You'll soon see Hollywood's treatment of one of the most important (and dangerous) moments in scientific history. Universal has released a trailer for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's biopic of the physicist who played a key role in developing and testing the first atomic bomb. The clip underscores the ethical issues surrounding the Manhattan Project and its work. While the team is hopeful that nuclear weapons will end World War II and usher in a new era of peace, they're also worried abut sparking an apocalyptic arms race — the movie doesn't end with the detonation.

The adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's American Prometheus book stars Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) as its namesake scientist, with Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's wife Katherine. Matt Damon plays Manhattan Project directo Gen. Leslie Groves Jr., while Robert Downey Jr. plays US Atomic Energy Commission co-founder Lewis Strauss. Rami Malek, Matthew Modine and Alden Ehrenreich also star.

Nolan's reputation and the top-tier cast will be the draws for many. However, this is also a rare movie that explores the role science played in WWII, not to mention in setting the stage for the Cold War and nuclear energy. The production of the movie is also notable. This is the first movie to feature sections of IMAX black-and-white film footage, so it may be worth heading to a supporting theater to get the full experience.

We’ve known there was a reboot coming of 1990s sci-fi cult hit Babylon 5 for a while now, but we didn’t have any concrete details until today. Original series creator J. Michael Straczynski just announced that it’s an animated feature length film developed by Warner Bros. Animation.

Straczynski is quiet regarding plot details but did say that the movie is “classic B5” with a “raucous, heartfelt” story, going on to suggest that the cartoon feature is “the most B5-ish” project since the original series bowed out in 1998. He also said that the movie is completely finished and just awaiting release. In other words, it’ll likely be a matter of months, not years, before mega-fans get their eyeballs on this one.

To that end, the writer said that the official movie title, release date and other details will drop next week. If the film is “in the can”, as Straczynski says, here’s hoping we also get a trailer or at least some animation stills with that release date announcement. It’s still unknown which original series actors, if any, will reprise their roles for the film.

Babylon 5 was originally on the air for five seasons, which was followed up by five made-for-TV movies (the last one aired in 2002). The show has long-been praised for its commitment to hard sci-fi and revolving crew of motley characters, netting two Hugo Awards and a Saturn Award during its run. It’s primarily set on the titular space station, calling to mind rival sci-fi epic Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There’s some discussion as to which series came first, as DS9 aired a full year before Babylon 5, but B5 was first to production. In recent years, series creator Straczynski has been heavily involved with shows like Sense8 and plenty of high-profile comic books.

Praise, Shaï-Hulud. Warner Bros. has shared the first trailer for Dune: Part Two, and if you were a fan of Denis Villeneuve's adaption of the first half of Frank Herbert's seminal sci-fi novel, let's just say Part Two looks like it will be even better. The teaser opens with Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya) talking about the future of Arrakis. "Where you see sand here, imagine water. If you dive in, you can't reach the bottom," Paul tells an incredulous Chani. 

Following that exchange, the trailer offers us our first look at Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan. Her character didn't make an appearance in Dune: Part One, but judging from the clip, Irulan will at least narrate some of the story, a change that could bring the movie closer to Herbert's 1965 novel. Another critical character that wasn't in Part One but makes an appearance in the trailer is Feyd-Rautha, played here by Austin Butler. Dune: Part Two will arrive in theaters on November 3rd. Unlike the first film, Warner Bros does not plan to simultaneously release Part Two to the soon-to-be-renamed HBO Max.

Now that The Super Mario Bros. Movie is finally (almost) done racking up coins, it’s time for another video game adaptation to head into theaters. Sony’s Gran Turismo film, highlighting the esteemed racing sim, has set a release date for August 11th and dropped a first-look trailer to prove it.

According to the trailer, this is not your standard video game adaptation. It doesn’t seek to adapt the “story” of Gran Turismo, but is rather set in a world obsessed with the racing sim. There's a tournament to find the best virtual racer out there (shades of The Wizard) and the winners get to race in real life (shades of The Last Starfighter).

Even weirder? This is all based on a true story. The film follows current professional racer Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), who actually was a teenage Gran Turismo obsessive. He really did win competitions and even managed to parlay that into an actual career. David Harbour, Orlando Bloom, Djimon Hounsou and Geri Halliwell round out the cast.

This might be an odd choice for a video game movie plot, but it’s not as if the Gran Turismo series has a deep well of lore to pull from. The film is directed by Neill Blomkamp, who made District 9 and Elysium, so this is at least worth keeping an eye on. In any event, August is just around the corner, so we don’t have long to wait.

If you like your fake racing with a bit more clown-based hyper-violence, Peacock just dropped a trailer for a Twisted Metal adaptation.

Over nine million people watched The Super Mario Bros. Movie over the weekend — on Twitter, The Verge reported. On Friday, a Twitter user uploaded the entire movie to the platform, and it remained there, openly violating copyright laws, until Sunday. The movie was removed and the user suspended from Twitter — again, shy of ten million people already seeing it. 

Sure, copyrighted movies have repeatedly spent a few days on Twitter since Elon Musk took over (firing most your safety and compliance staff will do that for you). But, previous posts, like The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift or Avatar, were shared in two minute increments across lengthy threads. The Super Mario Bros. Movie required only two posts, one with the first hour of the movie and another with the final 32 minutes. 

Why hasn’t this happened before now? Well, Twitter Blue subscribers can upload videos up to 60 minutes long. It's only available on Twitter’s website though, with app users limited to 10-minute videos.

Regardless of mainstream illegal streaming, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has crushed at the box office, making over $1 billion globally, and holding the number one spot four weekends in a row across the US and Canada. If it has come and gone in your area, don't worry, it will probably be back on Twitter soon. 

Over nine million people watched The Super Mario Bros. Movie over the weekend — on Twitter, The Verge reported. On Friday, a Twitter user uploaded the entire movie to the platform, and it remained there, openly violating copyright laws, until Sunday. The movie was removed and the user suspended from Twitter — again, shy of ten million people already seeing it. 

Sure, copyrighted movies have repeatedly spent a few days on Twitter since Elon Musk took over (firing most your safety and compliance staff will do that for you). But, previous posts, like The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift or Avatar, were shared in two minute increments across lengthy threads. The Super Mario Bros. Movie required only two posts, one with the first hour of the movie and another with the final 32 minutes. 

Why hasn’t this happened before now? Well, Twitter Blue subscribers can upload videos up to 60 minutes long. It's only available on Twitter’s website though, with app users limited to 10-minute videos.

Regardless of mainstream illegal streaming, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has crushed at the box office, making over $1 billion globally, and holding the number one spot four weekends in a row across the US and Canada. If it has come and gone in your area, don't worry, it will probably be back on Twitter soon. 

A young Harrison Ford will grace cinema screens for 25 minutes this summer — aided by some new Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) software. The news that LucasFilm's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny would feature a de-aged Ford came at the end of last year, but an interview with director James Mangold in Total Film just revealed it will be for almost a fifth of the film's running time. 

The fifth Indiana Jones iteration starts with an opening scene from 1944 — about eight years after Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark took place. "My hope is that, although it will be talked about in terms of technology, you just watch it and go, ‘Oh my God, they just found footage. This was a thing they shot 40 years ago," Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm and a producer, told Empire. The rest of the movie shoots forward to 1969, with Indy on a mission to prevent a comeback of Nazism.

The news of Ford's extended return to his thirties comes a few months after Disney, which produced the movie alongside LucasFilm, announced it had built an AI that could make an actor appear older or younger with relative ease at the end of last year. The researchers behind the AI, known as FRAN (face re-aging network), explained it would only work with real people if there were images available of the person in those poses and lighting at a younger age.

Footage of Ford's earlier roles was pulled from the Lucasfilm archives to accomplish this. Ford also acted with dots across his face to aid the system — and with the agility of a young man, according to Mangold. Then, the technology would quickly do its thing. Mangold would "shoot Harrison on a Monday as, you know, a 79-year-old playing a 35-year-old, and I could see dailies by Wednesday with his head already replaced." 

It took a couple of years, but Disney+ is finally doing more to patch the Spider-Man-sized hole in its Marvel movie lineup. The streaming service is adding the first wave of Spidey movies to its US catalog in the next few weeks. Sam Raimi's trilogy and The Amazing Spider-Man will be available tomorrow (April 21st), while Homecoming and Venom arrive May 12th.

More of Sony Pictures' Spider-Man movie and TV lineup will come to the US later in the year, Disney says. While you can already watch The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in at least some countries, this does mean you'll have to wait if you want to watch titles like No Way Home or Into the Spider-Verse without turning to other services (and in some cases, paying for a purchase or rental).

The gap has long been a pain for Disney, and particularly since the launch of Disney+ in 2019. Sony has a perpetual film license for Spider-Man so long as it releases a new title every 5.75 years. Disney had to reach a deal to borrow the web-slinger for Avengers movies as Sony still had the rights to the character's solitary adventures. You had to turn to Disney+ rivals like Netflix (which has exclusive rights for Sony movies) to see the rest of Spider-Man's story.

Disney addressed that omission in 2021, when it struck a deal to access Sony's theatrical releases through 2026 as well as archival Marvel titles like the Spider-Man series. You're now seeing the fruits of that agreement — Disney+ doesn't have to worry as much about viewers subscribing to competitors just to get their full superhero fix.

After 25 years, Netflix's original business is shutting down. The company has revealed that it will "wind down" DVD rentals (that is. DVD.com), with its last movie discs mailing on September 29th. Simply put, the shrinking demand for physical rentals is making it "increasingly difficult" to offer the service the company wants.

Netflix shipped its first disc (Beetlejuice, if you're curious) in 1998. It has since mailed over 5.2 billion movies in its signature red envelopes (nearly all of them before 2019) to more than 40 million customers. You likely know the story after that. The company began streaming on-demand video in 2007, and that business grew quickly enough that it became Netflix's dominant offering. After a premature attempt to spin off the mailed rentals as Qwikster in 2011, Netflix moved them to DVD.com in 2016. By that point, the company was well into producing original streaming shows.

Developing...

A Galaxy Quest series is reportedly under development for Paramount+. A new show based on the 1999 cult-classic film — a spoof of Star Trek and its fandom — will land on the streaming home of five original Trek series, according toThe Hollywood Reporter.

The sci-fi comedy followed a cast of washed-up actors making a meager living from the convention circuit after their television series — also called Galaxy Quest — was canceled. The plot involves aliens who picked up transmissions of the show from Earth, believing it to be a real-life documentary. The socially awkward extraterrestrials, gelatinous creates who take on humanoid forms, seek the actors’ leadership as their planet faces extinction. The cast eventually finds itself transported to outer space, where they reluctantly face the threat and eventually learn to live up to their TV personas. Galaxy Quest was a critical and commercial success, grossing over $90 million at the box office and gaining cult-classic status.

Paramount

If the series brings back the film’s original cast, it will have to make do without star Alan Rickman, who died of cancer in 2016. In addition to his scene-stealing turn as Alexander Dane, the movie starred Tim Allen as narcissistic William Shatner equivalent Jason Nesmith, Sigourney Weaver as Gwen DeMarco, Tony Shalhoub as Fred Kawn, Daryl Mitchell as Tommy Webber and Sam Rockwell as Guy Fleegman (a spoof of Star Trek’s expendable “redshirts”).

The new Paramount+ series is in its “early development stages.” Mark Johnson, an executive producer of the movie, returns for the upcoming series. No casting or writing decisions have been reported. Paramount TV Studios will develop the film for its streaming counterpart.

The upcoming series isn’t the first attempt to revive the IP. It was reported in 2021 that Simon Pegg and Succession writer Georgia Pritchett were helming a new series; it’s unclear whether the new project includes them. Before that, in 2015, an adaptation with the original cast was also under development. However, that one never advanced beyond the development stage after Rickman’s death and scheduling conflicts with Allen. In a 2016 interview, Rockwell told the Hollywood Reporter, “We were ready to sign up, and [then] Alan Rickman passed away and Tim Allen wasn’t available — he has [Last Man Standing] — and everybody’s schedule was all weird. It was going to shoot, like, right now. And how do you fill that void of Alan Rickman? That’s a hard void to fill.”