Katharine Trendacosta

Why Do So Many Science Fiction Stories Take Children Into Space?

Science fiction is filled with kids in space. This makes sense; if the future has us in space, children will be there, too. But if there are children in a spaceship, a number of things can go very wrong, both for the characters and the audience. The biggest pitfall is that putting children in space…

Showtime’s renewed Penny Dreadful for a third season. The third season will be nine episodes long. [Variety]

Watch Chris Pratt Be Unexpectedly Confronted By Robot Dinosaurs

SA Wardega, who was behind the Spider Dog, picked a new victim: Chris Pratt. Surprised by a pair of very real looking dinosaur robot puppets, Pratt does not channel his Jurassic World character. He does what we’d all do: have a near heart attack. The team didn’t use all that hard work on just one…

Eli Roth May Direct Warner Bros.’ Giant Prehistoric Shark Movie

After being stuck in development purgatory for twenty years, Warner Bros. is finally moving forward with Meg, about a giant prehistoric shark terrorizing the coast. Variety reports that Warner Bros. is in talks to have Eli Roth direct the movie based on the 1997 book Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten. Variety…

Boaz Yakin Talks About the “Cyberpunk” Batman Beyond Movie He Wrote

For a brief moment after he finished Remember the Titans, director Boaz Yakin was attached to a live-action version of Batman Beyond. Of course, Batman Begins ended up being the Batman project that Warner Bros. made, but Yakin calls Batman Beyond was the “best script I ever wrote that never got made.” Speaking to IGN,…

A Treasure Trove of Mad Max: Fury Road Concept Art

Peter Pound has a truly stunning amount of concept art up on his website. Apparently no one involved in this movie was anything less than amazing. It’s obvious Pound was working on this film for a long time — you can see a lot of evolution in the characters. Especially Max, who is clearly based…

Disney Gets Started on Maleficent Sequel, All Hope Lost.

As not a single week seems to go by without an announcement like this, I’m envisioning a future where Disney creates an interlocked live-action movie universe of re-imaginings of their animated tales. So, yes, Disney’s already working on a Maleficent sequel by having Linda Woolverton write a script. Maleficent II thus joins Beauty and the…

Crafton Hills College president Cheryl A. Marshall has refused to ban any books or alter the curriculum at the center of a student’s calls to “eradicate” four graphic novels from an English class. Her statement affirms the college policy on academic freedom and an open learning environment. [Comic Book Resources]

Want to make an origami Discworld for your desk? The tumblr Folds Within Folds has a post all about how to make one.

How The Flash Effects Team Used Comics to Bring Gorilla Grodd to Life

One of the best things about The Flash’s first season was that it took on the challenge of Gorilla Grodd, a giant, talking, psychic gorilla. That would be a challenge on a movie budget, with a movie’s post-production time. The Flash did it for TV. In the case of Grodd, the show started working on…

One Neighboring Galaxy Is a Bright Smear Across Space

The sphere surrounding the Milky Way is called the Local Volume, and it is 35 million lightyears in diameter. In the Local Volume is PGC 18431, a galaxy the Hubble caught as part of a mission to figure out how galaxies cluster and move. Explains The European Space Agency [via NASA]: Hubble’s high resolution allows…

This Is Why Having a Pet Dinosaur Is Just Like Having a Cat

Jurassic World may be thinking that dinosaurs are dangerous beasts hell bent on destruction, but We Have a Dinosaur makes a pretty compelling case that they’re really just big cats. Cats who hate your breakfast. Contact the author at [email protected].

Yeah, Dark Matter Is Predictable. It’s Still Fun as Hell.

Dark Matter premiered on Syfy last night, and we spent a lot of quality time learning the personalities of our brand new protagonists. Were there any huge surprises right out of the box? Not really. But it was fun. Spoilers… The plot of the pilot can be dispensed with relatively quickly: six crewmembers of a…

Meet The Ships Helmed By Dark Matter‘s Biggest Antagonists

In Syfy’s new series, Dark Matter, a crew of six wake up from hibernation with no memory of who they are or what their mission is. But they’re not alone in space, which is run by competing multi-planet conglomerates. One of those conglomerates is Ferrous Corp, and we’ve got an exclusive look at how their…

The Avatar sequels will come out one year later than expected. Instead of 2016, Avatar 2 is now slated for 2017. “Jim Cameron has his own pace,” 20th Century Fox chairman-CEO Jim Gianopulos explained. [Variety]

New Conspiracy Theory: Big Bird Has Secretly Been to Mars

Following a tweet showing a shadow that looked a bit like him on Mars, Big Bird has denied that he’s ever been to Mars. But no one was suggesting that he had. Methinks the bird doth protest too much. Here’s the semi-incriminating photo: And here’s Big Bird’s denial, only five minutes later: WHY SO QUICK…

Baby Bison Sticks Out Amongst the Herd

A calf moves with a herd of bison in Lamar Valley, Yellowstone National Park. Image credit: Neal Herbert/National Parks Service — CC BY 2.0 Contact the author at [email protected].

There Is So Much Innuendo In This New Man From UNCLE Trailer

While the first trailer was heavy on the action and the odd coupledness of Illya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo, this new trailer is all about the double entendres. Between the agents and the civilian. Between Napoleon and the villain. Between Illya and Napoleon. “It’s in and out, no mess. And we both forget about it…

Fox has moved up the release date of The Martian from Thanksgiving to October 2, 2015. It’s the same date that Gravity had two years ago. We so often hear of movies getting release dates pushed back, a vote of confidence like this has become a pleasant surprise. [via First Showing]

On the Finale of iZombie, Everyone Becomes a Villain

In “Blaine’s World,” we ended the season with every kind of villain possible. There were human villains and zombie villains. All joined together by one motive: selfishness. Spoilers… On the human side of things, we had Max Rager (and its CEO, Vaughn Du Clark), Cameron, and Major. On the zombie side, we have the Meat…