biteho.com

With E3 2020 officially canceled due to concerns over the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), Ubisoft has confirmed that it’s looking at “other options” to bring announcements directly to its fans.

Ubisoft took to Twitter to share its disappointment over E3 2020’s sudden cancellation, saying that it “fully supports” the decision the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) made. While Ubisoft has not explained what it plans to do in lieu of an E3 2020 press conference, the company said a “digital experience” may be possible.

“The health and well-being of our teams, players and partners is our top priority, so while we’re disappointed, we fully support the ESA’s decision to cancel E3 2020,” the statement reads. “E3 is and will continue to be a moment where we come together as a community and share our love of games. We’re exploring other options for a digital experience that will allow us to share all the exciting news we have planned.”

The ESA, the organization responsible for the annual trade show, said it is looking at other avenues to bring the Electronic Entertainment Expo to fans this June in the form of an “online experience.”

Despite E3 2020’s cancellation at least in the physical sense, many companies are still looking at livestreams, digital presentations, and other options to get the news out. Xbox boss Phil Spencer said the company intends to hold an “Xbox digital event,” while physical game distributor Limited Rum Games–which was also the first company to confirm its E3 2020 press conference–will still hold a presentation.

E3 2020 may not go forward as planned but the trade show isn’t closing its doors for good. The ESA plans to bring the annual event back in June 2021 for what’s supposed to be “a reimagined event that brings fans, media, and the industry together.”

E3 2020 has officially been canceled. The ESA, the company that organizes the annual gaming showcase, has confirmed it has decided to cancel this year’s show over growing concerns regarding the COVID-19 virus. While the expo proper will no longer be taking place, however, the ESA says it is looking into a possible online alternative.

In a statement, the ESA said it is “exploring options with our members to coordinate an online experience to showcase industry announcements and news in June 2020.” The organization didn’t share any more details about this possible alternative, but it says further updates will be posted on the official E3 website.

Following the news of E3 2020’s cancellation, Xbox boss Phil Spencer announced that Microsoft plans to hold an “Xbox digital event” in place of its annual E3 press conference. Ubisoft similarly announced that it is “exploring other options for a digital experience that will allow us to share all the exciting news we have planned.”

E3 is only the latest gaming event to be affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. GDC 2020 was postponed, while SXSW, Emerald City Comic Con, and other events were also canceled over concerns about the virus.

E3 2020 was slated to take place from June 9-11, although this year’s show would have been missing a number of key players. For the second year running, Sony decided not to attend the event. Geoff Keighley, who has hosted the fan-focused E3 Coliseum showcase since 2017, also backed out of the show for the first time in 25 years, and iam8bit recently announced it resigned from its position as E3 2020’s creative directors.

Despite E3 2020’s cancellation, the ESA still plans to hold the event next year. “We thank everyone who shared their views on reimagining E3 this year. We look forward to bringing you E3 2021 as a reimagined event that brings fans, media, and the industry together in a showcase that celebrates the global video game industry,” the organization said.

The Entertainment Software Association has officially canceled E3 2020, but that doesn’t mean the conference won’t return. E3 2021 will still happen next year, but it’s going to be a little different.

“We thank everyone who shared their views on reimagining E3 this year,” the ESA said in a statement to GameSpot. “We look forward to bringing you E3 2021 as a reimagined event that brings fans, media, and the industry together in a showcase that celebrates the global video game industry.”

The language the ESA used in its statement suggests E3 2021 could move to something more focused on the video game community than it does major publisher announcements. For this year, the ESA said it could be moving to a digital format to replace the traditional event.

If the coronavirus were the ESA’s only concern, E3 2021 would be a given. However, game companies’ support for E3 had already begun to dwindle.

PlayStation did not attend E3 2019 and was already planning to skip E3 2020. Nintendo, meanwhile, shifted away from live presentations for E3 2013 and has stuck with its pre-recorded Nintendo Direct presentations ever since. Electronic Arts also stopped participating a few years ago in favor of its concurrent EA Play celebrations.

With E3 2020 potentially being replaced by online-only video presentations, it will be curious to see if publishers move to this permanently for E3 2021. The live press conference certainly has its benefits, especially when Keanu Reeves is on stage, but there are far fewer chances for technical errors when everything is recorded ahead of time. E3 2021 adopting an online-only format would also be far cheaper, though the press and players would lose out on the chance to try new games themselves. As it’s a large opportunity for business networking between developers and publishers, they would also lose out by no longer meeting face to face.

When trying to come up with possible reasons why Bloodshot exists, it’s difficult not to descend into cynicism. This is a movie that seems designed to cash in on a dubious combination of copy-catting Marvel and DC’s successes on the big screen, and Vin Diesel‘s modest star power, which can potentially draw the same crowds who flock to each new Fast and the Furious movie (including us). And Bloodshot isn’t a completely worthless imitation–it smartly leaves a lot of the original Valiant comics’ cheesy trappings (white skin, red chest, red eyes) in the past where they belong, and it’s built on a really fun (albeit moronic) sci-fi conceit that brings with it plenty of cool visual effects and inventive action set pieces.

But those are all things we’ve seen before at the cinema, and Bloodshot does little to set itself apart from the last 25 years of superhero movies. It’s a supremely stupid movie, in the very literal sense that it rarely, if ever, makes any sense–the kind of movie that begs you over and over to simply “turn off your brain” and enjoy the machismo spectacle. But idling your brain low enough to “enjoy Bloodshot for what it is” might do permanent damage.

Vin Diesel’s Roy Garrison is a soldier who, when he’s not taking out bad guys and rescuing hostages all over the world, savors picturesque romantic getaways with his beautiful wife. Of course, things are actually a lot more complicated than that, but the movie takes a long time to get to its big “twist.” In case you want to go into this movie completely blind, I’ll mark this as a spoiler–but everything discussed here is explicitly laid out in the trailer: Garrison is actually an unknowing operative of a private paramilitary corporation that repeatedly implants him with false memories of his wife being murdered in front of him, then sets him loose on what he thinks are vendettas but are actually assassinations. They wipe him clean every time, tweaking and tuning the fabricated memories and their own performances as they prepare to sell “weaponized revenge” to the highest bidder.

On top of that, they’ve replaced Garrison’s blood with billions of “nanites,” microscopic machines that lend him superpowers and can repair any organic damage to his body in a matter of seconds. “Project Bloodshot,” as he’s dubbed, is like Wolverine on even more steroids; a meathead with a cybernetically enhanced heart of gold. Diesel is, naturally, perfect for the role, and he manages to squeeze in a dimension of vulnerability to the character that makes him likable in spite of everything.

Bloodshot’s lengthy opening act as it builds toward the reveal is almost unbearably stupid–and, admittedly, deliberately so. Once it gets there, the idiocy takes on a different tone. Bloodshot cribs liberally from a wide variety of better movies, starting out in the realm of 1992’s Van Damme and Lundgren-starring Universal Soldier, before eventually transforming into more of a knock-off MCU by way of later Fast and Furious movies, with a hint of Groundhog Day for good measure.

Diesel is surrounded by an able cast doing their best with dopey dialogue and scenarios. Eiza González, Sam Heughan, and Alex Hernandez portray the other members of Garrison’s “squad,” each with their own, fun cybernetic enhancement. González’s character KT, for example, breathes through an aperture installed in the center of her chest, rather than through her trachea and mouth.

To give you an idea of how dumb Bloodshot truly is: When, at one point, KT’s breathing implant briefly stops working, the character spends a few moments in the aftermath gasping for breath–through her mouth. That’s not even mentioning the fact that although the movie could use KT’s condition as a thin excuse to explain why she dresses almost exclusively in revealing, skin-tight crop tops, instead it just doesn’t even bother.

Guy Pearce is the man in charge who orchestrates the whole scheme, although he never really sells his character’s villainy. Siddharth Dhananjay (from Amazon’s excellent rotoscope-animated Undone) plays the chief developer behind the Bloodshot tech, though he mostly exists to have several jokes made about his apparently small penis, and so he can get one-upped by the superior hacker Wilfred Wigans, played by New Girl’s Lamorne Morris. Wigans is the source of most of the movie’s genuine laughs, and Morris at least seems like he’s having fun, even if most of his gags, like trying to speed-eat Chinese food while action scenes happen around him or talking to himself while doing generic hacking stuff, are essentially nonsequiturs that have little to do with the other characters or what’s actually going on in the movie.

Most of the characters’ motivations are, at best, unclear; at worst, they seem to actively contradict those characters’ personalities and/or stated goals. The whole movie operates under the weird conceit that there are no real consequences for anything that happens; this private group is orchestrating hits all over the world, causing large-scale destruction everywhere they go, but there’s never any discussion of collateral damage, innocent bystanders, or intervention from any form of government. Granted, that would definitely detract from the fun tone Bloodshot most often goes for, which it does occasionally achieve in isolated moments of blockbuster levity.

The nanites themselves provide plenty of fodder for cool visuals and effects. There are even some elements of body horror as Garrison sustains increasingly outlandish wounds, like getting half his face blown off, only for the nanites to swarm there and reconstruct it as we watch.

Bloodshot might not be entirely faithful to the original design of the comic book character (and I’m glad that Vin doesn’t have a big red circle in the middle of his chest), but there are some nods for fans. The nanites burn neon red when they’re doing repairs, causing Garrison’s chest to light up like a blood-tinged Iron Man. In one scene, Garrison gets covered in flour, causing him to appear ashy white, which feels perfunctory. Later, once he gains better control of the nanites, his skin turns white as if drained of blood when he’s concentrating them on specific tasks, which sometimes involves sending them out of his body entirely. How he continues to walk around when that’s happening is as much a mystery as any other choice in this movie, like how nanites that repair your flesh somehow turn you into a walking tank who takes bullets to the chest without so much as flinching.

If you’re asking these questions–as I did–you’ve already overthought Bloodshot. If Vin Diesel and a goofy sci-fi/superhero mash-up premise are enough to get your nanites pumping, then by all means, enjoy. Otherwise, Bloodshot will simply leave you cold.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

The recent horror version of The Invisible Man is a box office hit, making more than $102 million at the worldwide box office so far, from an estimated production budget of just $7 million. This will come as a huge relief to Universal, after the studio tried and failed in 2017 to launch Dark Universe, a series of films based on its classic monster movie properties. There are already several other movies in development, and the latest to be reported is a new version of Dracula.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the new Dracula movie is being developed by Invisible Man producers Blumhouse Pictures and will be directed by Karyn Kusama. Kusama’s previous work in the genre includes the 2009 cult favorite Jennifer’s Body and 2015’s acclaimed horror thriller The Invitation. Kusama’s regular collaborators Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi will write the script.

THR notes that since Dracula is a public domain character, Blumhosue could technically take the project elsewhere. However, the company has a first-look deal with Universal, which has distributed the majority of Blumhouse’s movies, so it seems very likely it will end up there. Obviously, it’s early days for the project and no further details are known, but The Invisible Man’s success has shown that the Dark Universe debacle was not the end for potential new versions of these classic horror stories.

In terms of the other monster movie projects in the works, last month it was reported that a remake of Bride of Frankenstein might still happen. This was originally set to be the second film in the Dark Universe, but it was postponed after the failure of The Mummy. Other films currently in development include The Invisible Woman, to be directed by Elizabeth Banks, and Dark Army, which has Bridesmaids director Paul Feig attached. For more check out, GameSpot’s guide to the biggest upcoming horror movies of 2020.