Denis Villeneuve will get the chance to create the second film of his planned two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's "Dune," Legendary Entertainment and Warner Bros. said Tuesday. From a report: The news comes after Villeneuve's "Dune" tallied $41 million at the domestic box office during its debut over the weekend, a solid haul considering the film also launched on HBO Max Friday. Globally, the film hauled in $220 million. While Warner Bros. seemed keen to greenlight a second film for Villeneuve, Legendary owns the cinematic rights to the novel and had to be onboard in order to continue the story on the big screen. The second film is expected to follow Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) as he joins the Fremen and works to bring peace to the desert planet of Arrakis. "Dune: Part Two" will debut on Oct. 20, 2023.

The latest version of macOS, Monterey, is now available to download, according to Apple. The software has been available in public beta for several months, but today's release means Apple thinks the software is ready for everyday use. From a report: As is tradition, Apple announced its latest version of macOS at WWDC in June. New features include the ability to set Macs as an AirPlay target to play content from iPhones and iPads, as well as Shortcuts, Apple's iOS automation software. There have also been improvements made to FaceTime, as well as a new Quick Note feature. For a full rundown of what's on the way, check out our preview from July, as well as Apple's own feature list.

Unfortunately, some of Monterey's biggest new additions, Universal Control and SharePlay, don't seem to be available at launch. Apple notes that both features will be available "later this fall." Universal Control allows files to be dragged and dropped between several different machines, as Apple's Craig Federighi demonstrated at WWDC. It also will let you control multiple Apple devices including Macs, MacBooks, and iPads, with the same mouse and keyboard. SharePlay will enable shared experiences of music, TV shows, movies, and more while connected over FaceTime. Once it's available, Apple says you can use the feature with Apple Music, Apple TV+ and unnamed "popular third-party services." It's better news when it comes to Safari's redesign, which by default now uses a more traditional interface rather than the controversial new tab design introduced at WWDC.

AMC Entertainment, the largest movie theater chain in the world, will offer open captioning at 240 locations in the United States, a move that the company's chief executive described as "a real advance for those with hearing difficulties or where English is a second language." From a report: Movie theaters provide closed captioning through devices that some customers describe as inconvenient and prone to malfunctioning. Open captions, however, are displayed on the screen in a way similar to subtitles; everyone in the theater sees the same captions, on the same screen. Advocates for the deaf and hard of hearing have long sought more and higher-quality captioning, but theater owners worry that people who aren't deaf simply don't like seeing captions at the movies.

"In some cases, putting open captions on the screen diminishes ticket sales for the movie," said John Fithian, the president and chief executive of the National Association of Theatre Owners, although he noted that the evidence was mostly anecdotal. He said the industry, whose business has been battered by the pandemic, was studying the relationship between open captions and ticket sales. Christian Vogler, a professor at Gallaudet University, a school in Washington that serves the deaf, said in an email, "Detractors of open captions often have argued that the wider hearing audience would revolt over them, or that these would be a losing business proposition for theaters." He praised AMC's move, which was announced last week, saying, "The fact that a large national chain has had a change of heart is significant, and may even open the floodgates for others to follow suit."

The Food and Drug Administration approved a virtual reality-based treatment for children with the visual disorder amblyopia, or lazy eye, the company behind the therapy announced today. The Verge reports: Luminopia's approach uses TV and movies to develop the weaker eye and train the eyes to work together. Patients watch the show or movie through a headset that shows the images to each eye separately. The images shown to the stronger eye have a lower contrast, and the images are presented with overlays that force the brain to use both eyes to see them properly. Kids using the therapy and wearing glasses had more improvement in their vision than a similar group of kids who did not use the therapy and just wore corrective glasses full time during a clinical trial of the technology. After 12 weeks watching the shows one hour per day, six days per week, 62 percent of kids using the treatment had a strong improvement in their vision. Only around a third of the kids in the comparison group had similar improvements over the course of the 12 weeks.

Luminopia has over 700 hours of programming in its library, and it partnered with kids' content distributors like Nelvana and Sesame Workshop to develop the tool. The authors of the clinical trial wrote that they think that the option to pick popular videos might be one reason users stuck to the program -- people followed the treatment plan 88 percent of the time. Less than 50 percent of patients stick to eye patches or blurring drops. With the approval, Luminopia joins only a handful of companies with clearance to offer a digital therapeutic as a prescription treatment for medical conditions. Last year, the FDA approved a prescription video game called EndeavorRx, which treats ADHD in kids between eight and 12 years old. Luminopia said in a statement that it plans to launch the treatment in 2022.

Thelasko shares a report from Ars Technica, written by Peter Opaskar: Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel Dune gets a new film adaptation -- this one helmed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) -- later this month. But before Ars Technica reviews the movie, there's the matter of its predecessor: 1984's Dune, made by a then up-and-coming filmmaker named David Lynch. Detractors call Lynch's saga -- a tale of two noble space families 8,000 years in the future, fighting over the most valuable resource in the universe amidst sandworms the size of aircraft carriers -- incomprehensible, stilted, and ridiculous. It lost piles of money. Yet fans, especially in recent years, have reclaimed Lynch's film as a magnificent folly, a work of holy, glorious madness.

So which group am I in? Both. Am I about to describe Dune as "so bad it's good"? No, that's a loser take for cowards. I once half-heard a radio interview with someone speculating that the then-current artistic moment was not "so bad it's good," and it wasn't "ironic" either -- it was actually "awesome." (I didn't catch who he was, so if any of this sounds familiar, hit me up in the comments.) Art can speak to you while at the same time being absurd. The relatable can sometimes be reached only by going through the ridiculous. The two can be inseparable, like the gravitational pull between a gas giant and its moon -- or Riggs and Murtaugh.

The example the radio interviewee gave was of Evel Knievel, the '70s daredevil who wore a cape and jumped dirt bikes over rows of buses. Absurd? Heavens, yes. A feat of motorcycling and physicality? Absolutely. But beyond that, we can relate to Knievel's need to achieve transcendence at such a, shall we say, niche skill. We might also marvel at our own ability to be impressed by something that should be objectively useless but is instead actually awesome. A more contemporary example might be Tenet. It's a relentless international thriller about fate and climate change and the need for good people to hold evil at bay. But it's also a "dudes rock!" bromance between Two Cool Guys in Suits spouting sci-fi mumbo-jumbo. It can't be one without the other. "I have faith in Denis Villeneuve and his new version of Dune starring Timothee Chalamet," says Opaskar. "But it will probably be a normal movie for normal people, in which characters with recognizable emotions talk in a recognizable way and move through a plot we understand to achieve clearly defined goals. Which is all fine and good, but how likely is it to inspire sick beats for '90s kids doing ecstasy?"

Somewhere on Yahoo, one writer asks "Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?" There was a time when comic books were sold at newsstands alongside mainstream publications, according to Forbes, but that changed in the early 1980s when periodical comics all but disappeared from newsstands. From then on, the vast majority of comic books were sold through independently owned retail comic shops.
But GamesRadar+ notes a boom started in the 1990s — when comic books became an investment: Long story short, folks outside of regular comic book readers discovered that, in some cases, key comic book issues (such as those that debuted popular characters or titles) could be worth significant amounts of money on the secondary market, leading to some fans buying dozens of copies of a single issue in the hopes of someday capitalizing on their monetary value...

Someone should've explained supply and demand — the bubble burst because when everyone is buying and meticulously preserving a million copies of a comic book, there is no rarity to drive up the value to the level of less well-preserved comic books from earlier eras.
Their article also points out that this era saw the dawn of lucrative "variant covers". But the '90s also saw a rebellion of top Marvel artists who left to found Image comics, "the first major third-party publisher to challenge Marvel and DC's reign over the industry in years," which led to "a rise in independent and creator-owned comic books, both large and small, and helped the rising tide of indie publishers gain a solid foothold as an overall industry presence." (Presumably this "rising tide" would also include publishers of manga and anime-derived titles.)

So where are we now? The article on Yahoo notes the vast popularity of comic book movies, and also argues that "The billion-dollar comic business continues to boom." According to Publisher's Weekly, sales of comic books and graphic novels topped $1.28 billion in 2020, an all-time high. It's no fluke. With a few exceptions — sales fell a little in 2017, for example — comic book sales have been rising consistently for decades.
But who's actually reading comic books? Is it teenagers? Nostalgic adults? Investing collectors? People who saw the movies first? (If you're 12 years old, are you going to read some comic book, or watch The Avengers?)

Comic books now also have to compete with incredibly immersive videogames, virtual reality, and a gazillion cellphone apps — not to mention social media, and even online fan fiction. So I'd be interested to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. It seems like we'd be a reasonably good cross section of geek culture — but can we solve the riddle of the state of the comic book industry today?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Load up the website This Person Does Not Exist and it'll show you a human face, near-perfect in its realism yet totally fake. Refresh and the neural network behind the site will generate another, and another, and another. The endless sequence of AI-crafted faces is produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN) -- a type of AI that learns to produce realistic but fake examples of the data it is trained on. But such generated faces -- which are starting to be used in CGI movies and ads -- might not be as unique as they seem. In a paper titled This Person (Probably) Exists (PDF), researchers show that many faces produced by GANs bear a striking resemblance to actual people who appear in the training data. The fake faces can effectively unmask the real faces the GAN was trained on, making it possible to expose the identity of those individuals. The work is the latest in a string of studies that call into doubt the popular idea that neural networks are "black boxes" that reveal nothing about what goes on inside.

To expose the hidden training data, Ryan Webster and his colleagues at the University of Caen Normandy in France used a type of attack called a membership attack, which can be used to find out whether certain data was used to train a neural network model. These attacks typically take advantage of subtle differences between the way a model treats data it was trained on -- and has thus seen thousands of times before -- and unseen data. For example, a model might identify a previously unseen image accurately, but with slightly less confidence than one it was trained on. A second, attacking model can learn to spot such tells in the first model's behavior and use them to predict when certain data, such as a photo, is in the training set or not.

Such attacks can lead to serious security leaks. For example, finding out that someone's medical data was used to train a model associated with a disease might reveal that this person has that disease. Webster's team extended this idea so that instead of identifying the exact photos used to train a GAN, they identified photos in the GAN's training set that were not identical but appeared to portray the same individual -- in other words, faces with the same identity. To do this, the researchers first generated faces with the GAN and then used a separate facial-recognition AI to detect whether the identity of these generated faces matched the identity of any of the faces seen in the training data. The results are striking. In many cases, the team found multiple photos of real people in the training data that appeared to match the fake faces generated by the GAN, revealing the identity of individuals the AI had been trained on.

In an article for The Conversation, Noah Wardrip-Fruin writes about how Computer Space marked the start of the $175 billion video game industry we have today when it debuted on Oct. 15, 1971 -- and why you probably haven't heard of it. From the report: Computer Space, made by the small company Nutting Associates, seemed to have everything going for it. Its scenario -- flying a rocket ship through space locked in a dogfight with two flying saucers -- seemed perfect for the times. The Apollo Moon missions were in full swing. The game was a good match for people who enjoyed science-fiction movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Planet of the Apes" and television shows like "Star Trek" and "Lost in Space," or those who had thrilled to the aerial combat of the movies "The Battle of Britain" and "Tora! Tora! Tora!" There was even prominent placement of a Computer Space cabinet in Charlton Heston's film "The Omega Man." But when Computer Space was unveiled, it didn't generate a flood of orders, and no flood ever arrived. It wasn't until Computer Space's makers left the company, founded Atari and released Pong the next year that the commercial potential of video games became apparent. The company sold 8,000 Pong units by 1974.

Nolan Bushnell, who led the development of both Computer Space and Pong, has recounted Computer Space's inauspicious start many times. He claimed that Computer Space failed to take off because it overestimated the public. Bushnell is widely quoted as saying the game was too complicated for typical bar-goers, and that no one would want to read instructions to play a video game. [...] At about the same time Computer Space debuted, Stanford University students were waiting in line for hours in the student union to play another version of Spacewar!, The Galaxy Game, which was a hit as a one-off coin-operated installation just down the street from where Bushnell and his collaborators worked. [...] Key evidence that complexity was not the issue comes in the form of Space Wars, another take on Spacewar! that was a successful arcade video game released in 1977.

Why were The Galaxy Game and Space Wars successful at finding an enthusiastic audience while Computer Space was not? The answer is that Computer Space lacked a critical ingredient that the other two possessed: gravity. The star in Spacewar! produced a gravity well that gave shape to the field of play by pulling the ships toward the star with intensity that varied by distance. This made it possible for players to use strategy -- for example, allowing players to whip their ships around the star. Why didn't Computer Space have gravity? Because the first commercial video games were made using television technology rather than general-purpose computers. This technology couldn't do the gravity calculations. The Galaxy Game was able to include gravity because it was based on a general-purpose computer, but this made it too expensive to put into production as an arcade game. The makers of Space Wars eventually got around this problem by adding a custom computer processor to its cabinets. Without gravity, Computer Space was using a design that the creators of Spacewar! already knew didn't work. Bushnell's story of the game play being too complicated for the public is still the one most often repeated, but as former Atari employee Jerry Jessop told The New York Times about Computer Space, "The game play was horrible."

The next time you see a movie or TV show that was dubbed from a foreign language, the voices you hear may not belong to actors who rerecorded dialogue in a sound booth. In fact, they may not belong to actors at all. From a report: Highly sophisticated digital voice manufacturing is coming, and entertainment executives say it could bring a revolution in sound as industry-changing as computer graphics were for visuals. New companies are using artificial intelligence to create humanlike voices from samples of a living actor's voice -- models that not only can sound like specific performers, but can speak any language, cry, scream, laugh, even talk with their mouths full. At the same time, companies are refining the visual technology so actors look like they are really speaking.

As streaming services export American fare globally and foreign markets send their hits to the U.S., dubbing is a bigger business than ever. But the uses of synthetic voices extend well beyond localizing foreign films. AI models can provide youthful voices for aging actors. The technology can resurrect audio from celebrities who have died or lost the ability to speak. And it can tweak dialogue in postproduction without the need for actors. All the tinkering raises thorny ethical questions. Where is the line between creating an engrossing screen experience and fabricating an effect that leaves audiences feeling duped?

The technology is set to hit a new target in the coming months, when foreign-language dubbed versions of the 2019 indie horror movie "Every Time I Die" are released in South America. Those versions mark one of the first times entire dubbed movies use computerized voice clones based on the voices of the original English-speaking cast. So when the film comes out abroad, audiences will hear the original actors "speaking" Spanish or Portuguese. Deepdub created the replicas based on 5-minute recordings of each actor speaking English.

Netflix's co-CEO revealed a list Monday showing its top shows and movies of all-time, reports NBC News. The list revealed that the 19th-century drama Bridgerton "was its most watched TV series ever, with 82 million subscribers tuning in for at least two minutes in its first 28 days on the service..." French series "Lupin: Part 1" and season one of "The Witcher," a fantasy series starring Henry Cavill, tied for second on the list, with 76 million accounts.

Among movies, the action film Extraction earned the No. 1 spot. The film about a captured CIA agent was watched by 99 million accounts in the first 28 days, Netflix said. Bird Box, a post-apocalyptic horror film, and the action-comedy Spenser Confidential were the second- and third-most popular films, according to the company.

All the films and series on the list were Netflix originals.
Using a different metric — which shows attracted the most hours of actual viewing time — Bridgerton still came in #1 for TV shows, followed by "Money Heist: Part 4" and "Stranger Things Season 3."

And the top three movies (based on hours of viewing) were Bird Box, Extraction, and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman.

In a statement released Thursday, Scarlett Johansson said she has resolved her legal dispute with Disney. "I am happy to have resolved our differences with Disney," said Johansson. "I'm incredibly proud of the work we've done together over the years and have greatly enjoyed my creative relationship with the team. I look forward to continuing our collaboration in years to come." The movie star filed the lawsuit against Disney in late July, alleging her contract was breached when the media giant released "Black Widow" on its Disney+ streaming service at the same time as its theatrical debut, thus negatively impacting her salary that was based in large part on the box-office performance of the film. Deadline reports: Unlike in their vitriolic filings and their shaming PR statements over the past few, Marvel-owner Disney had nothing but love today for the actor who brought Natasha Romanoff to life for them in nearly 10 separate films. I'm very pleased that we have been able to come to a mutual agreement with Scarlett Johansson regarding Black Widow, said Alan Bergman, Chairman, Disney Studios Content. "We appreciate her contributions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and look forward to working together on a number of upcoming projects, including Disney's Tower of Terror."

As is almost always the case in cases like this, neither side gave any indication of how much money was involved in the settlement. However, when all is said and done, the deal will run to more than $40 million, sources tell me. Accordingly, the funds will not be paid by Disney in a single lump sum, if you pick up the creative accounting I'm putting down.

Amazon announced its long-rumored $999 Astro home robot on Tuesday. CNBC: I had a chance to check it out in a demo with Amazon last week and wanted to share a few thoughts on what Astro is, what it can and can't do and why Amazon decided to build a home robot. Astro seems like a strange gadget for Amazon to launch. The company is best known as an online store. And most of its operating profit comes from its AWS cloud business. Notably, Astro is a "Day 1 Edition" product, which means it won't be sold to everyone at first. [...] Astro is about the size of a small dog. It roams around your house on three wheels, including two big ones that prevent it from getting stuck and a smaller one for rotating. It has a camera that rises up on a 42-inch arm that can keep an eye on your home as Astro patrols while you're away. It can follow you around and play music or display TV shows on its 10-inch touchscreen. It can recognize faces (if you want it to) so you can load up two sodas in the back storage compartment and tell Astro to go to someone in the living room.

Astro is like a combo of lots of Amazon's other gadgets placed on wheels. The cameras can be used for home security or for video chat, sort of combining Amazon's Ring cameras with its Echo Show smart screens. The cameras are also used to create a map of your house when you set Astro up for the first time. You can talk to Astro much like you'd talk to an Echo or Alexa (you can change the name to Alexa if you want) to get sports scores or the weather. And you can play movies or TV shows like you would on an Amazon tablet or Fire TV.

Newsweek reports: Chris Pratt is in a celebratory mood, following the announcement that he's set to voice lead character Mario in an animated movie adaptation of the enduring video game Super Mario Bros. The Guardians of the Galaxy star joins a star-studded cast in the movie, which includes Charlie Day as his brother Luigi, Anya Taylor-Joy [from The Queen's Gambit] as Princess Peach, Keegan-Michael Key [co-creator of Key & Peele] as Toad, and Jack Black as villainous turtle Bowser... Also included in the cast are Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong and Fred Armisen [from SNL and Portlandia], who will take on the role of his grandfather, Cranky Kong....

The producers said that the actors were selected for their ability to capture the spirit of each of their characters, per Variety.
Kotaku adds that future-voice-of-Mario Chris Pratt "isn't exactly instilling confidence right now." "It's ah me, ah Mario," he said in an Instagram video posted last night in the exact same voice I would use if I were pretending to be Chris Pratt pretending to be Mario. "That's not the voice, you'll have to wait to hear the voice, but we've been working hard at it and I'm really excited to announce that I'm the voice of that video game that I dreamed of playing as a kid."

For decades, Mario has been voiced in the games by Charles Martinet who is also not Italian but is an theatrically trained and experienced voice actor who specializes in accents and dialects. He will be involved in the new movie in some way, but at this point just as another avenue for Nintendo to troll longtime fans, it seems.

Comcast appears to be planning to offer TVs running its own software across at least two territories, according to recent reports from Protocol and The Financial Times. It comes a little more than a week after Amazon announced that it too will be getting into the TV set business. The Verge reports: In the US, the TVs will reportedly be branded as XClass TVs. Originally manufactured by Hisense, the 43 and 50-inch sets will run Comcast's X1 operating system, which is already found on its set-top boxes and Xfinity Flex streaming box. An Xfinity landing site confirms the "XClass TV" branding, while an FAQ spotted by Protocol says they'll aggregate "your favorite apps, live channels, and On Demand movies and shows together in one place."

Meanwhile in the UK, Comcast subsidiary Sky is reportedly planning to launch smart TVs of its own. The FT's report doesn't mention what operating system these TVs are likely to run. Sky already operates its Sky Q platform in the country, which currently runs on set-top boxes and shows satellite broadcasts alongside video streamed from services like Netflix and Disney Plus. As Protocol notes, the initiatives appear to be Comcast's attempt to insulate itself as customers turn away from traditional cable and satellite plans in favor of streaming services. By offering a platform that competes with the likes of Roku, Comcast would be able to maintain its direct relationship with customers. It could then aggregate content from other streaming providers alongside its own Peacock and Xumo streaming services. Controlling the viewing platform also gives Comcast and its subsidiaries the ability to negotiate with streaming providers to offer them better prominence on its platforms, the FT notes.

Netflix said on Monday it is launching a free mobile plan in Kenya as the global streaming giant looks to tap the East African nation that is home to over 20 million internet users. From a report: The free plan, which will be rolled out to all users in Kenya in the coming weeks, won't require them to provide any payment information during the sign-up, the company said. The new plan is available to any user aged 18 or above with an Android phone, the company said. It will also not include ads. The company told Reuters that it is making about one quarter of its movies and television shows catalog available to users in the free plan in the East African nation.

Comcast is gearing up to launch its own smart TVs: The company has struck a partnership with Chinese TV manufacturer Hisense to sell two smart TV models under the XClass TV brand, Protocol reported Tuesday. From the report: A number of clues left online suggests that a launch is imminent. XClass TVs run a version of Comcast's X1 operating system, which also powers the company's set-top boxes as well as its Xfinity Flex streaming box. However, unlike those devices, XClass TVs will be available to anyone, regardless of whether they subscribe to the company's cable services. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this summer that Comcast had struck a partnership with Walmart to sell its smart TVs; Protocol was first to report about Comcast's plans to enter the smart TV platform business a year ago. While under development for some time, Comcast's smart TV efforts have picked up steam in recent months: The company registered a trademark for "X Class TV" in February. The official XClasstv.com website remains inaccessible, but the company inadvertently left a temporary staging site accessible to the public that reveals many details about the initiative.

"XClass TV is a smart TV that brings all your favorite apps, live channels, and On Demand movies and shows together in one place," that site explains in a FAQ. " XClass TV ... gives you thousands of free movies, shows, music, and more. And to find what you love faster, XClass TV comes with a voice remote that lets you control your TV and search across apps with just your voice." Among the tidbits leaked through this staging site: Hisense is making two 4K TV models, with screen sizes of 43 and 50 inches, respectively, for Comcast.

Moviegoers know that the Matrix trilogy's finale "heavily hinted that our hero will be back at some point in the distant future," writes the Guardian.. "Now he is..."

But does the first three-minute trailer for the soon-to-be-released sequel The Matrix Resurrections suggest Keanu Reeves' "Neo" character has been wiped from existence? In his place is a beardy, incredibly well-aged fiftysomething who looks a bit like John Wick, or possibly that brooding weirdo from The Gift. He meets Carrie-Anne Moss's Trinity in a coffee shop, but fails to recognise her despite all their adventures down the digital rabbit hole. Later he's seen training in what appears to be a dojo with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's unnamed character, who appears to be fulfilling the Morpheus role of martial arts mentor and guide to the Matrix. Is Abdul-Mateen playing a younger version of the human resistance leader, and if so couldn't they just have digitally de-aged him, given the entire movie probably takes place inside Adobe After Effects anyway?

The teaser poses further questions. Why is Neo taking blue pills as medication? Does this signal the new Neo's willingness to succumb to the virtual world that keeps him blissfully ignorant of the horrifying reality? And if so, what's been going on — didn't the pesky machines promise to free all humans from the Matrix...?

The great thing about Matrix movies is that all usual rules of film-making continuity can be easily placed to one side. Reality can be shifted and reconfigured at every opportunity in the interest of entertainment. This is like the bit in Doctor Who where one Time Lord's face morphs into the next. For all we know, Reeves could be playing the Mad Hatter and Moss a giant pot plant who just appears to be a human being...

There could be a genuinely fascinating reason why Neo and Trinity are back and ready to kick machine ass once again. We won't know for sure until just before Christmas, when the movie hits cinemas.
ABC News notes the new film "also stars returning Matrix co-star Jada Pinkett Smith, features series newcomers Jessica Henwick from Iron Fist, Christina Ricci, Mindhunters star Jonathan Groff, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas." Though as IndieWire points out, there's no sign (yet) of the original Morpheus, Laurence Fishburne.

While the pandemic supercharged streaming, a few people decided to swim against the current and go back to the familiar format of VHS. It isn't the easiest of hobbies. From a report: VCR players haven't been in production within the last five years, and using the player on a current smart TV requires an expensive customized setup of several devices. Looking for a recent film on VHS format? It's likely you'll only find films from the 1980s and 90s, direct-to-VHS specials and home videos. That hasn't stopped die-hards. A small community of VHS fanatics has sprung up around the country, trading tapes and tips on how to watch. Much of it is organized around small boxes where people can drop off or pick up tapes. The "Free Blockbuster" boxes started in Los Angeles and spread. There are VHS tape trading events and auctions.

In the late 1990s, Hollywood studios began selling films on DVDs and VHS rentals lost their grip on home viewings. Blu-ray took over in the early 2000s. By 2010 Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection. To try to re-create a bit of the video-store experience, Brian Morrison started Free Blockbuster in 2019. The group turns former newspaper boxes into free little libraries of movies. VHS die-hards hope the effort encourages the exchange of home entertainment with strangers in their neighborhood. A film fan who worked at various video stores throughout his teenage years, Mr. Morrison, 37, stocked his first Free Blockbuster box in Los Angeles with old VHS tapes, hoping to create community around film watching.

Though DVDs and videogames showed up later in some boxes, he says VHS tapes were the more interesting draw for Free Blockbuster users. Mr. Morrison connects tape fanatics in different places, who maintain their own boxes. VHS tapes "aren't just DVDs' older cousins," Mr. Morrison says, "they're an art form in many ways." The 69 Free Blockbuster boxes, now located across the U.S. and in Canada and Australia, are maintained by a network of fans. Mr. Morrison said he received a request from Blockbuster, which is owned by Dish Network, last year that he change the name of his organization. He said he asked if the company would consider licensing out the name but hasn't heard back.

Netflix has announced that its long-delayed, live-action adaptation of the influential and popular classic anime series Cowboy Bebop will premiere on Friday, November 19. Ars Technica reports: The streaming service also released the first images from the show, giving fans some sense of what to expect from a live-action series based on an animated one famous for its visual flair. The images show actor John Cho (Star Trek, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle) as the series' lead character, Spike Spiegel. The series will also star Alex Hassell (Suburbicon), Daniella Pineda (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), and Mustafa Shakir (Luke Cage), among others. Andre Nemec will be the series showrunner. He previously worked as a writer and producer on sci-fi TV series Alias and Zoo, plus the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The director of the original anime series, Shinichiro Watanabe, is a consultant for the new show. Also returning from the anime is score composer Yoko Kanno.

Cowboy Bebop originally premiered in 1998. It is a space western about a group of bounty hunters on a spaceship called the Bebop. It drew critical acclaim and became a cult hit thanks in part to its striking visual style and its strong thematic elements.

Disney has filed a motion to have Scarlett Johansson's lawsuit against the company moved to private arbitration, the latest in the ongoing saga of her complaint against the company over Black Widow's streaming release. The Verge reports: Disney's lawyers filed the motion Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court on the grounds that Periwinkle Entertainment, which negotiated her deal, agreed that any claims related to her role in the Marvel film would be handled in confidential arbitration. But the motion also took several swipes at Johansson's complaint that argued Marvel, compelled by its parent company Disney, breached an agreement when Black Widow debuted on Disney Plus through Premier Access the same day that it premiered in theaters. The Hollywood Reporter earlier reported the motion. Johansson's complaint argued that the film's hybrid release cut into her potential earnings, as a simultaneous streaming release hampered the film's box office permanence and therefore impacted her bonuses. At issue is whether the film should have debuted as a theatrical exclusive. But according to Disney's motion, Periwinkle's contract with Marvel "does not mandate theatrical distribution -- let alone require that any such distribution be exclusive."

Furthermore, the motion states, the contract stated that any theatrical obligations would be met with showings on "no less than 1,500 screens." The motion stated the film in fact debuted on more than 9,600 scenes in the US and 30,000-plus screens worldwide. Additionally, Disney's lawyers also took issue with Johansson's claim that she'd lost earnings under the hybrid release model -- though it's still unclear what specifically was promised. Furthermore, the motion states, the contract stated that any theatrical obligations would be met with showings on "no less than 1,500 screens." The motion stated the film in fact debuted on more than 9,600 scenes in the US and 30,000-plus screens worldwide. Additionally, Disney's lawyers also took issue with Johansson's claim that she'd lost earnings under the hybrid release model -- though it's still unclear what specifically was promised.

Disney also provided updated figures on Black Window's performance, showing that it's continued to bring in big figures at both the box office and through early access rentals. As of August 15th, Black Widow has raked in more than $367 million in box office receipts worldwide and more than $125 million in streaming and download receipts, the motion stated, offering seldom-shared figures about the success of a hybrid release in both theaters as well as on a streaming service itself. Accounting for the $55 million the film pulled in on Premier Access and the $80 million in domestic box office receipts during its opening weekend, Black Widow's numbers surpassed the opening weekend figures of other Marvel films released pre-pandemic, the company argued, including Ant-Man and the Wasp and Guardians of the Galaxy. Disney's lawyers revealed in the motion that it served Periwinkle a demand for private arbitration on August 10th, a little over a week after Johansson's initial complaint was filed. The motion stated Periwinkle had yet to respond. Disney also reiterated its previous position that the complaint had "no merit." In a statement cited by The Hollywood Reporter, Johansson's attorney John Berlinski said that Disney "knows that Marvel's promises to give Black Widow a typical theatrical release "like its other films' had everything to do with guaranteeing that Disney wouldn't cannibalize box office receipts in order to boost Disney+ subscriptions. Yet that is exactly what happened -- and we look forward to presenting the overwhelming evidence that proves it."