Aside from monthly free games and online multiplayer access, PlayStation Plus members look forward to exclusive discounts on games in the PlayStation Store, and the latest PS Plus-exclusive sale is live now with steep discounts on PS4 titles. The Double Discounts sale is back with twice the savings on select games for those who have an active PS Plus subscription, and you have until June 10 to take advantage of the deals.
The latest Double Discounts sale isn’t huge, but there are still notable deals worth taking advantage of. Several Assassin’s Creed games are up for grabs, including Assassin’s Creed III Remastered for $16 and Assassin’s Creed Origins’ Gold Edition, which gets you the season pass and Deluxe Pack with in-game items, for just $20. The Assassin’s Creed Triple Pack is also discounted to $21.59 and combines Black Flag, Unity, and Syndicate in one package.
Return to Arkham City and experience two critically acclaimed Batman adventures in the Batman: Return to Arkham bundle, which includes remastered versions of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City with updated visuals and all previously released DLC. The Return to Arkham bundle is on sale for $10 as part of the sale. Meanwhile, you can get the latest game in the series, Arkham Knight: Premium Edition, for a discounted $10 as well.
Best PlayStation Plus deal this week:
PS Plus owners can also snag 2017’s phenomenal JRPG Persona 5 for just $8, a ridiculous price for a game with over 100 hours of content. You can’t beat this price, but if you’ve somehow held off on playing Persona 5 until now, consider grabbing Persona 5 Royal instead–the recently released definitive edition adds a ton of new content, new characters, and more. It’s also on sale for $49.94 at Amazon. But if you just want to try the game out and see if you like it, you’re not losing much for just $8.
We’ve indicated the PS Plus price, the regular discount, and the original list price in that order below. Make sure you’re logged into your PlayStation Plus account to view the full discount.
Walt Disney World Resort in Florida has set out plans to reopen the park beginning July 11.
After being closed for months following the lockdown period designed to combat the coronavirus pandemic, Walt Disney World has submitted plans to the Orange County Economic Recovery Task Force group for a multi-phase reopening of the park.
As revealed by Walt Disney World News Today, the plan begins on July 11, with the opening of Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom, and a few days later on July 15 Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Epcot will also reopen.
The plan outlines a limited capacity for the park, with visitors having to secure a reservation for the day they wish to attend in advance. The capacity of the park will then incrementally increase as the county furthers its reopening phases.
All major attractions within the park will use a virtual queuing system rather than actual lines, organised through the My Disney Experience app. Social distance will need to be maintained between visitors and face masks will be enforced. Temperature checks will also be mandatory to access the parks.
New signage has been developed to be placed around the park, explaining the new restrictions guests must adhere to. There are also new rules for the cast members who dress as Disney characters in the park, and well as increased cleaning and sanitation duties.
The plan does not guarantee a reopening of the park; they have been submitted to the Orange County Economic Recovery Task Force, and must be endorsed by the Orange County mayor before being submitted to Florida’s governor for final approval. Only then can Walt Disney World reopen.
The closure of Walt Disney World Resort was announced back in March, with the final day of regular business being March 15. It’s unprecedented for a Disney park to be closed for this length of time. This plan goes against the predictions of an analyst who suggested Disney will not open its parks until 2021.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.
This article is part of a new initiative on IGN where we spend a whole month exploring topics we find interesting in the world of video games (and hope you will, too!). May is Development Month, where we’ll tell untold stories from behind the scenes of our favorite games.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Story modes in fighting games have always been a tricky puzzle for developers to figure out. The origin of the fighting game genre has its roots in arcades, where the coin-operative design of games like Street Fighter 2, Killer Instinct, and Mortal Kombat prohibited any traditional storytelling. Instead, arcade games delivered their stories in small disjointed chunks via character-specific endings, as a reward for clearing a gauntlet of increasingly difficult battles. Even as fighting games started to move towards home consoles, these “Arcade Modes,” remained the standard for the genre when it came to anything story focused.
But then, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe changed everything.
Released in 2008 by Midway Games, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe was received rather lukewarmly from critics and fans alike for its gameplay prowess. These days it is remembered best as a T-Rated Mortal Kombat with neutered violence. However, it was also one of the first fighting games to introduce a four-hour-long, fully acted and motion captured story mode.
“We were really trying to just break the mold of fighting games with what’s typically expected of them,” said Ed Boon, co-creator of Mortal Kombat and creative director at Netherrealm Studios. “And also just because mixing Mortal Kombat and DC was such a dramatic, unexpected thing. We thought, okay, let’s just really shake things up.”
Ed Boon himself pitched the idea to The Central Groups at Midway Games, a team of talented artists, animators, and producers, but they weren’t quite sold on it.
“It involved a ton of work, a ton of new tech that wasn’t in place yet, in terms of streaming video while loading the next fight in, and a whole memory arrangement that we didn’t have,” said Boon. “And so it met with a decent amount of resistance, and not from the standpoint of, ‘oh, we don’t want to work,’ but it was more like, ‘is this going to be cool? Really? How? This is a single-player game, people are just going to play it once and then be done with it,’
It’s also worth mentioning that during this time, Midway was in the midst of a financial crisis that would eventually lead to its bankruptcy. The team pitched several alternatives to Boon’s ambitious plan,, but he was adamant that it would work. He wanted to make people “feel like they’re watching a movie and participating in it.”
The team showed Boon some motion graphics, “like you’d see in some fancy comic presentations” where music and dialogue played against still images to tell a story. “I remember experiencing some frustration with it because I was like, ‘how are you guys not excited about this?’ And eventually, I just kind of forced it through. So [it was] one of the few times that I feel like, I pitched an idea, people weren’t excited about it, and I was like, no, you guys aren’t going to kill this. This is going through, we’re going to do this, whether you’re on board or not.”
Despite the initial resistance, Boon said that it only took one completed scene of a transition into and out of a fight for it to click in everyone’s heads. It helped too that a number of people on the Midway team had backgrounds in film, animation, and scriptwriting, and got to utilize a skill set that they never thought they’d get to use. Of course, they also had the benefit of working with DC.
“[DC] insisted that we have two writers help us, so we didn’t make their characters diverge from what they would do. So Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray were kind of consultant writers. They would read our drafts and say, no, Superman would say this or Batman would never say it that way. [They] kind of kept us authentic to it,” said Boon.
After Midway went under, the Mortal Kombat team arose from the ashes and formed a new studio: Netherrealm. Taking everything they learned from Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, they would usher Mortal Kombat and its story into a new era with Mortal Kombat 9.
“The dream for us was being able to tell a proper Mortal Kombat story. MK vs. DC was MK meets DC. And so, it was Batman and Superman and Scorpion, and the novelty was the crossover of the two things. When MK9 came out, it was like, ‘oh, we’re going to tell a Mortal Kombat movie, we’re going to come as close as we can to making a Mortal Kombat movie. These stories that we’ve been telling through text, endings in the arcade, and other not as sophisticated forms of media, let’s finally tell it in the cinematic,’” said Boon.
Obviously, crafting a “Netherrealm quality” story mode isn’t easy, and it isn’t cheap either. While Boon wasn’t able to comment on actual numbers, Marty Stoltz, the cinematic director at Netherrealm, was able to provide some insight into the amount of workforce necessary to bring the mode to life.
“It’s a large team for sure. It’s almost like half a studio, I think, [in terms] of everybody that touches something in it,” said Stoltz. “From the beginning, we’re going to work with storyboard artists. We go to the next stage, which will be to board-o-matics. And then I’ll start working with the animation team at some point, right before we’re ready to shoot…and down the line, it’s going to be effects people, audio people, composers are brought in to do the music. And we have a team that goes and shoots just the Vcams itself. So we have handheld modern-looking camera that has to be shot. Pretty much all the cinemas are reshot with a comparable weighted Vcam that gets the style we want. So there’s another crew that comes in. So that’s a pretty massive endeavor.”
The effort seems to be paying off. The Netherrealm era of Mortal Kombat has been the most successful in series history, with Mortal Kombat X and Mortal Kombat 11 cracking the top 10 best selling games of their respective years, not to mention the successful launch of a new fighting game IP with the Injustice series. Of course, there is more that goes into these games than just their story modes, but Boon views story mode as a way to break out of the FGC bubble and reach out to the more casual fan that might not otherwise see much value in a fighting game.
“Fighting games by definition, need a certain amount of precision and practice and stuff that a number of casual players just don’t want to invest the time to learn, and let alone be good enough [at] to play a random person online,” said Boon. “And so, the online experience of just getting your ass kicked repeatedly was a turnoff for some people. So the focus was let’s do a strong single-player experience. And that was, I think it was… it’s at least 50% of the casual player appeal of our game, is this the standalone single-player experience.”
Netherrealm’s influence on the single-player fighting game landscape can be felt far and wide, whether it is through the direct attempts of rival games like Street Fighter 5, Tekken 7, and Marvel vs Capcom Infinite that have tried their own hand at cinematic storytelling, or through the indirect attempts of games attempting to do what Boon did 12 years ago: Break the mold. Not every fighting game developer has the financial backing or the workforce to replicate what Netherrealm has done with their story modes, but the success of games like Mortal Kombat and Injustice has to nonetheless highlight the importance of single-player modes in fighting games.
IGN’s latest installment of Watch From Home Theater focused on what is widely regarded as one of the best movies in Fox’s long-running X-Men movie universe – Days of Future Past. Writer/producer Simon Kinberg stopped by to reflect on the movie and how it tackled an iconic comic book storyline. He even revealed new, hidden details about the movie and how it connects to other chapters of the X-Men saga.
If you missed out on the livestream, you can still watch it in the video embed above. But if you just want the juiciest details revealed during the stream, we’ve got you covered. We’ve already focused on Kinberg’s surprise reveal that Mister Sinister was meant to have appeared in Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie. Now read on for other insider reveals, including the fate of a missing X-Man and whether or not we’ll ever see a Kinberg Cut of Dark Phoenix.
Given the frosty critical reception to 2019’s Dark Phoenix and the evidence the film’s plot was heavily changed during production, it’s certainly enough to wonder if we might eventually see a “Kinberg Cut” of that X-Men sequel. But according to Kinberg himself, that’s probably not going to happen. For one thing, it would require a lot of visual effects work on the scale of what’s reportedly being done with the Snyder Cut. And more importantly, he doesn’t feel that the theatrical cut substantially differs from his vision for the film.
“The movie they released was ultimately my vision for the film,” said Kinberg. “That vision did change over the span of making the movie. There are other scenes that we shot, just as there are a lot of other scenes in [Days of Future Past] that we shot and didn’t end up using. There were scenes we shot for that film and an ending that was quite different than the ending that was in the theatrical release. To release [a Kinberg Cut], it wouldn’t be just be like we splice those scenes back in, because those scenes were never completed because of visual effects and sound – all of the technical aspects that go into completing films of this scale. It would take a whole lot of work, but I appreciate the support.
Kinberg also told us that many of the changes to Dark Phoenix stemmed from Fox’s decision to condense the project from a duology into a single film. There’s no easy way to create a director’s cut more in line with his original story plans without going back and actually filming that canceled sequel.
Kinberg said, “With every movie, there are things you wish you did differently. On every movie there are things you thought were great and perfect, and then you watch them and didn’t think they were as strong as you imagined and you go a different way. Dark Phoenix was a hard movie because, in its initial concept when I wrote it, it was meant to be a two-part film. And then it suddenly became a one-part movie for reasons that weren’t of my doing. Having to create around that massive change was a challenge in itself. All these movies are uniquely challenging.”
Kinberg continued, “When you’re making a film as a writer, it’s never the same as when you conceived it. And when you make a film as a director, it’s never the same as what you shot. In that case it’s probably more significantly different. But ultimately, I was happy with the cut… that we shot and edited and completed.”
2011’s X-Men: First of Class introduced a mostly new cast of mutant heroes and villains anchored around that core trinity of Professor X, Magneto and Mystique. Many of those new characters were written out of Days of Future Past, as viewers learned mutants like Angel and Azazel were casualties of Trask’s Sentinel program. But one character’s fate has never been revealed. Whatever became of Caleb Landry Jones’ Banshee?
Kinberg revealed that Banshee originally had a brief cameo in the Days of Future Past screenplay, one that would have answered that very question. Long story short – Banshee met a similarly dark fate after First Class.
“We had an idea about Banshee that we were going to use in the script. It was a sequence to show the power of the Sentinel. In the past, Trask, instead of doing the Powerpoint presentation he does later for his buyers, he was actually going to show a video of mutants being chased in the forest and being killed by one of his Sentinels. Banshee was going to be that mutant. That sequence got cut, and I couldn’t find another place to effectively insert him into the film and not just feel like we were sticking him into the film, because he’s a great actor and a cool character. I didn’t want to just give him a cameo.”
Time Travel in Two Marvel Universes
Fox’s X-Men movies may not take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Days of Future Past and Avengers: Endgame share one important element in common. They’re both movies about heroes using time travel to try and undo a horrific global tragedy. But as Kinberg sees it, the two movies diverge in terms of how seriously they treat the rules of time travel.
He said, “What we did with the X-Men movies was try to create something that was a little more… I guess I would call it operatic or dramatic, even bordering on melodramatic, whereas the MCU movies are largely more fun and poppy and playful. Not that they don’t have their more serious moments, too, and obviously Endgame has some very serious moments. The way they handle time travel feels, to me, in line with the general tonality of their movies. Whereas this fit with the tone of what we do.”
Kinberg also revealed that no less an authority than Terminator 2 was a major influence on Days of Future Past. He relayed an anecdote about meeting director James Cameron during a 20th Century Fox panel and geeking out.
Kinberg said, “I knew James Cameron was going to be in this panel with me, so I had this handbook of Terminator 2 that I asked him to sign. I had brought it from Montreal so he could sign it. We’re backstage and I’m like, ‘I’m a huge fan of yours, and I’m doing this movie right now that’s a time travel movie – X-Men: Days of Future Past.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I know that movie.’ There are actually some similarities, and if you do some deep diving into the Internet… there are people who have conspiracy theories that some of the Days of Future Past comic inspired T2. Anyway, the whole point of it is, James Cameron writes in the book, ‘Dear Simon, Don’t f*** it up. Love, James.'”
With such a massive ensemble cast and two different time periods to explore, it goes without saying that Days of Future Past isn’t able to give every single X-Man the attention they deserve. Kinberg singled out Halle Berry’s Storm and Omar Sy’s Bishop as two characters he wishes he’d been able to explore in greater depth.
“I wish we had more time to spend in the future,” said Kinberg. “In that, I would say the character that really springs to mind is Storm. Storm is… one of my favorites and doesn’t really have the same prominence in the movies that she has in the comics. In the future part of this film, we got Halle, who’s an extraordinary actress, and for most of the movie she’s kind of standing guard. Toward the end she has some battle sequences, but there’s not a lot of emotional character work we did with Storm in this movie. In truth, I wrote more. I wouldn’t say it was great, but I wrote more. We shot it with her and Bishop, Omar Sy, but it was a scene that was just her sort of talking about being ready for war and what war meant to them. It was a more philosophical scene than a character or emotional scene. In a movie that was two-and-a-half hours long, it dropped out of the film… This was really the younger generation’s film, in terms of the body of the movie.”
Kinberg continued, “I think I could have written that better, in truth. What I ended up writing was more two people talking about war as a concept, because they’re strangers. It’s hard to have an intimate conversation sometimes with a stranger you have no history with, whereas these other characters have so much dense history with each other… It’s harder to do with two people who are essentially strangers, whether they have similar or even entirely opposing viewpoints about war. In the case of Bishop and Storm, they had very similar viewpoints, but it just felt like a scene between two people who don’t have much emotional history agreeing on something. Which is not always the most dramatic, no matter how good the actors are.”
Making JFK a Mutant
One of the more interesting examples of Days of Future Past rewriting US history comes when we learn Magneto is implicated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The truth, as it turns out, is that Magneto was trying to save Kennedy from the bullet, because Kennedy himself was a mutant. And while that reveal is basically a throwaway line in the movie, Kinberg told us there was plenty of thought and debate surrounding its inclusion.
“We didn’t spend much time on it in the movie, but we definitely spent a lot of time thinking about it and talking about it,” he said. “One thing we talked about when I came up with the line was – is it insensitive? One of the things we do with this film and X-Men: First Class especially is we create this sort of hidden, buried history. It’s not an alternate history, because it still fits within our historical timeline.”
Unfortunately, even Kinberg doesn’t know what JFK’s mutant power might have been. “With JFK, I don’t know what his mutant power would be, but one thing we did talk about was that family was extraordinarily powerful. They are somewhat mysterious. A lot of tragic things have happened to that family in mysterious ways, so we felt like in a universe that is a comic book universe, if you were ever going to take a family that’s a real-life, historical family, it does feel like the Kennedys are the Wayne family. We took it somewhat seriously, but we didn’t really get into the nitty gritty of if JFK could fly or read minds.”
Anna Paquin’s Rogue is another classic X-Man who doesn’t get much screen time in Days of Future Past. In fact, most of Paquin’s scenes were cut from the theatrical release, hence the extended “Rogue Cut” released on DVD. But Kinberg revealed Rogue is actually the source of a previously unknown Easter egg seen in the theatrical version.
“The pillars in [the X-Men’s hideout] are mirrored. We only realized very late that, in one of the mirrors we have, from the Rogue Cut, Rogue actually in the mirror instead of Kitty. It’s a really deep, deep cut unintentionally and completely accidentally. But we were like, ‘It’s taken us this long to notice it. We don’t think an audience is going to notice it.’ And no audience seems to have noticed it, or at least talked about it.”
Bringing Back the Original Cast
One IGN reader posed an intriguing question to Kinberg during the film’s emotional climax. If given the opportunity, how would Kinberg have continued the future timeline from Days of Future Past with the classic X-Men cast? While Kinberg said he had never considered the possibility before, he does feel it would be one way to tackle the Dark Phoenix Saga in a different and more comic book-accurate way from how it was handled in X-Men: The Last Stand.
He sad, “In the alternate universe he’s talking about, you could potentially – maybe not the next movie but the movie after that – because it would have been 10, 15 years after The Last Stand, you could do Dark Phoenix with Famke [Janssen]. You could do it with the Hellfire Club and with the screen time it necessitates, because it’s such a complex storyline. Probably you’d want a two-part movie. You’d want to bring the Hellfire Club in. You’d want it to be truly intergalactic. You’d want to bring in Lilandra. You’d want to really tell it that way, and I think you’d probably need at least one bridge movie between this and the beginning of that. The maturity of those actors and the history that goes back , which at that point would have been 25 years, could be interesting.”
With the X-Men franchise now in Disney’s hands and New Mutants most likely capping off a 20-year-old superhero universe, fans may be assuming Kinberg’s time with the X-men has come to an end. And while it remains to be seen if he’ll have any involvement with the rebooted X-Men line, Kinberg would certainly be interested in returning to the franchise in its new MCU setting.
Kinberg said, “Sure. I mean, I love the X-Men. They were my favorite comic growing up.. for a lot of reasons, wanting to fit in growing up and being a bit of an outcast as a young teen, X-Men really spoke to me. It’s something I’ve always loves. I’ve obviously dedicated a lot of my life, between X-Men movies and Logan and the Deadpool films. I’ve dedicated a whole lot of my life to it and could imagine doing it in a fresh new way. That would be exciting.”
When asked how he would choose to introduce mutants into the MCU, Kinberg said, “One of the things the MCU does so well, and I have such a profound respect as a fellow filmmaker and then as just a fan, is that they’re really loyal to the comics. They also are very unafraid f a more supernatural or science fiction tonality to their movies. They don’t feel like they need to ground them so much in a sort of physics-based reality. I think there’s something very great and liberating and spectacular about that. I think the X-Men could be very cool if you brought in science fiction elements and even the beyond Earth elements of the X-Men. That’s something as a fan I would love to see, because I don’t know that we’ve ever fully done that in a fully committed way in the Fox X-Men canon.”
Stay tuned to IGN to find out the next movie and celebrity guests in our Watch From Home Theater series.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
Sony is reportedly planning a PlayStation 5 digital event for “as early as next week,” kicking off other events that will take place over the coming weeks and months.
As reported by Bloomberg, people with “direct knowledge of the matter” have said the virtual event could take place on June 3, but also “cautioned that plans have been in flux and that the date may change.”
Sony is not expected to reveal everything about the PlayStation 5 at this first showing, and many more details will arrive with the aforementioned other events.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN who can’t wait and is so excited he just can’t hide it. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Fast & Furious Crossroads, the video game set in the same universe as the F&F movies, has been delayed from May to later this summer.
Fast & Furious Crossroads has changed course and is now headed for an August 7, 2020 release! Get ready to join the action. pic.twitter.com/8usLku2K4m
— Fast & Furious Crossroads (@FastFuriousCR) May 27, 2020
The game will now release on August 7, as revealed by the game’s official Twitter account.
When it does finally pull up on PC and consoles, Fast & Furious Crossroads will tell a new story in the F&F universe and feature Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Tyrese Gibson reprising their movie roles. They’re joined by Sonequa Martin-Green (Star Trek: Discovery, The Walking Dead) and Asia Kate Dillon (Billions, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum) as new characters written for the game.
The original May release date would have meant the game would release alongside the ninth Fast & Furious movie, but the film was delayed due to the impact of COVID-19 on the movie industry. At the time, developer Slightly Mad Studios and Codemasters had warned there could be a delay for the game. If you’re in need of some fast action ahead of August, you can always check out spin-off Hobbs and Shaw, released last year.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter.
This might be one of the best deals going in gaming right now, as far as money spent compared to the amount of content you get. Cities: Skylines is one of those games you can easily sink hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into playing. But that’s without any DLC. This deal, at its most basic level, gives you hundreds of hours of gaming goodness for $1. And it only goes up from there.
In addition to the DLC and the game, paying full price also unlocks 10% on your first month Humble Choice, formerly the Humble Monthly Bundle.
Disclosure: Humble Bundle is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of IGN. Humble Bundle and IGN operate completely independently, and no special consideration is given to Humble Bundle announcements or promotions for coverage.
A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pinball machine has been announced by Stern Pinball Inc. and it features a magnetic spinning pizza disc (!), three ramps, three flippers, comic-book style art, and the original cartoon theme song to tie it all together. Stern worked with Nickelodeon – recent custodians of the TMNT brand – to make this machine.
This is not the first TMNT pinball machine, as Data East put out Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that was kinda dull, if colorful (it also had a non-magnetic pizza-shaped spinning disc). This new game, designed by John Borg (Iron Man, Metallica, Tron) holds a lot more promise than the 1991 game. The TMNT (2020) art is by Zombie Yeti (Ghostbusters).
The Limited Edition Playfield with van toy, Krang toy, and ramp diverter.
There are three versions of Stern’s TMNT (this is the way, in 2020). The Premium and Limited Edition versions have a cool turtle van that spews out pinballs for multiball, a glider toy diverter that allows you to select a ramp to send the ball down, and a Krang toy that… bounces. Here’s the full feature matrix.
Recent Stern machines like Stern’s Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy have made use of licensed footage, but TMNT doesn’t have any old cartoon footage, instead using custom animations you can get a tiny glimpse at in the features video below.
The Limited Edition (LE), limited to 500 total made games, green (ooze?) armor, a unique art package with mirrored backglass, a custom autographed (by game creators) bottom arch and numbered plaque, art blades for the cabinet interior sides, an “upgraded audio system,” fancy anti-glare pinball glass, and a shaker motor (basically a rumble pack, but huge).
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is available now. The LE will set you back $9,099, while the Premium runs $7,699, and the Pro $6,099. You may have to wait a bit to find one of these on quarter play in public. Check out the tons of images below to help you make your decision.
Now that HBO Max is live, the battle of the streaming services is even more complicated. In fact, it’s not all that straightforward even if you’re only looking at the three streaming services with “HBO” in their names. What’s the difference between HBO Max, HBO Go, and HBO Now? Which one should you subscribe to? Read on, and we’ll sort it out.
HBO Go isn’t a standalone streaming service in itself. You get access to HBO Go automatically if you have a traditional HBO subscription through your cable company. Unlike the others, there’s no way to subscribe to HBO Go on its own. It offers subscribers access to HBO’s on-demand content, which includes a large catalog Hollywood movies, as well as HBO original series, comedy specials, and documentaries.
HBO Now
HBO Now is a standalone streaming service, and the content of HBO Now is identical to HBO Go. The only difference between the two services is that you can subscribe to HBO Now directly, without needing a traditional HBO subscription through your cable provider, making it perfect for cord-cutters. The regular price for HBO Now is $14.99 per month.
HBO Max
HBO Max is the newest entry in the streaming wars, and it also costs $14.99 per month. It combines select movies and TV shows from WarnerMedia’s many properties, plus HBO, plus new HBO Max originals. Put another way, it includes everything you get with HBO Go / HBO Now, plus a lot more.
That “a lot more” part is key. In addition to the standard HBO content, HBO Max offers shows like Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Rick and Morty, Adventure Time, and Batwoman. In terms of movies, it hosts classics like Casablanca and When Harry Met Sally, as well as the entire Studio Ghibli movie catalog, plus movies like The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and DC superhero films like Wonder Woman.
You should get HBO Max – here’s how to sign up. It includes everything from HBO Now and HBO Go, plus a bunch of additional movies and TV shows. HBO Max costs the same price as the other two, but has a significantly larger library of content. That’s really all you need to know.
The only exception is if you currently subscribe to HBO through your cable service and don’t want to lose access to your HBO channels. But even in that case, you may want to consider canceling your current HBO subscription and signing up for HBO Max instead.
What If You Already Have HBO?
If you already have an HBO or HBO Now subscription, there’s a good chance you already have access to HBO Max. If you don’t, you can read the HBO Max FAQ for details about your specific situation. If all else fails, you can always cancel your current subscription and sign up for HBO Max separately, but you shouldn’t need to, since you’ll theoretically be able to log in with your existing cable service provider or HBO/Now credentials.
