The August premiere date of the highly-anticipated Disney+ Star Wars: Ahsoka series is rapidly approaching and there’s an action-packed new trailer that’s sure to delight fans of the animated Star Wars: Rebels series. It’s filled to the brim with live-action appearances from beloved Rebels characters like Hera Syndula, Sabine Wren, Chopper, Ezra Bridger and even series antagonist Grand Admiral Thrawn.

The show takes place in the same timeline of The Mandalorian, but stars Ahsoka Tano, former apprentice of sand-hating Anakin Skywalker. Tano (Rosario Dawson) never appeared in the prequel films but was a mainstay in the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon before moving onto Star Wars: Rebels and, finally, season two of The Mandalorian.

Fans have long-surmised that Ahsoka would follow-up the cliffhanger ending (no spoilers) from Rebels, and they're definitely getting their wish. The trailer's packed with call-backs to the cartoon, even lingering on an animated still that appeared in the series finale back in 2018. For long-time franchise fans, the trailer boasts the very first live action appearance of Grand Admiral Thrawn, played by Lars Mikkelsen.

Thrawn was the primary villain in Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire book trilogy that followed the adventures of Luke Skywalker and the gang after the events of Return of the Jedi. Those books aren’t canon, because Luke went on to become a blue milk-loving hermit or whatever, but Ahsoka looks to be incorporating certain elements from the novels, as have recent seasons of The Mandalorian. Many fans speculate that the juiciest parts of Zahn’s books will make up the basic plot of the forthcoming ‘Filoni-verse’ movie, a crossover event featuring all of the newer TV characters.

Ahsoka premieres on August 23rd, with two episodes dropping at the same time before heading to weekly installments. In addition to Dawson and Mikkelsen, the series stars Natasha Liu Borzizzo, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Eman Esfandi and recently-deceased character actor Ray Stevenson.

Peacock launched a live-action Twisted Metal trailer today that provides a much clearer glimpse of the upcoming series than its teaser from earlier this year. Set to the beat of DMX’s “Party Up (Up In Here),” the campy clip has high-speed chases, guns and carjackings along with ample wisecracks and one maniacal clown — everything you’d expect from a live-action adaptation of the over-the-top franchise.

The two-minute trailer begins with star Anthony Mackie (The Falcon and The Winter Soldier) setting the tone as protagonist John Doe. “20 years ago, the world fell to shit,” he explains. “Cities put up walls to protect themselves and threw the criminals out so they could fight over what was left. But there are humble motherfuckers like me delivering cargo from one walled city to another. That’s where the cars and guns come in.” The series, which Peacock describes as a “high-octane action comedy,” appears to have a self-aware tone that relishes in the game’s extravagance with knowing winks to the audience (metaphorical or otherwise). Think Deadpool-style humor in a Mad Max post-apocalyptic wasteland.

In addition to Mackie, the series stars Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) as a carjacking outlaw who hitches a ride with Mackie’s Doe at gunpoint. We also get a peek at Neve Campbell as Raven, who promises Doe a great reward to deliver a package, Thomas Haden Church (Sideways) as Agent Stone and wrestler Samoa Joe (performing movement) and Will Arnett (voice) as the killer clown Sweet Tooth. The series is written and developed by Michael Jonathan Smith.

Twisted Metal will include ten half-hour episodes. It premieres on July 27th, streaming exclusively on Peacock.

Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI. On Friday, the comedian and author, alongside novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, filed a pair of complaints against OpenAI and Meta (via Gizmodo). The group alleges the firms trained their large language models on copyrighted materials, including works they published, without obtaining consent.

The complaints center around the datasets OpenAI and Meta allegedly used to train ChatGPT and LLaMA. In the case of OpenAI, while it's "Books1" dataset conforms approximately to the size of Project Gutenberg — a well known copyright-free book repository — lawyers for the plaintiffs argue that the “Books2” datasets is too large to have derived from anywhere other than so-called "shadow libraries" of illegally available copyrighted material, such as Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. Everyday pirates can access these materials through direct downloads, but perhaps more usefully for those generating large language models, many shadow libraries also make written material available in bulk torrent packages. One exhibit from Silverman’s lawsuit involves an exchange between the comedian’s lawyers and ChatGPT. Silverman’s legal team asked the chatbot to summarize The Bedwetter, a memoir she published in 2010. The chatbot was not only able to outline entire parts of the book, but some passages it relayed appear to have been reproduced verbatim.

Silverman, Golden and Kadrey aren’t the first authors to sue OpenAI over copyright infringement. In fact, the firm faces a host of legal challenges over how it went about training ChatGPT. In June alone, the company was served with two separate complaints. One is a sweeping class action suit that alleges OpenAI violated federal and state privacy laws by scraping data to train the large language models behind ChatGPT and DALL-E.

Marvel and Electronic Arts have revealed the second game they're making together as part of a deal between the two sides. A new Seattle-based Electronic Arts studio called Cliffhanger Games is developing a single-player Black Panther title.

It will be an action-adventure game with a third-person perspective, suggesting it’ll share some similarities with the likes of Insomniac's Spider-Man titles. According to Marvel, Cliffhanger aims to “build an expansive and reactive world that empowers players to experience what it is like to take on the mantle of Wakanda’s protector, the Black Panther.”

Cliffhanger says it and Marvel Games will collaborate "to ensure that we craft every aspect of Wakanda, its technology, its heroes and our own original story with the attention to detail and authenticity that the world of Black Panther deserves." However, Marvel and EA are staying tight-lipped on further details for now.

Kevin Stephens, who previously held a similar role at Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor developer Monolith Productions, is heading up Cliffhanger. The team includes former Halo Infinite, God of War and Call of Duty developers.

“We’re dedicated to delivering fans a definitive and authentic Black Panther experience, giving them more agency and control over their narrative than they have ever experienced in a story-driven video game,” Stephens said. “Wakanda is a rich superhero sandbox, and our mission is to develop an epic world for players who love Black Panther and want to explore the world of Wakanda as much as we do.”

It has been rumored for some time that EA had a Black Panther game in the pipeline. Last September, it emerged that EA Motive (the studio behind the recent Dead Space remake) is developing an Iron Man game. That too will be a single-player, third-person, action-adventure title, but we haven’t learned more details since. There’s no confirmed release window for either project.

Meta's Twitter competitor is off to a flying start. Within just four days of the app going live on Wednesday evening, Threads already has more than 100 million users according Quiver Quantitative's Threads Tracker. It helps that Thread is a sibling app to Instagram and it's easy for the image-sharing platform's billion-plus users to sign up — unless they live in the European Union, where it's not yet available.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, has provided several updates on Threads' user numbers. The app had 10 million users in the first seven hours and more than 30 million by Thursday morning. Around 24 hours later, that figure had more than doubled. 

It’s very, very early days for Threads, as the app is missing basic features that many users see as essential. It has minimal accessibility options at the minute, with no way to append alt text to an image for those who use screen readers. Search is limited to usernames, there’s no hashtag support and you can't post to Threads from the web.

Perhaps most gallingly of all, Threads doesn’t yet have a chronological feed of posts. The algorithmic feed is full of brands, influencers and celebrities, making it difficult for users to keep up with what friends and family are posting. A chronological feed is on the way, but Twitter may still be many people's app of choice for up-to-the-minute news.

"Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads — they have on Instagram as well to some extent — but we're not going to do anything to encourage those verticals," Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote, noting that the aim of Threads isn't to replace Twitter.

"Politics and hard news are important, I don't want to imply otherwise," Mosseri added. "But my take is, from a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them. There are more than enough amazing communities — sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc — to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news."

Quiver Quantitative's Threads Tracker uses data taken from Instagram users' profiles, according to the person who built the tool, co-founder Christopher Kardatzke. "By viewing the profiles of people who joined the platform, I can see where they were in line and get a general idea of how many users have signed up," he said. He added that the estimates appear to line up with Zuckerberg's Threads posts about user milestones.

Hayao Miyazaki's final film, the tentatively titled How Do You Live?, is coming to IMAX theaters. The milestone marks a first for Miyazaki and the animation studio he co-founded nearly four decades ago. According to Anime News Network, the film will also screen in Dolby Atmos, Dolby Cinema and DTS:X when it arrives in Japan on July 14th.

As Gizmodo notes, past Studio Ghibli films did not receive the IMAX treatment during their original theatrical runs. When you add that to the fact How Do You Live? is supposed to be Miyazaki's swan song (or so the auteur claims), you have the makings of a must-see movie event. However, one potential hitch is that the film doesn't have an international release date yet, and it's unclear if a North American distributor could secure IMAX screens for How Do You Live? when and if it arrives outside of Japan. In recent weeks, the availability of IMAX screens has been a contentious issue in Hollywood, with Tom Cruise reportedly calling some theaters to convince them to screen Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One instead of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.

Details on How Do You Live? are sparse. Studio Ghibli has not released a trailer for the film or bought any TV spots. In fact, the only promotion it has done so far for How Do You Live? is the single poster the studio released last month. The film is an original work but is named after the 1937 novel of the same name by Genzaburo Yoshino. In interviews, Miyazaki has said the book plays an influential role in the life of his film's protagonist.

Late last month, Apple uploaded the debut episode of Silo to Twitter to promote the show's season one finale. Now it's doing the same with its other tentpole sci-fi series. Starting Monday, you can watch Foundation's first episode on YouTube ahead of season two'sJuly 14th premiere.

Apple's live-action adaptation of Issac Asimov's classic novel series of the same name premiered in 2021 following a pandemic-related production delay. As 9to5Mac notes, you can already watch the first episode of the series for free on Apple TV, but that requires access to the app and not everyone might want to install Apple's streaming service on their smart TV. Season two of Foundation sees some of season one's original cast, including Lee Pace and Jared Harris, return. Filming of season three is rumored to be already underway. In the meantime, you can watch the show's first episode on Monday at 2PM ET, followed by a live Q&A with showrunner David Goyer.

Meta's Threads has blown up this week, with more than 70 million registered accounts being registered within around 40 hours of the app going live. One of those users is a particular thorn in the side of Elon Musk as they're posting what the Twitter owner once referred to as "basically assassination coordinates" for him.

In reality, the person behind Elonjet, Jack Sweeney, is using publicly available flight data to share the whereabouts of Musk's private jet in near-real-time. Sweeney used to post that information on Twitter, which bothered Musk long before he bought the company. Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete the account, but the offer was rejected (a counteroffer of $50,000 or an internship at one of Musk's companies never panned out).

In December, a couple months after Musk bought Twitter, the Elonjet account was permanently suspended. Twitter updated its private information rules around the same time to limit users to sharing "publicly available location information after a reasonable time has elapsed, so that the individual is no longer at risk for physical harm."

Sweeney created a new Twitter account that shows the location of Musk's jet on a 24-hour delay, which was A-OK under the tweaked policy. Elonjet accounts on other platforms display more up-to-date information, including Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Mastodon and Bluesky.A subreddit is tracking the plane too.

Elonjet never truly went away for long, but there's something quite fitting about it showing up on Threads. The new app is a blatant competitor to Twitter. So much so, Twitter has threatened Meta with legal action after accusing it of using former employees and trade secrets to build the Threads. Meanwhile, those planning to use Threads to closely keep tabs on Musk's jet will have to keep an eye on Elonjet's profile — Threads bafflingly doesn't yet have a chronological feed of posts.

That said, Elonjet didn't quite escape the wrath of seemingly zealous Threads moderators. According to Engadget alum Saqib Shah, Meta removed the account from the app "in error" but later restored it.

2K announced today that NBA 2K24 will arrive on September 8th. The 25th-anniversary installment in the long-running basketball sim adds crossplay between PS5 and Xbox Series X/S — a first for the series — while celebrating one of the league’s greatest all-time shooting guards.

The game focuses heavily on the likeness of Hall of Famer Kobe Bryant, who died tragically in a helicopter crash in 2020 at age 41. Not only does Bryant appear on the upcoming game’s cover, but 2K added a “Mamba Moments” mode that’s a Kobe-fied version of NBA 2K23’s Jordan Challenge. Similar to the previous installment’s MJ mode, you’ll “recreate some of Kobe’s most captivating performances and progress through his transcendent journey from a young phenom to one of the greatest players of all time,” according to the developer.

NBA 2K24 also adds a new technical feature called ProPlay for current-gen PlayStation and Xbox consoles that translates real-world NBA footage into the game engine. It “delivers animations and movements via on-court NBA action for a generational leap in authenticity on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S,” the description reads. 2K says it will tell us more about ProPlay and Mamba Moments “later this summer.”

The title will ship in three variants: the Kobe Bryant Edition (the standard version), the Black Mamba Edition and a 25th Anniversary Edition. The Kobe Bryant Edition will cost $70 for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S and $60 for Switch, PC, PS4 and Xbox One. The Black Mamba Edition adds virtual currency and a long list of digital collectibles for $100. Meanwhile, the $150 25th Anniversary Edition (only available through September 10th) adds everything from the Black Mamba Edition along with a 12-month subscription to NBA League Pass and other in-game collectibles and boosts.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie has been available for digital purchase and download from various sources for a little while now. The film will be available to rent starting July 11th on services such as Apple TV and Amazon Video. It was even available to watch through Twitter for a short period of time. But for those who prefer (or already subscribed to a ton of) streaming services, the movie will be hitting Peacock on August 3rd, according to Deadline. 

Despite some earlier mixed reviews, most fans seemed to like it overall. The Super Mario Bros. Movie even broke box office records. When we checked the movie out, our reviewer Devindra Hardwar thought that it was great for all ages with endless references that didn’t take you out of the movie if you’re not a diehard Nintendo fan. Its A-List cast includes Jack Black as Bowser, Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong, Keegan-Michael Key as Toad and Chris Pratt as the lovable Mario. The movie follows the Mario Bros struggling to get their Brooklyn-based plumbing business off the ground. Somehow, someway (you’ll have to watch the movie to find out) the duo falls into the Mushroom Kingdom and ultimately have to battle it out with the one and only Bowser.

The success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie hopefully sets a precedent for more films from Nintendo. It’s long been rumored that Nintendo is working on a Legend of Zelda movie or TV series, and the success of Mario might give them reason to finally do it.