Author: Trafficblast

You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos.

Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos.

This video has an invalid file format.

Sorry, but you can’t access this content!

One of publisher Electronic Arts’ bosses has spoken up to talk about how, after 25 years with the company, he continues to struggle with how EA is often perceived as “a bunch of bad guys.”

A publicly traded company with thousands of employees around the world, EA is among the world’s largest, oldest, and most established gaming publishers. EA’s EVP of strategic growth, Matt Bilbey, explained to GI.biz that when EA makes mistakes, these issues are blown out due in part to the company’s size and scale.

“25 years at EA and I still struggle with the external perception that we’re just a bunch of bad guys,” Bilbey said. “We love making and playing games. Unfortunately, when we make mistakes on games, the world knows about it because it’s of a size and scale.”

Indeed. When EA’s Star Wars: Battlefront II ignited a controversy in 2017 over its implementation loot boxes and microtransactions–which were removed before the game’s public release–the discussion kicked off a global examination of loot boxes in video games that continues today. The title might have been embroiled in controversy, but it shipped a gargantuan 9 million-plus copies in its first months alone, making it one of the most successful Star Wars games in history.

It’s a similar story to EA’s Battlefield 4, which had a rough launch but was also hugely successful from a commercial perspective.

Also in the interview, Bilbey spoke about how EA, as the company grows larger and larger, faces the perception that it becomes “disconnected” from new, original ideas. That’s where the EA Originals program comes in. The label is behind titles like A Way Out, Fe, and Sea of Solitude, along with more games coming up in the future.

“EA Originals is our opportunity to connect with that talent and those smaller ideas. When you are part of a big company, it’s too easy to fall into the trap where when you see a game concept… it has to be big,” he said. “The notion of actually coming up with small, unique game ideas… We know from the work that we’ve been doing on our subscription business that gamers will play a FIFA or a Fortnite–they have one main franchise–but then they want breaks from those games to play something that’s maybe five or ten hours long.”

At E3 this y ear, EA announced the latest partners for the EA Original label, including Hazelight, Glowmade, and Zoink.

Actor Rami Malek plays the villain in the upcoming 25th and untitled James Bond movie. Now, the Oscar winner has revealed that he needed a guarantee about the character before signing on. He told The Daily Mail that he discussed his intentions with director Cary Fukunaga, telling him that he wouldn’t play the part if the character was a religious fundamentalist.

“It’s a great character and I’m very excited,” Malek said. “But that was one thing that I discussed with Cary. I said, ‘We cannot identify him with any act of terrorism reflecting an ideology or a religion. That’s not ­something I would entertain, so if that is why I am your choice then you can count me out.'”

That kind of character was “clearly not” what Fukunaga had in mind, Malek said, so he agreed to do the movie. The character Malek plays is a “very different kind of terrorist,” he said.

Malek went on to say the script is “extremely clever,” and it should be “exactly what people want” from a James Bond movie. Malek also said he feels “substantial pressure” to deliver in his performance given the weight of the history of the James Bond series.

Oscar winner Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) was initially tapped to direct Bond 25, but he dropped out due to “creative differences.” Cary Fukunaga replaced Boyle before the film was delayed first from October 2019 to February 2020 and then again to April 2020.

Bond 25–which is not the final name–stars Daniel Craig as James Bond for the final time. Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, and Lea Seydoux will all reprise their roles for the film Jeffrey Wright and Ben Whishaw also return.

In June, a controlled explosion on-set went wrong, and one person was injured.

You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos.

Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos.

This video has an invalid file format.

Sorry, but you can’t access this content!

You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos.

Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos.

This video has an invalid file format.

Sorry, but you can’t access this content!

This year’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will address one of the most-discussed elements of the new trilogy: who the heck are Rey’s parents? Actress Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, told The USA Today that director JJ Abrams is planning to reveal more details about her parentage in the upcoming film.

“(Director J.J. Abrams) did say the question is answered. So at the end of the film, you do know what the dealio is,” she said.

In The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) told Rey that her parents were no one of significance; they were only “filthy junk traders,” according to Kylo Ren. Ren, who is the movie’s villain, told this to Rey in the middle of a tense, emotional scene where he was directly trying to manipulate her, so many have theorized that he was indeed lying.

Abrams said earlier this year that The Rise of Skywalker aims to offer a satisfying conclusion not only to the new trilogy that began with 2015’s The Force Awakens, but also for the entire “Skywalker Saga” that began in 1977. Part of this is revealing who Rey’s parents are, it seems.

Abrams said he doesn’t want to retcon what director Rian Johnson did in The Last Jedi with Ren telling Rey her parents were nobody, but there is more to the story. “I don’t want to say that what happens in Episode 8 [didn’t happen],” Abrams said. “We have honored that. But I will say that there’s more to the story than you’ve seen.”

Some of the theories about Rey’s parentage include that she is the daughter of Luke Skywalker, a Kenobi, or a descendant of Palpatine, among others.

The Rise of Skywalker releases in theatres in December. In addition to Ridley and Driver, the movie stars John Boyega as Finn, Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico, Lupita Nyong’o as Maz Kanata, Domhnall Gleeson as General Hux, Mark Hamill as Luke, and Billy Dee Williams as Lando. For more, check out the movie’s first trailer and everything we know about Star Wars Episode IX.

The Skrulls have been working with Fury

Every film loses moments here and there to the cutting room floor, as demonstrated by the deleted scenes ubiquitous on DVD and Blu-ray releases. Sometimes, those scenes are especially difficult to cut, as was the case for a particular moment in writer and director Ari Aster’s latest horror movie, Midsommar, which has now arrived in theaters amid very positive reviews.

Warning: There are Midsommar spoilers below. If you haven’t watched the movie, come back after you have.

Midsommar follows a group of friends that includes Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor), a couple who would have broken up long before the group’s trip to a remote village in Sweden, if not for the tragedy that struck Dani’s family. Christian winds up feeling obligated to stay with Dani, despite being pretty well fed up with her–and although he may be trying to do the right thing by not ending it, he’s not actually doing her any favors. Their relationship spirals throughout the Midsommar festival, although it never really comes to a head until the end of the movie, when Dani chooses a new family in a spectacularly f***ed up, but very satisfying, way.

Except, at one point, their relationship was supposed to come to a head–in a scene that Aster said was incredible difficult for him to ultimately cut.

“There [was] a very big argument between Dani and Christian in the middle. That was the only time that we see Dani fight back and argue with Christian, and that was a big debate in the edit room, about whether we keep that or lose that,” Aster told GameSpot. “If you told me that I would have cut that scene before we went into production, I would have told you that you were crazy.”

In Aster’s previous film, the acclaimed Hereditary, mother and son Peter (Alex Wolff) and Annie (Toni Collette) have a screaming match across the dinner table that fully demolishes their already fraught relationship. Aster said he once considered the cut scene between Dani and Christian to be just as important.

“I really love the scene that we cut,” he said. “It’s some of my favorite dialogue in the whole film, and in some ways it was as big of a decision to cut that as it would have been to cut the dinner table scene in Hereditary between Toni and Alex. It was that big of a cut. It was a very, very big day when we lost that from the film.”

Aster told us his original version of Midsommar was three hours and 45 minutes long, so naturally, cuts had to happen to get the movie to its final runtime of two hours and 27 minutes. As it is, the film spends a long time languishing in the Swedish village’s strange, unsettling rituals, but Aster said there were “two other giant rituals” that got removed entirely. And they dropped a scene that was glimpsed in the movie’s trailer, in which someone appears to be levitating (although Midsommar doesn’t actually feature anything supernatural, Aster confirmed with us, and that scene had more to do with the film’s mushroom-infused psychedelic elements).

“There’s a lot that’s been cut out of the film, and [distributor] A24 used a lot of images from the cutting room floor in the trailer,” Aster said. “I don’t mind that, because you’re sad to see these things go, and so if they are being put to use in one way or another, you’re happy.”

Ultimately, losing the big argument scene between Dani and Christian benefitted the movie, in Aster’s opinion.

“We did find that by cutting that, we were able to maintain the tension between them even more successfully,” he said. “I was in love with that scene, because it felt like an argument that I’d had with partners before, and I think it felt like the kind of argument that people would relate to. But it also felt like the movie could survive it being cut, which was a shock to me, and I didn’t make peace with that until very recently.”

Aster shared one other thing about the movie’s initial, much longer cut: The timeline of the Midsommar festival itself was much clearer in the original version. As it is, there’s plenty of ambiguity, but the writer and director clarified a few things. For one, although the Midsommar festival happens every year, the part that happens at the film’s end–the fiery human sacrifice–occurs only every 90 years. In addition to that, said sacrifice occurs on only the fourth day of the nine-day festival, leaving us to wonder how the festival could possibly continue to escalate for five more days after that.

“[That’s] something that we always understood would be potentially confusing to people, but I’m really allergic to exposition that’s not absolutely needed, or that’s not, like, woven invisibly into the fabric, and there was just no way of explaining that in a way that didn’t feel like spoon feeding information,” Aster said. “In the three hour and 45 minute version of it, it’s a little bit clearer, but it was just one of the casualties of cutting the movie down.”

“I think there might be a director’s cut for this one,” Aster emphasized.

Midsommar is in theaters now.

If you stuck through the Spider-Man: Far From Home ending credits (and we hope you did–Endgame may have broken the tradition of post-credits scenes in the MCU, but Far From Home has brought it back with a vengeance) you will have seen one very familiar and very surprising face–and, if you didn’t? Turn back now. Because we’re about to talk about one of the most surprising returns in superhero movie history.

Major Spider-Man: Far From Home spoilers from here on out!

During the mid-credits scene, we see Peter Parker back home in New York City, happily Spider-Manning around with MJ, until a special broadcast cuts into the Times Square jumbotron. A news outlet called The Daily Bugle has received a special report–a video taken by Mysterio–and the one and only J. Jonah Jameson is here to report.

Oh, yeah. And J. Jonah Jameson is played by none other than J.K. Simmons.

It’s a one-two punch of Spider-Man significance that involves some pre-MCU movie knowledge and some seriously weighty comics history. So, with that in mind, let’s break it down.

The Bugle, JJJ, And Peter Parker

The Daily Bugle was first introduced all the way back in Fantastic Four #2 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1962–a little over a year before Peter Parker would be given his own solo ongoing series. The early ’60s were a hugely experimental time for superhero stories, and the idea of a proper shared-universe continuity was just beginning to really solidify–something that the existence of the Bugle really helped cement. The Bugle appeared in most early Marvel publications as a bit of background flavor–something to really sell the idea that Marvel’s characters all existed in the same version of New York City at the same time.

After its year of relatively background-level existence, the Bugle’s offices and the characters within were introduced in Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s The Amazing Spider-Man #1 in 1963. This is where things really started to heat up, giving us our first glimpse of the paper’s over-the-top editor, J. Jonah Jameson, and some idea of his zany, antagonistic relationship to put-upon freelance photographer Peter Parker.

Jameson and The Bugle’s connection to Peter were instrumental in sparking Spider-Man’s initial popularity as a breakout solo hero. In its infancy, Marvel made a name for itself in the superhero genre by publishing stories that bucked the square-jawed conventions put forth by competitors like DC (or National, as it was known at the time). Marvel’s heroes were angst-ridden and outcast, products of the post-war era where nuclear anxiety and brewing complications with Vietnam were more relatable than the hard-boiled crime fighting and goofy, ray-gun slinging sci-fi of the ’40s and ’50s. In those early years, Marvel’s characters’ ennui usually manifested in a physical way–the X-Men and their mutations that immediately marked them as different, the Fantastic Four’s superpowers that looked strange, impossible, or disturbing. But Spider-Man took a different approach–there was nothing physical that denoted Peter as an outsider or a freak, and everything that sparked his angst and confusion was almost entirely mundane.

Sure, he had his Spider-powers, but the things he struggled with were making it through high school as a bullied nerd, hitting deadlines at his thankless job, and trying to survive an endless barrage of complaints by his impossible-to-please boss. You know, the same stuff virtually every human in the world can relate to at one point or another.

JJJ and The Bugle really sold the concept on multiple levels. Not only was Jameson (and by extension, the paper itself) the perfect caricature of a furious editor, the anti-comics panic that pervaded the 1950s, and of Marvel’s editorial bullpen itself, he was also given a cartoonish hatred of Spider-Man, making things for Peter even worse as he tried to thread the needle between work, life, and superheroics. It was the perfect blend of high flying escapism and completely relatable existential dread to really hook readers and keep them coming back for more.

In the decades since their introduction, the dynamic between Peter, Jonah, and The Bugle has shifted around countless times–Jonah doesn’t always hate Spider-Man (though he usually does), Peter doesn’t always work as a photographer, and so on. There have even been a few fleeting moments where Jonah’s learned the truth about Peter’s identity–though those don’t tend to last very long. But, even with a status quo that continues to evolve and change over time, the connection between Spider-Man and The Bugle has crystallized into one of the most universally understood and recognized parts of the character–which, of course, makes it a little odd that it took the MCU this long to cross that particular bridge.

JK Simmons, Spider-Movies, and The MCU

If there’s one thing we, as comic movie fans, have absolutely no shortage of, it’s live-action Spider-Man movies–and, love them or hate them, Sam Raimi’s original trilogy starring Tobey Maguire has cemented itself pretty firmly in the zeitgeist as a watershed moment for superhero movies. But that honor (or disgrace, depending on who you ask) doesn’t just sit on Peter’s shoulders–the world Raimi and his teams created for these movies informed a whole generation of new Spider-Man fans.

And that absolutely includes JK Simmons and his portrayal of J. Jonah Jameson. Pre-dating the MCU by almost a decade, Simmons was one of the most immediately and fondly recognized elements of the first Spider-Man movie. He looked the part, down to the letter, and sold it with the fist-clenching, cigar-chomping scowl that had defined the character for the last forty-some years of comics. Say what you will about the rest of the cast, from Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane to James Franco’s Harry Osborn, but Simmons was perfect in the role.

In fact, you could argue that he was too perfect. After Raimi’s trilogy concluded, the reboot duology starring Andrew Garfield didn’t even attempt to bring him in. He was referenced in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but never actually brought on screen.

For the most part, the MCU has avoided the problem entirely–Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is dramatically different from his other live action and comic book incarnations in some key ways. He’s not a photographer, he has no interest in reporting or writing, his supporting cast has all been aged down and shifted to mesh with his new status quo rather than his traditional one, and so on. Sure, The Bugle may be one of the things just about everyone, no matter how well they know the comics or the movies, associates with Spider-Man–but the MCU has never really needed it.

At least, until now–and how do you solve the problem of recasting a beloved, well-remembered pop culture icon for a new franchise? Easy: You don’t.

JJJ is back in live action, played by JK Simmons, here to ruin Peter’s life as per usual–except this time the stakes are dramatically different. For one, Tom Holland’s Peter has no relationship with The Bugle or with Jameson at all, making the attack on him both more and less brutal. Make no mistake, having his identity outed is going to royally screw things up, but at least he doesn’t have to worry about handling the complete implosion of his day job simultaneously.

On the other hand, this is the first time we’ve had any experience with The Bugle in the MCU, so we have no idea whether or not this sort of anti-Spider-Man/anti-Superhero rhetoric is part and parcel with Jameson’s “brand” or if this is a new thing. Either way, it’s perfectly clear that he is more than OK with ruining the life of a high school kid, superhero or otherwise, which is rough, to say the least.

But despite the new context and slight changes to his character, one thing is certain: Now that JJJ is in the mix, nothing in the MCU will ever be the same.