Emma Stefansky

When you’re part of a giant franchise, there are going to be toys of you. That’s just how these things tend to work. Star Wars is in a realm all of its own, with toys ranging from giant Star Destroyer LEGO sets to Elan Sleazebaggano action figures, and, naturally, the stars of the franchise have their favorites and least-favorites. Mark Hamill recently shared his opinion on what he thinks is the worst Luke Skywalker toy, and it’s quite a doozy.

For all intents and purposes, every sign points to Michael Bay and the Transformers series going their separate ways after The Last Knight. Bay even wrote a goodbye letter to the franchise thanking everyone involved for five movies’ worth of explosions, robots fighting each other, and female characters introduced from the legs up. But there’s one person who thinks he might be faking it.

While Black Panther has already been introduced into the MCU, his first solo movie will act as another introduction of sorts. We’ll meet Wakanda, the nation T’Challa now rules over; we’ll get to know the real motivation behind Ulysses Klaw’s fanaticism; and we’ll also get to see some really cool villains in their MCU debut. We know Erik Killmonger will be complicating things for T’Challa and his rule over the nation, but did you know that Deadly Nightshade will also be making an appearance? She actually already has!

The end of one month means the start of another, which also means that new things are coming to a streaming platform near you. Netflix’s July instant releases are stacked, and include a few classic cartoon dinosaur movies, the premieres of a new Netflix original shows, and one Star Wars Story.

Matt Reeves is the type of director who makes action movies that are primarily character studies: the character-driven empathy of the Planet of the Apes movies were a pleasant surprise and departure from what could have been just another big-budget CGI soup. Reeves is a director who makes you care about the people in his movies, which is why he might be the best choice to direct Ben Affleck’s The Batman after Affleck himself stepped down. Reeves’ work on War for the Planet of the Apes is done, and now that he can turn his attention to his DC movie, he already knows which director he’ll turn to for guidance.

Well, that was unexpected. Lucasfilm has just announced that Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are no longer at the helm of Star Wars’ Han Solo spinoff movie, due to, you guessed it, that perennial Hollywood scourge: creative differences.

We don’t know a whole lot about the Han Solo movie aside from the fact that it’s about Han Solo and he’s a young lad in it, but we have had some descriptions of the other characters to fuel our speculation engines. Woody Harrelson, for example, is said to be playing a kind of “mentor” to young Solo, which those of us who’ve stayed up to date on the Expanded Universe through the years know to be Alezsandr Badure, Han Solo’s teacher at the Imperial Academy who taught him all his flying skills. But now Woody Harrelson is saying that his character, whose name is “Beckett,” isn’t exactly the Imperial officer type.

Hollywood has been itching to do something with The Twilight Zone for quite a while now, but nothing seems to be sticking. Today brings news that Warner Bros. has officially hired on another screenwriter to pen the script: Christine Lavaf, of Fringe, Falling Skies, and Warner Bros. MonsterVerse fame.

It’s that time again — time to mark your calendars for the start of a new month and a new streaming season! Today brings great news for Amazon Prime subscribers, as July’s slate of new additions has some really, really good ones in the mix.

Oscar-winning director John G. Avildsen, whose 1976 Rocky shot Sylvester Stallone to instant acclaim and became an ageless classic, has died at the age of 81. His oldest son Anthony informed the L.A. Times that Avildsen died from pancreatic cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

It’s no secret that Hollywood has an ageism issue. While most actresses over 45 are doomed to playing mothers, grandmothers, or not getting any work at all, male actors’ careers are easily extended into their more distinguished decades. The last time Tom Cruise had a female co-star close to his age was Miranda Otto in 2005’s War of the Worlds. Which is why it’s so refreshing these days to see actresses past their thirties get a younger love interest. Or, is it? The Home Again trailer is here to test that theory.

Remember that book you loved as a child, that featured simple black and white illustrations of a Spanish bull who’d rather smell flowers and sit under his favorite cork tree than get riled and fight a bunch of dudes with pointy sticks in an arena? Well, it’s a movie now, and none other than John Cena is voicing the titular Ferdinand, whose chance encounter with the back end of a bee sends him packed into a truck and hauled off to the bullfights. There’s just one wrinkle: he won’t fight.