The Super Mario Bros. Movie has only been in theaters for a week and a half, but it's been pulverizing box office records faster than Nintendo's mascot can run from left to right. It already had the highest-grossing opening weekend for any video game-based movie in the US and Canada, but the film has proven to be a hit around the globe.

According to Variety, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has raked in north of $508.7 million worldwide. That makes it both the biggest film of 2023 so far as well as the highest-earning video game movie of all time in theaters. The previous record holder was Warcraft, which had a global haul of $439 million.

After the bizarre mess of the 1993 live-action Super Mario. Bros film, Nintendo swore off movie adaptations of its properties for decades. But with the help of Despicable Me studio Illumination and a focus on replicating the widely recognized art style of Mario games in animation, Nintendo has struck gold with the latest film (even if the plot doesn't amount to much).

There's a long way to go before Nintendo, Illumination and Universal, which co-financed and distributed the flick, can truly dream of The Super Mario Bros. Movie becoming one of the biggest animated films of all time. It hasn't broken into the top 50 yet, while the 2019 remake of The Lion King has the top spot with $1.66 billion.

Still, movies and other non-gaming experiences like theme parks will likely form a major part of Nintendo's business going forward. A Mario sequel and films based on other Nintendo properties (a Breath of the Wild adaptation, anyone?) now seem inevitable, as if Illumination founder Chris Meledandri having a seat on the board wasn't clear enough of an indication.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie hit theaters last week and broke records with the release raking in just over $146 million domestically. As Deadline says, that makes it the highest grossing opening weekend for any video game-based movie, knocking Sonic The Hedgehog 2, which previously held the record with $141 million, off the top spot. Mario has been a hit the world over, with global takings already more than $377, making it the biggest opening of the year so far.

Illumination and Universal's The Super Mario Bros. Movie bring the beloved Nintendo game to the big screen. The story follows Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day), two failing plumbers from Brooklyn as they face Jack Black's Bowser after finding themselves somehow transported to the Mushroom Kingdom. Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) rounds out the classic characters in this nostalgia-filled story. It's the video game's first movie adaptation since the 1993 widely disliked live-action film, Super Mario Bros. 

The newest film is available in 3D, IMAX, and other premium formats, which made up 38 percent of sales. According to Rich Gelfond, IMAX CEO, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the company's highest grossing animated film, making $21.6 million worldwide. 

It's not just animated and video game movies it's stacking up against, either. The Super Mario Bros. Movie had the historically third highest Easter weekend sales after Batman vs. Superman's $181 million and Furious 7's $161 million.

With opening sales like these, it’s fairly likely we’ll see an animated Mario sequel at some point in the future, and this might open the door to further big-budget adaptations of beloved Nintendo properties. Get ready to explore Boo's mansion or Donkey Kong's jungle in the next inevitable spin-off. 

The latest edition of Star Wars Celebration is underway and, along with some fresh details about shows coming to Disney+ over the next year or two, Lucasfilm revealed more info about what's ahead for the movie side of the franchise. It announced three Star Wars films, one of which will feature the return of Daisy Ridley as Rey.

That film will take place 15 years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, the final movie in the Skywalker saga and the most recent Star Wars movie to hit the big screen. It will center around Rey forming a new Jedi Order. Academy Award winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (Ms. Marvel, Saving Face) will direct the film.

A movie from James Mangold (Logan, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) will delve into the origins of the Force and the Jedi. It will be set 25,000 years before anything else we've seen in the Star Wars universe to date, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Meanwhile, Dave Filoni will finally get a shot at directing a live-action Star Wars movie. Filoni has been at the heart of the franchise for many years. He directed the 2008 animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars and has been deeply involved with the recent spate of Disney+ shows, such as The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew. Fittingly, the movie he's set to direct will tie the stories of those shows together and put a bow on them.

Disney and Lucasfilm haven't revealed release dates for any of these films. However, Disney's current slate includes holiday 2025 and 2027 dates for untitled Star Wars flicks.

After the last three Star Wars films (The Last Jedi, Solo and The Rise of Skywalker) didn't exactly receive wide acclaim, Disney and Lucasfilm walked back on their plans to release a movie every year. They have made several attempts to get other Star Wars films off the ground, including Patty Jenkins' Rogue Squadron, a trilogy from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, another trilogy from The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and entries from Taika Waititi and Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige.

All of those projects have either been canned or deprioritized, according to reports. Disney and Lucasfilm are evidently hoping these three freshly announced films will reignite Star Wars' success in movie theaters, even if we'll have to wait at least a couple of years to see the first of them.

Super Mario Bros. is an almost perfect kids film. It's stunningly animated, it has enough momentum to keep youngins from being bored, and almost every character is unique and likable (even Bowser himself, thanks to the comedic stylings of Jack Black). It's clear that Nintendo didn't want to repeat the mistakes of that other Mario movie, the live-action 1993 film that's ironically beloved by some '90s kids (it's all we had!), but ultimately failed to capture the magic of the games. This film, meanwhile, is chock full of everything you'd remember from NIntendo's ouvre. It's a nostalgic romp for adults, and it's simply a fun time for children.

But boy is it safe. Maybe I'm a bit spoiled by the excellent non-Pixar animated films we've seen over the last decade, especially the ones that Phil Lord and Chris Miller have touched (The Lego Movie! Into the Spider-Verse!). But it's glaringly obvious Nintendo didn't want to take any major creative risks with this adaptation. The script from Matthew Fogel is filled with enough humor and references to keep us from feeling bored, and directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic deliver some inspired sequences. But it's almost like the film is trapped in a nostalgia castle thanks to the whims of an aging corporate dinosaur. (Bear with me.)

Nintendo/Illumination

That wasn't a problem for the kids in my matinee audience, but it's a bit disappointing if you've waited decades to see a truly great Mario adaptation. It's in line with the recent live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie — Super Mario Bros. is "fine." There's no attempt to achieve anything deeper than the basics: Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are two floundering Brooklyn plumbers who are inexplicably transported to the Mushroom Kingdom. Luigi, ever the scaredy-cat, is almost instantly captured by Bowser's minions, and it's up to Mario and Princess Peach (an effervescent Anya Taylor-Joy) to save him. Big bad Bowser, meanwhile, has plans to either marry Peach or, barring that, take over the kingdom.

The film bombards you with an endless series of references from the start – just look at all those Punch-Out! characters on the wall! – something that will either delight longtime Nintendo fans or make your eyes roll. Personally, though, I mostly enjoyed seeing how all of the nostalgia fodder was deployed (the adorably fatalistic Lumalee from Mario Galaxy practically steals the film). The filmmakers also show off plenty of visual flair, like an early scene in Brooklyn that rotates into a 2D chase sequence. If only some of the musical choices were more creative. (A Kill Bill reference? Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero" during Mario's training montage? Come on.)

It's always nice to see kids movies reach far beyond our expectations — The Lego Movie wrestled with the prison of capitalism, the importance of pushing against restrictive social expectations and how fandom can ruin the thing you actually love, all in addition to being a fun adventure for kids and injecting a dose of smart humor for adults. In Super Marios Bros., Mario learns to eat mushrooms because they literally make him big and strong. What subtext!

At the same time, I can still respect a movie that simply accomplishes its goal of entertaining children. Over the years, I've been subjected to plenty of truly awful kid's films with ugly animation and production design, lazy writing, and zero creative vision. I wish I could reclaim the time I spent watching Space Jam: A New Legacy or the 2011 Smurfs movie. The Super Mario Bros. may be a bit basic and safe, but it's not a waste of time.

For one, we've never seen Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom look this good. Illumination may not have the stellar track record of Pixar, but this movie is filled with gorgeously detailed characters, vibrant worlds jam-packed with detail and some of the most fluid animation I've seen in years. It's a visual feast, and it makes me long for the day when a Mario game can look so lush (as much as I loved Super Mario Odyssey, it's visuals are held back by the Switch's aging hardware).

And for the most part, the voice acting kept me invested. Jack Black is inspired as Bowser, a hopeless romantic who can only express his feelings through song and world domination. Charlie Day basically plays his usual harried persona, but it fits Luigi, a character who mainly exists to support his little bigger brother. And Anya Taylor-Joy makes for a perfect Princess Peach, a leader who has to feign bravery to protect her adorable Mushroom Kingdom people.

Nintendo/Illumination

For all of Chris Pratt's hype about his Mario voice, though, it's merely serviceable. The movie jokes about Charles Martinet's original problematic accent (Martinet also voices two characters in the film), but Pratt's spin on it just feels like someone pretending to be a schlubby Brooklynite. That's particularly surprising since Pratt injected so much life into his Lego Movie lead.

What's most disappointing about The Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it's so close to being genuinely great. If the film had more time to build up its characters, or if it made room for Jack Black unleash his full Tenacious D talents as Bowser, it would easily be stronger. Why not go a bit harder on that Mario Kart sequence? (Even Moana managed to fit in a Mad Max: Fury Road reference!) Why not spend a bit more time on the rivalry/budding bromance between Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) and Mario?

With a projected opening weekend of $150 million or more, it's clear that Nintendo has a hit on its hands. A sequel is inevitable. I just hope that the company loosens up the next time around. After all, what fun is a Mario adventure without taking a few creative leaps over chasms of uncertainty?

Netflix released at least one movie a week over the past two years, but for 2023, the company is changing course. According to Bloomberg, the streaming giant is restructuring its movie division and releasing fewer movies overall. Netflix will combine the team working on small projects with a budget $30 million or less and the unit that produces mid-budget films that cost $30 million to $80 million to make. The restructuring will result in a "handful" of layoffs — the company didn't specify a number — and the departure of two notable executives. Lisa Nishimura, who oversees documentaries like Tiger King and small budget films, as well as VP for film Ian Bricke are both leaving the company after over a decade. 

As Bloomberg notes, Netflix ramped up its film development efforts after studios started building their own streaming services instead of licensing their movies to the company. In addition to the units working on small and mid-budget films, Netflix has one more division developing big-budget projects. It's unclear if the last group is also affected by the restructuring.

Despite the sheer number of titles Netflix previously released, only a few had won accolades, had reached millions of hours of streaming, or had the kind of cultural impact some of the biggest blockbusters had achieved. (According to the company's Top 10 page, its most watched movies for 2021 and 2022 include Red Notice, Don't Look Up and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.) Netflix Film chief Scott Stuber reportedly decided to cut down on the titles the service is releasing this year so he could ensure that the division is producing more high-quality projects. 

Stuber didn't say how many people are losing their jobs from the shakeup, but the numbers are supposed to be smaller than the layoffs that happened at the company last year. Netflix implemented job cuts before many of its rivals in the film, TV and entertainment space did. HBO and HBO Max had to let some production staff members go as part of a larger Warner Bros. Discovery restructuring back in August, while Disney recently announced that it's laying off 7,000 workers, including those involved with media and distribution.

Rumors of an animated Scott Pilgrim show have been swirling around for years, though Netflix officially confirmed those rumors last year by announcing it was working on something. More details just dropped, however, and not only is the Scott Pilgrim anime a real thing, but it is currently in production and features the entire cast of the original 2010 movie.

We mean the entire cast, including Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong and Mae Whitman. Some cast members have become major stars in the years since the film’s original release, but they are also returning. In other words, expect to hear the dulcet tones of Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Kieran Culkin and Aubrey Plaza as they reprise their original roles.

There’s also plenty of behind-the-scenes folks coming back for this animated follow-up. The big name here is original director Edgar Wright, who is returning as an executive producer and seems to be heavily involved if his tweets are any indication. Bryan Lee O’Malley, the original creator of the Scott Pilgrim comic, is one of the showrunners. Wright even tweeted to suggest that the film’s original composers, legendary chiptune band Anamanaguchi, would be back in some capacity.

Netflix has dropped a trailer, but it does not feature any actual footage, so the look and feel of the animation are still unknown. Additionally, no official release date has been announced, so it may be a while before we see what this new interpretation looks like. It’s time to play the waiting game again, but at least we know it’s actually coming this time. In the meantime, there is the original movie to watch, comics to read and a video game to play.

No, the origins of Tetris didn't involve a high-speed car chase, but the true story behind the game still reads like a spy novel. There's corporate intrigue, nefarious government agencies and an envious amount of globe-trotting. But the reality wasn't enough for the creative minds behind Apple's Tetris film, which premieres on March 31st. Director Jon S. Baird and writer Noah Pink couldn't help but spice up the story with hyperactive pixel art, cartoonishly evil villains and wildly discordant tonal shifts. The result is a film that may entertain general audiences – or critics who have somehow never heard of Tetris before – but will probably leave true aficionados of the game cold.

From its opening scenes, in which a young Henk Rogers (The Kingsman's Taron Egerton) recounts the magical moment he encountered Tetris at CES, the film aims for the snappy dialog of Aaron Sorkin's scripts for The Social Network and Steve Jobs. But it never reaches those heights. Rogers is the entrepreneur responsible for working together with Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), the Soviet programmer who created Tetris, to bring the game to the rest of the world. He makes for a compelling main character on paper, and yet the film doesn't delve too deeply into why he'd risk his life and business (he was the founder of Japan's Bullet-Proof Software) for a single game.

Apple

Call that a failure of storytelling, or perhaps it's just dramatic shorthand. Rogers is one of the first people to become truly obsessed with Tetris, and that alone defines his actions. Throughout the movie he and others experience the "Tetris effect" – hallucinating falling blocks after playing the game. That's a practically universal response to playing Tetris for an extended period. The world quickly fades out of view while you're focusing on those shapes, and its effect on you lingers for days.

In this film, that's shown in the most basic way possible: A hallucinatory display of shapes right in front of someone's eyes. But I couldn't help but imagine how a more artful take would have looked. Think Tetris by way of Darren Aronofsky's Pi, a movie where the lead character starts to see evidence of math in every corner of the natural world.

That being said, there's still plenty to enjoy in Tetris. Rogers’ early glimpse at a Game Boy prototype, the system that would make Tetris a global phenomenon, is treated like he's encountering the Holy Grail. He immediately sees the potential for appealing not just to kids with NES consoles but even adults. You could easily call it the first casual video game. Ben Miles and Togo Igawa also do a fine job of embodying Nintendo royalty, former Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln and the company's third president, Hiroshi Yamauchi.

“The very important role of Tetris of that time was that it started to break down the barrier between people and computers,” Pajitnov told me in an interview. Early on, he said people were embarrassed to admit they were hooked on Tetris, and others were quick to say they don’t play games, “just Tetris.” Now gaming, especially those of the casual mobile variety, can reach just about anyone.

At the very least, Tetris the film understands the power of games. But it would be stronger if it embraced the reality of the story, rather than try to position itself as a cheap spy movie. British billionaires Robert and Kevin Maxwell are more James Bond villains than actual humans (admittedly, that may not be far from the truth), as they wrangle with Soviet leaders and Rogers over distribution rights to the game. Soviet intelligence officers, who repeatedly threaten Rogers and Pajitnov, are even more cartoonish. By the time we reached an obligatory car chase that, for some reason, also turns into pixelated graphics, I was almost completely checked out.

Apple

It’s doubly disappointing since the movie didn’t need to do much of this. The real-world licensing dilemma, which kicked off after the British software seller Robert Stein sold rights to the game before the Soviet Union’s approval, could be compelling enough. Prior to Rogers’ discovery of the game, Stein had sold rights to the Maxwell’s Mirrorsoft for European distribution, and to Spectrum Holobyte in the US. Rogers’ snagged Spectrum’s rights, but quickly realized that Steins’ contracts were likely illegitimate. To the movie’s credit, it also covers this licensing drama, but it’s almost always overshadowed by the more fantastical elements added by the filmmakers.

While the pieces don’t entirely fit into place (sorry), if Tetris pushes more people to explore the actual history of the game through other media, like the BBC's documentary Tetris: From Russia with Love, Dan Ackerman's The Tetris Effect and the graphic novel The Games People Play, it may have been worth it. Still, its existence also means we won’t get to see any other adaptations, like a Halt and Catch Fire-esque limited series, anytime soon.

Apple's long-expected Martin Scorsese movie has a release date — for theaters, that is. The company has revealed that Killers of the Flower Moon will get a wide theatrical release on October 20th following a "limited" run starting October 6th. The company hasn't said when the film will be available to Apple TV+ users, but the streaming launch will come after the theater exclusivity period ends. This is Apple's first movie to get a widescale big-screen debut before going online.

Killers of the Flower Moon is an adaptation of David Grann's namesake book. It covers the fledgling FBI's investigation of murders of Osage Nation members in the early 1920s after the tribe won rights to oil profits on its land. Scorsese both directed the movie and co-wrote it alongside Eric Roth (of Dune and Mank fame). The cast includes more than a few big-name stars and Scorsese favorites, including Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone.

Scorsese struck a multi-year deal with Apple in spring 2020 that covered both movie and television projects. While the exact terms aren't clear, Killers reportedly has a budget topping $180 million. The pact came just months after Netflix's Scorsese film, The Irishman, received a massive audience but failed to win any Oscars.

The strategy of releasing a movie in theaters first isn't new. Industry awards like the Oscars frequently require movies to show in theaters before they qualify, and it's no secret that streaming giants like Apple, Amazon and Netflix chase after these awards for the publicity they bring. Apple's CODA was the first streamer to win a Best Picture Oscar, for instance. The scope of this premiere is new to Apple, though, and the company is clearly willing to spend on A-list talent to potentially clinch some statuettes and boost its credibility in Hollywood.

In the years leading up to, and through, World War II, animal behaviorist researchers thoroughly embraced motion picture technology as a means to better capture the daily experiences of their test subjects — whether exploring the nuances of contemporary chimpanzee society or running macabre rat-eat-rat survival experiments to determine the Earth's "carrying capacity." However, once the studies had run their course, much of that scientific content was simply shelved. 

In his new book, The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life, Seattle University Assistant Professor of Film Studies Dr. Ben Schultz-Figueroa, pulls these historic archives out of the vacuum of academic research to examine how they have influenced America's scientific and moral compasses since. In the excerpt below, Schultz-Figueroa recounts the Allied war effort to guide precision aerial munitions towards their targets using live pigeons as onboard targeting reticles.

University of California Press

Excerpted from The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life by Ben Schultz-Figueroa, published by the University of California Press. © 2023 by Ben Schultz-Figueroa.

Project Pigeon: Rendering the War Animal through Optical Technology

In his 1979 autobiography, The Shaping of a Behaviorist, B. F. Skinner recounted a fateful train ride to Chicago in 1940, just after the Nazis had invaded Denmark. Gazing out the train window, the renowned behaviorist was ruminating on the destructive power of aerial warfare when his eye unexpectedly caught a “flock of birds lifting and wheeling in formation as they flew alongside the train.” Skinner recounts: “Suddenly I saw them as ‘devices’ with excellent vision and extraordinary maneuverability. Could they not guide a missile?” Observing the coordination of the flock, its “lifting and wheeling,” inspired in Skinner a new vision of aerial warfare, one that yoked the senses and movements of living animals to the destructive power of modern ballistics. This momentary inspiration began a three-year project to weaponize pigeons, code-named “Project Pigeon,” by having them guide the flight of a bomb from inside its nose, a project that tied together laboratory research, military technology, and private industry.

This strange story is popularly discussed as a historical fluke of sorts, a wacky one-off in military research and development. As Skinner himself described it, one of the main obstacles to Project Pigeon even at the time was the perception of a pigeon guided missile as a “crackpot idea.” But in this section I will argue that it is, in fact, a telling example of the weaponization of animals in a modern technological setting where optical media was increasingly deployed on the battlefield, a transformation with increasing strategic and ethical implications for the way war is fought today. I demonstrate that Project Pigeon was historically placed at the intersection of a crucial shift in warfare away from the model of an elaborate chess game played out by generals and their armies and toward an ecological framework in which a wide array of nonhuman agents play crucial roles. As Jussi Parikka recently described a similar shift in artificial intelligence, this was a movement toward “agents that expressed complex behavior, not through preprogramming and centralization, but through autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning.” The missile developed and marketed by Project Pigeon was premised on a conversion of the pigeon from an individual consciousness to a living machine, emptied of intentionality in order to leave behind only a controllable, yet dynamic and complex, behavior that could be designed and trusted to operate without the oversight of a human commander. Here is a reimagining of what a combatant can be, no longer dependent on a decision-making human actor but rather on a complex array of interactions among an organism, device, and environment. As we will see, the vision of a pigeon-guided bomb presaged the nonhuman sight of the smart bomb, drone, and military robot, where artificial intelligence and computer algorithms replace the operations of its animal counterpart.

Media and cinema scholars have written extensively about the transforming visual landscape of the battlefield and film’s place within this shifting history. Militaries from across the globe have pushed film to be used in dramatically unorthodox ways. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson argue that the US military historically used film as “an iterative apparatus with multiple capacities and functions,” experimenting with the design of the camera, projector, and screen to fit new strategic interests as they arose. As Wasson argues in her chapter dedicated to experimental projection practices, the US Army “boldly dissembled cinema’s settled routines and structures, rearticulating film projection as but one integral element of a growing institution with highly complex needs.” As propaganda, film was used to portray the military to civilians at home and abroad; as training films, it was used to consistently instruct large numbers of recruits; as industrial and advertising films, different branches of the military used it to speak to each other. Like these examples, Project Pigeon relied on a radically unorthodox use of film that directed it into new terrains, intervening in the long-standing relationship between the moving image and its spectators to marshal its influence on nonhuman viewers, as well as humans. Here, we will see a hitherto unstudied use of the optical media, in which film was a catalyst for transforming animals into weapons and combatants.

Project Pigeon was one of the earliest projects to come out of an illustrious and influential career. Skinner would go on to become one of the most well-known voices in American psychology, introducing the “Skinner box” to the study of animal behavior and the vastly influential theory of “operant conditioning.” His influence was not limited to the sciences but was broadly felt across conversations in political theory, linguistics, and philosophy as well. As James Capshew has shown, much of Skinner’s later, more well-known research originated in this military research into pigeon-guided ballistics. Growing from initial independent trials in 1940, Project Pigeon secured funding from the US Army’s Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1943. The culmination of this work placed three pigeons in the head of a missile; the birds had been trained to peck at a screen showing incoming targets. These pecks were then translated into instructions for the missile’s guidance system. The goal was a 1940s version of a smart bomb, which was capable of course correcting mid-flight in response to the movement of a target. Although Project Pigeon developed relatively rapidly, the US Army was ultimately denied further funds in December of 1943, effectively ending Skinner’s brief oversight of the project. In 1948, however, the US Naval Research Laboratory picked up Skinner’s research and renamed it “Project ORCON” — a contraction of “organic” and “control.” Here, with Skinner’s consultation, the pigeons’ tracking capacity for guiding missiles to their intended targets was methodically tested, demonstrating a wide variance in reliability. In the end, the pigeons’ performance and accuracy relied on so many uncontrollable factors that Project ORCON, like Project Pigeon before it, was discontinued.

Moving images played two central roles in Project Pigeon: first, as a means of orienting the pigeons in space and testing the accuracy of their responses, examples of what Harun Farocki calls “operational images,” and, second, as a tool for convincing potential sponsors of the pigeon’s capacity to act as a weapon. The first use of moving image technology shows up in the final design of Project Pigeon, where each of the three pigeons was constantly responding to camera obscuras that were installed in the front of the bomb. The pigeons were trained to pinpoint the shape of incoming targets on individual screens (or “plates”) by pecking them as the bomb dropped, which would then cause it to change course. This screen was connected to the bomb’s guidance through four small rubber pneumatic tubes that were attached to each of side of the frame, which directed a constant airflow to a pneumatic pickup system that controlled the thrusters of the bomb. As Skinner explained: “When the missile was on target, the pigeon pecked the center of the plate, all valves admitted equal amounts of air, and the tambours remained in neutral positions. But if the image moved as little as a quarter of an inch off-center, corresponding to a very small angular displacement of the target, more air was admitted by the valves on one side, and the resulting displacement of the tambours sent appropriate correcting orders directly to the servo system.” 

In the later iteration of Project ORCON, the pigeons were tested and trained with color films taken from footage recorded on a jet making diving runs on a destroyer and a freighter, and the pneumatic relays between the servo system and the screen were replaced with electric currents. Here, the camera obscura and the training films were used to integrate the living behavior of the pigeon into the mechanism of the bomb itself and to produce immersive simulations for these nonhuman pilots in order to fully operationalize their behavior.

The second use of moving images for this research was realized in a set of promotional films for Project Pigeon, which Skinner largely credited for procuring its initial funding from General Mills Inc. and the navy’s later renewal of the research as Project ORCON. Skinner’s letters indicate that there were multiple films made for this purpose, which were often recut in order to incorporate new footage. Currently, I have been able to locate only a single version of the multiple films produced by Skinner, the latest iteration that was made to promote Project ORCON. Whether previous versions exist and have yet to be found or whether they were taken apart to create each new version is unclear. Based on the surviving example, it appears that these promotional films were used to dramatically depict the pigeons as reliable and controllable tools. Their imagery presents the birds surrounded by cutting-edge technology, rapidly and competently responding to a dynamic array of changing stimuli. These promotional films played a pivotal rhetorical role in convincing government and private sponsors to back the project. Skinner wrote that one demonstration film was shown “so often that it was completely worn out—but to good effect for support was eventually found for a thorough investigation.” This contrasted starkly with the live presentation of the pigeons’ work, of which Skinner wrote: “the spectacle of a living pigeon carrying out its assignment, no matter how beautifully, simply reminded the committee of how utterly fantastic our proposal was.” Here, the moving image performed an essentially symbolic function, concerned primarily with shaping the image of the weaponized animal bodies.

When we learned that a BlackBerry movie was in the works last year, we had no idea it would be something close to a comedy. But judging from the the trailer released today, it's aiming to be a far lighter story than other recent films about tech, like The Social Network and Steve Jobs. The BlackBerry movie stars Jay Baruchel (How to Train Your Dragon, Goon) and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton as Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEOs of the Canadian firm Research in Motion. They're not exactly household names, but they both played a huge role in the history of mobile communications. Without the BlackBerry's success, the iPhone may have never happened.

Judging from the trailer, the film will cover everything from the origins of BlackBerry as a crazy idea between a few college students (director Matt Johnson also co-stars as RIM co-founder Douglas Fregin), to its ignominious end as it failed to keep up with the iPhone and Android smartphones. It's a classic innovator's dilemma tale: RIM revolutionized the way we communicated by tapping into early cellular networks, but it failed to see the potential of touchscreen smartphones that didn't need physical keyboards.

BlackBerry is based on the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, which was written by Globe and Mail reporters Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff.