No obituaries this week, and we can open the weekly pop culture recap with good news instead. The Hollywood Actors Strike is over. As of 9 November, the strike was officially suspended after a record-breaking 118 days, with union heads from SAG-AFTRA announcing a new contract valued at over one billion dollars, including “unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI,” a first-time streaming participation bonus, substantial Pension & Health cap bumps for performers, and more.
So expect a lot of casting announcements and returns to production over the coming days and weeks. Also on the cards are a ton of official release date shuffles, like this one, which sees a couple of upcoming Marvel movies move from 2024 into 2025 and beyond. You can still expect Deadpool 3 next year though, with Ryan Reynolds’s R-rated superhero comedy sliding from 3 May to 26 July.
Film
We honestly forgot this one was even happening. Pixar’s emotion-centred Inside Out is getting a sequel, which arrives in cinemas in June next year. In Inside Out 2, Riley reaches puberty, which means that the personifications of her emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, are joined by new feelings, starting with Anxiety.
Maya Hawke voices Anxiety, with Amy Poehler as Joy, Phyllis Smith as Sadness, Lewis Black as Anger, Tony Hale as Fear, and Liza Lapira as Disgust.
From forgetting movies to upcoming releases we never even expected, there’s Mean Girls: The Musical. Adapting the Broadway musical based on the 2004 cult classic comedy, this fresh take features a new screenplay by Tina Fey (who returns to her role in the original) but revisits the same plot.
New student Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is welcomed into the top of the high school food chain by the elite group of popular girls called “The Plastics,” ruled by the conniving queen bee Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and her minions Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika). However, when Cady makes the major misstep of falling for Regina’s ex-boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), she finds herself in Regina’s crosshairs.
The new Mean Girls comes to cinemas on 12 January.
Finally, the Ghostbusters franchise is getting a new entry in Afterlife follow-up Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and here’s the first trailer for this supernatural action comedy.
This time around, the Spengler family leaves Oklahoma for New York City, where they join forces with the original Ghostbusters team to oppose an ancient evil known as the Death Chill. The stakes? If they fail in their mission, the earth could be plunged into a second Ice Age.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is currently set for release on 29 March next year.
Series
Netflix Geeked Week 2023 is underway, running from 6 to 12 November. It started a bit quietly but now the streamer has started to unleash its heavy-hitting announcements and reveals. Netflix is compiling all the Geeked Week news here, but hands down, the biggest to date has been the teaser trailer drop, and launch date unveiling, for their upcoming live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
This new reimagining of the beloved Nickelodeon animated series – which is set in a fantasy universe inspired by Asian history and mythology, where Benders exist who can harness the four elements – comes to Netflix on 22 February 2024.
Along with the trailer, a bunch of new images were released from Season 1 as well, including first looks at Suki, head of the Kyoshi Warriors, winged lemur Momo, and Aang’s sky bison Appa. Check them out below.
Another headline-making announcement from Netflix Geeked Week? We now finally know the release date for Arcane Season 2, courtesy of social media. The follow-up season of the groundbreaking animated series, based on video game League of Legends, comes to Netflix next November.
Moving away from Netflix now to Disney+. Given the way its release date was shifted around, along with plans to release the entire series in one go (for the first time in Disney+ MCU history), I kind of expected Echo to go largely unsupported by Disney. However, not only does this spin-off from Hawkeye look as dark and gritty as Netflix’s Daredevil – the first of the new-generation of Marvel heroes on the small screen – it’s being set up as the first series under a new Marvel Spotlight banner. Marvel Spotlight promises “more grounded, character-driven stories to the screen, and in the case of Echo, focusing on street-level stakes over larger MCU continuity.” With Marvel Spotlight properties, audience apparently don’t need to have watched other Marvel series or movies to understand what’s happening.
For the record, Echo continues the story of Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), a deaf Native American Choctaw and the former commander of the Tracksuit Mafia under Vincent D’Onofrio’s crime lord Wilson Fisk. Returning to her home town, Maya must must face her ruthless past, reconnect with her Choctaw cultural roots and embrace the meaning of family and community if she ever hopes to move forward.
All five episodes of Marvel’s Echo start streaming from 10 January.
Gaming
The top three gaming stories that caught our eye this week?
1. We’re now less than one month away from The Game Awards 2023, which will be streaming Live on 7 December on all platforms from 4:30pm PT (that’s 02:30am Friday in South Africa). Nominees in the various Game of the Year categories will be announced this coming Monday, 13 November.
2. What we’re willing to bet money on NOW is that The Game Awards will be where Rockstar debuts the trailer for their next, still untitled Grand Theft Auto game (presumably GTA VI). After a December trailer drop announcement was leaked this week, Rockstar was pretty much forced to confirm it as they ran through celebratory plans for their 25th anniversary next month.
3. Finally, with the Super Mario Bros. animated film doing gangbusters at the box office, Nintendo is looking to repeat the success with their other biggest franchise, The Legend of Zelda. Except they’re being even more ambitious with this adaptation, and going live action! Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto announced the film in a post on Twitter, while Nintendo followed up to say that filmmaker Wes Ball (The Maze Runner and upcoming Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) will be directing, and Sony Pictures handling film distribution. No cast announcements or release date window have been made.