Author: Trafficblast

The upcoming movie about The Lord of the Rings author, called Tolkien, does not come with a stamp of approval from the Tolkien Estate. That is no big surprise, as the Estate has for decades distanced itself from dramatic adaptations of the fantasy series, including Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings series. Now, Tolkien director Dome Karukoski has spoken about why it’s in the movie’s best interest to have avoided any relationship with the Tolkien Estate to begin with.

Speaking at the Tolkien premiere in New York City, Karukoski the movie might have been “suffocated” had the producers worked alongside the Tolkien Estate. “Honestly, you try not to work with the Estate for reasons obvious,” Karukoski said, as reported by Indie Wire. “Even if it would be out of kindness to ask the Estate, you start servicing them, they become your friends. You shouldn’t mess with the Estate, so the film can exist purely for your own reasons and your own feelings about the characters.”

Karukoski went on to say the the Tolkien movie producers did “very, very thorough research” to try to under Tolkien the man and the other key characters in the story, like Edith Bratt. The director said what viewers will see is that “the emotional truth of [the characters] is very true.”

Had the Tolkien producers worked with the Estate, that might have led to situations where the film would obscure or ignore certain character traits–and that wouldn’t be good, Karukoski said.

“To dig out the emotional truth of the characters, you have to try to not hide certain evidence and when you work with an Estate what happens is that that kind of gets suffocated,” he said. “You’re not allowed to do certain things so that the audience can feel an emotion from it.”

In another interview, Karukoski told SkyNews, “Even if they were the kindest Estate ever, they would kind of become your friends and you start servicing them rather than the purity of the drama you need to make the best possible film.”

Karukoski also confirmed that the producers invited the Estate to view the Tolkien movie before its premiere, but representatives reportedly declined. Karukoski said he is hopeful that members of the Estate see the movie someday.

The Tolkien Estate is led by J.R.R. Tolkien’s son, the 94-year-old Christopher Tolkien. He told French newspaper Le Monde in 2012 that “the commercialisation [of Tolkien’s work] has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing.” In the same interview, Christopher Tolkien said of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25.”

Going further back, Tolkien himself was skeptical and hesitant about the commercialization of his work, and specifically the prospect of selling the Lord of the Rings movie rights to Disney in the ’60s. He said he had a “heartfelt loathing” for Disney movies, and he said Walt Disney himself was “hopelessly corrupted” by profit-seeking.

Fox Searchlight, the production company behind Tolkien (which is now owned by Disney), said in a statement that it “has the utmost respect and admiration for Mr. Tolkien and his phenomenal contribution to literature.”

Nicholas Hoult (Mad Max: Fury Road, X-Men series) plays the adult Tolkien, while Lily Collins (To The Bone, Stuck In Love) plays Tolkien’s wife, Edith Bratt.

Middle-earth Enterprises, which is the rights-owner of Tolkien’s work separate from the Tolkien Estate, is by comparison more enthusiastic about commercial deals related to The Lord of the Rings than the Estate. Just this year, it announced a partnership with Daedalic Entertainment for a new Lord of the Rings game about Gollum. Additionally, Electronic Arts remains a Lord of the Rings licensee, as does WB Games and Lord of the Rings Online developer Standing Stone Games.

While the Tolkien Estate might not be involved with the Tolkien movie, the group does support some commercial endeavors. The Estate recently partnered with Amazon on the new Lord of the Rings TV show coming to the retailer’s streaming service.

Tolkien opens in theaters on May 10. Reviews have started to show up online–here’s a breakdown of what the critics are saying.

A new Minecraft game is in the works, it appears, and it might not be what you expect. The company today posted a teaser video for what looks like a Minecraft augmented reality game.

The brief teaser video shows some kind of Minecraft AR game similar to Pokemon Go or Harry Potter: Wizards Unite with its blending of real and virtual world elements. Whatever it is, it looks like it’ll be announced on the Minecraft website on May 17. Check out the teaser below, and yes, the man (who looks strikingly like Xbox pioneer J. Allard) does not appear to give the woman back her phone. We don’t know why.

At E3 2015, Microsoft showcased a stunning Minecraft experience for the company’s AR HoloLens headset. But given that the new teaser video doesn’t show anyone wearing an AR headset, it looks like the Minecraft AR game could be more akin to the aforementioned Niantic games in its headset-free blending of the real and digital worlds.

According to noted Microsoft insider Brad Sams, who has accurately reported on unannounced Microsoft stories before, the Minecraft AR game is code-named “Genoa.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told The New York Times in 2015 that one of the reasons Microsoft spent $2.5 billion to acquire Minecraft and developer Mojang was due to the potential benefits of marrying Minecraft and augmented reality. “Let’s have a game that, in fact, will fundamentally help us change new categories,” Nadella said. “HoloLens was very much in the works [when Microsoft announced the deal in 2015], and we knew it.”

The May 17 reveal date for the new Minecraft AR game is not random. It presumably aligns with the Minecraft 10-year anniversary celebration scheduled for the same day. Minecraft’s creator, Markus “Notch” Persson, is being excluded from the event over his “comments and opinions.”

The official Minecraft Twitter account cheekily reacted to the Minecraft AR news today with the thinking face emoji.

In addition to the rumored new Minecraft AR game, Microsoft is working on a Minecraft dungeon-crawler called Minecraft Dungeons. The title, which doesn’t have a release date, appears to take a more linear approach rather than the open-ended sandbox nature of the mainline game.

Minecraft remains one of the most popular games on Earth. By Microsoft’s latest count, it had 91 million monthly players, which is many millions more than Fortnite has.

The filmmakers behind Avengers: Endgame painted themselves into a pretty tight corner with the conclusion of the movie’s predecessor, Avengers: Infinity War. The Mad Titan Thanos managed to get all the Infinity Stones together, and with a snap of his fingers, erased half the life in the universe from existence. But this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the heroes always had to make an attempt at undoing the damage Thanos did. The question was: How could they?

The answer, as we now know, is time travel. But time travel is confusing in movies (not to mention theoretical physics) on the best of days, when you’re not dealing with space magic that can rewrite the rules of reality on top of it. It’s so confusing, in fact, that it seems like the directors and writers of Infinity War and Endgame have differing (and mutually exclusive) ideas of how it works.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, directors Joe and Anthony Russo described time travel in Endgame as creating alternate timelines–essentially, every time the characters return to the past, the changes they make to the past createnew, complete universes with new events, with the original universe staying intact and unaltered. That’s how the Avengers can go back to, say, the Battle of New York and accidentally release Loki. It creates a new timeline where Loki didn’t go back to Asgard, as he did in the original MCU timeline (depicted in Thor: The Dark World). The timeline were Loki is loose with the Tesseract in 2012 is its own separate universe, and the Avengers are able to travel between them somehow. This roughly matches up with how Bruce Banner explains time travel within the movie itself, so that’s good so far.

The Russos use that model of time travel to explain Captain America’s ending, one of the more confusing and controversial events of the movie. At the end of the film, Cap goes back in time to return the Infinity Stones to where the Avengers found them, but he stays in the past to spend his life with Peggy Carter, the woman Cap has said was the love of his life.

The time machine seen in the movie is less about getting people to the past, it seems, and more about helping them find their way back to their original universe, the one we’ve been watching in the MCU all along. But that raises the question: If Cap was in another timeline, how did he get back to the original timeline to give Sam Wilson his shield at the end of the film? The Russos covered that question in their EW interview, without giving a definitive answer:

“If Cap were to go back into the past and live there, he would create a branched reality. The question then becomes, how is he back in this reality to give the shield away?” Joe Russo asked with a smile. “Interesting question, right? Maybe there’s a story there. There’s a lot of layers built into this movie and we spent three years thinking through it, so it’s fun to talk about it and hopefully fill in holes for people so they understand what we’re thinking.”

We also know that Peggy was married and had kids while Steve was supposed to be frozen in a glacier, so wouldn’t Cap’s presence in her life fundamentally change those events?

The Russos agree that that’s true–but the Peggy Cap ends up with is in another timeline, which is how you get around the ethical questions that fans have raised about Cap wrecking Peggy’s family for the sake of his own happiness.

“If you went back to that timeline, between the point where Steve went into the ice [in Captain America: The First Avenger] yet before Peggy met her husband, Peggy was available,” Anthony Russo said in yet another interview, this time with The Hollywood Reporter. As for Peggy’s family, “They exist in a different timeline,” the directors said. So Cap didn’t erase her family in the original timeline, just the new one, which is maybe better, because they technically still exist somewhere?

Anyway, the way the Russos explain time travel is the way we interpreted it in Endgame as well (and really, it’s the only way it makes sense). But Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus, the movie’s writers, have a totally different take. The pair gave an interview to Fandango, in which they explained the movie’s time travel as being completely different. Instead of a lot of new timelines and alternate realities created by each of the changes the Avengers make when they travel through time, the writers said that only removing the Infinity Stones creates branches–which is similar (and similarly confusing) to what the Ancient One told Bruce Banner during the movie.

“We are not experts on time travel, but the Ancient One specifically states that when you take an Infinity Stone out of a timeline it creates a new timeline. So Steve going back and just being there would not create a new timeline,” Markus said. “So I reject the ‘Steve is in an alternate reality’ theory. I do believe that there is simply a period in world history from about ’48 to now where there are two Steve Rogers. And anyway, for a large chunk of that one of them is frozen in ice. So it’s not like they’d be running into each other.”

So Markus and McFeely say that Cap could just be in the past, living his life, and that his presence would not change the timeline–and therefore, he could just show up in 2023 to give the shield to Sam. That doesn’t seem to account for issues like Loki escaping with the Tesseract or Cap pretending to be a HYDRA agent, but it seems like the movie attempts to explain that with the conversation with the Ancient One: essentially, the Infinity Stones are magic, and since they create “the flow of time,” it’s impossible for alterations to mess up the timeline. Or something.

Lost? Yeah, us too. Maybe the overall point is that time travel is a beast for even talented Hollywood writers and directors to tackle, and trying to add it to something as huge and unwieldy as the MCU was even tougher. But while time travel might add an element of logical weirdness to Endgame, it seems like the greater MCU going forward will have something different to contend with, from what we saw in the latest trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home. That’s the idea of multiple parallel universes, something that’s straight out of Marvel Comics (not to mention last year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). Here’s hoping it doesn’t get too confounding.

If you didn’t know much about the long-running pop culture phenomenon known as Pokemon, it would be easy to assume that the blockbuster Japanese franchise is mainly for kids. But ask any of the now-adults who have been fans of Pokemon since the series’ debut on the Game Boy in the late ’90s, and you’ll find out that there are Pokemon fans who are young, old, and everything in between. And Detective Pikachu, the first ever live-action Pokemon movie, was made with all of them in mind.

Detective Pikachu director Rob Letterman has made plenty of films that you would most likely categorize as kids’ movies, from Shark Tale to Goosebumps. But as he told GameSpot, his approach to making any movie is simply to try and tell a good story, without any particular audience demographic in mind.

“I grew up with the movies in the ’80s that people say are family films, but they’re not really,” the director said. “Like Back to the Future, E.T.–when I was growing up, those were just movies, and the filmmakers didn’t target them for kids at all. They were just doing great stories and great characters. That was my childhood, loving that style of filmmaking, so that’s my approach.”

“I have kids. I’m a parent,” he said. “I go to movies with my kids, so I know what it’s like.”

Letterman’s kids have been into Pokemon cards and games for much longer than he’s been working on this movie, but the director himself missed the craze by a generation or so. The same isn’t true of Detective Pikachu star Justice Smith, who was into Pokemon as a kid just like so many fans were.

“I grew up with Pokemon,” Smith, who was born in 1995, told GameSpot. “I had all the original cards. I played Pokemon Gold growing up–that’s the first game I got for Game Boy Color. I had Pokemon Crystal. I had a lot of Pokemon games. I watched the anime.

“I have Pokemon Go on my phone right now,” he laughed.

Smith plays Tim Goodman, who teams up with his father’s former Pokemon partner, the titular sleuthing Pikachu, after Harry Goodman is killed in a car crash. It’s a dark premise that kicks the movie off on the right foot–Tim and Pikachu work to unravel the mystery of Harry’s death while navigating the perils of Ryme City, a gritty environment where Pokemon and people live together side-by-side.

Smith agreed with Letterman: Their approach was to simply tell a good story, and they focused on getting the humor right, not to mention the inherent “magic” of creating realistic-looking CG Pokemon in a live-action world.

“I think that the people who are going to go see this movie are people my age, who grew up with Pokemon, who had that nostalgia factor, who always wanted to see a live-action Pokemon film,” the actor said. “And then everyone else is like, ‘No, kids are going to go see this movie.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, are they?’ But I think it’s cool that this franchise just spans multiple generations. It bonds people regardless of age.”

The filmmakers also tried to fit in plenty of references to the original games and anime so that longtime fans would feel at home.

“I really wanted to connect it to the overall Pokemon universe,” Letterman said. “There’s a lot of references to [Pokemon: The First Movie] because that was the first Pokemon movie I watched with my kids, so that one was important to me, and Mewtwo plays a big role in this film…There’s a lot of subtle hints in there that connect us to the rest of the universe–there’s mention of the Kanto region, there’s posters in Tim’s bedroom in the background that true hardcore fans will start to read into and see how it all ties in.”

Smith was hesitant to say too much before the film’s release.

“There’s a lot of things that I really liked that we paid homage to from the anime that I don’t really want to say, because I don’t want to spoil anything,” the actor hinted–although he did point out that much like the original anime’s Ash and Misty, Tim and Lucy (Smith’s co-star, Kathryn Newton) have a Pikachu and a Psyduck. In addition, Smith pointed out that Lucy wears the red hoodie worn by Tim in the Detective Pikachu game. “There’s just Easter eggs all throughout the film–from the games, from the anime–that I think fans will enjoy–especially hardcore fans.”

“The idea is to make a movie for an audience of all ages,” Letterman explained. “That’s always been my approach. And, I also forget about that and just try to tell a story with character and human emotion in it.”

“I can’t tell you if that’s the best way to do things, but it’s the only way I can get into it,” the director continued.

Detective Pikachu hits theaters May 10. For more, check out our full movie review, our report from the movie’s set, the Pokemon Go tie-in event this week, and all the Pokemon we’ve spotted in trailers so far.

The first trailer for It: Chapter Two, the sequel to the well-received 2017 Stephen King horror movie, is coming very soon. A billboard spotted in Times Square reveals the first trailer is coming on Thursday.

That’s all there is to go on at this stage, so right now it’s not clear what time in the day the trailer will arrive. The billboard does, however, contain what appears to be the movie’s tagline: “Witness the end of It.” Keep checking back with GameSpot; we’ll post the trailer as soon as it arrives.

Chapter Two picks up 27 years after the events of the first movie. The kids are now adults, and Pennywise the Clown is back to terrorise them once more.

The cast is full of big names. James McAvoy plays Bill and Jessica Chastain portrays Beverly, while Bill Hader stars as Richie, Jay Ryan as Ben, James Ransone as Eddie, Andy Bean as Stanley, and Isaiah Mustafa as Mike. Bill Skarsgard returns to play Pennywise. The children who played the child characters from the original movie will return as well in flashback scenes.

Andy Muschietti, who directed the original, is back as well for the sequel. It: Chapter Two hits theatres on September 6.

The 2017 movie It made more than $700 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing horror movie in the history of cinema.

Ubisoft is hosting a Ghost Recon World Premiere event this Thursday, May 9, at 11:30 AM PT / 2:30 PM ET / 7:30 PM BST. Ubisoft hasn’t shared any other details about its Ghost Recon stream and it isn’t linking the event to 2017’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, so this reveal might be something entirely new. Ghost Recon Wildlands is currently available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.