Welcome to Streaming Rewind, a weekly breakdown of the new and noteworthy as we work to help readers wade through the absolute deluge of television series and movies in the streaming space.

Welcome to Christmas and New Years limbo, where the time is made up and the date doesn’t matter. There’s a limited number of releases this week, because Hollywood typically just shuts down for the last month of the year, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few surprises.

The Beyoncé Bowl (Netflix)

If you’re not a football fan, you may not have known that Beyoncé did a halftime special for the Ravens vs. Texans game on Christmas (that’s right, Netflix does football now too). In said special, she performed some of the songs from her Cowboy Carter album live for the very first time. If you’re a member of the Beyhive who wasn’t willing to sit through a football game to watch Queen Bey perform, Netflix released a stand-alone special of the performance today. And, for those wondering, Netflix did, indeed, manage to host two whole live events on Christmas day without its typical buffering issues.

Squid Game is Back for Round 2 (Netflix)

It’s been a Netflix week! The highly anticipated second season of Squid Game finally dropped, ironically resulting in many across the industry working during Christmas and continuing the trend of Netflix completely missing the point of the series. Reviews have been mixed due to it being painfully obvious that Seasons 2 and 3 were meant to be one complete story rather than split in half, but our critic Shannon Miller liked the season. If you’ve already finished your binge, check out how Squid Game’s Season 2 ending sets up Season 3.

The Order (On Demand)

Nicholas Hoult has yet another film out on demand, this time alongside Jude Law and Jurnee Smollett. The film’s been met with early acclaim, and is based on a true story (and adapted from Kevin Flynn’s novel The Silent Brotherhood) centered on a string of bank robberies in the Pacific Northwest. You may have seen it during its brief theatrical run when it released on December 6 but, if you missed it, it’s available for purchase now.

New and Notable:

• Gladiator II — December 24 (On Demand)
• Y2K — December 24 (On Demand)
• Doctor Who Christmas Special — December 25 (Disney+)

That’s, well… that’s pretty much it for this week. You can check out the few titles that are available on PVOD up above in the New and Notable section and, if you haven’t caught up just yet, there are a few options from last week that are still noteworthy. The Simpsons Christmas Special, O C’mon All Ye Faithful springs to mind! You can check out our review of the special if you’re not sure if you want to spend your precious lounge time on it. Don’t forget that What If…? Is dropping new episodes weekly, and that Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and Creature Commandos are in the middle of thier runs as well!

The Disney Treasure has officially begun its Maiden Voyage and has become the sixth Disney Cruise Line ship to embark on its first journey across the sea. Disney invited me aboard its latest ship to share with the world why this is one adventure that simply shouldn't be missed, and I'm excited to do so.

This Disney Treasure Ultimate Guide will provide everything you need to know about the ship, from the best food options to which shows can't be missed to which lounges and bars deserve your time, and I'd be more than happy to answer any further questions you may have below!

Before we get started, I do want to share that I discovered the meaning of the name Disney Treasure is not so much gold or gems, but the love we have for each other. I know this may sound sappy, but it's easy to take for granted these once-in-a-lifetime moments we get to share with our loved ones that are worth more than any amount of riches one can ever hope to earn, and this ship really took that to heart.

From the outstanding Tale of Moana with a cast and crew that has many members from the islands that inspired this story to the Plaza de Coco that reminded us our family will be with us forever and so much more, the theme of family, our love for each other, honoring those that mean the most to us, and being proud of where we came from was a part of every corner of the ship and it really made it feel like magic.

So, without further ado, let me share with you why the Disney Treasure is so special, and be sure to let me know your thoughts below!

Food

• Plaza de Coco Was an Emotional Dining Experience I Won't Soon Forget
• World of Marvel Is a Fun Adventure Through the MCU
• 1923 Is a Celebration of Disney's Past
• Marceline Market Is The Gold Standard for a Buffet at Sea
• Mickey & Friends Festival of Foods Gives You More Choice on Where to Dine
• Enchanté by Chef Arnaud Lallement Is One of the Finest Dining Experiences at Sea
• Palo Steakhouse Is an Adult-Exclusive Meal Worth the Extra Cost
• Jumbeaux’s Sweets Is a Love Letter to Zootopia

Entertainment

• The Tale of Moana Is One of the Greatest Shows I've Seen for One Very Special Reason
• Beauty and the Beast and Disney Seas the Adventure Are Fantastic Broadway-Style Productions
• AquaMouse Is a Water Slide Starring Everyone's Favorite Mice
• Pools and Water Play For All Ages
• Hero Zone Is an Incredible Excuse to Have Fun
• Sarabi Is a Lion King-Themed Theater With So Many Great Options
• Wonderland and Never Land Cinema Brings the Newest Movies to the Disney Treasure

Lounges and Cafes

• The Haunted Mansion Parlor Is the Perfect Extension of the Disney Parks Attraction
• Skipper Society Brings the Jungle Cruise to This Disney Cruise
• Scat Cat Lounge Is a Piano Bar with an Aristocat Flair
• Periscope Pub Is a Wonderful Excuse to Go 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• The Rose Is a Beautiful Place to Share a Drink and a View
• Jade Cricket and Heihei Cafes Are Delightful Walkup Cafes

Oceaneer Club and the 'it's a small world' nursery Are the Definition of Disney Magic

Staterooms and The EPCOT-Themed Tomorrow Tower Suite

Disney Treasure Merchandise

Food

Plaza de Coco Was an Emotional Dining Experience I Won't Soon Forget

Of all the dining options aboard the Disney Treasure, Plaza de Coco won my heart as it was one of the most delicious and emotional dining experiences I’ve had in quite some time. As the name suggests, Plaza de Coco is based on Pixar’s Coco and transports guests to Santa Cecilia three years after the events of the film.

This all begins with the first few steps as you get to see recreations of the Rivera family’s shoe workshop, pictures of the family, the letters Héctor wrote Coco when she was little and the song lyrics and notes of all the songs we love from the film, and so much more. However, the tears really start flowing when you arrive at Rivera’s Ofrenda, as it is complete with the restored photo of Héctor, Mama Imelda, and Coco and the photo of an older Coco now that she has passed.

This feeling of celebrating those we love reverberates throughout the whole experience, and that’s even before we get to the main event. The Plaza de Coco experience takes place over two nights, with the first reintroducing us to Miguel and the Rivera family and the second night turning the plaza into a Dia de los Muertos celebration that stars our favorite characters and songs from the film.

The show was very good, and they even included an emotional moment where we all got to honor the loved ones we have lost, but I do want to warn that your experience may vary depending on where you are seated. We were in a far corner and it was hard to keep track of everything going on and we didn’t have the best views of what was happening in the middle. Not a deal breaker by any means, but something to be aware of!

And the food! Plaza de Coco had my favorite bite of the entire cruise in the Michoacán Carnitas Tacos. The pork was so tender and crispy in the perfect places and it came with delicious tortillas, pillowy-soft cilantro-lime rice, and a perfectly spicy Salsa Roja Asada. It really was remarkable.

Other highlights included Miguel’s Churros Calientes, which were everything you’d hope a churro would be from its crispy outside and soft inside, the Beef Birria Empanada, which is the perfect appetizer, and the Red Chicken Enchiladas, which hit all the right notes for me. There also is a different menu on the first and second night, so you get the chance to try a ton of authentic Mexican food that has been crafted with a lot of love!

World of Marvel Is a Fun Adventure Through the MCU

World of Marvel is the other big themed dining experience on the Disney Treasure, and it’s a fun journey into the MCU. We were seated for the Marvel Celebration of Heroes: Groot Remix show and it was a fun experience that featured some of your favorite songs from the Guardians of the Galaxy films.

It was fun to see Groot plan a surprise party for Rocket, but the real star of the show for us was the trivia you could participate in on the table. They have these Quantum devices on the table and they ask Marvel questions in-between the big Groot moments, and they were the perfect distraction as we waited for our food. My son, who is 5, was so excited when he got the answer right and couldn’t get enough!

Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry: If the Superman Trailer Moved You, It's Time to Check Out the Arrowverse.

On December 26, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment announced that Wicked would be available for purchase or rent at home as of December 31, with the physical release hitting February 4 of 2025. The digital and physical versions are packed with goodies, including deleted scenes (one of which I discussed with director Jon M. Chu in the video below), a singalong, two commentary tracks — one with Chu and one with stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande — and a ton more. There’s no question of the value here (even if you don’t actually own anything you purchase digitally), but what has come up is whether or not it’s too soon for the theatrical wonder to offer an at-home option with how well it’s doing at the box office, with the digital release falling barely a month after the film opened in theaters.

I am of two minds here.

The first is that I really like movie theaters, so of course I want them to continue to get what they can out of any blockbuster hit available. I know this in and of itself is a complicated conversation, given how expensive corporations and studios have made seeing things theatrically over the years is coupled with incessantly abhorrent behavior from theater-goers (put the damn phone away). But, to that I mostly just say visit your mom-and-pop theaters whenever and wherever you can. Big releases like Wicked help them tremendously too.

The flip side of this conversation is way more complicated. Yes, I want movie theaters — particularly smaller ones — to survive, and they need every single win that they can get in this day and age, but I also want the people who cannot attend movie theaters to be able to experience art.

One day, probably decades from now at this rate, sociologists will look back at how we as a culture didn’t just decide COVID was no longer a problem, we left everyone incapable of living in that delusion behind. We, as a whole, have even largely abandoned masking, despite knowing that masks help mitigate the spread of COVID and other viruses as scientific fact. In conjunction with that, vaccination rates keep getting lower.

I’m not here to preach, and I’m not here to have a debate. The fact of the matter is that COVID remains a tremendous risk for anyone who is immunocompromised, and long-COVID can impact anyone. Because of this, there are significant swaths of communities across the planet that simply cannot afford to risk their health over stepping foot into a movie theater with abysmal ventilation and a bunch of unmasked occupants.

Additionally, attending the movies simply isn’t an expense that many American families can afford with prices being what they are. Even matinees are enormous expenditures in major metros across the country. In L.A., a trip to AMC for a family of four (two parents, two children) will run you an astronomical $110.72. I can't drop that every time I want to go see a movie, and I can’t expect others to do so when they’ve got mouths to feed.

Even with Christmas over, there are still many great deals available that you can score before they're gone. Here are the best deals for Friday, December 27.

Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition for $44.99

After 12 months of big hitters such as Helldivers 2, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Dune: Part 2 and Shogun, it’s not unreasonable to consider 2024 a good year for pop culture. But the smooth always comes with the rough, and the past year really has been a rocky one for the things we love and the people who make them.

From layoffs and studio closures to costly consoles, underwhelming adaptations and struggling sequels, these are the biggest disappointments in 2024.

Gaming Industry Layoffs and Closures

The games industry found itself facing a crisis in 2023 as many publishers and studios, both large and small, made scores of staff redundant in an effort to cut costs. But the pains of that year would be repeated in 2024, which has seen an estimated 14,600 job losses - a 39% increase year-on-year. The cuts have seen thousands of talented studio staff thrown into the most difficult job market the games industry has ever seen, with developers attempting to find new roles in a landscape where companies are slimming down.

Among the major companies cutting staff loose have been Riot, Microsoft, Bungie, Unity, TakeTwo Interactive, EA, and PlayStation. Such businesses have reduced their staff numbers for a variety of reasons and factors, be that rising development costs, shifting player habits in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, and the global impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Whatever the reasons, remaining staff at these publishers and studios must continue to work in uncertain times without the aid of their former colleagues.

That is if their studio still exists. Adding to the dismal picture are several studio closures. Perhaps the most prominent among them is Arkane Austin, Bethesda’s immersive sim specialist responsible for the acclaimed Prey. Sadly its most recent release, Redfall, was a critical and commercial bomb – a situation that seemingly sealed its fate. Arkane Austin was shuttered by parent company Microsoft, along with Alpha Dog Games, Roundhouse Games, and Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks. Somewhat miraculously, Tango was rescued by Krafton in a last-minute turn of fate, but such good news is rare. Also suffering closure this year was PlayStation’s London Studio, Galvanic Games, Avalanche Studio Group’s New York and Montreal studios, as well as others. To say it's been a tough year is an understatement.

Trend-chasing Failures

This article contains spoilers for Squid Game.

Netflix’s Squid Game isn’t a particularly subtle TV show. It’s a screed against capitalism and wealth inequity to the point that characters say this all out loud, in the dialogue, in the very first episode. Yet since it premiered in 2021, both viewers and even Netflix itself have been gleefully engaging with the show as a capitalist enterprise. So why does everyone keep missing the point of Squid Game?

There are likely a few reasons for this, but to spoil the eventual conclusion here: it proves the central thesis of writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s series, that we are all ultimately trapped by capitalism. It’s darkly funny, in a way, that the culture of fandom and corporate engagement that has grown around Squid Game is the same that leads the players in the show to play the Squid Game in the series… But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Squid Game first hit Netflix on September 17, 2021 – and it might be hard to remember now, given the show is a global sensation, but at the time at least in America, it was one of those classic “drop it on Netflix and see what happens” series that wasn’t really promoted by the streamer. No screeners for the press, no rabid red carpets full of screaming fans… And yet it caught on and grew almost immediately. On Nielsen’s report for the week of September 20-26, the show clocked 1.9 billion minutes – and that was only on TV screens, and only in the US. The next week, it garnered over 3.2 billion minutes on Nielsen’s chart, growing to become a clear viral success.

The show itself didn’t seem like a likely breakout hit, given its ultra-violence and dark subject matter. Squid Game (in case you forgot over the past three years, or have yet to check out Season 2) revolves around a death game played by 456 players competing for cold, hard cash. Run by the mysterious Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), the games are framed as a way for the players to even the playing field. They can by majority vote decide to leave at any time – and even do, in Season 1, Episode 2, before promptly returning to the game – but whoever wins gets a sum of cash equal to the amount of people who died playing. Time and again, it’s clear the game is rigged for the enjoyment of the billionaire VIPs who bet on it from the safety of their cushy lounge. And in the middle of this all? The sometimes good-hearted, perhaps naive loser Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), who goes on to – spoilers here – win the game, though perhaps at the cost of his basic belief in the goodness of humanity.

Season 2 widens things out further. We get to see what economically drives one of the Squid Game guards to join up and become a stone-faced murderer. We see a lot more of the outside world in Korea, and how every interaction, no matter how small, is a game driven by commerce. And the Squid Game itself changes to allow a majority vote to leave after every challenge. That latter tweak allows Hwang Dong-hyuk, throughout the season’s seven episodes, to dig into how capitalism controls even the existence of democracy and freedom of choice, and our divides (political, gender, monetary) are exacerbated by the very existence of money dangling over our heads. In this case, literally, thanks to the omnipresent piggy bank hanging over the room where the Squid Game contestants sleep and eat.

While there was some international promotion for the series when it first launched, including an appearance by the Red Light/Green Light doll in a mall in the Philippines, and a replica of the jungle gym set in a Seoul subway station, for the most part, the show traveled by word of mouth. Netflix had to play catch-up over the next few months. In an interview with the New York Times in advance of Season 2, Marian Lee, Netflix’s chief marketing officer, copped to as much. “Everything we did outside of Korea was reactive, because we didn’t know,” she said. “Even the content executives didn’t anticipate that it would be such a global phenomenon.”

By the time Squid Game had become the most-watched Netflix launch in the streamer’s history a month after release (one month later, it would become the most-watched show of all time, period), there was a pop-up store in Paris, and a Red Light/Green Light game complete with actors dressed as Squid Game guards in the Netherlands.

What followed was total Squid Game domination. Dalgona, the honeycomb candy at the center of one of the games in the series, began showing up at homegrown candy stores and even official Netflix pop-ups in malls everywhere, alongside costumes from the show, just in time for Halloween. The press tour eventually caught up, too, leading to the stars of the series growing to international sensations “overnight” (check with your local Korean TV and movie viewer to hear them furiously explain how many of these “overnight sensations” have been celebrities in non-US countries for years). Then came the Golden Globes wins, SAG Award wins, and 14 Emmy nominations, of which the show won five. The Funko Pop!s followed the next year, and as Netflix proudly includes in all of its press releases about Season 2 of the series, based on the footwear of the mostly deceased contestants in the show, “Vans slip-on sneakers sales increased 8,000%.”

While Dong-hyuk was mulling plans for a second, and third season of the series, Netflix began referring to a Squid Game “universe” as early as January of 2022. And they paid off on that promise. Squid Game: The Challenge, a reality game show that reproduced the initial TV series without all the killing hit the service in November 2023, though it was marred by multiple safety and health issues, as well as (per the point of this article) critics pointing out it vastly missed the whole thesis of Squid Game. Similarly, the online multiplayer game Squid Game: Unleashed is a 32-player party game for Netflix subscribers (currently free for everyone in time for the release of Squid Game Season 2) which the streamer’s own press outlet, TUDUM, describes as “takes all the thrills of the hit Netflix show and puts them in your pocket.” To be clear, there is no option in the game to hang yourself in anguish and shame after you’re forced to take your wife’s life in a deadly game of marbles, so perhaps not all the thrills.

Why do people keep engaging with Squid Game as something “fun?” Why is Netflix able to make a cottage industry out of products sold around the show? How are there corporate retreats where actors dress up as the Front Man and Squid Game guards and have employees run through games from the show, ostensibly for team-building purposes? There’s even an official Netflix Squid Game Experience that claims it’s perfect for “School and Camp Visits,” and if the thought of children playing the games from the hyperviolent TV show Squid Game doesn’t make you viscerally uncomfortable, you may be entirely devoid of human empathy.

Part of the issue is that Squid Game, for all its cultural cache, is nothing new. Gladiatorial battles go back millennia. More to the point, everything from Battle Royale to Hunger Games thrives on the idea of people – usually children – fighting to the death for a possible prize, and rich people’s amusement. Those, too, are often misinterpreted by the public (see any of the Hunger Games theme park rides worldwide). Like how society gets dulled by repeated violence in the real world, so too are we inured to it on screen. Squid Game is perhaps not as shocking as it could be, because it’s not the first out of the gate; it’s just another death games series in a long line of series and movies. And like any genre, it has its fans, detractors, and culture that surrounds it.

There’s the question of why we like to watch these things, though, with at least two major reasons. One is the broad sense of why we watch horror movies, violent action spectacles, or even ride rollercoasters: to confront our own real fear of death and overcome it. But to the point of the death game genre, it raises the question of what you would do in the situation, something that Squid Game confronts head-on.

There’s a deeper, more horrifying reason why both viewers and Netflix are able to engage with Squid Game on the most surface level possible, though, and it’s that Hwang Dong-hyuk… Is right. We are under the yoke of corporations and billionaires. They inure us into thinking that capitalism is a game we can win, but it’s rigged to their benefit, and not ours. Think about how the central action of the show features humans, reduced to numbers instead of names, forced to kill each other playing children’s games.

Dong-hyuk distills it down even more simply in Seong Gi-hun’s first encounter with the Squid Game in the series premiere. Penniless, defeated, and beaten up, he encounters a clean-cut man in a business suit (Gong Yoo) on the subway. The man tells Seong Gi-hun he can play a simple children’s game (called ddakji), and after losing the first round is told that if Seong Gi-hun wins, he gets money. If he loses, the businessman gets to slap him. What follows is a series of increasingly harder, more humiliating slaps as the businessman beats down Seong Gi-hun. When he finally wins, Seong Gi-hun goes to slap the businessman back – but no, the game is over. He gets paid. It’s done.

In Season 2, Dong-hyuk drives this home even harder, throwing any sort of subtly out the window in a desperate attempt to get his point across to the section of the audience who saw “die for money” as too opaque a metaphor. The businessman has graduated from ddakji to giving hungry homeless people the choice between bread, and a lottery ticket. Would you rather eat, or have the chance for money you’ll likely never receive? Guess which most of them choose (and lose)?

As the second season continues, in small ways and big Seong Gi-hun is as controlling of the men he sends on a treasure hunt city-wide to find that businessman as anyone running the Squid Game. There’s a major sequence early in the season set on Halloween that is clearly pointed at anyone who thinks it might be fun to dress as a Squid Game guard. Once Seong Gi-hun is back in the game, his seeming heroism turns self-centered, and his vision of bringing down the game is less about saving people than redeeming himself for his own complicated actions. It muddies the waters of the conversation, but also turns the camera towards the audience, practically screaming that if you thought you were a hero like Seong Gi-hun… Well, you’re bad, too.

But what can you do about it? The game is rigged. The billionaires are in charge of it all. Netflix is able to sell you those Funko Pop!s, the Vans, and the Red Light/Green Light Mattel doll for kids because the alternative – you cannot beat the system, we will all die in here – is too horrifying to contemplate. Netflix is worth nearly $400 billion. They are the VIPS in this scenario, seeing no repercussions for their actions. While they’re not literally making us walk a glass bridge until we plummet to our deaths, they are hiding behind their golden animal masks, and reducing us to streaming numbers controlled by the algorithm.

As the Front Man explains early in Season 2 when Seong Gi-hun tells him he wants to end Squid Game once and for all, the key isn’t killing one man, or even multiple men, as Seong Gi-hun has planned. It’s so much bigger than that. “If the world doesn’t change, the game doesn’t end,” the Front Man says. So how do you change the world? How can anyone?

To grasp that in any fashion is to know the system is everywhere, and it’s overwhelming. That’s what the contestants in the show realize during their brief sojourn back to Seoul in Season 1, that dying playing a children’s game is essentially the same as living in society. For us here in the real world, it’s easier to giggle about the actor dressed as the Front Man telling everyone on our corporate team that the Squid Games have begun, taking selfies and eventually heading back to our safe, identical hotel rooms, than contemplate we’re all trapped in one, large Squid Game ourselves, every day of our lives.

Infinity Nikki gets its first major update soon, Infold Games has announced.

The Shooting Star Season update lands on December 30 across PC, PlayStation 5, iOS and Android, and runs until January 23, 2025. It adds new adventures, limited-time events, and of course new outfits, which you can check out in the new trailer. Fans can also expect new storylines and platforming challenges. The tagline is: "Let shooting stars guide paper cranes on their journey of fulfilling dreams."

Here’s the official blurb:

Stories of the past still echo in the wind, as new wishes begin a brand-new chapter. During the season of shooting stars, people come together beneath a starlit sky. May paper cranes carry each precious dream, shooting stars shine upon every heartfelt wish, and may every day of the new year shine as brilliantly as the stars in the sky.

Infinity Nikki, downloaded over 20 million times since launch, is a free-to-play adventure dress-up game developed in China at Papergames and published by Infold Games. It’s one of IGN’s best-reviewed games of 2024, securing a 9/10. We said: “Infinity Nikki has deep open-world exploration, a quirky story, and some of the most beautiful in-game outfits you'll ever see – you just have to be ready to navigate a maze of menus to get them.”

For curious stylists and outfit collectors, we've got a guide to all Outfits in Infinity Nikki, plus all Ability Outfits, to help you avoid a fashion faux pas. As you explore Miraland and search for collectibles, keep an eye out for all the Whimstar locations, and make sure to check in with our Infinity Nikki daily tasks guide. Plus, there are plenty of Infinity Nikki launch rewards to claim, including some very generous promo codes you won't want to miss.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Tributes are being paid to Baby Driver actor Hudson Meek, who died aged 16 after falling from a moving vehicle.

Meek played Young Baby in the 2017 action film directed by Edgar Wright and starring Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, and Jon Bernthal. He fell out of a moving vehicle in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama on December 19, and died two days later.

Meek was best known for playing a younger version of Elgort’s titular character in Baby Driver, but he also appeared in 2014’s The Santa Con and episodes of the MacGyver reboot. Meek provided the voice for Young Yasuo in a 2020 cinematic for Riot Games’ League of Legends, and appeared in a number of adverts.

Kraven the Hunter is Sony Pictures’ worst movie launch since current CEO Tony Vinciquerra took the job back in 2017, he has admitted.

The Sony Spider-Man Universe movie stars Kick Ass and Marvel Cinematic Universe actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the titular villain, a skilled hunter who sets his sights on Spider-Man after conquering all other prey in the animal kingdom.

Kraven bombed at the box office with a paltry $11 million domestic haul from 3,211 theatres during launch weekend. That figure was enough to set an unwanted record: the worst ever opening for a Sony Spider-Man Universe movie. The R-rated action flick came in under the similarly disastrous Madame Web, which brought in just $15.3 million during its launch weekend earlier this year, as well as all the Venom movies and 2022’s Morbius ($39 million). Kraven’s current $43,877,089 worldwide box office is especially awful given the movie cost an estimated $110 million to produce. When you add on marketing spend, Kraven is set for a big loss.

In an interview with the LA Times, outgoing Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra described Kraven the Hunter as “probably the worst launch we had in the seven-and-a-half years” since he took the job, before going on to express his surprise at the film’s disappointing box office haul: “so that didn’t work out very well, which I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film.”

In the same interview, Vinciquerra discussed Madame Web’s launch, blaming its box office on the press. Indeed, Vinciquerra suggested the press was to blame for all the Sony Spider-Man Universe failures, pointing to the Venom trilogy’s success as coming despite this apparent campaign from critics.

“Madame Web underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it,” Vinciquerra claimed. “It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix. For some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films out of Kraven and Madame Web, and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with Venom, but the audience loved Venom and made Venom a massive hit. These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.”

Sony's Spider-Man universe officially includes six films, listed here alongside their IGN review scores: Venom (4/10), Venom: Let There Be Carnage (7/10), Morbius (5/10), Madame Web (5/10), Venom: The Last Dance (4/10), and Kraven the Hunter (3/10).

The question now is, is Kraven the final nail in the coffin for Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, a universe that, remarkably, does not feature Spider-Man? Earlier this month a leading talent agent told The Wrap that Sony had "developed what they want to develop for now" and was instead focusing on the next actual Spider-Man film under Marvel Studios, which is confirmed by star Tom Holland to begin filming in 2025. As a point of comparison, Spider-Man: No Way Home pulled in $587.2 million in its weekend box office debut.

Vinciquerra admitted Sony needs to “rethink” its Spider-Man universe strategy, but blamed the need to do that on the press, rather than any deficiencies at Sony Pictures itself. “I do think we need to rethink it, just because it’s snake-bitten,” he said. “If we put another one out, it’s going to get destroyed, no matter how good or bad it is.”

Overall, Vinciquerra insisted, Sony Pictures’ film effort has been “very successful” during his tenure as CEO, beating the company’s budgets each year since 2017. “It was a good run, and the film studio was a big part of it,” he said.

Sony has the aforementioned Spider-Man 4 to look forward to, at least. It arrives on July 24, 2026 as a continuation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe trilogy again starring Holland. It may even introduce Miles Morales into the MCU, something Holland is personally invested in.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sonic the Hedgehog film co-writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller to talk about everything Sonic the Hedgehog 3. We’ve already published stories from this interview about Big the Cat’s almost-cameo in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Casey and Miller’s dreams of making a The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker film, but I had so much fun chatting with them it only seemed write to publish the full transcript of our Sonic banter.

Before I started recording, Casey noticed a Waluigi plush hanging on the wall behind me on Zoom and started telling me about how he had been in an “online sketch show” years ago where he played Waluigi “with prosthetics and everything.” I asked him if I could start recording immediately, so that’s where we began. This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Pat Casey: I mean I don't even know if the sketch is still online. I don't even remember who it was, but my next door neighbor was a costume-maker and she was working on these sketches.

IGN: You said you had prosthetics and everything?

PC: Yeah, it was almost like 20 years ago, but they had a makeup artist and they gave me the nose and the ears and they were like, ‘Can you do a Waluigi impression?’ I was like, ‘I don't know. I don't remember what he talks like’" So then I went and checked out some videos and I was like, "Yeah, I could do..." I mean it was just kind of like, ‘WAAAH,’ something like that.

Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for that delightful... just completely unrelated to Sonic, but still sort of tangentially related to video games of our childhood story.

Josh Miller: I wonder if that's even findable.

PC: Dude, it was like... the early 2000s, man. I don't know what has become of it.

Okay, so Pat, you clearly have a video game history and Josh, I'm guessing you might as well. Tell me a little bit about your video game history and especially your past flirtations with the Sonic franchise.

JM: I guess it was fortuitous in a way for us to, if we're going to do any video game thing to wind up on Sonic, we're both of the Sega Genesis era and I would say Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is probably the game I played the most growing up.

PC: Me, too. I have a little brother and we would trade off, but most of the time I would make him play Tails when we were really trying to beat the game.

JM: Because most two-player games it was like you played and then once you died you would hand the controller and your friend or sibling would play until they died. So it's like Sonic 2, it was kind of, not that it was the first game to do it, but it was certainly the first game I really had on a home console that was really easy and fun to play with two people simultaneously. I think that was-

PC: You got to use real teamwork because when you're fighting a boss, it's Sonic's job to stay alive and it's Tails' job to just fling his corpse at the bad guy over and over again and die as many times as it takes.

JM: It was great for if you had a younger sibling that they could be Tails and it was not as complicated for them to play.

PC: Maybe we should explore that in the movie sometime, the fact that Tails is immortal.

So did you two end up playing Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 when those games came out?

JM: We did, just not, it was more an age thing. We just didn't play them as much. I mean, I never owned a Dreamcast though, so anytime I was playing it had to now be at a friend's place. The Xbox was kind of my console of that era.

PC: The first time I played Sonic Adventure was actually, I had a friend from Japan and he got the Dreamcast early before I came out here. So I played Sonic Adventure in Japanese and I had no idea. I could not follow the story. I just knew I was running away from a whale. There was all sorts of great stuff going on. Later I played the English version. I was like, ‘Oh, this all makes sense.’

JM: Oh, yeah. I mean I remember visiting, I mean we both live in LA now, we're from Minnesota, but I was visiting a friend in college who lived out here and they had the Dreamcast and I remember my mind kind of being blown by what 3D Sonic games looked like, but I guess that's how older people felt when they saw the Genesis games. I do remember my mom walking in the room for Sonic 1 and 2 and just kind of being like, ‘How can you even tell what's going on?’

PC: Like, ‘This isn't like the games I played when I was a kid. This isn’t backgammon. Whatever happened to Shoots and Ladders?’

Did either of you have any core memories from playing Sonic that made it into any of the films, but especially Sonic 3?

PC: When we were writing the first Sonic, we were actually on a really tight deadline kind of for no reason. So we didn't really even have a chance to be like, ‘Oh wait, let's go play the games and then think of the story.’ We had to come up with the story immediately. So it was sort of like-

JM: It was all sense memories.

PC: The core memories is all that made it into the movie. It was like, there's rings, there's emeralds. That's all we were working with.

JM: You've got to go through a loop. I mean, maybe that's a good example. It's funny because that's such a rudimentary thing, but I feel like it was always like, ‘How can we get them to go through a loop de loop? I feel like we got to get that loop de loop back in there.’

PC: But we figured that was a good way to know if something was important was like, ‘Is this something that we just remember all these decades later?’ Like the things that we remember, that's the important part. It's sort of like, Lynyrd Skynyrd never wrote down the lyrics of their songs when they were writing. If they couldn't remember them, then they weren't good enough.

JM: Like Pat's saying, we were the Lynyrd Skynyrd of screenwriting. But also on the very first movie, too, it was kind of like the marching orders were a bit different from where the franchise has evolved. Sega wanted to view it as almost a prequel to what was happening with Sonic before we got to him in Sonic 1.

PC: For Sonic 3, then, it was sort of like, what are the important parts of the Shadow story from Sonic Adventure 2, which is really, what did we already remember moreso than going back and playing?

Yeah, Shadow being an edgy Sonic with jet-powered shoes.

PC: Jet shoes we never explain in the movie. But we wanted to get him on the motorcycle, give him guns, the iconic imagery. Even though, why does he need a gun? Why did he ever need one?

I understand that the story is a little bit darker this time around. I mean specifically because Shadow is involved. Is that correct?

JM: Yes. I mean, I know the internet wondered if this one was going to be PG-13. I think our producers and Jeff Fowler felt pretty confident the whole time that they could somehow do it justice and still have it be PG. But yeah, I mean from the get-go the conversations were like, ‘Well, this is the movie where a little girl is going to die.’

PC: We're certainly walking it right up to the edge of PG-13. But yeah, I mean it's like we're, I guess, four years into this franchise, three movies in, so it's like the franchise continues to grow up and our original audience is growing up. The kids who were little kids for the first one are a little older now. It’s a little along the lines of how Harry Potter grew along with the kids, even though our CG guys don't have to go through puberty if we don't want them to. We have control over that.

So I know that Dragon Ball was a huge influence on Sonic the Hedgehog, and I heard it had an influence on the films too. Can you talk about that, or any other non-Sonic influences you used?

PC: It is true. The Chaos Emeralds and going supersonic, all these concepts were introduced to America in the Sonic games, but the Dragon Ball manga was already out in Japan. So it's like Sonic was parodying Dragon Ball even at that time. But it's like we in America experienced it first in Sonic before Dragon Ball hit. So the influence has always been there. I mean, we talked about Dragon Ball in the writer's room on Sonic 1 even.

JM: But I mean, there's, trying to remember. I feel like I remember Jeff [Fowler, director] saying at some point that we're going to be in Tokyo and Shadow's going to get on a motorcycle. So he is like, ‘Well, we've got to do the Akira motorcycle slide.’ It's amazing. I found a YouTube video, so I hope somebody updates it now that Sonic 3's out, but somebody put together every TV show and movie that does the Akira Slide and it's long. It's kind of amazing.

PC: There's all sorts of references that we don't even know about, that we don't write in necessarily ‘And then they hit this pose from that thing.’ But there's all these pose and shot homages throughout all the movies, and there are probably a bunch that Josh and I don't even catch.

JM: I'm sure it'll be the same for 3... I feel like when 2 came out, a bunch of websites like, ‘All the Easter Eggs in Sonic 2,’ and I'm looking at it, I'm like, ‘Oh, I didn't even know about that one.’

So over the course of the films, first we just had Sonic and then we got Tails and Knuckles. Now we have Shadow, and I'm not going to spoil it for our audience who hasn't seen it yet, but I understand there is another character that is introduced at the end of this film potentially setting up more films to come. How do you two decide this progression? The Sonic cast is big!

PC: It's certainly not only the two of us deciding.

JM: That's above our pay grade.

PC: It’s a group discussion, but I think with Sonic 1, pretty early on, once we realized Tails wasn't going to be a main character, we were like, ‘Let's do the teaser with Tails. Let's make him our Nick Fury.’ When we were working on Sonic 2, we were like, ‘Who are we going to do at the end of this movie?’ And immediately Toby Ascher [producer] was just like, ‘It's going to be Shadow.’

JM: It’s got to be Shadow. And that I think is very much that the creative Powers That Be on the franchise are kind of trying to gauge what they sense the hierarchy is of who fans are most excited about next. That's who we'll do next.

PC: I'll say that the next character is one that we've been wanting to get in there. We know that there's a great public demand, so I hope when you see the movie later, I hope you're happy.

Are there any obscure deep cut characters that you're like, ‘Dang, I wish we could find a way to sneak this person in?’ I know everybody's clamoring for Big the Cat.

JM: Oh, yeah. I mean that's what we always say. That's our joke response. That's not even entirely a joke because it's so easy to imagine just kind of like a random joke you could use with him.

PC: In one draft of Sonic 2, we actually, when they're going through the snowy mountains to the cave, we had a bit, because Sonic 2 was sort of an Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones, it's a trope that at some point a skeleton pops out at you and scares you. So we were going to do that, but with a skeleton of a, I would say, a Big the Cat, not necessarily-

JM: Not necessarily the Big the Cat.

PC: But we ended up cutting it. It didn't make any sense.

The Sonic franchise over the years has been this magnet for all sorts of weird silly ideas over the years. But then you're also telling a story that has a little bit of emotional weight to it. How do you balance those two things to keep it just from being a humorous reference fest and make sure that there's a little bit of gravity to Sonic the Hedgehog?

JM: I do remember there was a phase where we were kind of all worried like, ‘Oh, is this too dark?’ But that was because we were really just trying to crack the Shadow story, and once you start dropping Sonic and Tails and especially Donut Lord in there, then if anything we're like, ‘Oh, we got to make sure that we aren't undermining the seriousness of Shadow's storyline with how silly the rest of the movie is.’

PC: And well, Doctor Robotnik is always going to be very silly too. We found some good pathos for him in this one as well. But yeah, I mean it is about just finding that character. Like, that was the hardest thing in creating this whole franchise was kind of figuring out what Sonic's deal was in the first movie, and what was going to make people connect to him as a person and not just a silly animal, and finding that need for family, and the themes of loneliness and family carrying through all these films. And now kind of the hitting upon the theme also of loss and revenge.

Well, you mentioned Doctor Robotnik, so tell me about writing for Jim Carrey, especially now that you're writing not just for one Jim Carrey, but a second Jim Carrey playing off the first one.

JM: Much like we're from the Genesis generation, we're from the rise of Jim Carrey generation and the Ace Ventura years. So just the fact that we have done three movies that he's in is kind of mind-boggling to us and it's super fun, because when we wrote the first one, we didn't know that Jim was going to be Robotnik, so that was its own thing. But with the sequels now, it's so fun because we kind of compare it to... you want him to take whatever you wrote and find something even better to do. That's why you cast Jim Carrey. So we almost view it as like you're putting him in a playground or something and what can we design? What can this scene be to let him go bananas and do his Jim Carrey thing?

PC: We're trying to give him a comic premise and roll out a box of toys for him. Him playing two characters in the same scene together so often, I mean, it was really interesting to watch how he did it even on set, because he would have to sort of build both performances at the same time, but he can only do one at a time because it took hours to get into his Gerald makeup, so he would do one side of it, and then come back the next day and do the other side, and it ends up cutting together so seamlessly. It's crazy.

JM: We just saw it, I guess this is the third time we've seen it. We saw it yesterday in 4DX, which was great. But yeah, the more I see it, the more I just marvel at how complicated some of the routines he came up for himself to be playing off himself. That's normally the kind of thing that you have those two actors there rehearsing and honing these bits, but it was just like, nope, it was all in his head that he had to figure out.

PC: I'm campaigning Jim Carrey, Best Supporting Actor nomination.

I understand there’s been a significant amount of improv done by the actors, and I was curious how you felt about that as writers, but it sounds like at least with Jim Carrey, you're like, ‘Yeah, that's what he does. This is great.’

JM: Yeah, I mean, the truth is, if the improv's good, you always welcome it. It's only a problem if it's bad. Fortunately, I think this is a good enough creative team that if someone does a bad improv, it's not like Jeff's going to put it in the movie. I mean, with Ben Schwartz, Adam Pally, people who it's like that's their whole bread and butter is improv.

PC: James Marsden is an underrated improviser.

JM: Yeah. I think Jury Duty showed his skills off to the world for the first time.

PC: And if an actor comes up with a great line and it makes the movie, we're always happy to take credit for other people.

This is close to my heart because the memory I have of Sonic Adventure 2 is the Chao Garden. I lost it when I saw the trailer of the cast in the Chao Garden, which is now basically the Chuck E. Cheese of the Sonic world, I guess. Tell me about adapting that. How did you come to this? Are Chao even real in this world, or are they... what's happening?

JM: You never know. Who knows how many sequels they'll end up doing? I think part of the logic was that Jeff has no immediate plans for the Chaos to really be in, and we already had that set piece, because that's a real type of restaurant that Jeff had encountered while promoting, I think, Sonic 2 in Tokyo. So we just thought-

PC: We thought it would be funny, yeah, that this is a place where Sonic and the other critters can go without a disguise because they just blend in. I mean, obviously in real life, would that work? Would people think they're people in giant plush costumes? Perhaps not. But with the suspension of disbelief with film, you can believe it. It's like, ‘Oh, we'll have a theme restaurant.’ And it's like, ‘Of course it should be a Chao Garden.’

PC: It could be based on the real Chao.

JM: Indeed. But yeah, I think in the context of this movie, Jeff just thought it would be a funny, funny nod to the Chaos and fans love or love-hate relationship with Chaos, I suppose, depending on-

Who hates Chao? Who's doing that?

JM: People with no soul.

PC: I tell you what, Josh, last night watching the movie, I realized they cut out a shot that we saw in an early cut that was, I thought was the funniest shot in the movie. It’s of the Chao, like on fire.

JM: Oh, you're right. Every time I watch it, I just, my brain puts it in the movie.

PC: We have to confront the team about this. What happened to that shot of the Chao getting killed?

JM: Maybe that's what was going to push us to PG-13. It'd be like, ‘You can't have a Chao on fire. Kids are going to run out of the theater screaming.’

Before the Sonic trilogy came out, there was a lot of talk, at least in video game spaces, about the fact that video game movies were sort of cursed to be not very good. I think that's largely been broken in recent years, not just by the Sonic movies, but we've had Detective Pikachu, there's been several other really solid video game films. And you two have been a big part of that, having these fairly successful, very enjoyable video game movies. Are there any other video games that you would want to adapt someday as films since this has clearly gone very well for you?

JM: I feel like unfortunately we can't actually answer your question because there's going to be a couple of things we're trying to get going next year.

Are there any that you're not working on at all that you can say?

PC: I was going to say, we've already written a script for It Takes Two, which hopefully we'll get some good news on moving forward in the next year.

JM: What's an old game that we're probably not going to adapt, that still would've been fun?

PC: We've talked about Golden Axe. Golden Axe was another good Genesis multiplayer game.

JM: A Boy and His Blob.

PC: Oh yeah, that could work. Or the 7-Up game about the dot having a platforming adventure. [Cool Spot]

JM: I think another easy one I think we can answer because the movie's already happening and we're already not doing it would be a Zelda. I remember always when we played Wind Waker, we were always like, man, I mean, it would probably be weird if they made a Zelda movie to start with Wind Waker versus the more classic Hyrule. But we both loved Wind Waker and it's so cinematic. Yeah. So after they make this Zelda movie, I guess we're putting it out there in the world, maybe we can do a Wind Waker spin-off.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Mat, Matt, and Jen are here to present the IGN UK Podcast Alternative Game Awards for 2024. Which game had the best animal? Which simply requires you to get gud? Listen to find out.

Remember to send us your thoughts about all the new games, TV shows, and films you're enjoying or looking forward to: ign_ukfeedback@ign.com.

IGN UK Podcast 780: The Alternative Game Awards 2024

• IGN UK Podcast 779: The Alternative Movie and TV Awards 2024
• IGN UK Podcast 778: The Game Awards Reveals and Ferry Fights
• IGN UK Podcast Special Episode: We Visited CD Projekt Red to Talk About The Witcher 4
• IGN UK Podcast 777: Indiana Jones and the Great Game
• IGN UK Podcast 776: Breaking Down the Top 20 PlayStation Games

Even with Christmas over, there are still many great deals available that you can score before they're gone. Here are the best deals for Thursday, December 26.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for $44.99

Choosing a tablet is tough, we know. On Apple’s side, there’s quite a wide variety of options to choose from, and it’s not always clear what’s so different between them. Unless you’re versed in all the jargon, the difference between a Liquid Retina display and a Ultra Retina Tandem OLED with Pro Motion might not be obvious. There are also major differences under the hood with Apple currently offering devices featuring an older A14 Bionic chip at the low end and an exceedingly fast M4 chip at the high end.

And all of that is just Apple. The Android tablet market only widens the field that much more. Where Apple tends to trim off the older, outmoded tablets in its stable, the Android tablet market will still readily show you devices you shouldn’t have bought when they were new, let alone years later. And just like Apple’s devices, there’s a considerable range of hardware options that go from severely underpowered to totally overkill — at which point a Windows tablet could make more sense. What makes Android tablet shopping even more complicated is the software support. Apple keeps its tablets running on the latest operating systems for a long time, but how long any given Android tablet will stay up to date is a much harder question to answer.

After looking at the market, considering the iPad and Android tablets we’ve tested, and weighing what actually makes sense when purchasing a tablet, we’ve narrowed down a handful of options that strike the right balance.

Additional contributions by Mark Knapp

Featured in this article

A combination of power, versatility, and portability has helped cement tablets place in the portables market. So, no matter your need, whether you just want a device to entertain you at the end of a busy workday or require something more robust for video editing on-the-go, there’s a tablet out there for you. To help you with your search, we’ve gathered the best tablets on the market. Check them out below.

Contributions by Danielle Abraham and Michelle Rae Uy

1. iPad (10th Generation)

Best Tablet

2. OnePlus Pad 2

Best Android Tablet

3. iPad Pro (M4, 2024)

Best Tablet for Creative Work

4. iPad Air (2024)

Best Thin and Light Tablet

5. iPad (9th Generation)

Best Budget iPadOS Tablet

How to Choose the Best Tablet

The first step when deciding on a tablet is setting a budget. Looking to just stream shows and scroll socials? A cheap slate should suffice. However, you'll need to up your spending if you’re after a productivity tool that performs similarly to a laptop. You can even slap a keyboard onto some tablets, essentially turning them into the best detachable laptops, albeit with the limits of their hardware and operating system.

Next, design should be taken into consideration. You want an option that’s lightweight but still durable for on-the-go use. A sizable, crisp, and responsive display ensures the best user experience, while OLED panels are a more premium option with deep blacks and richer colors over their LCD counterparts.

Of course, the internal components are just as important, as you don’t want a sluggish device that leads to you reaching for one of the best smartphones or laptops instead. To prevent that from happening, a solid processor and at least 4GB of RAM is a must. For gaming or creative work, upgrading those specs can make a world of difference. Beyond that, you’ll want to ensure your software is up to date. Android OS is in its 15th generation while iPadOS 18 is Apple’s latest.

Other features like long battery life, great-sounding speakers, crisp cameras, and stylus support can help improve your experience on a tablet. You may even want to consider getting a 5G tablet that can connect to your cellular network when you’re not on Wi-Fi.

Tablets FAQ

Are iPads better than Android tablets?

No. Both types of tablets have plenty of solid models to choose from; it’s more a matter of personal preference. If you already have the best iPhone and MacBook, it makes sense to grab an iPad for seamless integration into your Apple Ecosystem, including the ability to double as a second screen for a MacBook. iPads are known for their smooth, enjoyable user experience along with their wealth of apps and games, but the pricing is more restrictive.

Tablets running on Android OS come from various manufacturers using a wide variety of components and different versions of the Android operating system, meaning performance and the experience is all over the place. But there’s a wider selection of slates, from ultra-cheap to high-end. It’s just important to do your research, as there are some duds—iPads’ performance is a bit more consistent. The selection of apps optimized for an Android tablet is also more limited. Still, almost all Android apps should function, just not as well as on your phone.

Should you buy a tablet with cellular network support?

Most will find that a tablet with cellular network support is unnecessary unless you’re constantly on the go with no way to connect via Wi-Fi. Adding that extra line to your cellular plan can be expensive, and your smartphone can usually work as a Wi-Fi hotspot for your tablet when you’re in a pinch. However, should you decide you’d like cellular network support, many of our picks come in 5G versions, just know you have to make that decision up front.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

This article contains spoilers for Squid Game Season 2.

Easily one of the most anticipated shows of the year, and it feels like with the return of Netflix's smash hit Squid Game we've all received an extra gift this Holiday season. The intrigue-filled story of a kids game inspired death-match enraptured audiences in 2021 and its back with another wild season following Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) as he attempts to take down the wealthy madmen behind the brutally violent game show. Other returning cast members include a cop on a mission to stop the games, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), and The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) AKA Hwang In-ho who both play key roles in the wild sophomore season. So, now that you've obviously binged the entire show we're here to answer all your questions and explain that wild ending and how it sets up Season 3 of Squid Game which will air next year.

Squid Game 2 Ending Explained

After a season of new and terrifying games, the penultimate season of Squid Game ended with a violent uprising and some shocking character moments which set us on a chaotic path into the third and final season. As Hwang Jun-ho led a crew to find the island where the games take place, it was revealed that there was a traitor among their ranks. The friendly

fisherman (Oh Dal-su) who had been helping Seong Gi-hun search the ocean for the islands was actually a killer. We saw him murdering one of the soldiers in order to hide the fact that he had sabotaged the team's drone, which was the main tool they'd been using to get a better look at the islands where they suspected the games may be taking place. The big question is whether he's a part of the game organization or has an agenda of his own.

On the island within the game compound the group vote whether to stay or leave — a big change this season is that they are given the opportunity to vote after every game, setting up larger conflicts between the group — and it comes to a tie. After a brutal fight in the bathroom reveals that killing your fellow players also ups the prize pot, a violent night ensues. Because he's already played the game, Seong Gi-hun predicts what will happen and gets his allies to hide under the beds and avoid the madness. The killings begin when the side who wants to keep playing waits for lights out and begins to slaughter those who want to leave. After a brutal battle that sees many players — including fan fave Se-mi (Won Ji-an) — killed Seong Gi-hun uses the chaos in the wake of the riots to ambush the guards playing dead and stealing their weapons. It's a smart gambit that enables many of the players to gain weapons and begin making their way to the top floor to find leadership.

Alas, the young navy seal Dae Ho (Kang Ha Neul) freaks out while on a mission for more ammo, hiding in bed and resulting in the group running out of bullets and eventually being captured by The Front Man. This leads to the murder of Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan) in front of his best friend Seong Gi-hun, leaving our leading man's fate up in the air and the rebellion’s chances looking worse than ever. It's clear that this will directly lead into Season 3, which was filmed at the same time as the sophomore season, with the show then split in two. So, as we wait for that next entry here are all our burning questions about what we can expect from Squid Game 3.

Why Did the Front Man Enter the Games?

Nothing screams Christmas quite like gothic horror. In his first project since 2022's The Northman, Robert Eggers returns with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke for a remake of 1922's Nosferatu. The Lighthouse alum Willem Dafoe also returns for what Siddhant Adlhkada's review describes as "one of the finest, most viscerally exciting works of horror this year."

Whether you're planning a Babyratu double feature or want to stream the original silent film, here's everything we know about how to watch Nosferatu.

How to Watch Nosferatu: Showtimes and Streaming Status

Nosferatu just released in theaters. You can find showtimes near you at the main theater links below:

• Fandango
• AMC Theaters
• Cinemark Theaters
• Regal Theaters

Nosferatu (2024) Streaming Release Date

Nosferatu will eventually stream on Peacock (instead of Netflix or Max) because the film's distributor, Focus Features, is a subsidiary of NBC Universal. Previous Focus Features releases from 2024, The Bikeriders and Conclave, were in theaters for about seven weeks before streaming. Assuming the vampire follows a similar timeline, Nosferatu should arrive on Peacock by mid-February 2025.

What Is Nosferatu About?

The new Nosferatu movie is a remake of the German 1922 silent film directed by F. W. Murnau, which itself was an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula trying to avoid copyright issues. Here's the official synopsis for the new Eggers adaptation:

Where to Stream the Original Nosferatu Movies

Besides the original 1922 silent film, there's also a (notoriously long) 1979 adaptation of Nosferatu directed by Warner Herzog. Both are available online for free, and you can check out your streaming options below:

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922):

Black and White:

• Philo (free)

In Color:

• Prime Video (free)
• Tubi (free)

Nosferatu the Vampyr (1979):

• Prime Video (free)
• Tubi (free)

Nosferatu Cast

Nosferatu was written and directed by Robert Eggers, with cinematography from Jarin Blaschke and a score by Robin Carolan. The movie stars the following cast:

• Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok
• Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter
• Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter
• Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding
• Emma Corrin as Anna Harding
• Willem Dafoe as Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz
• Ralph Ineson as Dr. Wilhelm Sievers
• Simon McBurney as Herr Knock

Nosferatu Rating and Runtime

Nosferatu is rated R for bloody violent content, graphic nudity and some sexual content. The movie runs for a total of two hours and 12 minutes.

What if Santa was buff and had a paramilitary security team? What if imaginary friends were real? What if someone gave… someone else scars… like, out in space? On a rebellious moon?

These are all great questions, and they can all be answered simply by watching some of the most critically panned movies of 2024. Yes, we’re taking a look back at the year that was in movies that were found wanting. Here you’ll see flicks that IGN rated a 4 out of 10 or lower. And 4 means “Bad” so - yes - you’re going to see what lies beyond just being plain bad and it’ll be up to you to decide the true difference between the slightly hyperbolic “Awful” (3), “Painful” (2), and “Unbearable” (1).

(Hopefully) The Last Dance

Getting raked over the coals by critics doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna be a total financial bomb, so we’ll kick off our 4’s with Venom: The Last Dance. It was a cinematic colonic in most aspects, sure, but also a humble winner at the global box office. When all is said and done Venom 3 will have garnered close to $500 million, which is not too shabby for a movie IGN’s Tom Jorgensen said had “two left feet.” Furthermore, despite a few moments of fun, Tom said in his review that this third Venom entry was “torn between its responsibilities to big-budget comic book moviemaking and a more-focused genre story of a boy and his alien,” ultimately delivering a lackluster Lambada (timely dance reference!)

Other 4’s include the newly released-to-streaming Dear Santa, which marked a reunion between Jack Black and the Farrelly Brothers while also marking, according to Jesse Hassenger’s review, a misguided mess full of “deeply questionable story choices.”

Blumhouse’s Afraid proved that you can’t just do M3GAN without M3GAN. This preposterous smart house thriller was Zillow Gone Mild. And you know what else isn’t scary? Ice. But that’s what the Ghostbusters – both generations of Ghostbusters, that is – squared off against in Frozen Empire. Everyone knows you don’t fight ice, you just bolt from it. Like Jake Gyllenhaal did in The Day After Tomorrow when he outran cold.

Both The Garfield Movie and Argylle proved that this was not the year for animated cats, whether they were staunch Monday haters/lasagna lovers or just terrible looking CGI caught up in a “sluggishly paced idea-dump” of a spy caper, as our review put it.

And if you’re longing for more computer-generated critters, then look no further than John Krasinski’s IF, which A. A. Dowd wrote in his review was full of “trite platitudes,” lacking “any real insight into the adventures of growing up.” So not even the all-star cast – including Ryan Reynolds, who had a blockbuster year otherwise – could win us over. IF almost did as poorly on Rotten Tomatoes as 1996’s Bogus, which had Gérard Depardieu as the kid’s imaginary friend. So if your $100 million kids movie isn’t any better than a film where Haley Joel Osment mourns his dead parent by palling around with an invisible French magician, then you need to take everything back to formula.

More 4’s here than you can shake a stick at: Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, Kevin Costner’s dream project, probably had its producers thinking Chapter 11 (amirite?), while Megamind vs. the Doom Syndicate, My Spy: The Eternal City, The Union, My Oni Girl, Role Play, A Family Affair, and Wicked Little Letters all got blammo’d with the “Bad” label.

Meanwhile, Brad Pitt and George Clooney were unable to handsome their way out of Siddhant Adlakha calling their John Watts streaming movie, Wolfs, “half-baked” with “little humor or heart” in his review.

This holiday season you were unlikely to see Rebel Moon toys on store shelves. Not like last year when they were, basically, overstocked due to no one buying them. That’s because Zack Snyder’s two-part sci-fi epic not only failed to resonate on a pop-culture level but also, you know, critics s*** all over it. And the second half of the story, The Scargiver, which landed in April, got a 4, just like Part 1 did before it. As Hanna Ines Flint put it in her review, “The Scargiver delivers a half-baked conclusion to a well-trodden story with flimsy character studies and lackluster action.

Crisis on Infinite Ughh

Warner Bros. Animation also contributed heavily to our 4 rankings, dropping both Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two and Three in 2024. Both released on digital, 4K UHD, and Blu-ray, these two movies concluded this particular adaptation of the famous ‘80s DC Comics storyline, Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Part Two, reviewed by Jesse Schedeen, was called “a lackluster follow-up to an already flawed opening act” while Part Three, reviewed by Hayden Mears, was stamped with “messy,” “forgettable,” and a “poor send-off for Kevin Conroy’s Batman.” Damn, that’s harsher than when Joker called Batman “Fatman.” Honestly, I’d never recover.

BLANDora… nope. Wait! PanSNOREa! (Nailed it!)

The Borderlands movie didn’t get the lowest score here at IGN, as it kicks off our 3’s, but it’s gonna get the spotlight here for sure. Not just at IGN where stalwart soldiers have been covering the game franchise for a whopping 15 years, but in Hollyweird in general, where it now stands alongside famous flops that can be called out by name. Yup, it’s Waterworld levels of disaster.

And that just sucks because a good-ass movie could be mined from Borderlands. You wouldn’t even need A-listers and/or Oscar-winners to star in it (though that was a particularly odd cherry on top). You just need to keep the Vault Hunters as Vault Hunters and have them run around shooting everything while cracking wise and taking lives. Not the overcooked lore-blunder we got, featuring a miserably Frankenstein’d script, weeks of reshoots, two years of sitting on the shelf, and Cate Blanchett sounding like she’s in a different movie than everyone else. Or is she in the right movie and everyone else is wrong? Who can say? If there was ever a time to do one of those hypothetical “one character is human and every other character is a Muppet” movies, this was it.

“An abysmal waste of a beloved franchise that takes a kooky band of murderous misfits and drains the life out of their first adventure together,” is what Matt Donato wrote in his review. The franchise’s trademark gallows humor gets steamrolled while its “uniquely deranged themes are replaced by recycled blandness geared toward mass marketability.” Borderlands tried too hard to be Guardians of the Galaxy but that’s never what the games were, despite some similarities on paper. And now we’re left with a “catastrophic disappointment that plays like hacked-to-pieces studio slop.”

Red Three

Speaking of studio slop… Red One. The Rock’s big holiday dud that, well, may get forgotten and forgiven quickly because of how HUGE Moana 2 is. So while Red One – which was originally supposed to be a streaming movie for Prime Video (and certainly feels like it) – is underperforming, Dwayne Johnson’s big animated sequel is kicking ass and taking names.

Still, Red One, our second 3 here, features “mismatched stars with a whole lot of shockingly inconsistent special effects, preaching a sentimental yuletide message even as it looks like the height of soulless commercialization.” A.A. Dowd also mentioned, in his IGN review, that “only those who find the thought of Santa needing a bodyguard or the North Pole becoming a high-tech compound inherently hilarious are guaranteed many laughs from this largely charmless holiday blockbuster.”

By the way, by the time this article goes up Red One will probably be on Prime Video. Where it should’ve entered the world to begin with.

The other 3’s from 2024 were Netflix slog Damsel, the haphazard Harold and the Purple Crayon, and horror prequel The Strangers: Chapter 1, which Lena Wilson called in her review a “mind-numbing reboot” with stupid main characters that pales in comparison to 2008’s The Strangers (and even 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night).

The Power of Christ Compels 2

Nothing was given a 1 this past year (fingers crossed for an “Unbearable” in 2025) but there are a couple 2’s, both coming from the world of horror. Tarot wound up making a nice profit despite being a “lazy Final Destination knockoff” and The Exorcism, starring Russell Crowe, was light on frights and high on “bewildering edits.” As Jarrod Jones wrote, “The Exorcism is compromised by its unfortunate postproduction saga” producing “undercooked genre crud.”

But let’s not forget, just last year Russell Crowe was in The Pope’s Exorcist, which was shlocky but fun, in an unlimited breadsticks kind of way. So if you simply must watch Maximus Decimus Meridius vanquish demons, that’s the way to go. Plus, he rides a scooter while Faith No More’s “We Care A Lot” blasts in the background and not much more is needed for true cinema.

What were the worst movies of 2024 in your opinion? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Squid Game season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.

If season 1 of the masterful Korean thriller Squid Game introduced audiences to the capitalist hellscape that made its macabre elementary school field day for deeply indebted adults possible, season 2 is seemingly meant to parse through the complexities of that cutthroat terrain. As we follow reluctant winner Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) back into the arena, we find an atmosphere charged not by lethal rounds of I Spy or hopscotch, but by interactions that muddle any prior notion of hero vs. villain or right vs. wrong. Expanded backstories and complicated motives ladder up to this season’s harshest reality: As easy as it is to blame a faceless machine for everything that’s wrong with the world, no machine can work without the cogs that keep it running. With a much leaner seven-episode run at his disposal, creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk explores the layers of this universe with rich storytelling that doesn’t simply take the cruelties and inequalities of this system to task. This time, he and Squid Game’s talented cast dig into why any reasonable person would feed themselves to its gears in the first place.

Still traumatized from the events of season 1, burgeoning vigilante Gi-hun refuses to disappear into a comfy life with his winnings. We learn that he’s invested three years and his own cash into a private search for the game’s magnetic recruiter (Gong Yoo), initially convinced that ending him would end the games. We also learn the recruiter’s unsettling backstory, which offers the grim perspective of someone wholly blinded by his allegiance to these games and a deeply flawed, oversimplified pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality. This mainly gives Gong Yoo the space to be less stoic and more of a terrifying arbiter of corporate injustice, delivering an absolutely rattling performance in the process. Not only does he make a worthy adversary for Lee’s more grounded but equally intense Gi-hun, he’s also a conduit for some of the season’s most creative moments of tension and breathtaking cinematography.

The recruiter’s story makes up most of the first episode – a departure from how quickly season one got to the games. But this isn’t cause for alarm. Despite taking place entirely in the outside world, the first two episodes are so loaded with anxiety-inducing pressure points that even a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors in a darkened building can become nightmare fuel. Yes, the games are an obvious centerpiece, but this thoughtful, more leisurely journey to them proves that Squid Game’s biggest draw is its worldbuilding.

We also reconnect with police officer Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), who previously went undercover as a games guard in search of his brother In-ho (who, in a first-season twist, turned out to be the game’s Front Man, played by the quietly chilling Lee Byung-hun). After taking on a much less exciting assignment, he eventually reunites with Gi-hun and joins the hero’s quest to uncover the secret location of the games. His presence briefly and intriguingly indicates that season 2 has the police in its social-commentary sights; new character Choi Woo-Seok (Jeon Seok-ho) notes that cops, in his experience, rarely help civilians. But it’s a thread that Hwang and company only tug at lightly, a notably weaker approach when compared to the other ways Squid Game speaks truth to power

When we do eventually return to the Squid Game, we meet a legion of new players, including a former YouTuber in trouble for slinging faulty crypto (Im Si-wan), his pregnant and savvy ex (Jo Yu-ri), a mother-son duo looking to collectively pay off gambling debt (Kang Ae-shim and Yang Dong-geun, respectively), a young former marine (Kang Ha-neul), and a menacing former shaman (Chae Kook-hee). While some feel more like archetypes than fully fleshed-out characters, Kang’s Jang Geum-ja stands out. More than a doting mom, Geum-ja often leans on her hard-knock upbringing to draw immeasurable strength for herself and the ragtag bunch of players she adopts as her own family. Other competitors might underestimate the older woman in their midst, but she proves them wrong with fierce conviction and a strong resolve.

Also among the ensemble are two rather high-profile additions. Park Sung-hoon plays Hyun-ju, a former special forces soldier and transgender woman who enters the games to earn funding for gender-affirming surgery. (Worth noting: Park is a cis man; Hwang says he had difficulty finding an out trans actress in Korea and chose Park for the role rather than cutting this important storyline.) Hyun-ju is sharp, compassionate, capable, and complicated – a fully realized person with her own incredibly valid motivations who’s treated with notable care by Park and Hwang. Another headline-grabbing choice: Choi Seung-hyun, a.k.a revered, once-underground South Korean rapper T.O.P, who plays, well, a revered underground rapper named Thanos. Thanos is a lightning bolt of unrepentant chaos in an already electric environment, and Choi has found a way to imbue pitch-perfect physical comedy, rage, and tragic recklessness into a character that makes the viewer simultaneously hold their breath in fear and beg for more. It’s a match made in hell through and through – though Thanos isn’t without his own sobering baggage, making him just as easy to pity as he is to fear.

There are new games and the return of one daunting bloodfest – but truthfully, they all take a backseat to a new, unnerving wrinkle: democracy. Voting played a small role in season one, but each one of season two’s games is punctuated by a chance for the surviving players to end it all with a majority vote, walking away with an even share of the prize money. Of course, as the body count grows, so does the size of those shares. Here, Hwang best blurs the lines between “us” vs. “them,” which are no longer restricted to the players and their overseers. It also means roles are constantly adjusting. While the players may not have guns, they’re armed with their own personal motives (like costly healthcare, or combatting serious addictions), strategic stories, and a vote that dictates everyone’s chances at survival. It’s a game-within-the-game, and it provides the chance for everyone to indulge their killer instinct – even those who seem to mean well.

Following a U.S. election cycle when voting for self-preservation versus the greater good was the hottest of hot-button topics, this development is almost uncomfortably timely. But it also cleverly illustrates how the games can sow division, how tough choices can swiftly adjust our perception of other people, and how, in some cases, you don’t need masked gunmen to make a space feel incredibly dangerous. Before, it was much easier to tell when the games were in session. Now, not so much. Squid Game trusts us to navigate this more nuanced story, and it’s rewarding. As we watch this heightened depiction of the economic and political forces that dictate our everyday lives, we’re challenged to pinpoint how we’d actually fit in in such a thorny universe.

DAY 2 UPDATED! Christmas (and now actual boxing day) have passed but don't despair, discount hunters. It's still a time for brilliant game bargains and wintry skinned online stores that look completely out of synch with our hellfire of a hemisphere. I'm taking a break from melting in near 40C heat to go hunt down the finest deals available. Let's get right to them now!

Warning: This piece contains spoilers for Nosferatu.

Get your Gothic garb on and hold your crucifix close, because Nosferatu is now arriving in theaters. The Robert Eggers-directed remake of the classic 1922 film has been a long time coming, having first been announced all the way back in 2015. Clearly a passion project for the auteur filmmaker, it’s dropping into theaters nationwide on Christmas Day to largely stellar reviews, including a 9/10 rave from IGN.

However, despite all the praise for the film’s performances, cinematography, and period set design, Nosferatu continues the tradition of adaptations and reworkings of the original Dracula novel messing up significant elements of the source material. This problem is so endemic that certain aspects of the book have been completely overwritten in the popular imagination by adaptational changes being echoed in version after version over the decades.

So today, let’s take a look at what those changes are, and why the original novel still doesn’t have a definitive film adaptation.

An Ancient Evil

To ensure everyone’s on the same page, let’s start with a brief refresher: Dracula, by Irish author Bram Stoker, is a Gothic horror novel published in 1897. The book is written in epistolary format, meaning that the text takes the form of notes, letters and documents written in-universe by characters in the story. There’s little argument among literary scholars that it’s not the most well-known and influential work of vampire fiction ever written, with Dracula himself becoming one of the most recognizable characters in popular culture. But despite that, much of the context around the novel’s actual plot and characters has been obscured in the popular consciousness because of how its adaptations have warped the common perceptions of them, and this began with the earliest film and stage productions.

The original Nosferatu, an unlicensed German film adaptation from director F. W. Murnau in 1922, condensed and reimagined much of the plot and characters. The film moved the action from England to Germany and renamed everyone in the cast, with the most famous example being turning Count Dracula into Count Orlok. This was mostly a failed attempt to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits. The 1924 Dracula play written by Hamilton Deane (and revised into its more well-known version in 1927 by John L. Balderston) likewise condensed the plot and cast, removing all the sections outside of England and merging Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra into one character named Lucy Seward in Balderston’s iteration. The play served as the basis for Universal’s 1931 film directed by Tod Browning, starring Bela Legosi as Dracula, a role he had previously played on stage.

Some of the most prominent deviations from the source material that became the default started in these early adaptations. Vampires dying in sunlight? Not in the book. Dracula is merely weakened by sunlight, but he can walk around in it just fine. The 1922 movie introduced the idea of vampires being killed by the sun. Dracula being a suave aristocrat who charms his victims? First introduced in the 1924 play. In the book he starts off decrepit and repulsive, and later morphs into a less monstrous form but still isn’t considered handsome or charismatic. Van Helsing being a vampire expert? Not until the 1931 film. In the novel, Van Helsing is merely an eccentric professor who’s studied the occult, and he’s never encountered vampires before. But most versions now depict Van Helsing as Dracula’s nemesis and a seasoned warrior against the supernatural, when he’s really just guessing his way through it in the book.

Hell, Dracula isn’t even staked in the book. He’s decapitated and stabbed in the heart with a knife. But those are details. If you want to see where Dracula adaptations have truly erred, it’s in the depiction of the book’s two primary female characters: Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra.

19th Century Women

As a story, Dracula has always been more of an ensemble piece, but if there’s one character who deserves to be called the protagonist of the book, it’s Mina Harker. She doesn’t appear for the first few chapters, but once she enters the narrative she becomes the most pivotal figure in the war against Dracula because of her intelligence, composure, and loyalty to her friends and loved ones. She doesn’t physically fight Dracula, but she’s instrumental to his defeat by assembling the letters and documents making up the text of the book, providing the research material the heroes need to figure out Dracula’s weaknesses. She helps everyone with their personal crises as they struggle to psychologically endure the situation. And although she is attacked and mind-controlled by the Count, she turns their psychic connection against him through force of will and reveals his location to her comrades, an act that directly leads to Dracula’s demise.

Sadly, this version of Mina simply does not exist in adaptations. She often either has her role reduced, is merged or swapped with her best friend Lucy, or is altered into a helpless (or worse, willing) victim. That last one is what happens in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film, where Winona Ryder plays Mina. This version is a complete betrayal of the original character because instead of being defined by her intellect and moral fortitude, she’s a brainless damsel who falls in love with the Count because she’s apparently the reincarnation of his long lost wife. What makes this especially egregious is that in the book, Dracula forces Mina to drink his blood against her will in an unmistakable metaphor for sexual assault. This means the movie takes a character who is for all intents and purposes raped by Dracula and has her lovingly fawn over him. It’s utterly reprehensible and totally misses the point of who Mina is.

Lucy Westenra receives similar treatment. In the book she’s defined by her innate goodness, a pure soul who is tragically destroyed by Dracula and turned into a vampire, forcing the three men who love her to help hunt her down and destroy her. In Coppola’s film, she’s reimagined as a shameless flirt who plays her suitors against each other and constantly talks in sexual innuendos. By portraying Lucy in this way, her sexuality becomes something she winds up being punished for, which she is by getting turned into a monster that must be put down. Like with Mina, it’s a complete misunderstanding of the character’s original context and what role they’re meant to play in the story’s thematic framework. It’s also just bizarre to see female characters from a book published in the 1890s be less regressive than their counterparts in film adaptations released a century later. Sadly, the new take on Nosferatu doesn’t do much to change this.

Symphony of the Light

The new Nosferatu begins with our Mina analogue Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) calling out into the night, only to be answered by Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). The thorny and unsettling connection between the two forms the backbone of the narrative, with the movie’s most interesting idea being that Ellen isn’t completely turned off by how monstrous and disgusting this version of the character can be. From there, the film follows much of the basic plot outline of the novel, albeit with the character names from the 1922 film used instead. However, like with Coppola’s film, Ellen/Mina’s character traits aren’t kept. She mostly screams and cries through the film rather than keeping her wits about her, and she clearly betrays her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) through her desire for Orlok instead of being loyal like in the book.

The movie tries to get around this by having Ellen be the character who “defeats” Orlok, but the way it’s done saps the choice of its power. Ellen sacrifices herself by inviting Orlok into her room and allowing him to feed on her, keeping him in place long enough for the sun to rise and kill him. However, the movie never shows her (or anyone else, for that matter) learning that sunlight will kill Orlok; it’s something the movie assumes everyone knows because of how prominent that weakness is in popular culture. Nor does Ellen forcefully hold Orlok down when sunlight pours through the windows to ensure she finishes the job, she just gently caresses him. Orlok’s death happening this way also just makes him seem dumb. Did he not know the sun was rising? The questions about how this ending plays out prevent it from functioning as a meaningful subversion of previous Mina adaptations. It also results in Ellen’s death, meaning she, like Coppola’s Lucy before her, is being punished for her sexuality because she unwittingly unleashed Orlok on everyone by indulging her desires.

To be fair to Eggers, it’s clear his interest was more in remaking Murnau’s film than adapting Stoker’s book, but that no other filmmaker over the years has done the latter well feels like a missed opportunity. We haven’t even touched on how Terence Fisher’s 1958 film starring Christopher Lee screws over Jonathan Harker, how John Badham’s 1979 film starring Frank Langella once again cuts all the scenes outside of England, or how last year’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter from director André Øvredal takes a great idea in adapting the boat chapter as a full film and ruins it by portraying Dracula as a generic slasher monster with almost no dialogue. It’s beyond absurd how many times this story has been adapted to stage and screen without any of the major works really getting the source material. Perhaps someday we’ll see a great version of Stoker’s text, but for now, that dream is as illusory as the mist Dracula can transform into.

Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Bluesky.

Never let anyone tell you it’s been a bad year for movies, because according to our review scores, there were plenty of excellent entries for film buffs to enjoy. Each year, we round up our best reviewed movies into a single list and going by our count, 22 films received top marks from IGN’s official reviews in 2024, which means they were awarded either a 9 or a 10. With so many strong films coming out this year, we won’t blame you if you missed a few, so we’re here to provide a full account of every 2024 film that IGN scored as either “Amazing” (9) or a “Masterpiece” (10).

Let’s start with the three movies that received a 10.

Sasquatch and Mad Max Sagas

First up is Sasquatch Sunset, a bonkers story about a family of non-verbal sasquatches. Reviewer Clint Gage is upfront about how divisive the movie likely is for audiences, but he loved it, calling it an “emotional masterpiece of experimental cinema.” Give it a try if you’re open to something truly unconventional. Another unconventional movie from this year is Riddle of Fire, a stunning debut feature from Weston Razooli that is a bizarre mix of crime caper, fairytale fantasy, and video game quest logic (really) about a group of kids going on an adventure to find a blueberry pie for their sick mother. We won’t spoil anything else about this special movie, but seek it out if you want to see one of the best and weirdest films of the year.

Lastly for the 10’s, we have Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the long-awaited prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road. Starring the always amazing Anya Taylor-Joy as a younger incarnation of Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron in Fury Road), this wasteland odyssey is in a much different tonal register from its 2015 counterpart, but its more melancholic and character-driven approach makes it an easy contender for one of the year’s best. Even if you’re not typically a Mad Max person, it’s worth watching for Taylor-Joy’s fantastic performance and some stellar action sequences. Sadly the movie didn’t light up the box office, so if you didn’t check it out in theaters, be sure to give it a watch at home.

TVs That Glow, Thinking About Dying, and Festival Faves

As for the 9’s, we have quite a few to get through. We’ll start with I Saw the TV Glow, an arthouse horror film from director Jane Schoenbrun. This is one of the most intensely personal and idiosyncratic films of the year, and has not only taken the Letterboxd community by storm but has also received praise from iconic filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader. Speaking of iconic filmmakers, be on the lookout early next year for Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, an experimental horror film shot from the perspective of a paranormal entity. Siddhant Adlakha reviewed the film for IGN out of the Sundance Film Festival, saying it’s a “resourceful haunted house thriller” and a “midnight genre romp.” Presence will be released in theaters on January 24, 2025.

And if we’re talking festival favorites, we have to mention The Brutalist, which has become one of the most acclaimed films of the year after a festival tour that included Venice, TIFF and NYFF. This three-and-a-half-hour epic comes from director Brady Corbet, and stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. Brody plays László Tóth, an architect and Holocaust survivor who travels to America and works to bring his wife and niece over from Europe. Although some may balk at the extended runtime (including an old-school intermission), reviewer Chase Hutchinson urges you to stick with it, saying that the film is a “bold, beautiful, and brutal look at the United States, not how we like to think of the country, but how it actually is for those smothered underneath it.”

Some other film festival darlings this year include Sundance entry Sometimes I Think About Dying, a not at all SEO-friendly dark comedy starring Star Wars alum Daisy Ridley as a suicidal office worker who struggles with severe loneliness. Reviewer Marya E. Gates said Ridley delivers a “rich and resonant performance,” and that director Rachel Lambert’s “surreal touches heighten its melancholy.” There’s also Sing Sing, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, but was properly released this year by A24. The film stars Colman Domingo as Divine G, an incarcerated man who brings together his fellow inmates with a makeshift theater group. Reviewer Carlos Aguilar called the film, which is yet another winner for Domingo’s filmography, a “touching drama and an inspiring reminder of how community and an outlet for self-discovery can positively shape someone’s outlook.”

Civil Wars, Challengers and Kindness

A24 distributed two other movies on our list, the first being Alex Garland’s blockbuster Civil War. Garland is usually more well-known for his smaller scale science-fiction films like Ex Machina and Annihilation, but with this movie he jumped into a speculative action epic filled with excellent performances and stellar cinematography. Led by Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny, Civil War is tense and thrilling in all the right ways. The second movie here is Janet Planet, a coming of age film and the directorial debut of Annie Baker, which went on a multi-festival tour in 2023 before finally being released this year. Typically more associated with her work in theater as a playwright, Baker didn’t miss a step in her transition to film, with IGN’s review saying the film’s “photographic aesthetic enhances its distinct sense of time, place, and memory.”

If you were looking for new entries from some of our most celebrated directors, 2024 was rife with those as well. Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria remake heads unite) turned in Challengers, a sweat and sex drama featuring both a love triangle and lots of tennis. Starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, the movie was widely beloved by film fans and critics, including our own. For movies that were not widely beloved, see Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating passion project Megalopolis, which stumbled with critics and audiences but found some defenders, including here at IGN. Starring Adam Driver as a visionary architect in an alternate 21st century, it’s a movie that’s difficult to describe without sounding a bit off the wall. We’ll just say that if you were looking for something that could only have come from a singular artistic mind (for better or worse), Megalopolis is truly a one of a kind experience.

The surreal sensation Yorgos Lanthimos also returned to theaters this year with Kinds of Kindness, an anthology film featuring three darkly comedic stories. Reuniting with regular muse Emma Stone (you saw Poor Things last year, didn’t you?), the Greek director delivered yet another gonzo movie primed for the sickos. His style isn’t for everyone, but if you can get on his wavelength, there’s no one doing this exact kind of movie at his level right now. And of course we also have Sean Baker’s Anora, one of the most talked about movies of the year as we prepare for award season. Mikey Madison, who before this was most well-known for her work in Scream 5, has become an early favorite for Best Actress categories due to her performance as the title character, a sex worker who goes through a bizarre series of events when her new husband’s parents try to get their wedding annulled.

The Dead Live!

And if we’re talking auteurs, we have to mention Nosferatu, the latest film from acclaimed director Robert Eggers. Known for excellent films like The Witch and The Northman, Eggers channels his Gothic energy by remaking the 1922 classic from F. W. Murnau, which is commonly considered one of the most historically important horror films of all time. Although some fans of the original novel may lament its deviations from the source material, Nosferatu pulls from a fascinating mélange of influences besides the book and Murnau’s film, such as the 1932 black and white film Vampyr, the 1979 remake from Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation, and even features a little bit of DNA from The Exorcist. This one is dropping in theaters on Christmas Day, so if you’re in the mood for a blood-soaked period piece after opening your presents, be sure not to miss it.

There were some strong franchise entries this year as well. A Quiet Place: Day One, the third film in the sci-fi horror series, surprised by being far better than your average prequel has any right to be. Featuring great performances from Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn and a confident character-driven story, Day One proved that this franchise has more life in it than many would have expected. We also saw the conclusion of Warner Bros.’ two-part animated adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal graphic novel classic Watchmen with Watchmen: Chapter II. Reviewer Zaki Hasan had nothing but praise for the second installment, writing that “the many ways it sticks to its roots delighted this fan of the comic, but it can just as easily serve as an entree into this story for someone experiencing it fresh.”

Sticking with animation, the Looney Tunes will soon get in on the action with The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. After the incredibly disheartening situation with the shelving of Coyote vs. Acme, this film premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and is set to be released worldwide on February 28, 2025. Reviewer Rafael Motamayor said the film “has enough gags per minute to leave audiences short of breath with laughter, but also a big heart that shows why these characters are so beloved even after nearly 90 years.” On that note, another animated staple will soon be making a comeback with Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a new feature-length film in the British claymation franchise. It features the return of The Wrong Trousers antagonist Feathers McGraw, and according to IGN reviewer Ryan Gaur, it “stands shoulder to shoulder with some of Aardman’s best work.” That one will be dropping on BBC One and BBC iPlayer December 25 and streams on Netflix beginning January 3. 2025.

Wicked Anime

For the anime fans in the audience, we want to highlight two particular films. The first is The Concierge, an adaptation of Tsuchika Nishimura’s manga series The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store, which is centered around a shopping center for anthropomorphic animals (the staff are human, if you were wondering). Reviewer Kambole Campbell praised how the film adapted the manga, saying that The Concierge has a “lively, expressive art style and wonderfully absurd characters.” The second is Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle, which is a sequel to the anime television series Haikyu!! This series is about the Karusono High School volleyball team and member Shoyo Hinata in particular, with the film detailing a particularly important match against Nekoma High School. Reviewer Mike Mamon said the film is “a delightful watch for long-time fans that doubles as an entertaining sampler for those curious about this beloved series.”

And last on our list is the long-anticipated film adaptation of Wicked, the beloved Broadway musical that acts as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. This Part 1 of 2 from director Jon M. Chu stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Galinda. Given the box office totals and A CinemaScore, IGN reviewer Alyssa Mora wasn’t alone in loving the way the film brings the musical to the big screen. She wrote that “this film adaptation epitomizes what modern movie musicals can and should be,” and that “Wicked will undoubtedly immortalize Grande and Erivo in movie musical history.” That’s some high praise! Of course, you know what she’s talking about since you’ve seen it already, haven’t you?

What were your favorite movies of 2024? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Bluesky.

This review contains full spoilers for Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Season 1, Episode 5.

A funny thing happens in this episode of Skeleton Crew, and that's not counting the surprising number of good jokes (“What’s a concubine?” being a standout): A character expresses fond memories for a thing from their past, only to discover that it has changed and isn’t as great as it used to be. It ponders if nostalgia is a trap and asks whether you’re doomed to disappointment if you put too much stock in it. Doesn't this seem explicitly heretical to the basic concept of the “Star Wars crossed with Goonies” mash-up that is Skeleton Crew?

Skeleton Crew doesn’t quite pull a Last Jedi and ask the audience to question whether or not they’ve wasted their lives, but SM-33’s realization that his old boss’ pirate lair, Skull Ridge Mountain, has been turned into a luxury spa is immediately followed by the most explicit Goonies riff that the show has done yet. A character literally walks around talking about how the thing he used to love has been “ruined,” and then the kids find themselves in a series of underground tunnels filled with old pirate traps (though, yes, the first one is definitely the “Penitent Man” from Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade).

Short of Captain Fern forcing Jude Law’s Jod Na Nawood (who gets even more nicknames in this episode, including Dash Zentin and Jodwick Zank) to do the Truffle Shuffle, it could not be more clear what they’re going for here, and that makes 33’s little background subplot seem very pointed. It doesn’t feel like Skeleton Crew is actively undermining itself, if only because the backlash against Last Jedi was so pronounced that Star Wars will probably never do something so smart ever again, but it was at least some thoughtful foreshadowing of the fact that this Goonies riff wasn’t going to work out very well for the Crew.

Wim is concerned at the beginning of the episode that this adventure hasn’t been as fun as he thought it would be, and if that wasn’t true then, it’s absolutely true by the time Jod orders 33 to reactivate the acid pool trap they had evaded earlier—which violently kills the Crew’s pirate pursuers offscreen. Nobody should’ve been too surprised once Jod started holding Fern at knifepoint, demanding that she surrender her captainship to him so he could force 33 to fly him to At Attin without needing the kids, as this whole adventure was already off the rails by that point.

Also, is it any wonder that Jod’s advice to a crying Wim was to simply forget about his family and live without any “attachments”? He’s fun to have around, and the mystery of his Force powers (which gets readdressed in this episode thanks to the appearance of a lightsaber) is so damn compelling, but he’s not a nice guy.

While the Jedi question remains unanswered, there are a few other curious developments in “You Have A Lot To Learn About Pirates.” For one, At Attin is apparently home to the last Old Republic mint, meaning that—if Jod can get access to it—he can get a limitless supply of a currency so valuable that people freak out when they see it. But we also have the ongoing mystery of At Attin’s Supervisor, a person(?) who the adults of the planet are pretty scared of. Also, the lair the kids are exploring was home to a legendary pirate named Tak Rennod, who appears briefly in a video message that is suspiciously garbled, meaning nobody (us included) can see what he looks like.

How likely is it that Tak Rennod is At Attin’s enigmatic Supervisor? 100 percent? He ditched the ship that the Skeleton Crew has since commandeered (we now know it’s called the Onyx Cinder) and is now living out every pirate’s dream of owning a whole planet that exists just to print money for him? Jod’s got to be picturing something like that when he double-crosses the Crew at the end.

The next episode might immediately walk that back, as this one did with SM-33’s heel turn, but here’s how it stands now: All of those beloved kids adventure movies where young people have a life-changing experience, all come home safe, and maybe they learn about growing up from a seemingly salty adult? The ones that Skeleton Crew has been trying very hard to remind you of from the first moment we saw the space-suburbs of At Attin? They were lying to you. Adventures are terrible and adults are mean.

If you celebrate today's festivities, my season's greetings to you. If you don't, well, no probs, because we're both just going to take advantage of the discounts aimed at people who do get into it. Everybody wins! Particularly if you want a free copy of Dredge or a cheap controller or a price slice on a game this connoisseur would buy himself.

In retro news, I'm celebrating the 28th birthday of Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams, arguably gaming's greatest goodwill limited edition freebie. Sega threw this in with my purchase of a select Sega Saturn game, and it was basically a little advent calendar whose content shifted in sync with my console's internal clock. Beating a level (reskinned in a wintry and/or outright Christmas theme) earned you limited chances to solve a tile-matching puzzle to unlock 25 "Presents." The best of the bunch—a mini-sandbox level starring Sonic the Hedgehog that ends with a satisfying Eggman scrambling. Honestly, I adore this demo disc and play it every year without fail.

This Day in Gaming 🎂

Aussie birthdays for notable games.

- Link: The Faces of Evil (CD-i) 1993. eBay

- Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon (CD-i) 1993. eBay

- Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams (SAT) 1996. eBay

- Art Academy (DS) 2009. eBay

Table of Contents

• Nintendo Switch
• PC
• Xbox
• PlayStation
• LEGO

Nice Savings for Nintendo Switch

• Maneater (-35%) - A$38.80
• Nyko GameCube cont. (-29%) - A$23.53
• NBA 2K25 (-32%) - A$27
• Metroid Prime Remastered (-18%) - A$49.95
• Fire Emblem Warriors: TH (-49%) - A$40.65

Expiring Recent Deals

• Unicorn Overlord (-40%) - A$56.99
• Mario & Luigi: Brothership (-20%) - A$64
• SpongeBob: Patrick Star Game (-40%) - A$36
• Rune Factory 5 (-47%) - A$39.51
• Lego 2K Drive (-47%) - A$21.20
• PowerA Pro cont. (-31%) - A$69
• 8BitDo Arcade Stick (-20%) - A$151.95

Or gift a Nintendo eShop Card.

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Purchase Cheap for PC

• Dredge (-100%) - FREE
• Days Gone (-78%) - A$16.86
• Everspace (-95%) - A$1.49
• Fallout 4 (-65%) - A$8.85
• Fallout: New Vegas (-56%) - A$6.57
• Witcher 3: Complete Ed. (-80%) - A$15.79
• Stardew Valley (-40%) - A$10.19
• Unpacking (-50%) - A$14.47
• Doom Eternal (-78%) - A$12.08
• Halo Col. (-75%) - A$14.98
• Hollow Knight (-50%) - A$10.97
• Celeste (-75%) - A$7.37
• Little Nightmares (-78%) - A$7.03
• Civ VI (-96%) - A$4.04
• Overcooked 2 (-78%) - A$7.90
• It Takes Two (-80%) - A$9.99
• Ancient Dungeon VR (-33%) - A$19.76

Expiring Recent Deals

• Planet Coaster (-95%) - A$3.24
• NFS Heat Deluxe Ed. (-95%) - A$4.99
• Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (-90%) - A$2.19
• Borderlands 1 GOTY (-90%) - A$3.99
• Batman Arkham Origins (-90%) - A$2.89
• Tales from Borderlands (-90%) - A$2.99
• Stellaris (-90%) - A$5.69
• The Forest (-90%) - A$2.89
• Divinity: Original Sin (-90%) - A$5.69
• Firewatch (-90%) - A$2.95
• State of Decay 2 (-90%) - A$4.29
• Warhammer Vermintide 2 (-90%) - A$4.19
• Total War Warhammer (-90%) - A$8.99
• Grim Dawn 2 (-90%) - A$3.65
• Metro Exodus (-90%) - A$4.49
• Titanfall 2 (-90%) - A$3.99
• Assassin's Creed Origins (-90%) - A$8.99
• South Park The Stick of Truth (-90%) - A$4.49
• Back 4 Blood (-95%) - A$4.49

Or just get a Steam Wallet Card

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Exciting Bargains for Xbox

• Fallout 4 GOTY (-60%) - A$21.98
• Dragon's Dogma 2 (-40%) - A$64.77
• X/S controller black (-29%) - A$64
• Titanfall 2: Ult. (-90%) - A$3.99
• T.Flight Hotas One (-22%) - A$140.95
• Tekken 8 (-54%) - A$47
• Skull and Bones (-78%) - A$24
• CoD: MW2 (-57%) - A$47

Expiring Recent Deals

• Green X/S cont. (-17%) - A$59
• FFXII: Zodiac Age (-63%) - A$29.38
• A Quiet Place (-28%) - A$33.98
• Shin Megami Tensei V (-56%) - A$43.95
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard (-51%) - A$53.99
• CoD: BLOPS 6 (-42%) - A$64

Or just invest in an Xbox Card.

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Pure Scores for PlayStation

• DualSense Camo (-30%) - A$84
• FF VII: Rebirth (-51%) - A$55.99
• Star Wars Outlaws (-46%) - A$58.99
• Mass Effect Legendary (-92%) - A$7.99
• Hogwarts Legacy (-75%) - A$27.48
• Stray (-20%) - A$32.12
• The Last of Us Part 1 (-53%) - A$59
• Madden NFL 25 (-41%) - A$59
• LEGO Horizon Adventures (-38%) - A$68
• DualSense Edge ($40 off) - A$300
• Breachers [VR] (-50%) - A$22.47
• Among Us VR (-40%) - A$8.97

Expiring Recent Deals

• Tekken 8 (-47%) - A$68.99
• Crisis Core: FF7 Reunion (-42%) - A$49.10
• Suicide Squad: KTJL (-84$) - A$19
• God of War: Ragnarok (-61%) - A$49
• Naruto: NInja Storm 4 (-24%) - A$19
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard (-51%) - A$53.99
• CoD: BLOPS 6 (-42%) - A$64
• NBA 2K25 (-64%) - A$44
• Persona 3 Reload (-60%) - A$42.90
• DualSense Sterling Silver (-32%) - A$85

Or purchase a PS Store Card.

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Legit LEGO Deals

• Retro Roller Skate (-42%) - A$35
• Super Mario: Peach (-39%) - A$49
• City: Police Bike Chase (-37%) - A$10

Expiring Recent Deals

• Nascar Chevrolet Camaro (-40%) - A$23.99
• City: Double-Decker (-36%) - A$70
• Minecraft: Nether Portal (-35%) - A$39

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