Author: Trafficblast

It’s going to be a big week for Epic’s battle royale game Fortnite. In addition to the launch of Season 7, Epic has an announcement teed up for The Game Awards.

Show organiser Geoff Keighley said there will be some kind of Fortnite announcement and a “world premiere” at The Game Awards on Thursday night. Epic’s own Donald Mustard will be on hand at the event to drop the news, apparently.

Epic PR lead Nick Chester confirmed in his own tweet that the announcement lined up for The Game Awards is not related to Season 7. “I can’t stress enough how much we have going on this week,” Chester said.

Keighley’s cryptic teaser mentioned that Fortnite fans will want to “keep your game close,” which sounds like a suggestion that something will happen in the game.

Avengers directors Joe and Anthony Russo, who are big fans of Fortnite, will be presenting an award at The Game Awards this week. However, it remains to be seen if the directors will have any news to share during the show.

The pair played Fortnite during downtime during of the editing process of Infinity War, they told EW this year. Joe Russo personally called Mustard to get a conversation going about about the Thanos limited-time mode that eventually came to Fortnite. More recently, Anthony Russo wore a Fortnite t-shirt during an Infinity War Q&A just last week, so their appreciation for Fortnite seemingly continues.

As for Fortnite Season 7, Epic recently released a new teaser that teases, “A bitter ice spreads,” which follows previous rumours and reports about the seventh season having a wintry, cold theme. Season 7 begins on December 6, which is the same day as The Game Awards.

The Game Awards 2018 take place on December 6, starting at 8:30 PM ET / 5:30 PM PT. That works out to 1:30 AM GMT and 12:30 PM AET on December 7. There are more than 10 new game announcements on tap, one of which is the next RPG from the makers of Fallout: New Vegas. You’ll be able to watch the show on GameSpot, while we’ll have a rundown of all the big news as well.

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In your daily scroll through the Netflix carousel, you’ve probably noticed a new Netflix-exclusive Christmas movie starring veteran actor Kurt Russell called The Christmas Chronicles. As it turns out, while the movie flew somewhat under the radar, the film has been extraordinary successful.

Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said this week that the film generated 20 million views in its first week. According to Sarandos, that would work out to a $200 million opening if The Christmas Chronicles was released traditionally in theaters.

“If every one of those [20 million streams] was a movie ticket purchase, that’s a $US 200 million opening week,” he said, as reported by Business Insider. “Even movies that go on to $US1 billion don’t typically do that in the first week.”

According to Sarandos, The Christmas Chronicles is Russell’s biggest opening ever for one of his movies. “Even in his successful career, he’s never had that many people see one of his movies in the first week ever,” he said. “That’s a testimony to what we can bring to the market for storytellers today that we couldn’t have ten years ago.”

Importantly, it’s unclear how many of the 20 million first-week streams for The Christmas Chronicles are repeats. But whatever the case, it is clear the movie has been popular, and while Sarandos is spinning the numbers in a way that makes Netflix look better, he’s of course absolutely right that Netflix is shaking up the film world.

Russell, who has been acting for decades, recently appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which made $146.5 million over its first three days and $183 million in its first week, according to the report.

The Christmas Chronicles stars Russell as Santa, along with Judah Lewis and Darby Camp as the brother and sister who caused Santa’s sleigh to crash. Together, they must all save Christmas.

The movie, which was released at the end of November, was directed by Clay Kaytis (The Angry Birds Movie) and produced by Harry Potter and Home Alone director Chris Columbus.