Idris Elba has faced off against powerhouses like Hela, Hobbs, and Shaw, but can he survive an encounter with a lion? Elba’s is in for a rough day in survival thriller Beast, according to a report from THR.
Initial reports offer very little on the film’s plot, other than that Elba will be fighting for his life as a lion hunts him; reports compare the film to Blake Lively’s The Shallows, which has her surviving a shark attack.
The thriller is an original idea from producer Jamie Primak-Sullivan, with writer Ryan Engle working on the script. Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur is set to direct, and will produce alongside Primak-Sullivan, Will Packer, and James Lopez. Kormakur is best known films made in his native Iceland, but has directed movies like Adrift and Two Guns. Ryan Engle, meanwhile, penned screenplays for Dwayne Johnson’s Rampage and Liam Neeson’s The Commuter and Non-Stop.
Beast marks the second time that Primak-Sullivan, Engle, and producers Packer and Lopez will work together. The quartet previously produced and wrote Gabrielle Union’s 2018 film Breaking In, which featured the star defending her family during a home invasion.
Beast currently has no scheduled release window, but Elba can be seen in the upcoming film The Suicide Squad as Bloodsport, and in movies like Thor Ragnarok and Cats.
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Netflix’s follow-up series to The Haunting Of Hill House, The Haunting Of Bly Manor, is right around the corner–and there has been no shortage of extra spooky content released to keep us curious. The first trailer was packed with possible clues as to the show’s story and the Manor’s resident ghosts, creepy dolls, and deeply unsettling children.
Now, the official Bly Manor twitter account has released the episode titles for the season with a series of posters. Take a look at them here.
Notably, the title for Episode 8 seems to be censored out. It looks like it’s going to be six words, probably starting with “the,” but that’s as far as we can guess. It’s poster features a very scary looking chest with water pouring out of it, so maybe it has something to do with drowning or that lake we saw over and over again in the trailer.
Like Hill House before it, Bly Manor will be loosely adapting a literary classic–Henry James’ gothic romance novella The Turn Of The Screw. It’s the story of a live-in nanny, called a Governess in the original story, who goes to work caring for a set of young and recently orphaned siblings on the grounds of a sprawling and possibly haunted house.
While you won’t be seeing any of Hill House’s Crane family in this season of the anthology show, you will see some familiar faces in new roles like Oliver Jackson-Cohen who played Luke, Victoria Pedretti who played Nell, and Henry Thomas who played Hugh.
The Haunting Of Bly Manor is arriving on Netflix on October 9.
October is just around the corner, and Pokemon Go developer Niantic has already announced a handful of events happening in the game next month. Beyond the fashion-themed event, Niantic is hosting another Community Day on Saturday, October 17, and the studio has now shared some more details about it.
As previously revealed, the featured Pokemon for October’s Community Day will be Charmander, the runner-up in Niantic’s recent Community Day poll. Throughout the event, Charmander will appear in the wild and in Raids more often than usual, making this a good opportunity to stock up on Charmander Candy. On top of that, you’ll have a better chance of encountering Shiny Charmander during the event.
This isn’t the first time Charmander has been the star of a Community Day; the Gen 1 starter was also the featured Pokemon back in May 2018, but this time around it will be able to learn a new event move. Every Charmander that you evolve all the way into Charizard up to two hours after the Community Day ends will learn the Dragon-type attack Dragon Breath. This applies to any Charmander that evolves during the designated time frame, even if you’ve caught them prior to the event.
Finally, a few other bonuses will be available during October’s Community Day. As usual, any Incense that you use during the event will remain active for three hours instead of the usual 30 minutes. Additionally, you’ll earn triple the normal amount of Stardust for each Pokemon you catch throughout the event. There will also be a Community Day-exclusive Special Research story called A Tale of Tails. Tickets to access the story will cost $1 USD, and completing it will net you a variety of rewards including Charizard Mega Energy.
Like the past few Community Day’s, October’s event will run for six hours instead of the traditional three, from 11 AM to 5 PM local time. That means you’ll have until 7 PM local time to evolve Charmander and get a Charizard that knows Dragon Breath. You can read more about the event on the official Pokemon Go website.
In the meantime, the Legendary Pokemon Zapdos is appearing in five-star Raids again until October 2, when it’ll be replaced by Moltres. There are numerous other events lined up for Pokemon Go next month, including the game’s annual Halloween event. While details on that are still scarce, Niantic has teased that it will introduce Mega Gengar during the event. Niantic has also said it is phasing out some of Pokemon Go’s pandemic bonuses starting October 1.
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While Codemasters’ Dirt 5 will offer free next-gen upgrades for both PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S players, the former will not be able to transfer any progress from the PS4 version of the game when making the jump to the newer console.
This was confirmed on the game’s official Twitter account in a response to a fan question. When upgrading Dirt 5 from PS4 to PS5, the game will allow you to move across any Playground track creations but no progress from its campaign, any in-game currency, and custom livery designs. By comparison, all of these are supported when moving your save from Xbox One to Xbox Series X/S.
Currently on Xbox, all progress can be carried over between generations. On PlayStation, your Playgrounds creations can be carried over, but other game progress (Career, currency, saved liveries) cannot. If that changes, we’ll let you know!
Dirt 5 is launching alongside the Xbox Series X on November 10 after two small delays. It will also launch on PS4, Xbox One, and PC on the same day, before coming to PS5 on November 12 when Sony’s console launches.
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The Hori Split Pad Pro is one of the best Nintendo Switch controllers you can buy. Each handle slides into the Switch, replacing the Joy-Cons and giving you more substantial pads to use in handheld mode. Hori recently released a number of different colours, and now the company has revealed a Pac-Man-themed version of the Split Pad Pro. It’s available to preorder now for $60 with a release date of November 19.
The new Pac-Man design has the little yellow guy on the left controller, accompanied by the blue ghost Inky, while the right controller features red ghost Blinky, pink ghost Pinky, and orange ghost Clyde. Beneath them, the controller features the classic Pac-Man map.
The Hori Split Pad Pro provides an experience that’s closer to a proper full-size controller in handheld mode. It features more accurate analog sticks, bigger face and shoulder buttons, and remappable back paddles. The paddles let you map a button on the front of the controller to the back. Unfortunately, you can’t map any buttons on the right controller to the left controller’s paddle and vice-versa. I found this feature particularly useful in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, as I could map D-pad inputs like the tool switch to the back paddle.
If you’re interested in more product recommendations, check out our Nintendo Switch gift guide. There are a lot of different controllers, headsets, and accessories that will make any Nintendo fan happy this holiday season.
Pokemon Go developer Niantic has been making numerous changes to the game over the past few months to make it easier to play from home amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but some of these tweaks won’t be around for much longer. Niantic has announced that some of the bonuses it implemented in the game will soon be phased out, while others will remain fixtures “for the foreseeable future.”
Beginning tomorrow, October 1, the distance it takes to hatch eggs will return to normal, although Niantic says it will also include more incubators in boxes you can get from Pokemon Go’s in-game shop. Additionally, Incense will now only be more effective while you are walking. Your Buddy Pokemon will also still give you gifts, but only when you’re close to running out, and only once per day.
Although these bonuses are being reverted, a handful will remain available going forward. You’ll still be able to carry a maximum of 20 gifts in your inventory, and you’ll still receive triple the normal amount of XP and Stardust for the first Pokemon you catch each day. Finally, Incense that you use will remain active for 60 minutes rather than the original 30 minutes. You can read more about the upcoming changes on the Pokemon Go website.
Niantic already has a number of October events lined up for Pokemon Go. A new set of Field Research tasks goes live starting October 1. Each time you achieve a Research Breakthrough next month, you’ll encounter the Ghost/Bug Pokemon Shedinja. Beyond that, a fashion-themed event will kick off in the game starting October 2. That’s also the same date the game’s current Legendary, Zapdos, will leave five-star Raids, with Moltres taking its place until October 9.
In other Pokemon news, The Pokemon Company confirmed that Pokemon Go compatibility will be added to Pokemon Home before the year ends. Once this functionality is live, you’ll be able to transfer certain monsters from the mobile game to the storage service and then bring them into Pokemon Sword and Shield. You’ll also get a few bonuses for transferring a monster. First, you’ll receive the Mystery Box in Pokemon Go, which is used to summon the Mythical Pokemon Meltan. You’ll also get a Melmetal that’s capable of Gigantamaxing as a Mystery Gift in Pokemon Home.
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If you’re a child of the ’80s or ’90s, chances are you know about the video game console wars. Before the era of PlayStations and Xboxes, many of that era grew up as either Nintendo kids or Sega kids. Of course, the war between the two video game companies went far deeper than playground squabbles about whether Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis had the superior Aladdin game–t was Sega, by the way.
There was also a battle in the boardrooms of Nintendo and Sega, as the companies battled for video game console supremacy, which takes center stage in the new CBS All Access documentary Console Wars, from directors Blake J. Harris and Jonah Tulis. Harris also wrote a novel of the same name, which was released back in 2014. What many might now know, though, is that the documentary doesn’t exist because of the book. Instead, they were developed simultaneously, along with another medium they want to use to tell this story.
“Blake came to me and said, ‘I found this cool story. I don’t know what it is yet.’ He’s like, ‘I think it’s a book,'” Tulis told GameSpot. At the time, the two were screenwriting and film producing partners, which gave Tulis the idea that, given how visual a medium video games are, this could make for an interesting documentary.
“You have all this great media and you want to be placed in this time capsule of the ’90s, which is sort of the biggest thing we try to do with this was turning this into a time capsule,” he explained.
Then, Harris realized they could also approach the story from a narrative angle, much like The Social Network. At that point, the duo met with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to see if they’d like to executive produce the documentary. Instead of that, Rogen and Goldberg offered to write the forward of the book, finance the documentary, and help them make their video game version of The Social Network, which was going to be produced with Columbia Pictures. Instead, the project will now be a limited series on the CBS All Access streaming service.
How will the series differ from the documentary, though? “It becomes much more of a character piece. I think you really want to get into the characters even deeper and deeper and deeper in a series like that,” Tulis said. “And, you know, you have the best actors in the world able to handle it and take these characters who need another level.” Thus far, no casting has been announced, but the documentary is full of interesting characters.
Chief among them is Tom Kalinske, the former CEO of Sega of America. He helped launch the Sega Genesis, coming to the company after working for Mattel over a decade. “Tom Kalinske, he’s a huge part of the documentary–you might say the main character–but we’ve really just scratched the surface there. We don’t really get into how things ended at Mattel not in a way that he wanted and sort of [how] Sega was his one last chance to do something great.”
Likewise, Harris hopes to put more of a spotlight on Ellen Beth van Buskirk, the former marketing services manager at Sega of America. “[She’s] probably my favorite character in the documentary. You don’t really get into it, [but] there’s a lot about what it was like to be a woman working at all, let alone in the game industry,” he said. “And these are the kinds of things that, we tried to hint at and try to get at in small ways. But in an episodic format, you can really get more much more into the motivations and what’s driving these people.”
Hopefully, focusing more on the characters in a limited series format means viewers will get to see the head of Nintendo legitimately wanting to get into a street fight with the head of Sega–an event that’s covered in the documentary.
The Console Wars documentary is streaming now on CBS All Access.
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Spider-Man Remastered for the PS5 is making a lot of visual upgrades to the acclaimed PS4 game, but one of the most noticeable is sure to be Peter Parker’s new face. Insomniac announced that it replaced face model John Bubniak with Ben Jordan, to better match the facial capture performance from Yuri Lowenthal. The new actor looks a bit younger and more like Tom Holland from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Insomniac released an early cutscene to show off Peter’s new face, and you can see it side-by-side with the original to choose your favorite Parker.
It’s been a while since the gang of South Park has graced our screens–since Season 23 wrapped up in 2019. However, airing on September 30 is a brand-new hour-long special titled “The Pandemic Special,” which was recorded remotely. A new video gives fans a glimpse into how it was done.
Producing any type of TV show remotely is an incredible challenge, and a video released on South Park’s Twitter shows us just that. Aside from massive video conference calls, with a staggering amount of attendees, and completing animations and voice over, the South Park staff had to deal with issues at home. This ranged from getting ethernet cables run under houses to dealing with children being at home during the workday. Check out the video below.
Go behind the scenes to see how South Park Studios produced its first-ever supersized episode, “The Pandemic Special”, completely remotely. The all-new episode premieres tonight at 8/7c on Comedy Central! #SouthParkpic.twitter.com/Y0DywVzwMJ
The special episode airs Wednesday, September 30 on Comedy Central at 8 PM / 7 PM CT. In order to watch it, you need to have access to Comedy Central through a cable, satellite, or streaming service provider.
If you don’t have Comedy Central, there are some decent streaming options. The cheapest is Philo, which offers 61 channels for $20 a month. Aside from Comedy Central, MTV, Travel, and Discovery, there is also video on demand as well. The second least-expensive option is Sling. Comedy Central is available in both the Blue and Orange packages, and individually, they cost $30 a month. You’ll probably want to go with the Blue package as it is entertainment focused and has more channels.
Aside from those, Hulu has live TV and so does YouTube, but it is a bit pricier compared to Philo and Sling. If you aren’t able to watch it live, it will more than likely be available for purchase through iTunes or Google Play the day after airing.
The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors. GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time is a direct follow-up to the original, Naughty Dog-developed trilogy that was released on the original PlayStation. But with decades having gone by since their release, Crash 4 developer Toys for Bob had the chance to make something ambitious in size and scope that just couldn’t be done back then.
Speaking to IGN ahead of Crash 4’s launch, Toys for Bob studio head Paul Yan elaborated on the scope and ambitions of Crash 4 from the team behind the Spyro Reignited Trilogy.
“…We did set out from the very beginning to make this the biggest Crash game ever,” Yan said, noting that the recently released demo, which has already led to some impressive speedruns, was meant to give longtime fans a sense that scope didn’t literally just mean the longest levels ever, but something much more all-encompassing.
“That was part of the motivation for releasing the demo, to help more people get their hands on it and get a feel for just how much bigger and massive the levels are. When you think about how we compare to the previous games, it’s not just the length of the levels, but also just how densely packed the activities are. Some levels like Snow Way Out asks you to explore open areas in limited ways, and it’s not entirely linear in the same way that you could compare it to the original the trilogy.”
But Yan emphasized that, even as the scope of the game grew with new gameplay additions, additional modes like the N. Verted mirror mode, playable characters, and more, grounding it in the classic Crash platforming experience returning players know was a key aspect of the development process.
“We developed the tool set of new abilities and we knew that the masks and their new powers were going to be a part of what we wanted to do to layer on top of the core Crash classic gameplay. And the balance of it is something we were really sensitive about all the way through,” he said. “There’s new masks. There’s new locomotion tricks. There’s new alternate heroes. But we want to make sure that you’re coming to this game presumably to play as Crash. And we don’t want this to be a string of disparate experiences where it felt like…all kinds of other things outside that may give variety, but might overpower what that core experience is.
“So when we looked at the original trilogy, many of us looked at Crash 2 [as] a really great example of hitting the right balance,” Yan explained, noting that the team doesn’t see Crash 4 as something to directly compare solely to Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, but merely that striking a balance was key to a great Crash experience.
“That was a lens which we applied and said, ‘Hey, everything that we’re putting into this and the way that we’re distributing it and pacing it out, does this compliment on-foot, core platforming gameplay?’ Because if it doesn’t, let’s get it out and make sure that we make Crash the center of this game.”
