ScreenCrush

Spider-Man: Brand New Day may be one of the biggest movies ever, but not every Spidey title is a hit. Amazon has canceled their Spider-Noir live-action TV show starring Nicolas Cage after only one season, according to Variety, The show was developed by Oren Uziel and starred Cage as Ben Reilly, a private eye who is secretly a superhero in 1930s New York City. Its cast also included Lamorne Morris, Li Jun Li, and Brendan Gleeson.

Avengers: Doomsday didn’t have a finished script when it went into production — but one of the movie’s directors doesn’t see that as a bad thing. That would be Joe Russo, who told the Associated Press how he and brother Anthony “always view the script as a living organism” as part of the outlet’s fall movie preview. Russo added: We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors.

In order for a story to have meaning, especially one with a lot of action and adventure and peril, someone’s gotta die. Characters running around in fear for their lives loses some of its potency every time everyone makes it out alive, so here and there a good story starts picking some of them off. They don’t necessarily have to be the main characters — although they can be — but major character death is a necessity for a story to have any real weight.

The big Marvel casting story of the week involves an actor named Noah Jupe. At this moment, hardcore movie and theater nerds might know him from his role in Hamnet or for starring in Romeo & Juliet on the West End recently opposite new Marvel star Sadie Sink. But according to the Hollywood trades, Marvel just chose Jupe for a secret role in Avengers: Secret Wars.

Do you like scary movies? Follow-up question? Do you like novel soda flavors? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then this is the movie-adjacent article for you. Because the mad food scientists at Fanta are at it once again, hatching up a new soda concoction themed to a horror icon in honor of Halloween. Last year, they had a whole line of Fanta Halloween cans.

TV houses are funny things. It was, and still is, rare to film a TV show in an actual home that it is based in, especially the ones filmed (say it with me) "in front of a live studio audience." But here's where those core memories kick in. Because the programs pre-2000s mostly relied on a catchy theme song and opening credits, it only made sense to show the house where most of the action takes place. Some shows even filmed the cast in front of them ... even when they were three thousand miles away.

Mark your calendars DC fans: Supergirl is coming home. No, not to Krypton. Or even to the ruins of Argo City. She’s headed to HBO Max. The latest DC Comics movie will premiere there for streaming next week. (Do you think Argo City had streaming movies while it was floating through space for years? I hope so. Can you imagine decades without access to the Criterion Channel?

After watching By Any Means I would like to propose a test that may be used in the future to judge the merits of any and all movies that claim to be “Based on a True Story.” To apply the test, simply ask this question: Is the movie more compelling than the Wikipedia page of its real-life subject? If the answer is no, your film has failed the Biopic Test. On my way home from By Any Means, I glanced at the Wikipedia page for Gregory Scarpa, the mob enforcer played in the film by Mark Wahlberg.

The bad guys in Top Gun are not Russians. In fact, they’re not anyone. Everyone watching Top Gun in 1987 assumed they were connected in some way to the Soviet Union, because the bad guys in every ’80s action movie were communists of some sort. But Top Gun never named the country its sinister “MiGs” came from. The pilots who dogfight Tom Cruise’s Maverick are never seen behind their dark helmets. They’re just bad guys; utterly faceless and as generic and as free of politics as possible.

Another one bites the dust ... Animal Actors on Location — one of three remaining opening day attractions at Universal Orlando still in operation today — will close for good later this fall. In a statement, the park said: As Universal Orlando Resort continues to evolve, Animal Actors On Location! will take its final bow on November 2, 2026, making way for a future experience.