A three-part documentary series on DC Comics is coming to HBO Max, according to Deadline. Warner Bros. Unscripted Television is producing the documentary, which will detail the influence and legacy of DC from the time it was established and the time Superman was born in the 1930s. The division is working with Leslie Iwerks (as co-director and executive producer) and Greg Berlanti (as executive producer) for the project. 

Iwerks is known for several other high-profile documentaries, including The Pixar Story that showed audiences what happens behind the scenes at the animation studio and The Imagineering Story, which gives viewers a look at how Disney develops rides and attractions for its parks. She will co-direct the documentary with Mark Catalena, who served as editor for The Imagineering Story. Meanwhile, Berlanti is a prolific writer, director and producer who'd previously worked on Doom Patrol, Supergirl, DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Superman and Lois, The Flash and Black Lightning.

Jim Lee, DC's Publisher and Chief Creative Officer, said in a statement:

"DC has a rich legacy of over 80 years of iconic storytelling: from the introduction of the genre defining Super Hero Superman in 1938 to the amazing movies, TV shows, cartoons, games and comics which have been synonymous with superheroism for generations thereafter. We are so excited to dive into this history and bring fans along this amazing journey."

The docu series doesn't have a release date yet, but it will expand HBO Max's DC offerings further when it arrives. WarnerMedia started migrating all DC Universe content to HBO Max last year, making the former streaming platform a comics-only subscription service.

Disco Elysium finally has a launch date for the Nintendo Switch over a year after its developer ZA/UM confirmed that it's heading to the console. The Final Cut version of the critically acclaimed title will be available from the Nintendo eShop on October 12th, with a physical release to follow next year. ZA/UM says the version heading to Switch isn't a port, but rather a "painstaking reassembly" of the game, with its redesigned user interface and font-scaling options.

The Final Cut version of the the game first became available for PCs, Stadia and PlayStation earlier this year. It doesn't just come with fresh playable content, but also full voice acting for the detective RPG. The hit indie open-world RPG is plot-heavy and features gameplay mechanics that focuses on dialogue and your choices. In the game, you'll take on the role of a detective trying to solve a murder case while suffering from drug and alcohol-induced amnesia. 

Disco Elysium was originally released for Windows in 2019 and has won multiple awards since then. Last year, ZA/UM and production house Dj2 Entertainment revealed that they're working to turn it into a TV series, though those plans will most likely take a while to solidify. For now, you can pre-order a digital copy of the game for Switch for £35 / US$40 / €40. You can also pre-order a physical collector's edition shipping in the second quarter of 2022 for the Switch or the PS5 for $250. The game is also expected to be available on the Xbox in the future, but ZA/UM has yet to announce a release date for platform.

During Thursday's latest Nintendo Direct event, acclaimed video game designer Miyamoto Shigeru announced that the company's upcoming feature length animation project — in conjunction with American film studio, Illumination — now has a firm North American theatrical release date of December 21st, 2022.

While release dates for Europe, Japan, and other markets have yet to be revealed, Miyamoto did share the studio's key character casting decisions. Chris Pratt will voice Mario. "He's so cool," Miyamoto commented. Anya Taylor-Joy, star of Netflix's hit series Queen's Gambit will portray Princess Peach while It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Charlie Day will voice Luigi. Jack Black will of course be the voice behind series villain, Bowser, while Keegan Michael-Key has been cast as Toad. And, for some reason, Seth Rogan will be in this too as Donkey Kong? The company is also bringing back long-time voice actor Charles Martinet — who has portrayed Mario and the rest of his cohort in a number of games to date — to fill in on various cameos throughout the film.

The following contains spoilers for episode three of 'Star Wars: Visions' and episode seven of 'What If...?'

Back in the days when DVD was king, I remember there was a trend of making animated tie-ins for live-action franchises. There were direct-to-video features for Chronicles of Riddick, Van Helsing and, the most famous project of them all, The Animatrix. Nearly 20 years later, streaming reigns supreme and services like Disney+ seem to be returning to the idea, but bigger and grander with shows like Marvel’s What If…? and Star Wars: Visions.

Visions, premiering this week, is probably the more ambitious of the two, enlisting talent from various Japanese anime studios to create short films about different aspects of the Star Wars universe. The list includes juggernauts like Trigger (Kill la Kill, Promare) Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Haikyu!!) and Science SARU (Devilman Crybaby, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!). Unlike The Animatrix, Lucasfilm was content to mostly hand over the reins to these studios, creating shorts that differ in tone, style and, most notably, continuity.

Robot Jedi? Sith twins? Intergalactic rock band whose members include a Hutt and a former Jedi padawan? It’s an intriguing array of concepts, but as a long-time Star Wars fan I couldn’t tell you how they fit into the timeline. If they fit in, at all. Visions is more about taking some base concepts — the Force, the Jedi, the Sith — and playing around with them in each studio’s unique style. It reminds me the most of Batman: Gotham Knight from 2008, a collection of shorts also by various anime studios, including Production I.G. The one thing that DC Entertainment has always had going for it is the variety of TV and movie adaptations it’s had going on independently of each other, where audiences just understood that these weren’t meant to be connected in any way.

Lucasfilm

However, even for DC things have been changing in that regard, especially after last year’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover. For years now, the TV “Berlanti-verse” has been flirting with continuity, not just in how The Flash was a spinoff of Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow was a spinoff of both, but even having the Flash and Supergirl meet up even though they were on different networks and in different universes.

DC

“Crisis” upped the ante by merging these separate worlds in the end, while also confirming almost every other DC-based TV show as part of the bigger multiverse. It was great for fans who obsessively watch every comic book program they can, but less so for people who would rather keep their viewing limited and compartmentalized.

On the other side, Marvel didn’t have the same deep catalog as DC did, with its live-action MCU franchise only taking off 13 years ago. Marvel Studios was perfectly happy to wipe the slate clean of everything that had come before, from the 1989 Punisher film to 2007’s Ghost Rider with Nicolas Cage. Since then everything live-action has tied into the universe somehow, including Netflix shows like Daredevil, Hulu shows like Runaways and the Freeform show Cloak & Dagger. This was great for someone committed to the franchise, but could be daunting to casual viewers.

It also presented some creative constraints. Everything Marvel now had to fit in with the larger MCU somehow, so once a character appeared another movie or show couldn’t present its own take on the same person (alas, poor Inhumans). They couldn’t have world-shaking events outside of, say, the Avengers films — at least, not without making some kind of excuse why Captain America or Thor couldn’t just come charging in. Everything had to be carefully planned out as the universe expanded and connected internally.

That’s partly why the show What If…? exists. Sure, it’s based on a pre-existing comic series, but what both show and comic do is allow creators free rein with the characters and events of the Marvel Universe, experimenting to see what would happen if you change one or two things. Though this week’s is hardly a “slight” difference.

Marvel Studios

The point of divergence here is that Odin doesn’t adopt Loki as his son, leaving Thor to become an arrogant, spoiled child who prefers to party rather than take his duties as the would-be king of Asgard seriously. How is he still worthy of Mjolnir? We have no idea and the episode isn’t interested in telling us. Instead we’re shown how Thor likes to take the Warriors Three on long benders across the galaxy, with his next destination being the “backwater” of Earth. And everyone’s invited — Drax, Rocket, Howard the Duck, the Grandmaster and even Loki and the other ice giants who somehow, are friends with Thor anyway in this reality. When you consider why and how these characters got involved in the “main” timeline in the first place, it really doesn’t add up.

Marvel Studios

You could just try to enjoy it at face value, as just a silly story with no larger bearing on continuity. However, the point has been made repeatedly that this show is technically, in continuity, and not just in the sense that the Marvel Universe consists of many realities and everything is valid somewhere. While other comics and shows can be given an official universe “number” like 616 or 1,999,999 and just written off as a huge divergence from what we know, the concept of What If…? is that it shows us incremental changes from the MCU in particular. But the divergences shown in this week’s episode are far more than incremental, with an offbeat, cartoonish tone to match. It’s the least What If-like What If…? installment so far.

Unfortunately, like most of the episodes so far, it still ends on a downbeat, one that’s sort of rushed in and not explained. I can’t even imagine how we ended up with a Vision-Ultron hybrid in possession of the Infinity Stones and, unless this episode gets a sequel, it doesn’t really matter. The ending is just a non sequitur to affirm, as every episode does, that the regular MCU sequence of events is the “correct one.” It’s tacked on, and makes what was already a messy adventure even worse.

Lucasfilm

This is where the strength of Star Wars: Visions lies. There’s no attempt to tie the episodes to each other or the larger Star Wars universe. It lets each installment stand on its own as an homage to the larger “ideas” of Star Wars, while also showcasing the idiosyncrasies of each studio. The third episode, “The Twins,” is a great example of this in action. There’s a lightsaber fight on the hull of a Star Destroyer! No one is wearing environmental suits! They’re yelling at each other despite a lack of air! People’s clothes explode off their bodies! It doesn’t make a damn lick of sense, but it doesn’t have to, because it’s not meant to be more than a bit of fun.

This post contains major spoilers for season two, episode seven of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks.’

Artificial intelligence has been baked into the Star Trek universe since the original series. Kirk and his crew occasionally faced off against computers gone amok, including Nomad, Landru and the M-5. The only way to defeat these digital villains was to outwit them using logic, which caused them to self-destruct. But in The Next Generation, the franchise became more interested in exploring the personhood of artificial beings like Data and hisfamily, Voyager’s holographic doctor or the exocomps. This week, Lower Decks dredges up the old-style megalomaniacal AI and asks, are you really sure about those rights?

The USS Cerritos is once more called upon to help out a civilization enslaved by an evil computer, this one called Agimus (voiced by long-time Trek actor Jeffrey Combs). Disconnected from his network of drones, he’s actually pretty pathetic, desperately begging the organic beings around him to just hook him up to a computer. All that’s left for Starfleet to do is to drop him off at the Daystrom Institute, which isn’t the most glamorous of jobs, so of course Beckett Mariner and Bradward Boimler end up on this particular babysitting gig.

CBS

A gravimetric shear complicates things for the pair, forcing their shuttle to crash on a barren world with only the pleading voice of Agimus to keep them company. The computer uses this opportunity to pit the two against each other, continuing a plot thread that we thought had been settled two episodes ago. Beckett still doesn’t trust Brad's abilities despite all they’vebeen through. It feels like a regression or perhaps even a mis-scheduled episode, except that we the audience still see his growth while his supposed best friend doubts him. It’s a plot line unlikely to go away after a few episodes, reaffirming this show’s commitment to character-driven storytelling.

However, that breadth of characterization doesn’t really apply to Agimus. He’s really just… kind of a jerk, and he doesn’t have the ability to directly influence anything due to his lack of arms and legs. Boimler and Mariner spend the entire episode lugging his box around: a sentient MacGuffin. If you’re not familiar with that term, it means an item (or person) that moves the plot forward and motivates the characters, but is not actually important in itself. With Agimus’s reign over, he really just serves here to get Mariner and Boimler at each other’s throats.

CBS

His status as a sentient being is never in question, but the problem of what to do with him as his behavior worsens goes in directions that would never come up for an organic individual. Mariner suggests burying him, a suggestion turned down by Boimler because he’s a sentient being and that’s not what Starfleet does. So it seems we have made some progress from the ol’ “destroy them with their own logic” days of TOS. But then the two ensigns end up burying him anyway, while Agamus protests that “he has rights!”

And yet Star Trek has always been a bit sketchy about what those rights are. While episodes like “The Measure of a Man” and “The Offspring” have reaffirmed Data’s humanity, it’s been contradicted since by events on Voyager and Picard. The Doctor asserted his authorial rights to a holonovel he created and won, but wasn’t actually recognized as a person. The question remained unanswered nearly 20 years later on Picard, with us only being shown holograms of limited capabilities, or those based on the personalities of other sentient beings (Rios’ crew). And fully synthetic beings like Data, ones with brains and bodies, were illegal after the attack on Mars.

CBS

Lower Decks takes place a mere year after the end of Voyager, so it’s free to pick up and explore some of those plot threads without that later baggage. But without a synthetic crew member on the USS Cerritos it can only glance off the subject. Agamus is dumped in a storage facility as just another “self-aware megalomaniacal computer,” not too dissimilar from the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant is dumped at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Is it a prison? Did he get a trial? Are he and the other computers just going to sit there until the end of the Federation? From an ethical perspective it isn’t great, but it’s unlikely to ever be fully addressed, because who in Starfleet is really going to fight for the personhood of a computerized fascist dictator?

Twitter plans to address a longstanding complaint people have had with its mobile app. If you use the software frequently, you may have noticed tweets will sometimes disappear from view just as you’re partway through reading one. You see this happen when your timeline refreshes and it happens most often when there are a lot of people replying to a single tweet.

“We know it’s a frustrating experience, so we’re working on changing it,” the company said, adding that it plans to roll out a variety of updates over the next two months to address the issue. Twitter didn’t detail what those changes will look like but promised they will keep your timeline fresh while preventing tweets from disappearing as you’re reading them.

Twitter has been iterating on new features at an increased clip in recent months. For instance, the company recently said it would begin testing a tool for removing followers sometime this month. Twitter also recently began rolling its Communities feature to users.

Facebook is about to close an important chapter in its history. CNBCreports the social network's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, is stepping down from his role after a total 13 years at the company. He'll move to a part-time position as Facebook's first Senior Fellow at some point in 2022. The move will let Schroepfer spend more time with his family and philanthropy, according to the CTO's blog post.

Developing...

There's no shortage of ways to capture YouTube videos on the web. Take your pick of dangerous websites, or just go old-school and record a video of your desktop. Now, YouTube is finally offering a simpler solution for computer users: A download button. As Android Police reports, it's currently available as an experimental feature for Premium subscribers. That's not a huge surprise, as YouTube already offers mobile video downloads for subscribers too. 

Once you've flipped it on, you'll see a download button right next to the share option below videos, or alongside the three dot menu when browsing. After downloading a video, it gets placed in your offline YouTube library. You can choose to grab videos in resolutions from 144p to 1080p — sorry, 4K fanatics. At this point, there doesn't appear to be any size limit, aside from your available storage.

From my quick tests, the feature works as advertised on Safari and Chrome. Personally, it's not something I'd use as often as mobile downloads, but it's a nice option to have for future trips.

Netflix is acquiring the Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC) and rights to the author's entire catalog, including classics like Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, the company announced. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed (and are subject to regulatory approval), but three years ago Netflix paid "nine figures" for the rights to 16 of Dahl's works, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In any event, it likely represents one of Netflix's largest acquisitions to date. 

News of the acquisition started bubbling up yesterday following a Bloomberg report. Netflix has big plans for Dahl's works, including "the creation of a unique universe across animated and live actions films and TV, publishing, games, immersive experiences, live theater, consumer products and more," wrote Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos and RDSC managing director (and Dahl's grandson) Luke Kelly. 

The companies revealed that director Taika Waititi and screenwriter Phil Johnston are working on a series based on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory world. Netflix is also working with Sony and Working Title on an adaptation of Matilda The Musical. 

The acquisition appears to go well beyond Netflix's past content deals, in which it simply licensed content from others. It famously did so with Marvel, then ended up canceling Daredevil and other Marvel shows when it couldn't come to terms with Disney, which was planning at the time to launch rival service Disney+. 

With Roald Dahl's catalog, it promises to "bring these timeless tales to more audiences in new formats... [while] maintaining their unique spirit and their universal themes of surprise and kindness," Sarandos and Dahl wrote. "These stories and their messages of the power and possibility of young people have never felt more pertinent." Last year, the company issued an apology on its website for Dahl's history of antisemitic statements, as Bloomberg noted.  

Facebook has just released a Billie Eilish pack for Beat Saber. Priced at $13 for the entire collection, the pack features 10 songs, including fan-favorites like “Bury a Friend” and “Bad Guy.” It also comes with a new environment inspired by Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever” music video. If you want to buy specific tracks, you can do so for $2 per song. The DLC is available on Oculus Quest, Rift, PSVR and SteamVR headsets. 

If you own an Oculus headset, you can also look forward to watching the singer’s upcoming Governors Ball performance when it’s livestreamed through the platform’s Venues app on September 24th. Facebook acquired Beat Saber creator Beat Games in 2019. Since then, the company has used its robust music licensing deals to bring paid content from all sorts of artists, including Kendrick Lamar, Linkin Park and others.