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With the release of Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins fast approaching, Paramount Pictures has released a new series of motion posters featuring the heroes and villains of this G.I. Joe prequel.

IGN can exclusively debut all eight motion posters, which depict the main characters of the movie alongside symbols of the three key organizations that fuel the plot – the Joes, Cobra, and the Arashikage ninja clan.. Scroll down to get a closer look at this long-awaited origin story for the silent ninja hero.

Static versions of the motion posters can also be found in a gallery at the bottom of the article.

Snake Eyes

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Henry Golding stars as Snake Eyes, a loner who is recruited into the secretive Clan Arashikage. The film will chronicle his rise and show how he becomes the elite but silent member of G.I. Joe. Though there’s no guarantee the movie will follow the usual path of past G.I. Joe stories, as we already know we’ll be seeing a lot of Snake Eyes’ face.

“Let’s just say he wasn’t born with a mask. There’s always a beginning,” Golding told IGN. “And the importance for giving complexity to such an iconic character, I think drove us to be able to allow him to express himself because I don’t think we were able to see that in the comic books. We weren’t able to understand the hardships that got him to be who he is, the decisions that were made, the hurdles that had to be overcome, the wrong, the right. And we see all of that within this, [film] because perhaps he isn’t the best of guys in the beginning, perhaps his motivations aren’t true. But what he goes through with the Arashikage [Clan] perhaps puts him back on the right track.”

Storm Shadow

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Andrew Koji plays Thomas Arashikage/Storm Shadow. In the comics, Tommy is Snake Eyes’ friend and fellow trainee, though their friendship will become an outright rivalry as they grow older and find themselves on opposite sides of the G.I. Joe/Cobra war. Their relationship will be at the heart of the film, which shows Snake Eyes gradually allowing others into his solitary existence.

“The only relationship that Snake Eyes, when we pick up with him, is his own,” Golding said. “He is a complete loner. He’s been on his own for the majority of his life, up until the point where we pick them up in the movie. And so, his motivations, his goals are solely for himself.”

Scarlett

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Samara Weaving plays Scarlett, one of the top-ranking members of G.I. Joe and sometimes portrayed as Snake Eyes’ lover. Presumably, we’ll see her team up with our hero and attempt to recruit him in this prequel.

“I can definitely say Scarlett acts as the agent between the Arashikage and the Joes, and there is a preexisting relationship between the two. Cobra plays a fairly large part in the bigger picture of this, of this movie, especially,“ Golding said.

Baroness

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Úrsula Corberó plays The Baroness, an elite Cobra operative second only to Cobra Commander himself.

Hard Master

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Iko Uwais plays Hard Master, the leader of Clan Arashikage. He’s one of the most formidable fighters on the planet and the uncle of Storm Shadow. Traditionally, Hard Master’s murder is the catalyst that drives Storm Shadow to Cobra and Snake Eyes to G.I. Joe, though it remains to be seen how closely the movie follows that path.

Blind Master

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Peter Mensah plays Blind Master, another leader in the Arashikage family. As his title suggests, he’s blind, but that hardly diminishes his martial arts ability. In the G.I. Joe comics, Blind Master is also the mentor of Jinx, another key ninja character.

Akiko

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Haruka Abe plays Akiko, a character who has been created for the movie. Akiko is another Arashikage trainee, one with deep ties to both Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow.

Kenta

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Takehiro Hira plays Kenta, another character who is unique to Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins. His Cobra background indicates where his allegiances lie.

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins opens in theaters on July 23, and it’s one of the big new movies of summer 2021.

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Director Shawn Levy’s upcoming action-comedy Free Guy revolves around Ryan  Reynolds’ bank teller Guy, an NPC in a raucous GTA-style, open-world shooter game called Free City who rebels against his programming. But while Guy is the heart of the movie and the focus of the story, Free Guy doesn’t take place wholly within the realm of a video game. The movie sees “real world” characters, such as Jodie Comer’s Millie Rusk, who wrote the code for Free City, enter the game as avatars.

The introverted Millie is out to determine who stole her code and, as her badass avatar Molotov Girl, she comes into contact with Guy. As Jodie Comer explained to IGN and other press visiting the Boston set back in June 2019: “What’s wonderful is Molotov meets Guy within the video world and he doesn’t realize that he is an algorithm. He thinks his life has this greater meaning, as we all do. And it’s about how these two people who are from completely separate worlds kind of help each other realize a lot of what is inside of them. And they help each other both get to the kind of destination it is that they need to be at.”

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Comer believes that Millie’s avatar reveals “a resilience and a determination” within her and that while the video game world may be artificial, she discovers a very real relationship with her creation, Guy. 

“The contrast is Molotov is very physically strong and there’s all of these very impressive things and it’s super cool, and Millie’s a little bit more introverted, so that is very different. But I think the resilience is there of Millie and her determination to kind of fight for what is hers. I feel like amongst all the kind of action of it all, there is a very human relationship there. The feelings that Guy and Molotov end up finding are all very real and kind of relate to a relationship in the real world.”

Initially, though, Millie/Molotov is “dismissive” of Guy, a background character in her coding she normally wouldn’t give a second thought to until she realizes something is amiss in her game. “It’s not until she senses some kind of abnormalities within the world and how people are reacting to things that she then engages with him,” Comer explained, “and that continues to grow throughout the movie.”

To prepare for her role, Comer’s homework included playing video games. She specifically played GTA on PS4 but found that whole experience “quite stressful. I find it quite amazing actually how, when I think of kids playing it, I’m like did they take it as literally as I am?”

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Comer opted to play Spider-Man instead since she found it more “carefree” than GTA. “I’m one of these people who just presses every single button in the hopes that I survive,” she admitted of her gaming skills.

As Millie, Comer shares scenes with actor-director Taika Waititi, who plays Antwan, the verbally abusive and greedy mogul behind video game company Soonami, maker of Free City. “He’s kind of my enemy within this. So, I did all in my power not to laugh at him because I was like, Millie would not. I was like I’m not going to give him this power.”

While she said she finds the idea of improvisation terrifying, Comer was awed by Waititi’s skills and said his brain “fascinates” her so much that she would come to set on days she wasn’t scheduled to work just to watch Waititi perform his scenes. 

“He’s fantastic. He brings such an energy to the film, especially within the realms of the real world and the video game,” Comer said. “We have all this action and this color, and it’s still present within the day-to-day world, because of what Taika and Joe [Keery] and Utkarsh [Ambudkar] bring to their [Soonami employee] characters.”

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Gamers can witness the action and color of Free Guy for themselves when it finally opens in theaters on August 13.

As the story goes, when Phil Spencer became head of Xbox in 2014, he got a call from newly-appointed CEO Satya Nadella. “I don’t actually know a whole lot about why we’re in gaming,” Nadella said to him.

Nadella’s remark at the time ought to have been unsurprising. The Xbox One had launched the previous holiday to strong initial sales but a slowing long tail compared to its direct competitor, the PS4. This was in no small part due to its emphasis on being a general living room entertainment box rather than a gaming console, and it was exacerbated over the years by a dearth of strong first-party exclusives. There are other reasons, sure, but at the core of it all was a company, Microsoft, that didn’t seem to have any idea what to do with the promising gaming division it had in Xbox.

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So Spencer, only a few weeks into his new job, spent some time puzzling out a response to his boss candidly admitting he didn’t know why Microsoft even had the division Spencer had just been appointed head of. And when he called Nadella back, he had decided to go big or go home with his pitch:

“If we’re going to stay in the gaming space, then let’s make sure we’re all-in,” Spencer said. “The last thing I wanted to do was run the gaming organization here as kind of an afterthought of the company and kind of half-in, half-out. Let’s go fix who we are.”

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It’s been seven years since that conversation, and it’s now abundantly clear that Spencer’s “all-in on gaming” pitch did not fall on deaf ears. In fact, Spencer appears to have been so successful in his bid that Microsoft and Xbox have unified themselves in a cross-company strategy that is primed to shed the need for a gaming box at all.

Today, Nadella and Spencer have announced a number of both reflective figures and future plans cementing this. There’s the obvious success of Game Pass, of course, which Xbox has consistently pointed at for years as a business model that encourages players to play more games and more genres, as well as spend more money on games. Without specific numbers its actual success can be hard to quantify, but Xbox has offered Square Enix’s Outriders as a recent example of a title launched into Game Pass, that also sold very, very well on Xbox in no small part thanks to Game Pass. There have been enough similar stories over the years of even indie games seeing benefits from Game Pass, as well as the deals associated with it.

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But a games subscription service does not an “all-in” gaming strategy make; not on its own. There have been rumors on the wind for years now that Xbox was going to do something to move beyond hardware generations, beyond the same old churn of console wars every six years or so. Those ideas coalesced a bit further as Spencer began talking openly about trying to get Xbox Game Pass on every device, not just Microsoft-made ones, in an effort to turn Xbox gaming into an ecosystem that wasn’t tied to an exclusive box. And in his announcements with Nadella today, Spencer and Xbox seem to be on the verge of leaping at last. Xbox, they say, is now working with global TV manufacturers to embed Xbox gaming directly into internet-connected TVs. All you’d need to use it is a controller. No Xbox console required.

What’s more, the two have promised to continue to spread this overall Xbox gaming experience even further, emphasizing breaking down as many barriers as possible. Geographical barriers, for instance, which Xbox is now looking at overcoming with different types of subscription offerings, different pricing models, and expanded reach of its cloud gaming offerings. Then there’s cloud gaming itself, which further dissolves challenges of requiring any specific device to get involved in gaming to begin with, especially now that Xbox is getting ready to bust open its cloud gaming offerings on web browsers and PCs. And particularly on the cloud gaming front, as Spencer points out, this is all only possible because it has buy-in from Microsoft proper and its Azure cloud computing technology.

Why is all this necessary? No, it’s not because Xbox was behind on the console unit sales game a generation ago, at least not to hear Spencer tell it. It’s because he foresees that console gaming as it is now is eventually going to hit a barrier of accessibility; or may even already have. He sees the rise of mobile gaming in particular not as an obstacle, or something to be dabbled in merely for the microtransaction money by making mobile spin-offs of Xbox IP, but as an opportunity Xbox can take advantage of through technology.

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“We’re doing this because we’re trying to reach the three billion people on the planet who in some sort of way play an electronic game,” Spencer said in the full video interview. “The thing is, there are only about 200 million households in the world, maybe 250, that are interested in consoles at all. Either way, that’s less than 10% of the three billion players out there. So we need to meet players where they are, which is mobile and on other screens and devices.”

All this wouldn’t matter much if Xbox didn’t have the gaming software ecosystem to make that cool technology worthwhile, but it has that too, and with more to come. Game Pass is already stuffed with games, and thanks to partnerships like it has with EA Play and heavy-hitting acquisitions like Zenimax, it increasingly has more than the library to back it up. And that’s all ignoring the fact that timing-wise, we’re likely only a few years out from a big wave of first-party releases from Xbox’s internal studios it’s bought up over the years. COVID may have slowed that down somewhat, but the floodgates seem primed to open.

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Were Xbox gaming still the island on the edge of Microsoft’s kingdom that it was in 2014, none of this would have been possible. Sure, some elements like Xbox Game Pass might still be a thing, but the pricey acquisitions, the powerful partnerships, the cloud buy-in, and the aggressive global interconnectivity would likely be little more than a pipedream without the full force of the company backing it. In fact, much of what Microsoft appears to be gearing up for is reminiscent of the company’s turnaround after it fell behind competitors in the 2000s during the advent of smartphones.

Then as now, Microsoft recognizes its success lies not in chasing the same thing everyone else is already doing very, very well. Instead, it wants to create something bigger, unifying, and different. Years ago, that was Microsoft’s cloud computing technologies. Now, it wants to make a unified gaming ecosystem that is accessible, affordable, fast, full, and powerful no matter who you are or how you’re using it. It wants to loop in content creators, too, with Nadella and mentioning in their interview the importance of integrating creators into this ecosystem they’re building. There’s less detail here, with Nadella bringing up the obvious connection with Minecraft and a less-apparent but still interesting mention of Microsoft Mesh. In this, Nadella is playing the long game it seems. “We’re very excited about what creators can do going forward with the platform shifts that we are going to have in the next ten years,” he said.

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It’s clear that Microsoft has moved beyond seeing gaming as a mere fun pastime, a profitable blip on its financial results. Instead, it appears to be gearing up to turn gaming into a new connective tissue that stands to be very profitable, of course, but also potentially very powerful in its reach and accessibility. We’ve been seeing the beginnings of it for years. And to be clear, there are still plenty of ways it could stumble or even fail as it progresses, especially in a world of aggressive moneyed tech competitors and metaverse daydreamers. But it’s now immediately clear that these plans are no longer just an Xbox initiative: they’re a Microsoft initiative. And that’s far, far more powerful.

In the published interview between Spencer and Nadella, Spencer prompts Nadella by asking why gaming is a priority for Microsoft now. Nadella’s answer references gaming’s importance from the early days of the company. The particular flavor of importance Nadella is referring to here is debatable given his 2014 comments and Xbox’s struggles to find its identity over the years. But then, he echoes Spencer’s own words back to him in a confirmation that the Xbox head’s bid to him seven years ago was far, far from in vain:

“As a company, Microsoft’s all-in on gaming,” Nadella said. “We believe we can play a leading role in democratizing gaming and defining that future of interactive entertainment, quite frankly, at scale…I’m really excited about the opportunity in gaming.”

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Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

The executives behind the failed theater ticket subscription company MoviePass have reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, following charges that they misled customers and failed to protect its user’s data.

As reported by Variety, the FTC ruled against Helios and Matheson Analytics, the company which owned MoviePass, CEO Mitch Lowe, and Chairman Ted Farnsworth. It stated that they will be “barred from misrepresenting their business and data security practices.” In addition, any other businesses they own must “implement comprehensive information security programs.”

The FTC’s ruling comes nearly two years after MoviePass closed down. The service launched in 2017 and enabled subscribers to book tickets for one film a day for an incredible $10 per month. Unsurprisingly, the company quickly ran into financial issues, and regularly changed its policies as it tried to manage cashflow. MoviePass eventually wound down in September 2019.

The FTC has now revealed that many of the technical issues that affected its heaviest users were a deliberate attempt to limit how many tickets they bought via the service. These included invalidating passwords while warning of “suspicious activity” on the account, and then making it impossible to reset passwords, and employing an undisclosed “trip wire” facility that blocked users that were perceived to be using the service too often.

There was also the controversial ticket-verification program that required selected users to submit pictures of their ticket stubs to continue to use the service. While MoviePass claimed at the time this was a random process, it has been revealed that it was again targeted at heavy users in an attempt to make them use the service less.

In addition, the FTC stated that MoviePass filed to properly protect the personal data it had collected from its members. Email addresses and financial information were not not secured properly, and there were insufficient restrictions on who could access this information.

In a statement, Daniel Kaufman, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said, “MoviePass and its executives went to great lengths to deny consumers access to the service they paid for while also failing to secure their personal information. The FTC will continue working to protect consumers from deception and to ensure that businesses deliver on their promises.”

The actors of the Marvel Cinematic Universe know enough to give lectures on their characters, but they’re not always privy to how projects will go down. When Anthony Mackie found out that Sam Wilson–also known as the Falcon and the new Captain America–was headed for Disney+, he was “mortified,” the actor said in a new interview with Variety.

“I was very afraid and very disappointed when I heard it was going to be a TV show because I didn’t think we could take the scope of what we had just done in all these movies and then put it on TV and it would work,” Mackie said, comparing the shift to putting the characters out to pasture. “I didn’t want to be the first failed entity of Marvel.”

For a long time, the classic Batman television show and movie from the late 1960s were the gold standard for what superheroes on TV would look like. Batman comics were campy back then, and the show was campy in equal measure. That was, however, over half a century ago, and it’s unclear why that was his first reference point when Marvel and DC alike have upped their game with shows like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, HBO’s Watchmen, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow in recent years.

“I thought it was going to be like Batman and Robin–the original one–where it was like ‘Pow! Bing!'” Mackie said.

Things changed, of course, once the show was in production.

“When you become part of the Marvel franchise, it’s almost like summer camp. So when you show up to set, it’s everybody and you never miss a beat. Some people have kids, some people bought a car…it’s like going back to seeing all your same friends over and over.”

The interview, which covers a variety of topics related to released and upcoming MCU Disney+ series, featured Mackie and Falcon and the Winter Soldier co-star Sebastian Stan, WandaVision‘s Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany, and Loki‘s Tom Hiddleston who says in the interview that he held a lecture on Loki that involved a whiteboard. The whole interview is close to 45 minutes and worth checking out on Variety.

Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is every Marvel fan’s favorite god of mischief, and the character has finally returned thanks to the premiere of his new Disney+ series, Loki. The show sees Thor’s brother leaping through time to stop “nexus events” and alternate realities, making it feel like anything is possible. But as Marvel Cinematic Universe boss Kevin Feige revealed during a recent press conference, Loki’s future was once even more uncertain than it is now.

When the majority of big screen MCU superheroes died at the conclusion of Avengers: Infinity War, it was generally assumed that most of them would return–with the exceptions of Vision and Loki, whose deaths were separate from the calamitous “snap.” The MCU shows on Disney+ have proved otherwise, but according to Feige, bringing Loki back for his own show wasn’t always the plan.

“I think we did not know [how Loki would return] when we shot Infinity War,” Feige said. “But I think we did know it when we shot Endgame, is my recollection of it.”

“One of my favorite things coming out of Endgame was people saying that we forget to tie up the loose end of Loki,” he continued. “Loki just disappears and we forgot to mention what happens to him at the end of that movie. And, at that point, we did know that there was Disney+ coming and the show coming. It became very exciting to make people wait until we figured out what the show would be.”

Hiddleston, whose portrayal of the character is beloved by fans, said he reacted with “a combination of delight and surprise” when he learned that Loki would return.

“I had to scratch my head, because [Loki’s death] scene in Avengers: Infinity War had felt so final, had felt so conclusive, as the end of Loki’s story,” the actor said. “But I knew that Avengers: Endgame was coming around the corner.”

Loki’s premiere episode drew inspiration from noir thrillers, and at times even felt like a two-character play, as the god of mischief and Owen Wilson’s Agent Mobius explored long scenes of dialogue opposite one another. For Hiddleston, getting to find out more about this character is an opportunity.

“What I love about the series is Loki is stripped of everything that’s familiar to him,” the actor said. “Thor is not close by, Asgard seems some distance away, the Avengers, for the time being, aren’t in sight. He’s stripped of his status and his power. And if you take all those things that Loki has used to identify himself over the last six movies, what remains of Loki? Who is he, within or outside all of those things? And I think those questions became, for all of us, really fascinating to ask.”

“I just love playing the character,” he added. “I always have. And I feel so fortunate that I’m still here, and that there are still new aspects to the character every time that I learn about. I think he’s a character of huge range. So it never feels like the same experience. And particularly this time around, I mean, I’m surrounded by these amazing people, truly. It’s not something that is lost on me, you know, all my conversations with Kevin [Feige] and [director] Kate [Herron] and [head writer] Michael [Waldron], and my interactions with Owen [Wilson] and Gugu [Mbatha-Raw] and Wunmi [Mosaku]–we just have a really good time.”

Loki airs Wednesdays on Disney+. For more coverage of the premiere episode, check out our list of Loki Episode 1 Easter eggs and references, as well as our breakdown of the Time Variance Authority’s stronger-than-an-infinity-stone powers.

Starfield feels like one of those elusive games that’s often talked about despite its low profile, and it’s hard to believe if it’s actually coming out in the near future. We’ve heard few details about this new IP from developer Bethesda Game Studios (best known for Fallout and The Elder Scrolls), seen a teaser back at E3 2018, and heard Todd Howard speak broadly about it on occasion, but we’re anticipating plenty more at this year’s E3.

Although it’s easy to think that we do the same song and dance at every major event where Bethesda has a notable presence, all signs are pointing to a relatively substantial showing for Starfield. We’ve compiled all of the current details so far in our Starfield: Everything We Know feature, but here, we’ll sum that up and get into a bit of speculation and what we wish to see from this seemingly massive sci-fi RPG at E3 2021.

What We Know So Far

We know Starfield won’t deviate too far from the developer’s wheelhouse. Todd Howard has stated in the past that this game very much has the DNA of a Bethesda game, and it’s understood to be an open-world single-player RPG, which is the team’s bread and butter. Studio director Ashley Cheng also said that the team behind Starfield are veterans of creating open-world RPGs. Yet, that’s a fairly basic canvas for Starfield’s larger picture.

Other than this being a space-faring adventure, we actually don’t have much information about the game itself. Based on Howard’s previous comments, we do know that it will be running on an upgraded game engine, said to be the most significant jump for Bethesda since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. As to how this could manifest in the experience–well, more on that later.

There have been recent rumblings about when we should expect Starfield to release, but nothing has been confirmed–again, more on that later. But given how little we know so far, and that the state of the world has hampered game development schedules across the industry, we aren’t exactly expecting the game to come out later this year (though we know for sure that Starfield is coming well before The Elder Scrolls VI).

What’s Confirmed For E3 2021

We can’t really say anything has been confirmed per se, but all signs point to Starfield being at E3 2021 in some capacity. (It doesn’t take an industry insider to guess as much!) Since Microsoft Game Studios’ acquisition of Bethesda, the two have combined forces to hold one big showcase for E3 on Sunday, June 13, starting at 10:00 AM PT, and if we are to see Starfield at all, it’s going to be then.

You can very much take the event’s key art as confirmation that Starfield is going to be a headliner for the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase. On one side of the image, you have Halo Infinite to represent Microsoft, and on the other, you can pretty much ascertain that it’s the planet-view graphic from Starfield (which was deduced by various folks).

What We Hope To See At E3 2021

I think it’s pretty easy to say that the thing everyone wants to see is gameplay, which would probably answer the myriad questions we have about Starfield. How does it look and run? What does combat play like? What sorts of RPG mechanics will we be able to work with? What’s the actual setting? What’s it like to navigate its open world?

Having actual gameplay would probably cover other broad questions we have, such as how Starfield is going to separate itself from the developer’s current franchises. There’s definitely room for a different style of RPG in Bethesda’s realm, and it’d be a lot more satisfying to think of Starfield as more than just The Elder Scrolls or Fallout in space. A lot of that will lie in quest structure, world design, storytelling, and RPG mechanics–and E3 2021 would be as good a time as any to start showing off those things (if Bethesda is ready to do so).

It’s been about six years since we got a mainline entry in both Fallout and The Elder Scrolls (Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online are entirely different beasts), so you could say we’re eager to experience what Bethesda has been cooking up all this time. With that said, a release date or a release window (which is more likely) is definitely something we hope to come away with at E3 2021.

Industry insiders have been dropping tidbits about Starfield over social media recently, and much of the discussion has been about its launch window. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier seemed adamant about late 2022 being the release window–given the anticipated scale of the game and the fact that we just haven’t seen much yet, it’s easy to believe it’s that far out.

The other question on the minds of many folks: Which platforms will Starfield be available on? We’d bet on it being a truly new-gen game with Bethesda making a clean break from the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Todd Howard has stated that the studio did the most significant game engine overhaul since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and while he hasn’t said one way or the other about leaving last-gen behind with Starfield, he did say that the team won’t compromise the game’s vision in order to run on old hardware. But how would this change the core game experience? Better graphics and performance are always welcome, and stability and fewer glitches/bugs would be important. But we’d also want to see if the more advanced hardware has afforded a more expansive open world or gameplay innovations that previous Bethesda games couldn’t do.

There are a ton of smaller details we’d love to know about Starfield–with this being a Bethesda RPG, getting a better understanding of choice-and-consequence or how character development would work in the game would be wonderful. These games are also known to be lengthy, with wild side quests and massive regions to explore, and getting a feel for Starfield’s scope is another plus. However, we wouldn’t want to be given too much too early–the element of surprise is always nice with new games, especially if they’re a ways out. Whatever comes out of E3 2021 with regards to Starfield, we’ll have it covered here on GameSpot, along with all the other major announcements and reveals throughout the event.

This week saw the premiere of a brand-new MCU TV show on Disney+ in an all new timeslot. Loki will be released weekly on Wednesdays, rather than Fridays like its precursors WandaVision and Falcon and The Winter Soldier–but all this change really means for most fans is their theorizing and speculating will now have to be done mid-week rather than over the weekend. And Episode 1, “Glorious Purpose,” left plenty to start theorizing about–including the introduction of a brand-new (to the MCU, at least) bureaucratic body that is more powerful than even the Infinity Stones.

The premiere picked up where you’d expect, with Loki’s surreptitious escape from the Avengers back in 2012, thanks to the Tesseract. This event was shown in Endgame, leading fans to speculate that Loki, the show, would actually follow Loki’s adventures using the Tesseract, which contained the Space Stone, as he hopped around the universe causing chaos. It turns out that isn’t the case–Loki’s teleportation with the Tesseract from Avengers Tower sent him to Mongolia, where he was able to give about a minute’s worth of villainous monologue to the locals before he was interrupted and apprehended by the Time Variance Authority (TVA).

The TVA is an extra-dimensional organization charged with maintaining the “sacred timeline.” It turns out that Loki was flagged as a variant for stepping off his predetermined timeline. He was swiftly apprehended and brought to the TVA headquarters, located somewhere outside of normal time and space, to stand trial for his offenses.

In the TVA, he (and we, the viewers) learn that long ago, there was a great multiversal war where multiple timelines battled for dominance and nearly caused the destruction of reality. That’s when the Time-Keepers, a trio of “space lizards” as Loki calls them, stepped in and organized the disparate timelines into one–the “sacred timeline”–and then created the TVA, an organization charged with maintaining the flow of events and preventing any splintered timelines from branching out to cause another war.

In the comics, the TVA’s mission is less focused on the prevention of a multiversal war. Instead they guard what is called the “omniverse” and all its associated realities from temporal and reality-hopping threats like Kang the Conqueror. It’s all a lot of very comic book sci-fi logic–if it helps, think of them as a sort of meta-commentary on complicated superhero continuity, similar to the Monitors over at DC. Several agents are even designed to look like past Marvel editors as a little in-joke about editorial responsibility and continuity management. The exact extent and scope of the comics TVA is vast but mostly fluid–they don’t show up very often and are rarely major players in top tier events, so it’s safe to assume that the MCU version is getting a considerable makeover in ways we have yet to really see in the show.

Notably, this episode establishes that both magic and magical objects–including the Infinity Stones–are totally useless within the TVA’s headquarters. They’ve even collected enough Infinity Stones, presumably from thwarted nexus events and variants, that the bureaucrats literally use them as paper weights and desk baubles. This of course begs any number of questions about the limits of the TVA’s power and authority–for example, how many Infinity War and Endgame-level crisis events has the TVA had to circumvent in the past? What would happen if a rogue officer were to escape HQ with a pocket full of Infinity Stones to play with? Is there anyone even remotely capable of standing up to the Time-Keepers for any reason, should they turn out to be evil?

With any luck these questions will be answered by the end of the series. But in the meantime, there’s more to the TVA than just mind boggling power. Among their agents is a man named Mobius (Owen Wilson) who happens to be on a very challenging case. There’s a variant who has been hopscotching through time and evading the TVA’s strike teams as they go, threatening the integrity of the timeline and, notably, stealing TVA equipment in the process–specifically temporal charges, meant to detonate and “reset” time after a variant-caused event.

Mobius believes that Loki can help him catch this variant–and for good reason. Apparently, the TVA has identified that the rogue variant actually is a version of Loki. That’s unfortunately all the info we get about that particular bombshell, so how and why a version of Loki is galavanting around time is left a mystery.

Needless to say, the TVA higher-ups, specifically Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) aren’t exactly thrilled about Mobius’s plan, but eventually acquiesce, and we end the episode with Mobius and Loki forming a tenuous agreement.

Some things to note in this episode:

• The TVA is so powerful that not only can Loki not use his magic, but even the Infinity Stones are rendered completely useless. Office workers can use them as paper weights.
• There are lots of explicit nods and callouts to the multiverse in this episode alone, something that the MCU is obviously building towards for the upcoming Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness movie. With the added context from the TVA’s infomercial, we can assume that the creation of a multiverse will involve a lot of branching timelines and, presumably, hasn’t actually happened yet.
• The Time-Keepers themselves seem to be a little shady–just listen to the way Revona talks about them during Loki’s trial.
• It’s too early to tell just how much this version of Revona will relate to her comics counterpart but in the books, Revona has a history that connects to Kang the Conqueror.
• How does the TVA know that it’s a Loki variant causing all this trouble and what makes this Loki variant so dangerous? Where did they come from?
• Notably, the infomercial calls the events where timelines diverge “nexus events,” which is the second time we’ve heard the MCU use that word in that way–WandaVision Episode 7 which featured a commercial for an antidepressant drug called “Nexus.” In Marvel Comics there is the concept of a “Nexus Being,” which isn’t often used but describes entities that have the ability to affect and change probability and the future. Notable Nexus Beings include Wanda, Kang the Conqueror, and Franklin Richards.

GameStop has announced its new CEO and CFO as part of the company’s financial earnings call. Matt Furlong will take over as CEO on June 21 and Mike Recupero will start as CFO on July 12.

This comes after it was announced in April that current CEO George Sherman would be stepping down from the role after two years. Both Furlong and Recupero come from Amazon and have experience in e-commerce and technology, which reflects the board of directors’ desire to make GameStop more than a retail company, according to the press release. GameStop’s previous CFO Jim Bell announced his departure from the company in February.

Furlong spent nine years at Amazon, focusing on e-commerce. He most recently was a country lead for Australia and spent time as a technical advisor for Amazon’s North American consumer business. Recupero was at Amazon for 17 years, where he spent time as the CFO of North American consumer business and CFO of Prime Video.

GameStop has been a popular company since the beginning of 2021, with its stock price fluctuating heavily due to a short squeeze early in the year. The price has been rising and falling since then; at one point the price hit as high as $500, but it has stabilized a bit lower, closing today around $300. That, however, is much higher than the $5 it was a year ago.

The retail company has been in dire straits in recent years, and its problems were only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the chain to close stores. However, in recent months GameStop has announced plans to transform its business–with help from the increased stock price–by hiring executives with experience in growth, technology, and e-commerce. The company announced an increase in net sales of 25.1% over the first fiscal quarter of 2020, totaling in $1.3 billion.

Scroll down to find out every week if there’s a post-credit scene in each episode of Marvel’s Loki.

Spoilers also follow for the premiere episode, “Glorious Purpose.”

If you’re binging the series, use this guide for quick reference on whether or not any of the episodes have end credits scenes.

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Marvel’s third MCU streaming series on Disney+, Loki, premiered this week, giving fans a fantastic follow-up to the scheming Asgardian prince’s exodus from Avengers: Endgame.

The pilot episode, “Glorious Purpose,” saw Tom Hiddleston’s Loki almost immediately captured by the Time Variance Authority, an entire cosmic bureaucratic entity created by three all-powerful Time Keepers in the wake of an ancient multiversal war. It’s here that Loki finds out that escaping his captors using the Tesseract went against the preordained actions of the one true “sacred timeline” and that he’d stand trial for his time crime.

Before final judgment could be rendered by Judge Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) however, Owen Wilson’s Agent Mobius manages to wrangle Loki for his own mission, hoping the mirthful master manipulator might be able to help track and capture an even bigger, more-threatening prize who’s currently mucking up the timeline. It’s here, in the TVA, that 2012 Loki, kicking and screaming, learns his entire MCU fate — including his death at the hands of Thanos — while also being humbled by the fact that the TVA is such a formidable force it literally uses variant Infinity Stones as paperweights. Cut down to size, Loki finds himself willing to listen to Mobius’ offer to consult on the case.

But what about post-credit scenes…?

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Loki Episode 1: No Post Credit Scene

Episode 1 contained no post-credit scene, just Natalie Holt’s impressive, operatic score. The episode did end with one heck of a cliffhanger though, as Loki learned that the dangerous variant being hunted by Mobius, the predator who’s killing off TVA hunters and minutemen, is… Loki.

Yes, a different version of Loki, from either a different time or universe (or both), is out there luring the TVA into traps, killing the operatives off, and then swiping the company’s time reset devices.

We’re last shown an attack in an Oklahoman oil field in 1858 where the minutemen are set ablaze by a cloaked Loki (Cloaki?) and the do-over doohickey is stolen. Also present on the scene is a weapon, an anachronism meant to draw the TVA to the location, from the “third millennium.” So, the distant future. Which also happens to be Marvel’s time-travelling villain Kang the Conqueror’s future. Just saying.

Marvel’s Loki

For More on Marvel’s Loki, check out our thoughts on the first two episodes of the show in IGN’s Loki preview and then read about how Mephisto won’t be appearing in the show. Learn about how Loki was inspired by David Fincher after that and then check out where Loki lands on IGN’s list of the 25 best Marvel villains in the MCU. And also check in on the Loki release schedule!

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