If you’re an aspiring horror writer with an established Reddit account, the tale of “My Wife And I Bought A Ranch” is a dream-come-true. Deadline is reporting that Netflix has won the rights to a short story posted to the No Sleep subreddit. You can see the post here, although the full story is divided across six parts.
The story, about an ex-marine and his wife who purchase a ranch and soon find out that there’s a malevolent force at work there, was written by Matt Query. It’s well-regarded among the No Sleep community, and has received 3000 upvotes since the first part was posted five months ago.
The rights to the story were bought for a figure in the low seven-figure range, likely meaning between $1-5 million.
The script will be handled by his brother, Harrison Query, who is already working on a Three Musketeers project for the streaming service. Scott Glassgold and Ground Control Entertainment are producing, but talks are underway with potential co-producers, including Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen at 21 Laps (Stranger Things) and Aquaman-director James Wan’s Atomic Monster.
No director has been attached to the project as of yet.
Back in 2018, Ryan Reynolds signed on to adapt The Patient Who Nearly Drove Me Out Of Medicine, another story posted to No Sleep. There have been few updates on the project since then.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Tannenberg, from M2H Game Studio, is available now on PS4 and Xbox One. The game is the second installment in the WWI Game Series, following 2015’s Verdun, and features 40-player matches across maps based on real battlefields. Unlike Verdun, this port was handled entirely in-house by the original developer.
The game, which released on Steam Early Access in February 2019, comes to consoles with all the updates the game has received since its initial launch, including a new map (Przemyśl) that has also been added to the PC release. Players can fight over control points using time-authentic weapons, including gas barrages and mounted machine guns.
While there’s no single-player campaign, you can play with up to 20 bots, or add them to a multiplayer match. You can play as troops from Russia, Romania, Latvia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria.
You can watch the game’s launch trailer below.
There’s a focus on squad combat, and the large maps have different weather variants to mix things up. The controls have also been optimized for console.
The game costs $20, and PS4 Pro and Xbox Series X owners will see more detailed graphics in the game.
Writer-director Taika Waititi has shared some new insight on the next Thor movie, Love and Thunder, calling it “insane” and “romantic.”
Speaking to the BBC, Waititi said he and his team has been working sporadically on the script for more than a year already. It might not be a surprise given the title Love and Thunder, but Waititi said he is incorporating some romantic elements, and he’s excited about that because it’s out of his wheelhouse.
“We’ve been writing the script off and on for over a year, and this week I’m doing another pass on it. It is so insane. It’s also very romantic. I’m into romances now,” he said. “I just want to make a romance. I want to make something I’ve never done or never cared for. I would like to attack something like that.”
Love and Thunder will be the first new Thor movie since 2017’s Ragnarok, which Waititi also directed.
Also in the BBC interview, Waititi offered only the tiniest teases for his new Star Wars movie, confirming, “We’re writing” and sharing no more insight.
The Fugitive, the hit 1993 film starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, is being reborn as a Quibi series, and the first trailer is now available. As with all Quibi shows, the episodes will be short, and some big stars are attached to the series.
Kiefer Sutherland plays Detective Clay Bryce, while the titular fugitive is Mike Ferro, played by Boyd Holbrook (Narcos). Ferro is a recently released former inmate, falsely accused of orchestrating an explosion in an LA subway station, and must go on the run when Bryce declares him the only suspect, with a “shoot on sight” directive.
You can watch the trailer below. Like all Quibi shows, the episodes will be short (10 minutes or under). It looks like this one will have a sub-plot about irresponsible journalists, too.
According to a synopsis provided to Deadline, Mike Ferro is worried about the well-being of his wife and daughter, who were on a train at the time of the explosion. Whether or not this means we’ll get a version of the iconic “I didn’t kill my wife” scene from the film remains to be seen, as they both appear to be alive in the trailer.
The Fugitive actually started life as a TV series in the 1960s, starring David Janseen and Barry Morse. It ran for four seasons. This new series drops on August 3.
One of Netflix’s popular original movie franchises, The Kissing Booth, recently returned with a sequel that debuted on July 24. That won’t be the last entry in the series, however, as it’s been confirmed that a third Kissing Booth movie was filmed in secret alongside the sequel.
Deadline reports that The Kissing Booth 3 was secretly filmed concurrently with Kissing Booth 2 in South Africa. Filming is finished, and all that’s left is post-production. The Kissing Booth 3 is expected to come to Netflix sometime in 2021, and bring back the stars of the original movies, Joey King, Jacob Elordi, and Joel Courtney. Additionally, director Vince Marcello, who directed the first two movies, came back.
THANK YOU SO MUCH EVERYBODY! I’m totally over the moon that we’re doing a third one (and yes, with all the same cast!) It’s been tough keeping this secret from you all but thank you for all the lovely messages about #TheKissingBooth3! Your support is everything to me 💋💋💋
The entire Kissing Booth series is based on the novels by Beth Reekles, the first of which she wrote when she was just 15 years old. Reekles said on Twitter, “It’s been tough keeping this secret from you all but thank you for all the lovely messages.”
With July winding down, you might be wondering what’s headed to Netflix in August. A lot of good stuff is coming, in the US at least, including the original Jurassic Park trilogy (August 1), the beloved animated show The Legend of Korra (August 14), and the James Bond movies Quantum of Solace and Casino Royale (August 31).
Ghost of Tsushima, the recently released PS4 exclusive, relies heavily on sound to guide players and flesh out its 13th century Japanese setting. As you might expect, getting the sound just right took a lot of work and tools–and the sound is even more important than you might realize while playing.
Over at A Sound Effect, the game’s audio director Rev. Dr. Bradley D. Meyer and its senior sound designer Josh Lord have delved into the game’s sound design, and how they captured the sounds of the era. They also explained how sound is used to guide the player through the open world.
Meyer reveals that the sound of the wind, which guides players, is even more intricate than it might seem. “We built a system where the sound travels on three splines pointing towards the player’s current objective, one centered over the player and one on either side spaced about 5 meters away,” he says. “These wind gusts are all reactive to the current environment the player is in. So if you’re skirting a grassland on one side and a bamboo forest on the other, the wind will sound like tall grass rustling on your one side and clacking bamboo on the other. This directionality helps players key into where they should be headed as they traverse the island.”
Meyer also reveals that the use of a Black Naped Oriole as the game’s “guide bird” is largely due to a spot of luck that allowed him to record the bird’s sounds. “It was chosen for three reasons: it could be found in Japan, it was visually unique, and I was fortunate enough to record one when I was on vacation in Sri Lanka in 2018.”
Meyer reveals that the sword noises were recorded using the same sword blanks that were previously used for God of War, and that he and Josh Lord “spent a lot of time recording them in all manner of ways from scraping them against each other, clanging them together, swinging them, suspending them from the ceiling and spinning them around to get interesting resonant tones, etc.” The team had custom-made katana and wakizashi, engraved with the game’s logo, to record sheathing and unsheating noises, plus additional sword noises. Recording sessions also involved using blades to slice through fruit, vegetables, and cloth–those are the noises you’ll hear when you cut through an enemy.
Various straw and bamboo mats, Japanese yukata, jinbei, and waraji footwear were all used in recordings. The team made period-authentic boiled leather armor and paper armor, too, which was used for recordings. Bamboo was purchased wholesale so that they could test out its sound properties in numerous situations.
One extra fun note: when you hear a Mongol sleeping in the game, you’re hearing game director Nate Fox snoring. “We shared a room at the Game Developer’s Conference once and when I came in one night, he was passed out and snoring LOUD, so, you know I had to do my field recording duty,” Meyer recalls.
The full interview digs much deeper, including anecdotes about recording animals, details about UI sounds, and discussion on the challenges of featuring both English and Japanese voice tracks. It’s worth a read if you want to know more about sound design at a major studio, or the specifics of how Ghost of Tsushima came together.
Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD was recently announced for a 2021 release on Nintendo Switch and PS4. The game, which is a remaster of the PS2 RPG first released in Japan back in 2003, debuted a quick trailer during July’s Nintendo Direct Mini. But now, thanks to a new stream, we have much more footage of the game to see how its art style holds up.
In a July 23 livestream, Atlus showed off the game at length, and while all of the discussion is in Japanese (without subtitles) there’s a whole heap of footage to dig into. From 40:35 onwards in the video below, the focus shifts from the series at large to the upcoming HD remaster. As the discussion continues on, footage from the remaster plays in the background.
This gives us a better look at how the game’s style has translated, and the work that is going into the remaster. It looks like the new game’s visual style won’t be so different from the original, but it has held up pretty well.
It’s also revealed in this video that the game will have a “merciful” difficulty, which will make the game a bit easier for beginners. This is welcome news, as the Shin Megami Tensei games are notoriously difficult.
Another new game in the series, Shin Megami Tensei V, is also in the works for a 2021 release. It will be a Nintendo Switch exclusive, and it also recently received a new trailer.
Can the Blue Bomber follow in the footsteps of the Blue Blur? It appears we could find out soon, as the Mega Man movie’s development has actually been progressing. In fact, the creators promise that we’ll hear more news on the live-action project soon.
Speaking to IGN while discussing their upcoming superhero movie Project Power, directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost–Joseph Gordon-Levitt was also there and hung around like a good sport–were asked about the Mega Man film first announced several years ago. They confirmed it is still in the works and that Project Power writer Mattson Tomlin would be assisting with the screenplay.
“We’re super excited about it. I think we’re going to have some big news about it soon,” Joost added. “I can’t say all that much right now but it’s a project very near and dear to our hearts and we’re psyched.”
Schulman chimed in, as well, saying Mega Man was the first Nintendo game ever played, and Gordon-Levitt expressed his appreciation for Bionic Commando, also developed by Capcom.
Mega Man isn’t the only Capcom franchise getting the movie treatment at the moment. A Monster Hunter film from husband-and-wife team Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich is planned for release in 2021. Both also collaborated on the extremely successful live-action Resident Evil films. Jovovich is an avid Monster Hunter player and she even chose to use the same armor and dual-blade weapons as she does in the game.