The latest movie in the Candyman franchise hits theaters later this year. It’s a direct sequel to the classic 1992 supernatural chiller, and is produced by Jordan Peele.
The original Candyman was an adaptation of the short story The Forbidden, by Hellraiser and Hellraiser creator Clive Barker, and directed by Bernard Rose. The film focused on the legend of the Candyman, who was originally the son of a slave but grew up as a successful businessman in the late 19th century, before his relationship with a white woman led to horrendous death at the hands of a mob. Many decades later, the vengeful, hooked-handed, bee-summoning ghost can be conjured up by anyone who dares to say his name five times into a mirror.
The movie was only a moderate success, but nearly 30 years later, it stands as one of the best horror films of the decade–an intelligent, scary, and beautifully-made chiller that has stood the test of time. Two sequels followed–Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995) and Candyman: Day of the Dead (1999)–but they were inferior follow-ups that contained little of the original’s mix of scares and powerful social commentary.
In 2018, it was announced that a new Candyman movie was on the way. The film was originally scheduled for release last summer but like almost every big movie due in 2020, it has had its release date pushed several times. The film is now set to arrive in August, so while we wait for it to finally be released, here’s everything we know to date about Candyman.
When will Candyman be released?
Candyman hits theaters on August 21, 2021. This is the film’s fourth release date. It was originally scheduled for release in June last year, and was subsequently moved to September and October, before being pushed back an entire year.
Who’s the director?
Candyman is directed by Nia DaCosta. This will be DaCosta’s second movie as director, following 2018’s thriller Little Woods, which starred Tessa Thompson and Lily James. She also directed two episodes of the British TV drama Top Boy. In August last year, it was announced that she will helm the Captain Marvel sequel for Marvel, which has a November 2022 release date.
Who are the producers and writers?
Get out and US director Jordan Peele is one of the main producers of Candyman, through his production company Monkeypaw. He’s producing with Win Rosenfeld (Hunters, Blackkklansman), and the pair have written the script with DaCosta.
Is there any footage or images?
Since the movie was only three months from release when it was first delayed, a trailer had already been released. This first trailer revealed the basic plot alongside lots of scary imagery. Even more impressive was the promo released in June, which was a short animated film that told the tragic backstory of Candyman using shadow puppets. The third trailer followed a few weeks later, which mixed footage from this video with new footage from the movie.
What’s the story?
Candyman isn’t a remake of the original movie, but a direct sequel, which ignores the two earlier sequels. 30 years later, the previously deprived area of Chicago’s Cabrini Green has been gentrified and turned into a desirable and expensive place to live. The movie focuses on visual artist Anthony McCoy, who appeared as a child in the original film, and sees him return to the area with his girlfriend Brianna. An encounter with one of Cabrini’s older residents leads Anthony to start investigating the legend of Candyman as inspiration for his work. But inevitably things start to get very scary when the hooked-handed ghost makes his return.
Who’s in the cast?
Aquaman and Watchmen actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II takes the lead role as Anthony, with WandaVision star Teyonah Parris as Brianna. The cast also includes Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Misfits) as Brianna’s brother Troy, and Colman Domingo (Fear the Walking Dead, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) as William, the older Cabrini Green resident. There are also a couple of actors returning from the original film–Vanessa Estelle Williams as Anthony’s mom Anne-Marie, and of course, Tony Todd as Candyman himself. Todd is yet to be seen in the trailers, but they do feature his distinctive–and scary–voice.
What has DaCosta said about the movie?
One of the most impressive aspects of the original film was the way it weaved a strong social commentary into a scary ghost story. Unsurprisingly, the new movie will also deal with some heavy themes alongside the horror. “It’s so much about identity and about what violence can look like,” DaCosta told Slashfilm last year. “It’s not just this very graphic lynch mob, it can also be the force of gentrification, or the micro-aggressions inside of trying to negotiate what your next art piece is going to be. It has many forms, so that’s part of what we wanted to talk about in this film as well. And that’s a big reason why [Anthony] fits in the art world, because he can really show that in an interesting way. Our points of view are about the multilayered ways that violence can take form and can kill in America, and that’s where the film will be.”
After a couple of weeks off, the Trials of Osiris is back in Destiny 2 this weekend. As every weekend, the map for Trials and the rewards you can earn have changed, so here’s a complete rundown of what you’re facing in the Crucible this weekend and the loot you can get for taking part in Destiny’s toughest competitive challenge.
There’s a host of new gear in Trials this season, including new armor and weapons. This weekend’s Trials event actually continues to the Tuesday weekly reset on March 16, so you’ve got a little extra time to earn rewards and spend tokens with Saint-14.
Trials of Osiris Map And Rewards (March 12-16)
Map: Midtown
3 wins — Hunter, Warlock, or Titan Gauntlets: Pyrrhic Ascent Grasps, Gauntlets, or Gloves
5 wins — Igneous Hammer, Solar hand cannon
7 wins — Sola’s Scar, Solar sword
Flawless run — The Messenger (Adept), Kinetic pulse rifle
The Trials of Osiris is Destiny 2’s weekend competitive multiplayer event, which takes place from Friday to Tuesday every week. The Trials are Destiny’s toughest challenge–your goal is to rack up as many victories in the mode as you can before you suffer three total losses, which forces you to reset your run. You’ll earn loot along the way as you rack up more and more wins, but the best rewards in the event come when you go on a winning streak of seven matches in a row–a “Flawless” run.
Going Flawless sends you to the Lighthouse, a special social space only accessible to players who go Flawless, and earns you exclusive rewards and recognition. In the Beyond Light expansion, opening the Flawless chest can earn you an “Adept” item, which comes with extra stat boosts unavailable on any other loot in the game, as well as powerful Adept mods that are likewise unavailable anywhere else.
Even if you don’t go Flawless, you can still get a lot out of playing in the Trials of Osiris. Loot is dolled out for notching three, five, and seven wins in total, even if you have losses–so you don’t have to be a PvP god to get something out of the event. Once you lose three matches total, however, you’re forced to restart your Trials run from the beginning. To access the Trials, you’ll need to see Saint-14 in the Tower to purchase a Trials card.
You’ll also earn Trials tokens as you play in the event and complete Trials bounties, which you can spend with Saint-14 in the Tower’s Hangar for more loot. However, Trials tokens expire at the end of each Trials event, so you have to spend them during the weekend you earn them. Double-check that you’ve spent them all before you stop playing.
Created by Jac Schaeffer, Marvel Studios’ first streaming show places B-tier Avengers Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) in a seemingly idyllic suburban town, with six of its nine episodes mimicking different eras of American sitcoms. At its core is a tale about Wanda’s grief — Vision was killed in Avengers: Infinity War and remained dead through Avengers: Endgame — and the show often succeeds at capturing her anguish, thanks in large part to Olsen’s performance. In a cinematic universe that frequently relies on dialogue to advance its stories, WandaVision is also one of the rare entries where visual storytelling is vital to the premise.
However, the show’s visual deftness often finds itself in a tug-of-war with storytelling instincts which run counter to its conceit; namely, its penchant for deflating exposition delivered from outside Wanda’s dream-realm, and its sudden, late-in-the-game reliance on lore and shared-universe concepts, both rooted in the comics and newly invented for the show.
World, Interrupted
Like in many a Marvel comic — especially 2004’s Avengers: Disassembled and its follow-up, House of M — the world of the series is a fabrication created by Wanda as a means to cope with Vision’s death. It’s denial made physically manifest, with Wanda retreating into the comforts of a TV universe and using comedy’s return to a safe, familiar status quo to avoid facing harsh realities. The first entry, “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience,” uses the aesthetics of a 1950s-1960s sitcom as short-hand for quirky hijinks wherein nothing ever truly goes wrong — that is, until the end of the episode, when one of Wanda and Vision’s guests, Mr. Hart (Fred Melamed), asks too many questions about their life before Westview. The couple either can’t answer these questions, or they don’t want to.
As if through supernatural interference, Mr. Hart begins choking on his food. His wife Mrs. Hart (sitcom veteran Debra Jo Rupp) plays it off as tomfoolery, at least in terms of dialogue. Her desperate expression however, and the scene’s eerie presentation, tell a different story. The lighting grows harsh, engulfing the dining room setting in shadow, as the camera creeps in on close-ups of each character, employing a longer lens for the first time, which turns the background hazy and draws focus entirely to the actors’ suppressed concern. Shots of the characters gazing at Mr. Hart, as he chokes on the floor, feel especially uncanny. It’s the first time the camera has been at anything other than eye level. There’s no longer any pleasant music or studio laughter. Just a ticking clock.
What makes the scene especially chilling is the way this aesthetic clashes wildly with the rest of the episode. Sitcoms of the era had a reliable look and feel, which series director Matt Shakman accurately imitates. The lighting was often bright and flat, owing to a multi-camera set up capturing things from different angles. If the camera moved at all, it was usually a pan to follow characters walking across the sound stage, or a slight push in or out to re-adjust the frame as people left or entered the scene. Early domestic sitcoms like The Honeymooners (1955-1956) rarely moved in tighter than a medium shot, even during emotional moments. I Love Lucy (1951-1957) helped set the template for “situational comedy” and its camera largely hung back and captured the environment, and the characters’ interactions with it. Perhaps the episode’s biggest influence — confirmed later in the series, through Wanda’s childhood flashbacks — is The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966). Wanda models her kitchen after that of Robert and Laura Petrie (Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore), and the specific episode she draws on, Season 2’s “It May Look Like a Walnut,” is a Twilight Zone parody which downplays Robert’s nightmarish anxieties and flattens them into easily-digestible sitcom fare.
WandaVision’s first episode doesn’t step outside its sitcom setting, but it establishes the series’ thematic conflict with the larger world. The show’s comforting status quo can, in fact, be threatened and broken. And since everyone in this realm seems to be playing specific parts, that conflict isn’t one that can be explained through dialogue (at least at first). Instead, the threats to Wanda’s reality take the form of jarring breaks in established tone. Wanda’s relationship to this environment is key, and like the viewer, she notices when things feel surreal and out of place. As the show goes on, these aesthetic interruptions grow more frequent and more noticeable, but the series also begins to shy away from this dynamic as its primary storytelling tool — for better and for worse.
WandaVision breaks with the late 1950s/early 1960s sitcom approach (left) when Mr. Hart starts choking and things get creepy (right).
The second episode, “Don’t Touch That Dial,” follows the first’s 4:3, black and white look, but transposes its design to the mid-1960s, following shows like Bewitched (1964-1972) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970), with their animated openings and tales of women with supernatural abilities. The talent show premise even mirrors the Season 1 Bewitched episode “It’s Magic,” and the eventual color transformation reflects both shows moving to color in 1966. However, unlike WandaVision’s first entry, its second can no longer rely entirely on tools like close-ups and longer lenses with shallow focus to make things feel out of place. By the mid-1960s, sitcoms had begun to incorporate these elements, albeit not quite as frequently or starkly as feature films. And so, the second episode begins to augment them with other, more literal interruptions, like a message on the radio (during which Wanda is filmed in a Dutch angle), or the sudden presence of color (à la the movie Pleasantville), or the arrival of a mysterious beekeeper, who Wanda deals with by rewinding the episode altogether and preserving its blissful fabric.
By Episode 3, “Now in Color” — which draws on family shows like The Brady Bunch (1969-1974) — the interruptions revolve around Wanda losing control of her powers, even though the show still plays this premise for laughs (for instance, a painted stork in Wanda’s nursery comes to life and runs loose around the house). However, the cracks in Wanda’s façade are truly opened during the episode’s closing moments, when Geraldine, aka Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), brings events from the real world crashing through Wanda’s fantasy as she sings to her newborn children. The exchange may be rooted in dialogue, with Monica reminding Wanda that her brother Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) was killed in Avengers: Age of Ultron, but the scene’s tension is built through its framing and editing.
Where sitcoms of the era still used closeups rather sparingly, WandaVision now crosscuts between two different sequences shot almost entirely in closeup: Wanda’s confrontation with “Geraldine,” and neighbors Agnes (Kathryn Hahn) and Herb (John Collins) alerting Vision to the strangeness of the world around him. This prompts him to head back inside — will he make it in time to witness Wanda’s rage? The result of these dueling closeup scenes is more intensity than ’70s sitcoms would normally feature. When Wanda ejects Monica/Geraldine from the town, the series finally shifts in aspect ratio, with TV’s old 4:3 giving way to a more cinematic 2.35:1, and with contemporary color-grading and modern military equipment. It’s a clue as to what’s actually going on; most viewers would have likely figured it out, though surprise isn’t really the point. It establishes an encroaching threat to Wanda’s self-made utopia. However, the largely Monica-focused fourth entry is where the show begins to warp its own premise, in ways that don’t entirely work.
Avengers Ensemble
The opening minutes of Episode 4, “We Interrupt This Program,” offer a poignant, on-the-ground look at events of prior films — Monica, who was “snapped” out of existence during the time period of Infinity War, returns to life five years later to find her mother has died in the interim — but the more the episode goes on, the more it simply becomes a series of inelegant reveals about events from prior episodes.
Characters like Captain Marvel’s Monica (now grown up), Thor’s Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) and Ant-Man’s Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) both provide connections to the larger MCU and take us through the preceding three episodes from an outside observer’s POV. They offer jargon and potential theories to explain Wanda’s TV world, and they treat it as a mystery to be solved from the outside — even when the show has thus far been adept at peeling back each layer from within. This sets up a dynamic for the following three episodes, wherein the sitcom setting is frequently intercut with SWORD and military scenes outside the perimeter. For the most part, these scenes involve characters verbally explaining the show we’re already watching (not to mention recalling intimate details of films we’ve already seen, as if they themselves were part of those stories; they weren’t, but these characters are more audience stand-ins than individuals).
This would, of course, serve a more coherent purpose if Monica were an intrinsic part of the show. She’s set up as a thematic mirror to Wanda, someone dealing with similar grief and lack of closure, but her perspective rarely comes into contact with Wanda’s, and the show merely uses her to set up an entirely different story (either Captain Marvel 2, the streaming series Secret Invasion, or both). Monica mentions her own grief in words, but it’s not something we ever see her confront or struggle with in any meaningful way that impacts the story.
However, despite the drudgery of the military plot, the Westview sections still manage to keep up the show’s momentum and explore the real world/fantasy dynamic in intriguing ways. Primary among them is Evan Peters as Wanda’s brother Pietro, even though his presence ends up being a ruse (rather than the implied introduction of a parallel universe, since Peters played Pietro in the X-Men films). Pietro’s arrival stands apart from the other interruptions. It grounds the sitcom world in an external reality that Wanda, for once, can’t simply shut out.
Episode 5 is titled “On a Very Special Episode…” and it takes after sitcoms like Family Ties (1982-1989), Roseanne (1988-1997) and most notably Full House (1987-1995), which starred Olsen’s older sisters, Mary Kate and Ashley, in the role of Michelle Tanner. Like The Brady Bunch, these shows focused on multiple generations of family, rather than just the adults (as was the case in the inspirations for the first two episodes). Wanda’s rapidly aging twin sons Billy and Tommy, therefore, become a central part of the story. The sitcom world is also invaded by reality early on this time, instead of towards the episode’s end. Vision begins to suspect something is amiss, and when Agnes fearfully asks Wanda if she should attempt another take, the comedy fabric grinds to a halt. The music stops and the studio audience falls completely silent, as the frame focuses entirely on the lead characters’ closeups: Vision attempts to parse the surrealness around him, while Wanda desperately reassures him that everything’s alright.
Vision gets a jarring non-Full House style close-up during a moment of tension in the ’80s/’90s-influenced Episode 5.
’80s and ’90s family sitcoms had their fair share of serious moments — the Season 7 Full House episode “The Last Dance,” in which Michelle’s great-grandfather dies in his sleep, was dubbed “A Very Special Full House” during its marketing — and they would slip into somber scenes sans audience laughter, where the focus remained on the characters’ emotions. But these scenes often announced their arrival, and acclimated viewers to extended periods of closeups as the episode dealt with heavier than usual subject matter. WandaVision, meanwhile, introduces these sequences suddenly and without warning, causing emotional whiplash, to which even Wanda and Vision themselves seem to respond. When Vision temporarily frees Norm (Asif Ali) from his mental prison, Vision is framed in extreme close-up, with his entire face enveloping the screen. It’s an especially uncomfortable moment in an episode ostensibly meant to evoke an easy, breezy tone.
To avoid Vision’s questions about the nature of their reality, Wanda triggers the episode’s end credit scroll. But as the canned audience applause returns, Vision continues pressing Wanda for answers from behind the closing text. It’s all very Too Many Cooks in its winking surrealism, and it leads to the kind of heated confrontation not often seen on such shows.
However, the episode’s most emotionally affecting moment arrives in its final scene. During the episode, Wanda is forced to teach her children about dealing with grief instead of running from it when their dog mysteriously dies, which, of course, is hypocritical given the way she deals with Vision’s death, and how she avoids talking about Pietro’s (“He’s far away from here”). When she begs her sons not to age-up again, the frame lingers on her uncertainty — a far cry from the centered stability of most ’80s sitcom parents as they imparted life lessons. And so when a version of Pietro finally arrives, the framing and performances do all the talking (well, most of the talking; the show still briefly cuts to Darcy so she can comment on the re-casting and break the scene’s emotional tension).
This new Pietro arrives in the mold of a sitcom guest star (excited audience reaction and all), though instead of the usual medium shots, which allowed viewers to absorb the actor’s presence, the close-ups on Pietro and Wanda ground the scene in their complicated emotional responses. Olsen and Peters’ performances are key here. Pietro’s appearance and demeanor are in the vein of suave smooth-talkers like Full House’s Uncle Jesse (John Stamos) and Family Ties’ Nick Moore (Scott Valentine), but buried beneath his introductory quip — “Long lost bro get to squeeze his stinkin’ sister to death or what?” — is a fleeting look of recognition. Pietro is playing his designated sitcom role, yet his eyes betray an emotional burden, which Wanda seems to share, though neither one mentions it explicitly. Regardless of his hidden motives, his recognition of Wanda’s pain begins to draw her out of her shell, especially in the following episode, “All-New Halloween Spooktakular!”
The early-2000s send-up of zany, visually inventive shows like Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006) marks the biggest departure from the early sitcom entries. The change in visual style and constant fourth-wall breaking means the show can’t rely on its usual surreal visual oddities, since “surreal” was already the lingua franca of the era. Instead, WandaVision begins to employ a few subtle editing tricks. Shows like Malcolm in the Middle, and single-camera contemporaries with voiceover and cut-away gags like Scrubs (2001-2010) and My Name Is Earl (2005-2009), were incredibly fast-paced, hopping quickly from one joke to the next (funnily enough, My Name Is Earl’s third season featured a similar premise, where Earl responds to head trauma by retreating into a ’50s sitcom world he internalized as a child). WandaVision’s sixth episode recreates their bustling energy, but it peppers the character interactions with moments that seem to linger just a little too long.
Pietro’s cutaway flashback to one of his and Wanda’s childhood Halloweens should not, in theory, be possible — he’s not the real Pietro, after all. When Wanda notices that some details of the memory are amiss, the shot holds on her confused reaction longer than it normally would in such a lively show (and longer than it already has during the episode’s other jokes). This technique crops up a number of times, like when Vision mentions the conflict of the previous episode, and the silent tension between him and Wanda breaks the otherwise snappy pacing.
Of course, by the time the episode ends, the fantasy of Westview has come apart in more overt ways, like Vision’s horrifying discovery that residents on the outskirts of town are stuck in suspended animation. It’s a slow, chilling reveal, anchored by the impactful closeup of a woman repeating pre-ordained actions, trapped in some kind of personal hell as a tear rolls down her cheek. Although by this point, the show has also fallen into the trap of having characters like Darcy, Jimmy and Monica explain everything we’ve just watched, so they immediately discover and comment on the fact that the residents at the edge of town don’t seem to be moving, in a scene that adds little else. It’s a waste of time, and an interruption to the genuine, Twilight Zone-esque intrigue created by the Westview story.
A Westview resident, trapped in a personal hell.
Episode 7, “Breaking the Fourth Wall,” adds a fun wrinkle to the premise, with Wanda alone at home and stuck in a depressive rut, while a now more self-aware Vision makes his way back from the edge of town amidst constant interruptions (including the episode’s “confessional” segments, given its Modern Family influence). It doesn’t advance the plot much, but it allows both leads to reflect on their conundrums without the pressures of having to be a pristine, perfect sitcom couple (if such a thing even exists in modern American comedy). However, the episode’s closing twist — accompanied by the catchy, Munsters-esque musical track “Agatha All Along” — leads to some major story problems.
The Lying Witch and the Wardrobe
The reveal that Agnes is actually the witch Agatha Harkness is practically meaningless in-world, since Agatha and Wanda have no pre-existing history here the way they do in the comics (it’s oddly evocative of Benedict Cumberbatch admitting to being Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, a reveal long-rumored by fans and met with blank stares from Kirk and Spock). But more than the specifics of who she is, the problem Agatha poses stems from all that she represents and introduces into the series’ fabric, including a strange new focus on Wanda’s comic outfit (which, in previous episodes, had been played as a winking in-joke).
The eighth episode, “Previously On,” features some of the show’s most riveting moments, between Wanda’s flashbacks and her emotional volatility when denied closure and dignity after Vision’s death. Olsen’s performance is tremendous here, equally nuanced and explosive, and she propels the episode to emotional highs seldom approached by Marvel’s films. But these sequences are also held back by Agatha’s presence, and her constant snarking at every aspect of Wanda’s backstory, as if it were an MST3K routine.
Agatha’s plot function is to extract answers from Wanda and then, once we see those answers play out dramatically, to explain the answers a second time in words. In these flashbacks, she hangs over Wanda’s shoulder in every shot, adding commentary that distracts from Wanda’s reflections on why she processes death the way she does.
In addition to sapping dramatic tension, Agatha also introduces, at the end of the penultimate episode, the idea that Wanda is some prophesied being in a larger witchcraft lore, the Scarlet Witch. This was once merely her name in the comics (at most it became a title passed down through her family in the 2016 Scarlet Witch series written by James Robinson and illustrated by Steve Dillon and Chris Visions), but the reveal is scored with the pomp and circumstance of an Earth-shattering twist, as the camera pushes in on Agatha. In the show’s final 40 minutes, it becomes its own major sublot with little to no bearing on Wanda’s tale of uncontrolled grief.
The final episode, “The Series Finale,” sees Wanda’s conflict devolve into sky beams typical of the superhero genre in ways that feel disconnected from the story. In contrast, even though the “White Vision” (made from Vision’s original body) leaves soon after he’s introduced, his battle with the Vision we’ve been following is at least visually inventive and character-centric. The camera glides smoothly alongside both Visions as they phase through one another, before they arrive at a stalemate, and are forced to duke it out through philosophical debate (similar to the 2016 Avengers series by writer Mark Waid and artist Mike Del Mundo).
Meanwhile, Wanda’s big battle with Agatha robs focus from her actual story, at a time when capturing her volatile emotional state is of utmost importance. She’s finally confronted with the weight of her actions when Agatha frees the minds of Westview’s residents, and so she decides to set them free once and for all. But when she opens up the “Hex,” Vision and her children begin to disintegrate. They can’t exist without the Westview illusion, offering Wanda an emotionally harrowing dilemma — which the show doesn’t actually pay off.
“The Series Finale” presents a “sky beam” conflict straight out of the movies.
Wanda temporarily closes the “Hex” to save her family, but this doesn’t seem to throw an emotional wrench into her decision to free Westview. It merely delays the outcome. There’s no moment following this where she’s forced to finally reckon with the weight of doing what’s right at devastating personal cost. The editing during the climax settles into a rhythm of moving swiftly down a list of plot-points, rather than holding on Wanda’s reactions as she weighs the consequences. There’s no dramatic beat where, after choosing her family, she actually makes the decision to let go of them, in a story all about learning to let go. When Agatha offers Wanda domestic bliss in exchange for her powers, the show doesn’t dramatize anything resembling temptation — a Return of the Jedi moment, where Luke Skywalker reflects on his humanity as he’s lured toward violence — and it ends up narratively un-engaging.
When the climax finally focuses on Wanda’s emotional response, it becomes thematically muddied. Agatha confronts her with taunts of “This world you made will always be broken, just like you,” but Wanda’s reply isn’t connected to her sorrow. Rather, it’s visually grounded in the brand-new subplot about the lore of the Scarlet Witch. “I don’t need you to tell me who I am,” she responds in close-up, but the shot’s focus is drawn to the magical crown from the witchcraft prophecy materializing on her head. The rest of the climax follows suit, obscuring Olsen’s performance behind a wall of light and focusing on a costume change that was, just a few minutes prior, entirely meaningless to Wanda.
“Release your burden,” Agatha says, though the battle’s busy and distant framing limits this statement to the burden of Wanda’s powers, rather than the burden of her pain.
Granted, the finale’s penultimate scene, back at Wanda and Vision’s home, does at the very least give us a moving goodbye between the characters. It rests on some difficult emotional work from Olsen and Bettany, as the camera spins around the characters while their idyllic Westview home disintegrates from all sides, leaving only a barren plot and devastating emptiness.
This emotional conclusion is tied directly to their poignant exchange in the previous episode, where Vision contextualizes Wanda’s grief as “love persevering” (a line evocative of Tennyson’s “Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all” from In Memoriam A.H.H.). But while the show captures Wanda’s mourning, it doesn’t do much to frame the pain she’s left in her wake. Her sitcom illusions aren’t just a metaphor for comfort and denial, but for the destructive nature of pain un-dealt with. The show seems reticent to frame her actions as truly horrifying, even though this has all the makings of a challenging conclusion, where Wanda exits Westview as a villain.
As Wanda heads back to the town center, the visual framing even places her at the center of her now-free neighbors’ reactions, but the way these extras are blocked and framed, and the way their performances are directed, center rage more than fear or trauma. As they creep towards Wanda from all sides, they’re only a few pitchforks short of a mob chasing down Frankenstein’s Monster. And before the episode allows us to consider their torment, they fall into background and out of focus, in favor of Monica’s last-minute assurance that they will “never know what [Wanda] sacrificed for them.”
Eventually, Monica’s grief throughout the series serves no real story function, other than to make Wanda’s actions seem reasonable. Monica’s reaction, and her absolution of Wanda, is granted a final close-up, and far more narrative weight than the fleeting wide shots of Westview’s residents. The show is telling us that their response isn’t as important as that of audience stand-ins like Darcy, Jimmy and Monica, a Greek chorus guiding viewers with unwavering support of Wanda throughout the series, sanding down the edges of a potentially complicated story.
WandaVision is ultimately a conflicted show, where the visual storytelling says one thing, and the dialogue from supporting characters either says the opposite, or re-explains what’s already been said. It begins as a tale of Wanda’s fragile relationship to the world around her, but this conflict with reality soon plays second fiddle to rote explanations of lore, and a villain who rears her head only to extract exposition and provide fodder for visual noise. Which is a shame, since the moments which focus on Wanda’s grief often arrive with the weight of a freight train — but they’re soon followed by extraneous dialogue from characters who exist to set up a larger universe, which just isn’t as interesting as someone who so desperately wishes for emotional comfort that she ends up hurting people in the process.
Capcom employees in Osaka are back in their offices despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has claimed nearly 8,500 lives in the region, according to a Business Journal report.
As translated by Kotaku, the Osaka-based company said it is abandoning remote work due to an inability to secure its data, as evidenced last year when Capcom suffered a massive breach.
“We are abandoning the remote network for the time being, and it was decided there is no choice but to come to work,” Capcom said. This has resulted in anxiety inside Capcom.
As a result of last year’s detrimental data breach and Capcom’s inability to secure external networks employees used in their home setups, the company has “forced employees” to return to work. Capcom noted, however, that work hours have been staggered and telecommuting was implemented. Inside the office, masks are required, social distancing is enforced, and temperatures are checked every time an employee enters the building.
The company was hacked in November 2020 by a group called Ragnar Locker. The hacker collective gained access to Capcom’s internal network, compromising 1TB of employee and customer data, including personal information, financial reports, and corporate secrets.
Capcom said that the health of its employees is a top priority even after mandating them to return to the office. The company told Kotaku that it “strives to provide a workplace environment with the utmost consideration given to the health and safety of employees.”
Capcom also said that while there are no unions currently established at the company and there are no talks to form one at present, the company isn’t opposed to employees unionizing. This is especially important since, according to Business Journal, there are larger corporate issues to deal with. One example is flexible work hours being dependent on one’s position.
“While there are none currently active within the company, employees are free to form labor unions,” Capcom said. “Capcom strictly observes all relevant laws and regulations regarding employees forming labor unions.”
In other Capcom news, the company is warning players of email scams containing early access to Resident Evil Village. The email, sent from a ‘no-reply(at)capcom(dot)com’ address, appears to be a phishing scam attempting to gain access to personal information.
Herman Miller’s “gaming chairs” beg the question: what, exactly, is a gaming chair? Does it have a headrest? Branded pillows? Lightsync? Racing-inspired seats that would look more at home in a Fast & Furious spin-off than a living room? The Herman Miller gaming collection has none of that. The chair I’m testing today, the Herman Miller Sayl, is identical to its office-friendly counterpart but with a bolder color palette. That makes the Sayl a compelling option for gamers that want an ergonomic chair that fits as well in front of a glowing battle station as it does an office desk.
Besides a few of the most garish gaming chairs, the Sayl is one of the most idiosyncratic and downright weird-looking chairs around. It’s the brainchild of famed industrial designer Yves Béhar, who drew inspiration from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Béhar wondered if he could apply those principles to an office chair, and the Sayl was born.
Its striking look is thanks to a web-like backing that features dozens of interlocking elastomer strands. Those strands provide elasticity that allows the chair to stretch and bend with your weight. The design provides more support in the areas that require it while allowing your spine to keep its natural “S” shape. This design leads to less fatigue, without the need for additional lumbar support.
The design also requires far fewer materials to create, and that drives the price down. At $725, it ain’t cheap, but it’s only half the price of some of Herman Miller’s flagship offerings, like the Embody ($1,495) and Aeron ($1,445). That’s still significantly pricier than many well-reviewed gaming chairs, but Herman Miller’s build quality puts most of its competitors to shame. Still, there are ergonomic reasons why gaming chairs aren’t all bad, including easy reclining and tall backrests. But their design can also encourage slouching. The neck pillows on the headrests usually shouldn’t be used while sitting, and their “lumbar support” is often just a branded pillow of wildly varying quality.
What’s the difference between the Gaming Edition and the stock Sayl?
Well, the OG starts at $549. But to kit the standard out with fully adjustable, 4D armrests and customizable seat depth raises the price to $755. That means, technically, you’re saving $30 bucks, as both of those features are included here. But there are other restrictions at play. The original Sayl offers a wider variety of customization options, including lumbar support, far more innocuous colorways, and a (currently unavailable) fabric back. What you’re paying for, instead, is a bold color palette.
A twistable rod on the right side adjusts how much pressure it takes to lean the seat, and behind it, another lever adjusts the seat height (from 16 to 20.5 inches). On the other side you’ll find a lever that lets you customize the seat tilt and how far back it can lean. The arms are fully adjustable, able to be lifted, lowered, moved closer to your elbows or slid out of the way, as well as positioned at a variety of angles.
The Sayl is the only Herman Miller gaming chair with customizable colorways, though the palettes are limited. You can only change the seat color from black to slate grey, and there are five different options for the suspension. The chair I reviewed was a subtle white and black with red levers, which is as unobtrusive as the designs come. The other palettes include a deep red, a striking neon green, and a lustrous ocean blue.
Herman Miller Sayl, Gaming Edition – Performance
There is an intrinsic weirdness about the entire Herman Miller gaming chair offering. The design-focused company has taken its best-looking chairs and (arguably) made them look a little worse, removed a slew of customizable options, added literally no features, and presented them as “gaming chairs” with nothing but marketing. That makes its product fit kind of weird. People who like gamer aesthetics don’t need to dish out 750 bucks to buy a chair, but discerning buyers who want a high-end office chair for gaming may not be interested in the not-so-subtle color palettes found here.
But does that matter?
Herman Miller makes fantastic chairs. I use an Aeron every day, and I’m convinced it’s one of the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever planted my precious cheeks upon. Gamers deserve that luxury, too.
The Sayl requires absolutely no assembly. Herman Miller ships its chairs fully assembled, able to roll out from its gigantic box straight to your desk. I find the aesthetic of most gaming chairs to be downright embarrassing, so I was pleased to see how easily the Sayl slotted into my minimalist setup. For those who prefer a more in-your-face look, the other colorways could fit in just fine next to the RGB glow of a monster battle station.
After customizing the Sayl’s height, seat depth, and lean tension, I was impressed, but not surprised, with how comfortable the chair was. The Sayl has won a bevy of awards, including Product Design of the Year from 2010’s International Design Awards jury. Sitting in it myself, I can see why.
Even after hours in the chair, I never experienced any back pain (except, unsurprisingly, after testing the tilt away from the desk). The chair doesn’t provide as much lumbar support as the Embody or Aeron, both of which cost almost exactly twice as much, but I never experienced any lumbar pain whatsoever. (If you’re prone to back fatigue or pain, the OG non-gaming edition of the Sayl does have an optional lumbar addition).
You can slide the armrests forward and back with a simple push, but I was pleasantly surprised that while leaning back and grasping a controller or switch, I never slid them with my elbows. I also found adjusting the arms’ angles inward gave my arms plenty of support while handheld gaming, though I do wish they could articulate even further inward so my entire arm could rest on them.
The forward tilt allows you to lean toward your keyboard or display without hunching. However, there are no gradations to the tilt angle – the seat is flat or leaned forward. And unfortunately, that forward tilt is overly aggressive and can make it feel a bit like you’re slipping off the seat or bracing yourself against your desk to prevent it. Loosening the backward tension and lowering the seat height to ensure your feet are planted on the ground can alleviate the feeling, but I’d prefer a few more setup tilt settings to choose between.
While working, I vastly preferred a more traditional setup, which means I had to adjust nearly every lever multiple times between gaming and working. As is the case with so many office chairs, I could never quite master the exact machinations needed to correctly adjust the dang thing. While seat height, tilt tension, and harm height was a cinch, adjusting the forward tilt felt like black magic. Changing it requires you to lean backward actively, then depress the front or lift the back (or vice versa) of a small hatched lever under the left-side cushion.
My other beef with the adjustments is the chair doesn’t rise high enough. At my desk, the standard range put me about an inch and a half short of total comfort. Anyone over 6-feet tall will want to opt for the extra $50 high-height range, which adds another inch-and-a-half to the maximum seat height.
Herman Miller says more colors are coming soon, and I hope more customization options are, as well. The OG Sayl has an upholstered back option, which in my opinion elevates its look. I’d like to see gaming-specific alterations, including additional tilt configurations, more extreme arm rotation, and a tilt lever neanderthals like me can comprehend. But until then, I have no qualms still recommending this wonderfully weird gaming chair.
Giant-Size X-Men #1 is easily among the most iconic Marvel comics ever published. But how do you top the comic that inducted mutant heroes like Wolverine, Storm and Colossus into the fold? You have to go planet-sized, of course.
Marvel has announced Planet-Size X #1, a special issue that kicks off the next major chapter in Johnathan Hickman’s sprawling X-Men saga. Written by Gerry Duggan (Marauders) and drawn by Pepe Larraz (House of X), Planet-Size X #1 kicks off a month-long crossover where 12 different X-Men comics will chronicle an event called the Hellfire Gala.
Art by Pepe Larraz. (Image Credit: Marvel)
If you’ve been following the X-Men line in the months since the X of Swords crossover wrapped, you probably have some inkling of what the Hellfire Gala is. Now that the population of Krakoa is swelling and Cyclops and Jean Grey have officially reestablished the X-Men as a team, the mutant race is celebrating its ascendancy as a global superpower. But more than ever, different factions within and without Krakoa are jockeying for power, so this won’t be any ordinary party. Each of the 12 X-books published in June will unfold over the course of a single night as the mutant race wines and dines the outside world and new alliances and rivalries are forged.
“Make no mistake—this is an X-Men book drawn by superstar artist Pepe Larraz. It is absolutely the most important issue of the month,” Editor Jordan D. White teases in Marvel’s press release. “Pepe is absolutely the star of the X-line and he is doing the most amazing work of his career. You cannot miss this.”
The “out of spite” part, however, seems to be more of a tongue-in-cheek joke as Wulff is often seen creating video game consoles and accessory mods on his channel, but it’s an incredible feat nonetheless and certainly one that Nolan likely wouldn’t approve of.
Tenet on Game Boy Advance Video, Photo Credit: @BobWulff on Twitter
Nolan told Collider last year that Tenet “is a film whose image and sound really needs to be enjoyed in your theaters on the big screen,” and for some, this inspired them to go see the movie in theaters. For others, it inspired them to wait until it was released on-demand and on Blu-ray. For Wulff, it apparently inspired him to put it on some Game Boy Advance Video cartridges.
Wulff says in the video that his five-cartridge movie mod is “possibly the worst way to view Tenet,” and he’s probably right — in order to fit the movie onto the five cartridges, Wulff had to bring the bitrate down to 8 KB/s, the frame rate down to six frames per second, and the resolution down to 192×128.
The movie is on five cartridges because a single cartridge can only hold about 30 minutes of video in a “watchable state,” according to Wulff. Tenet’s runtime clocks in at exactly 150 minutes so it just barely fits on five cartridges. Wulff went so far as to add custom labels to each of the cartridges too.
Tenet on Game Boy Advance, Photo Credit: @BobWulff on Twitter
You’d certainly expect to play as Crash in a game named after the bandicoot, but Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time introduces three additional playable characters – Dr. Cortex, Dingodile, and Tawna – on top of Crash and Coco. Each comes with their own moveset and series of levels that test players with unique mechanics within the platforming framework of the Crash series.
To coincide with Crash 4’s launch on PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and Nintendo Switch, IGN spoke with Crash 4 creative producer Lou Studdert about developer Toys for Bob’s creative process in bringing these characters to life. From the selection process to determining each character’s mechanical hook and more, read on for a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how Crash 4’s ensemble playable cast came to be.
While Crash 4 is a direct sequel to 1998’s Crash Bandicoot: Warped, Toys for Bob certainly understood the entirety of Crash’s history when creating It’s About Time. And so when the topic of other characters to include came up, Studdert explained how it was no easy task to choose for a team full of lifelong Crash fans.
“It’s actually one of the toughest conversations we had at the start of the game, because Crash as a series has this amazingly deep bench of characters. And we had a bulletin board with everyone from the franchise on it,” Studdert explained, namechecking everyone as varied as Crash 1’s Pinstripe to Crash Tag Team Racing’s Willie Wumpa Cheeks. But at the end of it all, gameplay had to be king.
“We could be doing a million different thing [but] we wanted them to feel, gameplay wise, still a part of the core tenants of Crash Bandicoot’s platforming DNA,” he continued, noting a character like Nitrous Oxide wouldn’t make the cut given Oxide’s association with being in a vehicle, and the team wasn’t interested in creating Crash Team Racing-like levels.
“From there we figured out narratively, we wanted each of them to have their own lanes, where you’ve got Cortex, and traditionally he’s evil, he’s the villain, and then you’ve got Tawna, we’ve positioned her as the guardian angel. She’s the good, and then we wanted to have some wild card energy there. And we had the idea of turning Dingodile into the chaotic neutral [figure]. He’s neither good, nor bad. He has a bad past and really he’s just trying to get home and he’s causing mischief along the way.
The three distinct personality types allowed the wider Toys for Bob team to find unique ways to integrate all three both into the Crash 4 storyline as well as into its gameplay rhythms, while still offering distinct opportunities when it came to introducing new platforming mechanics.
The Villain’s Turn
Perhaps the most prominent playable character of the trio, Dr. Neo Cortex is a core component of the bandicoot’s history, and so he made sense as a potential inclusion. For those who haven’t played, Cortex doesn’t have a double jump or spin attack, but instead can dash and uses his blaster to zap enemies into stone or jelly platforms, the latter of which can be used to bounce to new locations.
Figuring out what Cortex’s sidearm actually did, though, was something Studdert said went through several iterations.
“We knew we wanted to give him his blaster, and we actually struggled for a while to figure out what the blaster did,” he said. “When we were initially building his levels, we had some experiments where he devolved a creature, [but] then we’re like, ‘Oh my god, every single thing we make in the game and levels we put him in, we then have to double the amount of content that we as the studio make to accommodate [everything] being shot at.’”
Studdert of course noted from a production perspective, that would greatly increase the scope of what the team had to accomplish, but also the developers recognized some inherent issues players might have with the idea.
“From a player-information perspective, they then would have to go, ‘Okay what does that do? If I shot the dinosaur and it turned into a baby dinosaur, then what does that mean for me?’ And to have to do that at every single interaction we realized very quickly, “No, no, no, we need to simplify it.’”
But the ideas for this transformation blaster didn’t stop there.
“Then it became, ‘Okay…what if you hit it with his blaster and it turned into an object from the game? Maybe I shot a chicken and it turned into a bounce pad,” he explained. “That was funny, but it only sustained itself so long, because you wouldn’t know what you’d get when you hit it and because Crash is such a deterministic game you have to figure out [what to do next],” Studdert explained. He joked that this idea led to the team coining the phrase of a “producer pistol.”
“Someone said to me, ‘Wait, you get to shoot a gun to then reuse content from other parts in the game. Is this a producer pistol?’”
Development jokes aside, the team eventually landed on Cortex’s blaster as players know it, but not without even further refinement. At one point, Studdert explained that there were even three states players could switch enemies among, but ultimately paring the options down made more sense.
A New Tawna Rises
And while it might be easier to see the framework for which Cortex would fit into Crash 4’s story, and even gameplay, Toys for Bob’s new take on Tawna is a polar opposite. Featuring a completely different iteration of the character than we’ve seen before, Studdert explained how they took the responsibility of including Tawna very seriously, especially in a series largely dominated by a lot of male characters throughout its history.
“We knew from the start that we wanted to bring a new voice and a new perspective to Tawna,” he said. “We took that task very seriously internally, getting a very cross-functional group of developers to weigh in, different writers. Mandy Benanav on our team had a lot of hand in her flavor and her character and the writing. And the art team brought in different inspirations and the character team did a bunch of different iterations.
“We knew early on that we wanted to not just update this character, but really give them a role that they haven’t had a chance to play. Especially also for Coco, it was an intentional part of us as figuring out what this game was, is that we wanted to take these characters [and] break them free from those roles of sidekick or damsel in distress and make them as equal billing co-stars for the game.”
And in deciding what that meant for bringing Tawna more to the forefront of Crash 4, the team inevitably settled on going full “action hero” as Studdert put it.
“What does Tawna look like as Batman,” he said the team asked itself. “We want her to exude confidence and strength and just general awesomeness. And then the art team, experimenting in different looks and different appeals so that way she’s still recognizable… and then using those foundations for us on the narrative development side to figure out, ‘Okay, well, where does she intersect with this story? And how do we also rectify where she’s been in the previous games?’”
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=%22What%20does%20Tawna%20look%20like%20as%20Batman%3F%22″]Studdert explained how, as evidenced by earlier versions glimpsed in the Crash Bandicoot 4 art book, Tawna had a boomerang before her eventual hook shot, among other iterations. But the team’s plans for Dingodile actually steered them away from that tool.
“Once we realized what we wanted to do with Dingodile, the idea of getting something and bringing it back was already covered by a vacuum,” he noted. But Tawna’s hook shot allowed the team to really dig into Tawna as a mobile character.
“Tawna’s hook shot is less about the combat and the interaction than it is about moving her,” he explained, noting that there might have been some influence from so much of the team playing Sekiro during development.
John Wickodile
But as for the third playable character, Studdert explained how Dingodile was a good example in Toys for Bob’s approach to choosing these additions. They could come up with some great ideas, sure, like turning Dingodile into the John Wick of the Crash Bandicoot universe, but if it didn’t narratively and mechanically gel with the rest of the adventure, what was really the point?
“We worked a lot to try and figure out, ‘Okay, where does he go after his diner’s destroyed?’ At one point, we jokingly referred to it as ‘Dingodile becomes John Wick,’ trying to take out all of the bats through all of the dimensions for destroying his diner,” Studdert said. “He’s on a full-on mission of revenge. And he has nothing to do with the rest of the game,” he continued, noting that the narrative team questioning that move actually helped with level design, too, because it didn’t lock those designers into a very specific kind of Dingodile level.
And while Dingodile’s narrative role took some finessing, Studdert explained how the devs early on knew “the general notion of a vacuum” was what they wanted for the character’s gameplay. But, still, there were plenty of different iterations to get to what players ended up enjoying, including some more complex puzzle solving than some would expect in a Crash game.
“We had a bunch of different experiments of how there would be other moves that he could do. We initially had move sets where he could grab a TNT crate and then if he held onto it too long, the explosion would launch him backwards,” he said.
“But because he’s so beefy, it wouldn’t kill him. And so we had these puzzle steps where he’d grab a TNT and then have to turn away from the jump and get launched backwards. It made you feel super smart, but at the same time it just didn’t feel right, because that whole, facing the wrong way and lining up your jump, it was a little too layered.”
Studdert elaborated how the vacuum at various point also was used to pull switches, or to pull and launch slingshots, but that these more complex pacekillers didn’t line up with the overall goal of the team: making a great Crash Bandicoot game.
“It’s all about trying to make sure that this felt like a Crash Bandicoot game, where those mechanics [are] really cool in a test area, but trying to make sure that we kept at a pace and kept it feeling like it was part of Crash Bandicoot was so important to us,” he explained. “We need to strip away some of the layers here and get rid of some of the extra thought that goes into these puzzle mechanics to ensure that it still felt like Crash Bandicoot.”
Maintaining pace and ensuring that Crash Bandicoot DNA remains throughout the experience is something I praised it for in IGN’s Crash Bandicoot 4 review, noting how each character felt distinct enough to work in their own spinoff game, but still of apiece with the greater Crash game. And now players on Switch, PS5, and Xbox One can experience that for themselves, while PC players can enjoy Crash 4 later this year. If you’re just diving in, be sure to check out IGN’s Crash Bandicoot 4 guide for tips, tricks, and help finding every last gem.
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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor, host of Podcast Beyond!, and PlayStation lead. Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.
Modders have already created some first-person camera for Breath of the Wild, but one player has managed to figure out a glitch that should (in theory) let anyone look at Hyrule from a totally different perspective.
As reported by Kotaku, Twitter user A.xk managed to discover a specific button input that would trigger the camera to clip down to a roughly first-person view. Check out the gif below from A.xK’s YouTube channel.
Want to try it for yourself? Here’s A.xk’s instructions:
New item hold glitch
↓
Camera
↓
Item hold
↓
Item hold cancel
YouTuber Peco also managed to recreate the glitch if you want to see some longer clips of the first-person view.
It remains to be seen if Nintendo addresses this glitch in a future patch, so make sure to check it out for yourself before too long.
WarnerMedia has announced that it will roll out a cheaper, ad-supported tier for HBO Max in June. The news of the tier comes from AT&T’s analyst and investor day, though the company didn’t announce the price and official release date.
Alongside the cheaper price tag, the ad-supported tier will also remove day-one theatrical releases. Meaning anyone hoping to watch movies like Dune on HBO Max will have to pay for the full ad-free version.
And the day one theatrical movie releases are part of WarnerMedia’s big push to get the HBO Max subscriber numbers up. WarnerMedia made waves (and maybe even a few enemies) when it announced that its entire 2021 theater release line-up, including films like Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, and Dune would also be released on HBO Max the same day they’re set to be released in theaters.
WarnerMedia reported around 40 million subscribers as of January 2020, this trails Disney+’s 100 million subscribers, and Netflix’s 200 million. But according to Variety, WarnerMedia appears optimistic as it raised its subscribers forecast to 120 million by 2025, an increase over its initial 90 million projection.
A cheaper ad-supported tier could shore up those numbers and give customers a chance to try out HBO Max’s library, and then potentially commit to a more costly, ad-free experience with day one movie releases. The standard HBO Max subscription currently costs $14.99 a month.
An ad-supported option is already offered by other streaming services. Hulu offers an ad-supported version as does Peacock, which actually offers three tiers of subscriptions with different offerings at each level.
