Netflix’s The Dragon Prince: Official Season 3 Poster Revealed

Warning! Full SPOILERS for Seasons 1 and 2 of Netflix’s The Dragon Prince follow. 

Netflix’s The Dragon Prince roared its way into Comic-Con 2019 with an awesome Season 3 poster reveal, featuring Soul Regan towering above a cloaked figure.

“Season 3 finds Rayla and Callum finally at the cusp of entering Xadia, while young Ezran returns home to take his place on the throne. Meanwhile, Lord Viren begins to realize the influence and power of his new ally – the mysterious Startouch elf, Aaravos. As several storylines unfold in big ways, this season will be massively epic,” according to a synopsis from Wonderstorm and Netflix.

Photo courtesy of Wonderstorm and Netflix Photo courtesy of Wonderstorm and Netflix

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Daily Deals: Batman Beyond Pre-order, $15 Amazon Credit on Games, Lego Sales and More

Welcome to IGN’s Daily Deals, your source for the best deals on the stuff you actually want to buy. You can also follow us at Twitter @igndeals.

We bring you the best deals we’ve found today on video games, hardware, electronics, and a bunch of random stuff too. Updated 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Up for Preorder: Batman Beyond: The Complete Series Deluxe Limited Edition on Blu-ray for $99.99

batmanbeyondThis is going to be crazy popular. Preorder it now before it goes out of stock. The Deluxe Limited Edition includes all 3 season (52 episodes) in remastered high definition, the Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker animated movie on Blu-ray, Metallic Batman Beyond Funko POP, and more. You even get a digital copy (including a digital copy of the movie).

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Superman: Red Son Animated Movie Announced

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced two new animated, direct-to-video DC Universe Original Movies revolving around Superman and set for release in 2020 at Friday’s San Diego Comic-Con.

WBHE announced plans to adapt the acclaimed DC Comics story Superman: Red Son before they premiered their latest film, Batman: Hush, at Friday night’s con. It will be WBHE’s first release of 2020.

In addition, they also announced plans for another Superman animated film due out in 2020, this one titled Superman: Man of Tomorrow.

 

Unlike Red Son, Man of Tomorrow will not be an adaptation of any existing DC Comics material but rather an original film.

Man of Tomorrow will follow a young Clark Kent still n his early days as Superman.

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Marvel Reveals Six New X-Men Comics in ‘Dawn of X’ Relaunch

Marvel Comics finally revealed what’s in store for the X-Men franchise after writer Jonathan Hickman wraps up House of X and Powers of X this fall. As revealed at the Marvel next Big Thing panel at Comic Con, Hickman will be spearheading a full relaunch of the X-Men line that includes six new titles

Hickman will be writing the core X-Men title with artist Leinil Yu and co-writing the first story arc of New Mutants with permanent writer Ed Brisson and artist Rod Reis. Other titles include Excalibur (from Tini Howard and Marcus To), The Marauders (from Gerry Duggan and Matteo Lolli), Fallen Angels (from Bryan Edward Hill & Szymon Kudranski) and X-Force (from Ben Percy and Joshua Cassara).

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Westworld Season 3 Trailer Revealed at Comic Con 2019

A new trailer for Westworld’s upcoming third season debuted today during a panel for the series at San Diego Comic Con.

The nearly three-minute trailer provides a better look at life outside of the parks, which seems to be filled with just as many violent delights. Check it out below:

The trailer gives us a better idea of what to expect from Season 3, following the shorter teaser released in May, which focused on Aaron Paul’s new character, Caleb. We see Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores, Jeffery Wright’s Bernard, and Tessa Thompson’s Hale in the real world after the events of the Season 2 finale. Thandie Newton’s Maeve, meanwhile, appears to still be within Delos Destinations, in what seems to be a Nazi-filled, World War II-themed park.

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Why The Witcher Will Focus on the Original Short Stories

The cast of Netflix’s The Witcher talked with IGN about details of the adaptation, and how they chose what to focus on within the franchise for the upcoming series.

Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich specifically spoke about the books and original short stories.

“We’re all big fans of the books. We’re all big fans of the video games as well, but this is solely based on the books and that’s really where we drew our inspiration from – starting with the short stories,” Hissrich said.

When asked how they decided to focus the theme around the original stories, Hissrich elaborated, saying, “One of the first things that we did was basically tackle that question. Is do we want to do the short stories or do we want to do the saga, I mean, hopefully we have space and time to do it all.”

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Amazon’s The Expanse Season 4 Release Date Announcement

Amazon’s The Expanse blasted its way into Comic-Con 2019 with a new trailer and an official release date for the upcoming season. You can watch all 10 episodes of Season 4 on Prime Video on Friday, December 13, 2019.

Per Amazon, “Season 4 of The Expanse, its first as a global Amazon Original, begins a new chapter for the series with the crew of the Rocinante on a mission from the U.N. to explore new worlds beyond the Ring Gate. Humanity has been given access to thousands of Earth-like planets which has created a land rush and furthered tensions between the opposing nations of Earth, Mars and the Belt. Ilus is the first of these planets, one rich with natural resources but also marked by the ruins of a long-dead alien civilization. While Earthers, Martians, and Belters maneuver to colonize Ilus and its natural resources, these early explorers don’t understand this new world and are unaware of the larger dangers that await them.”

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SDCC 2019: Westworld Season 3 Trailer Takes Us To A Slick But Unsettling Future

Westworld‘s third season is eagerly anticipated and during the Comic-Con 2019 panel, we got some information on what’s in store for fans as well as a trailer, which you can watch above. The panel was attended by showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, as well as stars Jeffery Wright, Evan Rachel Wood, Thandie Newton, Tessa Thompson, and newcomer Aaron Paul.

The trailer showed Newton’s character, Maeve in World War II and there was a whole lot of time jumping with other prominent characters like Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores and Aaron Paul’s new addition, Caleb, in a sleek future city full of robots. This undoubtedly means Season 3 will be confusing web for fans to untangle and theorize over. Maeve is shown alongside Nazis, though it’s unclear whether she’s fighting them or working alongside them.

The Man in Black is apparently still around and ooking a bit rough, and Bernard’s voice over sounds like he’s talking to someone about Dolores, indicating this unknown person may need to stop her.

Thompson began by referencing her supposed demise the end of the previous season. “You never really die on Westworld though, right?” she said. Discussing the Man in Black, who is played by Ed Harris, Nolan said that the final post-credit scenes were written on the back of a napkin by Harris, who handed it to the showrunners to be shot.

“Will the Man in Black be back,” he wondered, before adding, “I’m not going to call him and tell him he’s not on the show anymore,” indicating Ed Harris’s enigmatic antagonist has plenty more mischief to make.

According to Nolan, Season 3 takes played in “a new world,” though when the suggestion that it was a new park was made he replied, “I didn’t say that.” Nolan went on to discuss how the show’s vision for the future it depicts.

“I grew up with my brother who made me watch Blade Runner once a week. That movie set the design for what the future looks like–and it’s brilliant, it’s a gorgeous movie, but we wanted to find something different than that. The thing about dystopias is that they can look really beautiful.”

Aaron Paul’s character is called Caleb and he’s a construction worker. “I am such a psychotic fan of Westworld,” Paul said. “I just had an out of body experience watching that trailer. I have a robot, his name is George. He’s a very helpful robot and I love him. He’s red.”

Caleb has a complicated past and is described as “a little bit white hat, a little bit black hat.” Paul extrapolated, saying Caleb is “just trying to survive in the world and, occasionally, that means doing bad things.” This would certainly explain his position in the trailer, either following or being escorted by a very dangerous looking Dolores.

Discussing the end of Season 2, Luke Hemsworth teased, “There’s a whole other thing going on [in the conversation between Hemsworth and Thompson at the end of Season 2] that everyone missed. The thing about my character is that he’s not very good at his job.”

“When we started, Westworld was a dystopia but I think now three seasons in, it’s maybe the best case scenario?” Nolan hedged, while discussing the themes that Season 3 is now grappling with. “I think we’re entering into the age of artificial stupidity … we’re trying to figure out what the rest of the world looks like, if that is indeed where the show is happening. There’s the netflix effect where there’s an algorithm determining what you’ll watch next and whatnot.

“These concepts are far in the future, but they’re also kind of not. They’re kind of right now. In Season 3 we discard metaphor–we deal with the world as it is literally, which is a giant shitshow,” Nolan laughed.

The panel’s moderator noted that, while the architects in the show are old white guys, their progeny are incredibly powerful women. Nolan was then asked if Ford was based on a real person. “He’s a composite of a lot,” Nolan said, before Joy agreed.

“One of the weird things happening with AI is that they’re privately funded, they’re very anonymous. Market advantage is to go in stealth mode,” Nolan said, referring to the way people tend to not know what’s going on in the world of AI development. “These projects are happening out of the public eye. That may not be a big deal. Or it may be the single biggest mistake we’ve ever made.”

“This is not just science fiction, this is in someways reality,” the moderator prompted, and Nolan agreed, “The show is heightened, but some of this is happening right now.”

Discussing her character, Charlotte Hale, Tessa Thompson said many see her as a supervillain. She then seemed to invoke the spirit of her character. “But they’re robots–they’re not human, they’re not,” she laughed, “I never know how to talk about this show! I never know what I can say.”

“There were moments in season 2 when we were shooting that I was already Holores (Ed’s note: This is the name given to Dolores in Charlotte’s body), and I didn’t know it,” Thompson recounted. “Once I knew where we were going, I could get on the phone with Evan and get some tips about how to do that.

“There’s one thing that Dolores does, when she sits down, her right hand is always in her left. Every single time,” Wood offered, highlighting the subtleties of Dolores as a character.

The next character in the spotlight is Bernard and Jeffrey Wright attempted to talk about whether his empathy was learned or programmed. “I guess that’s the question of the show,” Wright said, unable to answer it. “The question is the thing. It’s all about that question.”

“Being tortured by Anthony Hopkins and by Dolores for a couple of seasons lends itself to a certain internal turmoil,” Wright joked, highlighting Bernard’s withdrawn demeanor.

Thandie Newton then reflected on her character, Maeve. “I’ve never had to go through anything like [Maeve’s experience]. The set up is extraordinary. The second season was really, really hard. This incredible being who has learned so much and managed to find her free will, but chooses to sacrifice that.

“But I still got to kick some ass,” she joked. “[Maeve] is an expensive piece of hardware and she’s treated like she has no value–and yet we know that she really is an extremely expensive piece of hardware, so we get to see her discovering her own value. That’s something amazing about [Westworld, the Hosts] are never, ever told how much they’re worth, so Maeve finding her agency is amazing.”

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The moderator puts the question to the panel that Westworld seems to say there’s an error in the source code of humanity.

“Maybe it has something to do with these beautiful actors,” Joy replied. “I think when you’re pretty shy growing up, you start looking at the world from an outsider perspective, almost like a robot–trying to figure out when it’s safe to jump in. You see both beautiful things that people don’t notice, but you also see [terrible things]. You can’t help but see a really vast spectrum.

“I don’t think humanity is doomed, but I do think that we’ve capitulated [to] cycles of violence and tribalism. I don’t know what it’s rooted in but the implications of it are really difficult. Our technologies have evolved and it feels like we should be able to overcome this, we should be able to broker solutions–there’s a disconnect there.

“The show is violent, but nowhere near as violent as the world,” Joy continued. “If you look at the statistics of things like violence against women, we’re not showing more violence than there is in the real world–we’re putting a lens on it and we want to make people uncomfortable with it. It should make people uncomfortable.”

Asked whether the show has changed the way the cast sees everyday life, Aaron Paul said he sees the world a little differently now. “The story they were telling in the first two seasons made me look at the world [through] a more focused lense–it also makes me think that maybe we’re all just living in a simulation,” he laughed.

“I consider myself a very non-violent person,” Thompson continued. “Last season there’s a scene when Holores walks through and shoots some guards, and she walks through and steps on one of them. In the moment I felt really cool, I thought I was a badass. But later in the day, there’s a scene where I have a gun to someone’s head–and suddenly, that violence had a huge effect on me. I struggled with that. It made me think about the way we think about violence in the world and the violence that we pay attention to–what we can ignore in the world.

“I have been privileged to be non-violent,” Thompson continued. “I haven’t had the life experience that’s forced me to be in violent situations, so it helped me to have that experience on the show and realize that I have that in me as well.”

Jeffrey Wright then offered his perspective: “[Technology] is a huge driving factor in wealth disparity, and I’m grateful that we get to have that conversation in this show, especially in season three. The tools that we’re addicted to in real life are such massive tools of wealth disparity and the show really engages in that. So to answer your question about when the show takes place? It takes place right now,” Wright laughed.

At this point, fans offered their own questions to the panel, the first being whether morality is subjective, as it relates to Dolores.

“Things aren’t black and white and the longer I work on the show I see that more and more–but some things are, right?” Rachel Wood replied. “Like the system is rigged. We change the rules constantly. We call people heroes who are doing the same things villains are doing. There are so many grey areas. That’s why I love Dolores–it’s difficult for me to do a lot of the things she does, but I understand why she’s doing them.

“I’m really excited for people to see her this season because I feel like she’s constantly growing. She’s always a thousand steps ahead of everyone most of the time, but she’s still taking all of this information in and still learning and growing,” Wood added.

Another attendee asked Aaron Paul what draws him to less-than-perfect characters, calling to mind his role as Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad. “I just like to get beat up, man,” he replied.

On the subject of Thandie Newton’s favorite Maeve seen, the actor said there were too man. “I really relish the scenes I play in Season 1 where Maeve is completely vulnerable, physically naked, is just bottling every situation she’s in.”

Westworld Season 3 is coming to HBO in 2020.

The Simpsons Spoofs Stranger Things at Comic-Con

The first footage of The Simpsons: Season 31 debuted at Comic-Con today. The Simpsons panel offered attendees an exclusive first look at this year’s “Treehouse of Horror XXX” special, which also happens to be the series’ 666th episode.

The first clip comprised the entire cold opening of this year’s Halloween special, delivering a rapid-fire parody mash-up of The Omen and The Exorcist. It begins with Marge giving birth to her third child, with Homer alarmed to discover he’s about to have a second son. Dr. Hibbert comes to the rescue by offering to swap out their new son for a girl named Maggie, though he warns Homer “She tested positive for evil.”

Homer and Marge bring Maggie home, and right away Maggie begins showing Satanic powers and tormenting her family members and other Springfielders. Flanders vows to rid the town of her evil, attempting to sacrifice her inside the church. When Homer and Marge arrive to stop him, Flanders show them the Mark of the Beast on Maggie’s head, which turns out to be a Mickey Mouse logo. Clearly, the Simpsons crew are having fun lampooning their new corporate overlords.

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Surprising No One, Marvel’s Avengers Footage Leaks From SDCC

Attendees of the San Diego Comic-Con 2019 Marvel Games Panel were treated to an early look of Square Enix’s Avengers game and, surprising no one, the footage has leaked.

This early footage was only meant for those in the room, although Crystal Dynamics did confirm that it will be released to the general public a week after Gamescom this August. However, not everyone obeyed the rules and grainy footage taken on cell phones has leaked to the internet at large.

The footage shows Thor, Iron Man, and Hulk gameplay as they fight on and around the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransisco during the A-Day celebration, which was mostly the same demo shown behind-closed-doors at E3 2019.

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