A new report reveals just how incredibly popular and lucrative Epic’s free-to-play battle royale game Fortnite is on mobile, and specifically Apple’s iOS. A report from SensorTower states the game has now made $300 million from its microtransactions on iOS since it launched 200 days ago on March 15. That’s a incredible achievement, but it’s not the fastest to $300 million on iOS. Niantic’s Pokemon Go holds that record, bringing in $300 million after just 113 days on Apple’s platform, according to SensorTower.
Perhaps a better comparison for Fortnite is the iOS edition of rival PUBG. It started selling extra content on April 15, around 173 days ago, and has made around $47 million since then.
The SensorTower report also compares Fortnite’s first 200 days to other popular games, and Epic’s battle royale game dominates. As you can see in the chart here, Fortnite grossed many millions more than games like Clash Royale, Honor of Kings, and Knives Out over their first 200 days.
Of Fortnite’s $300 million in revenue on iOS, about 65 percent of the spending came from the United States. Worldwide, the game is averaging about $1.5 million revenue per day, according to the report.
The report also shines a light on how important the launch of a new Season within Fortnite is for the game’s commercial success. The iOS version pulled in about $20 million in the past week since Season 6 started September 27, due in part to the launch of the new Battle Pass that includes various extras.
Elsewhere, the SensorTower report states that Fortnite’s Android version has brought in $60 million since it arrived on August 9. Combined with the iOS edition’s $300 million $360 million for iOS and Android.
Fortnite is also available on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch, so the game’s total microtransaction revenue is surely significantly higher with all platforms accounted for.
While the Season 9 premiere of The Walking Dead might have seemed quieter and less action-packed than many of the show’s recent episodes–thanks to the end of the pesky war with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan)–there was still plenty to see. The new episode caught viewers up on what’s been happening since the end of the show’s “All Out War” story and set the stage for a major Maggie (Lauren Cohan) arc, leading up to her departure from the show.
In the final moments of the episode, Maggie lets Rick (Andrew Lincoln) know that she’s ready for him to step aside and let her lead. Following that, she supervises the execution of Gregory (Xander Berkeley), who tried to have her assassinated. The moment shows the woman Maggie has grown into since being introduced in Season 2 of The Walking Dead.
And during a visit to the show’s Atlanta set, new showrunner Angela Kang explained to GameSpot and a small group of other outlets that it would also inform her final story on the show–for now.
“We had always planned to have this great story with Maggie this season, and I think we promised something,” she says. “You know, we wanted to pay off that promise. So we definitely have a very strong Maggie arc. Lauren, I think, has always been such a great actress for us, has done some spectacular work this season. As you’ve seen in the episodes but also in the episodes that are upcoming, there’s some stuff that just blew me away. And I’m just a pure fan.”
Still, while Maggie may be the focus of what is unfolding at Hilltop, the coming events will also be used to build up those around her to fill the void, once the episodes featuring Cohan have come to an end. “It also opens up some interesting opportunities for other characters when that character is gone for reasons that will be explained in the story,” she explained. “That’s part of the story going forward, what’s happening at Hilltop? And how do people deal with Maggie not being there?”
Cohan has said she’d like to be able to return to the show at some point, and Kang is confident that could happen. “I’ll say first of all that we still plan to tell more story with Maggie,” she said. “Lauren wants to, it just it will be a little subject to her schedule. But hopefully, we have her back next season.”
While there is no clear picture or when or if Cohan will be able to return to The Walking Dead, her exit date from the series has not been revealed. While she’s shot her final scenes for now, AMC has not announced when she or Lincoln’s final episodes will air.
It looks like some kind of announcement about the Call of Juarez franchise is on tap. The Call of Juarez Facebook page recently updated for the first time in more than five years with new images that could point to an upcoming announcement.
The game’s Facebook page added a banner of Call of Juarez: Gunslinger main character Silas Greaves with the tagline “Legends never die.” Another image shows Greaves standing over a canyon with the quote, “I haven’t been here in many years. Name’s Silas Greaves.”
Image credit: Call of Juarez on Facebook
That is a direct quote from the opening cinematic of 2013’s Gunslinger, a digital only game that introduced players to the gunslinger himself, Greaves. This quote, along with the art that shows Gunslinger’s stylised approach, seems to suggest the announcement could be about a Gunslinger sequel or remaster. No official announcements have been made yet, however.
The Call of Juarez franchise has spanned four games so far. The entries have included Call of Juarez (2006), Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (2009), Call of Juarez: The Cartel (2011), and the previously mentioned Gunslinger (2013), all of which have been developed by Polish studio Techland and published by Ubisoft.
In April this year, Techland bought back the rights to Call of Juarez from Ubisoft. At the time, Techland did not say anything about its future plans, but buying the rights was a strong suggestion that the studio wanted to do more with the franchise.
With the exception of The Cartel, which was set in the modern day, the three other Call of Juarez games existed in the Western genre and took place in the 1800s. Keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest on whatever Techland might be teasing.
The next big Western is Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2, which launches on October 26 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is expected to be one of the year’s biggest games, with some projecting it to sell more than 15 million copies.
New York Comic-Con has almost come to an end, but Sunday offered up a few more panels for TV series, movies, and more. The YouTube Premium series Cobra Kai, held a panel to discuss what’s coming down the line for Season 2 of the series.
On the stage, stars Ralph Macchio and William Zabka, and screenwriters Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg discussed the first season of the series, while in the midst of shooting Season 2. They also revealed that there is a whole new–yet familiar set–coming to Season 2. A clip was shown at the event, and Heald provided setup for it. In it, the younger members of the cast give a tour of the Miyagi Dojo, a major set piece for the second season. Viewers saw Miyagi’s garden at the end of Season 1, and now Mr. Miyagi’s old home has been turned into a dojo. Obviously, this set piece will be the place where LaRusso trains his new students. It is completely empty inside, but the backyard is a place of serenity and peace, featuring trees, green grass, and a pond with water feature.
We learned that the next season Cobra Kai will debut sometime in the summer of 2019, and it will consist–like Season 1–of 10 episodes. However, the runtime for those episodes may be a bit longer, as Hurwitz explained the show “will be digging deeper on everybody.” Season 2 will expand a bit more on the younger generation we saw in the first season, but it will continue to have the same balance between the kids, Johnny, and Daniel.
Going into this new season, the writing team had a good idea of where they wanted to take the story. “We have multiple seasons planned out,” explained Heald, who also stated they had so much planned for different character arcs for Season 1 that they simply couldn’t pack it in. However, this show isn’t just trying to rekindle the love of Karate Kid with those who grew up with it. “It was important that a newer generation falls in love with this the same way we did,” Hurwitz stated.
There were plenty of questions for the cast and creators, particularly revolving around whether or not Daniel and Johnny will be fighting in Season 2. There wasn’t a direct answer, but it did seem like both men would be involved in fight sequences in the next season, but it wasn’t clear if it will be against each other.
Find out more about Season 2 of Cobra Kai when it hits YouTube Premium next spring.
Bryan Singer is currently negotiating a big payday to helm Millennium Films’ remake of Red Sonja.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Singer, whose previous outings include X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse, is reportedly seeking $10 million to direct the Conan spin-off.
His appointment as director is a subject of some controversy as, late last year, Singer was accused of sexual misconduct, leading him to be removed as executive producer on Legion.
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Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 comes out October 12, and we already know the long-rumored Battle Royale mode Blackout is real and a lot of fun. On top of the new Blackout mode, Zombie mode returns to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. If you’ve ever dreamed of slaughtering zombies in gladiatorial combat or on the Titanic, Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII zombies has you covered.
It’s been scientifically proven that X-Men: The Animated Series is the best treatment The Uncanny X-Men have been given outside of comics, so it’s only fitting that their fluorescent 1990s appearances be immortalized as beautiful collectible figurines by Japanese company Kotobukiya.
We were more excited than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs to get up close and personal with these at New York Comic-Con this week. It was a collectible Jubilee! Literally, figuratively, and figurally.
While the awesome Sentinel diorama is sadly only for display, these 1:10th scale figures are readily available as two-packs. Hopefully, Kotobukiya keeps this series going, we’d love an Archangel, Mr. Sinister, Apocalypse, or heck, even Morph.
Those who know of What We Do in the Shadows probably think of the 2014 cult hit mockumentary about a brood of oddball vampires wrestling with typical roommate drama like who should do the dishes and how to gobble down human blood without making a mess in the living room. Ten years before that, it was a short film that Jemaine Clement claims was made for about $200.
Before that, as Clement and his co-creator Taika Waititi revealed today at New York Comic Con 2018, the idea was born as a stand up comedy routine in which one of them told bad vampire jokes (“I just flew in from Transylvania and boy are my arms tired!”) and the other heckled him, also as a vampire, until they recognized one another as centuries-long rivals. Now, it’s FX’s latest comedy show, and based on the pilot episode–which screened exclusively during NYCC on Sunday–What We Do in the Shadows is perfect for fans.
(Disclaimer: The pilot episode screened at NYCC was reportedly unfinished, and this is not a review of the final program.)
The new What We Do in the Shadows follows a similar formula to the original. Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Laszlo (Matt Berry) are vampire roommates, this time in New York City’s Staten Island rather than the original’s New Zealand. But their dynamic, and the humor it enables, is similar. When Nandor, who was once a “ferocious” soldier in the Ottoman Empire, calls a flat meeting in the library, he and Laszlo (Berry, giving off similar vibes to Jemaine Clement’s character in the original movie) nearly come to blows over the bad habit of leaving half-drained humans around the house. They bare their teeth and hiss like feral cats before Nadja, Laszlo’s partner and the series’ first female vampire, defuses the situation.
As any normal roommates would, the three resolve to mark their human prey with their names and dates of consumption from now on to avoid the problem in the future. Nandor adds “buy markers” to the list of chores for his hapless familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillen), who keeps a photo of his childhood self dressed as Antonio Banderas from Interview with a Vampire framed in his sad bedroom under the stairs, and serves his master’s every whim in the hopes of one day being turned into a vampire himself.
Panel photos courtesy FX
The group’s way of life is challenged when an ancient vampire baron comes to visit via lantern-lit ship from the old country. Our heroes, it turns out, arrived Staten Island 200 years earlier and, instead of undertaking their mission to colonize all of America as part of a new vampire world order, they just kind of hung around. They worry the baron, who fills a similar comedic role to the movie’s 8,000-year-old vampire Petyr, is there to check on the progress of their mission.
Although the show is definitely similar to the movie, it’s clear from this unfinished pilot that co-creators Clement and Waititi–as well as executive producer and writer Paul Sims, who joined them onstage after the screening–have plenty of new ideas for this world.
For example, just as in the movie, our three vampire protagonists have a roommate. But instead of the millennia-old Petyr, Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) is basically just an average-looking guy. In what is undoubtedly the episode’s best and most unexpected gag, Colin is a “psychic vampire” who can drain all the energy from humans and other vampires alike just by speaking to them about boring subjects like office gossip and different types of car washes.
“We either bore you with a long conversation, or we enrage you,” Colin explains in the episode. “In fact, you probably know an energy vampire. We’re the most common kind of vampire.”
Clement said afterward that he came up with the idea for Colin while researching types of vampires. “I think we all know a person like that,” he said. “We hadn’t thought of anything like that for the movie, but when I was reading about different kinds of vampires, that was one that people mentioned as a real kind of vampire that exists and that we all come up against. And I could think of conversations I’ve had where I’ve been trapped by someone, and probably people have felt like that with me there.”
In the episode’s other subplots, Guillermo hunts for tasty virgins at a LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) event, while Nadja stalks a human man who she believes may be her reincarnated former lover, a knight named Gregor who she accidentally decapitated centuries earlier. Meanwhile, Laszlo and Nadja each separately reveal that they’re looking forward to the baron’s arrival for the same reason: Despite being a decrepit, crumbling horror, the baron is apparently a monster in the sack, although each is unaware that the other has been there.
It’s easy to see how FX will stretch out the absurd, distinctive comedy from the original 2014 movie into a full series. There’s plenty in this pilot–which is uproariously funny, even in unfinished form–that could conceivably continue for whole seasons, from Guillermo’s hopeless pining to become an immortal to Nadja and Lazslo’s unwitting love triangle with the ancient baron. And much like the movie, sprinkled throughout the show are moments of gruesome horror that give it just a little bit of a sharpened, wooden edge.
What We Do in the Shadows won’t premiere on FX until Spring 2019, but Sims has already teased a future episode in which the brood will venture into Manhattan. As they haven’t actually left Staten Island since arriving by ship centuries earlier, they’ve apparently always assumed the island borough is all of New York, or maybe even all of America. But they’ll discover that their fellow nightwalkers in Manhattan are “a little cooler” than them, according to Sims.
A still from the 2014 film
Now that we’ve caught a glimpse of What We Do in the Shadows and we know what kind of show we’re getting, the last remaining question for fans has to be whether Clement’s and Waititi’s characters from the movie will ever appear on the FX show.
“Only if something really disastrous happens,” Clemente teased cryptically. “It would have to be of incredible import.”
“We’re creating a universe to rival that of Marvel and DC,” Waititi joked. “What we’re doing is we’re taking one idea and stretching it out for years and years.”
“That’s what they do too,” Clement replied, laughing.
What We Do in the Shadows is scheduled to premiere on FX in Spring 2019.
