Future Stories

Image: Kaiyodo, Hot Toys, and Sentinel Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of all the cool toys we’ve found on the internet lately. This week we’re looking forward to 2022, mostly because there’s only a few more hours of 2021 left, making it very hard to release new toys this year. Check out what’s to come! Image: Hot Toys Hot Toys Marvel’s Eternals Thena Sixth-Scale Figure Thena, Angelina Jolie’s memory-addled warrior of war from Eternals , is joining Hot Toys’ Marvel movie lineup! Befitting her status as a master of martial weaponry, the 1:6 scale figure comes with a bevy of hands suitable to hold Thena’s magical constructs, which includes a spear, an axe, a dagger, a long sword and short sword, and a shield. She’s expected to release sometime in late 2022 or early 2023, and will cost $270. [ Hot Toys ] Image: Kaiyodo Kaiyodo Amazing Yamaguchi New 52 Superman The Amazing Yamaguchi line returns to the DC universe, this time for a more modern riff on S

And so, it’s come to this—the end of another long and winding year. It’s had ups and downs, things we loved and things we didn’t, and, frankly, Too Much Content. Speaking of which, should you find yourself wanting to look back at io9's 2021, here’s a nice big list of all our year in review pieces from throughout the month. Enjoy—and here’s to another year of great stories in 2022! The Best Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror io9 Rewatched in 2021 Image: Sunrise, Amicus Productions, HBO, Dimension Films, and NBC Universal Much like in 2020 , we all spent a lot of 2021 taking the time to catch up on old favorites or check out classics we’d missed. Here’s the io9 team’s picks for the things they’ve loved revisiting most this year . The Characters Who Gave Us Joy in 2021 Image: Universal, Lucasfilm, FX, Bioware/EA, and Marvel Studios The whole of 2021's been hard on all of us , which means it’s been a fun time adopting as many comfort characters as possible to keep us delighted

Hop softly and carry a big scythe. Screenshot: Square-Enix I have spent, I would say, a distressing amount of the last month with my eyes streaming tears—not for work obligations, personal reasons, or even really “ still in that Global Pandemic ” reasons. If anything, I’ve been doing it for fun, as I’ve worked my way through Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker , and the reasons it’s hit me so keenly have made it a story well worth ending another wildly challenging year on . Endwalker is the latest expansion for the reborn MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV , a game so popular right now you literally cannot buy it , as publisher Square-Enix desperately hopes to have fewer people clogging up login queues as players likewise desperately hope to work their way through the events of the critically acclaimed game’s long and winding story. Endwalker in particular has been billed by its creators as the climax of a story eight years in the making. Your character, the noble Warrior of Light, works to sto

Juggling release dates. Image: Marvel Studios Release dates rarely, if ever, have an impact on storytelling. Maybe a movie is set during a specific holiday so a studio wants to release it around that time of year. But even then, you can watch a Halloween or Christmas movie anytime you want. One place where release dates have everything to do with story, though, is the Marvel Cinematic Universe , and recently, two films changed entirely due to a shift in dates. Those two movies are Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness . Whether you’ve seen No Way Home or not, Strange’s new trailer clearly shows what the character learns in Spider-Man: No Way Home   impacts his journey in his new film . Like, literally, one film can’t happen without the events of the other. Only, that wasn’t originally the case. For a long time, Doctor Strange 2 was supposed to come out before Spider-Man: No Way Home. Originally, Doctor   Strange 2 was scheduled for May

We’re finally looking under the hood of Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Image: Sony Pictures The third act of Ghostbusters: Afterlife is filled with huge reveals . Some of them, even if you haven’t seen the film , you probably know about—like the fact that Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson all appear, reprising their roles from the original. Others, however, have still remained relatively secret despite the film having been in theaters for over a month. The biggest comes right at the end , and in a new interview, the film’s co-writer and director Jason Reitman finally discussed the long, careful process that led to the surprising scene. Ghostbusters: Afterlife leads up to a moment where the kids from the film are about to defeat Gozer and get help from the original Ghostbusters. But even the original Ghostbusters aren’t enough and that’s when the ghost of Egon Spengler, played by the late Harold Ramis, shows up. Now, whether you like this choice or not ( we honestly did not

A small sampling of the films coming to streaming this month. Image: Dimension/Fox/WB/Paramount/Uni 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 has evolved! 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 January 2022. If you’re just interested in the services you subscribe to, you can get to them directly here: What’s coming to Netflix in January 2022? What’s coming to Hulu in January 2022? What’s coming to Amazon Prime Video in January 2022? What’s co

Photo: Jay Maidment/Netflix If you watched the finale of The Witcher ’s second season , you got a good look at what will be season three’s new villains—the Wild Hunt, a group of seven spectral riders on skeletal horses who travel through the sky and are deadset (pun obviously intended) on capturing Princess Ciri and magic-granting Elder blood. Now, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich has explained how The Witcher brought them to life—and why the Wild Hunt has come to the show, even though they barely appear in Andrzej Sapkowski ’s original novels. As for the why, the answer is partially because they’re the major antagonists of CD Projekt Red’s immensely popular video game The Witcher: Wild Hunt . Given that the critically acclaimed game is how most of the Western world first became fans of The Witcher , leading to both book sales and the live-action adaptation, Hissrich knew that those fans would expect the Wild Hunt to appear on the TV series. But they’re also an important part of

Gowns, beautiful gowns. Image: Paramount+ Star Trek: Discovery ’s fourth season , much like the seasons that came before it, has put a lot of emphasis on the idea that perhaps the most important ideal any of its heroes, Federation or otherwise, could hold is a sense of unity and communal understanding. As it heads into a surprise mid-season hiatus this week, it makes that ideal more necessary than ever—in spite of what could be great cost to its lead character. “... But to Connect” brings to a head two of the biggest underlying plot points of Discovery ’s fourth season, finally taking the space to really focus on the threat of the Dark Matter Anomaly that’s been plaguing the galaxy after more than a few weeks spent riffing on classic Star Trek episode premises. As the Discovery sits in drydock repairing itself from the damage sustained last week, two plot threads intertwine over that theme of unity. At Federation HQ, Michael attends a massive diplomatic summit that draws toge

Kang on a minute... Image: Marvel Comics Kang the Conqueror is having something of a moment right now. Hot off the heels of helping to establish the multiversal concept that currently holds court in Marvel Studios’ cinematic universe in Loki —ahead of things to come in the next Ant-Man and the Wasp film —Nathaniel Richards is also the star of a new one-shot this week, Timeless , ringing out 2021 with a tease of what’s to come . And one of those things might be quite the shocking arrival in the world of Marvel Comics. Timeless —penned by Jed McKay, colored by Marte Gracia, lettered by Ariana Maher, and featuring art from Kev Walker, Greg Land and Jay Leisten, and Mark Bagley and Andrew Hennessy—is primarily a character study of what really makes the Conqueror tick. A sort of twisted riff on Doctor Who with more woolly mammoth wrestling, the issue sees Kang scoop up contemporary superpower professor Anatoly Petrov for an adventure across time and space. It’s an adventure Kang f

Thanks? Screenshot: Marvel Studios Turns out the Scarlet Witch cast a spell on much more than just the town of Westville. Marvel’s first Disney+ TV series, WandaVision , has been the most pirated TV show of 2021. But Marvel’s other shows also dominated the top 10, with only a few—but always nerdy in nature—exceptions. This is according to TorrentFreak , the filesharing news site, which has kept track of these stats for years when Game of Thrones ruled the proverbial pirate ship, which was followed by The Mandalorian in 2020. As for 2021, the top 10 most downloaded TV series on Bittorrent (and where you can legally watch them) are... 1) WandaVision (Disney+) 2) Loki (Disney+) 3) The Witcher (Netflix) 4) The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Disney+) 5) Hawkeye (Disney+) 6) What If...? (Disney+) 7) Foundation (Apple TV) 8) Rick & Morty (various) 9) Arcane (Netflix) 10) The Wheel of Time (Prime Video) As you can see, all of the five Marvel TV series released

Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Image: Lucasfilm The premiere episode of The Book of Boba Fett looked forward as well as backward . For the bulk of the episode, director Robert Rodriguez explored where Boba had been since we last saw him in Return of the Jedi, moving toward his reemergence on The Mandalorian . The other part gazed ahead at what Boba Fett returning to Tatooine meant for Star Wars and it looks like a pretty rough road for the bounty hunter turned crime boss, including some mysterious new characters. At the end of The Mandalorian season two , we saw Boba Fett and Fennec Shand kill Bib Fortuna and take over the throne once occupied by Jabba the Hutt. We already knew that after Jabba was killed by our rebel heroes out near the sarlacc, his second in command took over the reigns. But now, it’s Boba’s job, and as he’s sitting on the throne as the new daimyo (a term Star Wars borrows from our own world, the title of a shogun’s vassal lord in feudal Japan) of