Thursday 23 February 2023

Embracer Group strikes new deal with Warner Brothers to make new LORD OF THE RINGS movies

In a fairly neat solution to what was threatening to become a legally complex entanglement of rights, Lord of the Rings movie rights-holders Embracer Group have forged a new deal with Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema to create new feature films derived from the novel.

Not Amazon but you get the idea.

The Lord of the Rings film rights were acquired from the Saul Zaentz Company by New Line in 1997 to create a feature film trilogy based on the novel. Peter Jackson directed this trilogy to tremendous acclaim, which was released from 2001 to 2003 (New Line's parent company is Warner Brothers). Warner Brothers teamed up with MGM, who owned part of the film rights to The Hobbit, to produce a prequel trilogy based on that novel ten years later. Last year, the film rights were set to lapse, reverting back to the Saul Zaentz Company. Warner Brothers had put an animated motion picture, War of the Rohirrim, into production and claimed this was enough to satisfy their legal requirement to get a film into production before the rights were due to lapse. The Saul Zaentz Company disagreed.

Whilst legal arguments were being thrashed out, the Saul Zaentz Company suddenly sold their Lord of the Rings-related rights to the Embracer Group, the Swedish multimedia mega-corp which has been hoovering up various comic book, video game and board game companies for the past decade. Exactly why Embracer would step into such a legal minefield before it had been resolved seemed unclear.

Except, of course, it is now clear. Embracer simply created a new deal with Warner Brothers and New Line, immediately resolving all legal questions and allowing everyone to move forwards with new projects.

What those projects might be is unclear. Today's statement includes a note that the companies have no interesting in mounting a remake of Peter Jackson's seminal movie trilogy. There are also rights complications with The Hobbit (MGM, now owned by Amazon, retain some of the rights to the project) and also a question over TV rights, since Amazon struck a separate deal with the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate to launch their first TV show, The Rings of Power, which launched last year to a mixed reception. There has been some suggestion that Warner Brothers might be able to create a Lord of the Rings-derived TV series as long as it stayed within even stricter legal boundaries than Amazon, but it's not been clarified what those could be.

Any further projects will have to derive from The Lord of the Rings alone, and probably in the cinema. It's possible that film-makers will tap the Third Age for more ideas of a show, maybe focusing on ides like the settling of the Shire, the war with the Witch-King of Angmar, the adventures of the young Aragorn or possibly picking up a story with some of the surviving film characters several decades on from the movie trilogy. Such projects will have to survive the withering scorn and cynicism of fans watching out for a cash-grab exploitation of Tolkien's material.

In the meantime, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim hits cinemas on 12 April 2024, whilst Amazon's Rings of Power is currently shooting its second season for a 2024 debut.

Wednesday 22 February 2023

BABYLON 5 celebrates its 30th anniversary

Seminal space opera television series Babylon 5 has celebrated its 30th anniversary. The show's pilot movie, The Gathering, aired for the first time on 22 February 1993.

Babylon 5 ran for five seasons, notching up 110 episodes, seven TV movies and 13 episodes of a spin-off series, Crusade, between 1993 and 2007. It also generated a huge number of tie-in books, comics and roleplaying games, as well a video game that was - still bafflingly - cancelled when it was 95% complete.

The show was mainly set between the years 2257 and 2262 and depicted the misadventures of the crew and diplomats on board Babylon 5, a massive space station designed to serve as a sort-of United Nations in space, between the borders of five major powers and numerous smaller ones. Babylon 5 was purposefully designed by its creator, J. Michael Straczynski, as a "novel for television," with one pre-planned story unfolding over five years. This level of serialisation was unusual at the time, although not completely unprecedented. It was more unusual that the story arc was planned out in some detail ahead of time, though.

After a rough opening season, Babylon 5 hit its stride in its second and third seasons, with both years winning Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation. A near-cancellation in Season 4 saw Straczynski wrap up the main story arc last few episodes, but a late renewal allowed him to end the story as planned, albeit with a somewhat more spun-out fifth season than originally envisaged.

Babylon 5 broke the mould not just for serialisation, but also for its pioneering use of CGI to depict all of its visual effects. Most contemporary space shows still used very expensive models. As the show continued, its use of CG became more innovative, extending to the creation of virtual sets and all-CG aliens interacting with human actors; commonplace today but remarkable in the mid-1990s. B5 also used the Internet in a pioneering way, with Straczynski taking advantage of the Internet to discuss behind-the-scenes trivia and worldbuilding information with eager fans.

Despite its innovative structure, excellent pacing and outstanding cast, the show teetered on the edge of cancellation throughout its run, and has never had more than a dedicated, cult audience. The show also suffered appalling attrition among its main castmembers, making a continuation unfeasible. A Babylon 5 reboot project has instead been gestating at the CW for well over a year, although recent sweeping changes at the network and a retreat from drama commissions makes that project now unlikely to proceed (although the possibility remains of it finding a home elsewhere).

Wednesday 8 February 2023

Atlanta: Season 3

Paper Boi and his manager, Earn, have arrived in Europe for a tour and are soon joined by their friends Darius and Van. What should be a straightforward series of gigs becomes increasingly weird and convoluted, whilst Earn has a series of vivid dreams about what appear to be horror stories or alternate realities. Outside of the comfort zone of Atlanta, the group find themselves adrift.


Atlanta is a show that defies easy definitions. The project, headed by Donald Glover in collaboration with his brother Stephen and visionary director Hiro Murai, flirts with a standard setup where Glover plays the under-achieving cousin of a rising rap star, and manages to talk him into letting him become his manager. Shenanigans ensue. But the show undercuts, subverts or often just flat out ignores its own premise on a very frequent basis, dropping most of the cast to focus on one character, or forgetting its alleged status as a comedy-drama to instead turn into flat-out existential horror. In its first two seasons the show navigated these fluctuations with ease and verve.

For its much-delayed third season (arriving four years after the last), Atlanta flips the last vestiges of its format out the window. The gang are now in Europe, as Paper Boi's latest tour takes in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and London, among other cities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, even this is not as straightforward as it could be as Paper Boi experiences the worst trip of all time, Earn has to interrogate a suspected phone thief, Darius inadvertently destroys his favourite restaurant in London and Van experiences an identity crisis in Paris.

These voyages into the surreal - and they are even surreal by Atlanta's elastic standards of reality - are meticulously-crafted, intelligent slices of drama, comedy and horror intertwined with the show's traditional verve. But there are also only six episodes of them, in a ten-episode season. The show dedicates the remaining four episodes to almost completely stand-alone anthology stories.

The first is a flat-out horror, as a young boy's teacher mistakenly identifies him as being the victim of child abuse at home and he gets cycled into the care system, with decidedly unpleasant results. In the second, white Americans who are the descendants of slave-owners are forced to pay reparations to the descendants of their slaves, resulting is a seismic shift in society, and one white man rails against the new system. In a third episode, a white couple are completely reliant on their Trinidadian nanny are inconvenienced by her death, but baffled when their son asks to go to her funeral. This draws them into the life of someone they never really knew and barely ever thought about. And in the final story, a mixed-race, white-presenting high schooler is incensed when he loses out on a scholarship because of his appearance, leading to a questionable strategy for retaliation.

These four stand-alone episodes are each impressive - Three Slaps may emerge as Atlanta's creepiest instalment - and delve into themes the show has tapped into before, but in a freer way when they are detached from the show's normal cast and continuity. The Big Payback goes as far as taking place in a fantastical alternate-timeline. And all four episodes are hinted to be unusually vivid dreams that Earn is having during the European tour. It doesn't really matter since Atlanta has only a passing interest in making itself even vaguely realistic (remember this is a show which once featured an invisible car for the sheer hell of it). Instead, the stand-alones enhance the themes of the rest of the series, dealing with class, ambition and the complexities and hostility of interracial relations in America (and elsewhere). That they are brilliantly-written and directed is taken as read, but some may bemoan the limited screentime we have for our regulars; the last episode is almost a one-hander for Van (who herself is absent from most episodes), meaning that Earn, Darius and Paper Boi sit out a full half of the season.

That sounds churlish to the point of ridiculousness - who, by its third season, is watching Atlanta for a conventional narrative with a regular cast? - but there is also a slight sense of queasiness this season, of unease beyond the show's norm. The show is at its boldest and most experimental here but sometimes it feels like the experiments don't always pay off. Paper Boi being suckered into helping a company avoid corporate fall-out for its racism feels predictable, and the normally-affable Darius spends most of the season in a surprisingly dark place. The show complicating its (normally) most likeable character is a good move, but making him as dislikeable as they do here (particularly when he just bounces on Paper Boi, leaving him to the night from living hell) feels like a misstep. Van also spends most of the season on an extended strange journey separate to the rest of the characters, which feels initially disappointing - Zazie Beetz is the show's ultimate weapon of a performer, often floating around the fringes of episodes until she becomes the focus, when she absolutely kills it - but does pay off in the very clever finale.

Atlanta's third season (****½) is its boldest, strangest, weirdest, most scattershot and possibly patchiest. Perhaps you can even call it disappointing, in the same way that finding £500 on the street is disappointing after finding £600 the day before (twice!). But it's also maybe the most interesting and weirdly experimental of what is already an interesting and experimental show. The season is available to watch on Hulu in the USA and Disney+ in the UK.

Sunday 5 February 2023

The CW will not develop any pilots for 2023-24, likely ending BABYLON 5 reboot development

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the American channel CW has effectively abandoned the development of new, original drama programming. It will not pick up any new pilots for the 2023-24 season and may only renew three of its existing shows for next year (only one, All American, has been announced). For genre fans, this likely means the end of any chances for the Babylon 5 reboot project to move ahead at the channel.


The CW has spent many years as a relatively scrappy underdog, putting out a number of successful mid-budget shows like Supernatural and The 100 and a whole slate of DC Comics-adjacent shows like The Flash, Arrow, Superman & Lois and Legends of Tomorrow. These shows failed to turn a profit in first run, but did form a highly attractive package that was re-sold to streamers like Netflix for huge sums of money. Ill-advisedly, the CW terminated this deal to try to use its shows to push out its own streaming options as part of HBO Max. However, it was nowhere near as successful as the Netflix deal, putting the CW on the back foot. In early 2022, the CW was sold to Nexstar Media Group who immediately pivoted hard towards cheap reality programming and overseas imports. Ten CW scripted originals were cancelled immediately, with more following since.

The CW had previously picked up development rights to classic space opera series Babylon 5. The original series had run from 1993 to 1998, in first-run syndication and then on the TNT channel. 110 episodes were produced across five seasons, also generating six TV movies and a spin-off show, Crusade, that was cancelled after half a season. The show had not garnered a massive audience, but it had done solidly and turned an immense profit given its very low production costs (achieved through pioneering the use of CGI). The show had also picked up significant critical acclaim and multiple awards, as well as an enthusiastic cult audience. The show had pioneered serialised storytelling in dramas in an age of stand-alones and reset buttons, with writers including Damon Lindelof, the Wachowskis and George R.R. Martin citing it as an influential work. A partial HD remaster of Babylon 5 generated positive press coverage in early 2021 and introduced a new audience to the series.

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski confirmed that a Babylon 5 reboot was in development at the CW in September 2021. Due to the changes at the CW, the show's development was unusually put on hiatus for a year after it was not picked up in the previous renewal window in February 2022. However, the latest news seems to make the reboot an even more unlikely project then it already was.

The project may not be entirely dead. The new CW is looking for more adult shows to appeal to older viewers, especially if they can be delivered for under $5 million per episode. A legacy show with name value aimed at adult viewers with a reasonable overseas resale potential might still interest the new regime, but it would now appear to be a slim shot indeed, and almost certainly not happening this year.

Additionally, it's possible another streamer or channel takes on the project, although it is unclear which ones would be interested.

Thursday 2 February 2023

Death Stranding (Director's Cut)

A mysterious, apocalyptic event called the Death Stranding has ended the old world and ushered in the new. In this world the barrier between life and death has become vague and fluid. It is possible to breach the walls of death and visit the Beach, a purgatory-like stepping stone between this world and what comes after. But the Beach is feeding into our world, allowing dead souls, BTs or Beached Things, to manifest. Where BTs and living souls come into contact, there is annihilation, vast explosions called voidouts. These voidouts have obliterated much of America, leaving behind desperate islands of humanity, large numbers of survivors clustered in cities called Knots and singular preppers in remote shelters.


Sam Porter is recruited by Bridges, a company working closely with the nascent government called the United Cities of America. Their goal is to use the chiral energy of the Beach to reunite America, forming connections between cities and shelters until a single civilisation once again spans the continent. Sam is sent on a mission to complete the connections and find his missing adopted sister, reportedly held prisoner by extremists in a city on the remote west coast of the continent, cut off by a sea of tar. In this quest Sam is helped by a group of allies bearing oblique codenames and with varying motives. His closest ally is BB, a "Bridge Baby" (ghost-detecting quasi-foetus) wired into his suit's sensor systems, allowing him to sense and avoid BTs. But Sam and his BB are also being hunted by a mysterious figure, a soldier from the Beach who will stop at nothing to recover what he believes is his.


Death Stranding is a game that defies easy summary. It's a game which melds its decidedly familiar gameplay and format - an open world game you can traverse on foot or by vehicle, doing various missions for various people by means including stealth and combat - with the most obtusely deranged set of worldbuilding you've encountered this side of Steven Erikson's Malazan fantasy series, except even far more metaphysically weird. To play Death Stranding is to take an acid trip to a world where Darryl from The Walking Dead, Actual Guillermo Del Toro's Face and the baby from 2001 are FedEx couriers working to save America from Antimatter Ghosts you can shoot in the face with your own bodily excretions. To play Death Stranding is to play a game which asks, nay, demands that you pause it at least once per hour for the first five hours to ask, "what in the name of galloping fucknuts is going on?"

Of course, the obtuseness of the early game eventually gives way to understanding a bit more what's happening thanks to some of the longest infodumps in human history, in any medium. The game's characters are only too keen to tell you what is happening, using a battery of original Proper Nouns, holographic maps and charts. Essentially it's a narrative that has its weirdly obtuse cake and then also eats it from a plate of...frosty exposition? Death Stranding's worldbuilding and story eventually end up being nowhere near as inaccessible as some have made out, there's just a lot of it, and the story and worldbuilding are very front-loaded to the point that the game's opening few hours resemble wading through the treacle of lengthy cutscenes interspersed by tutorial-like bursts of gameplay before it gets out of its own way and lets you start playing the damn thing properly.


Once Death Stranding stops Lars von Triering out of your monitor, what emerges is a game almost disappointingly familiar: an open-world game where you walk around doing jobs for people. Jobs in this game consist almost exclusively of taking packages containing needed goods from one location to another. Early in the game you are limited to walking everywhere, and unlike almost literally every other video game in existence, the game has zero truck with you being able to carry three tons of inventory in an invisible container somewhere. Instead, every single item in the game has a physical presence and you have to account for it. This can end up with your character - Sam Porter Bridges, played by Norman Reedus from that zombie show and also that motorcycle show - comically staggering around with four feet of containers looming above his head, a mixture of cargo and survival gear. The more cargo you have, the easier it is to trip over and drop and damage it, which is no good for your client. You have tools to help you, such as ladders to ascend difficult spots or bridge streams and minor chasms, and ropes to ascend or descend sheer cliffs, but these are fairly limited at the start of the game.

Managing your cargo is a big problem initially, but Death Stranding immediately, and subtly, starts giving you ways of adjusting to the problem. The early settlements are relatively close to one another and it becomes easy to work out where to drop stuff off, double back to pick up other cargo, and then deliver stuff more efficiently. The game gives you a powered trike early on, but, amusingly, no way to charge it, so a bunch more deliveries lead you to gaining the ability to build field generators. Then the trike allows you to get around faster and carry more stuff, but soon you bump into new limitations.


The game also amps up the threat level quickly. You find your first batch of BTs early only, ghostly entities who don't just kill you, but first force you into a mid-tier-annoying boss fight. Detecting BTs with the help of your eerie demibaby companion becomes second nature, and avoiding them is relatively easy, though of course it's also easy to become overconfident and blunder down a hillside into a pack of them at the worst possible moment. Later on BTs become a more trivial threat once you learn how to weaponise your excretions into explosive weapons, but of course, not long after that the games starts feeding in more capable variants of BTs which are more difficult to defeat.

You also have human enemies to face, starting off with bandits called MULES (there's a ton of acronyms in this game and also absolutely zero explanation of what any of them stand for, which I kind of respect) and then advancing up to terrorists known as Homo Demens, whom everyone calls demons. MULES are annoying, beating you up with electro-poles and nicking your stuff, whilst the demons are lethal, happy to blow you away with automatic weapons and grenades. With both enemy types, the normal videogame instinct is to get some heavy hardware and liquidate them, but in the world of Death Stranding, this is a Very Bad Idea. Killing someone turns them into a BT; when a BT eats a passing live human, such as a MULE or terrorist when the camp respawns, it basically triggers a matter/antimatter explosion which effectively vaporises the game world. Or, more succinctly, every corpse you create in the world turns into a ticking time bomb which will eventually result in a game over screen. You can avert this by dragging the bodies either to an incinerator or into the Tar Sea, but these are at opposite ends of the game map and are very inconvenient to reach without a vehicle and still quite time-consuming with one. Just not killing people is the easier option. Since this game comes from the creator of the Metal Gear Solid series, there are fortunately myriad options for knocking people unconscious instead.


Death Stranding occupies an interesting space between the open-world action-adventure game and a narrative-heavy story game (not dissimilar to the previous game from the same team, Metal Gear Solid V). The narrative is very dense and complex, and taking a 20-hour break from the story to focus on side-missions won't exactly make it any more straightforward. On the other hand, taking long breaks from Yet Another Guillermo Del Toro Metaphysical TED Talk to just chill out hiking over some hills to some laidback Iceland rock might be very appealing.

The open-world elements are refreshingly stripped back: there is no skill tree, no pseudo-RPG ability unlocks (just occasional boosts to your carry capacity or stamina bar as you complete missions) and a bare handful of usable vehicles. Everything that is in the game is hyper-focused on making your life easier or the gameplay more interesting. Side-quests are almost uniformly a variation of "deliver something from Point A to Point B," with occasional missions directing you to raiding MULE camps or into BT-infested ruins to retrieve some vital piece of equipment. Occasionally missions direct you to unlock more information about your crew of supporting characters, and there's even escort missions, although these oddly involve strapping another human being to your back and lugging them around rather than them just, y'know, walking around themselves.


There is light crafting in the game, but the main building exercise in the game involves constructing, or reconstructing, a massive road network that spans the world map. Building this road network involves a ton of resource-collecting, with metals and ceramic either gained from completing quests, gatherable from allied outposts at regular intervals or lootable from MULE or terrorist camps. It's wholly unnecessary: vehicles with solid battery packs and building occasional generators in remote areas or shelters with garages for repairs will get you across the whole map without a problem. But even spanning a small corner of the map with roads to allow you fast transit between certain shelters can eliminate a lot the slower-paced travel from the game. How far you decide to go with that kind of activity is up to you; if you focus on the story and the story alone, you can finish Death Stranding in well under 30 hours. But if you set out to rebuild the road network solo and do every side-mission and get every achievement, you can expand this out to around 80 hours or even more with ease.

The game also features an interesting multiplayer mode. You never encounter other players in the game world, but your game data can synch with everybody else's on the server, so that other player's structures appear in your game and yours can appear in others'. Resources will flow into road repairs between your game world and others', dramatically speeding up the construction process. You can post signs warning other players about avalanches or raiders up ahead. You can dump unneeded equipment or weapons at a shelter for another player to pick up when it appears in their game. It's all rather interesting and ties into the game's central message about connectivity. Although you can also completely turn if off if you wish.


Death Stranding is built around this thematic idea of connectivity. As you traverse the game world, you bring isolated communities back into touch with one another through the medium of your role as a parcel delivery guy. The presumably unintended parallels to the COVID pandemic - the game was originally released just a few months before lockdowns became commonplace in early 2020 - are eerie. The theme is explored in interesting ways, although also fairly on-the-nose ones. Main character Sam is a loner with no interest in making friends at the start of the game, but through his connection with uncanny baby-thing BB and a host of bewilderingly damaged other characters, he becomes part of an extended family. It's both so cliched as to become saccharine, but also oddly effective.

It helps that the cast is both ridiculously stacked and extremely well-played. Reedus brings his familiar had-it-with-this-crap everyman exasperation from The Walking Dead and is a sympathetic lead (especially the way his stoic demeanour with others gives way to a goofier side when he's alone...well, apart from the player and BB). The Leftovers' Margaret Qualley is excellent as your main "man in the van," Mama, and Lea Seydoux gives an offbeat performance as Fragile, a fellow deliverer with an intriguing approach to next-day deliveries from anywhere on the continent. The Bionic Woman herself, Lindsay Wagner, makes for an excellent President of the United Cities, and Tommie Earl Jenkins and Troy Baker are having almost too much fun the ludicrously-named Die-Hardman (!) and Higgs, the antagonistic leader of the demons. Mads Mikkelsen lends the project fantastic gravitas as the enigmatic Cliff. Guillermo Del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn only lend their likenesses rather than their voices to the roles of Deadman and Heartman, with Jesse Corti and Darren Jacobs picking up the vocal slack.


More amusing is the battery of more random cameos among the preppers and shelter-keepers you encounter, with manga artist Junji Ito, film directors Edgar Wright and Jordan Vogt-Roberts, game designer Sam Lake (best-known for his work on Remedy games like Alan Wake and playing the original Max Payne) and Video Game Awards founder Geoff Keighley all cropping up in small roles. Conan O'Brien has a particularly random limited appearance as an aggressive cosplayer. These cameos should feel massively incongruous, given the melancholy, more serious attitude the game cultivates elsewhere, but they end up feeling effective.

The gameplay loop of delivering parcels, unlocking new tools and vehicles and travelling to a new area is very effective early on, and there's no denying that the story and world, although dense and complex, are also original and interesting. The heavy de-emphasising of lethal combat is interesting, as is the decision to let you still indulge in it despite the risk of just blowing up the entire game world. Action is rare but satisfying when it takes place. The graphics are mostly excellent (although the relatively limited draw distance by modern standards does feel weird), the music is absolutely outstanding, and the game handles its tonal variation from moments of intense action to outright horror to melancholy loneliness very well.


There are problems though. The game frontloads exposition and introducing its bewildering world into the first few hours, meaning it does not put its best foot forwards and can give a very misleading view of what the game itself is like. Vehicle handling is okay on roads but pretty awful off it, and the twentieth time your truck bounces over a boulder half its own size with no problem only you get stuck on a pebble the size of a hedgehog will make you start to wonder if any of the developers have even seen an off-road truck, let alone used one. It's also hard to argue that the mountain biome can be deeply frustrating to navigate, at least until you unlock the use of ziplines and figure out the hidden paths trucks can use.

But these negatives are, for the most part, manageable. Death Stranding (****½) may be obtuse and strange for the sake of being strange, but it's also uniquely its own thing. Its atmosphere is haunting, its ideas original and its utter rejection of most modern gaming conventions (and, indeed, its not-always-subtle satirising of them) refreshing. This is not a game for everybody, but if you lock into its headspace, Death Stranding will be a memorable, fascinating gaming experience. The game is available now on PlayStation 4 and 5, and on PC. A sequel, DS2, is currently in development.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.