Month: September 2026

Alexandre Smia’s political thriller Jupiter is headed to this year’s Venice Film Festival for a world premiere out of competition. It’s Smia’s first feature, and he’s starting big: a newly elected French president is thrown into a crisis that could slide into nuclear war with Russia.

The film’s hook is how grounded it sounds. Jupiter takes place in the actual Jupiter Command Post, the underground bunker beneath the Élysée Palace, and Smia is treating it as a film about nuclear authority, responsibility, isolation, procedure, architecture, and confinement. His phrase for the moment we’re living in is a “Third Nuclear Age.” In that setting, the weight of command matters more than spectacle.

Smia started writing Jupiter while Joe Biden was still president of the United States. Now the film lands after the Ukraine war reportedly shaped its development, with the February 2026 expiration of the New START nuclear arms treaty in view, and with fresh anxiety over miscalculation, accidental escalation, black swan events, and a world that still holds more than 12,500 warheads across nine nuclear states.

If smart, systems-driven political thrillers are your thing, Jupiter looks like one to seek out for its research-heavy procedural take on what nuclear war feels like inside the room where that decision gets made. First stop: the Venice Film Festival.

Tesla says its Robotaxi fleet has now passed 1,000,000 unsupervised miles. The company announced the figure at its Cybercab event in Austin, about six weeks after reporting 380,000 unsupervised miles on its July 2026 earnings call. For Tesla’s autonomous ride-hailing plans, that’s a major milestone.

The 1,000,000-mile total came out at the Austin Cybercab event alongside public rides in the two-seat Tesla Cybercab, which has no steering wheel or pedals. Based on Tesla’s earlier update, that means the company added roughly 620,000 miles in six weeks after reporting 380,000 on its July 2026 earnings call.

It’s a sharp expansion from Tesla’s small Austin launch in June. That rollout started with in-car safety drivers and a few early hiccups, and it has since expanded into more cities across Texas and Florida. Tesla has also reported progress on permits in Las Vegas.

Tesla uses “unsupervised” to mean there’s no human safety driver inside the car. The operation can still involve chase-car support and occasional remote intervention.

If you follow autonomous driving, this milestone matters. Tesla’s safety claims are still under scrutiny, and the company remains behind Waymo’s 200 million fully autonomous miles and Cruise’s earlier 1 million driverless miles, according to figures previously reported by Waymo and Cruise.

For now, Tesla’s Robotaxi service is available in Austin and in other expanding locations across Texas and Florida. Tesla also has 45 Cybercabs registered in Texas, and it’s showing the Tesla Cybercab in Asia as it seeks European approval for Full Self-Driving.

Evan Rachel Wood, who appeared with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock in 1998’s Practical Magic, says she won’t be returning for Practical Magic 2 nearly three decades later because, as she put it herself, nobody from the original film ever contacted her about the sequel. A lot of people assumed Evan Rachel Wood had passed on it, but what actually happened is one of those head-scratching Hollywood decisions nobody can really make sense of.

Evan Rachel Nope

According to Evan Rachel Wood, nobody from the first film reached out while the sequel was coming together, and they ended up replacing her with Joey King, who’s ten years younger. As it turns out, Joey King was the only one who called her: “I truly appreciate her reaching out to me because no one who worked on the first movie did. She’s a sweetheart.” Nicole Kidman may want to get that stab wound checked.

Director Susanne Bier has already said the switch wasn’t driven by bad blood. Quite the opposite: “It wasn’t personal. The kids in the story have just graduated from college, so it wasn’t even really a question. We had to recast.”It’s not like Evan Rachel Wood is hurting for work, but she’s been open about how much she would’ve loved going back to the set where she’d been so happy as a kid.

Think this sounds like some petty Hollywood feud? Not really. Evan Rachel Wood wanted in more than anything, and even said she was willing to do whatever they needed, “even if it was one scene or one line.” Hard not to think that, after all this, nobody’s going to be calling her for Practical Magic 3.

Producer David Heyman has finally explained why director Alfonso Cuarón didn’t come back for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire after directing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

If I had to pick my favorite Harry Potter movie, it’d be, easily, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third installment, where Alfonso Cuarón took over from Chris Columbus and let the characters grow up while pretty much doing whatever he wanted with them, giving us incredible scenes the rest of the saga could only dream of having.

But Cuarón chose not to return for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and a lot of us spent years wondering what happened there. All this time later, we finally know.

Cuaronus Directorus!

“You bastard.” That’s what Alfonso Cuarón said when, worn out after making the third film, they suggested he keep going, according to producer David Heyman: “We asked Alfonso if he wanted to do the fourth one, and he said, ‘You bastard.’ I think he was wrecked. I look at pictures of Alfonso back then (he’s one of my best friends and my son’s godfather, and I adore him) and he was exhausted.”

Really, if you go by Heyman’s version, there was never much of a chance of getting Alfonso Cuarón back: “Chris Columbus was like a kid, incredible. With Alfonso, he had nothing left to give. He said no.”

So, with Chris Columbus already out of the franchise after Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, they had to find someone else, and that’s how Mike Newell ended up joining the saga.

That question is going to come back around when HBO reaches Season 3: the film was so unique. Harry Potter, but with a deflated wand.

Andrew Garfield is now saying he hasn’t seen Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and that he won’t be turning up in a Marvel movie anytime soon.

If you’ve paid attention to Marvel actors for even a little while, you know the drill by now.

They swear up and down that they’re not in the next movie, and then later they stroll onto the screen anyway while the more trusting people in the audience go, “Wait, what? But he said he wouldn’t be in it!”

Marvel has pulled this trick so many times that it’s practically part of the marketing, and now Andrew Garfield is having his turn, trying to sell the idea that he’s totally, completely out of the franchise at this point. Sure. Of course. Wink, wink.

Spider-what? Doesn’t ring a bell

To be fair, Andrew Garfield isn’t exactly picking a side in the The Odyssey vs. Spider-Man: Brand New Day conversation either, because he says he hasn’t seen the former one too: “I don’t want to sound fake. For a movie to make money and for people to go see it is incredible, but I’ll talk more once I see Spider-man, which I’m really looking forward to seeing**. And I haven’t been able to see The Odyssey either. I’ll send Tom Holland a message when I see what he’s done”.

Believe it or not, Garfield says he hasn’t seen either of those movies, and on top of that, he insists we won’t be seeing him on the big screen anytime soon outside of The Uprising.

“I’m not in Avengers: Doomsday,” Garfield has now insisted for the umpteenth time to an audience that already assumes that if it’s not this one, then it’ll be Secret Wars. I mean, that Brand New Day post-credits scene had to mean something, right?**

After the reports that Marvel Studios is filming more scenes for Avengers: Doomsday so they can cram in, quite literally, even more cameos…

are we seriously still supposed to believe Andrew Garfield said no to a hefty paycheck for a single day of shooting? That’s the best and worst part of Marvel: they’ve gotten so good at the secrecy game… that nobody believes a word anymore!

Game of Thrones: Legends, the mobile game, says its House of the Dragon quest event lands on September 9. Just don’t read that as a TV announcement: the September 9 update is in-game content for Game of Thrones: Legends on mobile, not a new episode, a bonus episode, or an early HBO/Max return for the House of the Dragon series.

So yes, there’s new House of the Dragon material coming to Game of Thrones: Legends. It follows the mini-arc that hit the mobile game Game of Thrones: Conquest on August 10, 2026. The show itself, meanwhile, already wrapped season 3 on August 9 after premiering June 21 for an eight-episode run that covered the Battle of the Gullet and Rhaenyra’s capture of King’s Landing. Filming for that season ran from March to October 2025.

There’s also the bigger picture for the show. HBO has already renewed House of the Dragon for season 4, which is expected to be the final season, with pre-production expected to start in October 2026, filming set for early 2027, and a likely air date in 2028.

If you follow House of the Dragon closely, this kind of announcement will still catch your eye. But vague “mark your calendars” posts can sound a lot like a streaming tease, especially around a series whose season 2 premiere still pulled in 7.8 million viewers, down 22% from nearly 10 million in 2022 and still the biggest single-day audience Max had seen at the time.

Actor Elliot Page says new offers still aren’t coming in, even after Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey blew past $1.5 billion at the box office.

People can pretend otherwise now, but for months we had to hear the same line over and over: The Odyssey was doomed to flop because it was “woke” for casting Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page, a Black actress and a trans actor, appearing on screen while being exactly those things.

Regular moviegoers, obviously, did not care. The film has already cleared $1.5 billion, and pretty much everyone tied to it has landed on their feet. Well, nearly everyone.

No Work for Page

You’d think that after working with Christopher Nolan, Elliot Page’s phone would be blowing up. According to Page, that hasn’t happened at all.

Speaking on Kevin McCarthy’s podcast, Page said: “I’m not getting calls. So, if anyone wants to call me…”

McCarthy sounded genuinely taken aback. He asked Page what was next, and whether he had anything due out soon.

Page’s answer was blunt: “The truth is, no. I’d love to do a great job, that’s what I love doing”.

Apparently, Page has even started thinking he may need to call directors himself: “People used to see me one way before, and it’s different now. I think it’s for obvious reasons: I’m Canadian”.

If only. In a world where J.K. Rowling gets showered with praise, imagine if being born in Canada were the issue. Sigh.

For those of us who want to see Elliot Page do well and stick two fingers up at the world, there is at least one small consolation: he thinks he’s acting better now than ever. “I feel like I could do my best work now.”

Right now, the only credit listed on Elliot Page’s IMDb page is a voice role in a movie about dolphins. Is someone going to pick up the phone already?

Google is rolling out Gmail Live, Docs Live, and Keep Live, three new features that let us talk to our apps to look up information, draft text, and sort through our ideas. All three run on Gemini, and they push Google a little further down a path it’s already been on for months: weaving Google Gemini into everyday products like Gmail and Google Docs, after a long stretch of teaching people to use AI inside those apps.

Gmail Live makes the inbox something we can talk through, and Docs Live and Keep Live follow the same idea

With Gmail Live, we can ask Google Gemini about what’s in our emails. That could mean pulling up details about a trip, finding a specific piece of information, or just asking follow-up questions about the answers while a live transcript appears on screen.

TechCrunch reports that Google didn’t stop there, because the company is also adding this voice feature to Google Docs and Google Keep**.

In Docs Live, we can say what we want to write and Google Gemini will put together a first draft, using, if we allow it, context from Gmail, Drive, Chat, and the web. Keep Live takes a different angle. It turns Google Keep into a voice-driven notepad where we can organize ideas, lists, or even recipes.

Google says these features are rolling out in English on iOS and Android under different plans. Gmail Live is available with Google AI Plus, Google AI Pro, which students can get for free, and Google AI Ultra. Docs Live and Keep Live, on the other hand, require either a Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra subscription.

What Google is trying to do here is pretty clear: bring AI into the tools people already use every day. This time, if we’d rather speak than dig through menus and tap our way around the screen, that option’s there.

OpenAI unveiled GPT-6 Astra exactly one year after it launched GPT-5. Yesterday, the company began rolling GPT-6 Astra out to a small group of organizations.

OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra is its smartest model yet, and the one that’s most closely aligned with user intent. The company says the biggest jump shows up on the hardest professional work: programming, science, and autonomous computer use.

A model so capable that people are already talking about AGI

By OpenAI’s own numbers, Astra scores 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, and 100% on ExploitBench. The company is pitching it as a major step up from GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, which were released just two months ago.

OpenAI also says ChatGPT with Astra can use applications, browse the web, and handle multi-step workflows like creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. On most tasks, the company says, it’s nearly twice as fast.

Greg Brockman serves as OpenAI’s president, and he believes we’re starting to move into the era of artificial general intelligence. Part of that claim comes from OpenAI’s own testing: Astra’s cybersecurity capabilities have reached the company’s “Critical” level. OpenAI has also put new security measures in place after the Hugging Face incident.

The rollout started yesterday with selected organizations and, OpenAI says, GPT-6 Astra will reach the rest of ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in the next few days, along with the API and AWS.