Science fiction has a complicated history in musical theater. Much like the Academy Awards, which usually reward stories about “real people” over sci-fi and fantasy (with 2017's Best Oscar win for The Shape of Water being a notable exception), musical theater audiences tend to scoff at spacey sagas. However, some…
Hollywood has what we like to call dump months. These are the couple of times a year where studios toss the movies they don’t think are going to do well at the box office. January is the biggest one, since no one can afford to do jack after the holidays, but August is the summer dump. Still, we’ve seen some great (and…
Comics are filled with alternate realities—that’s why they call them multiverses, after all. While strange, most of these worlds are just variations of the primary universe, where Superman landed in Russia instead of America, or the radioactive spider bit Gwen Stacy, and so on. But underneath all those realities lies…
Westworld has ended its second season with more unsolved mysteries than it started with. Here are some of the biggest questions we hope to see answered in the next season (or two), as well as some hints from the folks in front of and behind the camera that may point us to the answers.
Deadpool 2 is just days away, and what better way to wait for the film than to dig into the Merc with a Mouth’s comic book backlog? We’ve got some suggestions, but with a twist—these aren’t the hilarious, bizarre adventures that usually star the quirky antihero. These are the stories that explore why Wade Wilson is…
Avengers: Infinity War features practically every iconic hero from Marvel Studios’ decade of groundbreaking superhero blockbusters coming together in one film. It also has Hawkeye! But alas, we’ve not seen a second of Hawkeye in any of the footage so far. So to honor our absent archer, here are his best movie moments…
This month, years of meticulous movie planning will culminate in the release of Avengers: Infinity War, smashing together heroes from a decade’s worth of some of the biggest films on the planet. The road to Infinity War has been paved with a decade of reporting around it—some of it leading to some very bizarre rumors…
Lara Croft has been raiding tombs on and off for over two decades’ worth of video games at this point, but her latest movie adventure wants to return Lara to her most basic elements in a reboot—which means some of Lara’s more bizarre opponents from the classic games are probably going to be missing.
The latest Star Wars movie and this week’s Star Wars: Rebels finale have given us looks at Force abilities and techniques so different from what we’ve come to expect from the series that some fans have been left confused, if not concerned, at just what the Force can do. God knows why, though, because the old Expanded…
Look, The Shape of Water is great. Seriously, it is. But when you look at film history, the fact that The Shape of Water is the first science fiction film to ever win Best Picture is kind of weird. There have been decades and decades of phenomenal scifi films better than The Shape of Water, so for it to get the award…
Life as we know is over in the transmogrified plot of real estate where Annihilation happens. It’s the latest scifi movie that shows how the end of the world often becomes the start of something simultaneously lovely and dangerous, a paradoxical approach that’s stretched back decades. Here’s a list of entertainments…
Black Panther isn’t just one of the Marvel universe’s smartest and most powerful heroes, he’s often the one with the most tricks up his sleeve. If Batman is DC Comics’ king of out-of-nowhere moments of surprise, T’Challa handily takes the crown for Marvel. Here’s a few times he grandly let us know he’s always a few…
Valentine’s Day is upon us, so we’ve scoured the big three streaming services—Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime—for movies that meld geeky themes with love. Some are tragic, some are salty, and some even involve zombies. Ain’t love grand?
Time travel as we see it in movies—using DeLoreans, phone booths, hot tubs, and the like—obviously doesn’t exist. But throughout history, people have insisted that they somehow managed to do it. Though most of their wild tales were eventually disproven, the stories are still incredible. Here are five of the most…
Scifi and fantasy films are famously fond of twist endings. Certainly, authors like Richard Matheson and TV shows like The Twilight Zone are a big reason why—but last-act shocks reach back to the era of silent cinema, as anyone who’s seen 1920's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari can attest. Last-act shocks don’t always…
Few creative mediums let you explore stories like video games. Players don’t just watch a story—they participate in it, sometimes steering narratives to wildly divergent endings. But in order for an interactive experience to truly transport players, it needs to have a well-built world for them to live in. Here are…
Eerie entertainment frequently takes inspiration from urban legends, with good reason—nothing’s scarier than a fantastical tale that still feels like it just might be true. TV shows like The X-Files and Supernatural have made liberal use of contemporary folklore over the years, and plenty of feature films have been…
The Star Wars galaxy is a weird and wondrous place, full of laser swords, aliens, and sentient robots. This can make trying to depict the banality of life there a bit difficult. So over years of tie-in material, writers have had to come up with oodles of new words to make the normal things people encounter in everyday…
“Real-life” doesn’t necessarily mean “true,” especially when the context is ghost stories but spooky legends have a way of influencing pop culture, as in the upcoming Winchester starring Helen Mirren. The film is based on the life of a real person who believed spirits were guiding the construction of her mansion.
One of the best things about Star Wars: The Last Jedi is that it solves several mysteries raised by The Force Awakens, but it also presents plenty of its own. Here are all the questions we had after we watched The Last Jedi—as well as our educated guesses as to their answers.
