Weird Mind News Room Episode 5: Mar 27th- April 2nd 2023
*Insert le breaking news music*
Hello and welcome to the new episode of the Weird Mind News Room with me as your always (hopefully) reliable and likable news anchor. For those that have just tuned into this weekly series, I take a look at the new releases, trailers and talk on some of the big news stories of the week in the areas of Media whether casting, rumours, release dates and some early social media reactions. So let's get right to the news.
New Releases
Movies
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor among Thieves
It is time for a new adventure in a vast fantasy world, a collective bunch of characters with different personalities and making a tale of a long running and very popular tabletop game into a full movie. Mix that together and you have the new film based on the popular Dungeons and Dragons. In this new film, we see a charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers including a Barbarian, Paladin, a Half-elf sorcerer, tiefling druid and a con artist will embark on an epic quest to retrieve a lost relic, but things go afoul when they cross paths and retrieve the item for the wrong people and must work together to fix all of this from total destruction. With a strong reception and an all star cast including Chris Pine, Hugh Grant, Michelle Rodriguez, Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith and Rege-Jean Page I am sure that overtime it will roll a critical hit.
TETRIS
Also releasing this week in films is a new biographical story based on the popular video game of Tetris and will tell the story of Hank Rodgers, a man who back in the late 1980s discovers the game of Tetris, makes it a race and a big risk to obtain the license by travelling to the Soviet Union during the Cold war, to join forces with the inventor Alexey Pajitnov to help bring the massively popular game to the masses. To know and learn of how the popular Game from Russia was nearly never going to be a worldwide phenomenon if it wasn't for this man and from some decent reviews, I will give it a watch on Apple TV+ when I get the chance
TV Shows
Mandalorian Season 3 episode 5
We continue on the escapades of the newest season of Mandalorian that has seen quite the mixed opinion with people wondering if there is an overarching narrative to this season and not the basis of some loose episodic like stories (but then again both previous seasons, especially Season 1 had the exact same thing of 1 episode type adventures but built to the overraching narrative at the end of it that people picked up on and that is what I feel is also happening here). This will follow on from the previous episode of the rescue mission from the foundling from the giant pterodactyl, as well with some from the backstory building of Grogu and will bring the case of learning more of the characters of the Mandalorian culture and of Grogu's history leading up to when we meet the precious cargo in the first episode. I have been very much enjoying the season so far and getting the idea of the overraching narrative for this season as well and look forward to seeing how this season will wrap up in the next few episodes.
Games
Last Of Us Part 1 (PC Port)
In the next addition of the popular PlayStation titles getting the port over to the PC would be the popular and multi award winning 1st series of the Last of Us, Which first came out in 2013 on PS3, a remaster a year later and a Full Remake/remaster on PS5 just late last year. For those that never played the game (or watched the excellent tv adaptation that I will give a review on soon) you can check out my review of the game I did here to get the full picture.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog
Now this one was actually a sudden appearance with no marketing or anything and dropped on Friday and involves everyone's favourite fast blue hedgehog, but in a different form of setting. This is a visual novel about you as a new character being a crew member of a luxury train who is working on the time frame that the entire sonic gang is celebrating Amy's Birthday and it is all a big murder mystery where the one dead.. is Sonic (or is he). No this is not an early April Fools joke and is fully available for free on PC right now
Trailer Talk Time
Now lets get right into the new trailers and footage that we have received this week for new films, shows and games coming out soon:
Elemental
Ah Pixar, the studio the pioneered the created of 3D Animated movies and have created so many different and excellent films in the past. Sure they may not be all that popular (some that come to mind is Last years Lightyear (which I honestly enjoyed a lot in my opinion and see as a pilot to the old star command series) and The Good Dinosaur) and some that have poor reception (Out of all of their films, the only one with a bad reception is Cars 2) but I think they all tell inventive and excellent tales with unique ideas and this is their next attempt with a love story set in the world of Element City where people made up of the 4 elements: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water, live side by side with one another. This tale follows Ember, a fiery young woman and Wade, a go with the flow kind of guy who while they can't touch due to different elements of Water and fire they do discover how much they have in common. While it is not the most elaborate or most original of stories about love stories, I am sure Pixar will find a way to make it unique and full of beautiful animation and probably a fair bit of emotions too
Trolls band together
Dreamworks seems to have that weird state that if you saw last year released 2 of their best films in the form of The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots the Last Wish, and they seem to have some ideas, but when it comes to the likes of this series of films, things are a little odd. When the first trailer for the first one came out where they were dancing to current trend songs and were doing the nae nae and...... twerking, it was that case of wondering why? then with the footage came out for it, it was a bit of an improvement and the first one was honestly not bad, The sequel just sort of appeared and released at the beginning of Covid and was a lot weirder and was just a musical version of Infinity War about 6 different strings belonging to the different music types and the rock troll wanting to destroy all of them and it was fine.
Now we come to the 3rd one where the main 2 trolls of Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and Branch (Justin Timberlake) are now a thing and they have been setting up a wedding for those 2 Bergen characters, which gets interrupted by Branch's long lost brother. Now branch has a secret past that he was part of a boyband (that I am surprised they waited until a 3rd film to make a joke of Justin Timberlake being part of a boyband in a film full of music and songs). When one of them gets kidnapped by some nefarious pop villains (one voiced by an actress and comedian that I'm personally not much of a fan of as is a lot of other people) they must go on a journey to save them. It will probably be some harmless fun but I guess we'll find out in November
Asteroid City
Wes Anderson is back again for an all new film with another large ensemble cast with this new quirky comedy sci fi film, that is set back in 1955 where student and parents across the country gather for some scholarly competition, rest, recreation, comedy, drama and romance at a junior stargazer convention that is taking place in a strange small fictional American town. Not the msot detailed of descriptions, but with a cast that includes Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johannsson, Margot Robbie, Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke and many others, it will surely be a unique and quirky film that only Wes Anderson can make and make really well.
In Other News
Now lets get to some of the other new media news stories that appeared over the last week
Some new release news and rumours
First on our list is the announcement of some rumoured release news for 2 shows. The first one is with one of Marvels shows of Secret Invasion, The fury centered series. It has been spotted with a possible release date for the series to start on June 21st of this year but we have not got confirmation for it as of writing from Marvel themselves so we will wait and see if it is, as well as wondering is there any other Marvel series out this year or just the films. The other one with a rumoured release window is Crystal Lake, a new series based on the Friday the 13th franchise and will focus a bit more on the serial slasher Jason. This one is projected for an early 2024 release date and once we hear more we will update on that when it gets any dates or footage.
A date with Destiny
In some film festival news, the upcoming Cannes Film festival in May has provided an announcement that it will be premiering a big summer blockbuster at that event before releasing worldwide a few weeks later and that film is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Cannes is usually known for its often release of a surprise film besides the announced ones so there is a chance there may be another big surprise one at this event, but for now it is exciting to see a long awaited sequel gets it first showing at this festival and will hopefully hear reception around that time for this film too.
The Kingdom is crying with beauty
On Tuesday of this week, Mr Aonmua, the creative director for the upcoming Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, sat down and gave us a 10+ minute gameplay preview of the upcoming game and showed some of the new things that have happened to the land of Hyrule from the last time we've seen it, some new features, powers and all that beautiful visual imagery and everything under the sun for what will surely be a very anticipated and acclaimed game upon release in May and I for one am very excited for this. We also got the announcement of a special limited time OLED Zelda Switch and new case and pro controllers too coming out in the weeks leading to the release so if you want some new things then this is for you
Swinging your way soon
This may be technically the previous weeks news but I shall place it here as well as it was recent. So as you may be aware from the recent PS5 ads going around that their is an upcoming sequel to the 2018 Spider-man game for the PS5 coming this fall, not much else is known (and frankly not much has been advertised about the game since the games announcement 2 years ago) not even a release date but that may have changed. According to the actor who is portraying Venom in this game, he seems to have indicated that this Game is releasing in September but it remains to be seen if it is releasing in that month. If it does it will follow the originals release as that launched as well in early September of 2018 and went on to be a critical Hit game, but I am sure we will hear something soon.
Take it to the stairs
Another season before the first season is even finished filming
Some small news year but according to Kingpin star Vincent D'Onofrio, who is currently on set with Charlie Cox to film the new Daredevil series for the MCU and Disney+, he has mentioned that it will be just as dark and violent as the original series and that there is already plans for a 2nd season of the show, Now it could be the case that the 1st season is actually 2 seasons of 9 episodes a piece or we have 2 seasons of 18 episodes each, but I am sure we will get better and clear answers when the series possibly releases next year.
Blowing up a bomb takes a while
Now Christopher Nolan is known for his big epics and this year he is bringing another historical drama biopic with Oppenheimer (and also battling it out on the same weekend as opening with Barbie), a story on the man who created the Atomic Bomb. Now according to one of the film's stars, Matt Damon, He has made mention that according to him the runtime for this new film is projected to be about 3 hours. This seems to be a new norm where most films are no shorter then about 2 hours (hour 45 at shortest) so about a 3 hour film does make sense. I am sure that we will get some clear answers closer to release on the full official runtime by the director himself, but for now we let the clock tick down till then.
Scott Pilgrim Vs Anime Vs the world
In a surprise reveal near the end of this week, Netflix announced that they were making a anime adaptation of the popular graphic novel series of Scott Pilgrim. Not only that but the director of the underrated and excellent film adaptation Edger Wright, will be an executive producer on the series. And if things could not get better for the series but the entire cast from the film adaptation are also coming back to reprise their roles for the series so this will surely be a really awesome adaptation to look forward to in the future.
Captain America: New World Villain rumours
In some rumoured casting news, another Marvel property is currently in the process of filming for its release in the next year or 2 with the 4th Captain America movie with Anthony Mackie taking on the role as the new Cap this time around. Now some of the rumoured appearance of Villains may all be part of a bigger picture that while we know that the Leader (played by Tim Blake Nelson from 2008s Hulk film) and appearance of Thunderbolt Ross (newly casted to be played by Harrison Ford) to become Red Hulk, it has been rumoured to be building to the villains of this film to be the Serpent society who are trying to get their hands on a more powerful metal then Vibranium, with Adamantium (the metal for Wolverine's claws) that is found from the giant Celestrial in the ocean (according to the rumoured plot for the film). As of right now we have no idea of if this is what is building up too but I am sure we will get some more context closer to the release.
Farewell E3
In a bit of a sudden announcement, the planned E3 conference for June has been announced a few days ago to now be cancelled due to the lack of the big names not taking part. First signs were due to the slow appeal to the expo and then it was the big names like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo pulling out of the conference, and then what followed suit with some other like Ubisoft and EA, it didn't feel right to continue so the show is cancelled for this year. While there is still Summer Games Expo this summer, I am sure E3 will make a comeback within the next few years
Last of the Textures: Left Behind
And that is all that I have today to discuss with some quick news stories from the last week that I have come across. Do let me know in the comments of any news media pieces I may have missed that came out this week and I will bring it up in the next one or update this piece. But until next time, you stay wonderful people and Goodnight and Good News.
Signing Off
Sam H
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