What Disney’s cooking
Disney held its annual D23 expo over the weekend where it showed off trailers for soon-to-launch titles, released morsels of info for recently announced projects, and took the wraps off a few new things that most people probably saw coming anyway. That doesn’t only include strictly Disney titles either, films and series from Pixar, Marvel, and the Star Wars franchise also showed up.
Among the most exciting headlines, at least from where we’re sitting, was the new trailer for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. This Disney Plus series will feature Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood and will be set during the New Republic era, sometime after what happened in Return of the Jedi. You can expect to start your binge on 3 December.
Fans of Moana got to see a new trailer for the upcoming sequel and learned Disney is already working on a live-action remake of the first movie. That’s only coming in 2026. Moana 2, however, should be here by 27 November.
Speaking of live-action, Disney has plenty more in store. There’s a Snow White live-action remake coming early next year followed by a Lilo & Stitch cashgrab live-action remake a little later. Before those, a live-action Lion King prequel called Mufasa: The Lion King should show up around 20 December 2024 – here’s the new trailer.
As far as new projects go, Zootopia 2 and Frozen 3 were officially revealed although everybody probably expected those. We think the announcements for Elio and Hoppers were a little more noteworthy. They’re new original Pixar-developed titles about a boy who becomes Earth’s Alien ambassador and a girl who likes beavers, respectively.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk hold dialogue
If you’ve got absolutely nothing better to do at 02h00 tomorrow morning then you might be interested to know former South African Elon Musk will ‘interview’ former US president Donald Trump on X.com, formerly Twitter.
We can think of several better things to do at that hour – reach out and ask for tips – but if you find yourself struggling to fall asleep, this ‘interview’ could help with that. It will be hosted on the former president’s X account.
This isn’t the first time Musk has tried to get his platform involved with US politics. He previously tried to host Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential announcement – that… didn’t go so well. That’s probably why Musk is performing “some system scaling tests” ahead of the chat.
Deadpool & Wolverine breaks records
Deadpool & Wolverine has enjoyed largely favourable reviews on audience aggregation sites with a 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8.1 on IMDb since it launched in July. We’re no economic experts but we think that kinda explains the film passing the highly coveted $1 billion box-office milestone over the weekend.
Not only is it the second-ever R-rated film to crack the $1B list (after Joker did it first in 2019), it has also been the fastest to do so. It is currently set to outpace Joker to become the biggest R-rated film of all time.
A movie making a lot of money isn’t especially exciting. Marvel’s done it many times before. This has made the MCU the highest-grossing film franchise of all time ($30 billion over 34 titles). But can you remember the last time any of them were this good?
Deadpool & Wolverine could be just what the MCU needed to freshen things up. Read our spoiler-free review here, if you haven’t already.
Doom-inspired Jupiter Hell Classic coming
We’ll be honest, we only picked this up because we were looking for news that started with a ‘D’ to make them all match. And we’re really glad we did because Jupiter Hell Classic looks cool as heck.
This Doom-inspired roguelike began life long ago as ‘DoomRL’, a free fan project that aimed to transform the original first-person shooter into a classic roguelike. Along the way, it had to change its name to DRL to avoid legal action by Doom’s owners Zenimax, and eventually evolved into a fully 3D game called Jupiter Hell.
Now, ChaosForge, the team behind the project is close to releasing their “demake of a remake of a roguelike unmake of a famous 1993 FPS shooter.”
Jupiter Hell Classic will be released on Steam before the end of this year complete with Steam Workshop support for modders. However, the original game, DRL, is still available on ChaosForge’s website for free if you want to give it a go.
