If you’ve held off on getting an Xbox One X until now, we’ve got good news. Amazon just dropped a bunch of deals on Xbox One X bundles, packaged with games like Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order, Gears 5, and NBA 2K20. These are the cheapest these bundles have been since Black Friday deals came around, so act now before they go back up in price or you’ll have to wait for another sale.
Xbox One X 1TB Console Bundle with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – See It
Xbox One X 1TB Console Bundle with Jedi: Fallen Order on Amazon – $349.99 (save $150)
This bundle includes a 1TB Xbox One X console, an Xbox One wireless controller, Jedi: Fallen Order deluxe edition, one month of Xbox Live Gold, a one month trial of Xbox Game Pass, and one month of EA Access.
Xbox One X 1TB Console Bundle with Gears 5 – See It
This bundle includes a 1TB Xbox One X console, an Xbox One wireless controller, Gears 5 ultimate edition (including downloads for Gears of War 1, 2, 3, and 4), one month trial of Xbox Game Pass, and one month trial of Xbox Live Gold.
Xbox One X 1TB Gears 5 Limited Edition Bundle – See It
Xbox One X 1TB Gears 5 Limited Edition Bundle on Amazon – $349.99 (save $150)
This bundle includes the Gears 5 Limited Edition 1TB Xbox One X console (with that fancy skull COG art), the Gears 5 limited edition wireless Xbox One controller, Gears 5 ultimate edition, Gears 1, 2, 3, and 4, a one month trial of Xbox Game Pass, and a one month trial of Xbox Live Gold.
This bundle includes a 1TB Xbox One X console, a wireless Xbox One controller, a digital download of NBA 2K20, a one month trial of Xbox Game Pass, a one month trial of Xbox Live Gold.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence proved that Bad Boys are indeed for life as the long-delayed third installment of the Bad Boys franchise, directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, raked in an impressive season $68.4 million dollars for its first four days (and $59 million for Fri-Sun). That’s reportedly almost double what expectations were.
As Deadline notes, Bad Boys for Life now holds the second best MLK weekend opening ever, behind 2014’s American Sniper.
Bad Boys for Life is also “Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, garnering mostly positive reviews from critics. Our own review even called it an outrageous sequel “you’ll likely love.”
Meanwhile, Universal didn’t manage to crawl out of the Cats-size hole they found themselves in over the holidays as Dolittle fizzled out slightly with second place and an estimated $30.6 million for the four-day weekend.
It’s not a terrible debut, but it’s certainly not what the studio was hoping for given the $160-$175 million budget and Robert Downey Jr. as the headliner. Industry experts think the film might do okay in the end, but will it do well enough to launch the franchise Universal was hoping for?
Dolittle, unlike Bad Boys for Life, has also been panned pretty hard by critics. It received a “3” from us and was labeled a “disastrous mess.”
1917 continued to ride high off the spoils of great reviews and earned awards, trailing only slightly behind Dolittle. After that it was Jumanji: The Next Level and Episode IX filling out the Top 5.
Just Mercy stayed strong in its second week, barely dropping by much, pulling in $6 million for sixth place.
Here are the Top 10 North American box office estimates for the (3-Day) weekend (via Box Office Mojo)
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
After The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich decided that she was going to use Dunkirk as an inspiration for telling Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri’s story all at once in Season 1, blending both the Geralt short stories and the “saga” elements of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books, she then knew an entire backstory needed to be crafted for Anya Chalotra’s Yennefer.
One the most recent Netflix Behind the Scenes podcast, Hissrich explained how Yennefer’s first season arc had to be meticulously pieced together in the writers’ room, based on very little from the early Geralt stories. When Yennefer is introduced in Sapkowski’s pages, she’s already a full-formed, powerful mage. Little else is known about her past.
Readers knew that Yennefer was part of the Battle of Sodden Hill, which we saw take place in the Season 1 finale, but the rest of her “past” was mostly reflected in this passage from the short story “The Last Wish.”
“The witcher approached, watchful and silent. He saw her left shoulder, slightly higher than her right. Her nose, slightly too long. Her lips, a touch too narrow. Her chin, receding a little too much. Her brows a little too irregular. Her eyes . . .
He saw too many details. Quite unnecessarily.”
“The are a couple of sentences in the books,” Hissrich said. “Just a couple of sentences where she is reflecting on her past. Or where Geralt is surmising things about her past.”
“The writers and I culled through all of those sentences, pulled them together, and then crafted a story from them.”
Instead of relegating Yennefer’s past to flashbacks, Hissrich decided to build out her entire timeline. “To me, for fans, I think it will be fun to watch Yennefer develop and say ‘Oh, I recognize what was wrong with her before her transformation.’ Or ‘I recognize her reference to her abusive father.’ But we actually get to see her abusive father. We actually get to see her experiences in her disabled body and to me that’s the added bonus of being able to do this on television.”
Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
The Xbox Adaptive Controller has been an important step for making games more accessible, but it’s had an obvious downside–it’s only compatible with Xbox. However, one man has found a way to change this, customizing an Xbox Adaptive Controller to work on Switch for his daughter.
Rory Steel, head of the Digital Jersey Academy, tweeted out a video of his daughter playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Switch using a heavily customized Xbox Adaptive Controller. There’s a lot of cables involved, and he says that this is only the first version, with further iterations to come. But it all works, and his daughter is clearly very pleased.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer has shared the tweet as well, calling it “incredible.” Steel posted an in-progress photo earlier, too, showing how much wire work was involved. He completed the project in a single weekend.
Microsoft said back at E3 2018 that it would love to see the controller working on PS4 and Switch, and while official support has not come, it looks like it’s technically possible on Switch at least.
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The first beta test for Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary‘s release on PC is coming up soon. Developer 343 Industries announced in a blog post (via Windows Central) that the first public test–or “flight” in the Halo vernacular–will begin in February.
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is the second title within Halo: The Master Chief Collection that’s coming to PC and other digital stores, following Halo: Reach at the end of 2019.
Microsoft is looking to test various elements of Halo: Combat Evolved, including the campaign (both solo and co-op), as well as multiplayer and its progression system.
In addition to launching the first Halo on PC, this next testing phase will include updates and improvements for Halo: Reach that Microsoft is testing before rolling out publicly. One of the updates is a feature that allows players to crouch while moving, which is supported on both mouse and keyboard and controller.
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary for PC will cost $10 USD on its own or $40 USD through The Master Chief Collection. A release date for Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary’s final version for PC hasn’t been announced yet. The remaining titles in the package–Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo 4–will release later. They will also be tested first through the Halo Insider program before launching publicly for everyone.
Part of the reason why Microsoft is being so thorough and extensive with its testing is because Halo: The Master Chief Collection got off to a horrible start on Xbox One back in 2014, and the company doesn’t want to repeat those same mistakes. It’s also worth noting that Halo: The Master Chief Collection is in a very good places these days with active player populations and ongoing support and updates.
2020 is a very big year for the Halo brand, as 343’s other internal team is working on Halo: Infinite for release across Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC later this year.
Confederate, the controversial HBO show from the minds of Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, has been officially canceled. HBO programming boss Casey Bloys confirmed this to TVLine.
Confederate was to take place in an alternate reality and depict the ramifications of a Confederate victory during the American Civil War. It would have been set in a version of America where slavery had not been abolished.
Back in 2017, the show’s announcement sparked some controversy, with many arguing that Weiss and Benioff were not the right pair to tackle this subject matter. In May 2019, Bloys said that the show was not a priority, and when Weiss and Benioff signed their new deal with Netflix, it looked like Confederate was done for.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a huge movie, earning 10 nominations at the 2020 Academy Awards and grossing over $373 million worldwide. Now, in an interview with critic Peter Travers on YouTube, Tarantino has talked about his process working on the film, and what inspired the film’s narrative.
(Warning: some spoilers for the movie follow.)
Tarantino recalls the slow process of writing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and says that when he initially started work, it didn’t take form as a movie script right away. “I wasn’t in a hurry to sit down and write a movie script,” he says. “Even my very first couple of years writing on it, I wrote it as a novel, or at least a couple of chapters as a novel, in a exploratory way.”
An opening scene between Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Pacino was initially written in the style of a one-act play. These were exploratory writing activities, Tarantino explains; he never seriously intended to write the whole piece as a book.
Tarantino says that the movie really started to coalesce when an older actor on a movie he was directing (he does not give specifics) approached him about their own stunt double, who they’d been working with for nine years. The actor approached Tarantino and asked if they could maybe use the stunt double for a scene they were shooting soon, for the sake of giving the stunt double something to do in the movie.
On the day in question, the stunt double showed up and did a great job. Tarantino says that as the day went on, he observed the relationship between the actor and their stunt double. “You could tell that there was a time where this guy was a perfect double for the actor,” Tarantino recalls. “Perfect. I mean, you could have shot close-ups with the stunt guy, and they would have passed. This time…was not that time.”
Instead, there was an air of melancholy to the pair, Tarantino recalls.: “this was maybe the last or second-to-last thing they’d be doing together.”
Tarantino says that as he watched the two actors, who were both dressed in the same costume, have a discussion, he could “see the whole nine years of their relationship,” knowing that this is the tail end of it. He thought about what this friendship would look like, when “one is working for the other”. The stunt person, he thought, is the one person the actor always knows on every movie set, as they might find themselves working with actors or directors they don’t know. “Wow…that’s an interesting relationship,” he thought.
Tarantino also talks in the interview about Sharon Tate, and how he thinks she has been, historically, “reduced to an extra in her own story” because of the brutality and cultural impact of her murder. He talks about how audiences, when they think about Sharon Tate, are mostly just going to think about her murder at the hands of the Manson family–before they’ve seen the film, at least. “I think the perception of Sharon has changed…now people think of her as more than just a murder victim.”
He also addresses controversy around how few lines Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate has in his film. “The fact that people would think that a character is denoted by the level of dialogue that they have…that is a situation where I just don’t agree with that hypothesis.”
The director also addresses his impending apparent retirement from film-making after his next movie. “I haven’t retired, so the idea of me talking about the aesthetics of my retirement before I’ve retired is kind of obnoxious…But I guess I do believe that directing is a young man’s game,” he says, saying that he’d like to work more as a writer. “My modus operandi is facing a pile of blank paper, where there was nothing before, and filling those blank pages,” he says.
Tarantino would like to “lean a little more into the literary,” he says, and become more of a homebody following the impending birth of his first child. However, he also acknowledges that he’s not entirely sure what he’ll do next.
Tarantino was attached to direct a new Star Trek movie until recently, but it looks like that film won’t be happening now. Tarantino also intends to direct the five episodes of Bounty Law he wrote for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the Avenue 5 premiere follow…
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Those looking for a new series that matches the acerbic wit and venom of Veep could obviously do worse than HBO’s Avenue 5, from Veep (and The Thick of It) creator Armando Iannucci. Yes, even though an argument could be made that the series became even funnier when Iannucci left as showrunner after Season 4 and David Mandel took over, Avenue 5 is still filled to the brim with enough spiteful workers, bitter cogs, and depleted hollow leaders to satisfy anyone’s penchant for rampant pessimism.
Bottom line: Avenue 5 is funny. The series opener, “I Was Flying,” certainly has a handful of drop-dead diabolical lines. But the witticisms are also often sidelined because of the series’ sci-fi skin. As a viewer, you spend equal time absorbing both the premise and the jokes and because of that some of the dry laughs don’t land.
Because it’s the pilot, one gets caught up trying to figure out the bones and bible of this future world (that smacks of Wall-E, Brazil, and a few other surreally defeatist takes on humanity’s fate) at the expense of some of the humor. Obviously, as the series goes on, the particulars of the show’s world will start to feel normal and more attention can be paid to the idiots in charge of this vanity pleasure cruise around Saturn (that gets magnificently derailed into a galactic prison), but this first episode has the unenviable job of introducing us to everything while still having to be funny.
The ensemble, while chock full of comedy chops, is lacking crucial root-ability at the moment. This could easily change as it the show moves forward and finds nuances to the characters that allow us enjoy them a bit more, even as soulless as most of them are. Of course, Veep’s bread and butter was verbal brutality but we still perversely rooted for the Selina Meyer and her team as the perceived underdogs. The best part of Veep, in fact, was that we could equally enjoy Selina’s wins as much as her humiliating losses. We don’t quite have that yet with Avenue 5 as it follows people in charge who don’t care about the people they’re supposed to protect – and also the people themselves, who are nightmares in their own right.
House M.D.’s Hugh Laurie (also of Veep, and of a tremendous British comedy background) is the anchor here, as Captain Clark, space “hero,” in charge of glad-handing and keeping spirits up aboard space-cruiser Avenue 5. Part of his day-to-day not only involves smiling and motivating, but tolerating Josh Gad’s man-baby Herman Judd, the hapless head of a Buy n Large-style tech company that’s taken over the cosmic exploration biz (as well as most of Earth one might assume). Because of Judd’s ridiculous needs and unfounded wants, the pilot-less luxury liner experiences a gravity mishap that sends it off course. So much so that a two month excursion becomes a three-year trek of terror.
The biggest laugh from the premiere actually involves a detour from the dialogue, as an entire Avenue 5 yoga class gets hurled into the side of the ship while the passengers’ loved ones get to witness the disaster unfold in real time on Earth – but with a 26 second delay. It’s fun to watch people panic with no immediate follow up to the catastrophe, as they have to wait for the transmission to catch them up. It was a big enough, and funny enough, moment that it was able to break through some of the series’ distracting gimmickry.
Lenora Crichlow’s second engineer, Billie, seems to be the odd one out, here at the start, as the only character devoid of ego and cruelty. Among Zach Woods’ misanthropic concierge, Suzy Nakamura’s humorless executive, and the other callous characters she might best represent our interests and ideas. It’s hard to say though. Avenue 5 feels like a social experiment as much as a high-concept comedy. As if everyone on board thought they were in the Good Place, only to find out it’s all a Bad Place illusion designed to push everyone to the brink of anxiety and agony.
Warning: Full spoilers for Episode 3 of The Outsider follow…
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The Outsider began to resemble Hulu’s Castle Rock, in a certain “mixtape” sense, this week with “Dark Uncle.” And by that I mean King-verse character Holly Gibney, played here by Oscar nominee Cynthia Erivo, made her debut while Holly Gibney is also currently being played by another actress (Justine Lupe) over on the Audience Network’s Mr. Mercedes. Not that The Outsider and Mr. Mercedes are meant to exist in a shared universe like King’s books.
See Holly is also a key character in King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, which includes the books Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch. Now the other show’s Holly is still a menagerie of mental maladies and marvels, but The Outsider’s take on her is still very much its own thing. It’s an iteration, and a portrayal, that’s different enough to (if you’d like) consider the two to be different characters. Overall, it’s just fun trivia and a way of segueing into the fact that Erivo is absolutely fantastic here.
With Holly in the mix The Outsider basically becomes a different show. Not tonally, per se, but now it’s now more of a full-fledged monster hunt, in very able-bodied X-Files way, featuring an investigator who’s going to be totally open minded about whatever she finds. And that’s going to hit a brick wall, most likely, with Ralph and the rest of the team. Especially Ralph since he flat out said he has no time or tolerance for the unexplained.
The way the first two episodes premiered together on the same night makes even more sense now given the introduction of Holly here and the shift away from the main town. With Jason Bateman’s Terry dead, and the damage already done back home — including the deaths of young Frankie’s family (Ralph eyes their fresh graves at one point) — the story is going to branch out more fully and dig into the lore of what this doppelgänger-type creature is. But there’s still a nice slow burn happening. The information is changing but the pace hasn’t quickened and that helps tether us to the Terry episodes.
Erivo gives us a Holly who’s both haunted and assured. Both vulnerable and in control. She’s a wonderful mix of limitations and savant-like acumen. And she lays it all out on the table for Ralph during their meeting. Her mental gifts got her poked and prodded by teams of cold scientists as a youth and now she’s doing her best to cope and contribute. So why is she brought in? Well Ralph’s guilt over all that went down has him working, while out on leave, to find out what happened. Not in full to clear Terry’s name (though he’d like to), but just to uncover the truth so it doesn’t eat away at him. And when Yunis shows him the bizarre evidence (and ooze) the creature left behind in a barn, the two head to Howie Gold for help.
Because of this, the story now has two prongs: Ralph back home tending to the Maitland grief (and young Jessa Maitland’s dreams that probably aren’t dreams) and Holly out in Dayton retracing the Maitlands steps. Which opens us up to a new wrinkle in the mystery.
“Dark Uncle” contained a mini-mystery that unfolded throughout, centered on an incarcerated man fearing for his life after he spotted a new inmate he was almost certain had arrived to kill him. Answers didn’t come to us until they came to Holly, in that her reading about why the cops would have questioned Terry’s dad for a completely unrelated issue led her to the case of hospital worker convicted of killing two girls.
We can safely assume, at this point, it’s a doppelgänger situation and that this creature/being kills in a chain, going town to town, spreading misery. And that its clone targets aren’t necessarily picked on purpose, but more circumstantially. The way the story opened, with the tale of Terry visiting his dad, with none of the family present, made it seem like maybe his father had some root cause in all of this. But the dad was just the reason Terry was in the same hospital as this inmate – who wound up killing himself rather than get shivved.
THE MOST STEPHEN KING THING YET
Nothing says Stephen King more than a bully-slash-creep who gets targeted, and puppeted, by the monster. And here we’ve got Jack, a drunken violent detective played by Marc Menchaca. To the show’s credit — and it just did the same thing with Holly — we didn’t meet Jack until the show wanted us to. It makes everything feel organic when characters enter focus as needed. Like how messy would everything have felt if we also followed Holly, off in Chicago, during the first two episodes?
Anyhow, Jack got himself stung (darted? quilled?) in the barn as the creature attacked him and…infected him? The back of Jacks neck looks like a burn and the injury is also so debilitating that the entity can cause Jack severe pain from far away, like flipping a switch. In time, the doppelgänger will probably turn Jack into its own person Renfield.
Examining the creature’s powers, at this point, we know that it can take someone else’s form. It also sheds that shape, in some manner, leaving behind glop and what seemed to be dried skin patches. Now, as of “Dark Uncle,” it can spit venom onto someone’s neck and cause them pain. We can guess that that pain makes them bend to the beast’s will as the thing didn’t kill and/or consume Jack. It let him go.
Now as for Jessa’s dreams…she was obviously somehow talking to the thing. Four times. But can it go in her dreams or was it actually in the house? And also, why her? Why not tell Ralph himself? It seems like a self-sabotage move (ya dumb monster!) since very few people would take Jessa’s story as being real. On the upside, the moment allowed Mare Winningham’s Jeannie to step forward as a more active character. At least someone more active than just being Ralph’s partner in mourning.
