Future Stories

SpaceX enthusiasts have photos of all of the parts of the steel plates and pipes that will be used to make the water-cooled steel plate. Elon Musk said that SpaceX was working for the past three months to make a water cooled steel plate that will protect the ground and launch site the 33 Raptor ... Read more

An Academy award winning Special Effects technology from OTOY is reviving Roddenbery Star Trek. They are working with the Roddenberry estate. OTOY Inc. is the definitive cloud graphics company, pioneering technology that is redefining content creation and delivery for media and entertainment organizations around the world. OTOY’s Academy Award®-winning technology is used by leading visual ... Read more

Image: Apple TV+ Adaptations of popular books are all the rage these days, and Apple TV+’s newest entry into that space is the upcoming series Silo . It still feels like the show is flying under the radar, but Apple TV’s recently begun to show more of the dystopian show ahead of its release in May, and that includes releasing a new clip to draw interested viewers in. Silo Episode 1 Clip: This could be the key Like the books they’re based on, the Silo show is set in a post-apocalypse where the last 10,000 humans on the planet have formed community established deep underground in the titular silo. In the lead role is Dune’s Rebecca Fergusson as Juliet, an engineer looking for answers regarding the murder of one of her co-workers who ends up stumbling onto a larger conspiracy. Naturally, that conspiracy goes fairly high up; in the clip above, Rashida Jones’ Allison is looking to bury some secrets, and her husband Holston (David Oyelowo) is the sheriff of the town. Silo is bas

Image: Illumination The Super Mario Bros. Movie didn’t just hit make $1 billion dollars, it also had the honor of being uploaded to Twitter for several hours. And it wasn’t the only one—James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water  got the same treatment. Per Forbes , Illumination’s animated movie got posted on the website on late Saturday evening. Split across two parts, viewers were able to watch the full 92-minute movie at no extra cost, thanks to the efforts of Twitter user vidsthatgohard. (And from the sound of things, it was a pretty good quality rip overall.) Those two videos were up for several hours and through Sunday morning before they were finally deleted. But it definitely didn’t go unnoticed, as according to Forbes, over nine million people watched the movie prior to its deletion. The Way of Water was uploaded earlier in the evening sometime prior to the Mario movie from the same account, and also split into multiple parts since it’s a 3-hour movie. Unlike with Mario

Image: Sony Computer Entertainment Over the last few years, Sony has made it quite clear it wants its PlayStation games to pull double duty as TV/movie successes. So far, that’s given us the Tom Holland-led Uncharted from 2022, and the recent HBO adaptation of The Last of Us . But there’s plenty more adaptations on the horizon ( Zero Dawn ) , from recent blockbusters like Days Gone and Ghost of Tsushima to... Twisted Metal . Just before the weekend started, Peacock released the first trailer for the show ahead of its release in late July. It doesn’t really give you an idea about what the show will be about, though: the footage is just Anthony Mackie in a car and driving through an apparent battlefield, and there’s also an ice cream truck driven by a guy with a clown mask. The show’s premise sees Mackie playing an amnesiac milkman named John Doe, who’s tasked with driving a mysterious package through the post-apocalypse. At some point, he’ll cross paths with Quiet (Stephanie Beat

There is another relatively thorough attempt to analyze SpaceX revenue. Payload Space underestimated Starlink revenue in October 2022 for 2022 at less than $1B and then had to revise up $1.87B. They are still underestimating for 2023 but it is relatively up to date if SpaceX is unable to really scale Starlink monthly dish production ... Read more

Don’t count out the J.J. Abrams Ta-Nehisi Coates Superman just yet. Image: DC Comics With Superman: Legacy , the first true film in James Gunn’s new DC Universe, beginning to come together for a 2025 release, one might assume all other takes on that character are as gone as Krypton. However, io9 has learned that’s not the case. Gunn is getting ready to release Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 , his final film for Marvel Studios, next week and then move full time to not only directing Superman: Legacy , but molding the DC Universe as a whole with his DC Films co-president, Peter Safran. That move seemingly pushed everything happening at DC before their appointmen t back, which was disappointing for many reasons, but none more so than the rumored Ta-Nehisi Coates-written and J.J. Abrams-produced take on Superman . However, speaking with io9 this weekend, Gunn confirmed that just because his Superman movie is coming, doesn’t mean that one is completely off the board. “Those two thi

GE and SpaceX currently have about the same market valuation of $150 Billion. GE is currently two companies, GE and GE Healthcare. GE is worth about $110 Billion and GE Healthcare about $40 billion. GE Aviation, GE Healthcare, and the combined GE Renewable Energy, GE Power, and GE Digital businesses will become three industry-leading, global, ... Read more

Image: Firaxis/Marvel Games All the way back in 2019, Marvel Studios announced that it was working on a new solo movie for its famous vampire hunter   Blade, with Mahershala Ali stepping into the shades once inhabited by Wesley Snipes . Since then, it’s been a bit of an ordeal trying to get the movie made. Now, as the film’s started to build out its cast, there’s been another wrinkle to things in the form of another writer. As revealed by the Hollywood Reporter , Nic Pizzolatto was recently brought on board to punch up the original script by Michael Starrbury ahead of the film’s May start date. Pizzolatto is best known for HBO’s anthology crime series True Detective, which Ali starred in the third season back in 2017 and later earned an Emmy nomination for his performance. The writer/director has mainly operated in TV, though he’s also written a handful of films, including the 2016 reboot of The Magnificent Seven . Blade marks the fifth movie he’s written in his career. As prev

Image: Universal It started so simply. In 2001’s The Fast and the Furious , Dom Toretto’s crew of street racers/thieves were stealing combination DVD/VCR players. In 2021’s F9: The Fast Saga , Dom and his friends—excuse me, Dom and his family —had to save the world by recovering a device that could hack into every computer on the planet. The franchise has been down a very long road, but one that will come to an end with next month’s Fast X and its conclusive sequel. So if you haven’t been watching their journey, is it worth jumping into the driver’s seat? Absolutely, and here’s what you need to know. (And I’ll try to cool it on the car puns.) What Is Fast & Furious About? It’s been about a lot of things over the course of two decades. When the first movie debuted, it was about racing and living life “a quarter mile at a time.” It was essentially a car-centric version of Point Break , as LAPD undercover officer Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) went undercover to investigate Domin

Do all the Guardians survive volume three? Image: Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is something of a rarity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While several heroes have gotten film trilogies in the saga, with the exception of Spider-Man , none of those trilogies have felt like one complete story. Stories with endings. Stories where, if the filmmaker wanted, they could—let’s say—kill a character or two. In most cases, like with Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Ant-Man, we expected those characters to return after their respective part threes. For some reason—maybe because writer-director James Gunn has since departed Marvel for its biggest competitor, DC —with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 , you just have the sense that anything could happen. Everyone could die in a single explosion and it wouldn’t matter because Gunn is done with the MCU for good. And so, with that all in mind, we wondered: did Marvel Studios, and specifically its president Kevin Feige, give Gunn

US Navy is planning to lay the keel for the first next-generation Frigate in August 2023. The USS Constellation is the first of twenty planned FFG-62 (was called FFGX) frigates. The U.S. Navy procured the first FFG 62 in FY2020, the next was awarded in April 2021, and the third is planned to be awarded ... Read more

Image: Courtesy of Shudder A consistent theme in horror is that— no matter how desperate you may be —it’s almost never a good idea to summon a demon to fix your problems . Still, characters keep giving it a try , including the protagonist of From Black , who decides to put herself through hell as a way to escape the hell she’s already in. From Black , directed and co-written by Thomas Marchese in his narrative feature debut, stars Anna Camp (True Blood, Pitch Perfect) as Cora, a recovering addict haunted by her young son’s disappearance several years prior. Her grief is exacerbated by the fact that the boy scampered off while she was passed out in her then-boyfriend’s needle-strewn trailer. As From Black opens, it’s clear that Cora has just endured another incredibly awful event—her house is full of blood splatters and evidence of witchy mayhem—that she’s reluctant to explain. Her sister Allison ( Nope ’s Jennifer Lafleur) happens to be the local cop in charge, which means she

The US Navy DDG(X) program wants next-generation guided-missile destroyers (DDGs) to replace the Navy’s Ticonderoga (CG-47) class Aegis cruisers and older Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) class Aegis destroyers. The US Navy plans to start buying the first DDG(X) in FY2032. The Navy’s proposed FY2024 budget requests $187.4 million in research and development funding for the program. ... Read more

Image: Unique Nicole / Stringer (Getty Images) Damon Lindelof has revealed a bit more about his recent departure from the galaxy far, far away in a new interview with Esquire. Lindelof turned in a script to Star Wars earlier this year and departed the project (alongside co-writer Justin Britt-Gibson) at nearly the same time. “I joined the Star Wars universe and was asked to leave,” he said. But Lindelof is not one to hold grudges. He told Esquire that if Star Wars came knocking again, or even if he had to put himself out there again, he would do it: “Will I get back in line outside the club and try to get back in again? Absolutely.” Lindelof’s response is candid as he continues throughout the interview. “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again, or again ‘again try,’ as Yoda would say.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote last October that the script Lindelof was working on featured an older Rey who was training two Jedi knights. THR’s sources said that it was intended to

Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler as Coriolanus Snow and Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Image: Lionsgate Set “64 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteered as tribute, and decades before Coriolanus Snow became the tyrannical President of Panem,” The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes explores the origin story of that future tyrant . After a couple of cryptic teasers , a full trailer has finally arrived. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) Official Trailer – Tom Blyth Yep, that’s Peter Dinklage, once again playing a character who drinks and knows things , plus a little vocal cameo from Donald Sutherland, who played Snow in the main Hunger Games movies. Based on the book by Suzanne Collins, the prequel is directed by Hunger Games series veteran Francis Lawrence and has a screenplay by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt. Here’s the official synopsis: “ The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & S

Screenshot: OTOY/The Roddenberry Archive The restoration of the Enterprise -D , long thought lost since it was broken up and crash-landed decades prior in Star Trek: Generations , was one of the biggest surprises of Picard ’s final season . But now we know that parts of the ship made their way back home to be restored, this touching new short imagines just how. Created in partnership with the Roddenberry Archive , cloud-rendering graphics company OTOY has released a short epilogue to Generations aptly titled Re-Generation . It’s short and sweet, and well worth the couple minutes it takes to watch. 765874 - Regeneration (2K) Using similar technology the company used to “holographically” re-create Star Trek ’s original pilot , “The Cage,” the short bookends the two great losses of Generations : the destruction of the Enterprise -D, as its saucer section crash-lands into Veridian III, and the death of Admiral James T. Kirk. It’s a touching pairing, as we see the damaged Enterprise

Screenshot: Paramount/YouTube With a trailer that’s been out in the world for almost a year now, expectations couldn’t be any higher for Tom Cruise ’s  Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One . Except they can go higher, now that Paramount’s screened 20 minutes of breathtaking footage at CinemaCon 2023.  It’s unclear where this scene happens in the movie, but it all starts with Hayley Atwell ’s character. She’s been arrested in Rome, where she’s accused of multiple crimes in multiple countries with multiple identities. She claims it’s not her, despite all of the passports with her photo on them in her purse—and the man interrogating her doesn’t believe her. The phone rings and, apparently, her lawyer is there. She’s surprised by this but she goes with it, as we see multiple groups of people pull up to the building outside, including an ominions-looking group led by Pom Klementieff and another led by Shea Whigham. A man, played by Esai Morales, comes in looking for Atwell.

Screenshot: British Lion Films “You wouldn’t want to be here on May Day,” a character cautions Edward Woodward’s rigidly Christian, notably prudish Sergeant Howie in folk-horror classic The Wicker Man . After he travels to the isolated Summerisle to investigate reports of a missing child, he’s shocked— shocked! —to discover a community steeped in pagan beliefs . Famously, it doesn’t end well for him. But for the rest of us, the movie contains a cornucopia of wisdom worth keeping in mind as we enter the exact time of year in which the 1973 film is set. Here are our favorite life lessons from Robin Hardy’s film —plus one from the wonderfully terrible 2006 Nicolas Cage remake, for good measure. “Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent” Screenshot: British Lion Films The island’s leader, Lord Summerisle ( Christopher Lee ), receives Howie’s visit to his lush estate with extreme bemusement—a feeling that only escalates once he sees how horrified Howie is with the

Screenshot: Apple TV As a fan of Hugh Howey’s books, I am quite excited to watch Apple TV+ ’s live-action adaptation of the hit sci-fi series Silo , about the remnants of humanity who have been living in an underground bunker for so long they’ve forgotten why they’re there. But Apple has just revealed the opening credits for the adaptation, and I couldn’t help but note they seem a little... hmm. Just listen—and watch—for yourself. Here’s composer Atli Örvarsson’s opening to Silo : Silo — Opening Title Sequence | Apple TV+ And now, for comparison, here’s Westworld, by Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi: Westworld Season 4 Opening Credits (4K) Am I crazy? I don’t think I’m crazy. The music sounds so much alike, from the sinister, increasingly frantic piano to that final chord. (Is it in the same key? I don’t know much about music, but it seems very close if it’s not.) And the visuals, full of languidly moving snippets meant to be evocative of the series and its themes give

Image: Games Workshop Things rarely go well in the grimdark universe of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 setting . It’s kind of there in the grimdark moniker: things either start bad and get worse, or every victory is wrenched from the jaws of defeat, sometimes literally, at great cost. As the game gears up for a major relaunch, that’s not changed. Games Workshop recently announced its plans to launch the latest edition of its beloved tabletop miniatures game Warhammer 40K , the 10th official update to its ruleset , setting the stage for a new narrative conflict that will drive early storytelling in the setting’s ongoing fiction. It sees a re-emergent swarm of the alien Tyranids’ hive fleets assaulting a relatively undefended (in a Warhammer scale) area of space in the Imperium of Man, itself already split in two by a massive interstellar anomaly known as the Great Rift during the last great crusade by the forces of Chaos and their leader, Abaddon the Despoiler. Like I said: th

In the Stars from Punkrobot Image: Lucasfilm/Disney+ After the acclaimed debut of Star Wars: Visions volume one in 2021, a new collection of animated shorts is about to drop on Disney+. io9 recently spoke to Lucasfilm’s executive producers on the series—James Waugh, Jacqui Lopez, and Josh Rimes—about putting together the upcoming anthology Spanning the world and exploring new styles, the shorts in Star Wars: Visions volume two explore the Star Wars universe through the lens of cutting-edge animation houses like 88 Pictures, Punkrobot, Triggerfish, Aardman , Studio Mir, and El Guiri. io9 interviewed Lucasfilm’s executive producers on Visions —an apt name, since the series highlights the best of what Star Wars can be when more storytellers explore the potential contained within the franchise’s expansive universe. It’s a global love letter inspired by the impact Star Wars has had on cultures around the world. Aaru’s Song from Triggerfish Image: Lucasfilm/Disney+ Sabina

HuggingChat is a new open-source 30B chatbot alternative to ChatGPT. There will likely soon be be HuggingChat Apps. Jim Fan believes HuggingFace is in a great position to become the Android App Store. HuggingFace may have an edge over OpenAI: the apps can be other multimodal models already on HuggingFace. HuggingChat, the open-source 30B chatbot ... Read more

Image: IDW The weather may be getting warmer, but there’s a spooky chill emanating from the pages of Brynmore —an IDW horror comic coming soon from writer Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) and artist Damien Worm, who also worked together on October Faction . io9 got a chance to interview Niles over email, and we also have Brynmore peeks to share! Here’s the plot description for Brynmore : “In Brynmore, the recently divorced and newly sober Mark Turner returns to his hometown of Turner Island hoping to rebuild his shattered life and rekindle a relationship with his estranged daughter, Sophie. Planning to renovate the town’s dilapidated church into a home for himself, Mark’s dreams of a second chance soon begin to crumble as he encounters hostility from the locals and finds himself enmeshed in a dark and sinister legacy of intrigue dating back to when the island was first named after his ancestors. Locked in battle with malefic forces beyond his control, Mark must work to uncover