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That meeting was recounted as part of a larger exposé from The Hollywood Reporter on X-Men director Bryan Singer, which details a long pattern of unprofessional and allegedly abusive behavior on set and off that eventually saw Singer fired from directing Bohemian Rhapsody nearly two decades later.
Michael Jackson met with Bryan Singer and a group of the filmmakers involved in the X-Men movie back in the spring of 1999. Jackson, who THR notes was wearing sunglasses and refused to shake hands, made his case for why he should play Professor Charles Xavier, mentor and leader of the X-Men, in what would become the first big Marvel movie blockbuster.
Jackson, it must be remembered, was no stranger to acting, having portrayed the Scarecrow in 1978’s The Wiz. He also acted in several of his extended music videos, such as “Thriller” and “Bad,” and starred in the 1988 musical anthology film Moonwalker as well as the Francis Ford Coppola-directed, George Lucas-scripted fantasy short, Captain EO.
X-Men producer Lauren Shuler Donner recalled telling Jackson at the X-Men meeting, “I said to him, ‘Do you know Xavier is an older white guy?’ … And Michael said, ‘Oh yeah. You know, I can wear makeup.'”
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Jackson’s “elaborate presentation” to the X-Men team included showing the short film Ghosts, wherein Jackson plays an older white mayor at one point.
THR claims Jackson was, “never seriously considered” for the role, citing one unnamed former film exec citing the late singer’s child sex abuse scandal as one reason why: “Michael was already in the thick of all his allegations by X-Men.” (It should be noted that THR also delves into the many sexual misconduct allegations against Bryan Singer in their piece.)
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In the end, Patrick Stewart was cast as Professor X in 2000’s X-Men, a role he continued to play until 2017’s Logan.
Michael Jackson’s pitch to play Professor X isn’t the only curious “what might have been” piece of X-Men casting history. Then-unknown Hugh Jackman replaced Dougray Scott as Wolverine, while Jim Caviezel was originally tipped to play Cyclops before James Marsden won the role.
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Somehow, the Nintendo Switch is still sold out everywhere, thanks to the rush of people looking to buy consoles during the coronavirus pandemic. If you’re someone who’s looking for a Nintendo system to play games on right now, some of Nintendo’s older handhelds and classic models are currently available directly from the Nintendo store. These are products that have been refurbished directly by Nintendo and come with everything you need to play. “Although it may have minor cosmetic blemishes, it is guaranteed to be fully functional,” each product listing states.
Notably, you can buy the NES Classic and SNES Classic, which were released by Nintendo in 2016 and 2017, respectively, and have since been discontinued. Unless you want to pay an absurd price for these systems somewhere on the internet, the best place to buy them now is on the Nintendo store, which sells “Authentic Nintendo Refurbished Sets.” The refurbished NES Classic sells for $50 at Nintendo and comes with the system, one controller, an HDMI cable, AC adapter, and 30 pre-installed games. Meanwhile, the refurbished SNES Classic is $70 and gets you the mini console with two wired SNES controllers, one HDMI cable, one USB cable with AC adapter, and 21 pre-loaded Super NES games.
Several of Nintendo’s 3DS and 2DS systems are available as well, including a red 3DS XL for $120, two 2DS XL colors for $100, and two 2DS options for just $50 each. There are a ton of great games that can be played on these systems, including The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Ocarina of Time 3D, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and more.
You can check out all the refurbished Nintendo systems available directly from Nintendo below. You’ll see the Nintendo Switch included as well, but unfortunately, both the gray and red/blue Joy-Con versions are sold out.
You read that right. The fungus scientifically known as Massospora has been infecting male cicadas for years, according to a journal from PLOS Pathogens as reported by LiveScience. It doesn’t end there though. Much like a zombie army, the male cicada zombies begin to work toward growing their numbers by luring in other male cicadas using a flickering wing movement traditionally used by female cicadas to lure in male mates.
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When the non-infected male cicadas attempt to mate with the infected cicada after being lured in, the Massospora is transferred and it begins to infect the new cicada by eating away at its abdomen. It replaces the abdomen with itself, which looks like a grouping of yellow spores.
It’s apparently not easy to spot this zombie-like transformation occur as the cicadas usually infected are of the Magicicada genus, which spend up to 17 years of their life underground at a time. Fortunately for the scientists behind the PLOS Pathogens report, they’re able to track different populations of cicada emerging at different times through a cycle of years.
Once the abdomen is transformed into a mass of spores, the now-zombified cicada will fly around and drop spores to infect even more cicada. As to how the Massospora controls this spore-dropping flight and the mating call that occurs after infection, scientists aren’t yet sure which chemicals within the fungus are making that happen.
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A non-infected cicada’s life after emerging from the ground years and years after it is born would generally only last a few weeks. They mate, lay eggs, then die. When infected by the Massospora, their life is prolonged but considering they are zombies at that point, it’s not really living.
If you’re clamoring for zombie-like science, read about how scientists are resurrecting 100-million-year-old underwater lifeforms. After that, read about how a bionic moon jellyfish was created by scientists earlier this year.
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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.
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Episode 9 of American Horror Story ‘Hotel’ is named “She Wants Revenge,” but who is She? Could it be Liz Taylor? Ramona Royale? Miss Evers? The Countess (Lady Gaga)? Probably all of the above. One thing’s for sure, The Countess has a long “To Kill” list, Iris likes to channel her inner Dirty Harriet, and vampire kids enjoy hot homeless meals.
If you thought Botox was a miracle to reverse the signs of aging, think again. Being a vampire has kept The Countess looking young for over a century. What’s the point in looking young if your lovers, Natacha Rambova and Rudolph Valentino, are gone– unless it turns out that they’ve been imprisoned in Hotel Cortez’s walls for years. Count your days, James March! In other news, it’s time to finish what she started with Will Drake; wedding bells here we come.
Donovan isn’t interested in The Countess anymore. In fact, he’s willing to team up with Ramona over a nice glass of blood and tied up film stars. Or is he… Well, it doesn’t matter because The Countess is head over heels in love with Rudolph.
By the end of the episode, The Countess crosses one more person off of her kill list.
Be sure to check out our GameSpot Store for some cool merch including face masks, t-shirts, hoodies and even an awesome skateboard. It’s all for a good cause too – until the end of August, all proceeds are going to charity to help us raise money for Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 Direct Relief. Check it out at store.gamespot.com!!
Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare series has now spanned over a decade. In this time, fan-favorite maps have been re-used and remastered into other games and game modes. Developer Infinity Ward has done a great job of re-purposing these maps from their award-winning single player missions over the years. Not all of them are obvious, and take some digging and boundary-breaking to find. Let’s take a look back at some of these memorable maps and their history in the Modern Warfare series.
First up is Crash from Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. This map has not only been used across multiple Modern Warfare titles, it’s also had 24/7 playlists and a special winter time version called “Winter Crash”. This version replaces character deaths with boxes of presents and even has a Santa Claus Easter egg. Next is the “Invasion” map, which debuted in 2009’s Modern Warfare 2. This one is a little tricky to find as it’s hidden within the Euphrates Bridge map from 2019’s Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare. While it’s more of an unfinished outline, the memories from MW2’s multiplayer still come rolling in.
The iconic map “Rust” from Modern Warfare 2 has made its way into four of Infinity Ward’s titles. Sadly, one of them is an unplayable Easter egg within Advanced Warfare’s map “Cargo”. Also from Modern Warfare 2 is “Scrapyard”. This small airplane graveyard map has been reused across nearly every game mode within 2019’s Modern Warfare. Next up is “Vacant” from Call Of Duty 4. This fan-favorite map stems from the iconic “All Ghillied Up” mission and has been reused and remastered in nearly every Modern Warfare title. “Broadcast” from Call of Duty 4 was a DLC map that made a surprising comeback into 2019’s Modern Warfare and even Warzone. Last but certainly not least is the Gulag. Despite its popularity and infamy in Warzone, this small map got its start in Modern Warfare 2 in the mission “The Gulag”. The memorable mission called for players to rescue prisoner 627 aka Captain Price himself.
The new edition includes the 4K Blu-ray, HD Blu-ray and digital edition, as well as new cover art and special features on the disc: “Accessing Section 9: 25 Years into the Future” and “Landscapes & Dreamscapes: The Art and Architecture of Ghost in the Shell.”
Here’s where you can preorder the 4K Blu-ray release of Ghost in the Shell
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With both PS5 and Xbox Series X offering 4K Blu-ray compatible models coming up, there’s no reason why you can’t claim yourself a copy of this anime classic now if you plan on getting one of the new consoles later.
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Seth Macy is Executive Editor, IGN Commerce, and just wants to be your friend. Find him on Twitter @sethmacy.
Sometimes, video games help you to lose yourself in their worlds and stories, using the power of interactivity to bring you into the life of a character and to provide you with the opportunity to experience at least some version of their emotions. And sometimes, you get “Press F to Pay Respects.”
If you’re somehow not familiar with a video game joke that became a pretty widespread meme, the “Press F” moment came about in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Early in the story, tragedy strikes, and the protagonist character attends a friend’s funeral. As the scene plays out, Advanced Warfare throws some interactivity your way to add some gravitas, prompting you to hit a button to enable your character to express their grief. If you’re playing on PC, the default key for honoring the dead in this case is “F.”
It’s not even Call of Duty’s fault–lots of games have had very similar moments with very similar prompts, or have allowed you to do dumb video game things at the exact wrong times–but the instance in Advanced Warfare just feels particularly goofy, probably because it appears in such a high-profile game. Here you are at a digital funeral for a fictional character in what the game hopes is an emotional, poignant moment, but a passing attempt at adding some interactivity to the scene actually works to completely undermine it. “Press F to Pay Respects” does nothing but scream at you that you’re playing a video game, and that the video game is ham-fistedly trying to get you involved in something so quintessentially human as mourning, and failing at it. It’s a glaring reminder that a lot of AAA games just don’t have a good idea of how to make it feel natural to interact with the world in a way that’s not about killing stuff.
Which brings us to Ghost of Tsushima and its take on pressing F to pay respects.
Ghost of Tsushima is pretty emotional, for an open-world game about sneaking up on and stabbing the soldiers of an invading army. Its themes include sacrifice, what you owe to others and to yourself, and failing to live up to the expectations of those closest to you. It spends a lot of time building relationships between Jin and various characters, and then explores how much it can hurt to lose those relationships, whether through tragedy or through the characters’ own actions.
It’s a surprisingly introspective and contemplative game, and that’s reflected in several moments in which Jin visits graves. When dropping by, say, the grave of Jin’s father, you get Tsushima’s brand of “Press F to Pay Respects,” but it’s more than just hitting a button to trigger a momentary somber animation. Instead, Jin sits quietly before the grave for a moment and takes in the scene around him. A second later, you’re spurred to engage with one of the more interesting ideas of Ghost of Tsushima, and write a haiku.
Before we go any further, more than one person has criticized the implementation of Ghost of Tsushima’s haiku mechanic and the quality of the haiku it allows you to construct, and those criticisms are right. (Our own Kevin Knezevic breaks down everything that’s wrong with Tsushima’s haiku pretty comprehensively, in fact.)
Yes, haiku is historically anachronistic for the period the game is covering, which makes them feel, at least intellectually, like the idea of an element of Japanese culture rather than a more deft use of it. And Tsushima does not help you write particularly good haiku, it must be said. The system gives you a prompt (such as “Reflect on loss”) and then lets you pan the camera across the landscape around you, where you can pick one of three lines. You repeat the process until you create a little 5-7-5 poem out of the nine total options. As it was described by Austin Walker on an episode of Waypoint Radio, it’s essentially Mad Libs, and as Kevin wrote in his piece, all the poems are pretty much meaningless.
Considering all that as read, Tsushima still gets a lot right in deploying its haiku idea for these emotional moments–it’s less about the haiku you produce and more that you’re spending time producing one at all. When you visit the grave of Jin’s father, you actually visit his grave. You sit there for a while. You look around the scene and take it in. You reflect on their relationship and what it means to Jin, something that has been built into his character development. You take a second out from the sneaking and sword fighting to just sit and think. And you write a bad poem.
In trying to find a way to add interactivity to a personal, human moment, developer Sucker Punch actually landed on a pretty good idea, or at the very least, a creative solution to the problem. The haiku system is still pretty damn video gamey, but at least it actually does kind of feel like paying respects–more than hitting a key to advance a cutscene does, anyway.
Tsushima is an action game that’s willing to slow down and put its players in quieter, more introspective moments to serve its story. If games are going to continue to try to make these moments interactive in a meaningful way, you could do worse than cobbling together a bit of dumb verse to honor your dead in-game dad.
The Hargreeves family just can’t seem to catch a break. This season saw them thrown from one apocalyptic event right into another–this time back in the 1960s. If you’re wondering exactly how they got there, you may want to check out our Season 1 refresher (don’t worry, we only covered the absolute need-to-know points, like the time travel). Hopefully if you’re here, however, you’re already up to speed on the first season and, ideally, finished with Season 2, but left wondering what any of this means.
We’re going to try and make sense of that ending cliffhanger–but first, this ought to go without saying, but there are massive spoilers from all of Umbrella Academy from here on out. Proceed with caution, because unlike Five you won’t have the ability to blink back in time to a point where you haven’t spoiled the show for yourself.
For ease and convenience we’ll break it down in pieces, since the overlapping plots can get a little difficult to keep track of all at once. Here we go.
For the early part of the season, handling the Kennedy Assassination is priority number one for most of the Hargreeves family. For Diego, that meant a relentless (and delusional) effort to try and save his life, while for Five, it meant trying to stop Diego from screwing up the timeline by saving his life. For everyone else, it meant something somewhere in between those two extremes.
Eventually, Five and Diego’s combined efforts revealed that their adoptive father, Reginald, and a clandestine secret society actually had put the assassination plans into motion–but that was the least of their problems. It turned out that stopping Kennedy’s assassination was actually what triggered the new apocalyptic future Five had been made privy to–though it wasn’t Diego’s interference that did it. The Cold War meltdown was caused by Vanya, who lost control of her powers and caused an explosion while the president’s motorcade traveled by. Kennedy survived, but the explosion was seen as an act of war by Russian forces.
To prevent that from happening, the siblings had to make sure that Vanya couldn’t blow up the building. This was made trickier by the fact that Vanya had unwittingly found herself in FBI custody as a suspected Russian spy. Her powers began melting down as she was tortured for information, but the catastrophe was circumvented thanks to Ben, who was able to possess her body and reign her abilities in. The process, unfortunately, used up the last bits of Ben’s ghostly energy and finally allowed him to pass on.
Though they may have prevented the explosion from triggering all out nuclear war, the whole debacle put every member of the Hargreeves family very much in the spotlight, and they were promptly proclaimed enemies of the state and put on most-wanted lists. Not exactly an ideal solution, though one that was certainly preferable to the literal apocalypse.
But, before they could deal with their Most Wanted status, Vanya had another issue to deal with.
While the other Hargreeves kids dealt with their new lives in the 60s with varying degrees of success, Vanya settled down as an amnesiac live-in nanny to a family with an autistic son named Harlan. Harlan’s mother, Sissy, and Vanya began a secret love affair, prompting the fury of Harlan’s deadbeat dad. The stress and upheaval, along with Vanya’s slowly recovering memories, caused Harlan to panic and attempt to run away. He nearly drowned in a retention pond, but was saved by Vanya, who used her powers to revive him.
The process inadvertently transferred some of Vanya’s powers into Harlan, who could not control them. In dealing with the aftermath of the Kennedy debacle, Vanya began to experience flashes of Harlan losing control and knew she had to help. Her siblings didn’t immediately jump to her aid, first opting to stay focused on the task at hand in mitigating the Kennedy fallout, but they eventually came to Vanya’s aid. The entire Hargreeves crew traveled to Sissy’s farm where Harlan’s abilities were manifesting at an alarming rate.
That’s when things started to get really, really messy because…
Throughout the season, Five worked tirelessly trying to not only figure out a way to solve this new apocalypse but get his family back home to 2019–but this, unfortunately, forced him back into a partnership with some familiar villainous faces from Season 1.
The Handler, who had survived her gunshot wound to the head but had been ousted from her position of power in the Commission during her recovery, offered Five a deal. If he could infiltrate and kill the Commission’s board of directors, clearing a path for the Handler to regain control, she could provide him with a time-traveling briefcase which would allow the Hargreeves siblings to get home. Meanwhile, the acting board has sent a trio of Sweedish assassin brothers (known only as the Swedes) to try and eliminate the Hargreeves siblings entirely, so they keep cropping up to make trouble while Five works out his plan.
With no other real options on the table, Five accepted, murdered the board, and plunged the Commission into chaos. But, unsurprisingly, the Handler then allowed the other shoe to drop–she had set Five up for failure, giving him an impossible deadline to use the briefcase to get home, and then declared he and his siblings enemies of the Commission who needed to be eliminated.
This all culminated into a final showdown at Sissy’s farm, interrupting Vanya’s attempt to talk Harlan’s new powers down. Thankfully, the combined efforts of all the Hargreeves siblings were able to stop the Commission assassins set to kill them–but the Handler had one final ace up her sleeve. Lila, her own adoptive daughter who had spent the season undercover as Diego’s new friend (or girlfriend, in her own words), turned out not only to be a highly trained fighter but have superpowers of her own. It was revealed that Lila was actually one of the other children who were mysteriously born on October 1, 1989, but she’d been scooped up secretly by the Handler rather than bought by Reginald as a baby.
As you can probably imagine, this revelation prompted its fair share of drama but ultimately Lila was swayed to join forces with the Hargreeves family and help take out her maniacal mother. Hopefully for good this time.
With the Handler gone, the remainder of the Commission in complete disarray, and the Kennedy assassination debacle dealt with, the Hargreeves kids (minus Lila who escaped with a Commission briefcase and could be anywhere) were finally able to return home to 2019 using the Commission’s now abandoned time-travel technology.
It was all well and good, until…
It turned out that the future the Hargreeves siblings returned to was not the 2019 they remembered, despite their initial impressions. They arrived back at the Umbrella Academy mansion to find it rebranded, by a very much alive Reginald Hargreeves, as the Sparrow Academy. And that’s not all–it turns out that in this reality, Ben never died. Now, alive, and an adult, Ben doesn’t recognize his siblings at all, and apparently leads the Sparrow Academy team.
Unfortunately, that’s about as much as we get before the season ends. The good news is that both apocalyptic events have, apparently, been successfully avoided and Ben isn’t dead anymore–the bad news is that there’s absolutely no way to tell what went wrong in the timeline to have caused this change, or how it’s going to affect everyone.
We also get a glimpse back into the 1960s where we see that Harlan’s powers are very much still a thing–there’s even the implication that Harlan may have something to do with an alien or UFO incident in Roswell, New Mexico. The last surviving Swede joins the remainder of Klaus’s free-love cult, Destiny’s Children, who continue to exist despite Klaus vanishing from their lives. Oh, and Reginald briefly revealed himself to be an alien–though none of the Hargreeves kids were ever made privy to that information. We suspect that, now in this new timeline with Reginald still alive, that might come up.
All told, Umbrella Academy Season 2 poses more questions than it answers–which is pretty much par for the course for the show as a whole at this point. These sort of things happen when you send a bunch of severely underqualified, traumatized superpowered siblings through time without any real rules or supervision, we guess. It’s safe to say there is plenty to dig into should the show return for a Season 3.
