For all the conveniences of streaming, there’s still something to be said about venturing out to see a film at a movie theater. Sure, there isn’t an endless amount of choice, and you can’t pause when something else requires your attention but seeing a compelling film on the silver screen is its own treat.

On September 3rd, US cinemas will make it more affordable to enjoy that experience. As part of a newly announced National Cinema Day, more than 3,000 theaters across the US, including chains like AMC, will offer discounted $3 tickets. With all major film studios and more than 30,000 screens involved, there’s a good chance a theater near you is participating.  

“After this summer’s record-breaking return to cinemas, we wanted to do something to celebrate moviegoing,” said Cinema Foundation president Jackie Brenneman. “We’re doing it by offering a ‘thank you’ to the moviegoers that made this summer happen, and by offering an extra enticement for those who haven’t made it back yet.”

While people are returning to theaters to see films like Dune and Top Gun: Maverick, the promotion comes at a time when the industry is still dealing with the aftermath of COVID-19. The pandemic saw movie studios like Universal significantly shorten theatrical windows, and many chains, including Regal Cinemas, struggled to stay open amid strict lockdown measures in the US and other parts of the world.

The Last of Us Part I, a complete remake of PS3 classic The Last Of Us, will hit PS5 on September 2nd (and PC at some point in the future). Not only will the game include all of the extensive accessibility options from 2020’s The Last of Us Part II, Naughty Dog has revealed some extra ones that it's including.

One that takes advantage of the DualSense controller seems particularly novel. “[A feature that] started as a prototype but ended up being really successful during playtesting is a feature that plays dialogue through the PS5 DualSense controller as haptic feedback," game director Matthew Gallant told the PlayStation Blog. "That way a deaf player can feel the way a line is delivered, can feel the emphasis, along with the subtitles to give some sense of how that line is delivered."

Another big accessibility update is audio descriptions for cutscenes. Gallant said Naughty Dog teamed up with a company that delivers descriptions for TV, movies and game trailers. The feature will be available across all the localized languages in The Last of Us Part I. “We’re expecting this to be an accessible experience for blind players, for deaf players, for players with motor accessibility needs,” Gallant said.

The blog post details all of the settings, including presets for vision, hearing and motor accessibility. You can expect visual aids and a way to zoom into a specific section of the screen using the touchpad. You'll be able to fully remap the controls — there's even the option to link a command to shaking the DualSense. There are also in-depth settings for motion sickness, navigation, traversal, combat, the heads-up display and, of course, difficulty.

It's heartening to see Naughty Dog place so much emphasis on making its games as accessible as possible. Not every developer has the resources of that studio, but here's hoping more game creators take inspiration from Naughty Dog's work in this area. In the meantime, if you want to find out much more about The Last Of Us Part I, you can read Engadget's review on August 31st.

This week, Cherlynn is joined by UK Bureau Chief Mat Smith to discuss what they expect Apple to announce at its upcoming event on September 7th. Besides new iPhones and Watches, what might the company launch? Our hosts are also joined by senior reporter Jess Conditt to go over the highlights from Gamescom, including Sony’s new DualSense controller and PSVR2 update. We’ll be taking a break next week, so come back in two weeks for a new episode!

Listen below, or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!

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Topics

• Apple confirms September 7 “Far Out” event – 1:46

• What to expect from the IFA electronics show in Berlin – 32:35

• The most interesting news out of Gamescom 2022 – 41:56

• Other news: Mark Zuckerberg's bad VR avatar and a movie based on BlackBerry – 1:11:47

• Working on – 1:13:01

• Pop culture picks – 1:15:48

Video Stream

Credits
Hosts: Cherlynn Low and Mat Smith
Guest: Jess Conditt
Producer: Ben Ellman
Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos
Graphics artists: Julio Barrientos, Cherlynn Low
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

A blockbuster court case centering on who had access to a celebrity’s Instagram Stories will be the subject of a new documentary on Disney+. Wagatha Christie will tell the story of broadcaster Coleen Rooney, who is married to former Manchester United and England football superstar (and current DC United coach) Wayne Rooney. After stories about the Rooney’s life were leaked to the press, stories that were only apparently communicated via private Instagram Stories messages, Coleen opted to do some detective work. After a lengthy winnowing process, Rooney believed that the source of the leaks was Rebekah Vardy, the wife of Leicester and former England star Jamie Vardy.

The case, which has taken on a new and distinct character thanks to social media, was then prompted after Rooney publicly announced that Vardy was the source of the leaks. In a single tweet containing a screenshot essay, Rooney explained how she had narrowed down the options with a series of fake stories targeted at increasingly-small Instagram close friends groups. The disclosure prompted Vardy to sue Rooney for defamation, but Vardy managed to substantially weaken her own case after failing to produce data called for as part of the trial.

(Oh, for those not in the know: WAG is an abbreviation of “Wives and Girlfriends,” a derisory term used to denote the soccer player’s partners, often while playing for the national team. Agatha Christie is the author of a number of famous detective stories, including the Poirot and Miss Marple series. Don’t say the British don’t love a good pun every now and again.)

Back in February, Netflix announced it was working with 2K and Take-Two Interactive for a live-action movie based on the BioShock series. The project has taken an important step forward, as it now has a writer and director on board. Michael Green (Logan, Blade Runner 2049 and American Gods) is on script duties, while Francis Lawrence will be keeping the director's chair warm.

Along with I Am Legend, Lawrence has directed four of the five Hunger Games movies as well as some episodes of the Apple TV+ series See. He's currently shooting The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, so don't expect a trailer for the BioShock movie anytime soon.

It appears as though the film will in fact be an adaptation of the first game. Netflix's Tudum site explains a few basics of the original BioShock and notes that Lawrence will presumably "strap into a Big Daddy suit and get ready to brave the flooded corridors of Rapture soon enough." For the sake of clarity, there's only one question truly worth asking: Netflix, would you kindly reveal more details about the movie?

Twitter really isn’t giving up on this whole “also becoming an audio app” thing. The platform announced today it is testing a newly re-designed Spaces tab that will also offer a selection of popular podcasts. The podcasts — which include well-known titles from Vox Media, NPR and more — will be categorized under themes like news, music and sports and featured alongside similar Spaces. Twitter is currently testing the feature with a limited group of global English-speaking users on the iOS and Andriod apps, with a wider release and more features on the way.

Earlier this year, under-the-hood sleuth Jane Manchun Wong discovered that Twitter was working on a “Podcasts” tab. Instead, it appears Twitter wants to lump all of it audio content under Spaces as an all-in-one destination for podcasts and live audio. Furthermore, the Spaces tab features separate categories for current Spaces, upcoming Spaces and a “Stations” tab that will group podcasts and Spaces under similar themes — which it will auto-play once selected.

If this doesn’t seem like the most instinctual or user-friendly design for those looking for a specific podcast or episode, you’re right. Instead, Twitter seems to have tailored the feature to work as a sort of a curated radio experience in the style of Pandora. Users can rate each audio selection with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down," allowing Twitter to further tailor a station to fit your specific interests. This isn’t restricted to content you view under Spaces. As the company noted in its blog post, if you regularly interact with Vox Media content on Twitter, you’ll likely see their podcasts show up in your Spaces tab.

Sony revealed a few months back that a Netflix show based on Horizon Zero Dawnwas in development and now we have a few more details. Steve Blackman, the creator and showrunner of The Umbrella Academy, has re-upped his deal with Netflix and is working on the adaptation.

Blackman said the game's protagonist, Aloy, will be a main character in the show. This is also the first confirmation from Netflix that the series will be based on Horizon Zero Dawn, instead of a show that's set in the same universe. Rumors previously indicated it would be set in 2047, before the fall of humanity and nearly a thousand years before Aloy was born. Still, the show may still depict some of the events that led to animal-like robot organisms reigning over Earth.  

"Horizon Zero Dawn is an exceptionally well-crafted game with wonderful characters not often seen in the rank-and-file of the gaming world. Guerrilla Games has created an incredibly lush and vivid world of man and machine who find themselves on a collision course to oblivion," Blackman told Netflix's Tudum site. "Their salvation comes in the form of a young female warrior named Aloy, who has no idea she's the key to saving the world. My writing partner on this, Michelle Lovretta, and I are thrilled to be able to expand this remarkable IP into a series for all types of viewers."

The latest update on the Horizon Zero Dawn project came as Netflix renewed The Umbrella Academy for its fourth and final season. The other show Blackman is currently developing is an intriguing-sounding thriller called Orbital, which is set on the International Space Station.

"From a character- and world-building perspective, there's a clear throughline: I gravitate to characters who are grounded and relatable but exist on the fringe," Blackman said about his projects. "Outliers who struggle to find their place in a world of conformity and structure. All my stories strive to subvert expectation and find a new way of looking into the worlds we think we know." Aloy fits that description perfectly.

Netflix is working on the Horizon Zero Dawn series with PlayStation Productions, which has a ton of other shows and movies based on Sony's games in the pipeline. Among them are HBO's The Last of Us, a Gran Turismo film, a God of War series for Amazon Prime Video and the Peacock show Twisted Metal. Recent reports suggested that movies based on Days Gone and Gravity Rush are in development too.

Supermassive Games, which you might know for developing Until Dawn, has released the trailer for the fourth entry of The Dark Pictures Anthology at Gamescom 2022. The anthology, which the developer first announced in 2018, is comprised of interactive standalone titles that tackle various horror tropes and subgenres. This entry is entitled The Devil in Me, and it's all about serial killers. It centers around a group of documentary filmmakers who gets invited to visit a replica of the Murder Castle, the hotel in Chicago where H. H. Holmes tortured and killed his victims. And because it's a survival horror game, of course things aren't what they seem, and the characters find themselves being watched and controlled.

The game serves as the anthology's Season One finals and will have to solving tool-based puzzles to survive and escape "killing rooms" where failure means death — and yes, all playable characters can die during your playthrough. If you don't want to play alone, you can share your story online with a friend or play offline with up to four other people using the pass-the-pad mode. 

The Devil in Me will be available starting on November 18th, 2022, and unlike Until Dawn, it won't be a PlayStation-exclusive. In addition to the PS5 and the PS4, it will also be playable on the Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, as well as on PCs. You can watch the game's full trailer below:

Facebook looked different for at least a couple of thousands of users when they logged in earlier today. Instead of seeing posts from their friends and from the groups they're in, they saw their feeds spammed with random people's posts on celebrities' pages instead. As UK news organization Sky News reports, users posted about their dilemma on other social networks like Twitter, showing the state of their News Feeds with screenshots. 

Apparently, everyone following a certain celebrity page — say, The Rock's — were getting everything other people were posting on it in their timelines. Since users tend to follow multiple celebrities, their feeds got clogged with posts from strangers on the website. Some reportedly even used the opportunity to promote their businesses or look for jobs. 

While there are no official stats on what percentage of users was affected, over 2,600 people have reported the issue to DownDetector over the past few hours. Over 80 percent of the reports came from people using the desktop version of the social network, with the rest reporting issues with the app.

Sky News also says outages had been reported not just in the UK, but also in the US, Spain, Canada, Mexico, Italy, France, Poland and Australia. Facebook told the news organization that it's aware of the issue, but it didn't elaborate on what went wrong. In a newer statement provided to Metro UK, a Meta spokesperson said that the problem was caused by a "configuration change" earlier today. They added: "We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

For a while, BlackBerry phones were the phones to have, used corporate bigwigs and heads of state to answer emails and do tasks they couldn't normally do on other cell phones. Those days are long gone. Now, film studios want relive the rise and fall of the company from the time it was still known as Research in Motion until it lost its fight against Google and Apple in a new movie. According to Variety, the upcoming film that's simply entitled BlackBerry is directed by Operation Avalanche director Matt Johnson and has recently wrapped production. 

It stars Jay Baruchel (This Is The End) and Glenn Howerton (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), Variety says. And though it's not confirmed, they're likely playing the company's founders and co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. The screenplay is based on the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by The Globe and Mail reporters Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. Since the book was published in 2015, the movie likely won't include all the failed attempts to revive the brand that happened in the years thereafter. 

In 2019, TCL manufactured new BlackBerry phones until the company decided not to renew its contract and stopped selling the devices merely a year later. Security startup OnwardMobility then announced that it was planning to release a 5G BlackBerry smartphone with a physical keyboard in 2021 for North America and Europe. In the end, however, those plans never came to fruition. OnwardMobility reportedly lost its license to use the BlackBerry name and ultimately shut down the company in February this year.