The pandemic has been tough on just about everyone, but as far as businesses go, movie theaters suffered quite a bit, having to shut down all but entirely. After filing for bankruptcy earlier this year, theater chain Alamo Drafthouse is now emerging with plans to open new theaters, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The independent theater chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year, a move that begins a reorganization process for a struggling business. The company sold assets to pre-existing investor Altamont Capital and newcomer to the chain, Fortress Investment Group, to keep the business afloat as theaters stayed closed, pushing studios to delay upcoming movies.
Thanks to new financing from the sale, Alamo Drafthouse is now looking to open a 14-screen theater in Manhattan alongside its planned Staten Island theater. The chain is also planning 9-screen theaters in Washington D.C. and Arlington, Virginia, as well as a theater in St. Louis, Missouri. Meanwhile, two Texas theaters and one in Kansas City, Missouri will close; the chain is also ceasing development of a planned Orlando, Florida location.
“We’re so thrilled to be reopening theaters across the country and welcoming back audiences for an unparalleled moviegoing experience with films we’ve been eagerly awaiting for over a year now,” said Alamo Drafthouse CEO Shelli Taylor in an official statement. The Wrap notes that Alamo founder Tim League and some of the other original investors are listed among minority partners for the organization following the restructure.
The Austin, Texas chain currently has 41 theaters in operation.
Watch live streams, videos, and more from GameSpot’s summer event. Check it out
Pokemon Go is kicking off its new Season of Discovery with a Slowpoke-themed event from June 8-13. The event is called A Very Slow Discovery, and it introduces Galarian Slowpoke and Galarian Slowbro to the mobile game, as well as standard Slowbro’s Mega-Evolved form.
The event marks the first chance you’ll be able to encounter and catch Galarian Slowpoke in Pokemon Go. Unlike standard Slowpoke, this form is a pure Psychic type, and to evolve it into Galarian Slowbro, you’ll need to catch 30 Poison Pokemon while it’s set as your Buddy. The following Pokemon will also be appearing in the wild more frequently during the event:
Slowpoke
Slowbro
Slakoth
Vigoroth
Gulpin
Spoink
Galarian Slowpoke
In addition to the wild Pokemon spawns, Mega Slowbro will debut in Mega Raids, while the following monsters will be appearing in lower-tier Raids during the event:
One-star Raids
Galarian Slowpoke
Alolan Grimer
Shellder
Shinx
Timburr
Three-star Raids
Snorlax
Slowking
Slaking
Toxicroak
Beyond that, Niantic will offer a batch of event-exclusive Field Research tasks to complete, as well as a new Collection Challenge. If you’re able to clear the latter, you’ll receive a Slowpoke Forever shirt for your avatar along with 30 Ultra Balls and 3,000 XP. Niantic will also give away a free event box in Pokemon Go’s in-game shop, and there will be other new Slowpoke-themed cosmetics. You can read more about the event on the official Pokemon Go blog.
In the meantime, Pokemon Go’s June Community Day takes place this Sunday, June 6. This month’s featured Pokemon is Gible, and it will be able to learn the Ground-type Charged Attack Earth Power if you can evolve it into its final form, Garchomp, either during the event or up to two hours afterward. Niantic has also rolled out a short new Limited Research task line that will give another chance to catch Galarian Ponyta.
Watch live streams, videos, and more from GameSpot’s summer event. Check it out
Dark Horse Comics has opened a new gaming and digital division and is already speaking with AAA developers to potentially collaborate on games based on its biggest titles.
As reported by VentureBeat, Dark Horse has opened a new Dark Horse Games division out of Oregon and Shanghai with the intent of bringing its books — which includes properties like Hellboy, Sin City, 300, Umbrella Academy, and more — to games.
According to Dark Horse Games general manager Johnny Lee, the plan currently is to work with top developers on games based on Dark Horse’s most famous books, presumably titles like Hellboy.
All the while, Dark Horse will build an internal studio to create games based on either newer books and properties or older books that are less well-known.
“We have evergreen properties, like Hellboy, where there will always be interest in making games and doing collaborations,” says Lee. “We and our partners can really evaluate if a story IP and character universe would be a good fit for games that they’re internally designing and developing.”
Lee says Dark Horse is already in “late-stage discussions” with several AAA game developers and says if deals go well fans will start seeing its characters in major video games “no later than the end of Q1 next year.”
Game of Thrones aired its series finale two years ago, but many of its actors finished working on the show long before it concluded. Though Sean Bean’s Ned Stark is one of the series’ most well-remembered characters, the English actor was only a main cast member in the show’s first season in 2011, with his role in the story wrapping up in an early, much-memed exit.
Since leaving Game of Thrones, Bean had apparently checked out on what was happening in Westeros over the next seven seasons. In a recent profile in The Times of London, the actor learned how the series ended for the first time and expressed a muted approval of how things shook out.
Warning: Spoilers for Game of Thrones’ ending are below
In the piece, the interviewer described how the series concluded with Ned’s son, Bran, being crowned the king of Westeros and his daughter, Sansa, becoming queen of the North.
“So did Winterfell stay separate?” Bean asked. “Oh, good for them.”
The exchange began as a question the interviewer had about Bean’s thoughts on the parallels between the Starks’ kingdom’s secession from the rest of Westeros and Brexit, the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union.
Bean admitted he had not kept up with Game of Thrones since leaving the show. When asked if he would want to avoid spoilers in case he eventually did get around to watching the rest of the series, Bean said “I’ll have forgotten by then, go on.”
As E3 2021 looms, the big games are starting to show their hand. We discuss the recent gameplay reveals for Far Cry 6 and Dying Light 2 – both of which also got firm Fall release dates. Plus: Bungie’s next project, Microsoft Flight Simulator does some housekeeping to maybe get ready for its Xbox Series X release, and more!
Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our new YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 download of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out the latest episode of IGN Unfiltered, featuring an interview with Shadow Warrior 3 game director Kuba Opon on how they resurrected Shadow Warrior, his career path from programming to game directing, and much more:
After days of teases and weeks of leaks, UFOs have finally begun abducting people in Fortnite. Tuesdays are typically update days for Epic’s huge game, but today seemed to come and go without any fanfare, patch notes, or other major milestones to note. That was the case until this evening, at least. Players have begun sharing clips of the first-ever alien abductions in Fortnite.
As you can see below, the aliens seem to appear at random and choose one person to abduct. A brilliant beam of greenlight then focuses on that player for a few seconds before they’re lifted into the air and eventually dematerialized in front of any onlookers nearby. If, like Fox Mulder, you want to believe, here’s your proof.
This in-game event was leaked earlier this season but was not announced to be coming at any particular time. As is often the case, dataminers were able to tip off the community before Epic could really surprise everyone, but the arrival of UFOs still feels sudden given the lack of any official advance notice.
According to leaks, the UFOs will abduct someone during a round, heal them fully with 100 health and shields, then drop them somewhere else on the island to resume playing. This additional clip confirms the leaks, as it shows the event from the perspective of an abductee. With this all happening so suddenly, there’s still more to learn, but it seems like the next week will be eventful.
Those who study alien abduction reports are likely familiar with the concept of lost time, where alleged abductees claim to have minutes or even hours of their experiences wiped from their memories and unaccounted for. Could it be that players who get abducted by Fortnite aliens will later learn they’ve been used in some grander scheme as part of the Season 7 storyline? Such a twist sounds in line with the same lore guardians currently obfuscating the apparent truth that Fortnite’s masked man, The Foundation, is secretly played by The Rock.
Thor: Love and Thunder’s Chris Hemsworth has shared the exciting news that the upcoming MCU movie has finished filming alongside an image of him looking absolutely ripped.
Hemsworth took to Instagram to post an image of himself and Taika Waititi, who plays Korg, and his arms look worthy of the God of Thunder, even on “national don’t flex day.”
“That’s a wrap on Thor Love and Thunder,” Hemsworth wrote. “It’s also national don’t flex day so I thought this super relaxed photo was appropriate. The film is gonna be batshit crazy off the wall funny and might also pull a heart string or two. Lots of love, lots of thunder! Thank you to all the cast and crew who made this another incredible Marvel journey. Buckle in, get ready and see ya in cinemas!!”
Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder will be released in theaters on May 6, 2022, and will star Hemsworth and Waititi alongside Natalie Portman, Chris Pratt, Tessa Thompson, and Christian Bale as the villain, Gorr the God Butcher.
There’s a permeating sense throughout The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It that the stalwart horror franchise has come to a fork in the road. After two movies which mined the haunted house setup to great effect, the series could’ve played it safe and sent the Warrens to another spooky home to battle an entity plaguing an unsuspecting family. Instead, director Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona) reframes Ed and Lorraine Warren as paranormal detectives as they try to prove a murderer was not acting of his own volition at the time of his crime. It’s admirable to see this latest Conjuring movie taking narrative risks — most of which will assuredly pay dividends in future installments — but on its own merits, The Devil Made Me Do It is a mixed bag that doesn’t quite balance its interesting central mystery with the scares followers of the franchise have come to expect.
The opening sequence, the exorcism of David Glatzel (Julian Hilliard), serves as a sort of tonal handoff and feels like it could’ve been the end of an alternate-universe version of the third Conjuring movie. Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) have endeared themselves to the ailing Glatzels and, after an intense demonic assault featuring some great body horror, seemingly succeed in casting the entity out of young David. But saving David’s soul comes at a cost: not only does Ed suffer a massive heart attack, the demon takes hold of Arne Johnson (Ruairi O’Connor), the boyfriend of David’s sister Debbie (Sarah Catherine Hook). The demon’s influence over Arne is swift and deadly. In a fit of harried psychosis, Arne murders he and Debbie’s landlord, Bruno Sauls. Realizing that the crime was fallout from David’s exorcism, Ed and Lorraine encourage Arne to plead guilty by reason of demonic possession and set about finding evidence to confirm it.
The Conjuring franchise has always been marketed on its “based on true events” credentials, but The Devil Made Me Do It falters out of the gate in how it tries to service both the drama and the facts of Arne’s murder. Many of The Conjuring series’ strongest horror beats — and indeed, some of this film’s as well — happen when characters experience demonic activity in total isolation, forcing the viewer to question whether the demon is actually having an effect on the real world or if it’s in the character’s mind. The buildup to the murder is marred by cutaways to the perspective of Debbie and Bruno’s experience of the possessed Arne, making plain that, possessed or not, the man is not in his right mind. We already know Arne’s not a murderer by nature, so if the film had committed to limiting the crime to one character’s perspective, it may have been more impactful. It feels like a huge miscalculation, especially when Chaves actually nails this dynamic later on in another scene of a character detaching from reality and experiencing something different than what’s actually happening.
There’s also an uncomfortable choice made to paint Bruno as a volatile drunk. While this may be in keeping with the accounts of the real Johnson and Glatzels, here it feels as if the audience is asked to absolve Arne from the murder, possessed or not, because Bruno had it coming. It’s an odd move for a franchise that’s never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Taken with Arne’s limited displays of remorse for killing Bruno as the film goes on, and it becomes hard to emotionally attach to his plight in the same way it was for a loving mother in the first Conjuring or a working-class girl in the second. Chaves often cuts away to Arne and his continuing struggles against the demon terrorizing him, but most of these beats feel hampered both by our empathy for the character and the restricted avenues for horror that the prison setting allows. These telegraphed scares and over-engineered misdirects, which are a problem throughout The Devil Made Me Do It, feel endemic of The Conjuringverse going through growing pains as it closes in on a decade on screen.
While this film may be the least scary of the mainline series, it does make some strides in how it opens the franchise up to stories of greater scope. Even though you may end up caring more about the Warrens’ success than Arne’s absolution, The Devil Made Me Do It’s central investigation plot is engaging and sets it apart from other films in the Conjuringverse. As the Warrens discover Arne’s demon may not be on our spiritual plane of its own accord, they’re faced with an enemy who, in many ways, is more threatening than any they’ve faced before. The Occultist (Eugenie Bondurant) is a nihilistic, off-putting foe with powers that rival Lorraine’s. While Lorraine’s abilities are usually used passively, The Occultist weaponizes her power in ways that put the Warrens into real peril. The ongoing game of psychic cat and mouse Lorraine and The Occultist engage in provides The Devil Made Me Do It with dangerous energy, especially during one attack that hits especially close to home for the Warrens.
Bondurant cuts an imposing figure throughout, and her appearances always portend especially harrowing challenges for Ed and Lorraine, whose enduring love for each other is exploited as both their greatest weakness and their only defense. Whether or not The Occultist has a future in the franchise, she’s certainly one of the strongest elements of The Devil Made Me Do It and leaves a lasting impression. The always-reliable John Noble (Fringe, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King) likewise delivers some dark gravity as Father Kastner. Kastner’s a retired priest who assists the Warrens in their hunt for The Occultist and makes the most out of his relatively short appearance. He does make a couple of head-scratching omissions that feel more in service of keeping the Warrens’ in the dark long enough to move them into place for the climax, but overall, Kastner’s contributions feel substantial.
At this point, it’s no secret that the chemistry between Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga’s Ed and Lorraine is one of The Conjuringverse’s secret weapons. Wilson and Farmiga are as watchable as ever here, but The Devil Made Me Do It rests on its laurels in furthering our understanding of them as a couple, and doesn’t do much more for them individually. Ed does have to grapple with the limitations his weakened heart puts on him, but Chaves implies most of this internal struggle with Ed’s labored breathing and frequent falling behind, rather than use it as fodder for conflict between he and Lorraine as they face more and more danger. Farmiga really gets to swing for the fences in her battles with The Occultist, but The Devil Made Me Do It doesn’t give us much insight into how she’s affected by them. Ed and Lorraine’s relationship is most effective in this film’s quieter moments, and glossy romantic cutaways to their first meeting don’t approach the understated sweetness of Lorraine remembering something Ed’s forgotten in a key moment late in the story.
While it may not be especially frightening, The Devil Made Me Do It is certainly the best looking Conjuring film. The freedom that the Warrens’ wide-ranging (well, New England-spanning) investigation allows for gives Chaves ample opportunity for technical setups that the first two films didn’t have room for. Lorraine’s Batman-style “investigation mode” reconstruction of a girl’s disappearance allows for some great in-camera day-to-night shifts and The Occultist’s dark influence blurs the line between reality and illusion with some great funhouse trickery. Chaves has a keen eye for visuals and even in scenes where you can see the scare coming from a mile away, at least every setting’s ominous atmosphere is thought out and shot with flair.
The King of Fighters XV has been delayed from 2021 to Q1 2022 due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the game’s development timeline.
SNK shared the news in a press release, and The King of Fighters XV’s producer Yasuyuki Oda explained the team’s difficult decision to delay the upcoming fighting game.
“There are many fans who are anticipating the release of KOF XV in 2021, however at this point in time, we unfortunately have to announce that KOF XV will now be launching within the 1st quarter of 2022,” Oda said. “The development timeline we set out to reach in the beginning has been affected by the ever-still rising cases of COVID-19 within Japan.
“We have made the ultimate decision in the end that the product’s quality must come first, and so with that decision comes an altered release window. We sincerely ask for your kind patience and understanding as our development teams continue to work hard on KOF XV as we draw closer to its release.”
The King of Fighters XV was announced during EVO 2019 and we got our first look at gameplay earlier this year alongside six fighters that will be part of the game, including K’, Kyo Kusanagi, Leona, Benimaru, Shun’ei and Mai Shiranui
In honor of Pride Month, Square Enix has revealed a Pride Mascot designed by Final Fantasy 9’s Toshiyuki Itahana that it wants its fans to name.
Square Enix shared the Pride Mascot on Twitter and has asked its fans to reply to the tweet with a name idea that “might become part of Square Enix history.”
Our #Pride Mascot designed by Toshiyuki Itahana represents diversity and freedom, and we want you to help name them!
Itahana, who has also worked on Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, the Chocobo’s Dungeon titles, and more, explained why this mascot is so much more than just a colorful character.
“The character represents diversity and freedom, with its multitude of colours being the diversity aspect and the trainers and wings that allow it to travel anywhere symbolizing freedom,” Itahana said. “I designed this character hoping that the world can become even more free and diverse in the future.”
Square further explained that, in year’s past, its employees have “marched alongside others in support of intersectional equality, dignity and inclusion.” Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many of these parades and celebrations have been cancelled, and the company “wanted to do something special to honour the LGBTQ+ community and show our support.”
The yet-to-be-named Square Enix Pride Mascot has also found its way onto three shirts and a hoodie that can be purchased on the Square Enix Store. Throughout June, Square Enix will be donating all profits from the shirts to the Stonewall and GLAAD organizations.
