Sam Barsanti

A ways into Casino Royale, after James Bond has won the poker game and discovered that the bad guys are sore losers, he furiously chases after Le Chiffre in his Aston Martin and has to swerve to avoid running over Eva Green. In a somewhat over-the-top stunt that feels out of place in the otherwise realistic film (or at least relatively realistic, given the rest of the franchise), Bond’s car flips through the air seven times before coming to a stop. The stunt held the Guinness World Record for ca…

Beau DeMayo, the creator and showrunner of Disney+’s X-Men ’97—a continuation of Fox’s iconic ’90s cartoon—was apparently fired by Marvel Studios early last week, with the news coming out publicly just a day before the show’s Hollywood premiere and just about a week before the show is going to debut on Disney+. No reason has been given for DeMayo’s departure, and The Hollywood Reporter says that it happened “suddenly,” that his company email was deactivated, and that the cast and crew “were info…

Today is Mario Day, a.k.a. March 10, a.k.a. Mar10 (which looks like “Mario”), meaning it’s the one day of the year when the world comes together to celebrate brotherhood, plumbers, coin collecting, vaguely Italian heritage, and the ceremonial stomping of turtles. When Mario Day carolers go from house to house, saying “Wahoo!” and “Let’s-a go!” in exchange for mushrooms. When we wish for the day we may find our princess, for she remains in another castle. When we all dream of reaching the top of…

Joe Rogan’s podcast is not generally an accurate representation of… reality (you could just glance at the caliber of his usual guests to know that), but filmmaker Zack Snyder appeared on the show this week and dropped a curiously bold claim: According to him, Netflix’s whole distribution model is so “crazy” that he thinks more people have probably seen his movie Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child Of Fire than Barbie (when it was in theaters)—due to Netflix’s ubiquity and the fact that you can just thr…

It was all over the moment the first person decided to open up their own wallet and accept the fact that they could no longer mooch off of someone else’s Netflix account. And by “it” we mean society in general. It’s been all downhill since July of last year, when Netflix gleefully announced that very few people had actually canceled their subscriptions over the company’s decision to crack down on people who were sharing passwords and that a good number of former password borrowers actually signe…

Last summer, an Ariana Grande track called “Fantasize” lit up the TikTok and Spotify charts, but there was a problem: Grande herself didn’t release the track or others that were also going around. They were leaked demos created for something else that she had never actually intended to release. Grande asked her fans to stop sharing the songs, but, the Streisand Effect being what it is, that just made more people aware of the leak and prolonged the spread. Now, though, Grande has changed her tune…

Forthright Entertainment and Soma Games released a couple of small video games this week based on Redwall, the beloved children’s fantasy series written by the late Brian Jacques. They are, effectively, the first time the franchise has been touched in over a decade, when Jacques’ final book in the series—2011’s The Rogue Crew—was released posthumously. That means, for 13 years, every Hollywood studio has either ignored Redwall or failed to make any adaptations of its epic saga about heroic medie…

Well, when you work out a business deal as huge as the one where Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox all team up to share the streaming rights to professional sports through one super-subscription, you’re bound to ruffle a few feathers—at the same time, when three people are making all of the money, it stands to reason that someone will be mad that they’re not also making all of the money. However you want to slice it, that’s what’s happening here, and it’s hard to argue with the party that…

If you’ve ever wondered what Veep would look like if Selina Meyer got everything she ever wanted and became an all-powerful autocrat, then HBO just might have you covered with The Regime. Coming in March, the limited series stars Kate Winslet as the fairly evil chancellor of a fictional European country in the midst of political upheaval, with apparently nothing standing between her and her various whims. She wants to have a close relationship with a brutal soldier-man called The Butcher? She do…

Argylle isn’t lighting up the box offices (in retrospect, they should’ve just lied and said Taylor Swift really did write it), but it still has so many famous actors in it doing the promotional cycle and they need something to talk about. That brings us to the latest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, during which host Josh Horowitz decided to resurrect the whole “sex scene” discourse from a while back. And get this: Henry Cavill is not a fan of them. Cavill said that sex scenes “can be…

5,000 years ago, in 2017, James Cameron laid out his basic vision for the future of the Avatar franchise—which, at that point, was just the one movie. In addition to revealing that Avatar 2 would come out in December of 2020 (it didn’t), Cameron teased that Avatar 3 would come a year later (it didn’t), Avatar 4 would come in December of 2024 (it’ll be weird if it does), and Avatar 5 would come out in December of 2025 (it still could, but again, we’re a sequel behind his schedule). In a new chat…

Whenever a well-liked piece of entertainment gets a questionably necessary sequel or reboot or remake, the typical way to make the new thing more palatable to fans of the old thing is to remind them that the old thing isn’t going away. That bit of stock reassurance is particularly relevant for video game fans right now, thanks to the release of developer Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. A spin-off of Rocksteady’s beloved trilogy of Batman games—Arkham Asylum (2009), Arkham Ci…

In a move that may make you feel the sudden urge to look at a calendar to confirm that it is still 2024 and not somewhere around 2014 or so, someone just paid $100 million for a podcast. And not just someone, but SiriusXM, the satellite radio people who recently got in trouble with New York’s attorney general for allegedly making it “intentionally difficult for its customers to cancel their subscriptions.” Apparently they have $100 million laying around, and they used it to get “certain exclusiv…

French director Pierre Morel’s Taken came out in U.S. theaters 15 years ago this month, meaning we’ve been able to intermittently enjoy a decade and a half of star Liam Neeson’s attempts to just do Taken again, and again and again and again. And why shouldn’t he? Taken made $200 million past its budget and rebuilt Neeson’s career, and if the premise of “older guy you wouldn’t expect to be an action star” was good in 2009 when he was in his 50s, then it only gets better as he gets older. Though…

MachineGames, the developers behind Wolfenstein: The New Order and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, are experts in making video games about punching Nazis, so it makes sense that they were tasked with developing Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, a brand new first-person action game starring pop culture’s most famous puncher of Nazis. Microsoft showed off the first real trailer for the game during an Xbox announcement stream today, revealing its title, release window (this year!), and the first f…

This week, the Emmys crowned another Outstanding Limited Series that might live on past its end and become a regular series, and now one of the most famous examples of that practice might have yet another continuation on the horizon. As reported by Variety, HBO CEO Casey Bloys has addressed rumors about a third season of Big Little Lies, and while he won’t formally commit just yet, he does say that he thinks having more of the show “could be great”—just the kind of enthusiasm you want out of a T…

Though the initiative was first launched to give solo spin-offs to Marvel heroes from the movies (the Scarlet Witch, Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, Loki, and Hawkeye), Disney+’s MCU shows spent all of last year introducing whole new characters (Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk) in their very own bespoke spin-offs. Now we’re getting a fun combination of the two, with Alaqua Cox’s Echo getting her own show after debuting in Hawkeye. But who is Echo? What’s her whole deal? And how is she now on…

Money Heist was an early international success story for Netflix in 2017. The Spanish TV series, about Robin Hood-style bank robbers who become folk heroes in a war against out-of-control capitalism, originally aired season one in its home country. Netflix picked up the streaming rights, turning it into a global hit. They then dumped a ton of money into expanding its budget for two additional seasons. The series had a lot of iconic characters, including Álvaro Morte’s heist mastermind El Profes…

Joker: Folie À Deux director Todd Phillips offered up a little holiday gift to everyone earlier this week in the form of two new photos from his Joker sequel, and while it’s nice(?) to see ol’ Arthur Fleck again through a little window, Phillips’ second photo seems like an even nicer gift—if only for its meme potential. See, do you ever find yourself completely obsessed with something that will inevitably turn you into a total stupid fool? Like, you know, a clown? Maybe it’s a crush, maybe it’s…

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around. If I have any personality flaws, perhaps the biggest one is that I am unrepentantly an Xbox user—which, in the video game space, is the only thing…