How The DCEU Is Treating Its Cinematic Universe Model After Wonder Woman

The Marvel Cinematic Universe changed the superhero game with its creation of connected, live-action worlds, and other franchises have started to catch on. However, as other companies have proven less successful at establishing cohesion compared to the MCU, they have instead opted to branch out and try new things. One of the chief examples of that idea is DC, and following Wonder Woman's widespread acclaim, it sounds like the DCEU (while still very much a cinematic universe) will soon place less emphasis on shared narrative threads between films. DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson explained:

Our intention, certainly, moving forward is using the continuity to help make sure nothing is diverging in a way that doesn't make sense, but there's no insistence upon an overall storyline or interconnectivity in that universe.

Wonder Woman's success made it abundantly clear: a well-made standalone story can still sell tickets. The decision doesn't necessarily mean that DC is opting to turn the DCEU into a series of full-blown independent franchises -- that responsibility falls to the other, currently unnamed DC film banner. However, what it does mean is that future DC movies will have more in common with Wonder Woman than The Avengers with regards to continuity. Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne could still show up in a future Superman movie, or Ezra Miller's Barry Allen could pop up in an Aquaman film, but DC won't become too focused on weaving plot threads between these franchises.

Perhaps the best example from Wonder Woman comes through its tenuous (but still very much present) connection to other members of the DCEU. Although Batman doesn't appear in-person, the film makes an explicit reference to Bruce Wayne and his company by having his men deliver a package to Diana in Paris. He's out there; he's just not vital to this story.

Such a creative decision actually mirrors ideas that have been working in the pages of DC Comics for the last year. Upon the launch of the DC Rebirth line of stories, the comic book giant reduced the continuity between its different titles to focus on telling unique stories that work for each hero -- with the occasional crossover thrown in for good measure.

One of the biggest hopes with this creative push is that it will embolden directors to go all in on the DCEU and apply their own artistic mark to their films. Elsewhere in her conversation with Vulture about the shift, Diane Nelson continued:

Moving forward, you'll see the DC movie universe being a universe, but one that comes from the heart of the filmmaker who's creating them.

That filmmaker-driven approach is already something that makes DC considerably different from other superhero franchises. Only recently, Nightwing movie director Chris McKay touted DC Entertainment's willingness to take a more auteur-focused method, highlighting the A-list names that have signed on to DC projects. It makes sense in the long run; reduced emphasis on continuity increases creative freedom, and increased creative freedom brings in some of Hollywood's biggest names.

The DCEU will press forward with its biggest film yet when Justice League debuts on November 17, but looking beyond that, it sounds like we can look forward to far more insulated projects for the foreseeable future. If you're in the market for more up-to-date information on all of the most highly-anticipated films of the next year, then take a look at our 2017 movie premiere guide and our 2018 movie premiere guide.

Read more >> Why Aquaman's Willem Dafoe Liked Working With James Wan

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Why Aquaman's Willem Dafoe Liked Working With James Wan

The DC Extended Universe is a funny place. Because while new movies are being announced at blinding speeds, there aren't a ton of concrete release dates or a schedule locked down. That is, except for the shared universe's next two installments. Because after Zack Snyder's Justice League hits theaters in November, James Wan's Aquaman will be the next down the pipeline. The film has been shooting for a few months, and some actors have been nearly the end of their time onset. Willem Dafoe recently wrapped his role in the blockbuster, and took the time to praise Wan's skill and vision as a director.

James Wan's great. He's great. I mean, because of the underwater [aspect of the movie] it's very complicated technically. But you see it in his films, he's very detail-oriented. He figures the cut. He's very precise. He's a real gifted filmmaker.

Willem Dafoe seems to really think highly of James Wan, which hopefully is a testament to the director's vision for Aquaman. After all, he's got a big task ahead of him.

Willem Dafoe's comments to Playlist seemingly confirms what audiences have thought about James Wan's work as a director for years. Anyone who has seen Wan's horror films like the Inception and Conjuring franchises can see that his vision is focused and deliberate. Those films and their respective creatures have a visual style that is unlike any other, and now it sounds like DC has given him free reign to explore with Aquaman.

Everyone involved in Aquaman have spoken to how technically complicated the shooting process is. Because the majority of the film is set underwater, the cast isn't able to use space and walk around as they normally would. Instead, there are rigging systems to ensure that they appear to be floating. This makes even the smallest scene a technical hurdle, and should translate onto film very interestingly.

The illusion of floating underwater will also need a crap ton of visual effects. Each strand of hair and article of clothing must be in constant weightless motion, so the artists doing the CGI will have hours and hours of labor on their hands. All of this once again revolves around the specificity and detail-oriented nature of James Wan's filmmaking, and how all the moving pieces must assemble in order for Aquaman to function visually.

Considering just how many credits Willem Dafoe has on his resume, the high praise for James Wan speaks volumes. Dafoe has worked with the best in the business; so if he believes that Wan is gifted, then he must have really won over the Oscar nominated actor.

Aquaman will dive into theaters on December 21, 2018, but both the title character and Willem Dafoe's Nuidis Vulko are also set to appear in Justice League on November 17th. In the meantime, check out our 2017 release list to plan your next trip to the movies.

Read more >> A Major Arrow Villain Is Returning For The Big Superhero Crossover, But Not How We Expected

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My Little Pony (2017)

My Little Pony Synopsis

When a dark force threatens Ponyville and the Mane 6, they go on a journey to the end of Equestria to save their beloved home and they meet new friends and dangerous challenges along the way.

My Little Pony Release Date

In Theaters October 6, 2017

My Little Pony Credits

Starring: Kristin Chenoweth, Emily Blunt, Zoe Saldana, Tara Strong, and Ashleigh Ball

Written By: Meghan McCarthy and Rita Hsiao

Directed By: Jayson Thiessen

Produced By: Haven Alexander, Stephen Davis, Marcia Gwendolyn Jones, Sarah Wall, and Brian Goldner

MPAA Rating: [ PG ]

Distributor: Lionsgate

IMDB: My Little Pony on IMDB

Read more >>The Florida Project (2017)  

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New X-Files Season 11 Photo Is A Total Throwback, And It Definitely Spells Trouble

The X-Files returned to the small screen for the first time in nearly 14 years back in 2016 for a Season 10 that reunited the iconic duo of Mulder and Scully for some more investigations into the paranormal. While many things were the same as they had been in the original series, there were some big changes that were somewhat jarring to longtime fans. The show is returning for a Season 11 in early 2018, and a photo for the new season was just released that's a total throwback to the original run of the series. Take a look:

Yes, one of our agents will be stuck in the hospital while the other is still up and about, presumably to rampage and/or reflect. Longtime fans of The X-Files know well that Mulder and Scully ended up in the hospital on a semi-regular basis. Whether it was one of them getting shot, contracting a terrible disease, lying comatose, or recovering from an infestation, there were a lot of hospitalizations. Scully back in the hospital with Mulder at her bedside definitely spells trouble for what's ahead.

Admittedly, I did laugh when I first saw this photo, if only because part of me wonders if Mulder has his head down because he's doing mental math to try and figure out just how much time the two of them have spent in hospitals over the years. That said, we probably shouldn't be too amused by Scully back in the hospital, as the imagery of her unconscious in a blue hospital gown with Mulder looking exhausted at her side seems an awful lot like a callback to what was arguably Scully's most physically devastating time in the hospital:

The Season 11 photo of Scully in the hospital bed looks frighteningly similar to Scully's state in Season 2, when she suddenly turned up after being abducted, comatose and wasting away to the point that she was certain to die if taken off life support. We didn't know it then, but tests had been done on her, a chip implanted in her neck, and her ova had all been removed. If the Season 11 photo was deliberately staged to call back to Scully's post-abduction state in Season 2, we can be sure that Scully's in for a rough ride.

Season 11 will delve back into the X-Files mythology connected to Scully's abduction and the chip in her neck, according to EW, so the similarities between the two instances of Scully in a hospital bed and Mulder at her side may not be coincidence. Then again, maybe poor Scully was afflicted by yet another freak accident, and the wardrobe department just happened to put her in blue. For her sake, I only hope that it's not the return of her cancer.

We'll have to wait and see. Season 11 of The X-Files will return to Fox at some point in early 2018. Check out our breakdown of what we know about Season 11 so far for a peek of what has been announced about the new episodes, and take a look at our picks of questions that absolutely need to be answered sooner rather than later in the new season. For your viewing options sooner rather than later, take a look at our fall TV guide.

Read more >> DC's Titans TV Show Just Cast Another Comics Character

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DC's Titans TV Show Just Cast Another Comics Character

DC is bringing a new group of superheroes to the small screen with Titans, which is slated to debut on DC's upcoming exclusive director-to-consumer streaming service. A number of characters from DC Comics will be adapted for television, and we already knew a number of the actors who will bring them to life. Now, Titans has cast another comic character. Lindsey Gort of The Carrie Diaries is on board to play Police Detective Amy Rohrbach.

While Amy Rohrbach is not exactly the biggest comic character of DC fame, she did have a great deal of significance for a time in a certain comic series. She was a cop based out of Bludhaven when Dick Grayson relocated to fight crime in her city as the masked vigilante known as Nightwing. Dick decided to become a police officer so that he could fight crime from within the system as well as with his work as Nightwing. As a rookie cop, he was partnered with Detective Amy Rohrbach, who was one of the few honorable and non-corrupt officers in the Bludhaven Police Department.

The two weren't partnered up for too long in the grand scheme of DC Comics, but they became strong allies. Although Dick did have to turn in his badge after Amy learned his secret, she protected his secret, and she became a friend to certain vigilantes operating in Bludhaven. She wasn't a vigilante herself and she didn't wear a mask, but she was one of the good guys in a city full of corrupt cops.

Not too much is known about the Titans version of Amy Rohrbach at this point, although TVLine reports that Amy will be the new partner of Dick Grayson, which at least tells us that Titans' Dick Grayson will be with the police as well. We can't say at this point where he's working. We can rule out Gotham City, however, as Dick is trying to get out from Batman's shadow in Titans, and that could never happen in Gotham City. Dick is being played by Brenton Thwaites of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. We can bet that Lindsey Gort will share a lot of her screentime with Thwaites.

All things considered, Lindsey Gort is probably best known for her role as the young Samantha Jones on the CW series The Carrie Diaries, which was a prequel of Sex and the City. The show only ran for two seasons from 2013-2014. After The Carrie Diaries got the axe, she landed a role on TV Land's Impastor from 2015-2016. Recently, she appeared as Candy Morningstar in an episode of Lucifer on Fox. It should be fun to see how she operates in a world of superheroes.

Lindsey Gort joins a cast already comprised of Brenton Thwaites as Dick Grayson, Anna Diop as Starfire, Teagan Croft as Raven, and Alan Ritchson and Minka Kelly as the crime-fighting duo Hawk and Dove. We're still waiting to learn who will play Beast Boy, and the odds are that we're in for adaptations of other comic characters as well. Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for the latest Titans news, and check out our fall TV premiere schedule to discover when all the current superhero series will return to the airwaves.

Read more >> Why Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5 Almost Didn’t Happen

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Battle Of The Sexes Review

Battle of the Sexes is, at best, a light volley of banter and debate over important topics, rather than a hard-hitting expose with contemporary ties to ongoing gender discussions (which it easily could have been).

Given the film's synopsis, I expected Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' sports biopic Battle of the Sexes to be about tennis. Specifically, I anticipated it being about the highly-publicized 1973 exhibition match between female tennis sensation Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and former tennis champ Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell).

It's not. I mean, Battle of the Sexes does gradually build to the staging of this groundbreaking competition, an event that still to this day holds the distinction of being the largest audience to watch a tennis match in the United States (an estimated 90 million viewed the match worldwide, with 30,472 in the Houston Astrodome to witness it live). But tennis is a virtual afterthought in this movie -- there's a shocking lack of actual tennis being played on screen -- while Dayton and Faris focus, instead, on the melodramatic personal developments in the lives of the two lead characters at their disposal. Battle of the Sexes wants us to understand King and Riggs off the court, as people. The match they finally play against each other is essentially inconsequential to the point of this story.

And in the larger context, Battles of the Sexes is the story of Billie Jean King, who was facing numerous "conflicts" off the court that are, tangentially, tied to her status as the world's top female tennis player at the time. The movie begins with the 29-year-old King (Stone) wining three Grand Slam singles titles, proving her dominance over her chosen sport. However, King and her fellow female pro players remain at odds with Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) and the chauvinistic execs in the world tennis association, who favor male players and refuse to offer women equal prize money. Backed by some of the country's top female players, Billie Jean branches out and forms her own competition circuit, making both hay and headlines as they take their show on the road.

It's on the road that King meets, and gradually falls for, Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), a California hairstylist who drops everything and begins following Billie Jean as she travels from tournament to tournament. The problem? Billie Jean King was married at the time to Larry King (Austin Stowell), so in addition to fighting for equality on the pro circuit and wrestling with her romantic entanglements in the roadside motels of the new ladies' tennis circuit, King was also watching her game slip because her focus on actual tennis was wavering.

There's more than enough rich material in this fertile chapter of Billie Jean King's personal and professional biography to sustain a feature film (read up on the repercussions of King's outing as a lesbian after you leave Battle), but this also means that Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) gets short-changed by Battle of the Sexes... despite the fact that his side of the story is equally compelling. A gambling addict, Riggs appeared to miss the limelight that used to come with his tennis success. When a cronie plants the spark of a marketing idea in Bobby's head that he'd make a fortune by returning to the courts to play the world's top female tennis athlete, Riggs can't let it go. He embraces the sideshow that becomes the pursuit to stage the Battle of the Sexes. But he also juggles a deteriorating marriage to Priscilla Wheelan (Elisabeth Shue), for reasons that are hardly touched on in this film.

Battle of the Sexes might have been better if it focused intently on one or two of these important issues. By tackling all of them, it shoulders too large of a load, and appears to give the Cliff's Notes version of some significant chapters in Billie Jean King's history. Stone and Carell are good in their roles, though they don't share the screen until the picture's end, so it's as if they're operating in two disconnected stories that marry almost accidentally. And the film takes a safe, soft approach to complicated topics of sexism in the pro-sports arena, the sacrifices one takes to be the best in any chosen profession, and the repercussions of trying to live life in the afterglow of global success.

While not quite toothless, Battle of the Sexes is, at best, a light volley of banter and debate over important topics, rather than a hard-hitting expose with contemporary ties to ongoing gender discussions (which it easily could have been). It does an admirable job of explaining how and why then "battle" between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs was bigger than the actual match. But in the end, it'll be remembered as being a movie about several important topics, rather than being an important movie in and of itself.

Read more >> Gerald’s Game Review & Trailer

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Gerald’s Game Review & Trailer

With the thrill and punch of the better Stephen King films we've experienced, Netflix has now officially entered the Stephen King business with Gerald's Game. If this is any indication of what a continued partnership would bring, both parties should look for as many chances as they can to stay together.

It's been said before, and it'll be said again: 2017 has been the year for Stephen King adaptations. And with Netflix's release of Gerald's Game, the famous author's work has yet again been plucked from the page, and given new life on the screen. While the novel seems to have a reputation as one of King's lesser works, the film is the polar opposite, as it is a claustrophobic head trip that is set to dazzle the audiences who are about to enjoy its contents.

Jessie (Carla Gugino) and Gerald Burlingame (Bruce Greenwood) head off to a secluded getaway for a weekend of marital rehab. With Gerald looking to spice things up with a little bit of kink, the couple gets off to a bad start when Jessie confronts him about his obsession with dominating her. Things only get worse when her husband dies due to a heart attack, just after he has handcuffed her to the bed. With no easy means of escape, and no one but herself in the room, Jessie's about to go through quite the interesting weekend.

So far this year, there have been two levels of Stephen King adaptation: either it's a Dark Tower level experiment, or an IT style success. Gerald's Game lands on the better side of the spectrum, as co-writer / director Mike Flanagan takes what could have been a solid hour of anthology TV and turns it into an engrossing feature film. The tension of Jessie's confinement, as well as the mental gymnastics she goes through due to her predicament, are all pitch perfect, with Carla Gugino carrying a substantial portion of the film.

Both Gugino and Bruce Greenwood turn in nuanced portrayals of a married couple on the proverbial rocks, and in the section of the film that opens on that story, they really do a good job of convincing the audience that they'd be perfectly ok if the film just focused on that story. Of course, this being a Stephen King story, things get deadly, and they get weird, with the stranger side of the spectrum allowing our duo to play different facets of their characters' psyches. While the bulk of the film is focused on Jessie's story, Greenwood's Gerald makes himself very much present throughout the narrative of Gerald's Game, without being intrusive or extreme. His character is ambiguous, being left for the audience to determine the level of his true villainy, and it shows through every piece of the finished product.

The best part about Gerald's Game, besides the presence of a powerful script with two equally luminary participants shining in its light, is the cinematography. Michael Fimognari's framing of the limited locations that the film takes place in is tight, but never restrictive for the sake of being so. Naturally flowing with the story's expanding and contracting viewpoint, it's a pretty fantastic film to watch, as well as to digest from a narrative perspective. Of course, all of this praise helps the one flaw of Gerald's Game's narrative stand out all the more.

While the film manages to bring itself in at a taut 103 minutes, the film could have been a little tighter if it didn't fall into an expository rabbit hole in its epilogue. Surely there are pieces and details that are vital to the story's ultimate catharsis, but considering how well paced the rest of the film before it was, the ending to Gerald's Game steals some of the wind from the movie's overall sails. The fact that a sequence of intense body horror and tension precedes this epilogue serves as a hard barrier between the two tones of the film, and if anything, the moments after the shock and awe of Flanagan's well-crafted film should have been shorter and sweeter.

With the thrill and punch of the better Stephen King films we've experienced, Netflix has now officially entered the Stephen King business with Gerald's Game. If this is any indication of what a continued partnership would bring, both parties should look for as many chances as they can to stay together.

Read more >> Flatliners Review

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Flatliners Review

Though competently directed and well-acted, Flatliners does little to set itself apart from a run-of-the-mill thriller. True to the material, it simply lacks a pulse.

What happens after we die? Is there truly an afterlife with a white light at the end of a long, dark tunnel? These existential questions have plagued humanity for millennia, but perhaps science has finally caught up with our desire to know the truth of existence. A reimagining of the 1990 film directed by Joel Schumacher, Niels Arden Oplev's Flatliners attempts to answer all of our questions about life after death, but while the movie works on a technical and performance level, its cheap scares and contrived plot do little to move the dial forward for the horror genre.

Neither a direct sequel nor a full-blown remake, Flatliners takes the core idea established by the 1990 original and updates it with a new cast of characters for a new generation. Haunted by a (possibly preventable) car crash that took the life of her younger sister nine years earlier, Courtney (Ellen Page) is a talented medical student who spends her evenings secretly studying the mystery of the afterlife. Discovering a possible path to experience the afterlife for brief stretches of time, Courtney enlists the help of fellow students Ray (Diego Luna), Marlo (Nina Dobrev), Sophia (Kiersey Clemons), and Jamie (James Norton) to kill her for one minute and then bring her back. As a result of this bold experiment, the students not only find a path to the afterlife, but they fundamentally rewire their brains to unlock the cognitive potential that they never thought was possible. The downside? They bring something evil back from the other side with them that wants to punish them for their sins.

2017 has seen some great horror movies debut -- whether it is Annabelle: Creation, It, or Get Out. Sadly, we cannot place the Flatliners update among those ranks. Yes, Niels Arden Oplev capably helms the sequel-boot from a purely visual standpoint. That said, while there are a few legitimately creepy sequences (such as one involving a ghostly little girl drawing by candlelight), Flatliners boils down to a series of fake-out jump scares scattered throughout a relatively predictable narrative, and culminates in a rushed climax that simply doesn't pay off the preceding story in an emotionally satisfying way. There's quite a bit of style here, but minimal substance.

As a result, while Flatliners opens quickly and commendably gets to the point almost immediately, the film loses its momentum once the concept of "flatlining" has been fully explained and fleshed out. Because of this, the second act mostly boils down to a series of haunts shared between each of the four main characters that go through with the procedure. Like the steady flow of a pulse on a heartbeat monitor, Flatliners eventually becomes so predictable that you can almost anticipate which of these young doctors will be the next to find themselves visited by a demonic apparition before it even happens.

In a certain sense, it almost feels like Flatliners has one hand unfortunately tied behind its back by its need to stick within the horror genre. This reimagining expands on the premise of the original by positing that flatlining enhances the cognitive function of these stressed out and overworked medical students. It creates an interesting Limitless-esque framework to explore how these characters can become fixated to this dangerous game (drug and addiction motifs play a significant role in the story), but those compelling ideas are sidestepped to focus on the scares. It's a shame, because what could've been a deeper examination of the original's core premise mostly just devolves into a retread that struggles to justify its existence.

The more notable issue that plagues the film's ensemble is the fact that script does not afford the actors much to do in their respective roles. What we need to know about any of the five core doctors is usually summed up by a comment made about them ("Medicine comes easy to you," for example), and we're not given much of a reason to root for them or care about what's happening. Their rationale for taking part in the flatlining procedure is inherently selfish from the get-go, and the added layer of their sins coming back to haunt them ultimately makes it hard even to want to root for most of them to make it out of the film alive.

Despite that issue, if there are two shining lights in Flatliners, they would have to be Diego Luna and Ellen Page. Even when Flatliners' script does not give them much to do, they milk the material for all it is worth and deliver the two best performances in the movie. Page deserves particular credit, as she throws herself into Courtney's obsessed nature and really lets loose when the character realizes what she has unleashed. It just would've been nice to see a more compelling story constructed around the heroine.

Though competently directed and well-acted, Flatliners does little to set itself apart from a run-of-the-mill thriller. True to the material, it simply lacks a pulse. On a superficial level, the film will most likely deliver the requisite scares (albeit cheap jump scares) to enter the Halloween season, but it probably will fail to leave a lasting impression.

Read more >> American Made Review

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Full Pitch Perfect 3 Trailer Sends The Bellas Out On An Emotional Note

Pitch Perfect didn't strike me as a comedy that would produce numerous sequels. Even the original movie made a persistent running joke out of the fact that a capella singing was uncool, and aspiring music producer Beca (Anna Kendrick) wanted nothing to do with the Barden Bellas. Only, she did. Because a capella cover songs actually ARE cool. And Pitch Perfect dialed into an ensemble of witty and lovable actresses who we wanted to spend more time with. And so, this December, Pitch Perfect 3 brings the trilogy to a close (we assume). Check out the latest trailer:

Pitch Perfect 3 picks up the microphone and sings a number of expected sequels tropes, which is probably unavoidable but worth noting all the same. We catch up with the original Bellas -- a group that includes Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow and Anna Camp -- as they are being passed on the professional level by the next generation of Bella singers (led by newfound pop star, and Pitch Perfect 2 standout, Hailee Steinfeld). Eager to recapture their sliver of the spotlight, the Bellas hit the road -- taking the action to Europe for a USO tour, where they plan to compete against another round of colorful competitors who hate everything the Bellas stand for.

 

The new trailer also introduces a wrinkle in the close-knit community of the Bellas. A record producer wants to sign Beca to a recording contract. Only, they just want Beca, and not the rest of the Bellas. Will she sacrifice her on-stage family for off-stage success?

I mean, if you watched either of the first two Pitch Perfect movies, you know the answer to that question. But you aren't really showing up for Pitch Perfect 3 for monumental character development and/or soap opera twists. You want cover songs, and this new trailer suggests that versions of George Michael's "Freedom" will be on your iPod by the time this movie is out of theaters.

As for when Pitch Perfect 3 opens... well, it's in the shadow of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Which means it might work as counterprogramming. Or it might struggle to find a theater screen, as the Star Wars sequel gobbles up multiplex space. Will you see the conclusion of this fun and frivolous trilogy in theaters?

Read more >> Natalie Portman Confronts A Terrifying Mystery In First Annihilation Trailer

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When The Wii Shop Channel Will Cease Operations

Nintendo supports a lot of its older hardware and software for quite some time. In fact, the original Wii Shop Channel on the eShop is still up and available, despite the fact that the Wii released a whole 11 years ago. Well, the Big N won't be keeping the shop channel for the motion-controlled gaming console open for too much longer... if you don't consider January, 2019 to be "too much longer."

According to Gematsu, Nintendo has plans on shutting down the Wii Shop Channel starting January 31st, 2019. The site picked up the news from the official Nintendo of Japan website, where the site states that Wii Points will no longer be purchasable after March 27th, 2018.

You'll still be able to use those points that you've acquired to pick up Virtual Console titles for the Wii, along with WiiWare games. For unused points or those purchased with a prepaid card, Nintendo has plans on refunding those following the closing of the Wii Shop Channel, but details on how to get a refund were not disclosed at this moment. The company has plans on sending the announcement soon, though.

Now, if you're worried about your digital purchases, you'll still be able to re-download all your games that you've already purchased from the eShop, including both Virtual Console titles and WiiWare games.

Additionally, Wii owners will still be able to make use of the Wii system transfer that allows gamers to move content from the Wii to the Wii U. So if you're one of those rare people with a Wii U in your possession, you can move over your Wii content to the Wii U. Gematsu notes that eventually these secondary services for the Wii will eventually be shutdown as well, and at that point you will no longer be able to re-download your games to a Wii console. This means that you'll most definitely want to download all your WiiWare and Virtual Console games now before it's too late.

Obviously, even with a two year heads-up before the Wii Shop Channel closes for good, a lot of gamers are still absolutely unimpressed with the whole digital landscape of buying games since, one day, the service will shutdown and you will lose all of those digital purchases.

It's exceptionally frightening for a lot of big AAA games (even those released on physical disc) that require day-one patches just to operate or an online handshake before you can play. Once those servers go down for good the game is lost to time.

Organizations like the EFF have been attempting to advocate on behalf of emulation as a means of preservation for some types of games that can no longer be purchased physically and are no longer available digitally. But the digital landscape is always going to suffer from this particular problem.

However, in Nintendo's case this could be remedied if the company decides to open up the Virtual Console for the Nintendo Switch, which is something gamers have been clamoring for since the console's announcement. If the Switch does receive Virtual Console support, then it could easily make up for the Wii's channel being brought to a close on the eShop.

Read more >> Why Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5 Almost Didn’t Happen

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Why Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5 Almost Didn’t Happen

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was Marvel's first major live-action television show, coming years before the Netflix leg of the Marvel universe kicked off. The four seasons so far have been a hit with diehard fans, and Season 4 changed things up in some exciting ways. That said, ratings have been declining more or less steadily since the beginning, and fans have had to worry that S.H.I.E.L.D. would get the axe just about every spring. As it turns out, we were right to worry about the show while Season 4 was still on the air. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5 almost didn't happen due to some behind-the-scenes opinions at ABC.

ABC and Marvel have reportedly not been on the same page when it comes to both of their current shared comic properties. According to Variety, some folks behind the scenes at ABC wanted to cancel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. after Season 4, but Disney mandated that S.H.I.E.L.D. be renewed for Season 5. While it's not clear why some at ABC thought it was time to give S.H.I.E.L.D. the axe, the odds are that the combination of disappointing ratings and high effects costs meant that S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't exactly a top priority series for renewal.

It's worth noting that ABC did make some changes for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. this year. The show aired for the first four seasons in various time slots on Tuesday nights, with a premiere in late September. For Season 5, the show was pushed back to a winter debut and will air on Fridays. Although the show was technically pushed back to allow ABC to air Inhumans, a move to Friday is rarely a good thing for a show. That said, S.H.I.E.L.D. was still ordered for a full season, despite being pushed back, and ABC Chief Channing Dungey has said that the goal is to turn Fridays on ABC into a fantasy destination, with Inhumans/S.H.I.E.L.D. paired with Once Upon a Time.

We can only hope that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. gets a ratings boost in Season 5 so that ABC doesn't regret the mandate from Disney that they renew the Marvel series for another batch of episodes. The Season 4 finale ended on a crazy cliffhanger that could have devastating consequences, which might be a big draw for viewers. We also know of a major character slated to return in Season 5, along with a possible Kree presence.

Of course, the reception for S.H.I.E.L.D. might at least partially depend on how Inhumans performs in primetime. The new show isn't generating much in the way of positive buzz with critics, and it didn't run in IMAX for as long as we thought. If Inhumans doesn't resonate with viewers and flops, then people might not be inclined to return for more Marvel on ABC. We'll have to wait and see.

ABC has not yet announced an official premiere date for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 5, so be sure to stay tuned to CinemaBlend for the latest news. Inhumans will debut on Friday, September 29 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC. Our fall TV guide can help you plan the rest of your small screen lineup moving forward.

Source: cinemablend

Read more >> Natalie Portman Confronts A Terrifying Mystery In First Annihilation Trailer

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Natalie Portman Confronts A Terrifying Mystery In First Annihilation Trailer

We don't know a great deal about the newest movie by the creator of Ex Machina which stars Natalie Portman. However, after seeing the first trailer for the new project, you will almost certainly be curious. The trailer shows a team entering a bizarre and mysterious stretch of wilderness and what they find there, well, it apparently defies description. Check out the trailer below.

Annihilation is based on a book series by Jeff VanderMeer, so those who have read the books will know exactly what it is that's being described here. For the rest of us, however, everything is being kept incredibly mysterious. The trailer gives away nothing about what's going on. The soundtrack makes everything in the trailer feel constricting and claustrophobic, even though everything we see feels open. There's clearly a horror movie vibe to the trailer, but there's just as clearly a lot more going on.

What we can discern from the trailer is that Natalie Portman is actually part of a second team to go into this strange area, following her husband who had gone in previously. However, even after this second incursion, it seems little more has been learned by the characters about what is going on, meaning that the audience is going to be that much more in the dark. This is how a good teaser trailer is made. The movie has only teased us with what is happening, but we're desperate to know more.

Annihilation has one of the more remarkable casts we've seen together in quite some time. In addition to Natalie Portman, the film stars Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny and Oscar Isaac.

It's been over a year since we've seen anything significant from the production of Annihilation. A couple of images from the set were sent out on social media. They looked like interesting pictures at the time, but they don't even compare to the final product that we're seeing here. Everything is both lovely and terrifying at the same time. Writer and Director Alex Garland brought in his Ex Machina cinematographer Robert Hardy to shoot this film as well and based on the trailer it looks like a masterful job was done.

 

While we're looking forward to solving this mystery, we'll have to wait a few more months to do so. Annihilation is set for release on February 23, 2018.

Source: cinemablend

Read more >>  Badass Thor: Ragnarok Chinese Trailer Has Doctor Strange, Hela Battles And Lots More

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A Major Arrow Villain Is Returning For The Big Superhero Crossover, But Not How We Expected

The annual Arrow-verse crossover will be bigger than ever this year, and it will take our heroes somewhere they've never gone before. Although the crossover is still a couple of months away, we're already getting some intriguing details about what's to come. One of the biggest villains of Arrow is going to return to the action in the crossover in a very unexpected way. Yes, Season 5 supervillain Prometheus will appear in the 2017 superhero crossover, but he won't be the same Prometheus as we came to know.

The Prometheus who will appear in the crossover will be the Prometheus of Earth-X, and he'll be fittingly known as Prometheus-X. His return was technically teased when the first teaser image was released, as somebody who looks an awful lot like Prometheus could be seen facing off against the good guys with the likes of Dark Arrow, Dark Flash, and Overgirl. What the image didn't reveal was that the man under the Prometheus mask won't be the Adrian Chase of Arrow Season 5.

There are reportedly no plans for Josh Segarra to reprise his role as Adrian Chase in the Arrow-verse, according to EW, which means that somebody else is under the mask as the Prometheus of Earth-X. The big question is whether Prometheus-X is the Earth-X counterpart of an existing Arrow-verse character or we'll get a newcomer who just so happens to go by the same name as an Arrow supervillain.

The absence of Josh Segarra is unfortunate for those of us who came to love his particular brand of crazy as Adrian Chase, especially since the journey to Earth-X meant that he could reprise his role without Arrow making leaps of logic to somehow resurrect Prometheus after he shot himself in the head in the Season 5 finale. There's also been the theory that Adrian had a twin brother, as he did in certain DC Comics stories. It wouldn't be the first time Arrow brought an actor back to play a never-before-mentioned twin.

Without Josh Segarra on board, there are plenty of candidates for Prometheus-X, and some are more off-the-wall than others. The Prometheus in the crossover teaser image is pretty clearly a man, so we can rule out the ladies of Arrow as Prometheus-X. Arrow toyed with making Quentin believe he was Prometheus whenever he blacked out drunk; perhaps the Quentin of Earth-X really did became the bow-toting baddie. Then again, there's Roy as a possibility. The Roy of Earth-1 developed archery skills, and Prometheus-X can be seen with a quiver on his back. Colton Haynes did recently tease his return. Who knows? Maybe Prometheus-X is John Diggle. who was notably absent from the teaser image.

Admittedly, John Diggle is one of the most upstanding characters of the whole Arrow-verse, and it's hard to imagine an evil version of him. That said, the stakes would be raised on Earth-X if the good guys discovered that they would have to battle a version of their good friend Digg, and it would give David Ramsey the chance to get back in the superhero action, if his hints about what's going to happen to Earth-1 Diggle come to pass. We'll have to wait and see. No theory is necessarily too wild at this point.

The four-show crossover will span four hours on two nights, starting with Supergirl and Arrow on November 27 and The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow on November 28. Swing by our fall TV guide for your other TV dates.

Source: cinemablend

Read more >> New Justice League Storyboards Tease A Key Sequence

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New Justice League Storyboards Tease A Key Sequence

In terms of sheer scale, Zack Snyder's Justice League arguably looks like it is going to become the biggest DC movie ever. The timeline of the film looks like it will span centuries, and it will feature some absolutely insane sequences that we would've never fathomed in other eras of DC movies. One such sequence involves the introduction of Steppenwolf's Mother Boxes, and Snyder has officially revealed the storyboards for that key sequence. Take a look at the sketches below.

Although they are definitely crude, these sketches are a key look into the mind of Zack Snyder as he envisioned Justice League during the film's development. The sequence in question (which Snyder posted on his Vero account) appears to show a flashback scene in which a group of knights buries a Mother Box to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Of course, given the fact that it looks like the red skies are heading to Earth, it appears that nothing can stay hidden very long in the DC Extended Universe.

Based on everything seen in Zack Snyder's post, it looks like this particular sequence has already shown up in some of the Justice League marketing. Here's one of the shots from the Justice League trailer that debuted at San Diego Comic-Con 2016.

 

Moreover, here's another angle from this sequence, showing the knights burying the Mother Box.

 

This does not give us much to go by as far as concrete plot details go, but Wonder Woman may help shine some light onto the nature of the scene. The recent home release for Diana Prince's first solo adventure included a bonus scene in which everyone's favorite secretary, Etta Candy, recruited Steve Trevor's surviving teammates to recover one of the artifacts after World War I bombs uncover it in the Belgian countryside. The Justice League story will revolve around the quest to find the Mother Boxes before Steppenwolf (but apparently not Darkseid) can get his hands on them, so this sequence will likely serve to set up the importance of the artifact and provide some valuable backstory as to how and why the bad guys from Apokolips choose Earth.

Although one of them was briefly seen in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the Mother Boxes will make their official DCEU debut later this year when Justice League hits theaters on November 17. Looking beyond the highly-anticipated DC team-up film, take a look at CinemaBlend's comprehensive 2017 movie premiere guide, as well as our 2018 movie premiere guide, to see what other films are in store on the silver screen over the course of the next year.

Source: cinemablend

Read more >> How The DCEU Is Treating Its Cinematic Universe Model After Wonder Woman

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The Florida Project (2017)

The Florida Project Synopsis

Set over one summer, the film follows precocious 6-year-old Moonee as she courts mischief and adventure with her ragtag playmates and bonds with her rebellious but caring mother, all while living in the shadows of Disney World.

The Florida Project Release Date

In Theaters October 6, 2017

The Florida Project Credits

Starring: Willem Dafoe, Macon Blair, Brooklynn Prince, and Valeria Cotto

Written By: Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch

Directed By: Sean Baker

Produced By: Sean Baker, Chris Bergoch, Kevin Chinoy, Andrew Duncan, Alex Saks, Francesca Silvestri, and Shih-Ching Tsou

MPAA Rating: [ R ]

Distributor: A24

IMDB: The Florida Project on IMDB

Running Time: 115 min.

 Source: cinemablend

Read more >>My Little Pony (2017)

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The Mountain Between Us (2017)

The Mountain Between Us Synopsis

What if your life depended on a stranger?

After an incoming storm forces the cancellation of her flight to New York, talented photojournalist Alex Martin finds herself stuck in Idaho the night before her wedding. Scrambling to make it home in time, she hits upon a longshot idea and charters a plane to Denver in the hopes of catching the red-eye to New York that same night. Another stranded passenger, Ben Bass, a skilled British neurosurgeon due back on the East Coast to perform a critical, life-saving operation, tunes out his own misgivings about the plan and joins her.

As Alex and Ben fly ahead of inclement weather in a small Piper two-seater, their pilot suffers a massive stroke, and the small craft crashes in the deep snows of the Uinta Mountains in northeastern Utah. Trapped in the remote region with little hope of rescue, the two weary travelers embark on a terrifying and transformative pilgrimage across the unforgiving reaches of the vast, rugged terrain, fighting against the elements, animals and time. Under the most extreme circumstances imaginable, they gradually learn to trust one another, and a powerful connection grows between them---one that will reshape the course of their lives.

The Mountain Between Us Release Date

In Theaters October 6, 2017

The Mountain Between Us Credits

Starring: Rosamund Pike and Charlie Hunnam

Written By: Scott Frank and J. Mills Goodloe

Directed By: Hany Abu-Assad

Produced By: Peter Chernin, Dylan Clark, and Jenno Topping

MPAA Rating: [ PG-13 ]

Distributor: Fox

IMDB: The Mountain Between Us on IMDB

 

 Read more >> My Little Pony (2017)

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