Like its predecessor, Pokémon Legends: Z-A is bringing back three classic starter pokémon to get you started on your next adventure.

Though Pokémon Legends: Z-A will likely introduce a number of new creatures, Chikorita, Tepig, and Totodile will be the first three partner pokémon you can choose between as you journey into the depths of Lumiose City. The starters were the stars of the Pokémon Legends: Z-A teaser The Pokémon Company debuted during this year’s Pokémon Presents. Details about the game are still sparse, but we now know a little bit more about how its battles will work.

Like other Pokémon games, you will be able to fight wild pokémon found throughout certain areas, but rather than just launching attacks turn by turn, Legends: Z-A will require players to think strategically about the range moves have and where their monsters are on the battlefield. The video — which focuses on how moves can have different effects and levels of damage depending on a pokémon’s position on the field — makes Legends: Z-A’s battles look a bit like fighting in Diablo. 

The video also emphasizes how, because the game is set entirely in Lumiose, many of the areas where wild pokémon can be found are special locations like alleys and rooftops, where the creatures are learning to cohabitate with humans. Like in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, players will be able to catch monsters without battling in some cases by simply throwing pokéballs at them from a distance.

That mechanic, in particular, should make the game feel much more fluid than Scarlet and Violet, but we won’t know for sure until Pokémon Legends: Z-A debuts for the Switch family of systems sometime later this year.

Each Pokémon Presents stream is special in its own way, but we’re expecting big things from this year’s showcase given the imminent arrival of the Switch 2. A new console means a new generation of games like Pokémon Legends: Z-A and the franchise’s next mainline title. But there should also be some major updates for more casual games like Pokémon TCG Pocket, Pokémon Sleep, and Pokémon Go. We’ve already gotten a little (animated) taste of what Nintendo has been cooking up, but there are even more reveals in store, which you can follow along with right here.

• Mega evolution is on the Horizon.
• Pokémon Unite is leveling up with Alola’s coolest monster.
• Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s starters make their debut in new trailer
• Pokémon Champions gets right to the fights
• It’s almost pokémon time.
• Kick off Pokémon Day 2025 with this gorgeous short film
• Oh yes, wait a minute, Mr. Postmon.
• A pikat the new Pokémon game?

It’s technically already Pokémon Day in Japan, and while we’re still a few hours away from this year’s big Pokémon Presents showcase, there’s a new animated short film out that right now feels like the perfect way to get pumped up for whatever surprises Nintendo has in store.

Many of the Pokémon Company’s animated projects outside of the mainline anime have been fun explorations of what people and their pokémon get up to besides battling. But director Maho Aoki’s Dragonite and the Special Delivery also feels like a reminder to thank your mail carriers for all the hard work they do. Produced by CoMix Wave Films — the studio behind Suzume, Weathering With You, and Your Name — Dragonite and the Special Delivery tells the story of Hana (Riko Fukumoto), a young Paldean postal worker who dreams of becoming an expert deliveryperson.

While most deliverypeople get the chance to venture out into the world, as a letter sorter, Hana’s days are usually spent behind a desk with her partner Fuecoco. But when Hana happens to find an unaddressed letter from a young boy who is trying to wish his traveling father a happy birthday, she recognizes it as an opportunity to prove that she has what it takes to become one of the postal system’s greats like a certain friendly Dragonite.

The short spotlights how it takes all kinds of specialized human and pokémon labor to keep the inter-regional postal system running smoothly. Unsurprisingly, CoMix Wave’s take on the pokémon world is a visual delight that makes all of the short’s creatures look downright majestic regardless of whether they’re ordinary or legendary monsters. The short also features a sweeping shot of Kalos’ Lumiose City and quite a few pokémon capable of Mega Evolution.

Those details could be a nod to the location and mechanic both returning in Pokémon Legends: Z-A (and Flygon finally getting its due), but we won’t know for sure until tomorrow morning.

Though Max has always said that it planned to charge more for access to its CNN and Bleacher Report Sports add-ons, the price hikes are coming in a roundabout way, targeted at subscribers of the streamer’s cheapest tier.

Max announced today that it no longer intends to charge subscribers of its Standard ($16.99 / month or $169.99 / year) and Premium ($20.99 / month or $209.99 / year) tiers an extra $9.99 a month for CNN Max and Bleacher Reports Sports. The add-ons will be removed from Max’s ad-supported tier ($9.99 / month or $99.99 / year) beginning on March 30th, however, meaning that subscribers will have to move up to more expensive tiers should they want to keep watching live sports and news.

As The Hollywood Reporter notes, Max’s decision reads very much like a sign of the streamer prioritizing live sports as part of its bundling strategy and responding to competitors like Peacock and Netflix getting more serious about live sports programming of their own. In a statement about the pivot, Warner Bros. Discovery’s head of global streaming and games, JB Perrette, said that Max’s new plan of action came after a year of assessing how users were engaging with sports content on the platform.

“We believe that the best place for that content for now is within the Standard and Premium tiers,” Perrette said. “This update ensures that subscribers can continue to enjoy that coveted access within Max, while also enabling ongoing investment in our premium sports and news portfolio.”

Technicolor Group, the French VFX giant that owns some of Hollywood’s most in-demand post-production houses, appears to be on the brink of collapse — putting thousands of jobs at risk.

Variety reports that Technicolor has begun winding down operations after failing to secure a new round of investment necessary to keep the entire international outfit running. In a message sent to employees on Monday, Technicolor CEO Caroline Parot claimed that COVID-19 era setbacks and the 2023 writers strike were two sources of the “severe cash flow pressures” the company has been struggling to deal with.

Parot also said Technicolor — which operates in the U.S., Canada, Europe, India, and Australia — “must face reality,” and explained that the company has petitioned the Paris Commercial Court to initiate receivership proceedings.

“In each country, the appropriate framework for orderly protection and way forward is currently being put in place to allow, when possible, to remain in business continuity,” Parrot said. “This decision was not taken lightly; every possible path to preserve our legacy and secure the future of our teams will be thoroughly explored to offer a chance to each of its activity to be pursued with new investors.”

Parot’s latest message to employees came days after workers in the US received WARN notices informing them of the potential for imminent mass layoffs, and Technicolor’s pivot to receivership in France gelled with the company’s recent move in the UK to file for administration.

Technicolor Group, which owns Moving Picture Company (Dune, Spider-Man: No Way Home), The Mill (Detective Pikachu, Severance), Mikros Animation (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Orion and the Dark), and Technicolor Games (Mass Effect: Legendary Edition), is no stranger to financial woes. The company was spun-off from Vantiva SA (formerly known as Technicolor SA) in 2020 after the latter filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy and underwent a large-scale restructuring. Parot also pointed to Technicolor’s separation from Vantiva as a factor that contributed to its current “difficult operational situation.”

Though new episodes of Andor dropped individually (for the most part) during the show’s first season, Disney Plus is switching things up when the show returns this April.

Along with a new Andor  trailer showcasing some of the action Cassian (Diego Luna) is going to get into in the show’s second and final season, Disney announced today that the upcoming episodes (there are 12 total) will be released as four weekly chapters. In a statement about the new season, creator and executive producer Tony Gilroy teased that that, because it follows Cassian’s adventures during the four years leading up to Rogue One, the show is going to feel even bigger this time around.

“One of the great thrills of making Andor is the scale of the story and the number of characters we’re able to meet — ordinary people, Imperial overlords, passionate revolutionaries,” Gilroy said. “They are real people making epic decisions, all of them staring down questions with terrifying consequences. Cassian’s journey is the soul and spine of our story, but it’s the choir that makes the show.”

The trailer definitely makes Andor’s second season seem like its stakes are going to be raised to meet its scale as Cassian marches towards a fate we’ve already seen play out. The weekly episode was part of what made the first season work so well, but these new batch drops might be a refreshing change of pace when Andor season 2 premieres on April 22nd.

Rumours about the next mainline Avatar series have been circulating ever since Nickelodeon announced that Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko were returning to lead Avatar Studios. But now, we finally know a bit more about where the franchise is heading after The Legend of Korra.

Today, Nickelodeon announced that the Avatar saga (which began with The Last Airbender) will continue with Avatar: Seven Havens, a new 2D animated series co-created by Konietzko and DiMartino and executive produced by Ethan Spaulding (Mike Tyson Mysteries) and Sehaj Sethi (The Winchesters).

No casting or potential release windows have been teased, but the network shared that Seven Havens’ story will be told over the course of 2 seasons consisting of 13-half-hour-long episodes each.

Seven Havens will introduce a new earthbending Avatar who is seen as a threat to the world because of her powers. “Hunted by both human and spirit enemies, she and her long-lost twin must uncover their mysterious origins and save the Seven Havens before civilization’s last strongholds collapse,” according to Nickelodeon.

The show’s announcement comes just a little under a year after the premieres of Netflix’s live-action The Last Airbender adaptation that Konietzko and DiMartino bowed out of in 2020 after two years of production due to creative differences. The Last Airbender showrunner Albert Kim similarly parted ways with the series after its first season, and Netflix brought on Jabbar Raisani and Christine Boylan to oversee the show’s next chapter.

Though Netflix’s Avatar project is its own thing separate from what Avatar Studios is working on, there might be some narrative tissue connecting Seven Havens’ story with Nickelodeon’s upcoming movie focused on Aang and his friends in the time between The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. But that won’t become clear until Nickelodeon decides to share more.

Barbara Broccoli’s longstanding beef with Amazon is a big part of what kept the e-commerce giant-turned-studio from producing new James Bond movies following its acquisition of MGM in 2021. But now, it seems like both parties have set aside their differences in order to get the ball rolling on 007’s next chapter.

Today, Amazon MGM, Broccoli, and fellow Bond producer Michael G. Wilson announced the formation of a new joint venture that will give the studio full creative control over the Bond movie franchise. After the deal is finalized, Broccoli and Wilson (who are half-siblings) will remain co-owners of the franchise with Amazon MGM. But in a statement about the deal, both producers were clear about their desires to step back and focus on other endeavors after spending most of their lives working on Bond.

“My life has been dedicated to maintaining and building upon the extraordinary legacy that was handed to Michael and me by our father, producer Cubby Broccoli,” Broccoli said. “With the conclusion of No Time to Die and Michael retiring from the films, I feel it is time to focus on my other projects.” Wilson echoed his sister’s sentiments and insisted that they trusted Amazon MGM to “lead James Bond into the future.”

Previously, Broccoli — known for making Bond-related decisions based on her own instincts — was very outspoken about her belief that Amazon might ruin the franchise because of its more algorithmically-driven approach to developing entertainment projects. Following the recent announcement, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos took to his X account to ask his followers who the next Bond should be.

According to a Wall Street Journal report from last December, Broccoli saw Amazon development execs as a bunch of “f— idiots,” and her feelings seemed to be borne out in the way there has not been a new Bond film since 2021’s No Time To Die. It’s not clear what exactly brought Broccoli and Wilson around on the idea of letting Amazon MGM steer the 007 ship. But now that they have, it probably won’t be long before we start hearing what’s next for the iconic character.

The original BBC Radiophonic Workshop put itself on the map by crafting the music for radio adaptations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the original Doctor Who theme song before shuttering in the late ‘90s. The Workshop’s experimental approach to audio engineering in pursuit of unique sound effects made them early pioneers of the electronic music genre. Even though a new Workshop opened in 2012, things were never quite the same, but the BBC has been working on a plan to give a new generation of musicians access to the original Workshop’s massive archive.

Today, BBC Studios and Spitfire Audio announced the launch of a new downloadable library containing multiple decades’ worth of archival music and sound effects created by the Radiophonic Workshop during its initial run. Access to the library can be purchased for £119/€143/$159 until March 17th, after which the price will jump to £149/€179/$199.

In addition to sounds from original tapes, the new Radiophonic Workshop library contains a number of fresh recordings from various Workshop members like Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb, and Mark Ayres. The new library also includes a wide selection of microphones, turntables, loudspeakers, reverb machines, synths, tape machines, and vocoders.

In a statement about the project, Ayres noted how similar modern day sampling techniques are to the workflows used by original members of the Workshop. He also described the new digital library as a unique instrument embodying all of “the work, processes and equipment that the Workshop created and used.”

“I’m the youngest member of the core Radiophonic Workshop – and I’m 64,” Ayres said. “We’re not going to be around forever. It was really important to leave a creative tool, inspired by our work, for other people to use going forward.”

Robert Eggers’ excellent Nosferatu remake will finally be available to stream very soon.

Peacock announced today that Nosferatu — which stars Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Bill Skarsgård — will make its streaming debut on February 21st. Along with the film’s original theatrical cut, Peacock subscribers will also be able to watch the extended cut that was previously only available on DVD / Blu-ray or by buying it from a digital platform. 

As Deadline notes, Nosferatu was one of Focus Feature’s biggest successes last year as it raked in $95.4 million in the US and $175.9 million globally. That didn’t keep the studio from fast-tracking its digital release (you could download it less than a month after its theatrical debut, which is becoming the new norm). But it might be part of why Nosferatu, which is technically a romance movie and a horror, isn’t hitting the streamer until the week after Valentine’s Day.

With its first few Captain America films, Marvel Studios sold audiences on the idea that its superhero movies could be more than live-action cartoons. By borrowing from other genres, they could become gritty, character-focused thrillers like The Winter Soldier or splashy crossover events like Civil War. And the tonal shifts between each feature made it feel like the first Avenger was evolving in tandem with the larger MCU’s ongoing story.

That evolution came to a climax with Avengers: Endgame, which sent Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers off into the sunset to stunning box-office effect. The movie also set the stage for Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson to take up the Captain America mantle like in Marvel’s comics. But narratively, it left the MCU in an awkward, Avengers-less state that Marvel has struggled to pull the franchise out of. 

Marvel clearly wants director Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World to be a palate cleanser — one that remembers and builds on the events of Marvel’s other recent features. The film does a serviceable job of establishing a new status quo, but it struggles to articulate how this Captain America is different from his predecessor. And whi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

At least one more season of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power  will be coming to the small screen sooner than later.

Today, Amazon announced that it has greenlit production on another installment of its Lord of the Rings prequel series starring Morfydd Clark as Galadriel, Charlie Vickers as Sauron, Robert Aramayo as Elrond, and Daniel Weyman as Gandalf. In a press release about the renewal, Amazon shared that, while it has yet to lock in a tentative release window for the new season, it is scheduled to begin filming some time this spring. The streamer also noted that, since its debut in 2022, The Rings of Power has pulled in  “170 million viewers worldwide, and continues to be one of Amazon’s strongest drivers for new Prime membership sign-ups.”

In its last season, The Rings of Power did away with much of its mystery as it revealed Gandalf’s true identity and spelled out how Sauron plans to conquer Middle-earth with his precious set of elf-forged accessories. The show’s third season will presumably have a much darker tone as it gets closer to the events of the Lord of the Rings books, but we won’t know for sure where Amazon wants to take the series until more details start hitting the internet.

The first teaser for Sony and Screen Gems’ big screen Until Dawn adaptation made it seem like it might just be another supernatural horror with a splash of Groundhog Day tossed in to keep things mildly interesting. But judging from the way the studios are describing the film, it sounds like this Until Dawn will also feature another important element from its video game counterpart.

Though old man Hill (Peter Stomare) still won’t tell Clover (Ella Rubin) and her friends just what kind of danger they’re wandering into in Until Dawn’s new trailer, the meddling youths have a much easier time figuring out the basics of what’s going on. Somehow, the strange building they’re staying in is able to hurdle them back through time after they’re murdered by different kinds of monsters, and the phenomenon gives them another chance to survive through the night.

That much was obvious in Until Dawn’s first teaser, and the new trailer shows off a few more of the ghouls Clover’s group will encounter. Something that was less apparent, though, was how the movie will limit the number of extra lives each character will have. According to Sony and Screen Gems’ new synopsis for the film, the fact that group only gets a handful do-vers is one of the more terrifying things about their situation. That makes it sound like a couple of characters might run out before they’re able to escape, which could make Until Dawn feel even more like the game when it hits theaters on April 25th.

Though the hype around Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale gradually faded as time went on, the show’s final season looks like it’s going to be a sobering and timely reminder of what made Margaret Atwood’s story so powerful in the first place.

Though June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) seemed ready to put Gilead behind her in The Handmaid’s Tale’s season 5 finale, a new trailer for the show’s sixth season finds her back in the belly of the beast quietly rallying other women to strike back at their Christofascist oppressors. While Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) and Serena Joy Waterford (Yvonne Strahovski) don’t seem to know exactly how June plans to destroy everything they’ve built, they can feel that there’s a new subversive energy coursing through Gilead’s population of subjugated handmaids. 

That doesn’t appear to be an immediate concern for Commander Joseph Lawrence (Bradley Whitford) as he achieves a new level of power within Gilead. But the trailer’s shots of handmaids arming themselves with switchblades makes it seem like they’re way past ready to burn everything down if that’s what it takes to be free.

When The Handmaid’s Tale first premiered in 2017, it seemed so dystopian that it was easy for some to dismiss it as pure speculative fiction. But given the ongoing push to further limit women’s access to reproductive healthcare in the US, the show is probably going to feel that like even more of a plausible vision of the future when it returns on April 8th.

Netflix definitely wanted to debut Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour-long documentary chronicling Prince’s life, but that won’t be happening thanks to the late singer’s estate.

Though Edelman’s untitled documentary was already completed, Netflix announced on Thursday that it has “come to a mutual agreement” with Prince’s estate to keep the film from being released. As part of the agreement, the estate also now has the ability to develop a documentary of its own “featuring exclusive content from Prince’s archive.” 

Along with the announcement Prince’s official X account posted a message stating “The Vault Has Been Freed” along with the quotes: “Despite everything, no one can dictate who you are to other people,” and “The truth is, you’re either here to enlighten or discourage.”

Edelman, who won an Academy Award in 2016 for his documentary O.J.: Made in America, spent five years on his Prince project after Netflix signed a 2018 deal with Comerica Bank and Trust, the executors of Prince’s estate at the time. The original deal guaranteed that Prince’s estate would not try to exercise any editorial control over the film’s final version. But as The Guardian notes, things began to change in 2022 as the Netflix executive who brokered the deal exited the streamer, and Prince’s estate came under new ownership that did not like early cuts of the film.

Sources within Prince’s estate told Variety last July that parts of Edelman’s documentary were overly “sensationalized” and insufficiently fact-checked. It seems more likely that the estate didn’t like what the filmmaker found. Months later, a New York Times report about the film detailed how Edelman had interviewed a number of Prince’s former protégées / lovers — some of whom began dating the singer while they were underage — to paint a complicated picture of who he was:

They all appear in the film and give differing accounts of their experiences. Some, like Jill Jones, describe his cruelty and diminishment of them; others, like Electra and Fantastic, are still spellbound by their time with him and speak of how he buttressed their sense of self.

The women emerge as variously funny, appealing, appalled, victimized, knowing. We’re asked to sit with Prince’s multiplying paradoxes for many hours, allowing them to unsettle one another.

One of the most disturbing parts of the film depicts Prince’s relationship with Mayte Garcia, who became his wife. Now a striking, doe-eyed 50-year-old woman in a flowing silk shirt, she describes how she met Prince when she was 16 and he was 35, after he saw tapes of her belly dancing.

Currently, there’s no word on when or where Prince’s estate plans to release its new documentary.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man star Hudson Thames left many eyebrows raised last week after his comments about fearing the Disney Plus series would be “annoying and woke.” During a subsequent Reddit AMA, series creator Jeff Trammell was quick to start doing damage control, and he insisted that Thames had misspoken. But even in its most charitable interpretation, Thames’ statement was pretty odd considering how being annoying and constantly vigilant about injustice are kind of Spider-Man’s whole schtick.

We may never know exactly what Thames meant or whether his feelings could have been expressed more thoughtfully. But what’s funny about the entire situation is how Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is, in fact, one of those “woke” shows you’re always hearing culturally conservative types harp on about. It celebrates multiculturalism by treating diversity as a simple fact of the world Peter Parker exists in. And the series’s “wokeness” is honestly one of the best things about it.

There’s a lot of the Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man series that rings familiar if you’ve spent time reading Marvel’s comics or watched any of the studio’s …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Following AMC’s recent changes to its Stubs program — a set of perks that actually seemed like a solid way to get people to sign up — the theater chain is now planning to raise the subscription service’s prices.

Variety reports that, beginning May 7th, a membership to Stub’s A-List tier — which currently allows subscribers to see three movies a week at any AMC theater nationwide — will increase from $24.95 / month to $27.99 / month. To make the subscription a bit sweeter, AMC plans to increase the number of movies Stubs A-List members can watch weekly from three to four. And in a bid to court more young film buffs, AMC is also lowering the age requirement for a Stubs A-List membership to 13.

In a statement to Stubs subscribers about the changes, AMC CEO Adam Aron noted that this was the service’s first price hike in years and insisted that “A-List is still an incredible bargain.”

“Even with this necessary price adjustment, in most cases the cost of an A-List membership will be less than seeing two movies per month as a non-member, especially so if you see a movie in our premium formats and/or buy your tickets online,” he said.

Rooster Teeth — the studio behind animated web series such as RWBY, Red vs. Blue, and Gen:Lock — seemed like it was shuttering for good last year. The company announced that it was winding down operations due to parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s inability to find a party interested in buying the production outfit. But in an interesting turn of events, Rooster Teeth is now coming back under the leadership of one of its original co-founders.

On Wednesday, Rooster Teeth announced that it and many of its assets have been acquired by Box Canyon Productions, a company owned by Rooster Teeth co-founder Burnie Burns. In a statement about the acquisition, Rooster Teeth said that it plans to double down on its “focus on innovation, community engagement, and the spirit of creativity,” and Burns said that he was excited to bring the company back to its roots.

“The heart of this brand has always been its fans, and I look forward to writing a new chapter together,” Burns said.

It’s not entirely clear how many of Rooster Teeth’s remaining assets Box Canyon purchased from WBD. But Box Canyon announced that it has plans to launch a number of new projects in 2025 including “renewed production of some of the platform’s classic shows,” a “reimagining” of Burns’ first film titled The Scheduled and Again, an all-new audio drama.

For a while, it looked like the first live-action Gundam movie was going to make its debut on Netflix, but Bandai now plans to put the movie in theaters.

Though details about the film are still very slim, Bandai and Legendary announced today that their live-action Gundam feature will now be written and directed by Sweet Tooth co-showrunner Jim Mickle. Previously, Jordan Vogt-Robert (Kong: Skull Island) was attached to direct, but according to Deadline, he is no longer involved with the project. We still don’t know whether the Gundam movie will tell an original story or be an adaptation of one of the franchise’s many anime series, but Bandai made clear that it will receive a theatrical release.

Bandai also revealed that it is launching a new North American subsidiary in April that will oversee Gundam’s production and be tasked with growing the larger Gundam brand overseas. It will probably be a while before we start hearing things like a potential production timeline and news about casting, but it sounds like the studios are very serious about getting this thing off the ground.

The larger Jurassic Park franchise feels like it should be telling stories about dinosaurs having taken over the entire planet at this point, but the new trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth makes it seem like the movie is going to retread old territory with a bit of a video game-inspired twist.

Set five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, Rebirth introduces a new group of human characters with their hearts set on getting up close and personal with genetically engineered dinosaurs. Because most of the modern world’s climate has turned out to be inhospitable to the dinosaurs, they don’t seem to be much of an immediate threat to humanity in the new trailer. 

The dinos have clustered on a unique island where they’re fine minding their business in peace. But when a pharmaceutical company discovers that the DNA of certain prehistoric animals can be used to make a new wonder drug, covert operations expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and navigator Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) are tasked with collecting samples and risking their lives in the process.

The way the movie’s story is all about people doubling …

Read the full story at The Verge.