As with many wild and dramatic stories, the tale of Theranos and its former CEO Elizabeth Holmes is getting multiple adaptations. The Jennifer Lawrence-led Bad Blood, which was just snapped up by Apple, will likely get the most attention. (Expect it to get plenty of Oscar love, like Adam McKay's recent films, Vice and The Big Short.) But don't count out Hulu's miniseries, The Dropout. First announced in 2019 with Kate McKinnon as the infamous serial fibber, Elizabeth Holmes, the series will now star Amanda Seyfried when it premieres on March 3rd, 2022.
Hulu
Judging from the first round of pictures, Seyfried certainly captures the wide-eyed magnetism of Holmes. It's also surprising to see the great Naveen Andrews (Lost, Sense8) as Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, Theranos' former COO and Holmes' former boyfriend. According to Hulu, the series will follow "an unbelievable tale of ambition and fame gone terribly wrong. How did the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire lose it all in the blink of an eye?"
Theranos managed to raise over $700 million from investors due to its seemingly miraculous device, the Edison. It was a blood testing machine that was supposed to test for a wide range of illnesses. But of course, it was all a lie. Reporting from the Wall Street Journal and others revealed that the company's technology never actually worked. Ultimately, the SEC charged Theranos, Holmes and Balwani with "massive fraud."
Alex Gibney's HBO documentary, The Inventor, did a serviceable job of covering the drama around Theranos, and Holmes' unusual mystique. But there's also plenty of ground to cover in a dramatic adaptation.
When Grand Theft Auto Online’s “The Contract” expansion arrives later this week, Dr. Dre won’t be the only musician joining the game. The DLC will also add a new station hosted by Rosalía and Arca, Rockstar Games announced on Monday. Motomami Los Santos will see the frequent collaborators play music from the likes of Popcaan, Daddy Yankee and Caroline Polachek of Chairlift fame.
The station will also play “La Fama,” the first single off of Rosalía’s upcoming third album, Motomami. While they’re not household names, both Rosalía and Arca have found a lot of success in their respective genres. Rosalía, in particular, has won eight Latin Grammy Awards, including an album of the year award for her sophomore release, El Mal Querer.
In addition to Motomami Los Santos, The Contract will include updates for two existing in-game stations. Radio Los Santos will add new tracks from Hit-Boy, Freddie Gibbs, Future and Tyler, The Creator, while West Coast Classics will host a new segment dedicated to Dr. Dre. It will feature career-defining collaborations the rapper recorded with 2Pac, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Nas and others.
Rockstar Games will release The Contract on December 15th. After the 16th, GTA Online will only be available on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC.
Universal Music Group is hitching its wagon more firmly to the metaverse hype train. The record company teamed up with avatar company Genies to create digital versions of its artists, as well as non-fungible token (NFT) outfits and accessories, for use in virtual worlds.
The idea is to give Universal's artists official virtual identities for the metaverse. Some of the roster, including Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes, had already asked Genies to make avatars of them. Now, the plan is for Rihanna, Migos et al to be able to take those facsimiles into various metaverses, or use the avatars across social platforms. In the coming months, through an NFT marketplace run by Genies, fans will be able to buy and sell virtual merchandise for the avatars.
This isn't Universal Music Group's first foray into the metaverse. Last month, it announced a virtual band comprising four characters from the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, a bit like Gorillaz.
Other prominent brands are looking to make waves in the metaverse, including Adidas, which seems to be working on its own NFTs, and Nike, which built a virtual playspace and a store for digital goods inside Roblox. That platform is one of several in the gaming space (including Fortnite) that helped pave the way for other companies and brands to venture into the metaverse.
Warning: If you’re planning to watch the Sex and the City revival, And Just Like That, avert your eyes for this intro — spoilers are incoming. Peloton probably wished everyone did just that.
Yes, the ubiquitous, expensive exercise bike featured in a major plotline in the first episode of the new series, which itself isn’t particularly shocking. The shock came when Carrie's husband, Mr. Big, died of a heart attack after he finished a 45-minute Peloton class on the company's Bike (with real instructor Jess King in a fictional role as… a Peloton instructor).
The plotline hit Peloton’s stock price over the weekend — something the company has seen over the last year as many folks head back to their gyms or perhaps, like me, justdon’t want to stay in their homes to exercise anymore.
Peloton was also caught unawares — the company knew HBO would feature a Peloton in the episode and that King would portray an instructor, but "confidentiality reasons" prevented it from learning it would kill off a character.
It released a statement saying that Big’s death was probably due to his “extravagant lifestyle” — the guy was smoking a cigar earlier in the episode and had previously suffered a heart attack.
I doubt the result of Peloton’s appearance on the show will be a net negative — it’s arguably the most talked-about twist from the premiere of a highly anticipated TV show. It’s definitely a test of the adage: Is any publicity good publicity?
It sucks fluid out of astronaut's heads and toward their feet.
More than half of NASA astronauts that went to the International Space Station (ISS) for more than six months have developed vision problems. Researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a sleeping bag that could prevent or reduce those problems.
Fluids tend to accumulate in the head when you sleep, but on Earth, gravity pulls them back down into the body when you get up. In the low gravity of space, though, that fluid collects, applying pressure on the eyeball, leading to vision impairment. The researchers have made a sleeping bag that effectively sucks fluid out of astronauts' heads.
It's the latest attempt to hijack a major politician's social media profile.
An intruder temporarily seized control of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Twitter account over the weekend. The attacker tweeted a claim that India had adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and pointed users to a (broken) scam website. For followers of Modi’s account — or anyone familiar with his stance on cryptocurrency — it was obvious something had gone wrong.
The company also promised an easier way to track failures in the future.
Amazon has explained the Web Services outage that knocked parts of the internet offline last week. As CNBC reports, Amazon revealed an automated capacity scaling feature led to "unexpected behavior" from internal network clients. Devices connecting that internal network to AWS were swamped, stalling communications. The AWS division has temporarily disabled the scaling that led to the problem and won't switch it back on until there are solutions in place. A fix for the glitch is coming within two weeks, Amazon said.
The tech word of 2021 is definitely “metaverse,” crowbarred into the collective conscious when Mark Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s new name, Meta.
Metaworld founder Dedric Reid has been selling his interpretation of the metaverse for the past five years. His vision is a decentralized space, a “10,000-square-mile vast-scale simulation, owned by community and run by community,” according to Reid.
But the story of Metaworld is one of patchy crowdfunding, communication silence, fake promotional assets and some understandably angry backers. To borrow from The Matrix, read Senior Editor Jessica Conditt’s full report to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
CNN just landed a big name for its upcoming streaming video service. The network has revealed that Fox News host Chris Wallace is leaving his TV home of 18 years for CNN+ ahead of that service's early 2022 launch. The departing Fox News Sunday anchor said he was eager for the "freedom and flexibility" streaming would allow for interviewing major figures.
In his last Fox News Sunday show, Wallace said he wanted to both "try something new" and to "go beyond politics." He didn't indicate where he was heading next during that broadcast, however. Wallace is believed to be jumping ship as his contract expires.
WarnerMedia, meanwhile, wasn't shy about touting its coup. The Wallace hire showed CNN's "commitment" to both CNN+ and journalism as a whole, CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker said.
It's too soon to say if CNN's move will prompt a talent war among streaming news outlets like CBSN. Fox News Sundayhasn't always fared well against comparable shows, like Face the Nation. Regardless, Wallace represents a big bet — CNN is clearly hoping his name will draw viewers to its internet-only service and provide an edge over competitors that might only see streaming as a nice-to-have extra.
You won't have to wait too much longer to catch Marvel Studios' Eternals on Disney+. The movie will be available to stream on January 12th. That's just over two months after the most recent Marvel Cinematic Universe film, which received lukewarm reviews, arrived in theaters.
In September, Disney announced that its remaining slate of theatrical releases would get at least a 45-day run in theaters before they were available to stream — save for Encanto, which will hit Disney+ on December 24th, just 30 days after it landed in cinemas. Eternals was one of those movies, but Disney evidently decided to keep the movie exclusively in theaters beyond that minimum timeframe of 45 days.
Starting with Mulan last September, Disney experimented with allowing Disney+ subscribers to stream theatrical releases at home on the same day they debuted in cinemas for an extra fee. However, Scarlet Johansson sued the company, claiming that the streaming strategy cost her up to $50 million in lost earnings from Black Widow. Disney settled the suit.
Sonic the Hedgehog turned out to be one of the biggest movies of 2020, despite serious CG character issues that caused a three-month delay. Now, Paramount has dropped the first trailer for the sequel that gives us our first look at a new character, Knuckles, voiced by none other than Idris Elba.
The trailer shows Sonic (Ben Schwartz) and his new sidekick Tails (Colleen O'Shaughnessy). He's once again taking on Dr. Robotnik, aka, Eggman (Jim Carrey) who's seeking a classic Sonic McGuffin, the Chaos Emeralds. However, Robotnik has an Echidna up his sleeve in the form of Knuckles, who shows off his brute strength and weirdly elegant speaking voice. (Elba promised that his Knuckles wouldn't sound sexy, but he is more posh than ever.)
The first Sonic film became one of the most successful video game adaptations ever, so there's a lot riding on the sequel. Luckily, the slick trailer indicates that we won't be seeing any of the CGI issues that plagued the first film. The sequel is set to be released on April 8, 2022.
The 2021 Game Awards kicked off last night, mixing the year’s winners (It Takes Two, Deathloop, Kena and several more) with fresh game trailers and bona fide compelling new releases incoming, including Alan Wake 2. (I’m finally playing through the original at the moment, so this piqued my attention.)
We also got a release date for Final Fantasy VII Remake on PC, new Star Wars, Dune and Star Trek games and several (ten, actually) Lady Gaga hits coming to Beat Saber. There may be something for every gamer.
Oppo has teased its first foldable smartphone nearly three years after it unveiled a prototype device. The Find N looks like a device along the lines of Samsung's Galaxy Fold lineup, created after "four years of intense R&D and six generations of prototypes." Expect to hear more next week at Oppo’s Inno Day on December 15th — which is good because the company hasn’t shared many concrete specs just yet.
He played a key role in the history of game consoles.
Masayuki Uemura, the lead creator of the Famicom and Super Famicom (aka NES and SNES), died on December 6th at the age of 78. Uemura, initially employed by Sharp, first became involved with Nintendo after the company's Gunpei Yokoi asked about using Sharp solar cells to produce light gun games. Uemura joined Nintendo in 1971, and the company released gun games that included a home-friendly game called Duck Hunt (yes, the predecessor of the NES title). By November 1981, Uemura was tasked to build a machine that lets you play arcade games on your TV. The result was 1983's Famicom, known to the rest of the world as the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Before Amazon's Alexa became known as the company’s voice assistant, it was the name of its web-ranking site. It was established in 1996 and became famous some time ago for analyzing web traffic and listing the world’s most popular websites.
While Amazon didn't explicitly say why it's shutting down the service, Alexa Internet's traffic has reportedly been on the decline over the past decade. At least the name will live on in Amazon’s smart speakers, displays and the rest.
Paramount+ is adding 18 live channels (just like TV). The initial batch includes one focused entirely on Star Trek, which will stream episodes from new shows like Discovery and Picard and classics such as Enterprise and The Next Generation. (I'm not sure Enterprise is a classic, but you know what I mean.) There are also franchise-specific channels for Survivor, The Challenge and, oh boy, PAW Patrol.
It may not be suspicious, but it certainly is a surprise. Among Us is getting the first-person, VR treatment, and the experience is heading to PlayStation VR, Meta Quest 2 and Steam. There's no release date, but this is seriously happening, people.
Among Us VR was revealed during Thursday night's The Game Awards, with a short trailer showing off a glimpse of first-person gameplay. It plays like the original, with players attempting to complete tasks and figure out who among them is the impostor, but from a first-person perspective. Developer Innersloth had the following to say about the new project:
"This new 3D experience will place you and our suspicious spacebeans in the heart of the Skeld, with all of the core mechanics of teamwork and betrayal you know and love. The VR edition will continue to support the multiplayer experience too, of course! Now you can really have an emergency meeting together."
Among Us VR won't be compatible with the original version of the game, of course. It's in development by Innersloth, Robot Teddy, and Schell Games, the studio behind I Expect You To Die.
After a dearth of games, Star Trek fans have something to look forward to in 2022. Sometime in the spring, ViacomCBS will release Star Trek: Resurgence, a new third-person adventure game from Dramatic Labs, a studio made up of former Telltale Games developers, including individuals who worked on The Wolf Among Usand The Walking Dead.
Set after the events of The Next Generation, Resurgence will feature two playable lead characters: First Officer Jara Rydek and Crewperson Carter Diaz. In a setup that sounds like classic Star Trek in the best possible way, it’s up to them to unravel a mystery involving two alien races that are ready to go to war with another. Dramatic Labs said Resurgence will also feature appearances from “returning” characters. It also noted its building the game in the Unreal Engine, which hopefully means the game won’t have the jank Telltale’s games were known for in the studio’s later years.
We’ll have to see how Resurgence turns out, but based on the talent involved, Star Trek fans can at least be cautiously optimistic. That’s not something that’s been true in recent years. Outside of Bridge Crew, there haven’t been many great Star Trek games since the early 2000s when titles like Bridge Commander and Elite Force did the universe justice.
Star Trek: Resurgence will arrive in spring 2022 on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Windows. On PC, it will be exclusive to the Epic Games Store.
