It’s been a busy week for film, series and gaming news, so we’re just going to jump straight into the stories that caught our eye. Meanwhile, for the first time in a long while, there are no high-profile creative deaths to report, so enjoy the breather.

Film

While the Warner Bros. Discovery merger has seen numerous big and small screen projects canned for financial reasons (including the shocking Batgirl cancellation), it turns out the sequel to Matt Reeves’s The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson has survived the culling. It joins Todd Phillips’s musical sequel Joker: Folie à Deux, with Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, as announced DC Comics movies that managed to stay alive through the chaotic and uncertainty-plagued regime change.

Also talking movies going ahead, although at this point we’ll only believe it when we see it, the loooong in development BioShock movie has a creative team steering the ship. Netflix’s video game adaptation, about the fall of underwater Art Deco utopia Rapture, will be directed by Francis Lawrence, who knows a thing about dystopian settings. Lawrence has made five Hunger Games movies, including upcoming prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Writing the script for BioShock is Michael Green, who most recently worked on The Jungle Cruise and Death on the Nile, but also has Logan and Blade Runner 2049 under his belt.

In anticipation of the upcoming Avatar 2 (officially titled Avatar: The Way of Water) in December, James Cameron’s original Avatar is heading back to cinemas around the world next month. Seeing as the first film came out in 2009, saying “it’s been a while” is putting it mildly.

Unfortunately, this also means that Avatar has been pulled from Disney+, at least temporarily. So if you didn’t rush out to buy the Blu-ray – which is a thing we did 14 years ago – the only way you’re going to jump start your memory of Avatar is in cinemas, or via a video on demand service like the Movies tab on the Google Play Store. Along with the rest of the world, South African audiences can look forward to their big-screen refresher course on 23 September. Cinema chain Nu Metro has already confirmed that the original Avatar will be screening in their IMAX equivalent Xtreme and multi-sensory 4DX cinemas.

What is it with Netflix and black comedy apocalyptic films? There was Don’t Look Up last year, and, now, we have the teaser for upcoming White Noise. From acclaimed Marriage Story filmmaker Noah Baumbach, White Noise is based on the award-winning 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, which sees a contemporary American family dealing with the aftermath of an airborne toxic event. Mundane concerns collide with bigger questions of mortality, and happiness in the midst of uncertainty. Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle star.

White Noise is debuting at the Venice Film Festival at the end of this month, and enjoying a select theatrical run before coming to Netflix on a as-yet-unannounced date.

Step aside, Liam Neeson. Joining the ranks of Jamie Lee Curtis, Carrie Fisher, Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver as a badass older woman action star is Allison Janney, thanks to Netflix’s new film, Lou. Premiering on 23 September, Lou also stars Jurnee Smollett as the mother of a kidnapped young girl, who teams up with the mysterious woman next door to pursue the kidnapper – a journey that tests their limits and exposes shocking secrets from their pasts. Tom Hardy lookalike Logan Marshall-Green also stars as the film’s villain.

Netflix has also unveiled a first-look image and release date for the sequel to 2019’s excellent murder mystery whodunnit Knives Out, from writer-director Rian Johnson. Titled Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Daniel Craig is returning as Detective Benoit Blanc, and is joined by an ensemble cast consisting of Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista and Ethan Hawke.

When tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) invites some of his nearest and dearest for a getaway on his private Greek island, it soon becomes clear that all is not perfect in paradise. And when someone turns up dead, well, who better than Blanc to peel back the layers of intrigue? Glass Onions: A Knives Out Mystery will have its world premiere at the 47th annual Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022, followed by a global release on Netflix on 23 December. Happy holidays!

We stan stop-motion animation studio LAIKA, the makers of Coraline, Paranorman and Kubo and the Two Strings, and always pay attention to anything they’re working on. One of their upcoming projects is Wildwood, based on Colin Meloy’s young adult fantasy novel about two seventh-graders who enter a hidden, magical forest outside Portland, Oregon, to rescue a baby kidnapped by crows.

Just yesterday, LAIKA announced the ensemble all-star voice cast for Wildwood, which includes Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Charlie Day, and Richard E. Grant.

Now for some release dates. If you missed it on the big screen, Thor: Love and Thunder (our review) is coming to Disney+ on 8 September. Still talking superheroes, the house-cleaning post Warner-Discovery merger means that both Shazam! and Aquaman sequels have been pushed back. Shazam! Fury of the Gods moves from 21 December this year to 17 March next year, while Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom shifts from that same 17 March 2023 date all the way to 25 December 2023.

Well before then, no doubt hoping to repeat the success of Predator prequel Prey (our review), the straight-to-streaming Hellraiser remake is premiering on Hulu on 7 October. The announcement tweet below provides a first tiny glimpse of Jamie Clayton’s Pinhead, a sado-masochistic being whose extra-planar Cenobite realm is accessed by a puzzle box in our reality.

Series

Next week! On 2 September, Amazon Prime Video’s billion dollar, House of the Dragon-slaying Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power premieres. Here’s the final trailer to get you hyped (and sign up for that Prime Video sub if you haven’t already done so).

For the record, fantasy epic The Rings of Power is set thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and centres on the Second Age of Middle-earth. What does that mean for non Tolkien devotees? The Second Age marks the return of evil to Middle-earth, ending a period of prosperity and leading to the fall of great civilizations, plus the pivotal forging of the Rings of Power.

Live-action The Batman 2 may be safe but that’s not the case for animated series Batman: Caped Crusader, the spiritual successor to iconic 1990s cartoon Batman: The Animated Series. Caped Crusader even had TAS creator Bruce Timm on board, with J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves and Ed Brubaker as fellow executive producers.

At least all is not lost for Caped Crusader. While HBO Max has passed on the series, production remains under way, and it is being shopped around to other outlets. More here and here.

If you were worried that The Umbrella Academy would end with with Season’s 3 cliffhanger and numerous unanswered questions, you can relax. Netflix’s series about a dysfunctional family of superheroes, based on the Dark Horse comic, will have a fourth and final season to wrap everything up.

Related to The Umbrella Academy, series writer/director/executive producer Steve Blackman will be overseeing Netflix’s Horizon Zero Dawn video game adaptation. He had this to say in an interview with Netflix’s Tudum newsroom:

Horizon Zero Dawn is an exceptionally well-crafted game with wonderful characters not often seen in the rank-and-file of the gaming world. Guerrilla Games has created an incredibly lush and vivid world of man and machine who find themselves on a collision course to oblivion. Their salvation comes in the form of a young female warrior named Aloy, who has no idea she’s the key to saving the world. Suffice it to say, yes, Aloy will be a main character in our story. My writing partner on this, Michelle Lovretta, and I are thrilled to be able to expand this remarkable IP into a series for all types of viewers.

Previous rumours suggested the Horizon series would be a kind of prequel, depicting the fall of humankind in the year 2074, 1 000 years before the events of the Horizon games. Even though we now know the show will feature Aloy, it could still pull a Resident Evil and feature parallel timelines.

Finally, as part of a “Coming soon to HBO Max” clip, we received our first 15-second tease for The Last of Us, based on the grim and emotionally intense PlayStation game exclusive. Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, Gabriel Luna and Nick Offerman star in the post-apocalyptic survival series, where civilization has collapsed after the outbreak of a dangerous fungal infection. The Last of Us premieres in 2023.

One final series tidbit is that Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy has joined the cast of Sex Education for Season 4. Playing Thomas Molloy, a cult author who tutors Maeve (Emma Mackey) during her time studying in the US, Levy is a welcome new addition to the cast. He’ll be helping to fill the void left by the handful of fan-favourite characters who won’t be returning for the next season (not confirmed as its last) of the Netflix hit.

Gaming

Both good and bad news from Sony this past week.

The good is that they’ve revealed their most customisable PlayStation controller ever, the DualSense Edge wireless controller for PlayStation 5. The DualSense Edge is basically the PS version of Xbox’s Elite Series 2 controller, offering players next-level personalisation options in terms of their play style, and, to a certain extent, their aesthetic preferences.

We’re talking about the ability to remap button controls, adjust stick sensitivity, set up multiple custom control profiles on a game-by-game basis, and even swap out stick caps and back buttons. The launch date and pricing has yet to be confirmed, but right now you can read all about the DualSense Edge on the PS blog.

Oh yes, we mentioned bad news. Effective as of 25 August (yup, it was immediate) the price of the PS5 is going up “in select markets due to global economic environment, including high inflation rates.” The United States is unaffected but that’s not the same for the UK, Europe, Canada, Japan, China, Australia and Mexico. It remains to be seen if South Africa will be affected – it seems likely – but pre-announcement the default PS5 Disc Edition has been priced at R12 000, and the lesser spotted PS5 Digital Edition at R10 000, locally. More here.

To wrap up, there’s a new Tintin game on the way. Tintin Reporter – Cigars of the Pharaoh is a family-friendly adventure adaptation of Hergé’s comic album of the same name, the fourth volume of The Adventures of Tintin. In Cigars of the Pharoah, Tintin’s investigation of a drug trafficking ring takes him from Egypt to India, and introduces him to policemen Thomson and Thompson, and other key allies.

Developed by Pendulo Studios, with publishers Moulinsart and Microids, Cigars of the Pharoah is coming to PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch in 2023. Watch the trailer, see more images, and learn more about the game here.