasts that eat people and defecate them as wine bottles. Listen, we’re just telling you what’s in the trailer.
Solar Opposites, co-created by Roiland and ex-Rick and Morty writing assistant Mike McMahan, is the story of four Shlorpian aliens who crash-land on a home in suburban America. Krovo and Yumyulack hate the planet, while Terry and Jesse love everything humanity has to offer. Either way, they have to endure the planet until they can escape, or until their living super computer Pupa evolves to consume them and terraform Earth.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Warzone are entering Season 2 with a new battle pass that focuses on zombies. Based on recent trailers, zombies are expected to invade both the Dirty Bomb maps and Warzone. Currently, in Warzone, the developers are building unanswered mysteries such as a dark ship approaching the shore, and an inactive Trail Computer from Zombies has been found.
In this video, we’re going to take on the newly released Outbreak mode which involves fighting the undead on a much larger scale than previous maps Die Maschine and Firebase Z. The new experience places squads of four in free-roam environments where they will take part in objective-based modes such as defend, escort, retrieve, eliminate, and holdout. Even though the maps are open to explore, players will still be able to extract or continue after each phase. Familiar staples such as the Crafting Table, support items, armor, and weapon upgrade machines, Pack-a-Punch, and Perk vending machines will all be present. Rewards for Outbreak include the new Refined and Flawless Aetherium Crystals, allowing players to upgrade skills to tier four and five. The previous cap was three. Zombies modes also typically involve secret areas, mysteries to solve, and Wonder Weapons. Over on Call Of Duty’s battle royale map, we still don’t know what is going to happen with the season pass listing Warzone’s event as “A dark wave approaches Verdansk.” Join us to find out.
Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and free-to-play Warzone are available for PS4 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Cold War Season 2 releases on February 25th.
