TV, Movies & Home Theatre - Page 4

Amazon has confirmed it's making two seasons of the God of War TV show, as the news has come from the showrunner Ronald D. Moore, who is overseeing the project that's currently in the works.

Moore appeared on The Sackhoff Show with Katee Sackhoff, where he was asked about what he's currently working on. The showrunner explained his current workplate consists of an "adaptation of this video game called God of War" and that his job is to be in the writer's room, adapting the video games to TV. Moore goes on to say the challenge is daunting with such a large and well-respected IP, and is especially daunting considering he doesn't consider himself a gamer.

Sackoff followed up by asking Moore if he has tried to play any of the God of War games, and the showrunner said he has taken a "stab at it" but gave up as he can't work out the controls. Moore goes on to explain that he grew up in '80s where video games were in arcades, making this whole business with what are traditional video game controllers nowadays extremely foreign to him. "The controllers now..." he laughs, "Press R1, which one's R1, oh I'm dead! I can't quite get a hold of that."

Amazon just revealed Alexa+, the freshly upgraded assistant that's powered up considerably by AI, and one of the niftiest tricks unveiled is a handy sounding ability for movie addicts watching via Fire TV.

This is a piece of functionality that allows you to tell Alexa+ to skip to a particular bit of a movie as a verbal instruction.

The 'jump to a scene' feature was demonstrated by Amazon with A Star Is Born, where Alexa+ was told to skip to the part of the film where Bradley Cooper sings a song, and it duly obliged.

Netflix has been the subject of viewer backlash following the release of their latest true-crime docuseries American Murder: Gabby Petito. The series, which chronicles the murder of 22-year-old Petito, utilizes voice recreation technology to simulate the voice of the victim, used throughout the show to read out journal entries and text messages and provide narration.

The three-part series, released this week, opened with a disclaimer stating: "Gabby's journal entries and text messages are brought to life in this series in her own voice, using voice recreation technology." It's reported that the Petito family gave their blessing for the recreation; however, viewers have been quick to slam the creative decision. Calling it"a violation", "weird as hell," and an "unsettling use of AI".

In an interview with Us Weekly, filmmaker Michael Gasparro defended the decision, stating that the AI narration brings her story to life in a more powerful way, and that they wanted to tell the story "as much through Gabby as possible."

The pursuit of exponential growth is on full display, as Netflix recently announced it will be increasing its prices in the US, Canada, Portugal, and Argentina.

Fortunately, Oceanic and European audiences will keep that extra change in their pockets (for now). As reported by The Verge, the ad-supported tier is increasing from $6.99 to $7.99 per month, and the standard ad-free tier from $15.49 to $17.99 - effectively a 15% increase. The premium tier will also receive a 9% bump from $22.99 to $24.99.

If you're wondering, 'Why do they keep doing this to me?' - then look no further than the quarterly earnings report, which essentially highlights that they executed their 2024 plan (to grow) and highlights their 2025 plan (to grow). The following rationale was outlined by a Netflix spokesperson:

The first trailer for James Gunn's new Superman is here, showing Kal-El battered, bruised, and bleeding before Krypto comes to save him. Check it out:

The new Superman movie is being directed by James Gunn, who helmed the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy for Marvel and the MCU, but is now the co-chief of DC and the writer + director on Superman. In the opening scene of the trailer, Krypto is called to (well, whistled) by Superman who needs help... as the trailer cuts to other parts of the movie.

We get to see the visual style and color grading that James Gunn has used for Superman, shots of Lois Lane and Clark Kent in the Daily Planet, cuts to the Kent Farm with Clark and Pa Kent embracing... it shapes up so well, but then Superman flies in front of a little girl that has just been attacked by a... KAIJU... an epic shot, absolutely epic.

The Premiere 8K is Samsung's latest flagship premium projector for home theaters. It's the first to receive 8K Association (8KA) certification for 8K projectors, a new standard implemented this month.

To obtain 8KA certification, a projector must meet a series of standards, including a proper 8K resolution (7680 x 4320), brightness, contrast, and color gamut ratings that meet a certain standard, high dynamic range (HDR) support, and the ability to upscale lower resolution content to 8K - also, immersive audio capabilities with support for the latest formats.

Samsung's Premiere 8K projector will debut at CES 2025 in January. It will have a world-first feature and bring "unmatched immersion to home cinema."

"Everything you are, everything you've done... has come to this". Paramount Pictures have unleashed the teaser trailer for Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, which debuts in theaters on May 23, 2025. Tom Cruise's last mission is nearly here... check it out:

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning has been renamed from its last movie in the franchise -- Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1 -- from Dead Reckoning Part 2, to "The Final Reckoning". This is reportedly Tom Cruise's last mission as protagonist Ethan Hunt, but I'm sure we could see one last mission...

This is the 8th entry in the franchise, with Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning to be the conclusion from the events of the cliffhanger in Dead Reckoning Part 1 from 2023. We don't know the full plot details just yet, but Ethan and his team must stop one of the most dangerous weapons from destroying the world, and will take to the depths of the oceans again to stop it.

The upcoming Lord of the Rings animated prequel movie is scheduled to release in December, and ahead of the release, Phillipia Boyens, one of the movie's writers, has given some behind-the-scenes details on one of the characters, Saruman the White.

Boyens also co-wrote Peter Jackson's trilogy of Lord of the Rings films and is now, along with Peter Jackson, producing the War of Rohirrim. This animated prequel will take viewers back 183 years before the events of Jackson's trilogy, and will tell the story of Helm Hammerhand, a legendary kind of Rohan that is required to defend his people and family from the Dunlendings, a group of wild mountain people that are bitter foes to Rohan.

This story includes Saruman the White, and according to Boyen's Christopher Lee, he will post-humorously reprise his role as the character in the new animated movie. According to the writer, the team behind the project gained access to Lee's archive and was able to sample enough authentic voice recordings that it was possible for Lee to voice the character once again.

Videogame TV adaptations have come a long way, partly thanks to the critical and commercial success of both The Last of Us on HBO and Fallout on Prime Video. Award-winning drama, engaging action, and faithfully staying true to the spirit and tone of iconic interactive experiences are now the expectation or new bar for a new high-profile videogame to TV adaptations.

Announced in 2022, a live-action God of War series from Sony Pictures TV and Amazon MGM Studios entered production - with the series set to follow in the footsteps of the most recent games. The story follows Kratos, now in the Norse realm of Midgard, looking after his son Atreus as they embark on a mission to spread his recently departed wife's ashes from the highest peak.

Those who have played God of War and the sequel, God of War Ragnarok, on PC or PlayStation 5 will undoubtedly be excited about the possibility of a new TV series - especially when the games are incredibly cinematic. It might be time to temper those expectations, as the TV adaptation is in trouble.

Can you believe Interstellar was released into theaters 10 years ago? Paramount Pictures is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Christopher Nolan's epic space movie being re-released into theaters, into IMAX, and a new 10th Anniversary Collector's Edition 4K Blu-ray box set.

The new 10th Anniversary Collector's Edition was created with Christopher Nolan's participation and approval, which includes Interstellar in both 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray disc, as well as a third Blu-ray. There's also a digital copy of Interstellar, reproductions of the 5 costume patches, 5 theatrical poster reproductions, and a never-before-seen storyboard sequence from Nolan's archives.

Interstellar's new 10th Anniversary set also includes over 2 hours of new and legacy bonus content that drives deeper into the science of the film, its groundbreaking production, and a brand-new discussion on the impacts Interstellar has had in the last 10 years.

Amazon is planning on increasing the amount of money it makes on its Prime Video streaming service by increasing the number of available advertisement slots, meaning users will be blessed with even more ads than they are already consuming.

Notably, current Prime Video users consume between 2 and 3.5 minutes of advertisements every hour. According to a recent Financial Times interview with Kelly Day, Amazon's Vice President of Prime Video International, currently, standard-tier Prime Video users don't receive ads in the middle of content, but that could change in 2025 with Amazon's plan to revise its advertising structure across its platform.

The FT article also revealed Amazon's plan to roll out different forms of ads on Prime Video, such as shoppable ads, carousel ads, intermissions ads, and brand quiz ads. Currently, advertisements on Prime come in two forms; a trailer for Amazon's next upcoming big piece of content (movie/TV show), and then additional slotted ads from brands that have purchased these slots.

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.