Make no mistake about it, there continues to be no more desirable collectible than Funko’s line of Pop vinyl figures. The company makes them for everything, from Pokemon to beloved Star Wars character Baby Yoda (or The Child, if you want to be technical).
Now there will be two more for your collection, but you’re going to have to travel to get your hands on them. When Avengers Campus launches at Disney California Adventure this summer, the new Disneyland Resort expansion will feature a pair of new Funko Pop figures for sale–Iron Man and Spider-Man.
While, yes there are numerous Iron Man and Spider-Man Pops already, these are special. These particular figures feature the theme park exclusive costumes for both heroes. Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering have worked together to design new versions of both heroes’ costumes. Those costumes will be worn by in-park characters for meet-and-greet purposes and also figure into some of the merchandise available, like these Pops.
The Spider-Man Pop features the superhero webbing up a spider-bot, the mechanical nuisance that is at the center of the new Avengers Campus ride, Web Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure. Iron Man, on the other hand, is seen mid-flight and ready to use the blasters in his hands.
Until they’re available, perhaps you should focus on getting the rest of your Funko Pop collection together with this look at the best Marvel Pops available. Whatever you do, though, you should avoid thesetruly terrible Funko offerings.
For more about Avengers Campus, take a look at our comprehensive coverage:
Avengers Campus at Disneyland Resort’s California Adventure is scheduled to open on July 18.
When the land opens, not only will Black Widow be one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe superheroes guests will see, but she’s bringing along a villain for the Avengers to fight. “The supervillain Taskmaster has some things he may want to steal from the Avengers Campus.” Walt Disney Imagineering creative executive director Brent Strong revealed during a media preview of the land.
Taskmaster will figure into the live entertainment at Avengers Campus, a stunt show that takes place on the exterior of the Avengers Headquarters. In the show, the villain will come face-to-face with Captain America, Black Widow, and Black Panther and battle it out.
According to Strong, his specific powers will be put to great use in the show. “Taskmaster is interesting to us because he has photographic reflexes. He can watch someone fight in their fighting style and immediately mimic it,” he explained. “So I think it’s gonna be very interesting when the Black Widow and Black Panther and Captain America spring into action against Taskmaster up on top on the ramparts of the Avengers headquarters.”
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Black Widow (2020) – Official Final Trailer
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For Marvel Studios, the opportunity to introduce a villain from a brand-new movie was the perfect fit. “For us bringing that character to the big screen this summer in Black Widow, it was a great opportunity again for us to say, ‘Well, hey, it’s a living breathing place. Let’s have him there on opening day,'” Marvel Studios vice president, franchise creative and marketing Dave Bushore said. “Again, I think it speaks to the opportunity to always be injecting new, fun story character elements into this place.”
The potential of Avengers Campus constantly evolving based on what’s happening in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is exciting. That said, given that the land is not set in the main MCU timeline, you shouldn’t expect the land to mimic the movies too closely.
For more about Avengers Campus, take a look at our comprehensive coverage:
Avengers Campus at Disneyland Resort’s California Adventure is scheduled to open on July 18.
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When Avengers Campus opens at Disney California Adventure this summer, the centerpiece of the new land will be WEB Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure. The ride will give guests their own web-slinging powers as they team with Spider-Man to take on an army of spider-bots on the loose.
The premise is simple enough. It’s an open house at the Worldwide Engineering Brigade (WEB for short). “At WEB, young inventors like Peter Parker have been brought together by Tony Stark to help create technologies that allow everyday people like us to have powers just like the Avengers,” Walt Disney Imagineering creative executive director Brent Strong said during a media preview of Avengers Campus. “When we get inside, we find out that they’re not quite as well funded as Stark Enterprises. They’re not quite as militaristic as SHIELD. In fact, they’re not all that organized at all. These are some kids that have some amazing power, right? Vibranium from Wakanda, Pym Particles from Ant-Man. They have arc reactors from Tony Stark. In fact, they probably have a little bit more power than they have responsibility.”
To get those powers, typically a guest would have to use some form of tool. For instance, in the Tory Story Midway Mania attraction–which is somewhat similar to WEB Slingers–you are armed with a blaster that is triggered by pulling a cord. Superpowers don’t tend to come from blasters, though. To Walt Disney Imagineering had to figure out a way to give guests the ability to sling webs without accessories.
“What you won’t see is people holding onto a blaster, people holding onto an interface. Believe it or not, with nothing in your hands, you get to reach out and you will sling webs on this ride. In order to do that we invented a brand new interface,” Strong explained. “This is the first time we’ve ever shown this outside [of Imagineering]. This is a gesture recognition system that we have built into every slinger vehicle and sixty times a second, we are able to determine where a guest’s head is, their shoulders, their elbows, and even their wrists. We’re able to track the motion of your body so that when you reach out and sling a web, since we know where your eyes are, and we know where your hands are, we can render a virtual web coming right out of the palm of your hand, right out of your virtual web-shooters and into a virtual world.”
A video demonstrating how the gesture recognition system works showed a wireframe tracking of four individuals at once, each slinging their own webs at various speeds. Each ride vehicle holds eight people in two, four-person rows that face opposite directions. And to make it more accessible to families, there are no age or height requirements for the ride. “This is something where guests of all ages get to live out that epic action, which is wonderful,” Strong revealed.
While the goal for the ride is for WEB Slingers to feel like a real-world interaction with Spider-Man, there’s still a gaming aspect to it all. As with rides like Midway Mania, scoring will be involved. Each guest on the ride will get their individual score, based on how many spider-bots they defeat. However, the important number is the combined score of everyone in your row, which will be tallied and put up against other teams on the ride.
Still, though the ride consists of shooting virtual webs into a virtual world, a la Midway Mania, it’s not a typical screen-based ride. “This attraction does use a hybrid of physical sets, practical effects, as well as virtual set extensions to bring this epic universe to life,” Strong said.
The ride will also include a pre-show, featuring multiple layers of projections as Spider-Man himself, who will be voiced by Tom Holland, explains the situation before loading guests into the ride cars–which are called slinger vehicles. During a brief tour of Avengers Campus, which is still under construction, we were able to see the pre-show and queue area for the attraction. For purposes of the ride’s location, WEB has taken over an abandoned Stark Automotive factory.
As Strong explained previously, this is a group of kids without the financial resources of the Avengers, so the building looks dirty, features cracked walls, and doesn’t necessarily seem like the safest place to be carrying out science experiments. That said, the contrast between a dusty factory and a massive workshop for young inventors is interesting to see, as modern technology is strewn around a room with much older equipment.
The attention to detail in WEB Slingers, and throughout Avengers Campus, is one of the most exciting aspects of the entire project. As was clear with the launch of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in 2019, Walt Disney Imagineering spares no expense in making the environments feel real and lived-in. Now it’s just a matter of time until guests get to experience that, first-hand.
For more about Avengers Campus, take a look at our comprehensive coverage:
Avengers Campus at Disneyland Resort’s California Adventure is scheduled to open on July 18.
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe is about to launch Phase 4 with the release of Black Widow. The overall franchise includes a long list of movies, several TV shows, an upcoming slate of films, and even a series of streaming shows that will stream exclusively on Disney+. Where does Avengers Campus fit into that timeline, though?
The upcoming theme park extension at Disney California Adventure will bring the heroes of the MCU to life in a new way, with a Spider-Man ride, an Ant-Man restaurant, and several other experiences for guests. However, the new land will also feature the chance to meet superheroes like Captain America and Iron Man. In case you somehow missed Avengers: Endgame in 2019, that seems pretty difficult, given that Iron Man sacrificed himself to defeat Thanos and Captain America is now a very old man that has retired from his time as an Avenger.
Thankfully, during a media preview of Avengers Campus, the land’s creative team cleared up exactly how this is possible. The short answer is Avengers Campus isn’t set in the primary MCU timeline.
“I would say if you’re a Marvel fan, we all know it’s a vast and infinite multiverse and gives you a lot of opportunities to have a lot of fun with a lot of characters,” Marvel Studios vice president, franchise creative and marketing Dave Bushore explained in a group interview.
Expanding on that, Walt Disney Imagineering staff writer Jillian Pagan credits the events of Avengers: Endgame for making the land’s place in the MCU possible. “As we see in Avengers: Endgame, where they go back to 2012 and everything about the universe is the same up until that point, and then they divide and start spinning off into multiple timelines,” she said. “We see ourselves as having that same shared history with what we’ve seen in the films. And then, clearly, there was just that point in time where they’ve split off and now have created, in one timeline, these new campuses for us to assemble alongside them and are still alive and well and we can assemble with them. So it gives us, admittedly, maybe a little bit of a cheat, but I don’t think it’s any more of a cheat than what the comics and the films have already introduced in terms of being like, ‘Oh, we killed off that character. Let’s bring them back.'”
Ultimately, it lets Avengers Campus have the best of both worlds. “It lets us have our narrative cake of leaning into all of the awesomeness that we’ve seen in the films that we know guests want to play in and step into that world, but eat it too,” Drake continued. “And here, you want to go meet Iron Man? Congratulations, he’s alive in this timeline.”
For more about Avengers Campus, take a look at our comprehensive coverage:
Avengers Campus at Disneyland Resort’s California Adventure is scheduled to open on July 18.
It’s been a strange last year for Spider-Man. Back in August, it was announced that the character would no longer be tied to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Then Tom Holland appeared at the D23 convention to essentially let the fans know that he was as sad about the news as they were. Of course, ultimately, Marvel Studios and Sony were able to agree on a new deal, allowing Spider-Man to remain an Avengers. Throughout all of this, though, nobody said what kind of impact this would have on the Spider-Man ride at the upcoming Avengers Campus theme park expansion at Disney California Adventure.
In fact, until now it hadn’t been confirmed one way or the other if Holland will lend his voice to the attraction, which is officially called WEB Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure and will feature a speaking Spidey. At a recent media preview of the land and ride, though, a little bit more clarity was given.
Speaking to Walt Disney Imagineering creative executive director Brent Strong in a group interview, GameSpot asked if Holland would be voicing Spider-Man on the ride. He responded, “We haven’t made any announcements, but there’s only one Spider-Man.”
Furthermore, it was officially confirmed at a shareholders meeting on Wednesday, March 11, that Holland would be voicing Spider-Man for the ride. All is safe in the world of Spider-Man. Of course, fans will also get the chance to meet Spider-Man and see him web-slinging high above Avengers Campus thanks to an impressive new animatronic being put to use.
For more about Avengers Campus, take a look at our comprehensive coverage:
Avengers Campus at Disneyland Resort’s California Adventure is scheduled to open on July 18.
This is a review for the first episode of anthology series Amazing Stories, which premieres Friday, Match 6 on Apple TV+
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The TV reboot/revival wave has finally washed up on the shores of Steven Spielberg’s short-lived (but memorable) ’80s anthology series Amazing Stories – which was inspired by the Amazing Stories sci-fi magazine Spielberg remembered from his youth.
Striking right at the time of Spielberg’s true zenith, 1985, Amazing Stories was a more family-friendly version of The Twilight Zone, complete with a soaring John Williams score. Now the show is back, with Williams’ theme intact (yay!) through Apple TV+ — under the developmental watch of Spielberg himself along with Once Upon a Time’s Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz.
Much like CBS All Access’ Twilight Zone revival, the new Amazing Stories has, essentially, doubled the average length of the old show’s episodes. What was once a half-hour show, with commercials, now runs over 50 minutes. Usually, this doesn’t help the format — it certainly didn’t with The Twilight Zone. But for Amazing Stories’ first new episode in 35 years? It works… pretty well.
“The Cellar” is a sweet time travel tale that feels appropriately Spielbergian. One often wonders what kind of decisions the creators of an anthology series have to make regarding which episode to open with: Do you go for the safest option, concept-wise, or do you keep your scariest story for later? “The Cellar” feels like a perfectly traditional love story to welcome fans, old and new, to the show. But it’s also not built to grab you in the way that a show has to in this era of Peak TV.
Written by American Horror Story’s Jessica Sharzer, and directed by The Americans’ Chris Long, “The Cellar” features Dylan O’Brien (Teen Wolf, American Assassin) as an aloof lothario who is as non-committal with relationships as he is to his brother’s house restoration business. During a once-in-a-century derecho (which I learned is a strong storm that sticks around longer than usual), O’Brien’s Sam is transported back in time a hundred years and meets young Evelyn (The Haunting of Hill House’s Victoria Pedretti), a woman who’s being forced into a loveless marriage.
Once the two fall in love, the story softly morphs into the final act of Back to the Future, where the duo must evade those who seek to separate them while timing their dimensional exodus via atmospheric anomaly. It’s a storm-crossed lovers tale that sends the dating app-swiping millennial back to a time when most people, especially, women, had very few choices in life, without feeling too preachy. The end result is the discovery that Sam needs to minimize his life while Evelyn needs to expand hers. And there are enough time travel hooks to help the story play out over an hour… just barely.
“The Cellar” is soft and simple and very much tracks as an “Amazing Story,” fitting the gather-round-the-hearth brand of genre TV that the ’80s original transmitted into living rooms. In 2020, however, it might not be enough to lure viewers back in for more. Maybe, like Sam, that’s the lesson we’re all meant to learn as an audience. We need to simplify our television viewing habits.
“We can’t start on it right away because they’re still finishing up the second game, but pretty soon,” Mazin said. “We’ve been talking about it for months and coming up with little plans and things. But we’re going to dig in in full, full earnest pretty soon, just as soon as they wrap up their final work on the sequel. So hopefully more exciting news to come on that front because it’s something we’re both motivated to see on TV.”
Mazin also revealed that he was introduced to Druckmann via a mutual friend, Shannon Woodward, who is Elsie Hughes in HBO’s TV show Westworld. Mazin also talked about how he insisted The Last of Us should be made into a TV show rather than a movie, which it was being turned into previously.
“It was going to be a movie for a long time. Neil was working on it as a movie for one of Sony’s divisions, and my feeling was that you can’t make a movie out of this thing, it has to be a show, it needs length,” Mazin said.
“It is about the development of a relationship over the course of a long journey, so it has to be to be a television show and that’s that. That’s the way I see it. Happily, Neil agreed and HBO was delighted, and so here we are.”
After the announcement of The Last of Us TV show last week, Mazin responded to a question from a fan on Twitter, promising that main character Ellie will still be gay in the show, just as she is in the games.
Update March 11, 2020: The Collector’s Edition is sold out everywhere except GameStop. All other editions are still widely available for preorder.
Ghost of Tsushima is coming to PS4 on June 26. The game is set in the 13th century, as the Mongol army is marching (and sailing) to conquer the East. Tsushima is an island off the coast of Japan, and the first to fall as the enemy fleet arrives and the invasion begins.
You play as Jin Sakai, one of the lone survivors of the first wave of the attack on the island. The story trailer shows some of the attack and introduces some key characters in the game. We meet Jin’s uncle Shimura, the lord of the island and a father figure to our hero. We also meet the leader of the Mongols, Khotun Khan, who quite rudely tries to kill Jin. See how it plays out in the trailer above.
As with many AAA titles, the game will be available in a number of special and collector’s editions, each one containing various extras. Below, we break down what comes in each edition, how much it costs, and where you can place your preorders right now.
The collector’s edition of the game retails for $169.99 and comes with a heap of extras, both digital and physical. As for the physical items, you’ll get a Sakai mask and stand, Sashimono war banner, cloth map of Tsushima, Furoshiki wrapping cloth, 48-page mini art book, and a steelbook case. Digital extras include a director’s commentary, Samurai PS4 dynamic theme, Hero of Tsushima skin set, and one Technique Point to be used in-game.
The digital deluxe edition comes with the following digital extras: mini art book, director’s commentary, Samurai PS4 dynamic theme, Hero of Tsushima skin set (Golden Mask, Body Armor, Sword Kit, Horse, Saddle), 1 Technique Point, and Charm of Hachiman’s Favor.
Preorder any edition of the game, and you’ll also receive a digital mini soundtrack, a Jin avatar, and a PS4 dynamic theme based on the game’s box art.
Coming June 30 is this gorgeous art book to accompany the game. Published by Dark Horse, this 208-page hardcover tome covers the game’s development from start to finish, with detailed images of the characters, landscapes, weapons, and even storyboards used to create the game.
A satire about these extremely politically divided times that we live in — Red State vs. Blue State was reportedly the title of an early version of the screenplay, actually — Universal’s The Hunt is now finally here, almost six months after it was originally scheduled to be released. As it turns out, the film is a blast when it’s at its best, and even when it’s not at its best, it’s still not much to get worked up about in terms of its political message. The Hunt swings big, but it’s much more a critique of hyper-partisanship on both sides than a condemnation of the views of either end of the spectrum.
Produced by Jason Blum through his Blumhouse Productions, written by Watchmen’s Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, and directed by Craig Zobel, The Hunt takes the tried-and-true concept of “The Most Dangerous Game” and applies it to an exaggerated version of our fractured political landscape. This updated concept is the reason the movie was delayed half a year, shifted by the studio over concerns of its release being insensitive coming on the heels of the tragic, politically motivated mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso last August. In the conversation surrounding that shift, The Hunt was criticized in the media and, seemingly, by President Trump.
But to take The Hunt on its premise alone is to miss the point, as it’s through-and-through a satire where hippie-dippy, woke, liberal caricatures compete with rhino-hunting, conspiracy-minded conservative distortions, and none of them are portrayed as being anything close to righteous. Where this war in our real world may have begun on the airwaves of cable news and has been fought largely from the relative safety of social media anonymity, The Hunt takes this splintered political dialogue to its ultimate, bloody, and ridiculous endpoint in the form of a human hunting expedition.
The Hunt is a difficult film to discuss without giving away some of its best surprises, but suffice to say the first act is a hilarious, gory humdinger that jerks the viewer around, pulling the rug out from under you just when you think you’re gaining your bearings. The filmmakers are playing with our expectations here, introducing familiar tropes — the square-jawed hero! The beautiful girl! The meet-cute amid the carnage! — but their very placement is meant as a diversionary tactic, not unlike the bait the hunters lay out for their intended victims. Meanwhile, the hunters quickly settle in as our antagonists as they hunt our identifying characters.
The set-up is simple: A “bunch of normal folks” (quote via the film’s trailer), all apparently of the Red State variety, are spirited against their will to a remote location where they are to be hunted down by a group of “liberal elites” (again, via the trailer), of course of the Blue State type. Familiar faces abound: Emma Roberts (American Horror Story), Justin Hartley (This Is Us), Betty Gilpin (GLOW), Ike Barinholtz (The Mindy Project), and so on. It doesn’t take long for the shooting to start and the aforementioned zig-zags to get underway, but eventually, things settle into a more normal narrative routine. And by then characters like Gilpin’s Crystal have proven compelling enough that you find you have a stake in this contest, despite how outrageous things can get.
Hilary Swank is also here, a corporate high-flyer who — again, in true social-media-age fashion — typed the wrong thing at the wrong time and hit send and has been paying for it ever since. Of course, that’s what The Hunt is really about: the way that the Internet and modern media, social and otherwise, have helped to create a bifurcated society of Us and Them, and one where the slightest misstep can lead to disaster. The Hunt, in many ways, is the ultimate example of how such a scenario — a stray tweet, a dredged-up aspect of one’s past, an inopportune joke gone wrong — can escalate to the point where it ruins a person’s life, or the lives of others. Were you an awful person before everyone online decided you were? Or did that arbitrary judgment become a self-fulfilling prophecy? It’s a chicken-or-egg nightmare that’s insane, zany, and horrific, as told here; but like any good genre film, is also deftly reflected back on us just enough to give one pause.
This could all very easily turn into just dumb caricatures and mindless splatter jokes, but The Hunt makes it work, in no small part due to the subdued yet kick-ass performance of Gilpin in particular. Her character’s quiet exhaustion and simmering anger not just at her involvement in the hunt, but also at her lot in life, is genuinely moving. The filmmakers know how to balance the inane fun of The Hunt’s crazy premise with a smart, stinging commentary about the world we live in.
The film does lose its step a bit in the final showdown, a problem which feels like it may hail from the realm of tacked-on reshoots. There, we learn that perhaps not everyone is what they at first seemed in this story, but the revelation only muddles the message. Is The Hunt telling us that we can transcend our petty and extreme viewpoints? Maybe it’s saying there’s more to us than just our online personas, and that there’s something to that whole “Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged” thing. Or maybe it’s just taking the easy way out by letting one of its characters off scot-free, separating them from the pack of irredeemable caricatures? It’s almost as if the filmmakers know that in the end someone has to win this most dangerous game, and they feel obligated to give us that person in as baggage-free a state as possible. But in pulling its punches like this, the film loses its edge. And if the point is that not everyone is Red or Blue and there are plenty of people just caught in the middle, The Hunt just doesn’t do enough to set that up.
Doom Eternal won’t support true 4K on Google Stadia as was promised when it was announced for the platform a year ago.
Bethesda, the game’s publisher, released new technical specifications for each platform that Doom Eternal is coming to (after leaking them earlier this week). Revealed is that the Google Stadia version of Doom Eternal “will run at 1080p @60 FPS on HD displays and up-sample to 2160p from 1800p @60 FPS on 4K displays.”
For it to be true 4K the game would have to run with a horizontal display resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels, usually 3840 x 2160. Instead, it will run at 3200 x 1800, which means it doesn’t have true 4K.
Upsampling the 1800p display resolution simply means that extra pixels are calculated to make it up to around 4K. However, this is an artificial means of hitting 4K and is sometimes criticised for not having as sharp an image as true 4K.
When Google Stadia was announced at GDC on March 19, 2019, one of the big selling points that was pushed was that it would run Doom Eternal at 4K. Doom Eternal’s co-director Marty Stratton even took to the stage at the time to say the game would run “true 4K.” That’s now been confirmed to not be the case, at least not at launch.
It’s worth pointing out that the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro versions of Doom Eternal will run also be upsampled to 4K as the Stadia version is. However, the PC version’s “Ultra-Nightmare” specs, the highest setting, will support true 4K.
When IGN went hands-on with Doom Eternal on Stadia back in June 2019, id Software said it hadn’t tried demoing the first-person shooter with 4K at that point, but that it would be soon, and would announce details about the 4K support at a later date.
With this latest news it seems that id Software hasn’t been able to get a true 4K version of Doom Eternal working with Stadia yet. It’s not the first developer that has run into this issue.
When Stadia launched in November 2019, controversy arose around Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 for not supporting true 4K on the game streaming platform, despite Google saying its launch games would. In response, Google said that it’s down to developers to get their games running true 4K on Stadia.
Doom Eternal comes out for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Google Stadia on March 20, 2020. A Nintendo Switch version will be released later in 2020. If you pre-order Doom Eternal then you’ll get Doom 64 as a free bonus.
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Chris Priestman is a freelancer who writes news for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.
