Netflix has announced that it’s temporarily shutting down production for its original movies and shows to reduce the spread of coronavirus.
All of the streaming giant’s scripted television and film projects in the United States and Canada will go on hiatus for two weeks. Included in these productions is Stranger Things, which was in the midst of filming its fourth season.
The Warner Bros. Television Group released a statement regarding the situation:
“With the rapidly changing events related to COVID-19, and out of an abundance of caution, Warner Bros. Television Group is halting production on some of our 70-plus series and pilots currently filming or about to begin. There have been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 on any of our productions, but the health and safety of our employees, casts and crews remains our top priority. During this time, we will continue to follow the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control as well as local officials and public health professionals in each city where our productions are based.”
AMC has also stopped production on Fear the Walking Dead Season 6, until at least the week of April 13, while pre-production on Season 11 of The Walking Dead has also been delayed for a month, although the writers’ room is still active and working on scripts.
Keep it locked into IGN for all the latest news from the entertainment world regarding COVID-19.
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Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
In an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus, AMC Theaters announced that it’s reducing capacity in each of its auditoriums by at least 50%, from Saturday, March 14 through April 30.
AMC will cap ticket sales for each showtime in each of its theatre’s auditoriums to half of the normal capacity. In auditoriums with more than 500 seats, AMC will further cap ticket sales to a maximum of 250.
Per Deadline, AMC is the first theater chain to address the COVID-19 pandemic and, as the largest theater chain in the country, is also actively complying with “all local authorities’ directives on social gathering and is further reducing the availability of tickets to comply with any current or future federal, state or local governmental order.”
Each theaters’ health and safety cleaning protocols have also been enhanced “to ensure that at least once per hour within an AMC building, the theatre team is cleaning high touch point areas, including kiosks, counter tops, restroom areas, glass, handrails and doorknobs.”
Keep it locked into IGN for all the latest news from the entertainment world regarding COVID-19.
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Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
Universal Pictures halted production on Jurassic World: Dominion on Friday due to the ongoing novel coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19).
Jurassic World: Dominion, the third entry in the new trilogy that continues the saga of 1993’s Jurassic Park, had been filming in London since February.
The movie — directed and co-written by Colin Trevorrow — unites the casts of the Jurassic World and Jurassic Park films, including Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Omar Sy, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum.
Universal also stopped production on two other live-action films, the Ice Cube sports film Flint Strong and the Billy Eichner film formerly known as Bros.
Universal and Blumhouse Productions’ action-thriller-satire The Hunt has been the subject of its fair share of controversy dating back to last summer. That’s when, in the wake of the tragic mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, the film’s “liberals hunt conservatives” premise led the studio to bump its release date by some six months. The film was subsequently the target of much debate in the media, with even President Trump apparently getting in on the act (although he never specifically referred to the film by name in his comments).
But now that the film is out, it is clear that The Hunt is satirizing the very us vs. them mindset that helped to ignite the controversy over it in the first place. The Hunt’s Red State conservatives and Blue State liberals are mostly extreme caricatures, a trollbot’s idea of what our political divide looks like. Produced by Jason Blum, directed by Craig Zobel, and written by Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, The Hunt holds a ghastly mirror up to us and asks, what if?
Of course, coming as it does in part from Lindelof — who is riding high these days on the recent success of his HBO Watchmen series — it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that there’s more to this hunt than at first meets the eye. We spoke to Lindelof about the surprises laced in the film’s script, what he and the team were hoping to say with The Hunt, and much more.
The Janet Leigh Trick, a.k.a. Who’s Our Main Character Anyway?
The Hunt starts off with a fun bit of cinematic legerdemain where we just don’t know who our main character is for the first 20 minutes of the film or so. As the hunted (regular Joe conservatives) awaken in the secluded zone that the hunters (rich, elite liberals) have set up, we jump from character to character, trying to latch on to somebody we can follow as our identifying character in this insane situation… only to have each potential player shot or blown up or otherwise dispatched.
“It’s now familiar territory to do what they did in Psycho — the Janet Lee, trick as it were, where the hero that you think you are watching gets killed in fairly short order,” says Lindelof, referring to the presumed main character and biggest star of the Alfred Hitchcock classic who surprised audiences at the time by being killed off halfway through the movie. “[Now] we’re now post-Scream, which satirized that very idea. And so it felt like the next version of that twist or storytelling technique was to just do it again.
“Then it was like, ‘Well, O.K., so once Emma [Roberts’ character] dies, well, she’s dead. But now Justin Hartley has got to be the star of this movie. He wouldn’t just come down and do one day [of filming]. … He just exploded. There’s Ike Barinholtz, he looks familiar. I love that guy. He was great in Neighbors. Like, it’s going to be him [who will be our main character]!’ And then he buys it in the gas station. And so I think that the intention was to create a feeling in the audience, the same emotional experience that those hunted had, which is anybody can go at any time. And I’m not going to basically get too attached to any of these people. Because this is a movie where the hero can die.”
Lindelof says that when the filmmakers were trying to find the “sweet spot” of satire, they came to realize they needed to go over the top for this kind of material. Getting too close to the world that we live in was always a danger, and so depicting a group of (mostly) stereotypes — characters who were also caricatures — became essential. But not all of the characters would fall into that category, and that’s where the player who eventually does wind up being our main character comes in.
“The real key is that you have to find a center, if you’re going to go over the top, and for us the answer was Crystal,” says Lindelof, referring to the character played by Betty Gilpin (GLOW), a kickass ex-military who starts out as one of the hunted but turns the tables on her captors. “Betty Gilpin is just such an amazing actor because she’s taking what’s happening to her very seriously. But at the same time, she has kind of a cynical sense of humor about it.
“She’s incredibly fun to watch, but she’s almost got this attitude of like, ‘I do not want to be in this movie, but now that you’ve put me in the movie, I guess I’m just going to have to kill everybody.’ And so I think that she created that balance between the absurdity of a movie that’s first kill is by a high-heeled shoe and then ends with a 20-minute-long fight sequence in a Nancy Meyer kitchen. But I think that Betty found a way to prevent the movie from floating off into the highest levels of Absurd Town.”
The interesting thing about the Crystal character is that we eventually find out that she apparently was mistakenly chosen for the hunt; she happens to share the name of someone with more extreme political views. And in the end, she is triumphant against those who hunted her, including Hilary Swank’s character, an ex-highflying corporate type who is the ringleader of the hunters. But Crystal is the one character in The Hunt whose political leanings we never really get a sense of.
“It’s possible that she is not a political character,” explains Lindelof. “She clearly identifies as someone who doesn’t want to talk about politics. And that is indicative of a vast number of people who live in this country. We live in a bubble. We consume the media that we consume. And for some of us on both sides, by the way, the political situation in the country is almost all we talk about. But for many, many others, they just don’t care. They care more about feeding their families or keeping their jobs or having to renew their license at the DMV. And the idea of what’s happening in Washington is just not of their concern. And I think that Crystal is a character that speaks for those people, who’s like, ‘Why do I have to pick a team? I’m on team me.’”
Sort of working as the flipside of the Crystal character is Swank’s Athena. We eventually learn that she didn’t start off as the crazed leader of a human hunting party, but rather saw her life and career ruined by a dumb, joking text message thread with her friends that went public. Whereas Crystal is apparently apolitical, Athena it seems is forced to take sides (very, very extreme sides, yes) due to the pressures of the sharply divided world around her. In so doing, she enters into a downward spiral and becomes the very thing people accused her of being when that text message thread went viral in the first place.
“The question that we were asking is, what happens to someone who gets accused of being a monster,” says Lindelof. “And not just accused of it but it’s believed about them. At a certain point do they just throw up their arms and say, ‘O.K., you want me to be a monster, then that is what I’ll be. If you believe that about me anyway, I might as well just do it.’ And does that speak to [the fact] that there was always a part of them that was already a monster? I think that’s the scariest part of humanity. We have this idea of people are born evil or they’re not born evil. When I find that, moving through life, people make good choices and they make bad choices. But the innate nature of their character is not something that’s predetermined.”
But the problem, according to Lindelof, is that people go on the defensive when they are accused of things, and it becomes very hard to be your best self in that moment.
“In Athena’s case, that becomes a justification for some very, very bad choices,” he says.
Considering the real MLB has recently delayed its 2020 season, MLB The Show 20 literally is the closest you’ll get to real pro baseball for a while. So it’s a good thing it’s great, as usual! That said, this is an annual franchise, and this year’s version isn’t as much of an improvement over last year’s impressive MLB The Show 19 as we’ve seen in big years in the past. But it finally adds some much-desired variety in ways to progress through the excellent Diamond Dynasty card collection mode, expanded customization for its addictive Franchise mode, and further gameplay tweaks to improve what was already one of the best, most dynamic baseball simulations we’ve seen to date.
One of the best gameplay tweaks this year is that perfect contact and perfect timing on batter hits leads to hard-earned ‘Perfect-Perfect’ hits, which let batters get more involved by rewarding you with higher-quality content that will lead to more home runs, line drives, or hot-shot grounders (a higher BABIP, basically). That makes the Plate Coverage Indicator a potentially deadly weapon during at-bats, because you can use your own skill in combination with your batter’s skill to make those precision home runs. Just as in MLB The Show 19, you can customize your PCI in any way you’d like, making it truly your own for the best results.
Where last year’s outfielding improvements made playing the outfield way more dynamic and enjoyable with features like a ball path indicator for top-ranked outfielders, the simulation still needed work, especially when the CPU was in control. MLB The Show 20 takes another necessary step forward here: Outfielders have been dialed in more, and now react more accurately than ever. Your skilled fielders will get a good first-step jump to catch a fly ball, while poor defenders risk fumbling it at the critical moment when closing in on a high-risk catch attempt. This adds to the realism of MLB The Show 20, and it also reinforces the need to keep your hits away from the opposite team’s best field defense.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Your%20skilled%20fielders%20will%20get%20a%20good%20first-step%20jump%20to%20catch%20a%20fly%20ball.”]Graphics and animations look just a bit sharper this year, but it’s definitely beginning to feel like Sony San Diego is pushing the upper limit of what the PS4 and even the PS4 Pro are capable of. Even on “Faster” mode on PS4 Pro, which claims a ‘stable’ 1080p image, you may experience infrequent frame drops in moments when a lot of players are on the screen at once. Whenever I watched a team take their victory lap in the rain, for instance, my PS4 Pro began to sound like a jet engine on a runway. With options for native output to 4K HDR, and some of the most detail ever put into individual scans of real-world player likenesses, equipment, and animations, MLB The Show 20 feels like it’s just begging to be played on a PlayStation 5.
Franchise mode, where you run your own team just the way you want, is still one of the highlights of this series, so it’s disappointing so little has changed this year. As always, you can micromanage how your team operates, or you can simply let the computer do it all for you while you focus on playing baseball. However, there’s at least one improvement: For the first time, MLB The Show 20 carries over the team customization system from Diamond Dynasty for its Franchise mode, which is a great idea. That said, it’s unfortunate that it isn’t necessarily as well-implemented as it could be. For one, it’s still hard to make a team logo that looks great in its overly complex and unintuitive logo maker tool, but worse, you still have to adopt a real team’s home stadium as your own instead of being able to create your own. Even your season goals are tied to a template based on a real team. As a result, my custom team never felt fully my own.
At this point, many longtime fans have been yearning for the ability to craft their own stadiums for Franchise mode, and rightfully so. With the amount of depth given to the character creator, and even the team management simulation itself, it seems odd that Franchise mode still doesn’t give you the ability to design a personalized stadium that shows off your team’s true colors.
This can be forgiven though, because something else that has been sorely missing from past iterations of MLB The Show is finally here: Minor League rosters are in full effect now, carrying in what must be hundreds of real players and their likenesses from double-A and triple-A teams into circulation. It’s now far less common to run into made-up players on the field. This is fantastic news for hardcore MLB fans who want that pure fantasy baseball experience and who pay attention to real MiLB players that may actually reach MLB positions at some point in the coming seasons.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=It%E2%80%99s%20now%20far%20less%20common%20to%20run%20into%20made-up%20players%20on%20the%20field.”]It sucks that there’s no such thing as a multiplayer Franchise mode, and the highly anticipated Custom Leagues mode doesn’t deliver anywhere near the same amount of depth or nuance. It’s true that this mode introduces a way for you and your friends to join a league and compete online as your favorite teams, which is good. You can still select the number of teams per league, select which teams you and your friends play as, and you can even change a few of the house rules. The problem is the options for customization and micromanagement here are ironically much less fleshed-out than in other established modes, such as the Franchise mode that it’ll be heavily compared against. In other words, if you value customization you can safely ignore this one and challenge your friends in Diamond Dynasty mode instead.
Sadly, there isn’t much to talk about regarding MLB The Show 20’s version of Road to the Show because so little is different. You can bring last year’s save file on through, but you probably won’t find that enough’s changed to justify going through all of it again. There are a few changes to the user interface, including the addition of markers that indicate when your plays on the field impact your relationships with teammates, but it’s still fundamentally the same exact game as it was last year. One cool new thing about MLB The Show 20 is the ability to pick an ‘affinity’ team when you first log in, which gives you a unique reward progression track as you play and nearly ensures that you’ll be drafted into that team at the beginning of your Road to the Show career path.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Many%20of%20the%20rewards%20you%20earn%20can%20be%20taken%20with%20you%20to%20other%20modes.”]Over in Diamond Dynasty mode, it’s great that many of the rewards you earn, such as experience points and equipment, can also be taken with you to other modes. This isn’t anything new, but now there are more ways to play and earn said rewards by doing virtually anything in MLB The Show 20 that constitutes regular gameplay. Moments, Conquests, and Events are back, and it’s enjoyable that progression in each of those modes still contributes to your Live Series Collections, Team Affinity, and XP Reward Path.
There’s also an entirely new mode within Diamond Dynasty:. tThe brand-new Showdown mode, which is instantly one of the best parts of MLB The Show 20, especially because you don’t need to progress into the regular Diamond Dynasty mode to get the most out of it. Here’s how it works: as you take on a brand-new squad outside of your regular Diamond Dynasty rotation, you get to complete a series of bite-sized challenges. For example, ‘Take the lead in the 9th inning’ or ‘Hit a home run before making X amount of outs’. Likewise, the ‘boss battles’ against legendary MLB pitchers, like Al Leiter, and even ‘mini-boss’ encounters with up-and-comers like Walker Buehler, are challenging and tense.
Finally, March to October, which sorely needed some love before, now has a new Momentum system to heat things up if you’re winning a lot, which affects your win rate between key moments. Likewise, losing matches can kill your momentum or even send you on a losing streak. Incredibly sharp casting from Matt Vasgersian and the like pinpoint key moments in those turnaround games, making it enthralling to turn a losing streak into a winning streak and regain positive momentum once more. This system definitely adds a new layer of emotional investment to March to October mode, compelling you to make it all the way to the postseason. Also new to MLB The Show 20, you can now call-up new and trade your players throughout the season, and it’s particularly cool that you can focus on improving the performance of one player by successfully completing a special challenge match.
Cooler Master isn’t the first company that comes to mind when I think about gaming headsets. Though the PC gaming component maker has been in the audio game for some time, it has had trouble differentiating itself from more popular manufacturers like Astro, Turtle Beach, and HyperX. CM’s newest headset, the MH670, gets a lot of things right, particularly in the design of physical headwear – but the sound and other features fall a little short of the company’s more popular competitors. Still, the MH670 gets more right than it does wrong, and delivers a solid budget-conscious alternative for players who specifically want a wireless headset with surround sound.
Design and Features
The MH670 looks like a quality headset, with a clean design that avoids “gamer” cliche. The simple black plastic shell with the hexagonal company logo on the cans looks sleek and interesting without making the kind of visual “statement” many companies feel compelled to make. The top band has a stainless steel core, so the headset is durable and flexible. The plastic components, including the rotating mounts for the ear cups, feel sturdy and well-made as well.
The top band is quite wide, so even players with a big head like myself will find that the cups fall into place with pushing against the sides of your head. I went back and forth on whether or not that’s a good thing – I like a little swaddling from my headphones, but would prefer to feel no pressure, rather than too much. The fit is comfortable, though, with wide ear cups that don’t clamp or crimp your ears. The “high-density” foam padding provides a lot of give, so the cups feel soft against your ears and head.
While the look and feel are on point, the actual sound production on the MH670 leaves something to be desired. Despite its 50mm drivers and plenty of room in the cup for the sound to breathe, the tone feels somewhat muted across the board. When listening to songs like “Lava” by Still Woozy, the high tones come in clear, but lack the bright texture you can get in other headsets. With mid- and bass-levels, the sound simply feels a bit muted. You can course-correct the mids a little bit using the virtual mixer in Portal, Cooler Master’s configuration software, but better mixing can’t make the bass boom or prevent a certain amount muddling among instrumental channels.
As you might expect, everything sounds just a bit better with the surround sound turned on, whether or not you need to simulate audio position. The sound, regardless of whether you’re watching a movie, playing a game, or listening to music, comes through a little louder and a little clearer. That said, it isn’t necessarily so pronounced that you’ll quickly notice the difference in stereo recordings.
The button layouts on the underside of the cups can be a little wonky. On the left side, from top to bottom, you have a volume dial, mic mute, 3.5mm audio jack, and a port for the detachable microphone, which comes with a rubber cover. The 3.5mm jack has a custom twist-lock system, which is great because it means you’ll never rip out the headset, but a pain if you find yourself needing to swap out a cable for any reason.
On the right, from back to front, you have the 7.1 surround sound toggle, microUSB port for charging, an indicator light, and finally power. Placing the power button in the most awkward spot on the headset feels like a design faux pas, as it makes the first and last thing you do on the headset unpleasant. Likewise, while it isn’t hard to tell whether or not the surround sound is on when bullets are whizzing by or there are footsteps coming up behind you, it would be nice if there was a light or other indicator on the button to let you know if it’s on or off, as it can be difficult to tell before you get into a game.
The MH670 connects wirelessly to PC, PS4, and Xbox One using a 2.4GHz USB wireless dongle. I did not find it introduced any kind of audio lag after dozens of hours of testing. If you prefer a wired connection, though, it comes with the aforementioned locking 3.5mm audio cable. The battery life is also strong: According to Cooler Master, it gets 25 hours on a single charge. I found I needed to recharge the headset after about 10 days of regular, daily use.
Software
The MH670 has some software-based customization options, which you can adjust by downloading Cooler Master’s configuration app, Portal. It’s worth noting that Cooler Master has multiple versions of Portal that are required for different devices, so it is slightly more complicated to download than the average configuration app.
The software supplies two types of customization – a basic sound mixer to adjust levels based on what you’re listening to, and a surround-sound customization feature that lets you adjust the position and distance of the virtual speakers.
The sound mixing allows you to adjust five individual frequencies, or just play with the bass and treble. Chances are if you actively want sound mixing in your headphones, you will want something more powerful than this, but it is nice to have the option to recalibrate the sound for when you need to hear something for gameplay purposes, versus when you want the sound to wash over you. You can also adjust the volume of both the headset and, more importantly, the microphone.
Adjusting the speakers, particularly the “distance,” offers a tradeoff. When you push the speakers closer, the volume goes higher, but the sound comes through less clear. If you push the speakers too far, however, the sound also loses texture. I never felt compelled to change speaker positions because I was generally happy with the sound “coverage” and positional audio but, again, it is nice to have the option.
Gaming
I noticed the MH670’s audio shortcoming significantly less when playing games. Most game audio came through nice and clear, particularly dialogue and gameplay-relevant sound cues like reloading noises or switching triggering.
The most impressive aspect of this headset is far and away the surround sound. For simulated surround sound on a wireless headset, the positional audio was surprisingly accurate. I could track player movements based on footsteps in shooters like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and hear spooky murmurs coming out the walls in Control.
Overall, though, the soundscape is far from perfect. Again, music simply doesn’t come in with the nuanced texture that you’ll get from a high-end headset. Certain sounds, including explosions and other booming effects, tend to come in somewhat muted.
Purchasing Guide
The Cooler Master MH670 is available for $119.99 on Amazon.
Much of the nation is in a transitional period, weather-wise, as we grow ever closer to the official coming of spring. Thankfully the IGN Store carries both pullover sweatshirts and t-shirts, so you can prepare for the warmer weather put remain protected should the temperatures turn cooler again. On top of that, we just added a bunch of awesome new Metroid designs to our already great selection of Nintendo graphics, so you’re bound to find something awesome to wear.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and the complete 9-film Skywalker Saga are both now available for purchase on digital platforms, and they arrive four days early.
While it hasn’t been officially announced, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and The Skywalker Saga collection can now be purchased on such digital platforms as FandangoNOW, Vudu, and iTunes.
In “Broken Pieces”, we learn the backstory and origins of the Zhat Vash, the secret Romulan cabal, and what motivated them to try to stop the “destroyers”. We learn Narissa’s true connections to Oh and Rahmda.
Meanwhile, Soji’s presence throws Rios off while Agnes’ secrets are revealed. Raffi deciphers a Romulan drawing which leads her to the truth about the conclave of eight. On the Borg Artifact cube, Narissa aims to get rid of the Borg and directs her guards to capture Elnor, who gets help from a new friend.
We also got another handful of Star Trek Easter eggs and references in this episode, calling back to The Next Generation and Star Trek Voyager.
Disclosure: ViacomCBS is GameSpot’s parent company.
