Author: Hermes Andrea Gayle Sousa

Ridley Scott’s two divisive Alien prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, landed on Peacock in the US on September 1, 2026. That puts this stretch of the franchise back within easy reach.

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The timing stands out. Scott has said he wants to return to Alien, and that means circling back to David’s unresolved story after Alien: Covenant. All of this comes as The Dog Stars has opened weakly and picked up middling reviews.

It also arrives after Alien: Romulus gave the series a real boost. The film made about $350 million worldwide on an $80 million budget, pulled an 85% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, and reportedly has a sequel on the way. Fede Álvarez isn’t expected back after saying he wouldn’t direct another one, and Scott reportedly brushed the film off as “okay.”

Scott’s prequels still matter at the box office. Prometheus made more than $400 million worldwide, still the top grosser in the franchise, with critics mostly on its side and fans more split. Alien: Covenant cost about $110 million, made around $240 million, and sits at 65% with critics and 55% with audiences.

If you’ve been meaning to catch up with the most argued-over corner of Alien, now’s a good moment.

In the US, you can stream both films on Peacock. In the UK and Australia, the series is generally on Disney+, while other regions may depend on Netflix, HBO Max, or digital rental and purchase stores.

“Days of Future Future,” the Season 25 Simpsons episode that aired on April 13, 2014, ended up as one of the show’s most argued-over future-set stories. It throws a lot at you: Homer Simpson dies and comes back as a series of flawed clones, Lisa Simpson gets stuck with zombie Milhouse Van Houten after a cosmetic procedure goes horribly wrong, and Bart Simpson is left in a busted future with Jenda and their child. For plenty of fans and critics, that whole pileup felt more exhausting than inventive, with the dark comedy, sci-fi parody, and family drama all pulling in different directions at once.

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Then the episode reveals that much of it was only a simulation inside Bart Simpson’s mind, which takes a lot of the air out of it. Dennis Perkins of The A.V. Club called it “a pile of leftover Futurama jokes,” and when you put it next to “Lisa’s Wedding” or “Holidays of Future Passed,” it’s pretty easy to see why so many viewers felt the problem wasn’t the weird science fiction itself. The story just never comes together.

If you’re looking for Simpsons sci-fi with some real emotional grounding, this probably isn’t one to revisit. Looking back, the show seems to have taken the hint and saved its wilder ideas for self-contained episodes or Treehouse of Horror, never going back to this timeline, while most of the talk about its legacy stayed confined to English-language criticism.

You can watch it on Disney+.

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Ares Games has announced Sieges of Middle-Earth, the fourth expansion for War of the Ring: Second Edition. The current target is winter 2026, or Q4 2026.

Earlier reports suggested it was an RPG add-on. It’s actually the fourth board game expansion for War of the Ring: Second Edition. Ares Games says Sieges of Middle-Earth is built around siege warfare, with new systems for attacking and defending the strongholds of Middle-earth. The publisher also says it will push the tension, attrition, and big momentum swings that define the setting’s largest fortress battles.

On the Shadow side, the expansion adds siege engines to make assaults on fortifications more dangerous. For the Free Peoples, it brings heroic actions and sortie mechanics. Ares Games lists Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi, and Francesco Nepitello as the designers.

If you play War of the Ring regularly, this one already looks worth picking up when it lands, especially given the strong early reaction from fans and, according to Ares Games, the planned extras: plastic miniatures, special dice, cards, tokens, and a limited edition for collectors that’s set to arrive later.

You can expect Sieges of Middle-Earth from Ares Games in winter 2026. Pricing, region-specific release dates, and a fuller public preview are still up in the air.

Blue Beetle may be heading back to theaters in Man of Tomorrow on July 9, 2027, with Xolo Maridueña returning as Jaime Reyes for DC Studios’ new movie era. James Gunn, who co-chairs DC Studios, has already said Maridueña will stay in the DC Universe as a fresh version of the character, not a straight carryover from the DC Extended Universe. And since the planned Superman follow-up, Man of Tomorrow, is currently set for July 9, 2027, Jaime would end up as one of the reboot’s first big tentpoles.

That would put Jaime in a very short list of old DCEU holdovers, right there with Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller and John Cena’s Peacemaker. And this goes beyond continuity talk. Blue Beetle gave DC its first live-action Latino superhero lead, and trade reports have also pointed to an animated series that’s still in early development.

If you keep up with DC, this is one to watch. The 2023 film drew generally positive reviews, but it made about $130.8 million worldwide against a reported $104 million to $125 million budget. The Hollywood labor disputes got in the way, the cast had limited chances to promote it, and the uncertainty around the coming reboot didn’t help its run either. For now, Man of Tomorrow is expected in theaters on July 9, 2027.

20th Century Fox announced Wraiths of the Broken Land in 2016, not long after The Martian, with Ridley Scott lined up to direct and Drew Goddard brought in to adapt S. Craig Zahler’s 2013 novel. The movie never happened, but the setup was hard to ignore: a turn-of-the-20th-century border story about men trying to save their sisters after they’re sold into prostitution. What gave it its edge, though, was the tone. This wasn’t just a rescue story. It was a vicious frontier nightmare, pulling together Western, horror, noir, and exploitation-level violence.

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On paper, Scott made a lot of sense for it. He’d already shown he could handle that kind of punishing historical force in Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, and later The Last Duel. Goddard, meanwhile, had already built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s more flexible genre writers.

Zahler’s name also gave the project some bite. His work already carried a reputation for being grim and genuinely shocking, something audiences later saw on screen in Bone Tomahawk. At the same time, Zahler himself suggested the novel might simply be too sprawling to fit into a single film.

So if you liked the idea of Scott taking on a savage revisionist Western, this was one of those lost projects that stuck in the mind.

You can’t stream or download Wraiths of the Broken Land anywhere, though, because it seems to have vanished into development hell, caught between Scott and Goddard’s schedules, worries that the book was too big for one movie, and Disney’s takeover of 20th Century Fox.

The 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale is back on Netflix in some regions, and in a few territories the sequels have turned up as well. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku and adapted from Koushun Takami’s 1999 novel, Battle Royale is set in a dystopian Japan where ninth-grade students are sent to an island and forced to fight to the death. That last-person-standing setup still feels surprisingly current if you’ve spent any time with PUBG or Fortnite.

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Quentin Tarantino has been praising Battle Royale for years. He once said it was the film he most wished he had made, even though he’s more often associated with calling Jaws the greatest movie ever made.

If you mostly know Battle Royale through the games and later YA dystopias it helped inspire, it’s worth going back to the source. The film was a ¥3.11 billion hit, sits at 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was banned in several countries because of its graphic content and the age of its characters. And the violence isn’t just there for shock. It’s tied to themes of authoritarianism, social pressure, generational breakdown, and lost innocence.

You can stream Battle Royale on Netflix in some countries. Battle Royale II: Requiem, which Kinji Fukasaku began and his son Kenta Fukasaku completed after Kinji Fukasaku’s death, was never as acclaimed, but it may also be available depending on where you are.

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Grand Theft Auto VI is now set to launch on November 19, 2026, for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The money projections are huge. Newzoo says GTA VI could bring in $3.25 billion to $5.2 billion and move 37 million to 60 million copies in its first week alone, with year-one forecasts sitting at 40 million. That kind of release would help push the broader games market to $213.9 billion, with full-game spending up 17.5%. Prediction markets are just as bullish on the awards side: after the game’s extended look on Netflix and YouTube, GTA VI is sitting at 74% to 75% to win Game of the Year, far ahead of Marvel’s Wolverine, which is down at 2% to 6%.

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If you’re already planning to pick up Grand Theft Auto VI at launch, that probably sounds like all the reassurance you need. Still, big sales don’t automatically turn into the top award. The Game Awards rules split voting 90% to the jury and 10% to the public, and there’s already a clear example of that playing out: at The Game Awards 2018, God of War beat Red Dead Redemption 2.

The timing could matter, too. Grand Theft Auto VI’s November 19 release lands very close to The Game Awards’ November 15 to 25 nomination cutoff. Marvel’s Wolverine is due out earlier, on September 15 for PlayStation 5, while Gears of War: E-Day hits October 6 on Xbox Series X/S and Windows, with a beta planned for August. And then there’s the Zelda chatter, with a Korean rating listing kicking Ocarina of Time remake rumors back into gear. Grand Theft Auto VI will be available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The Walking Dead: Dead City just aired “Genesis,” and it takes one of the boldest swings this franchise has tried: an alternate-reality story where the outbreak never happened. Dead City is still canon, and “Genesis” doesn’t rewrite the main TV timeline. It plays more like a what-if detour, which is a pretty rare move for a sequel that usually sticks to a single continuity.

With the trauma that defines Maggie and Negan stripped away, the episode leans into choice, fate, and identity. Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan get room to play lighter versions of their characters, and Beth Greene’s return gives the whole thing extra weight. Critics have mostly praised the risk. Fans, though, seem split. And with the season 3 premiere drawing roughly 297,000 live viewers, the franchise looks like it’s taking bigger swings for a smaller audience.

If you follow The Walking Dead regularly, this episode is worth watching. Even if the alternate reality never touches the main timeline, it already changes what you can expect from the franchise.

You can watch The Walking Dead: Dead City on AMC and AMC+.

Bleecker Street has dropped a new trailer for A Talent for Murder, Anton Corbijn’s next thriller, ahead of the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere in September 2026. The big draw here is Helen Mirren, whose take on Patricia Highsmith looks a lot darker, stranger, and more intimidating than you might expect.

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Mirren plays the famed novelist as brilliant, withdrawn, and deeply unnerving. Alden Ehrenreich plays Edward Ridgeway, a young literary agent who heads to her secluded home in the Swiss Alps to pitch one final Tom Ripley novel, only to find himself trapped in a psychological standoff full of mind games, menace, and constant shifts in control. Corbijn directs, with Joanna Murray-Smith adapting her 2014 play Switzerland, and the result looks like a tight, dialogue-heavy chamber thriller with real suspense, a few sharp twists, and the kind of polished prestige sheen awards voters tend to notice. Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson are in the cast too, but the campaign is very clearly built around the Mirren-Ehrenreich showdown.

If stylish prestige thrillers are your thing, you’ll probably want to watch this trailer.

It’s up now from Bleecker Street ahead of the film’s TIFF premiere in September 2026 and its theatrical release on October 23, 2026. Bleecker Street also says the film is rated R for sexual content, some violence, and language. Mirren, meanwhile, is also set to receive TIFF’s Share Her Journey Groundbreaker Award, according to TIFF.

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