Amazon's long-awaited The Lord of the Rings series has a release date, but don't go rushing to stake out the best spot in your living room just yet. The show will premiere on September 2nd, 2022, with new episodes dropping on Prime Video each week.
Filming on the as-yet-untitled series wrapped up today. Production began in February 2020, but it was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
— The Lord of the Rings on Prime (@LOTRonPrime) August 2, 2021
The series takes place thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A cast of old and new characters will have to resist a newly resurgent evil during the Second Age of Middle-earth.
Along with the release date, Amazon revealed the first proper image from the show. It depicts a figure looking at a vista with a white city and, much further away, the outline of two curious trees. With no sign of a trailer yet, expect the internet to analyze every pixel of the image for hints.
Even before filming started, Amazon renewed the series for a second season. So, whatever happens in this first batch of episodes, you can be rest assured that there will be much more of the story to come.
Epic Games is continuing its string of superstar Fortnite concerts. The game developer has revealed a "Rift Tour" concert series that will star none other than pop songstress Ariana Grande. The first show takes place August 6th at 6PM Eastern, with subsequent shows on August 7th and 8th to ensure people in other time zones can tune in.
The game developer is warning concertgoers to arrive early (an hour before the show). The Rift Tour playlist will go live 30 minutes beforehand. It won't surprise you to hear that there will be themed cosmetic items, either. You can pick up an Ariana outfit to play as the pop star, and Piggy Smallz Back Bling adds a cute touch while you take down your battle royale rivals. Both should appear in the Fortnite Item Shop on August 4th at 8PM Eastern, and show attendees will pick up an umbrella glider.
Like with J Balvin, Travis Scott and other Fortnite performers, this is as much about attracting newcomers to the game as it is enticing people to come back. It's also notable that Epic is widening the range of artists to include female stars (recently unearthed plans for a Lady Gaga concert never panned out). In theory, Grande could help reel in people who wouldn't otherwise play Fortnite — even if only a fraction of them stick around once the "7 Rings" singer has moved on.
Paramount+ effectively revolves around Alex Kurtzman given its continued dependence on Star Trek, and it's clear CBS will do whatever it takes to keep the director and producer aboard. CBS Studios has signed a deal that will have Kurtzman and his Secret Hideout unit exclusvely producing shows for Paramount+ and other platforms through 2026. He'll continue to lead Star Trek efforts for the "next six years," CBS said.
CBS didn't say how much it paid, although Deadline sources understood the agreement was in the "$150 million range." Kurtzman had two years left on an existing deal, but that was worth far less at 'just' $25 million.
Kurtzman has no less than six Star Trek shows underway, including existing productions Discovery, Picard and Lower Decks as well as upcoming efforts like Strange New Worlds, Prodigy and the currently unnamed Section 31 spinoff. He's also responsible for Showtime offerings like the upcoming The Man Who Fell to Earth TV remake, and has Secret Hideout working on projects like a Stephen King short story adaptation.
It's not surprising that CBS would pay a premium for Kurtzman as a result. While he's not the only one creating well-known shows for Paramount+, losing him and Secret Hideout would risk leaving a giant gap in CBS' streaming strategy. The risk, of course, is that CBS is further tying its fate to one person and one production company — Paramount+ might be in a tough spot if there are ever major problems with Kurtzman's shows.
For the better part of its recent history, Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists have been the company’s go-to way to help people discover new music. In the span of a week, it has added two additional discovery tools. The first, What’s New, is a panel that highlights new releases from your favorite artists and podcasts. The second, which the company detailed today, is a curated playlist, but one that’s aimed at those who want to know more about the music industry.
Dubbed "Noteable Releases," the weekly playlist collects new tracks from the world’s leading producers and songwriters. Expect to see contributions from people like frequent Billie Eilish collaborator Finneas O’Connell and Ester Dean, who helped write Katy Perry’s 2010 hit “Firework.” The result is an eclectic playlist that doesn’t stick to any one genre, though pop music is represented strongly for obvious reasons.
The introduction of Noteable Releases follows last year’s rollout of songwriter pages and is another example of the company trying to cater to the broader music industry. You’ll notice at the top of the playlist that Spotify encourages digging into a song’s credits to find out more about the people who worked on it. You can do that by tapping the three dots icon and then “show credits.”
If Gary Numan had heard a different sound the first time he encountered a synthesizer, we might not have had “Cars,” “Are 'Friends' Electric?” or even Gary Numan (he was born Gary Webb before adopting his stage name). The New Wave movement might have been little more than a ripple, Synth Pop may have never happened and, in a roundabout way, Calvin Harris might never have known what we came for.
But Numan did hear that all-important sound, the one that lit up his brain and switched him on to technology as a music-making tool, paving the way for electronic music to go mainstream. That’s just one of many accidentally influential moments to be found in Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson — a documentary jaunt through the cornerstones of music technology that’s streaming now on Apple TV+.
Ronson is, perhaps, best known for his work with Amy Winehouse — a decidedly analog, brassy affair. But his love of technology is abundantly clear as Watch the Sound serves up easily digestible bites of musical history around key technological themes: Sampling, drum machines, synths and beyond. Along the way, Ronson casually drops in on such luminaries as Paul McCartney, Quest Love and the aforementioned Numan, along with contemporary artists such as Charlie XCX and King Princess. If the series doesn’t inspire you to google around for a MIDI controller by the end of it then nothing ever will.
Apple TV+
Unlike Netflix’s fast-paced This is Pop, Watch the Sound leans more histrionic. Each episode starts with Ronson recounting his own first experience with whatever this episode is about (a sampler, distorted guitars and so on). He then spends time with artists that popularized that sound, asking pensive questions and generally nerding out about music as only someone with Ronson’s wide palette of influences really can.
This sense of a journey through Ronson’s musical interests gives Watch the Sound a more intimate feel than This is Pop’s more talking heads approach. “I think what's important is that there is a familiarity between the episodes, there is a kind of a guiding force. And that was always going to be Mark's personal experience,” executive producer Mark Monroe told Engadget.
This sense of “experience” is perhaps no more apparent when Ronson spends time with Sean Ono Lennon. Lennon talks candidly about his father’s own struggle with the sound of his voice. He then adroitly reinvents a recording of Lennon senior with Harmony Engine (that Ronson describes as “autotune on steroids”) in what turns out to be a surprisingly tender moment. Lennon junior is visibly moved by this brief yet intimate musical encounter.
Of course, the show is about the machines as much as the people that made them important. Watching DJ Premier’s absolute mastery of the MPC, for example, is as impressive as it is frustrating (at least to anyone else who’s had a go on one and could barely peck out a beat). Later on, watching Ronson take a box cutter to a speaker cone with David Grohl feels like it should have been an outtake until... goddammit, why is he somehow good at everything? (You’ll have to watch it to find out why they did this.)
Other humorous moments are, perhaps, less intentional. Ronson at one point finds himself in a full miner’s jumpsuit, and he’s never looked so uncomfortable. In episode one, we enjoy a rare, albeit slight crack in his golden touch as he struggles to make anything remotely musical with autotune (he rectifies that later, naturally).
If there were an enduring message in Watch the Sound (and many other series of its ilk) it’s that perfection and talent are rarely what creates something magical. Most of the technology featured was either misused, misunderstood or reappropriated through necessity. Legends were born thereof and this is just how we do things now.
It’s refreshing, if not invigorating to know that you don’t have to aspire to perfect pitch or even really have any formal musical training to be a pioneer. In fact, it’s easy to convince yourself that knowing your scales might even hold you back sometimes if you find yourself trying to only play by the rules.
This sentiment is solidified in the episode about synthesizers. Here, the cast of heroes is more at home with an oscilloscope than with an oboe. The band of misfits (and, let history show, many, many more women than are ever given credit) effectively reinvented what music could be from the ground up.
Apple TV+
Monroe said that was something that became apparent during filming, too. “Digging into synthesizer and really kind of understanding what a disruptor it was … what an opportunity for the people on the outside of the music business … and not just to gain a foothold, but to become, you know, legendary.”
Even if you don’t have an interest in how music is made, the show will have you jotting down the names of bands and songs you want to explore further and delight you with a sense of possibility. Or in my case, vindication. The episode on sampling recounts the abhorrent push-back that this new technology received. “That’s not real music” someone remembers being told. If, like me, you grew up listening to Fear of a Black Planet and the countless artists it inspired, it’s hard not to do a mental fist-pump to yourself for not being one of those jerks.
By the end of the show, you might find yourself motivated to dig out that guitar from the loft, or fire up your laptop. Apple, it seems, knew this might be the case. To coincide with the show’s launch, the company has created a “companion experience” for GarageBand via an exclusive Producer Pack.
That said, once you discover how the Beastie Boys achieved their iconic vocal sound on "So What’Cha Want" or how Sonic Youth creatively used drumsticks on their guitars, you might realize you don’t even need any fancy software to do something different.
Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson premieres on Apple TV+ today.
This week, Cherlynn and Devindra dive into the toxic mess at Activision Blizzard with Senior Editor Jessica Conditt. California is suing the company over its frat boy culture, something we’ve seen at many gaming companies over the years. What’s actually going on, and what does it mean for the gaming industry as a whole? Tune in for our thoughts! Also, we chat about Facebook’s metaverse ambitions, some new chip plans for Intel and… Xbox Krispy Kreme donuts.
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!
Credits Hosts: Cherlynn Low and Devindra Hardawar Guest: Jessica Conditt Producer: Ben Ellman Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos, Owen Davidoff, Luke Brooks Graphics artists: Luke Brooks, Kyle Maack Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien
The BBC has announced that Chris Chibnall (pictured, center), Doctor Who’s executive producer, and its star, Jodie Whittaker (pictured, right), will leave the series in 2022. A trio of specials through next year would herald the pair’s departure from the long-running series. This, then, seems like an ideal time for Doctor Who to undergo the radical shakeup it so desperately needs. I don’t agree with The Guardian’s recent piece saying that the series needs to be off the air for a while, but it is very clearly time for the show to evolve again.
This is in part because Doctor Who under Chibnall has been such a waste: the showrunner’s work before taking the job, while popular and award-winning, had always left me cold. My initial apprehension was calmed, somewhat, by the news emerging from the production of the revived series’ 11th run. Chibnall also deserves credit for hiring the first two writers of color in the show’s nearly sixty year history. The fact that many of the episodes had an explicit focus on material social history suggested a bright new direction for the series. The Woman Who Fell To Earth, too, was a blisteringly confident debut and all seemed well.
And then, yeesh. As good as Chibnall is at birthing some truly inspired ideas, the quality of his execution is terrible. He struggled to flesh out the quartet of lead characters and failed to offer them real stakes to deal with. And for all of the era’s emphasis on diversity, the content of each episode seemed to be far more backward-looking. I’ve written before about Chibnall often appearing to make the argument opposite to the one he thinks he’s making. Unless he intended to say that polite protest is the only good protest, Amazon’s treatment of its staff is good, actually, and that we can all benefit from the spoils of colonialism.
Naturally, the casting of a woman in the central role encouraged the usual petulance from those corners of the internet. Sadly, I think that the actors involved have all performed miracles trying to make anything Chibnall writes remotely believable. And Whittaker’s departure before she could work with another executive producer will be yet another tragically wasted opportunity in this era. I hope that this bad-faith criticism doesn't force the production team to make a “safe” choice for the next Doctor.
The big secret to Doctor Who’s endurance is both the malleability of its premise and its knack for reinventing itself. Every few years, often as the show’s creative team changed, it would become an almost entirely different show. You could argue that this lack of sentimentality has been the case since the show’s first mission-switch, which happened in its fifth episode. The revived show has been using a version of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer template since 2005, and it’s starting to wear a bit thin.
It didn’t help that while Series 11 was designed to avoid any of the show’s dense backstory, Series 12 was at times incomprehensible to anyone but die hard fans. Chibnall, after all, devoted his series arc to validating a production gaffe in an episode that aired on January 24th, 1976. (And, in doing so, made the Doctor the Time Lord equivalent of Jesus, contradicting everything that we’d learned over the last six decades.) This was the worst kind of self-indulgent fan fiction, and hardly a bold new direction for a mainstream drama.
Unfortunately, the media landscape has changed, and competition has intensified beyond all belief. The BBC no longer has a monopoly on the conversation as it did — at least here in the UK — and is dwarfed by the streaming giants. Netflix, Amazon, Disney and others also have the wealth to offer the sort of creative freedom that once made the non-commercial BBC stand out among the crowd.
The knee-jerk reaction, I’m sure, will be to demand Doctor Who jumps on the bandwagon driven by Marvel’s recent streaming shows. That would be a mistake, because Who is at its best when it pushes away from whatever genre show is cresting into the mainstream that year. Financially, the BBC can’t compete with these mega-franchises, but the quality of its writing and its unique sensibilities, can. The one thing that the series could learn from those shows, however, is how to build every episode into an event.
This could mean that the show becomes a run of occasional specials with a longer running time, like a glorified movie of the week. Or it could, like the COVID-influenced 2021 season, be a shorter run of tightly-interconnected episodes. Chibnall may indeed stumble onto the template that helps revitalize the show going forward, but I’m personally hoping for something more radical.
For instance, if Doctor Who can’t succeed as a glossy, hour-long standalone drama, then why not go back to being a series of short serials? Netflix’s Russian Doll and the BBC’s I May Destroy You are both examples of (excellent) half-hour dramas that offer a break from the current prestige-drama template. It helps, too, that Doctor Who was run in this format for 25 of its first 26 seasons, and offers new — or at least different — methods for structuring a story.
It may also make it easier to binge during its long second life on a streaming platform. Think about it: how many times have you ducked watching a long episode of The Crown because it’s too much time to invest out of your day, but you’ll happily burn through four episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine without complaint. You could even get Michaela Coel to write it, although at this point I’ll settle for anyone who isn’t named Chris Chibnall.
Twitter’s Spaces is getting another update that makes the audio feature easier to share and discover. Now, users will be able to compose a new tweet directly from the Space, which will link to the audio chat and any accompanying hashtags. While it was previously possible to compose new tweets while listening to a Space, having the composer directly in the space will allow participants to more easily tweet about the conversation as it’s happening.
On iOS, Twitter is also adding new “guest management” controls, that allows hosts to more easily view who is in a Space and who has requested to speak. Finally, the company is adding a new search feature to the Spaces tab it started testing in June. Now, instead of just a curated list of active Spaces, users with access to the tab will also be able to search for Spaces by title or the name or handle of a host. (No update on when more people will have access to the Spaces section of the app, though.)
on iOS updated the guest management - put the control bar for participants on top of the guest management page so it is always accessible - added section state for Host to better see what type of participants they have in their space (including pending speaker requests) pic.twitter.com/Ig2F6GIuVE
Twitter has been steadily updating Spaces since introducing the Clubhouse competitor late last year. The company has recently added support for a web version of the feature and has started experimenting with allowing hosts to sell tickets to the conversations.
Along with showing off a bunch of upcoming games during its showcase on Thursday, Annapurna Interactive announced some developer partnerships. One of them is with a new studio called Ivy Road from powerhouse indie developers Davey Wreden and Karla Zimonja.
I am thrilled to announce that @zusty, @C418 and I have started a new video game studio called Ivy Road! We are working with @A_i on an unannounced game, and I can't wait until we're able to finally show it to all of you. pic.twitter.com/N5j5BFv4rV
Wreden is best known as the writer and designer of The Stanley Parable. Zimonja previously worked at Fullbright and is the co-creator of indie hits Gone Home and Tacoma. They're now combining their talents at Ivy Road, which is based in Vancouver.
The duo didn't reveal any details about the first game they're working on for AI. However, they did note that composer Daniel Rosenfeld (aka C418), of Minecraft fame, is part of the team, along with severalotherdevelopers.
The Artful Escape is an idealized vision of everything the music industry could be, straight out of the brain of Australian rockstar Johnny Galvatron. In five years of development (at least), The Artful Escape has transformed into a psychedelic adventure game with a living soundtrack of original folk and rock music, a cast of ridiculous characters, otherworldly environments, and a roster A-list voice actors, including Jason Schwartzman, Lena Headey, Michael Johnston, Carl Weathers and Mark Strong.
The Artful Escape is set to hit Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, and PC on September 9th, priced at $20. It'll hit Game Pass at the same time, and it's being published by indie hit-maker Annapurna Interactive.
Galvatron is the frontman of The Galvatrons, a high-energy Australian rock group that toured the continent and opened for bands like Def Leppard and Cheap Trick in the late 2000s. However, for the past few years, Galvatron has been a game developer first and foremost. In the 2010s, he used YouTube videos to teach himself how to create a game in Unreal, building off the 3D animation and coding courses he took back in college, right before Warner Music signed him. He then founded a studio, rented some office space, secured a deal with Annapurna, and somewhere along the way, he ended up in a recording booth with Jason Schwartzman.
"We just hung out and spoke about David Bowie and Bob Dylan and video games and stuff," Galvatron said. "And it was just like, it was a moment for me. He came into the studio and he had like a cape and he had a dressing gown and like an umbrella and a little tiny Korg synth. He brought all these things and he put them all around him and he would like, do the line with the cape and then he would throw the cape around another way, and then he would hold the umbrella and do the line. I was just on my feet the whole time."
Annapurna Interactive
In The Artful Escape, the main character, Francis Vendetti, goes on a multidimensional journey to discover his true stage persona — which seems to be a David Bowie-esque shred machine — while at the same time reckoning with the legacy of his late uncle, a Bob Dylan-style folk icon. He travels through strange and trippy worlds, playing music and hunting for his true sound.
To give a sense of the game's oddball vibe, Schwartzman plays a giant brain perched atop a pile of discarded fish parts.
"He’s a really funny comic support character," Galvatron said. "Like a very lofty British alien, like a brain floating in an aquarium on a flotilla of goldfish fins. It'll make sense when you see it."
For Galvatron, The Artful Escape is exactly that — an escape. His career as a mainstream rockstar was ultimately unfulfilling, filled with red tape, stagnant bureaucracy and awkward interactions. In between shows, he often found himself curled up in the corner of the tour bus, reading Dune or writing his own novel, watching the continent fly by.
As a game developer, he's building the industry he actually wanted to be a part of, one line of code at a time.
"It's kind of what I dreamed the music industry would be, this world of magical doors and these great experiences, instead of like drinking Melbourne Bitter at an RSL in Wollongong, trying not to get beaten up because you look like you're in Poison," Galvatron said. He laughed and, without missing a beat, added, "Can you use that quote in its entirety?"
Sure thing, Galvatron — but only because that sounds like a solid premise for a sequel to The Artful Escape.
