Category: Games

The Napoleon Bonaparte movie from director Ridley Scott and starring Joaquin Phoenix is close to signing another star. Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer is the top pick to play Josephine, Bonaparte’s wife, according to Deadline’s sources.

The site’s sources said it’s still “early” in the process, so Comer hasn’t officially signed on yet. However, Deadline said Comer is Scott’s top choice and “all signs point to it coming together.”

The movie is called Kitbag and it’s being made for Apple TV+. It probably won’t release anytime soon, as Scott is currently working on the MGM crime movie House of Gucci starring Lady Gaga, moving on to Kitbag after that.

Scott and Comer have worked together before, as he directed her in the period movie The Last Duel, which also stars Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Adam Driver. “Insiders say Scott was blown away by her work during production of the film, which wrapped at the end of last year,” the report said.

Kitbag–which is a reference to the line, “There is a general’s staff hidden in every soldier’s kitbag”–is just the latest big get for Apple Studios. In 2020, Apple signed the new movie Emancipation from Antoine Fuqua and starring Will Smith, as well as Killers of the Flower Moon from Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

As for Comer, she’s expected to film Killing Eve season 4 this year, while she is set to appear in the Ryan Reynolds video game movie Free Guy later in 2021.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

The first trailer for Amazon’s Tom Clancy adaptation Without Remorse has been released. The movie stars Michael B. Jordan as vengeful CIA operative John Clark, and it hits Amazon Video on April 30.

The trailer sets up the basic plot, which sees Clark and his family attacked by highly trained assassins. Clark survives but his wife dies, so the angry operative goes rogue in an attempt to find whoever launched the assault. This being a Clancy story, there also lots of shadowy conspiracy thrills alongside the high-octane violence, a mix that diretor Stefano Sollima (Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Gomorrah) has proven to be very skilled at in the past. Check the trailer below.

Without Remorse also stars Jamie Bell, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Guy Pierce. It’s written by Taylor Sherdian, who wrote both Sicario movies. The novel Without Remorse was published in 1993 and was an origin story for John Clark, who had appeared as a supporting character in Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels. Clark has previously been played on screen by Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber.

Without Remorse is the latest big movie that was originally intended for a theatrical release but has moved to streaming instead. The film was produced by Paramount but was sold to Amazon last year, much like the comedy sequel Coming 2 America, which releases this week. Amazon has previously produced two seasons of the Jack Ryan show, starring John Krasinski.

In related news, Jordan is expected to return for the third Creed movie. The film doesn’t have a director or release date yet but last year it was reported that Zach Baylin had been hired to write it.

Disney’s upcoming live-action Pinocchio movie has cast more of its main roles, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Batman) lined up to voice Jiminy Cricket and Cynthia Erivo (Harriet) playing the Blue Fairy.

This news comes from Variety. The new cast members joins a cast that already includes Tom Hanks as Geppetto and Luke Evans as The Coachman. Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (Flora and Ulysses) will voice Pinocchio, while Keegan-Michael Key will voice Honest John. Goodfellas star Lorraine Bracco will voice Sofia the Seagull, a new character.

The film is being directed by Oscar-winner Robert Zemeckis (Forest Gump, Cast Away, Back to the Future) and is expected to begin production this month in the UK. The movie will blend live-action with visual effects.

Disney’s new Pinocchio movie is slated to come to Disney+, not theaters.

The fairy tale story of Pinocchio is in the public domain, and Disney is not the only company working on a new film. Guillermo del Toro is set to direct an animated version of Pinocchio for Netflix with a cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz, and Ron Perlman, among others. In 2019, Italian film director Matteo Garrone released a well-received Pinocchio movie based on the classic tale.

The new Netflix movie The Gray Man–which is the most expensive original Netflix movie in history in terms of its budget–has added new cast members. Oscar-winner Billy Bob Thornton will appear in the film, alongside Bridgerton actor Rege-Jean Page and Oscar nominee Alfre Woodard (Cross Creek, 12 Years a Slave), according to Deadline.

These new cast members join the previously announced cast that includes Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana De Armas, Wagner Moura, Jessica Henwick, Dhanush, and Julia Butters.

Avengers directors Joe and Anthony Russo are set to direct the film, which was originally set up at Sony before it went back into the market where Netflix bought it. According to Deadline, Netflix is eyeing The Gray Man to become a new franchise, and it’s spending more than $200 million to produce the film–that’s the highest budget ever for a Netflix original movie.

Production will begin in Los Angeles later this month. The movie is based on the 2009 Mark Greaney novel that follows a freelance assassins and former CIA operative named Court Gentry.

The Gray Man is written by Joe Russo with help from Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the pair who wrote Captain America and the Avengers films.

After winning the inaugural women’s Dusty Rhodes Tag Team Classic, NXT superstars Dakota Kai and Raquel González were flying high on their way to a WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship match. Now, WWE’s Shayna Baszler and Nia Jax are looking to send them crashing back to Earth.

Speaking to GameSpot’s Wrestle Buddies podcast, Baszler admitted she and her co-champion aren’t sweating the competition. “They did a great job through that tournament,” she said. “They showed that they were the best tag team in that tournament. But, like we weren’t in that tournament because we don’t need to be.”

Baszler continued, “They’re flying high right now. But they’re going to learn [and] they’re going to learn real fast.”

This is more than a match. For Baszler, this NXT appearance is a homecoming. Baszler was NXT’s first-ever two-time Women’s Champion, with her second reign lasting over a year, cementing her as one of the brand’s top villains.

“I’m so glad that I got to experience that, even though they hated me most the time I was there,” she remembered. “I didn’t see it until actually I went to Raw. You know, you don’t know what you got [until] it’s gone. I think people were appreciating what I did for the title and the division and just the girls that were there during that time.”

Baszler and Jax will defend the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championships on this week’s episode of NXT, which airs Wednesdays on USA.

The director of the Mortal Kombat movie is promising that the video game adaptation will feature some epic fight scenes befitting of the Mortal Kombat name.

Simon McQuoid–an Australian commercials director who makes his feature directorial debut with Mortal Kombat–told Collider that the goal was to create the best fight scenes ever committed to film.

“The fights themselves, what we’ve attempted to do… is to innovate within,” he said. “To drive character forward and story forward within the fight. So we spent a lot of time on that. The fight team are incredible on this movie. The first thing I said to Kyle [Gardiner], who is the stunt coordinator, he runs the whole thing, I said to him, ‘Ok Kyle, we have to make the best fights that have ever been on film. So, no pressure.’ … But it was really about building character and story within the fight itself so it didn’t just feel like a plugin. It actually felt like part of the scene and part of the act.”

Producer Todd Garner, meanwhile, said the aim with the film was to make the “most badass fight movie that’s ever been shot.” Garner acknowledged this would be a difficult task, but the team tried its best to make it happen.

“The closest thing I can think of is that it feels like a dance movie. Where it’s just like, we got this. You’re not faking anything … These guys are just, you know, they’re the best at what they do. [Lewis Tan, who plays a new character named Cole Young] has done every piece of fighting choreo in this movie. And they all have,” Garner said.

Joe Taslim, who plays Sub-Zero, said Mortal Kombat features an extended, four-minute fight scene where they really go all-out. “There’s one crazy fight,” he said. “That… every day I discuss it with Simon, with our action directors, to make it better and better and better.”

The full interview touches on numerous other aspects of the fight scenes in Mortal Kombat, with insight from the actors and others involved. It’s a good read–check it out here at Collider.

The Mortal Kombat movie, which is produced by Aquaman’s James Wan, releases on April 16 both in theaters and on HBO Max. You can check out a trailer above.

AMD has announced its mainstream RDNA 2-powered GPU, with the RX 6700 XT set to launch on March 18.

This is the most affordable GPU in the 6000 series yet, with specs that target 1440p for maximum performance. This pits it against Nvidia’s RTX 3070 and less powerful RTX 3060 Ti, with AMD nestling in between the two with its $479 MSRP. Of course, if the past few months have been any indication, that figure might not count for anything, considering the inflation of GPU pricing due to stock shortages.

If you can snag one at release for anywhere close to the recommend price, AMD is promising performance on par and, in some cases, exceeding that of the RTX 3070. In its internal benchmarks, AMD has the RX 6700 XT beating its Nvidia rival in many modern titles. What isn’t as clear in the image is that the benchmarks are making use of AMD’s Smart Access Memory boost for increased performance, a feature which Nvidia hasn’t yet rolled out to the RTX 3070.

That could skew metric somewhat, but benchmarks are only truly accurate once consumers start getting a hold of cards anyway. The RX 6700 XT is a powerful one then, sporting a core clock of 2424MHz, 12GB of GDDR6 memory, 40 compute units (just 20 shy of the 60 in the 4K-capable RX 6800 XT), and a TDP of 230W.

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AMD will be launching reference models with its familiar 6000 series dual-fan design, while AIB designs seem to mostly feature triple-fan configuration. Both will be available on March 18, with AMD promising that it will refresh stock on its own website weekly going forward. That might help with the price hikes, but only if AMD can supply enough to satiate demand.

AMD closed off today’s stream with a tease of 6000 series GPUs being prepared for laptops in the near future, so look out for an announcement on that soon.

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