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The Borderlands movie trailer has all the nuance of a Borderlands game
The first trailer for the upcoming Borderlands movie is upon us. The film’s directed by Eli Roth and stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jack Black.
Jack Black will reportedly play Steve in the long-delayed Minecraft movie adaptation
Jack Black is reportedly set to play Minecraft Steve. Deadline wrote on Tuesday that the School of Rock actor will play the game’s blocky protagonist alongside Jason Momoa in the Minecraft film adaptation.
Chris Pratt and Charlie Day headline the Mario Bros. movie in 2022
There's a new Nintendo-sanctioned, animated Super Mario Bros. movie coming out December, 2022. You've been warned.
Jack Black will play Claptrap in the Borderlands movie
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and School of Rock actor Jack Black will play snarky robot Claptrap in the upcoming Borderlands movie.
What’s coming to Netflix in June: ‘Black Mirror’ and the final 'Jessica Jones'
Netflix packed May with new movies like Wine Country, the animated series Tuca and Bertie, a Ted Bundy biopic and more. Now, it's bringing just as much new content and star power to June. In just the first half of the month, Netflix will release season five of Black Mirror -- a three episode run, which you can watch trailers for now -- and the third and final season of Jessica Jones.
Jack Black plans MMO mockumentary Wizard's Way remake
MMOs in movies are all the rage now (if by rage we mean exist or are currently casting), and Jack Black is getting in on act. The actor and his production company, Electric Dynamite, have secured the rights to remake a British mockumentory Wizard's Way, a film that focused on MMOs and the people who play them. The plot centers on two gamers who spend their time playing a fantasy game called Wizard's Way and includes the pair discovering secrets about the game and one's real-life quest to find his in-game wife. While there's no release date for the remake, you can catch a screening of the 2012 original on January 19th at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. And don't miss a sneak peek of the original trailer below.
Broken Age reunites Double Fine with Jack Black, Jennifer Hale
Remember when Double Fine got Hollywood superstar Jack Black to star in a video game? Well, it's happening again with Broken Age, the studio's Kickstarter-funded point-and-click adventure in which Black plays the excellently named Harm'ny Lightbeard, apparently the "lifter of clouds." If you've not heard of Jack Black, that means you've not seen School of Rock, and that in turn means we can't be friends - sorry. The other big-name returnee to Double Fine's recording booth is Jennifer Hale, gaming's equivalent of Hollywood talent as far as voice acting goes. Hale has appeared in all video games ever made, but she's probably best known for her role as Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect games. If you have a minute, it's worth going through her game-ography and just gaping in awe at her career. After proving to be be more expensive than anticipated, Broken Age will arrive in halves. The first half is due in January, available via Early Access. Double Fine will use the income generated from the first half to sustain funds to make the rest of the game.
5 ways to explain we're not playing Kung Fu Panda
I think we've all settled into deep, personal relationships with Mists of Pandaria at this point. I know I love sitting up late at night, staring soulfully into its joyful, brew-laden eyes. I can't be the only one. It's like kismet or something. But not everyone gets our love. They look at Mists of Pandaria and mistake it for a video game version of Kung Fu Panda. There's a better way to handle that miscommunication than making myself bald when I yank my hair out, screaming, "No. it. is. not!" So in the interest of propogating better understanding between Mists of Pandaria lovers and those who confuse it for Jack Black's latest endeavor, here's 5 ways to explain that we're not playing the Kung Fu Panda MMO.
WoW Moviewatch: Kung Fu Pandaren
The Pandaren pet was a huge hit, so I guess this parody video was somewhat inevitable. However, PixelatedPixels definitely knocked this WoW remake of Kung Fu Panda out of the park. Obviously, the soundtrack is mostly from Kung Fu Panda, but there's a subtle twist at the end that makes Kung Fu Pandaren pure WoW. The animation and graphics work in Kung Fu Pandaren were absolutely amazing. The creator was able to make great use of the Pandaren's extant emotes to really fill out this video. I loved the video as it is, but the animation is so good that I hope the creators go on to create a new, original story for the Kung Fu Pandaren. Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at machinima@wow.com.
Caption contest: Gulliver's iPhone makes it big in Hollywood
So apparently the hidden island of Lilliput has cellular coverage, but who cares -- it's still gonna be another crap movie. Way to ruin Gulliver's Travels with Jack Black. Joe: "Finally, Angry Birds the way it was meant to be played." Darren: "That's a big iPhone." Josh T.: "The monolith taught the monkeys to kill, also, how to make conference calls." Paul: "Time-traveling Jack Black plants hidden iPhone reference in Jonathan Swift novel." Thomas: "It's holding you wrong." Tim: "Eighteen months ago, the first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth was discovered. It was buried forty feet below the lunar surface, near the crater Cupertino." Vlad: "It's just a jumbo iPhone, I don't see what all the fuss is about." Sam: "What does this mean? It's so bright, so vivid." Sean H.: "And so did the tiny scholars toil for decades to unravel the mysteries of the blue block, and the significance of its question marks." Richard Lai: "Paul Miller makes a cameo appearance in this scene, tut-tuts at the low pixel density." Myriam: "I'm crushing your head! I'm crushing your head!"
The Digital Continuum: The 'Next Big Thing' in MMOs
Is All Points Bulletin the "Next Big Thing" in MMOs? While I'm fully aware that Realtime Worlds doesn't specifically prefer to associate the game with this genre, it's very much a part of it -- but it also orbits the fringes of what we commonly refer to as a massively multiplayer online game. Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2 and All Points Bulletin come from a different school of business models. These games hinge on the idea that most people dislike coughing up 15 bucks a month to keep playing their favorite title. Just look to the success of the original Guild Wars, having a year ago passed six million copies sold. That's a pretty great start for non-subscription MMOs, and because of that success we now have GW's sequel and APB on the way.
Brutal Legend postmortem: Scrum, content explosion and lawsuit drama
It's been a bumpy road to release for Brütal Legend. Tim Schafer's had to change publishers, deal with a pesky lawsuit, soldier through PR missteps and even handle some post-release DLC. This is all common knowledge, but in a lengthy postmortem at Gamasutra, Caroline Esmurdoc, executive producer at Double Fine, goes in depth on the development strategy for the title and talks about what went right and what went wrong in the creation of this rock gaming opus. Double Fine adopted the Scrum method of agile software development for Brütal Legend, which allowed the company to create a renderer, terrain and a playable Eddie Riggs for Tim in a mere month. Content creation was fairly steady, Esmurdoc admitted, but around January of this year, the game's content jumped from the 2.5GB generated over three years to a massive 9GB, thanks to multiple teams unloading assets for the game simultaneously. Esmurdoc also touched on the lawsuit, though she couldn't go into specifics beyond mentioning that the transition between publishers caused "internal unrest and morale dips among the team", and that Double Fine learned Activision would not be publishing Brutal Legend when the game was suspiciously absent from a list of the publisher's upcoming games. Double Fine then pursued a new publishing partner.
Jack Black discusses the demon slayer's workout on Jimmy Kimmel Live
This week, Jack Black continued his bizarre Brütal Legend promotional tour with an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, somewhat in character as Eddie Riggs. As we watched Black upturn furniture and do clap push-ups, we started to realize that he's getting rather a lot of mileage out of that muscle suit. And then we couldn't help but wonder: what do you think that suit smells like right now? And how do you even clean the inside of a foam rubber muscle suit? Do you use household cleaners of some kind, or does the film industry have a specially formulated solution just for cleaning bodysuits?... Oh, right, the Kimmel segment's after the break, in four parts.
Review: Brutal Legend
I have to start by being brutally honest with you: Brütal Legend is not the game I hoped it would be. As a huge fan of director, designer and writer Tim Schafer's body of work – especially Double Fine's debut effort, Psychonauts – I had prepared myself for a wonderfully written, laugh-out-loud funny, constantly surprising experience filled with compelling characters that would have me grinning in anticipation of where it was taking me next. What I came away with after beating the game in about six hours (granted, I didn't embark on many of the battle- and racing-based sub-missions, but I did do quite a lot of exploring) was the opinion that Eddie Riggs is a truly awesome character, along with a sense of wonder at the fantastic – and very metal – world Schafer and crew had created. Unfortunately, I also came away with a questioning of why so much of the game felt like a b-side to the hit single that had been its first couple of hours. %Gallery-75305%
Brutal Legend video talks about the competition
If you're like us, you're still writhing about in agony from the last round of Brütal Legend videos unleashed upon the internet. It's okay, we had little hope things would get better -- that is, until we were handed this latest video. It's actually entirely watchable and even makes a few funny comments about the various games being released around Brütal Legend, including Assassin's Creed 2's feathered protagonist Ezio and how those night-vision goggles that come with Modern Warfare 2 aren't as awesome as slamming an axe into a demon's face. Check it out above.
Don't watch this Brutal Legend video
We're going to put this up front: There's really no reason to watch these Brütal Legend videos. They were shot during a press event at the Key Club in Hollywood, during which Jack Black dressed up as -- and pretended to be -- the game's protagonist, Eddie Riggs. The videos are unequivocally groan-inducing affairs. We're sure that the idea seemed funny at the time, but it falls pretty flat in execution. It's like watching bad improv, which, we suppose, is exactly what it is. There are a few notable tidbits in here, like Tim Schafer explaining that he didn't have the nerve to approach Jack Black for the project until he found out Black was a Psychonauts fan. Still, that one nugget -- which we've heard before -- will cost you five minutes of awful. For the truly masochistic, two more videos can be found after the break, one of Tim Schafer interviewing Jack Black, and another of Black playing Brütal Legend.
Jack Black shares more Brutal Thoughts on roadies
Brutal Legend's upcoming Rocktober release is nearly at hand, marking this new episode of "Brutal Thoughts" one of the last. This latest episode feels more phoned in than others, with Jack Black simply talking about roadies, and why they're genetically different from the rest of humanity. Perhaps it's just us, but testicular punchlines (ed: ouch) just don't cut it (ed: ouch, again) with us anymore.
Jack Black cosplays as Eddie Riggs at VMAs
Okay, sure, he may have looked ridiculous dressed up as Eddie Riggs at last night's MTV video Music Awards, what with that awful wig and foam arms that would have been laughed off the set of Popeye. And yeah, we know he's got a stake in the project's success, but you have to love Jack Black's commitment to Brütal Legend, one that we wish all big-name celebrities could share when they appear in games of their own. Seriously though, Jack, let's have a talk about that wig.
PAX 2009: Brutal Legend lets you decide about the F-word
Tim Schafer showed us the opening cinematic for Brutal Legend at PAX, where they revealed the band that Jack Black's Eddie Riggs roadies for: Kabbage Boy. It's a band full of hipster d-bags (one guy wears a Phantom of the Opera half-mask) and they think they're metal. The only problem is that they sound like every emo-alternaband out there, much to Eddie's chagrin. Hopefully we'll get to reveal who's in the band soon, until then just let your speculation run wild.All of that inside, the cinematic included a very novel way to select if you want to hear the super-cussin' & swearin' version of Brutal Legend, or go the sanitized and parental-safe route. Eddie notices one of the musicians crawling around on top of his behemoth-sized, Stonehenge-on-acid set (which Eddie has already been chastised for not tailoring to their "tween" audience), and is not happy. He spouts, "I don't know how many times I've told you not to crawl around up there! I don't know what the F....." And then the game freezes. A menu screen pops up and you have to choose if you want to hear naughty words or not, and when you resume he finishes the word appropriately. Much better than choosing from a menu screen, eh? There another option-setting moment like this a bit later in the scene which was cut short, but we imagine it'll have something to do with violence and blood spurts. Thanks for making even the settings fun, Double Fine.
Video: Jack Black and Jellybean, the guitar-playing cat
As far as internet memes go, you can't do much better than amusing cat-themed images. Jack Black, sage that he is, knows this all too well. As such, the latest edition of Brutal Thoughts is packed to the brim with hilarious cat action. Granted, it's not quite as satisfying as the last, battle axe-infused episode, but it has its moments. Watch it now and be among the first to witness Jellybean, the cat with serious face-melting skills.Oh, there's some Brütal Legend footage in there too. Also with cats.
