Anne Hathaway says that she went on her audition for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises prepared for a totally different DC Comics femme fatale: Harley Quinn.
In a new interview with BBC Radio 1 (via Batman-News), Hathaway explains that she dressed in the style of Harley Quinn when she met with Nolan assuming that was the role he had in mind for her only to discover in the middle of it that she was up for Catwoman.
“I came in and I had this lovely Vivian Westwood kind of beautiful-but-mad tailoring top with stripes going everywhere,” Hathaway recalled. “And I wore these flat Joker-ey looking shoes. And I was trying to give Chris these crazy little smiles.”
This went on for some time before Nolan dropped a bombshell on her.
“About an hour into the meeting he said ‘Well, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but it’s Catwoman,’” Hathaway said. “And I was shifting into a different gear. ‘Now ok, we’re slinky. We’re slinky. And I hate my shirt. I love my shirt, but I hate it right now. We’re slinky.’”
Given how notoriously secretive Nolan is about his projects, Hathaway can be forgiven for not knowing which character she was up for before she went in. And considering his previous Bat-film, The Dark Knight, featured Joker, perhaps Hathaway assumed the sequel would somehow bring in his shrink-turned-girlfriend Harley Quinn.
In the end, Hathaway played Catwoman in Nolan’s final Bat-film and Margot Robbie went on to bring Harley Quinn to life in Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey.
With Justice League Dark: Apokolips War coming to digital next week, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has revealed exciting new details on their next animated DC Universe Movie, Superman: Man of Tomorrow.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the film sees “Clark Kent working as an intern for the Daily Planet and learning on the job how to save the city of Metropolis.”
Darren Criss (Glee, Midway) has been cast in the lead role of Clark Kent, while Star Trek and Heroes’ Zachary Quinto will voice his foe, Lex Luthor.
Criss is no stranger to DC Comics adaptations, having appeared on The CW’s Supergirl and The Flash as the supervillain known as Music Meister.
The voice cast ensemble of Superman: Man of Tomorrow also includes San Andreas and True Detective’s Alexandra Daddario as Lois Lane, Brett Dalton (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) as cosmic bounty hunter Lobo, Ryan Hurst (The Walking Dead) as the supervillain Parasite, and Ike Amadi (Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion’s Revenge) as Martian Manhunter.
Jonathan and Martha Kent will be played by Neil Flynn and Bellamy Young, respectively.
The film’s creative team includes director Chris Palmer, screenwriter Tim Sheridan, and supervising producer Butch Lukic.
Superman: Man of Tomorrow is due out this summer on digital, 4K Ultra combo pack, and Blu-ray combo pack.
This year also saw the release of another Man of Steel animated movie from WBHE, Superman: Red Son. In our positive review of the film, we praised it as “one of the stronger additions to DC’s animated movie library in recent years.”
Beginning as a toy brand in 1984, which then spun-off into a cartoon series, Transformers has had seven theatrically-released Transformers movies–one of which was the 2018 spin-off Bumblebee. Now, there’s another Transformers movie in the works, but this one will take the audience back in time. No, not like how 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight showed Transformers hanging out with King Arthur and Merlin.
The next Transformers film will be an animated feature, and Deadline is reporting that Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley is being tapped to helm the film. The script comes from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (Ant-Man & The Wasp).
This story will be very different from past Transformers films, as it will take place on Cybertron and will follow the relationship between Megatron and Optimus Prime, before the war between Autobots and Decepticons made them enemies.
There’s no release date set for the animated feature nor information if this is going the classic 2D animated route or 3D. While many movies are seeing delays, an animated feature may be easier to complete during social distancing, since everyone working on the film don’t have to work in close-quarters during production.
Additionally, Netflix is producing a Transformers TV series called Transformers: War for Cybertron Trilogy. The first trailer arrived back in February, and the show will consist of six, 22-minute long episodes. The series will also take place on Cybertron, following the battle between Autobots and Decepticons.
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla was fully announced today with a CGI trailer, but the press release also included the first in-engine screenshots of the game.
While almost certainly composed, rather than taken during regular gameplay, they give a sense of what the first next-generation Assassin’s Creed game will look like. Check them out in the gallery below:
The images include a castle-based battle scene, possibly a siege, a group sailing in a longship, and a verdant countryside scene. The latter two images show off the female version of main character, Eivor.
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla was teased in a lengthy stream yesterday, and subsequently revealed as a current- and next-gen game, coming this Holiday 2020.
After an extended teaser announcement, Ubisoft revealed Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the next entry in the long-running series, with a release date window of the 2020 holiday season for PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, Xbox One, PC exclusively on the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft Store, Google Stadia, and UPlay+.
Revealed alongside a cinematic trailer offering a glimpse of the new setting and characters, Ubisoft confirmed Valhalla will be set in ninth-century Europe, as players take on the role of Eivor, a Viking raider who leads their people out of Norway and into the kingdoms of England. Valhalla is being developed at Ubisoft Montreal, which previously developed Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Assassin’s Creed Origins, with over a dozen Ubisoft associate studios contributing as well to the new game.
While the reveal trailer did not showcase direct gameplay, many of its scenes echo the new additions Valhalla is making to the franchise’s gameplay.
The open world setting of England’s Dark Ages and Viking culture will also bring with it some key elements to Valhalla’s gameplay, perhaps most notably the Viking settlement Eivor is leading.
Sounding akin to Black Flag’s Inagua settlement, and even Ezio’s Assassin’s Creed II villa before it, Valhalla game director Ashraf Ismail told IGN ahead of the announcement more about how important the settlement is to Eivor’s story, as well as what the gameplay of it may look like.
“The settlement is a key feature of the game. It’s quite grand in what we’re trying to achieve with it. We want you to feel that this is your home, that you’re building, that a lot of what you’re doing in the game world is, at the end of the day, going to feed into the settlement so that it can grow, it can flourish. We have a ton of buildings that people can build. Each building comes with its own gameplay purpose,” Ismail said.
“There’s a lot of effort that’s gone into making sure that players can feel like this home that they’re developing is really meaningful to them. It’s meaningful to the journey that they’re on. The people that they invite to their settlement have meaning to them. Lots of events and things happen based on how you decide to kind of grow this place. It’s really core to the experience of the game.”
Of course, Eivor will need to leave their settlement and venture out into the world to experience it in true Assassin’s Creed style, and Valhalla introduces more adjustments there as well.
The introduction of the Viking longship points to naval combat, which this development team pioneered in Black Flag, while Eivor will also be able to lead their people on raids from the waterfront to gather resources and money.
Valhalla will also update the combat that saw a major revision in Origins, introducing dual-wielding weaponry against a promised “greater variety of enemies than ever before.”
And Valhalla will build off of what Assassin’s Creed Odyssey offered in terms of player customization. In addition to playing Eivor as either male or female, players will also be able to customize Eivor’s hair, tattoos, clothing, war point, and gear. Meanwhile, choices will have to be made in the story, including dialogue choices and “political alliances” that will affect the world of Valhalla.
“There’s customization on the character we’ve never had in the [franchise] before,” Ismail said. “The gear system has been revamped quite a lot to really push a balance between having great gameplay-oriented gear, but also the look that players can really customize the look of that gear. In terms of the grander choices, it comes down to the journey and the settlement, and what do you want to leave behind in the settlement and what kind of impact do you want to have on the people that you’re trying to take care of?”
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on PS5 and Xbox Series X
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will be the first entry in the series to take advantage of the PS5 and Series X, and Ismail spoke to how those new consoles are helping to bring Valhalla’s world to life for what is meant to be a “flagship” Ubisoft game on the next-gen consoles.
“Assassin’s Creed has always been committed to new technologies because our ambitions with these games and these worlds is to deliver the most immersive experience that we possibly can. So anytime there is new technology, we’re very open to it, our software is very open to it. Our software is open to it,” Ismail said. “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is meant to be a flagship game for next-gen for Ubisoft, so we’re quite excited.”
Specifically, he said the team is quite excited about what the reduced load times will allow for the new entry’s world.
“Having significantly faster loading times, effectively means we’re able to remove some of the friction of the immersion we’re trying to go after. We’re trying to build the most immersive experiences we possibly can, so having extremely fast loading helps us out a lot with that. These worlds, the Dark Ages of England and Norway, these are breathtaking, living worlds. So to be able to push them to an incredible potential is wonderful for us,” he said.
Story and World
As the reveal trailer indicates, Eivor’s journey will take them and their Viking community from Norway across the North Sea to the four kingdoms of England. While all those territories will be explorable in some fashion in Valhalla, Ismail indicated there are some surprises in store.
“You can actually quite dynamically go back to Norway anytime you want. And Norway is quite breathtaking. We have the four kingdoms within England, Wessex, Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia. It’s quite a large chunk of England,” he said. “There’s other surprises that I won’t spoil, but our ambition has been to deliver the Viking experience, the Viking fantasy within the Assassin’s Creed world.”
Among the opposition Eivor and the Vikings will face is Saxon resistance, namely in the form of King Aelfred of Wessex.
Of course, this being an Assassin’s Creed entry, there will likely be some tie-ins to the modern-day story present throughout the series, as well as more on the history of the Templar and Assassins, though what that will be is a mystery for now.
Inclusion of Norse Mythology
One notable moment in the reveal trailer features Eivor seemingly spotting the Norse god Odin on the battlefield, who then transforms into a raven and flies away, a good omen amidst the battle.
Does this mean the Norse gods will heavily feature in Valhalla’s story, particularly given the name? While Ismail understandably did not want to explore the story, he said Norse mythology figures and beliefs are certainly part of the game because Eivor’s spirituality, and their belief in these gods, is very much a part of their and the Vikings daily lives.
“The Norse beliefs and the Norse mythology was an everyday part of the culture. And this is the way we’re approaching it, from a sense of the grounded history of the Vikings and the Norse people,” Ismail said. “We also, we’re telling a personal story of Eivor. So Eivor’s perspective of the world, this is sort of what’s hinted at in that trailer, how Eivor will take a sign or see something and put their own spin on it.
“It’s an important part of Eivor’s journey through this world, but the cue [of Odin in the trailer] was the Norse people, their belief structures, that mythology itself was a part of the everyday life.
Preorder, Season Pass DLC, and Special Edition Info
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will have a season pass of DLC Ubisoft has not yet detailed, but the game will be available this holiday in several forms, including the standard edition. The other versions include:
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Gold Edition: the base game and the season pass
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Ultimate Edition: the base game, the season pass, and the ultimate pack, which includes exclusive customization content, like the Berserker Gear Pack, the Berserker Settlement Pack, the Berserker Longship Pack, and a set of Runes used to improve weapons and gear.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Collector’s Edition: everything included in the Ultimate edition, plus a replica of Eivor and her longship (30 cm height), a collector’s case, a steelbook, a numbered certificate of authenticity, a Viking statuette of Eivorr with his raven and Dane axe (5 cm high), exclusive lithographs, and a selected soundtrack. This version will only be available on the Ubisoft store.
Preordering Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will net players an additional mission at launch, The Way of the Berserker, which has Eivor join a legendary Norse Berserker on a revenge quest.
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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor, host of Podcast Beyond!, and a huge fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Debate with him which is the best in the series on Twitter @jmdornbush.
Hollywood star Harrison Ford is once again in trouble over his piloting abilities, with the actor wrongly crossing a runway where another plane was set to land. Federal authorities are currently investigating the incident.
At Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles on Friday, Ford was piloting his small aircraft across the tarmac when, according to his publicist, Ford misheard an instruction from air traffic control and crossed into the path of an incoming plane.
“He immediately acknowledged the mistake and apologized to ATC for the error,” his Publicist told USA Today. ”No one was injured and there was never any danger of a collision.”
The Federal Aviation Administration released their own statement, saying that a two-seat Aviat Husky plane (the one Ford was piloting) crossed the runway while another aircraft was performing a touch-and-go landing.
In the most recent Clone Wars episode, Ashoka and Darth Maul crossed lightsabers in one of the most intense duels in the entire series. A new behind-the-scenes video shows just how much work went into creating the climactic battle on Mandalore.
Stuntman Ray Park was brought on board to capture the physical essence of Darth Maul after playing him back in The Phantom Menace and Solo: A Star Wars Story. While he was dubbed over in the films, it was Park who was performing those flips and twirls in each fight.
This was the first time motion capture was used in the series. It took layers and layers of animation and lighting effects over the motion capture footage to create the final product.
The next Assassin’s Creed, titled Valhalla, has officially been announced and it has, you guessed it, vikings. Cliff Blezinski, of Gears of Wars, LawBreakers, and Radical Heights fame, is making the most of his quarantine time and is working on a new project, but it may not be a game.
Techland is bringing Hellraid back from the dead and the project is getting a second lease on life as paid DLC for Dying Light. Also, the Epic Games Store is taking some extra precautions for its free games.
Join us every day for all the breaking gaming news stories, right here on Save State.
Why are we putting up with bad video game adaptations of the anime we love? That question has been stuck in my head, so think of this as my attempt to untangle some thoughts, vent a bit, and maybe come to an understanding. Because anime games are bad, and it’s really, really frustrating.
I think what rubs me the wrong way the most is the frequent reliance on arena fighters, and because of that, I guess what I’m saying is that the shounen genre deserves better–though other genres aren’t entirely free from shoddy adaptations. The arena fighter is, I think, a poisonous gameplay template when it comes to anime and manga adaptations. It emaciates its source material, reducing intricate stories, nuanced characters, fascinating worlds, and emotionally resonant themes into button-mashy pugilism.
I’ll say up front that, no, I’m not saying every game based on a shounen property is bad. Dragon Ball FighterZ stands out as a recent exception, but the rule it defies still exists: The vast majority of anime games are disappointing. And for some reason, we just seem to put up with it.
Every time I play one of these games I feel like I’m at school again, desperately trying to convince friends that there’s more to Naruto, Bleach, or Hunter x Hunter than screaming dudes, boasting about power levels, and sticking fingers up butts.
I’m not trying to incite a weebvolution here, but I found myself quite upset with Dragon Ball Kakarot recently and finally snapped. I was Goku, Krillin was my feelings being lifted into the air as I watched in horror, and Bandai Namco was Frieza laughing and shouting, “Pop goes the weasel” as it crushed Krillin/my feelings. And you know what happens next…
I know some people really enjoyed Kakarot, and to those people I want to say: I’m glad you did, I respect that, and I can even understand why. The nostalgia of watching iconic moments like Gohan exploding out of Raditz’s ship, the epic Vegeta Oozaru fight, or Goku’s first time turning Super Saiyajin is incredibly powerful. And to its credit, Kakarot is a nice-looking game. But there was something cynical to me about how moments that Dragon Ball fans have held dear for so long were being used as bait to move us from one repetitive gameplay sequence to the next.
Kakarot is a game that garnered a lot of interest because it touted semi-open-world environments and RPG-like quests, luring longtime fans into thinking this was the grand video game Dragon Ball Z adventure they’d been dreaming of. Seeing fans show so much love for the attention to detail that Arc System Works put into FighterZ gave me hope that, finally, developers and publishers would see the value in actually investing in making these games good. But in the end, I felt that the execution was just lip service yet again. To me, Kakarot’s world felt like an empty artifice; flying around it at high speed felt clumsy and unsatisfying, it was choked with garish item pickups, the quests were mostly forgettable busy work, and the core of the game and the Dragon Ball Z experience–combat–was the same tired model that we’ve been playing since the PlayStation 2 era. In Dragon Ball terms, it was Hercule–talking a big game but with little there to back up the bluster.
Recently we’ve had Dragon Ball Kakarot, My Hero Academia: One’s Justice, One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows, Jump Force, and probably some others I’ve pushed out of my mind. These games all basically play the same, and in the process, surgically remove everything that makes their source material special. Jump Force is particularly vicious in this regard, as it brings together characters from numerous beloved properties and dumps them in one tragically poor game. It honestly felt like an attack on my entire teenage years as a shounen fan.
Yes, the shows these games are based on certainly make it easy for developers to orient their games around the arena fighter mold. These franchises do often use bombastic battles to push crucial narrative beats forward, but the Shounen genre has also moved past violence for violence’s sake, and it feels like the people that make the games either willfully choose not to or aren’t given the opportunity to explore that.
Remember how this moment made you feel?
Take My Hero Academia for example. It’s currently one of the most popular shounen anime worldwide. The game, My Hero Academia: One’s Justice, predominantly involves characters circling each other in an arena and kicking the crap out of each other by spamming special moves that, in the show, would demolish city blocks or comprehensively defeat a target in just one hit.
Contrast that with the All Might Versus Nomu fight in the show, during which a beleaguered All Might, on borrowed time, pushes past his limits against an enemy engineered specifically to defeat him. Using what little energy he has left he delivers a brutal barrage of strikes at the expense of his degrading body. All the while, dozens of teenagers that have grown up idolizing him and wanting to be a hero like he is look on, unaware that his story is coming to a close and his battle to save them from invading villains would be one of his last.
When you see that final, destructive punch, coupled with a triumphant shout of “Plus Ultra,” it’s emotionally crippling. It makes your nerves tingle, your breath shorten, your heart race, your palms sweat, and if you’re like me, you might even tear up a bit. And there’s more: Deku’s first Detroit Smash to save Uraraka; Kota realizing Deku is a hero he can believe in; Todoroki coming to terms with who he is–My Hero doesn’t just have these moments, it is entirely about these moments. And yet, where are they in One’s Justice? Where is even a fraction of that feeling? It’s just not there.
I get that I’m zeroing in on something that is not easy to replicate, but anime games of late don’t feel like they’re even making an attempt. Of course, there are business realities driving these creative decisions too–games are expensive to make and, for these kinds of licensed products specifically, harvesting the low-hanging fruit is the most efficient way to feed the hungry masses.
That approach, however, diminishes the licenses and fails to play to the strengths of video games as a medium. Games are more than capable of marrying sophisticated storytelling, world-building, and rewarding gameplay mechanics. But between the half-assed retellings of the same stories over and over, the squandering of charismatic characters, and the devaluation of awe-inspiring worlds, I can’t be blamed for thinking this is more a case of won’t do than can’t do.
These adaptations may not be able to transmute the soul of the source material, but they don’t even try to jumpstart the heart of it. They take the essence of something great, and use it to give life to a chimera that is just sad to look at. There’s no equivalent exchange.
We all know what happens when there’s no equivalent exchange…
It’s a huge shame because, at one time, we had a small taste of what an anime adaptation can be if treated with some respect. For my money, one of the best anime-to-game adaptations of all time is Ubisoft’s Naruto: Rise of a Ninja. It came out at the height of Naruto’s worldwide popularity and, although it wasn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, Ubisoft Montreal paid attention to the spirit of what makes Naruto interesting and made strides in presenting that in video game form.
The most obvious example of this is its recreation of Konoha, the village where protagonist Naruto is from and where the early part of the series takes place. In the game, players could explore Konoha–and areas beyond–on foot, running through its streets, brushing shoulders with citizens. They could use ninja abilities to scale buildings and platform around structures to reach new areas. For me, being able to move around a world that I had grown to know intimately through manga and anime was an amazing feeling, and I remember really appreciating that Ubisoft had put in the effort to let me do that.
Similarly, the combat system had enough depth to keep me engaged and thinking about what I was doing. Since it functioned more like a fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter–albeit not as complex–there was a need to consider strategies more carefully, use timing to my advantage, and execute jutsus at opportune moments. It was a far cry from the basic spamming of most arena fighters of today. Like Dragon Ball Z Kakarot, it also allowed players to take on missions–but since the world felt populated and interactive, and there was gameplay variety in these missions, the act of working towards those hits of nostalgia felt smoother and I daresay enjoyable.
In the years after Ubisoft stopped making Naruto games, we were pummeled by a procession of arena fighter Naruto games. Developer CyberConnect2’s efforts in making these look the part can’t be understated or swept aside. The Ultimate Ninja Storm series has some of the most jaw-dropping visuals around and that did a lot of work in drawing fans to them. But a look behind the traced images revealed that the important details were crudely copied if not completely missing.
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Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot – First 16 Minutes Of Cutscenes And Gameplay
When playing Kakarot, all I could think of is the cycle of incremental updates these arena fighters undergo. All those years of Budokai titles and the Dragon Ball games we have today aren’t all that different from it. The almost identical Naruto and One Piece series of games. The extremely forgettable Bleach games. Another samey My Hero Academia title is on the way, and I expect another One Punch Man game will follow suit, barely changed from its predecessor. This led me to think about the next few years of Kakarot iterations that we’ll settle for until the next baby step in the evolutionary chain. Is that what we really want?
Again, it’s the squandered potential that hurts the most. Anime is a fertile ground for video game developers and publishers to plant seeds in. More so than movies, TV, and any other medium, video games are suited to leveraging what anime has to offer; they’re replete with possibilities. I can’t help but fantasize about what a One Piece game made by Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag team could be like. Or Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma team doing Hunter x Hunter. Imagine Platinum Games on JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure or Remedy Entertainment on Full Metal Alchemist. Insomniac Games Presents My Hero Academia.
Of course, I’m not saying those specific studios should be the ones to do it, I’m more speaking to what could be made if a studio had a willingness to come at an anime property with respect and the desire to do right by it. It doesn’t have to be a big name team, it just needs to be one willing to think outside the same old box. That’s what Rocksteady did for its landmark adaptation of the Dark Knight. By current standards, Rocksteady was an unknown developer before Arkham Asylum, and what it did in that game wasn’t particularly innovative or revolutionary on paper. Even if the ideas were familiar, it was smart about adapting them for the character and the universe, and did so in the smartest way, from a place of passion and reverence. The results speak for themselves.
So, when will anime get its Batman: Arkham Asylum? It deserves better than arena fighters. Video games can do more than arena fighters. And we shouldn’t just keep accepting arena fighters.
Weebvolution, rise up!
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After holding a livestream that revealed 2020’s Assassin’s Creed would take place during The Viking Age, Ubisoft announced the official name of the upcoming game is Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Ubisoft isn’t done teasing its new game yet, however, as another livestream is scheduled to premiere tomorrow, April 30 at 7:45 AM PT / 10:45 AM ET which will include a trailer that debuts at 8 AM PT / 11 AM ET. You can watch it below.
Until Ubisoft announces more information, we actually don’t know all that much about Valhalla. The Viking Age actually lasts several centuries, so the game could take place anywhere between 100 and 400 years prior to the original Assassin’s Creed.
This does probably mean that Valhalla will give us more opportunities to see the evolving philosophies of the Hidden Ones and the Order of Ancients, the respective precursors to the Assassin Brotherhood and Templar Order, but that hasn’t been confirmed. The origins of these two groups and the rising escalation of their conflict has been a major part of both Assassin’s Creed Origins and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
Valhalla is the first Assassin’s Creed game to release since 2018’s Odyssey, once again breaking from Ubisoft tradition of releasing new mainline games in the franchise on an annual basis. Instead, 2019 saw Odyssey further fleshed out with the multi-part Legacy of the First Blade and Fate of Atlantis DLCs–both of which were long enough to basically count as full-fledged games.
