Future Stories

Those Pasaana mountains sure look like Arrakis, don’t they? Image: Lucasfilm At this point, most of us can agree that Denis Villeneuve made the impossible possible . He took Frank Herbert’s legendary sci-fi book Dune and made it into popular, digestible entertainment , a feat no one thought would ever happen. And yet along the way he had multiple obstacles, including one from a galaxy far, far away. “If you think about trying to do your own space opera today, I’m sorry, you are fucked by the huge elephant in the room that is Star Wars ,” Villeneuve joked in a new piece by the Hollywood Reporter . He’s talking figuratively of course, in multiple senses of the word, about how Star Wars has become so popular that any similar space opera—even ones that came along before Star Wars, such as Dune , John Carter or Flash Gordon— now will forever be compared to Star Wars . And while making his Dune , the director found himself in a direct competition with that other franchise. In the s...

Screenshot: Netflix I hope you didn’t have anything going through, uh, the entirety of 2022. That’s because Netflix isn’t going to make it easy for you to get anything done for those 365 days. The streaming giant has announced which 19 genre offerings, of the countless projects it has in the works, are slated to come out next year, including The Sandman , Magic: The Gathering , The Witcher: Blood Origin , Cyberpunk: Edgerunners , and more... with somehow more confirmations to follow, apparently. Here’s everything on Netflix’s nerd roster for the general 2022 timeline, along with its official synopses of varying degrees of illumination. Let’s start with the four shows that Netflix does have a specific release date for. When does Archive 81 premiere? January 14, 2022. Archive 81 follows archivist Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie), who takes a job restoring a collection of damaged videotapes from 1994. Reconstructing the work of a documentary filmmaker named Melody Pendras (Dina Shih...

The Beatles could have been on top of Mount Doom (as well as this rooftop) if history had gone a bit differently. Image: Apple Corps Ltd. For years, there have been rumors and stories that legendary rock group the Beatles toyed with the idea of making movies based on J.R.R Tolkien’s fantasy classic  The Lord of the Rings . It’s one of those projects maybe you heard about , maybe you didn’t, but either way you simply can’t imagine it. What you can imagine are Lord of the Rings movies made by director Peter Jackson because those actually happened. What also actually happened is that Jackson was in the unique position to talk to Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr about it because, as you’ve surely heard , Jackson directed a three-part mega documentary called The Beatles: Get Back which recently debuted on Disney+ And so, the Lord of the Rings and Beatles doc director told the BBC what he was able to find out from the last two living Beatles as they collaborated on the new d...

The Veiled Throne by Ken Liu Image: Gallery / Saga Press December is traditionally the month with the least amount of new sci-fi and fantasy book releases, so you’ll notice our regular list is a bit shorter than usual. But there are still plenty of intriguing releases on the way, so read on for tales of magic and mages , murder and mutations , and more. Image: 47North Innate Magic by Shannon Fay The Marrowbone Spells series begins by introducing ambitious “cloth mage” Paul Gallagher, who’s trying to make his mark in postwar London. When he tells his crush that he’s hiding an illegal magical talent, he accidentally puts not just his friends in danger but threatens the fate of the world. (December 1) Innate Magic (The Marrowbone Spells, 1) Image: DAW Absynthe by Brendan Bellecourt In an alt-history version of 1920s Chicago, a World War I veteran realizes his murky memories and PTSD are tied to his unwilling participation in an experiment that gave him latent telepat...

Nicolas Cage (seen here in 2021's Pig ) is about to suck some blood as Dracula. Image: Neon Nicolas Cage is probably some kind of vampire in real life , so the fact that he’s about the play the most famous one ever makes perfect sense. The Oscar-winning star of Face/Off and Mandy and many, many other strange films is set to play Dracula in the upcoming film   Renfield . Which means, no, Dracula isn’t the main character, but yes, he’s gonna kill it. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news of Cage’s involvement in the project, which is being directed by Tomorrow War and Lego Batman Movie helmer  Chris McKay . Nicholas Hoult ( X-Men First Class, Mad Max: Fury Road ) is playing the title character in a film described by the trade as “as a modern-day adventure story that is comedic in tone.” Previously we’d heard that “this take on the project is described as a comedic, lighthearted approach in the vein of Taika Waititi’s vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows , ...

Cover art from a deluxe illustrated edition of 2015 A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms . Art by Gary Gianni Image: Subterranean Press We know HBO has been working on several Game of Thrones -related spinoffs for years. The first to get the go-ahead was House of the Dragon —based on author George R.R. Martin’s extensive history of the Targaryen civil war that erupted some 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones . That history was published as Fire & Blood back in 2018. Now a second prequel has been officially announced, and it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s based on the only other material GRRM has written set in the world of Westeros: The Dunk and Egg novellas . Set about 90 years before Game of Thrones , the stories follow Ser Duncan the Tall and his young squire Egg as they travel through the countryside. The twist is that Egg is secretly Aegon V Targaryen, who later in life becomes the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Daenerys’ great-grandfather. The reason a Targary...

Sounds like Matrix Resurrections is gonna be mind-blowing. Image: Warner Bros. Movies that connect with audiences in different ways are always the biggest hits and The Matrix is the perfect example . On the surface, it’s got plenty of action, romance, and sci-fi mythology, as well as a dense, entertaining story. For most movies, that would would be enough—but The Matrix goes deeper. A lot deeper . Below the surface there are allegories for almost anything you want: oppression, revolution, self-expression, gender issues , the list goes on and on. And it’s those enduring themes and emotional connections that not only have let The Matrix endure, but will extend to the new film . The highly anticipated fourth installment , The Matrix Resurrections , opens December 22 and in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly , writer-director Lana Wachowski talked about the choice to go back to the Matrix and to keep those core mysteries and allusions going. “Art is a mirror,” Wachowski sa...

Elon Musk immediately rallies all employees to get all hands on deck to fix potential Raptor engine production delays. Boeing and Grumman have a decade of SLS delays to get to a first launch and they just ask for another $2 billion per year for decades from the US Government and NASA. If SLS slips ... Read more

Scream, Jennifers Body, a new Matrix, Fast Color and the original Spider-Man are all streaming in December. Image: Dimension/Fox/WB/LG/Sony Welcome back to io9's the Nerd’s Watch, where we pare down the enormous lists of new films and television shows arriving on all your favorite streaming services into the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror titles we think you’ll like most. The Nerd’s Watch is evolving. Again . You’re still going to get all the best new films and TV coming to Netflix , Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and HBO Max, but from now on we’re adding Paramount+, Shudder , and Peacock (and more) to the list. Folks, there may be too many streaming services. And now, we’re streamlining it down to just the nitty-gritty. Take a gander at the best of what’s streaming in December 2021. If you’re just interested in the services you subscribe to, you can get to them directly here: What’s coming to Netflix in December 2021? What’s coming to Hulu in December 2021? What’s comin...

Elon Musk emailed SpaceX employees that there is a crisis in Starship Raptor engine production. SpaceX could face a ‘genuine risk of bankruptcy’ if they cannot achieve Starship flight rate of once every two weeks in 2022. Elon emailed: Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago. ... Read more

The spice must flow, Morty! Image: Oni Press/Sarah Stern The spice must flow, Morty, for he is Padishah Rick now. Before Rick and Morty returns to TV screens sometime next year , fans looking for a fix of multiversal shenanigans will get not one, but three cinematic spoofs in comic book form courtesy of Oni Press. Each one shot in the Rick & Morty Presents series will have a different creative team, and each will tackle a different sci-fi movie homage, kicking off with Hericktics of Rick by writers Amy Chu and Alexander Chang, artist Sarah Stern, and letterer crank!, which is... well, it’s literally just Dune . Image: Oni Press/Sarah Stern The comic will see Rick uncover a highly valuable, perhaps spicy, mysterious substance on the planet “Arrickis,” only to find himself and Morty embroiled in the world’s politics, dire religious prophecies, and conflicts with its native societies. Expect at least one gross-out sandworm joke, surely. Joining Hericktics of Rick will be...

Image: HBO We all have a lot in common with best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire   author George R.R. Martin . We’re all carbon-based lifeforms. None of us have published a book titled The Winds of Winter , although all of us would like it to be out ASAP. And it turns out all of us are bummed out about how HBO’s TV adaptation of GRRM’s fantasy epic, Game of Thrones , ended up. According to an upcoming book by the journalist James Andrew Miller, titled Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers (via Yahoo ), Martin was worried after season five ended and Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss started deviating from the author’s plans for the story. According to Martin’s agent Paul Haas: “George loves Dan and Dave, but after season five, he did start to worry about the path they were going because George knows where the story goes. He started saying, ‘You’re not following my template.’” According to the book, Martin not only wanted Game of Thrones t...

Enter the Matrix and party like it’s 2004. Image: Monolith Productions/Warner Bros. When the third Matrix film, Revolutions , released in 2003, the series’ time flourishing at the box office was ostensibly done .   As you well know, nothing’s ever really gone in the age of blockbuster franchise cinema, and now, we’re a month away from a fourth Matrix movie . But the latest sequel was never actually the next chapter of the tale after Revolutions— it was The Matrix Online.   That was what the Wachowskis, back in 2005, really considered to be the continuation of the world they had crafted over their movie trilogy : a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) where users cast themselves as newly self-actualized humans flung into   the Megacity, the digital cityscape hub of the Matrix itself, after the events of Revolutions . The movie series ended with the cycle of reboots of the Matrix broken thanks to a truce negotiated by Neo between the human remnants ...

Shazam might find his hands full dealing with new threats in his sequel. Screenshot: Warner Bros. A new look at Hocus Pocus 2 teases the Sanderson sisters’ return. There could be more to come from the world of Malignant . Jessica Henwick hypes up Carrie Anne-Moss’ return to Matrix Resurrections . Plus, what’s coming on 4400 , and Kathryn Hahn reacts to her Wandavision spinoff . Spoilers now! Shazam: Fury of the Gods In conversation with the Associated Press , Helen Mirren discusses playing “one of three goddesses” in the upcoming Shazam sequel. I’m not going to tell you the answer [whether Hespera is a hero or villain]. You’re going to have to ascertain for yourself. I’m a member of three goddesses: Lucy Liu as Kalypso and the third goddess played by Rachel Zegler, who will be a huge star in a very short space of time. So there are three of us together, and that was really a great experience because it’s so infrequent that you get to spend a whole of a movie with two other ...