TV, Movies & Home Theatre - Page 3

The season two finale of Amazon's The Rings of Power has just wrapped up, and now we are beginning to hear the rumblings of the third season being greenlit.

The first season of The Rings of Power wasn't particularly well received by Middle-Earth fans, who cited many problems with the story, particularly the differences between the adaptation and the book lore. Despite the criticisms, the first season generated more than 150 million viewers, and according to studio head Jennifer Salke, season two has generated 55 million and is expected to catch up to season one's numbers. Amazon declined to comment on what constitutes a "view" but did say that The Rings of Power is still within its streaming platforms' top five shows.

Will season three get greenlit? The Hollywood Reporter states Amazon is on the verge of officially approving the third season for the show, with the studio expected to make a decision and an announcement by the end of the month. An indicator that a third season is on the way is that Amazon MGM Studios touted The Rings of Power content to advertisers at the Prime Video UK Upfront presentation in London, which typically only happens when a studio is confident in continuing development on that project.

BIOSTAR has just launched its new flagship X870E VALKYRIE motherboard, ready to run AMD's new Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPUs.

The new BIOSTAR X870E VALKYRIE motherboard is ready for AMD's new Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, with the X870E VALKYRIE motherboard supporting up to 192GB of DDR5 memory, enough to handle a few Chrome tabs, that's for sure.

Get ready to crank up your gaming rig with the X870E VALKYRIE, because this beast of a motherboard doesn't mess around. It's packing dual PCIe 5.0 x16 slots alongside a PCIe 4.0 x16, so you can slap in those top-tier GPUs without breaking a sweat, ensuring your system is future-proofed for whatever comes next in gaming or pro-level rendering.

James Cameron has been working with and in the water for decades now, starting with Titanic in the mid 90s through to Avatar... but now the Terminator director's next movie is Hiroshima: a real-life story of a man who survived both nuclear blasts in Japan.

Deadline reports that the Aliens and Terminator director has secured the rights to Charles Pellegrino's upcoming historical book Ghosts of Hiroshima, and will use that as well as Pellegrino's previous non-fiction book The Last Train From Hiroshima, as the basis for a single movie about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Cameron describes The Last Train From Hiroshima as an "uncompromising theatrical film" which will reportedly shoot as soon as he's unlocked from finishing Avatar. Hiroshima will be a movie about a Japanese man that survived the first nuclear bomb dropped in Hiroshima, to catch a ride to Nagasaki, and then survived the second nuclear explosion.

FromSoftware games have become extremely popular with a large portion of the gaming industry really respecting the difficulty and time that goes into completing each of the studio's titles.

The explosion in popularity of FromSoftware games peaked with the release of Elden Ring, which went on to sell 25 million units by June 2024, being awarded Game of the Year, and becoming one of the best-selling video games of all time. The success of Elden Ring brought an influx of new fans of FromSoftware games, and probably one that falls to the wayside in discussions about FromSoftware's Dark Souls and Elden Ring games is Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

However, rumors previously suggested Shadows Die Twice was pegged to receive its own anime based on the video game, and now according to Ecuf, who writes it can exclusively announce the production of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice will be handled by Qzilla. Additionally, the anime will have a "low episode count" and be based on the events occurring in the FromSoftware title. For those anime fans out there, Qzilla recently produced the opening for Jigokuraku / Hell's Paradise Season 1.

One of the most beloved performances to ever grace the big screen screen was Ian McKellen's role as Gandalf the Grey/White in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, and with new Middle-Earth movies on the way it begs the question - Will Ian McKellen be returning to the iconic role of Gandalf?

McKellen has previously expressed extreme enthusiasm at the idea of returning to the role of Gandalf, even going as to publicly say he wants to pick up the staff before he finally retires, which currently doesn't have an end in sight. McKellen told The Big Issue that his passion for The Lord of the Rings hasn't subsided and that he will keep on acting as long as his body has the strength to enable to him to do so. "I shall just keep at it as long as the legs and the lungs and the mind keep working," said McKellen.

The 85-year-old said to the publication that he was informed there are new Middle-Earth movies in the works and he has been approached to reprise his role as Gandalf. McKellen didn't confirm that he was returning to the role but said, "Gandalf will be involved, and they hope that I'll be playing him." Speaking to BBC Breakfast McKellen said, "I'm not letting anyone else put on the pointy hat and beard if I can help it."

The official trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim has been released on the Warner Bros YouTube channel, giving us our first look at Peter Jackson's ground-breaking return to J.R.R Tolkien's Middle-Earth.

The War of the Rohirrim will focus on the story of Helm Hammerhand, a king of Rohan, and the character that Helm's Deep was named after. For those who don't remember, Helm's Deep is where Theodon, the King of Rohan in Jackson's films, and his people retreat to in The Two Towers, which is then eventually attacked by Saruman's forces.

The trailer starts off with showing footage from Peter Jackson's Two Towers, such as shots of Edoras, Gandalf, the iconic Middle-Earth map, and Helm's Deep, which is where the trailer cuts from live-action into anime. The events of The War of the Rohirrim occur 183 years before the events of the original trilogy of movies. Fans should expect a pretty self-contained story that only sparingly references characters from the original trilogy of movies or even the Hobbit movies.

The high-budget, star-studded Borderlands film currently in theaters could be the most ill-conceived video-game to-movie adaptions to date, with many calling it a flop - one of the biggest in Hollywood history. With a reported $145 million budget, including marketing, the film only managed $8.8 million in its opening weekend at the box office in the U.S., falling massively behind recent hits Deadpool and Wolverine and Twisters.

The Borderlands franchise from Gearbox is undeniably popular, with the second game in the series being one of the highest-selling games of all time - blending mature-rated, over-the-top violence with humor and first-person shooting that incorporated Diablo-style loot for the game's seemingly countless guns.

The film adaptation ditches the story found in the games to present a brand-new take on the universe with familiar characters like Lilith, played by Cate Blanchet, alongside a star-studded cast that includes Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jack Black voicing the robot Claptrap. The film also ditches the game's hyper-violent presentation for a more family-friendly PG-13 rating.

James Cameron returning to the Terminator franchise would be crazy good, as the director is currently knee-deep in Avatar sequel production... but now he's teased he's working on "Terminator stuff".

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter (THR) the Avatar and Terminator director said he's working on new Terminator stuff, adding: "It's totally classified. I don't want to have to send out a potentially dangerous robotic agent if you were to talk about it, even retroactively".

Cameron was asked about the work that he previously did on Netflix's Terminator Zero animated series, to which Cameron told THR: "It looks interesting. My relationship to that is very much like The Sarah Connor Chronicles - other people spinning stories in a world I set in motion is interesting to me. What's their takeaway? What intrigued them about it? Where are they going with it? It looks like they're going back to the root cause of Judgment Day - the nuclear war - and whether that's an ultimate timeline".

Google is officially sunsetting its Chromecast branding to introduce a new streaming device that is much more powerful and expensive.

The search engine giant took to its blogs to announce its discontinuing the Chromecast brand after 11 years of it being in service to introduce a new product called the Google TV Streamer. The new streaming device isn't designed to be a direct replacement for Chromecast dongles, but Google will replace the $50 4K Chromecast with the $99 Google TV Streamer.

What separates the Google TV Streamer and Chromecast? Google has outfitted its new streaming device with all of the features of Chromecast, plus a little more. The new set-top box is much more powerful than the highest-end Chromecast, as the new device contains a processor that's 22% faster than the previous generation, twice as much RAM at 4GB, and four times the storage at 32GB. Additionally, the Google TV Streamer supports 4K streaming at 60FPS and comes with a HDMI 2.1a port.

In 2023, HBO's The Last of Us adaptation became the first videogame adaptation to earn multiple Emmy Award nominations snagging 24 in total, ultimately winning 8 Emmys. With the recent success of Prime Video's Fallout adaptation created in collaboration with Bethesda, the show is now joining last year's prestige drama hit by earning 16 Emmy nominations across 15 categories.

The nominations include the award for Outstanding Drama Series, where Fallout will compete against Shogun, The Crown, The Gilded Age, and The Morning Show. Celebrated actor Walter Goggins' memorable performance as The Ghoul has also earned a nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor In A Drama Series. The show has also earned a nomination for Outstanding Writing For A Drama Series.

Three prestigious award nominations alongside several more cover aspects of the show, including costume design, prosthetic makeup effects, makeup, music, and visual effects.

The Halo TV series has officially been cancelled at Paramount, sources have told The Hollywood Reporter.

Paramount has shuttered its Halo television show after two seasons, but showrunners are trying to find a new home for the series. The news comes just weeks after the announced merger of Paramount and Skydance Media.

While seemingly popular among viewers, with season 2 among the top 10 most-streamed shows tracked by Nielsen with a strong 354 million views in February 2024, the Halo show has proven to be controversial due to its divergence from the core timeline set by the video games.

TCL is known for its consumer electronics, which includes an extensive range of impressive and affordable TVs. As part of its home entertainment products, the company offers its own streaming platform called TCLtv+ - an ad-supported platform offering a variety of entertainment, sports, music, and lifestyle programming.

With that, TCLtv+ Studios is the production arm creating original content for the platform, some of which are built using generative AI tools. The company's first AI sci-fi film short, "Message in a Bot," is now available on YouTube and X, with its TCLtv+ debut coming later in the month. This is TCL's second AI-generated piece of content, following the release of Next Stop Paris, its AI-generated romantic comedy, which we covered a few months ago.

And, well, you're probably wondering if it - you know - works as a film. The short answer is yes, even though much of it looks like a collection of AI-generated GIFs stitched together to form a somewhat cohesive plot. The story, as it were, involves a UFO crash landing Earth and humanity using the recovered technology to send a dog through a wormhole to an alien planet filled with E.T.-like creatures. More or less.

Sony and Legendary Pictures plan to release a new live action Street Fighter film in early 2026, sources tell Variety and Deadline.

A new live action movie based on the best-selling Street Fighter series is currently in the works at Sony and Legendary Pictures, with the popular games publisher Capcom producing. The film is set to launch in theaters in March 20, 2026, nearly three after the release of Street Fighter 6, the most recent entry in the popular franchise.

No concrete details on the film's central plot have been revealed at this time, and information on who will star in the film--alongside who will direct it--remains scarce. Danny and Michael Phillippou--directors behind 2022's Talk to Me--were originally to direct the Street Fighter adaptation, but both have detached from the project due to scheduling conflicts.

One of the strangest and most beloved characters in J.R.R Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy is officially coming to Amazon's The Rings of Power season 2.

That character is none other than Tom Bombadil, who was famously cut from Peter Jackson's iconic trilogy of movies. For those that don't know who Tom Bombadil is, he is a merry fellow that lives in the valley of the Withywindle in the depths of the Old Forest, east of Buckland, and close to the dangerous Barrow-downs. While movie fans have never seen Tom, he is a big part of the start of The Fellowship of the Ring book where he rescues the hobbits from an old willow tree, and again from Wights in the Barrow-Downs.

The origin of Bombadil was purposely left in ambiguity, with very little canonical information to go by besides Tom being described as "Eldest" Tom, himself, said he remembers the "first raindrop and the first acorn... He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless - before the Dark Lord came from Outside." Tom is one of, if not the most mysterious character in Tolkien's legendarium, with the majority of his intervention being in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, or in the age of Frodo, Bilbo and the One Ring.

Viggo Mortensen, the actor who played Aragorn in Peter Jackson's beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy has been asked if he will reprise his role of the Numenorian king in the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum movie.

For those that missed the news, last year Warner Discovery announced it was creating three new Lord of the Rings movies. There was radio silence from the studio for quite some time until its recent earnings call this year where it announced the title and release year for next film. The Hunt for Gollum will star and be directed by Andy Serkis, and produced by Peter Jackson. More good news is that it will be written by Jackson's original trilogy writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.

Canonically, The Hunt for Gollum takes place between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings movies. Please read no further if you don't want any spoilers, as I'm about to explain the basic premise for the movie based on the events that take place in the books.

Apple recently released iOS 17.5 to all of its users, and one bug that some users were reporting was concerning to many as it revived long-deleted photos on devices, leading owners to believe Apple has kept all of their deleted photos.

The bug quickly became controversial as users were reporting seeing images reappear in the Photos app that were deleted and even permanently deleted. Apple described this issue as "rare" and issued an iOS 17.5.1 update, which addressed the bug but didn't provide an explanation as to what caused it in the first place, with the company writing it was related to photos experiencing "database corruption," enabling them to reappear in the Photos library despite being deleted.

Now, Apple has given a proper explanation as to what is behind the bug, with the Cupertino company explaining to 9to5Mac, the bug has nothing to do with iCloud Photos and the problem can be traced to the "corrupt database entry that existed on the device's file system" and that a photo reappearing on a device from years ago (some cases as old as 2010) can be explained by the new device restoring from an old backup.

The latest hit to land on the Apple TV Plus streaming service appears to be Dark Matter, a sci-fi show that's based on a best-selling book of the same name by Black Crouch and starring Joel Edgerton alongside Academy Award winner Jennifer Connelly.

The new show has only been available since its premiere on May 8 but it's already taking the streaming charts by storm. New figures shared by the data collectors at Reelgood have Dark Matter sitting at the top of the pile in terms of the TV show streaming chart for the week beginning May 9. To get there it beat out some big names including Fallout, Baby Reindeer, and a Man in Full. In fact, the show also came out at the top of the overall streaming chart which includes both TV shows and movies.

The Dark Matter book was hailed as one of the best sci-fi novels of the decade and follows Jason Dessen (played by Edgerton), a physicist, professor and family man who is abducted into an alternate version of his life. From there he's left to figure out what is going on and then try to get back to his real life all the while trying to figure out who was behind the whole thing. It's a gripping story, and one that is sure to prove popular as the later episodes begin streaming. The finale isn't due to arrive until June 26.

If you're a Comcast Xfinity internet or TV customer you can now get your hands on a trio of top-notch streaming services under a single monthly fee. And if that sounds like the cable of old, that's probably because it's very similar indeed - except your content will now come over the internet instead of a traditional TV signal.

The new offering, dubbed Xfinity StreamSaver, bundles Apple TV Plus, Netflix, and Peacock together under a $15 per month fee and will launch next week across the United States. We're told that StreamSaver will include Netflix Standard with ads, Peacock Premium, and Apple TV Plus with savings of almost $100 per year when compared to paying for all of the subscriptions separately.

Those who want to add another service to their bundle can choose to add NOW TV for an additional $15 per month, making the full bundle $30 per month. That'll give streamers access to more than 40 live TV channels including AMC, A&E, Hallmark, History Channel, Lifetime, and WEtv, as well as more than two dozen integrated FAST channels including AccuWeather, NBC News, TODAY All Day, and Xumo Movies.

If you're an Apple TV Plus subscriber on the lookout for their next binge-worthy show, the streamer has confirmed that a new drama starring Natalie Portman will premiere on July 19. The Lady in the Lake will premiere with two episodes available on that date and then a new one will arrive every Friday through to the season's conclusion on August 23.

The show, which will run for seven episodes and stars Academy Award and Golden Globe Award winner Natalie Portman, also features Emmy Award nominee Moses Ingram. Portman also serves as executive producer on the project.

Starring alongside Portman and Ingram in the series are Y'lan Noel, Brett Gelman, Byron Bowers, Noah Jupe, Josiah Cross, Mikey Madison, and Pruitt Taylor Vince.

If you're a Spanish-speaking Apple TV Plus subscriber you can look forward to a new crime drama TV show hitting your screen on July 31. The show will debut globally and will carry the Spanish title Las Azules.

Apple offered a first look at the new show via a press release today, setting the premiere date and confirming that the upcoming 10-episode show features an entirely Hispanic cast and crew. That cast will be led by Ariel Award nominee Bárbara Mori. Apple also confirmed that the first two episodes of the show will be available to stream on July 31 while a new episode will then debut weekly through to the season's conclusion on September 25.

Apple's press release describes the show as having been inspired by true events and set in 1970. It tells the story of four women who choose to defy ultraconservative norms and join Mexico's first female police force. However, they then find that the whole thing was just a publicity stunt to distract the media from a serial killer who is on the loose.