Netflix dropped a trailer for its upcoming series The Sandman, which is set to debut on August 5th. The highly anticipated show is based on the popular graphic novels by Neil Gaiman from the nineties, and features the likes of Tom Sturridge, Gwendolyn Christie, Stephen Fry and Patton Oswalt. Netflix also announced today that Mark Hamill will be voicing the kingdom's resident handyman Merv Pumpkinhead.
The new trailer is less than two minutes long, but gives us a good glimpse at how the show will recreate the mystical realms in which the story is set. The Sandman follows the King of Dreams, also known as Morpheus (played by Sturridge) after he escapes captivity and returns to his now suffering kingdom, the Dreaming. But a number of people aren’t happy about that, including the occult detective Johanna Constantine (played by Jenna Coleman) and The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), a former inhabitant of the Dreaming who went rogue.
The decision to adapt Gaiman’s best-selling graphic novel series may seem like a no-brainer for studio execs, but it took a lot of effort to actually make happen. A planned film adaptation by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Batman Begins screenwriter David Goyer fell apart after disagreements with the studio. Admittedly, the show’s source material is a tricky one to adapt and spans multiple timelines. Gaiman has previously stated, "I'd rather see no Sandman movie made than a bad Sandman movie.” Hopefully, the Netflix treatment will do the story justice.
TikTok is joining forces with Pearpop to launch a comedy docuseries hosted by creator Jericho Mencke, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It's cost $5 for all eight episodes, each 30 minutes long, with the first two running for free for all TikTok users.
Called Finding Jericho, the series will feature Mencke doing comedic interviews with characters like a clown from Craigslist. It'll be executive produced by Pearpop executives Zack Bernstein and Austin Sokol, along with Mencke.
Last month, TikTok unveiled the Live monthly subscription tool for creators on an invitation-only basis, after unveiling the service in January 2022. It allows creators to "increase their earnings while continuing to grow their communities" with perks like subscriber badges, custom emotes and a subscriber-only chat.
In 2020, TikTok announced a $200 million fund to support creators, but the subscription service gives personalities a more direct stream of income. Pearpop, meanwhile, is a separate platform that allows creators to "monetize their influence" through challenges and brand sponsorships. The first episode of Finding Jericho premiered late yesterday at 9PM PST and following episodes will arrive Tuesday and Thursdays at the same time on the @Jercho1 and @pearpopofficial TikTok accounts.
A few months after confirming the existence of Street Fighter 6, Capcom has revealed that the upcoming entry to the fighting franchise will come out in 2023 for the PS 5, PS 4, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Like the company promised in its initial teaser, the game will include Luke, a key DLC character for Street Fighter V, as well as fan favorites Ryu and Chun-Li. The video game developer previously described Luke as "a key player in the future of Street Fighter" who would help expand its world.
Capcom is using its own RE Engine to develop the fighting game, and it says that gives it the capability to make sure finer details shine through, such as the look of individual muscles tensing up. The company also used the RE Engine to for its other popular titles, including Resident Evil Village, Devil May Cry 5 and Monster Hunter: Rise.
One of the features debuting with the title is Real Time Commentary, which will provide easy-to-understand explanations about gameplay for your matches. These commentaries will be voiced by notable Fighting Game Community commentators, starting with Jeremy "Vicious" Lopez and Aru, and they'll support subtitles in 13 languages.
It will also feature modes from previous entries, along with two new ones called World Tour and Battle Hub. In addition, Capcom is introducing Modern Control Type with Street Fighter 6 to make special moves easier to execute: It will allow you to perform special attacks simply by pressing the button for it along with directional input.
The company has yet to announce an exact release date for it, but you can watch a trailer for the game below:
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has only been in theaters for a few weeks, but you won't need to wait much longer to catch the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie at home. It will start streaming on Disney+ on June 22nd at no extra cost to subscribers.
In another example of the theatrical exclusivity window narrowing, the movie will be available on Disney+ just 47 days after its arrival in theaters. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Free Guy also landed on Disney+ just 45 days or so into their theatrical runs.
It used to be the case that movies would be in cinemas only for 90 days before they were available as home entertainment options, but the pandemic upended that. Some major studios, including Disney, started putting movies up on streaming services or made them available for digital rental on the same day they debuted in theaters. Netflix and some smaller studios and distributors adopted the day-and-date approach long before the onset of COVID-19 prevention measures.
Meanwhile, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness isn't the only MCU property coming to Disney+ this month. The Ms. Marvel series will premiere on June 8th.
Four decades after famed film director Quentin Tarantino and his "Pulp Fiction" co-writer Roger Avary started their employment at Video Archives in 1983, the pair are reuniting once again to host a podcast exploring those seminal moments and the movies that influenced their later careers in The Video Archives Podcast, premiering on Sirius Stitcher later this summer.
“We never imagined that 30 years after we worked together behind the counter at Video Archives, we would be together again doing the exact same thing we did back then: talking passionately about movies on VHS,” Tarantino and Avary said in a joint statement. “Watching movies was what originally brought us together and made us friends, and it’s our love of movies that still brings us together today.”
The films will be pulled from Tarantino's extensive collection of more than 8,000 tapes and DVDs — Video Archives' actual archives that he bought after the rental shop went out of business.
Meta is adding a slew of new tools to Reels as it tries to keep up with TikTok. The updates include new editing features, longer uploads and the ability to push reels into Facebook feeds. The changes come as Meta has made competing with TikTok one of its top priorities. Mark Zuckerberg has said that attracting younger users — who are increasingly spending more of their time on TikTok, not Meta-owned apps — is the company’s “north star.” And that Reels will be “as important for our products as Stories.”
In keeping with that theme, Reels on Instagram are getting several features that have long been popular on Stories, including poll, emoji and quiz stickers, which have helped boost engagement with Stories over the years.
The app is also adding new editing tools that should give creators more flexibility in the types of videos they can create in the Instagram app. Notably, creators will be able to import their own audio, so they can add sounds from videos in their Camera Roll to their Reels.Instagram is also adding templates, to make it easier to riff on other creators’ videos. Finally, the app is expanding the maximum length of Reels to 90 seconds, which is nowhere near the 10-minute videos TikTok recently announced, but is a significant bump from the previous 60-second limit.
Meta is refreshing Reels on Facebook as well. The company is adding separate editing tools for desktop, including video clipping features so creators can easily grab portions of live and other longer form videos and turn them into Reels. Facebook is also getting new scheduling and audio tools to more easily publish and edit reels from desktop.
Finally, Facebook will start pushing a lot more “suggested” Reels into users’ feeds. Reels will appear more often on Facebook, similar to how Reels have slowly been taking over Instagram’s feed in recent months. The company will also prompt Instagram creators to start cross-posting their Reels to Facebook.
BioWare has finally shared more than the briefest of teases for its next Dragon Age game. The studio has revealed that the future title will be named Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, and that it will revolve around its enigmatic namesake character. The Dread Wolf, also known as Solas, is rumored to be an ancient elven god and could be a traitor, a hero for his people or something in between.
More details for Dreadwolf are coming later in the year, BioWare added. The company still hasn't committed to a release date, but it emphasized that the new Dragon Age game wouldn't arrive in 2022.
Word of the new Dragon Age first emerged in December 2020, but little has been mentioned since. There may have been a sharp change in direction, however. Reports emerged that BioWare and EA scrapped plans to make Dreadwolf a Destiny 2-style "live service" game in favor of a more conventional single-player experience. If so, this isn't shocking — BioWare's online-only Anthemfloundered, while Respawn's multiplayer-free Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was a hit that prompted a sequel. The long development time might be necessary to rework the game and deliver the follow-up series fans are expecting.
Just a couple of weeks after divulging the release date for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Activision Blizzard is set to show off much more about the next game in the long-running series. A "worldwide reveal" will take place on June 8th at 1PM ET.
The embattled publisher teased the reveal when it announced the October 28th release date last month. Activision previously confirmed some of the characters who will appear in Modern Warfare II, including John “Soap” MacTavish and Simon “Ghost” Riley. The reveal will surely offer a lot more info, probably including a first look at gameplay.
Infinity Ward is on deck for this year's Call of Duty game, which is a sequel to 2019's Modern Warfare.That itself was a reboot of the Modern Warfare sub-series, which started in 2007 with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Confused yet? Don't blame you.
Infinity Ward is also working on a major revamp of the Call of Duty: Warzone battle royale, which will arrive at the same time as Modern Warfare II. Among the updates will be a new engine for both games.
As promised, Sonos has launched its own voice assistant. Sonos Voice Control is now available on every speaker the company has released with a built-in mic. As with most new features, you set it up via the Sonos app on your iOS or Android device, and it's a super simple process. I just added the feature to my Sonos One (the second-generation model released in 2019) and it took a scant five minutes.
Once it is set up, you can ask Sonos Voice Control to start music from a handful of services, including Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Deezer and Sonos Radio. Saying "Hey Sonos" activates the assistant, and from there you can ask it to play artists, albums, songs or playlists. From there, you can adjust volume, pause music, skip tracks and ask the assistant to tell you what song is playing. And as we saw in a demo last month, the assistant is voiced by actor Giancarlo Esposito — though he doesn't talk much. The assistant was designed to minimize responses and keep music playback at the forefront.
Sonos Voice Control also lets you control your entire Sonos system, whether or not the speakers have microphones. You can use it to add or remove speakers from a group, start music playback on all Sonos devices in your home, and combine these requests all in one command. (Example: Hey Sonos, start playing music in the bedroom and stop it in the living room.) Sonos made privacy a big part of its voice assistant, as well — the company says that all requests are processed locally on the speaker with nothing transmitted to the cloud or back to Sonos.
To celebrate this launch, Sonos is having a rare sale, too. The company's two portable speakers — the larger Move and the comparatively tiny Roam — will both be 20 percent off from Saturday, June 4th through Sunday, June 12th. It's not often that the company does direct discounts on its products, so it's not a bad time to check these speakers out if you're in the market for something you can take with you this summer.
Nearly four years after Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal to a mostly apathetic audience at Blizzcon 2018, the game is finally here. And if you’re like me, there’s a good chance you haven’t followed Immortal’s development since its first showing. Not knowing what to expect, I had a chance to play the game ahead of its official launch tomorrow and left the experience both excited and worried about what I saw.
Set five years after the end of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, Immortal opens with your character arriving by boat in the town of Wortham, a location from Diablo 3. You find the hamlet under attack by Skarn, the self-styled Lord of Damnation.
I haven’t played the game’s story through to its end, but what unfolds following the introduction is a far more interesting narrative than what Diablo 3 had to offer. Immortal inherits some of its predecessor’s more annoying tendencies. Characters, particularly villains, talk too much, and the game is missing the atmosphere that made past Diablo games so memorable. But on the whole, Immortal serves as a more fitting sequel to its predecessors than Diablo 3 ever did.
Blizzard / NetEase
One early zone in the game sees your character venture to the Dark Wood, an area from Act One of Diablo 2. There, you’re reunited with characters like Akara and Kashya. The voice actors aren’t as memorable as their Diablo 2 counterparts, but the way Immortal pulls on the narrative threads established in its predecessor to continue that game’s story is satisfying and memorable.
But what is even more impressive is that Blizzard tells the story in the context of an MMO. As you go about your adventure, you’ll see other players doing the same, and you can freely group up to tackle the campaign – in addition to dungeons, raids and Immortal’s many other activities – as a party.
Even on a small display, the game features classic Blizzard polish. Controlling your character is similar to titles like League of Legends: Wild Rift. On the bottom left of the screen, there’s a virtual thumbstick for moving your character, while on the right-hand side, you have dedicated buttons for your different skills. Immortal includes controller support, and if you own a Razer Kishi or Backbone One, they’re the best way to play the game on mobile.
Blizzard / NetEase
You can use up to five skills at any one point. At first, combat feels simplistic, but once you have a full complement of abilities, there’s a fun rhythm to your demon slaying. The best part is encountering stronger enemies like elites and bosses. The latter involve multi-stage fights that reward you for learning their move sets. With Immortal, I can safely say the moment-to-moment gameplay is the best it’s ever been in the Diablo franchise.
But with only two primary and 12 secondary skills per class, it feels like there’s less build diversity than in past games. Unlike his Diablo 2 counterpart, I can’t play my Immortal barbarian as an ax-throwing ranged character or a singer who shouts his enemies to death. He’s strictly a dual-wielding melee character.
Modifying your skills also feels more limited than the system Blizzard had in place with Diablo 3. Instead of earning skill runes as you level your character, you find legendary items that tweak their abilities. For example, I found a piece of armor that made it so my barbarian’s whirlwind attack would send out gusts of winds as he spun about. You can equip a legendary weapon or armor piece in every one of your primary item slots, meaning you can add six modifications to your skills.
Blizzard
Most items drop with slots you can modify with stat-enhancing gems. Currently, there are two types of gemstones in Immortal. First, there are the “normal” ones you obtain primarily by completing hidden lairs. These are dungeons you can find in the game’s various zones. Each time one opens in the area you’re exploring, Immortal will notify you and you’ll have a few minutes to find it. You can earn up to six normals gems per day by completing hidden lairs. It’s also possible to obtain them as part of bundles you can purchase with real money, from other players via Immortal’s in-game auction house and a merchant who will trade you them in return for an in-game currency called Hilts.
And then there are the game’s legendary gems. They are the most powerful way to enhance your character, with each one adding new abilities to their attacks. For instance, one I obtained with my barbarian empowered him with lightning that would chain to nearby enemies.
You probably already have a sense of where this is going. Not all legendary gems are equal. Many of the one- and two-star ones are relatively easy to obtain, but if you want to outfit your character with the best-in-slot gems for their class, the sense I get is that you will have to spend money.
Blizzard / NetEase
That’s due to how Blizzard and NetEase designed the system for obtaining those gems. They drop exclusively through dungeons called elder rifts. You can play through one whenever you want and they take at most three to four minutes to complete. The catch is that you can modify the rewards you get at the end of an elder rift with rare and legendary crests. The former you can obtain through the merchant I mentioned earlier, and as part of one-time bundles you can buy for completing certain milestones with your character. The game also gives you one free rare crest per day.
Rare crests increase your chance of earning one-star legendary gems by five percent. Legendary crests, meanwhile, give you a 100 percent chance for a legendary gem to drop at the end of an elder rift. The catch here is that what one you will get is up to chance. Adding a further wrinkle to things is that five-star gems can be anywhere between one and five stars in quality when they drop, and you may need to use other gems to unlock their full potential.
There are a few ways to earn the odd free legendary crest, but you’ll be primarily buying them. A pack of 10 costs 1,600 of the game’s premium currency, or about $25. Legendary crests represent Immortal’s primary form of monetization, but you can also spend money on cosmetics, an enhanced battle pass and a few other things.
The gem system has enough similarities to loot boxes that Activision Blizzard won’t release Immortalin countries with laws against that kind of monetization. It’s also a setup that rewards “whaling.” In other words, the players willing to spend nearly endless amounts of money on the game will be the most powerful.
Blizzard / NetEase
How you will feel about Immortal’s monetization will depend on what you want to get out of it. You can safely ignore all the systems I mentioned if all you want is to play through the game’s story and level your favorite classes. But just how much you’ll need to spend to participate in the game’s endgame is hard for me to say. Going into tomorrow’s release, the consensus among Immortal’s community is that the answer is a lot.
Again, all of that may not matter to you, but if there’s an issue with Immortal’s monetization, it’s how counter it is to the spirit of the franchise. When Blizzard removed Diablo 3’s controversial gold and real-money auction housesin 2013, the studio said it did so because they ultimately undermined the game’s core gameplay.
It must also be said how easily Immortal could become addictive for some people. In the week Blizzard granted me early access to the game, I spent nearly every spare moment I could find playing through it because I was having so much fun. And when the game becomes officially available on June 2nd, I plan to spend money on things like the enhanced battle pass, but I won’t pay to buy any legendary crests because I think that system is predatory. Some won’t have that restraint.
Outside of Diablo 2: Resurrected,there hasn’t been a new Diablo game in 10 years, and, as of this June, it will be 23 years since Blizzard released Diablo 2. And I think that’s what makes Immortal so easy to be conflicted about. It shows the studio can still create engaging experiences when it gives its talented staff the time they need to work on a project, but it’s also a game that’s impossible to separate from its economics. It’s easy to see a scenario where Immortal is hugely successful for the studio and ends up informing its approach to Diablo 4 and future projects.
