Den of Geek New York Comic Con 2025 Special Edition
ALSO A decade of cover stories and exclusive interviews that EMBODIED EVERYTHING GEEK
THE R U n N i NG MAN
Another Timely Tale from King
BL A C K P H O Ne 2
PREDATO R : bA DLA nds
The hunter becomes the hunted, and ELLE FANNING ’s synth becomes an unlikely bridge to Alien
IT : w E L CO ME TO de RR Y
Director Scott Derrickson Answers the Call Pennywise Dances Again
▼TONY HALE
The TV comedy legend behind Buster Bluth on Arrested Development and Gary Walsh on Veep sits down for a careerspanning conversation with Den of Geek. PG. 14
BLACK PHONE 2
Black Phone 2 director Scott Derrickson has famously walked away from sequels in the past, including Doctor Strange, but he is ready to explain why the Grabber has a hold you cannot shake. PG. 10
▲THE RUNNING MAN
Cat and mouse games continue in Edgar Wright's fresh take on Stephen King’s The Running Man. The Hot Fuzz filmmaker tells us about stepping out of Schwarzenegger’s shadow, while Glen Powell reveals why this is a bucket list dream project. PG. 46
▲ON THE COVER: PREDATOR: BADLANDS
The world of the Yautja will become a lot bigger and scarier in a film that asks "what if the alien that hunted Arnold Schwarzenegger for sport was now the prey?" Director Dan Trachtenberg and the leads, including Elle Fanning as a Weyland-Yutani robot at the end of her warranty, invite us on the hunt. PG. 36
INSIDE COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES
The biotech company that broke the internet by bringing back the dire wolf invites us into its new laboratories and HQ, where the woolly mammoth might be next. Welcome to Pleistocene Park! PG. 52
▼IT: WELCOME TO DERRY
The horrors of Derry extend well beyond Pennywise. The cast and creators of It: Welcome to Derry provide a look inside the buried secrets and missing people of HBO’s It series. PG. 56
▲STAR STRUCK
To celebrate 10 years of Den of Geek magazine, we highlight 10 rising stars who have graced Den of Geek studios at big-time events. PG. 60
TALAMASCA: THE SECRET ORDER
AMC’s Immortal Universe ventures beyond Anne Rice’s books with a new series about the underground organization tasked with keeping tabs on the supernatural world. PG. 20
THE END OF THE CONSOLE WARS
With traditionalist Nintendo clinging to its hardware and beloved IP, and Microsoft and Sony transitioning to a consoleless future, Chris Freiberg reminisces on a bygone era. PG. 22
FROM THE DEN
Bruce Campbell came back to our NYCC studio years after gracing our first ever cover and took this photo. Hail to the king, baby!
Comic Cons, and later as a quarterly periodical and special edition event collectible. (Please take a moment to think of our designers, who are sometimes producing three issues inside of a month.)
During this time, we experienced fantastic opportunities: cover stories with Denis Villeneuve and Rebecca Ferguson discussing Dune, meeting the next generation of dragonriders in House of the Dragon, and events that found us hanging out with Dwayne Johnson at SDCC and EVE fanatics in Reykjavík. At SXSW, we published the first interview anywhere with Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All at Once. And personally, the magazine allowed me to sit down with Edgar Wright, Robert Eggers, James Gunn, and Jodie Comer, to name just a few. The access is nice, but the chance to really dive into the work with artists in an unharried space opened DoG to a larger world of filmmaking and storytellers.
A Decade In The Den
THE FIRST TIME YOU SEE YOUR byline in print is an enchanted thing. Many folks who worked at Den of Geek over the years saw theirs on the website at one time or another—and on a near-daily basis for some poor souls. But beholding it in the printed pages of a magazine is different. It’s something you can feel in your hand. It has weight.
The weight—and wait—of that first issue coming together 10 years ago
lives in my memory, too. The long nights, the proofs, the breathless anticipation to see what exclusive images of Bruce Campbell and his chainsaw-arm we might receive for the cover. It is a great quirk of this industry that at a time when the rest of entertainment media pivoted to online-only, Den of Geek really came into its own on the printed page— initially as special editions at events including San Diego and New York
Yet more than just coveted scoops or name-drops, it is the passion and dedication of everyone who made 10 years of this magazine possible that I would want you to know about. Folks like Mike Cecchini and John Saavedra, who each operated as EIC during most of the magazine’s existence; Rosie Fletcher, who, with endless English cheer and cheek, led the magazine as print editor to quarterly success; and Chief Creative Officer Chris Longo, who first dreamed up the wild idea of taking a website to the printers. In this economy?! They put this in your hand. They gave it weight. And they ultimately made it possible for Den of Geek to have a future as a brand that lives out in the world: at events and interview studios, off the page and out of site.
David Crow, Managing Editor
READ THIS ISSUE, THEN SLAB IT!
Together with CGC, we’re offering an exclusive grading discount to celebrate our 10th anniversary issue and CGC’s 25th anniversary.
CGC REVOLUTIONIZED COMIC BOOK COLLECTING with the introduction of expert and impartial certification services that are backed by a comprehensive guarantee. Now, with more than 20 million collectibles certified, CGC is the world’s largest and most trusted third-party grading service for comics, magazines, TCGs, sports cards, video games, home video, and more.
“It’s hard to believe that it’s been 25 years since CGC first made its mark on the world of pop culture collectibles, but we’ve achieved so many milestones and made so many memories, I guess it must be true,” CGC President Matt Nelson says.
The company continues to grow, with the addition of new services, investment in the latest technology, and record-setting prices realized. CGC is part of the Certified Collectibles Group, whose mission is to empower collectors with services that ignite passion, create value, and build community.
“Over the years, it’s been a pleasure to work with Den of Geek and have the opportunity to reach its amazing followers and fans. We are proud to support this community and create value in the area of magazine collecting, where we’ve seen some incredible prices realized for CGC-certified magazines. Here’s to the next 25 years!”
Oren Katzeff CEO
Matthew Sullivan-Pond PUBLISHER
EDITORIAL
Chris Longo CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER
David Crow
MANAGING EDITOR + FILM EDITOR
Alec Bojalad
DEPUTY EDITOR + TV EDITOR
ART
Lucy Quintanilla CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Jessica Koynock ART DIRECTOR
PRODUCTION
Kyle Christine Darnell
MAGAZINE PRODUCTION
Rosie Fletcher
MAGAZINE SUB EDITOR
Sarah Litt
MAGAZINE COPY EDITOR
PHOTO & VIDEO PRODUCTION
Nick Morgulis SENIOR VIDEO PRODUCER
Andrew Halley HEAD OF VIDEO PRODUCTION
LITERALLY MEDIA IS A NETWORK OF LEGACY, ICONIC INTERNET BRANDS, BOASTING THE #1 HUMOR NETWORK ON COMSCORE, AND CREATING CONTENT DAILY IN THE MEME, COMEDY AND ENTERTAINMENT SPACE.
Horror master Scott Derrickson returns to the world of The Black Phone with longtime collaborator Ethan Hawke for a different kind of nightmare.
BY MAX EVRY
WHAT IF YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE
just kept coming back? Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions are doing everything in their power to turn Ethan Hawke’s The Black Phone slasher The Grabber into a bona fide horror icon. The masked killer is becoming a staple of Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights, his unnerving grin adorns cans of Fanta, and now he’s headlining the inevitable second movie.
The snowbound sequel, Black Phone 2, brings a terrifying new dimension to the 2021 sleeper hit based on the short horror story by Joe Hill. The whole gang is back, including director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill, as well as stars Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw (whose young characters are now going through high school growing pains). And yes, Ethan Hawke dons The Grabber’s mask once more, becoming a dream-haunting supernatural killer in the Freddy Krueger tradition.
Derrickson, who began his directorial career with Hellraiser: Inferno, then later helmed Doctor Strange for Marvel, had “no thoughts about making a sequel” while shooting the 2021 original, but toward the end of production, Hill came up with the kernel for a continuation that the filmmaker tells us he “never would have thought of.” It got the ball rolling toward something truly sinister…
Were there times when you and Cargill were writing the script for Black Phone 2 and thought, “This or that’s cool, but it doesn’t feel like Black Phone anymore?”
No, I don’t think I felt that way at all in the process of it. Doing a sequel, you have to strike a balance between keeping elements of the original that audiences are going to want to return to, which, in this case, is really the characters and The Grabber. In terms of evolving it, you don’t want to make it entirely different. The biggest choice I made was waiting for a couple years to pass so the kids would be older. Making a high school horror film demanded something more impactful, more violent, and an evolution of the kind of film that the first movie was, but sticking to a certain point of view. There are a lot of emotional
similarities between the two movies. Ethan saw it, then said, “I think this elevates the first movie.” Coming from him, that’s about as high praise as I could get.
In terms of expanding this world, do you see these two films as bookends, or is Ethan Hawke playing The Grabber until he’s 90?
I was never trying to create a franchise. Film franchises can be really fun and exciting, but I, as a filmmaker, can only do one film at a time. I did not feel obliged to make a sequel. I believed that I could make something really interesting that was a proper evolution of what the first movie was, but not the same movie— not a regurgitation, just giving people the same kind of film. I don’t have any story ideas for a third one. I might
Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw, reprising their roles as brother and sister Finney and Gwen after the first film. The characters are now in high school and haunted by trauma.
YOU HAVE TO TRUST YOUR OWN INSTINCTS ABOUT WHAT’S GOING TO BE INTERESTING AND ENTERTAINING, AND TO SOME DEGREE, SCARY. AND I THINK THE MASK IS A REALLY GOOD EXAMPLE OF THAT.”
think about that later, but not yet.
The Grabber is such a ready-made horror icon in the Freddy Krueger mold. How do you make a character like that indelible?
You have to trust your own instincts about what’s going to be interesting and entertaining, and to some degree, scary. And I think the mask is a really good example of that. We worked really hard on that mask in the first one, and it seemed like the most fundamental iconography from the first movie to hold on to.
Finn (Thames) ended the last movie somewhat elated and socially
elevated, but four years later, all that is gone, and he’s isolated again. How do you take the character to these dark places without negating the triumph of the first film?
If you’re going to pick up these characters three or four years later— the first movie was set in 1978, this one in 1982—you can do it. You can use movie sensibility and not take it seriously at all. There doesn’t have to be any emotional effect from those events, but I feel like what happened to these kids would have a real impact on them.
It would be something that would take a lot of years to deal with. That was an interesting place to start:
Ethan Hawke teams up with Scott Derrickson for a third time while reprising the most disturbing role of his career, The Grabber.
“What kind of effect did those events have on their lives?” People come out victorious from situations that are really terrifying, but sometimes it affects them for years to come.
Although Finn was very much the focus of the last movie, the second one feels more like his sister’s film. Gwen (McGraw) has this big emotional arc. Did you question whether the audience would go along with that shift?
To a degree, it’s true what you’re saying, but they’re both in pretty much every sequence. It’s more about switching the primary point of view. The central thing in the [first] movie was their relationship, and that was something that had real power. There had been a lot accomplished in the first film, establishing and building that relationship, so carrying that on was really interesting to me.
In terms of her having more focus than she had in the first movie, I definitely was interested in doing that. She was a surprisingly beloved character, and she’s such a good
actress, a big emotional engine in such a little person. That was something worth exploring more.
Jason Blum has said that Blumhouse always puts a little more into sequels or IP stuff. Was Black Phone 2 different in terms of “more money, more problems?”
That’s always true with a movie. I was fortunate with both The Black Phone and Sinister at Blumhouse, in that they were pretty small movies, off-theradar, and they just left me alone. On this one, there was more involvement from Universal than Blumhouse, because there’s a lot more at stake. We did spend more money, but that’s also normal.
I also really like working for Universal and Peter Cramer. Having a little bit more of a creative back and forth, talking about scenes, and getting notes was to the benefit of the movie. Universal gives good notes and never forced me to do anything, ever. I talk through what I think is a good idea and what’s a bad idea, and it helps the creative process. I don’t think the first Black Phone was a big enough movie to really merit anyone’s time, but now there’s a lot more money being spent. There’s a lot more marketing money that will be spent. I welcome them wanting to be a little more involved in their investment.
Black Phone 2 opens in theaters Oct. 17.
The Grabber now haunts Finney like a nocturnal demon, literally calling from the other side of death.
Arianna Rivas, Madeleine McGraw and Mason
Thames film a scene where Gwen’s dreams are stalked by The Grabber.
SPOTLIGHT
A Motherboy’s Life
Comedy legend Tony Hale walks us through his career, from Arrested Development to Veep to Pixar and beyond.
BY ALEC BOJALAD AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY BEN TRIVETT
GROWING UP WITH BUSTER BLUTH ON ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Buster was so fun. He’s like a cartoon character. I once asked a very actor question to [Arrested Development creator Mitchell Hurwitz]: “What does Buster want?” He said he thinks he wants safety. That’s why Buster is always pulling his chin back. He’s always in this state of defense. He’s ready for something to come at him.
One of my favorite things is when people come up and say, “I love this joke [from Arrested Development].” And I say, “Please tell me it, because I’ve completely forgotten.” The only joke from the show that I remember, because it’s my favorite bit, is Tobias joining the Blue Man Group because he thought it was a support group for depressed men. There’s nothing better than that. That was the level of comedy you were working with.
Back then, people weren’t used to watching a show and having to think about it. But because of Netflix (and DVDs), people could rewind it and be like, “Do you see that blue handprint on the wall? That’s from three episodes ago. Do you see that Buster is sitting in front of something that says ‘Arm Off?’ Oh, that’s foreshadowing to him having his hand bitten off by a seal.” All those layers just made Mitch brilliant in my eyes.
BEING VICE PRESIDENT SELINA MEYER’S “BAGMAN,” GARY WALSH, ON VEEP
Gary spent a long time sewing pockets into that bag because everything had to have a place. He had Costco versions of whatever was in the bag at home, because God forbid he ever ran out. I think, in one episode, there was a game to see how fast he could pull items out of it. For Gary, that bag was his world. And that’s why it was so hard in that one episode when Selina gave him a new bag. It’s like Linus’ blanket.
Here’s a fun fact. I watch [the projects I make] once, but I don’t watch them again. But I watch the blooper reels. I have every gag reel of Veep on my Dropbox to give me immediate joy. As a wrap gift to the cast, I put them all on a flash drive and gave them out. I don’t remember a lot of stuff. But I remember the bloopers.
BECOMING “FEAR” FOR PIXAR’S INSIDE OUT 2
Inside Out is one of my five favorite movies. I remember seeing that movie and just going, “How did they conceptualize this?” They brought emotions to life and brought them into the world. I had to get past that starry-eyed thing towards Pixar—even after [voicing “Forky” in] Toy Story 4 But of course they’re very lovely. They told me the story of Inside Out 2, and I asked them, “What’s the difference between fear and anxiety?” They said, “Fear is an actual threat. Anxiety is a perceived threat.” It’s so good.
SPOTLIGHT
PLAYING AN ANTI-GHOST POTTERY PROFESSOR ON NBC COMEDY COMMUNITY
[Community star] Joel McHale is a buddy of mine. I think Anthony and Joe Russo directed that one because they were producers on the show, and I had worked with them on Arrested Development. I remember really going at it, hitting my toe against the door, and I sprained it from getting pissed off. But it was for the art!
PRODUCING AND STARRING IN THE FAMILY FILM SKETCH
It took eight years to get made. My buddy, Seth Worley, who’s the writer-director, had the idea and wrote the script. We just went back and forth for a few years trying to find financing and that kind of stuff. It’s like launching a child into the world. I haven’t produced much, so it’s a feeling I haven’t had. But I’m so proud of it.
I play a single dad who’s really worried because his daughter is drawing these pretty crazy pictures, and they end up coming to life. We describe it as “Inside Out meets Jurassic Park.” It’s a really fun family adventure with a theme about processing feelings. One of my favorite movies growing up was The Goonies. I remember making my parents watch it over and over, and they didn’t mind because it’s a fun experience. I have a daughter, and there are a lot of movies I had to watch over and over that I was like “I cannot watch this again.”
Photographed at San Diego Comic-Con
THE BEST OF GEEK
Say What?
Quotes of the month from Den of Geek
exclusive
interviews
“It’s like the neglected stepchild of my career in some ways, because I think it’s such a beautiful film and just grossly underappreciated. That had to do with the way it was released in that it kind of wasn’t released.”
— Jeffrey Wright on Ride with the Devil
. BY DEN OF GEEK STAFF
HE PROBAB LY WROTE
‘T O MR. PU R PLE’ T O ABOUT 10,000 PEOPLE. IT’S LIKE GEORGE LU C AS W RITING, ‘T HE F O R CE I S W ITH YOU.’
Gareth Edwards on getting Quentin Tarantino to sign an autograph for him as a kid.
“SOME VERSION OF L AT E NIG H T WILL CONTI NUE… T HERE’S GON N A BE LOTS OF OPP ORTUN I T Y F OR US.”
— Bob Odenkirk on the future of late night.
Being a goody-goody is what’s punk rock about him. He is those things; he is Pollyanna. He is oldfashioned, and aren’t we a little thirsty for people like that [because] there aren’t any anymore? They’ve all become mean.
— James Gunn on Superman. VISIT
“Kids a re great a c t in g teac hers. For pre-production, we did musical chairs and th e n l ea rned how to ki l l people on s et.”
— Sydney Chandler on playing the child-like Wendy in Alien: Earth
“The last few films I’ve worked on have been preoccupied by a sense of amnesia of lessons that felt impossible to unlearn following, say, the Second World War.”
Alex Garland, writer of Civil War, Warfare, and 28 Years Later.
10 Years of Geek
Take a trip back through a decade of Den of Geek magazine cover stories and the talented voices who helped change Geek culture. BY
DEN OF GEEK STAFF
NEW YORK COMIC CON
“Sam [Raimi] is like Uncle Sam in LA. We all go visit him, and he cooks [a] massive barbecue, and we have a bunch of children running around in the backyard.”
— Lucy Lawless on the extended Evil Dead family, including husband Rob Tapert.
2018 EVENT ISSUE: NEW YORK COMIC CON
“This is the greatest job I will ever have, and I know it. I knew it then, I tried to pretend it wasn’t, and now I understand it is my absolute legacy, and I am thrilled.”
— Jamie Lee Curtis on playing Laurie Strode.
2019 EVENT ISSUE: NEW YORK COMIC CON
“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t even know if it worked. There was a lot of experimentation going on, and I feel like I learned a lot from making these nine episodes, but I’m not entirely sure I’m able to articulate to you what I learned.”
— Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof on his atypical
ISSUE 2: THE SUICIDE SQUAD
“With a name like Bloodsport, he’s definitely going to grill. I don’t think he’s the guy that’s seasoning, but I think he’s behind the barbecue with the fire, making sure that meat and blood are cooking.”
Idris Elba chatting
The Suicide Squad and BBQ.
ISSUE 3: DUNE
“At the very core of Dune is a warning. Anyone who is trying to blend religion and politics—that is a dangerous cocktail.”
— Denis Villeneuve ahead of Dune’s 2021 release.
2022 EVENT ISSUE: SXSW
“I had no idea what the hell it was about.”
— Michelle Yeoh after reading the Everything Everywhere All at Once script.
“There’s no actual story. You might be like, ‘Oh, I was born, and then I smoked, and then I ate, and I got married, and then I had a dog, and then I got sick, and then I died.’ Those are just things that happen. It’s not a story. Stories make sense to us. They help us understand what’s happening, but they’re not actually what’s happening.”
— Donald Glover on crafting the surreal world of Atlanta
ISSUE 6: THE BOYS SEASON 3
“It all comes from this very logical place of ‘if there really was a superhero orgy, what would it look like? How would you depict it in the most honest way possible?’ Because
ISSUE 13: HOUSE OF THE DRAGON SEASON 2
“All these people choosing Team Black are driving me insane. Just stop being so boring! You need a bit of spice in your life. You need some danger. You need some betrayal. You need some vileness.”
— King Aegon II actor Tom Glynn-Carney, making his pitch for Team Green on House of the Dragon
ISSUE 14: ALIEN: ROMULUS
“There’s something striking in the restraint of those designs that ended up being the iconic xenomorph. The attachment of the human anatomy is just really strange, confrontational, and uncomfortable.”
— Alien: Romulus star Cailee Spaeny
2024 EVENT ISSUE: NEW YORK COMIC CON
“A lot of people live with a true fear of death, understandably so, but we’re kind of drawn to it and intrigued by it… because it’s the most terrifying thing, it’s the most titillating thing.”
— Nosferatu star Lily-Rose Depp.
“We need to find where the fear is in this archetype and bring it out again, and put to bed my friend Rob’s sparkling vampire.”
— Nosferatu director Robert Eggers on his pal Robert Pattinson.
2025 EVENT ISSUE: SXSW
“I always like it whenever they bring the blood. It’s like you’re getting into about getting doused in glitter-blood at 4 a.m.
Supernatural Spies
Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe goes underground as Talamasca: The Secret Order explores those who keep watch over the witches and vampires. BY MICHAEL AHR
WHEN TALAMASCA: The Secret Order premieres on AMC on Oct. 26, it won’t have a wealth of source material to draw from like its predecessors, Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches. The Vampire Chronicles visionary Anne Rice never wrote a book specifically about the underground organization tasked with keeping tabs on the supernatural world. The next show in the Immortal Universe will have to forge its own path and write its own rules, which may allow for some creative freedom for co-showrunners
John Lee Hancock and Mark Lafferty.
“It’s nice to have Anne’s work as a backstop and to know that she created this organization and talks about it a decent amount,” says Hancock, during his visit to Den of Geek’s San Diego Comic-Con studio, along with the cast of the show. “But we don’t have to follow the strict plot construction of anything regarding a Talamasca book. All the actors here play characters that aren’t in Anne Rice books.”
Hancock and Lafferty lean heavily into the spy thriller genre for Talamasca: The Secret Order, allowing it to blend with the drama of vampire immortality and immorality. The titular group acts as an intelligence organization with its own agenda, hierarchy, and political infighting like any good conspiracy drama, with the addition of supernatural creatures for a unique narrative hybrid.
“The idea of a large organization and the difficulty of keeping everyone in line and keeping everyone on mission was a fun thing to explore,” says Lafferty. “It has a lot of analogues for how the spy genre works, and it
was really fun to take this concept that had not yet been explored in one of Anne’s books and to say, ‘What would be the logical story if you actually had to keep an organization like this running and keep it together?’”
The audience is introduced to this cloak-and-dagger world through the eyes of Guy Anatole, a new recruit to the order, played by Nicholas Denton. “He’s gone through a lot in his life, and at this point, when we meet him, he’s kind of gotten it back together only to have it all taken away from him by the Talamasca,” says Denton. “Everything he has been brought up knowing and doing has all been planned, plotted, and tested by the Talamasca.”
DON’T BE SURPRISED AT ALL IF YOU SEE ONE OF THESE [TALAMASCA] CHARACTERS IN EITHER INTERVIEW OR MAYFAIR WITCHES.”
His handler, Olive, played by Maisie Richardson-Sellers, has her work cut out for her, bringing Guy up to speed, but they both have hidden talents that they discover together. “He’s a real handful,” Richardson-Sellers admits. “But at the beginning, she’s looking at this kid and thinking, ‘He’s just another guy—what’s special about him?’ And over the season, she learns.
She’s whip smart, and she’s very good at reading people and what their needs and wants are and manipulating those to get what she needs and wants out of them.”
The Talamasca are organized into motherhouses, with a hierarchy that includes Elizabeth McGovern’s Helen, who’s in charge of the New York branch, and William Fichtner’s Jasper, who is described as “a mysterious American who has quietly assumed control and influence over the Talamasca’s London Motherhouse.” Fichtner says cryptically about his
Nicholas Denton stars as Guy Anatole; on the cusp of graduating law school, he is approached by a representative of the Talamasca.
villainous role, “All I can say is that the backstory of why the character of Jasper is in London is probably the number one reason why I was excited to take this journey.”
Also in the mix is Doris, played by Celine Buckens, whose questioning of the Talamasca’s supposedly protective motives leads her to embed herself into a reclusive coven of witches. “In this supernatural world, you’ve got the Talamasca to control the bad guys and keep the peace, but Doris doesn’t believe that the Talamasca necessarily is the good guy,” Buckens says. “Not
rakish
themselves into. Our fourth episode is just one big antic romp. And as you’re going through the spy world, it is kind of fun to take a detour and end up in a place that gives you a laugh, and that is fun and is a thrill ride.”
that she doesn’t believe that the bad guys are bad! She just doesn’t trust anyone. And that’s why she ends up with this specific coven, because they stay under the radar.”
Fortunately, the producers promise that the team dynamic of their supernatural spy thriller does have room for lightheartedness. “We wanted the entire world to feel grounded and… strangely enough, to be grounded you also have to have levity,” says Lafferty. “Real life is funny, and there are a lot of absurd situations that our characters get
As for the inevitable crossover, Mark Johnson, who oversees the Immortal Universe trilogy of shows, promises there will be plenty of synergy. “Between the three shows, there’s some real commonality between characters,” he says. “There will be some surprises in Talamasca: some that you expect, some that you don’t suspect. Some at the very beginning, some embedded into the season. And don’t be surprised at all if you see one of these [Talamasca] characters in either Interview or Mayfair Witches.”
Talamasca: The Secret Order premieres on Oct. 26 on AMC.
Jason Schwartzman portrays Burton, a charming,
vampire, leading a cloistered life in a luxurious Upper West Side penthouse.
Maisie RichardsonSellers plays Olive, a beguiling and ambitious agent of the Talamasca.
End of the Console Wars
In a gaming era marked by powerful PCs, generous subscription deals, and a dearth of exclusives—what even is a “console” anymore?
BY CHRIS FREIBERG
GROWING UP IN THE 1990S, my parents refused to buy me a Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo. They thought it was a waste of money since I already had the Nintendo Entertainment System. To folks who had zero interest in video games, there really was no difference. All consoles were just “Nintendos.” After years of complaining and begging, however, I finally wore them down, and they agreed that for Christmas 1995, I could have the brand-new 32-bit console of my choice.
In hindsight, this should have been a no-brainer. The original PlayStation, which had just hit the U.S. a few months earlier, went on to build one of the greatest libraries a console has ever seen. The brand still dominates the gaming landscape three decades later. But this was a time before the internet was widely adopted, and I was just an 11-year-old who wanted to play games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage 2, and Shinobi III, having missed out on the 16-bit era. So, I asked for a Sega Saturn.
It was one of the best Christmases I ever had growing up. I even really enjoyed my first year or so with the Saturn, playing fantastic exclusives like Panzer Dragoon, Nights into Dreams, and Dragon Force.
Then the new releases started to dry up, and I had to come to terms with picking the wrong console unless I wanted to spend my formative years repeatedly dominating CPU
opponents in Virtua Fighter 2. I know I wasn’t the only kid who made the mistake either. While the Saturn was not a huge success, at least I fared better than the kids who ended up with an Atari Jaguar or a Virtual Boy.
But that has always been the risk with console gaming. You’d pick the system that had the games you wanted the most at that moment, knowing full well you would also miss out on the exclusives that ended up on other consoles. Hopefully, though, whatever you selected would still have a deep library for years to come.
It’s not a perfect system, but ultimately, competition in any marketplace is good and should encourage console makers to do everything they can to court buyers with better exclusive games and features. At least that’s how the console space used to work for most of its five-decade history.
But it’s 2025 now, and I can currently play Helldivers 2, a Sony game, on my Xbox Series X, or I can fire up Forza Horizon 5, part of a longtime Microsoft franchise, on my PlayStation 5.
Sega left the hardware market long ago and freely puts its classics and new games alike on almost anything that will run them. That includes the Nintendo Switch 2, which is a great way to play (slightly) inferior portable versions of almost every third-party game on the market, including Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, an Xbox
Studios game that’s already hit the PS5 and will be debuting on the Switch 2 in 2026.
We’ve come a long way from the console wars of the ’90s and 2000s, where exclusives sold systems, and it seemed like a conspiracy theory that Crash Bandicoot might end up on the N64 or Master Chief could take the fight to PS2.
In theory, the big three console makers should have a bevy of exclusives waiting in the wings to court gamers to their respective corners. In reality, modern console gaming means that unless you’re into the ultra-niche Japanese games that only appear on PlayStation, you could just flip a coin, and whatever you want to play will probably show up there eventually. And a lot of those obscure
games still end up on Xbox, too, if you wait long enough.
Microsoft has officially resigned itself to bringing almost all of its exclusives to PlayStation over time, and it’s heavily rumored that Helldivers 2 is just the first Sony exclusive to come to Xbox. Development costs have simply gotten too high for big-budget triple-A games to remain locked to one console.
PC gaming, meanwhile, has become the space to play almost all of Microsoft and Sony’s big games. It’s actually not that expensive to build a respectable gaming PC that can compete with the consoles, though optimization can still be an issue depending on the game. With two of the biggest players in the console industry slowly mingling their IPs and
circling the PC market, it begs the question: why even buy a console if nothing is truly exclusive anymore?
The only console maker that seems to understand the console space is Nintendo. Yes, for all of the warranted criticisms about high prices, questionable online infrastructure, and refusal to make older games available for sale, Nintendo has kept in mind that exclusives sell units.
We have yet to see Mario, Donkey Kong, or Link on Xbox or PlayStation. Never say never, but it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change anytime soon. While Sony and Microsoft by all accounts keep throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into games that never recoup their costs, Nintendo has kept development costs reasonable without sacrificing quality.
And it has made their console business a massive success. The original Switch handily outsold the PS4 and Xbox One, and just a few months after launch, the Switch 2 is breaking sales records.
Essentially, the console war is over. It’s not even really a console space anymore, or at least it won’t be for much longer. While Nintendo seems to be content chugging along with the traditional strategy (and doing quite well at it), Microsoft and Sony look to be transitioning to something akin to pseudo-third-party publishers who sell hardware. And it’s hardware you’ll have fewer reasons to purchase with every passing year.
At least in this new world, no one will make the mistake of picking up the next Sega Saturn for Christmas.
Chainsaw Man
The Movie: Reze Arc Preview
The
BY DANIEL KURLAND
ew anime have completely redefined the public’s perception of what’s possible in the medium like Chainsaw Man. Based on Tatsuki Fujimoto’s popular manga, serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump, the anime hasn’t just redefined anime concepts, but torn through them and bathed in the bloody aftermath.
Chainsaw Man’s TV series chronicles Denji’s tumultuous acclimation to his role not only as Chainsaw Man but also as a member of the Public Safety Devil Hunters. The TV series hit impressive heights, but it’s ready to go for broke with the release of its first feature film. Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc is an adaptation of the manga’s highly acclaimed Reze Arc, which sees Denji
endeavor to bond with a mysterious new girl named Reze, which could lead to romantic bliss or Chainsaw Man’s undoing.
Yusuke Tannawa has been a leading force on Chainsaw Man’s CG production, which has carried over to Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc. Tannawa is MAPPA’s CGI Producer and one of the studio’s leading voices in CGI development and production. Tannawa has previously worked on some of the biggest and most visually dynamic anime of the past decade, including Dorohedoro, Kakegurui, Hell’s Paradise, Attack on Titan: The Final Season, and Jujutsu Kaisen. With the movie’s North American debut scheduled for Oct. 24, Yusuke Tannawa breaks down the challenges behind adapting
Chainsaw Man’s Reze Arc, bringing the film’s explosive Devil powers to life, and why Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc is just as much a twisted love story as it is an action epic.
Den of Geek: Chainsaw Man’s Reze Arc has such an acclaimed reputation. Can you speak at all about the decision to present this arc as a movie, rather than as part of season two?
Tannawa: The Reze Arc is an episode depicted across Volumes 5 and 6 of the original comic, in which Denji’s encounter with Reze, their interactions, misunderstandings, the battles, and the shocking conclusion all form a complete story. Because of this, we felt that rather than dividing it into a TV series, telling the story in its entirety as a feature film would better capture and convey the story’s tension and emotional range.
In addition, when considering the runtime, the story fit perfectly within about two hours without excess or omission, making it clear that a film format was the most suitable choice. Also, by designing the entire arc as a single continuous narrative, we were able to define the color palette and tone of each scene in advance. This approach became a key factor in shaping the film into a richer, more immersive cinematic experience.
give viewers the sensation of actually being there. It is not just about visual appeal—the direct reflection of the characters’ emotions and circumstances on screen is what truly defines Chainsaw Man’s action and visual style.
It can be quite tricky when it comes to some anime’s ability to blend 2D and 3D assets. You really make them seamlessly work together and find ways for these visuals to complement one another. What has it been like to establish that visual identity for Chainsaw Man?
In the Chainsaw Man TV Series, the drawings are primarily done in 2D, but elements such as the movement of the chainsaws, the three-dimensional motion of backgrounds, and the vehicles are expressed in 3D. While we clearly divided their roles to make use of the strengths of each technique, our goal was not to place different techniques side by side, but to make them coexist naturally, as a part of the same image.
The consistency in lighting and camera work was crucial to achieving this, as well as unifying the density of the drawings. By designing both 2D and 3D to stand within the same “filming space,” we achieved visuals that combine the weight of the action with the raw presence of the characters, resulting in a look that is both realistic and stylish.
Through this film, I hope viewers will not only enjoy the action but also personally reflect on the question of what true happiness means to them.
It seems like the anime’s look—particularly in Reze Arc—continues to change and evolve along with the story. Can you speak to that?
You’ve worked on some remarkable action series throughout your career. What makes Chainsaw Man’s action and visuals unique?
The action in Chainsaw Man is not merely about pursuing speed or flashy spectacles. Its defining feature lies in a raw sense of realism, making the audience feel the pain of flesh being torn and the weight of the chainsaw through the screen. Sparks flying as blades grind against walls and floors, the dampness of scattering blood, the shock of city structures collapsing… Every detail was crafted to appeal directly to the audience’s five senses.
We also drew inspiration from the comic’s distinctive panelling and pacing. In animation, this translated into bold camera work and handheld-style motion, aiming to
The Reze Arc is a story where Denji’s everyday life and extraordinary events intertwine, and we paid close attention to this contrast in the visuals, too. In the calmer scenes in the first half, we used soft lighting and colors, carefully depicting the atmosphere of the city and the distances between characters, aiming to give the audience the feeling that they were spending time alongside the characters.
However, once the battle begins, the structure of the screen and the color palette shift dramatically, bringing speed and destructive energy to the forefront. This contrast is what supports the dramatic aspect of the Reze Arc—the visuals themselves gradually heighten the tension as the story progresses. We aimed to create a highly immersive visual experience throughout the
In Partnership with Sony Pictures
feature-length film, where the imagery directly reflects the characters’ emotions and relationships.
Chainsaw Man’s TV Series has such incredible action sequences and a really inspired use of 3DCG. How did you set out to top these heights in Reze Arc and take advantage of the movie’s cinematic scale?
The feature-film format allows each action to be depicted on a larger scale. In the Reze Arc, there are many scenes with explosions and destruction set across the city, with buildings and the environment dynamically changing. We focused on conveying a sense of spatial expansion and chain reactions of destruction—elements that we couldn’t fully express in the TV series—so that audiences can experience them through the large screen and immersive sound of the theater.
Sound design is also a major element unique to the film. The impact of explosions and the chainsaw’s sounds, along with carefully placed songs, allows the visuals and music to resonate with each other, heightening the audience’s sense of immersion as they are swept up in the same emotional waves as the characters. We aimed to create an experience that is possible only in the theater.
Chainsaw Man’s radical Devil powers are one of the anime’s most exciting elements. Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc really goes for broke with Bomb’s explosive powers. Was it difficult to bring these Devil powers to life and do Fujimoto-san’s manga justice? Bomb is a character with a strong visual impact. While expressions of explosions and flames were somewhat similar to existing anime depictions, the challenge was how to faithfully reproduce the “eerie beauty” that Fujimoto-sensei draws.
Rather than simply presenting explosion effects, we meticulously refined details and timing to make the audience feel the terror of body parts transforming like weapons and the destructive power that engulfs the city indiscriminately. Balancing visual pleasure with a sense of fear, making viewers feel that they would never want to encounter her, was crucial in expressing Bomb as a Devil.
What were some of the greatest challenges faced during production regarding the movie’s more complicated sequences?
In a feature film, the amount of information in each single shot increases dramatically, so the balance between “density” and “tempo” was the biggest challenge.
Especially, scenes where explosions, flying debris, character movements, and background destruction occur simultaneously carry the risk of becoming too visually complex for the audience to follow.
To address this, we constantly planned where to guide the viewers’ attention and organized the information through camera work and cutting. As a result, I believe we were able to maintain the impact of the visuals while ensuring that the story and the characters’ emotions were never lost.
Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc is full of explosive action, but it’s also a twisted love story. Denji’s bad luck when it comes to his continued romantic pursuits is a running theme through the series. Why is this an important part of the movie and Denji’s journey?
The Reze Arc features destructive action as one of its main attractions, but it is also the first story of “romance” for Denji. For him, happiness means eating until he’s full and sleeping under a roof—things that should be taken for granted by anyone, but which he wasn’t able to obtain in his life. This is why Reze’s words resonate so strongly with him.
His longing for the tiny happinesses and the special feelings of romance intertwining make Denji’s story even more compelling. For the audience, his battles aren’t just
fights; they embody the universal wish to be happy, which everyone can surely relate to. The way action and drama drive the story together is, I believe, at the very heart of Chainsaw Man
Has production on the movie been any different than the work process on the TV series?
The TV series requires each episode to have a clear beginning, middle, and end, delivering a rhythm to the audience on a weekly basis. In contrast, a film is a long-form story meant to be experienced all at once from start to finish. For this reason, it was necessary to design the overall structure and pacing with even greater precision.
Additionally, because a feature film is created with the assumption of a large screen and immersive sound environment, it allows us to fully maximize the scale of both visuals and audio, which is another major difference.
What do you think is the Reze Arc’s main theme, and what do you hope audiences take away from this thrilling movie?
I believe the theme of the Reze Arc is “the ordinary happiness that people seek as human beings” and “the cruelty of having it taken away.” Denji’s wishes and dreams are by no means small to him—they are deeply heartfelt. Through the intersection of love and betrayal, longing and despair, this theme emerges vividly.
Through this film, I hope viewers will not only enjoy the action but also personally reflect on the question of what true happiness means to them.
It’s been so exciting not just to see Chainsaw Man find greater popularity, but that the rest of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s work, like Look Back and Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26, is also breaking into the mainstream. Why do you think the rest of his work is beginning to experience wider appreciation?
Although Fujimoto-sensei’s works often include elements of battle and horror, they consistently depict human emotions and the strangeness of society with sharp insight. In Chainsaw Man, as well as his other works, behind the extraordinary settings lie universal themes that allow readers to relate them to their own experiences and emotions—a distinctive feature of his storytelling.
Furthermore, his unique black humor, bold compositions, and unexpected plot developments strike even readers who are not typically familiar with comics as intensely fresh and engaging. The combination of universality that resonates across time and borders, along with overwhelming originality, is what I believe explains why his works are currently receiving such widespread acclaim.
1 O F 1 s TRANSFORMING INTO 1 O F 1 s
This story is presented in paid partnership with eBay.
THE UNITED STATES’ largest comic con is finally here, and the celebration is being kicked up a notch.
Skybound Entertainment, eBay, and Big Clutch are teaming up for some awesome auctions at New York Comic Con that coincide with the 25th issue of Skybound’s Transformers comic. Select sellers are getting exclusive eBay Live Comic Trading Packs—a three-issue bundle with special variants, sketches, and other chase items. There are only a thousand packs available, and they have some bangers in them.
BY JIM DANDENEAU
Packs could include con-exclusive variants of Transformers #25 from cover specialist Godtail, Spanish retro artist Suspiria Vilchez, Transformers artist Pete
The Collector’s Digest powered by
Carroll, or horror artist Mark Spears. The packs may also have special one-of-one sketch covers from comics heavy hitters like Ryan Ottley, Rose Besch, Enid Balam, Favian Gonzalez, Chris Burnham, and more. And every pack has a chance at a one-of-a-kind CGC-graded sketch cover from comics legend Bill Sienkiewicz.
Historically, Transformers is a comic property that punches well above its weight class. The cartoon and movie universe are beloved, but the comics have taken the bright color-and-action figure combination that makes the animated stuff so special and added a layer of thoughtfulness, depth, and creativity that make them consistently some of the best books published. Skybound took that history and added in blockbuster creators. The book launched with Daniel Warren Johnson
pumping it full of Energon, and has since added kinetic masters including Ryan Ottley and Jorge Corona to the art. Now, issue 25 gains comics legend Robert Kirkman writing and Dan Mora, the hardest working man in superhero books, on art.
With big-time comic creators on the book, the temptation to rip these apart and use them as wall art is going to be overwhelming, and we’re not ones to tell you what to do with your collectibles, so grab them while you can. The new arc promises to be just as gorgeous and fun as the earlier stories, so no shame to you if you’re reading for love. Unless you grab that Sienkiewicz cover—keep that one slabbed, the man is a master. eBay Live has a big stream kicking these auctions off on Oct. 8, with the rest of the packs going live on Oct. 9.
P A
W N- I N G A L E G A C Y
L E G A C Y S
Todd McFarl ane shar es the “secret sa uce” that has made bo t h Spawn and McFarlane Toys such e pic success st ories.
BY JOE GEORGE AND NICK MARINO PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN TRIVETT
TODD MCFARLANE got his start penciling comics for DC and Marvel in the ’80s, and soon became a superstar while working on The Amazing Spider-Man. These days, he is better known as the namesake of McFarlane Toys and the creator of Spawn, a character who has not only headlined his own independent comic series for over 30 years but also appeared in television and film, not to mention the countless action figures and other collectibles.
So what has allowed McFarlane to remain in the spotlight, even after decades in the industry?
“The one thing that I try to stress to other creative people is longevity matters,” McFarlane tells Den of Geek “At some point, over time, I don’t care what business it is, you’re going to have high and low points. What matters is that you make sure that your brand, that word that you’re putting out there, just never goes away. It always stays out there.
“Has Spawn had highs and lows? Of course it has… [but] it’s been there nonstop for over 30 years. That’s the secret sauce,” McFarlane says. When he debuted the character in 1992 as part of the launch of Image Comics, McFarlane experienced both record sales and critical derision. The big retail numbers were driven, in part, by a collector’s market that went bust within two years. Sure, it was popular in the moment, but like so many other also-rans against Marvel and DC, it looked like Spawn might be another comics fad that would quickly sputter out.
Yet that’s not what happened. Over 30 years later, Spawn
has been the star of his own toy line, an HBO animated series, a movie that’s reached cult status, and over 370 issues of comics, which includes respected runs by creators such as Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Greg Capullo, and others. The key, according to McFarlane, is not focusing on short-term wins, but getting characters and books to resonate outside “the bubble” of loyal comic fans.
“My frustration as president of Image Comics is that creators come in and do four or five issues of really good books that, in my mind, could easily go 40, 50, 60 issues. You don’t have to do 300; that’s me being insane. But four or five issues and then jumping to the next thing? You’re not building anything that resonates because your book’s the hot thing for two weeks, and then the hype goes away. You get big sales on your first five and then they start to flatten or taper down. And the thought is, ‘Well, I can go start another book and I’ll get big sales for the next five of those, right?’ The answer is ‘yes,’ economically. In the short term. But I’m telling you, long term, you need to get to issue 50. Every book that Image Comics has done that has gone 50 or more issues has gotten outside the bubble.”
This isn’t to dismiss the importance of the core audience, McFarlane assures us, but rather to illustrate the importance of not putting limits on potential success.
“How do you get it out to T-shirts, hats, toys, video games, movies, TV shows, so that your neighbor may have heard the word? The Walking Dead, as great as that book was, got outside the bubble. When I tell people I created Venom, they go ‘Oh my gosh, Todd,’ but it’s because they saw the movie. They didn’t buy the comic book. They got it because Venom got outside the bubble.”
Such longevity is only possible if creators don’t get distracted by the highs of a new book launch or discouraged when sales dip, and keep pushing to 50 issues. And to do that, they just have to keep focused on the work itself.
“You put a book out every month, and four years and two months adds up to 50,” he says. “Here’s my frustration: I could have a room of a thousand of my peers, and I could ask a simple question, ‘How many of you have been in the business for four years and two months?’ I’m going to get an 85 percent hand raise. And then I’m going to go, ‘And how many of you spent any of
Bidding for a Good Cause!
JOIN DEN OF GEEK AND TODD MCFARLANE at NYCC for a lively discussion about his career, complete with an amazing charity auction, fan giveaways, and special merch drops in partnership with McFarlane Toys.
It’s all for a good cause: The charity auction benefits The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that coordinates charitable programs to strengthen the bookselling community.
Since its inception, the organization has provided over $11 million in financial assistance and scholarships to more than 10,000 families.
SCAN THE CODE TO SET A REMINDER!
⊲ WHO: Todd McFarlane, Den of Geek, Binc, eBay Live…and YOU! What are you waiting for?
⊲ WHAT: McFarlane DC Multiverse and Gold Label action figures, comics, and more!
⊲ WHEN: Saturday, Oct. 11 at 1 p.m. ET
⊲ WHERE: The eBay Live Booth #2435
COLLECTOR’S DIGEST
that time on a project that you own?’”
For McFarlane, that makes all the difference and he's convinced that creators can do it. McFarlane is quick to point out that he says all this not to boast (“It’s just math!”) but rather to encourage his fellow creators to make their own creations household names.
“If you’ve been in the industry for four years and two months, you could have done it,” he declares. “How many have been in the business for 10, 15, or 20 years? You could have done this four times over. You could have gotten the 50, then started a new IP. And yet, when I was talking to Eric Stephenson, the editor-in-chief at Image Comics, and we asked, ‘How many books have actually gotten to 50 in 30-plus years outside of the original founders and the partners?’ We could only count five.”
For evidence of his claims, McFarlane needs only to look at his own work. “I’ve gotten to issue 50 seven times on Spawn, and now I’m adding more.” Wise words from the man with a Guiness World Record for the longest running creator-owned superhero comic series of all time.
LIFE CAN CHANGE IN A FLASH.
When that happens for comic shop or bookstore employees and owners, Binc is a phone call away.
TheBook Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) is the only nonprofit in the country dedicated to supporting bookstore and comic shop owners and employees through life’s unexpected emergencies like ER visits, eviction, cancer diagnosis, flooding, death in the family, and weather-related disasters. Support bookstores, comic shops and the people who work there by supporting Binc. Find out more at bincfoundation.org.
“Binc helped me to survive what felt like an impossible financial situation. I had help within a day of completing my application. I was able to have my rent paid, go food shopping, and cover household utilities. I would not have been able to do any of this without their assistance."
—Comic retailer helped through a housing crisis
Director Dan Trachtenberg and stars Elle Fanning and Dimitrius SchusterKoloamatangi dish on New sci-fi action epic Predator: Badlands, and why this Predator film is for everyone.
By Ryan Britt
So, a rOboT froM tHe a lIen FraNcHi S e a N d a Pred at O r from Predator W a lk i N To a moVie Tog e t He r.
If that sounds like the setup to an old Dark Horse comic from the 1990s, in which Batman fought the Predator and xenomorphs at different times, the reality of Predator: Badlands isn’t too far off.
The new film from director Dan Trachtenberg is very much a gift to longtime fans of both franchises, but it’s not a gratuitous team-up movie for the sake of team-ups. Instead, Badlands tells a new, action-packed science fiction story that in many ways could be a fresh start for both sagas. For those who loved Trachtenberg’s 2022 film Prey,
a unique historical approach to the Predator mythos set in 18th-century Comanche lands, Predator: Badlands is… well, nothing like that at all. Rather, this film represents a new truth about the possibilities of big, well-loved IP-driven worlds: there’s always a fresh way to approach the familiar.
“Everyone has the same ambition, and maybe I’ll fail,” Trachtenberg tells us while reflecting on his desire to flip the Predator franchise’s formula on its head.“Everyone who does this sort of thing is trying to make a sequel entertaining for everyone, but also furthering a story when we’re so far into a series.” Yet few have completely inverted their saga’s core concept, wherein the recurring big bad of the series, here an apex alien predator, is now both the hero and the prey.
Set deeper into the future than any previous
Synthetic Thia (Elle Fanning) and Predator Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) in Predator: Badlands.
installment of the Alien and Predator franchises, Badlands is positioning itself not just to be the breakout sci-fi hit of fall 2025 but also a jumpstart for a new kind of shared universe. And for the stars and the director, the trick is all about making an impossibly big movie feel small, relatable, and intimately human. Which is a pretty nifty trick when there’s not a single human being on the screen. Welcome to a future of only aliens and AI synths.
A Dy namic Duo
The heart and soul of Predator: Badlands is not-sosecretly centered around an unlikely partnership between a young Predator named Dek (Dimitrius SchusterKoloamatangi) and a Weyland-Yutani synth they call Thia (Elle Fanning). As trailers have revealed, Dek is carrying a damaged Thia around on his back for much of the movie after both sentient beings end up on a planet that even the Predator species of Yautja fear. According to Trachtenberg and his stars, this image defines the basic ethos of the film.
“This is very new for the Predator franchise,” Fanning explains. “I think oftentimes you don’t feel like you’re creating something new or doing something people haven’t seen before. That’s a hard thing. But I think we all kind of felt that this had a special feeling. I mean, there’s obviously a little C-3PO and Chewbacca thing there!”
Fanning is referencing the fact that having her robot character strapped to the back of a sci-fi monster like Dek
evokes a similar image in the third act of The Empire Strikes Back, when a disassembled version of the droid C-3PO is rigged up to the back of the legendary Wookiee. And what is a small part of that Star Wars film, Trachtenberg admits, is a large inspiration for the character dynamic of Badlands
“When I was thinking about this, I was also thinking, ‘What if there was a Chewbacca movie?’’’ Trachtenberg says. “This is what the purpose of this or any other franchise is: to do things like this.”
Due to the irony of this pairing—where science fiction’s most fearsome hunter carries a shattered robot on its back like she’s a sack of old potatoes—the secret production title for Predator: Badlands became “Backpack.” And while it may seem that Fanning and Trachtenberg are joking around about the imagery, Trachtenberg makes it clear that the aesthetics inspire him as much as a story’s literary concepts. Hence, like his previous film in the franchise, Prey, the image of Dek and Thia was an artistic, visual choice from which the rest of Predator: Badlands’ inception sprang.
“I just loved the silhouette of it,” Trachtenberg says. “That’s something I’m drawn to. It’s a really great, dynamic silhouette. I love the silhouette of Mad Max and his dog in Road Warrior, which is why Naru had a dog in Prey. I love the iconography of that. I love The Monster Squad; the silhouette of the kids with Frankenstein in the sunset. What is the iconography of the movie? Everything starts with that.”
A Re al Hang Out Movie
Although Predator: Badlands is a VFX-heavy film, Schuster-Koloamatangi makes it clear that nearly everything you see, including him carrying Fanning around his neck, is very much real.
“She was literally on my back,” Schuster-Koloamatangi says with a laugh. “I did have wires and stuff, to be honest. But a lot of it was yes, carrying her on my back. I didn’t
think much of it when I read the script, but then when we got on set, it was like, ‘Wow, I’m really carrying her around!’”
Fanning echoes the importance physicality of the characters and makes it clear that what you see on the screen is what was filmed, including during the stunts:
“He was carrying me most of the time, and we were flying through the air together while still being hooked up,” Fanning says. “There were definitely physical challenges, but it was very exciting too, because something that’s always enticed me about the Predator franchise is that it’s not a monster that’s CGI. It’s someone that’s physically there, in the suit, that’s tangible.”
Unlike in previous iterations of the franchise, SchusterKoloamatangi’s Dek is seen in much more detail than the larger and older Predators that came before him. In a sense, Predator: Badlands is the first Predator movie of its kind, simply because the titular alien hunter is portrayed as a sympathetic protagonist, one who’s been effectively exiled from his clan because he’s viewed as the runt. It’s a Predator movie actually about the Predator.
“In a lot of the previous installments of the Predator, you only see him come in periodically throughout the film, and then right at the end, it’s the final battle,” Schuster-Koloamatangi says. “So there’s not a lot of emotional depth required. But for this film, since it’s a unique take on the Predator and he’s seen throughout the entirety of the film, there had to be a different way to convey those emotions.”
For this reason, Schuster-Koloamatangi’s face was physically exposed throughout the filming, despite being inside the large Predator suit. This technique was called an “open cowl,” which allowed the VFX team to use
Schuster-Koloamatangi’s real facial expressions as a guide for the CGI Predator face added later. The actor points out that this lets Badlands tell the story as “authentically” as possible, but it also created a kind of theatricality to his performance that he hadn’t expected.
“Prepping for this character felt like theater,” SchusterKoloamatangi explains. “A lot of the way I use my face, it had to be big. The movements have to be exaggerated a lot. It’s like stage whispers, you’re doing everything big, so that everything is big and people can see it and understand it.”
Furthermore, as tough and talented as SchusterKoloamatangi is in real life, he wants to set the record straight on one strange bit of Google misinformation that’s out there. Despite what some search results might tell you, he’s not over seven feet tall like a real-life Predator. “I don’t know where that came from,” he laughs. “I’m only six-foot!”
A Robot By Any Other Name
Another open secret of Badlands is the fact that Fanning isn’t playing just one Weyland-Yutani android, but rather two versions of the same model. In addition to Thia, Fanning reveals she also gave life to robot Tessa, who is the opposite of Thia in almost every way.
“With Thia and Tessa, it’s like, how are we going to make them very distinct and different?” Fanning explains of her characters. “With Thia, she’s broken, she’s had time up in this nest to see the world in a different way, and she
has an empathy about her. She’s quirky and spunky, and she wants someone to talk to. She has this comedic tone and a really fun personality. But with Tessa, I think you can imagine she’s quite the opposite. She’s more practical and scientific.”
By this point, longtime fans of both Alien and Predator must be wondering, ‘Why is the robot in this Predator movie specifically from the Alien universe?’ It’s been 18 years since the last Alien vs. Predator movie hit theaters, and the two franchises haven’t co-mingled like this since then. Aside from some brand synergy for 20th Century Studios, what motivated Trachtenberg to bring another franchise into his new Predator movie?
“I started thinking about a monster and a robot together, and that felt very cool. And then I thought, ‘I know someone who makes robots, and that is spiritually linked to this franchise,’” Trachtenberg says. “They share a world. They share a studio. How cool would it be to do that, and there also be no xenomorph in the movie?”
The decision to make Thia and Tessa both WeylandYutani synthetics is obviously quite cool, but for Fanning, it also meant there was a rich tradition to draw upon for her performance. From Ian Holm’s sinister Ash in the original 1979 Alien to David Jonsson’s more enigmatic Andy in 2024’s Alien: Romulus, Fanning took it all in and relished the shifty, duplicitous nature of this breed of sci-fi synth.
“Sometimes they’re not always up to good,” Fanning says of the history of Weyland-Yutani’s artificial lifeforms. “You don’t quite know if they’re good or bad.”
While Badlands was filming, Fanning tells us that the cast and crew went to see Alien: Romulus. And while she
admits that she took a “little inspiration” from Jonsson’s Andy in that film, she also doubles down on the fact that, because Badlands takes place so far into the future of both franchises, Thia and Tessa are basically the most advanced models of Weyland-Yutani robots ever.
“These synths are highly, highly developed,” Fanning says. “Much more than we’ve seen before.”
A New Kind of Franchise
S h E WA S L I te RALLY O N MY BAC k … I D i D n ’T
T HI n K m U c H O f IT W HEN
I R E ad THE SC ri PT, b UT
TH E N WHEN WE GOT o N SE t, i T WAS LIKE, ‘WO w , I’M REALLY c AR r YI ng H E r AR O u N D!’
By teaming up a Yautja apex predator with a WeylandYutani android, Badlands must clearly be leading to some kind of larger plan, right? Is Trachtenberg guiding 20th Century Studios into a bigger shared universe, one which culminates in a major crossover event?
So far, there have been hints that that is very much the case. Not only did Prey heroine Naru (Amber Midthunder) show up in the final moments of the animated anthology film, Predator: Killer of Killers, but after that movie hit streaming earlier this year, it was also revealed that the Yautja had Dutch (Arnold
Schwarzenegger) and Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) likewise preserved in suspended animation. This all seems to suggest that, like the MCU or the DCEU, we’re headed to a convergence point.
Yet while Trachtenberg asserts that he does have a vision, he doesn’t view Badlands—or Prey or Killer of Killers—as puzzle pieces in a larger tapestry. Instead, he wants each film to be accessible to anyone, regardless of what they know about Dutch Schaefer’s Vietnam service or the precious cargo on LV-426.
“It’s not Alien versus Predator,” the director insists. “Maybe one day we will get there in an elegant way, but
not in a gimmicky way where we’re just taking all the action figures and smashing them together. Maybe we get there if that’s where the stories aspired to go and they make things better for each other.”
If this strategy sounds new-ish, Trachtenberg’s essentially already proven he knows how to do it. Both Prey and Killer of Killers require zero previous knowledge of the Predator franchise, and with Badlands, any connectivity to the larger world is, from Trachtenberg’s point of view, a bonus. The last thing he wants the audience to think about in Badlands is doing any homework. With its standalone pedigree, could the Predator approach to world-building be the new standard for big IPs? Is this the geek universe healing from the overwrought juggernaut of the MCU? Trachtenberg says things aren’t quite that black and white.
“I think everything needs to feel like it’s an awesome movie,” Trachtenberg says. “I think that’s what we’ve loved from recent Marvels to old Star Wars [films]. I saw Empire before I saw Star Wars growing up. I think that’s fine. But, you know, I think even Marvel movies can seem like there’s a lot more homework involved. And they’re aware of it and dealing with it. But look at Doctor Strange, that was very deep into the MCU and could absolutely be seen on its own. There are always these pockets where t H e SE S Y N T h S ar E hi GHL Y , H i GHLY DEV E LO pe D. m U C h M o R e T h A n W E ’ v E s E E N BE f O r E.
Director Dan Trachtenberg on the set of Predator: Badlands. PHOTO
everyone recognizes the value of something, and not be too worried about making it something that isn’t as tethered to continuity.”
Trachtenberg says his favorite bit of movie continuity ever is in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) when Indy (Harrison Ford) passes by a wall-drawing of the Ark of the Covenant, a reference to Raiders of the Lost Ark. When questioned if he’s sure that’s what it is, he says flatly, “Pretty sure.” For Trachtenberg, that “pretty sure” was a “gift of a movie moment.” And it’s that kind of connectivity he’s striving for in the Predator franchise.
With that said, he does have a loose plan. “Before Killer of Killers, or Badlands, I wrote, for the studio, a little universe Bible, of what we could be doing, all the different things, all the different kinds of movies that could be,”
Trachtenberg confirms. However, he is also aware that he’s not the first filmmaker to plan for a future that is far from set in stone. “I break no new ground by saying this. We have to make one movie at a time.”
Fanning also posits that Badlands is an extremely accessible project, one she thinks appeals to all
demographics, regardless of whether you think you like movies about murderous extraterrestrials or not.
“This story in particular can really open the world to a whole new audience of newcomers,” Fanning says. “Not to say these movies weren’t open in the past. I think Sigourney Weaver has [drawn in] a lot of female audience members in Alien. Definitely me. But the Predator world may not necessarily be something that the female audience always goes to see. I’m hoping that this one is universal. And I think a new crowd can discover it for the first time.”
Predator: Badlands represents a bit of an elegant paradigm shift in massive, studio-owned IPs. Trachtenberg may have a plan, but he’s clearly willing to discover new ideas along the way. And if the audience discovers they love Elle Fanning as a certain bisected, Weyland-Yutani robot, then it’s possible the future of the converging franchise isn’t just continuing, but beginning all over again.
Predator: Badlands opens in theaters on Nov. 7.
EDGAR WRIGHT AND GLEN POWELL RETURN TO THE STEPHEN KING SOURCE IN THE RUNNING MAN.
BY DON K AYE
EDGAR WRIGHT, the filmmaker and genre specialist who has given the world modern gems like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Baby Driver, estimates he was around 13 years old when he read “the Bachman Books,” a collection of four novels that Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman during the early years of his career. Among those books was The Running Man, a dystopian thriller set in an economically ruined 2025. There, a totalitarian U.S. government keeps the public distracted by constantly broadcasting a deadly TV game show.
“I read The Running Man and was really bowled over by it,” Wright tells us during a break between sessions in the post-production of his own 2025 Running Man. “I had actually read the book before I saw the 1987 film. So even
though I enjoyed the film, I was very aware that it was radically different from the book, and it’s probably the first time as both an avid reader and a film fan that I was really aware of how different an adaptation could be.”
The movie that Wright is referring to, 1987’s The Running Man, was very loosely inspired by King’s novel and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. For his modern retelling, Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall have gone back to King’s source text, in which an unemployed construction worker named Ben Richards, desperate to find money for his family and medicine for his gravely ill daughter, volunteers to participate in the title game–a competition in which the “runner” must stay alive for 30 days while pursued anywhere in the world by government assassins known as Hunters. If Richards makes it to the end of the month, he’ll
win a grand prize of $1 billion. If not, he’ll die trying.
Wright is keen for the audience—whether it’s King devotees, fans of the first film, or just casual moviegoers— to know that his Running Man is not a remake of the 1987 cult classic, even as he hints they pay homage to the Schwarzenegger film in a couple of spots.
“It’s clear, having done test screenings, that there are people who have neither read the book nor seen the 1987 film,” Wright says. “But when it first came to me, I wasn’t interested in doing a remake of the film because there wasn’t any sort of reason to do that. I think the reason to remake a film is if there’s something else in the material. So it was never going to be a scene-for-scene literal remake. It was always, in our heads, a new adaptation of the source material.”
Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, a man who must survive being hunted across the world for 30 days on a reality show.
“I WASN’T INTERESTED IN DOING A REMAKE OF THE 1987 FILM BECAUSE THERE WASN’T ANY SORT OF REASON TO DO THAT. I THINK THE REASON TO REMAKE A FILM IS IF THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE IN THE MATERIAL.”
— EDGAR WRIGHT
MEET THE RUNNING MAN
This century’s Ben Richards is played by Glen Powell, the throwback movie star of such recent hits as Anyone But You, Hit Man, and Twisters. His natural charisma and everyman demeanor make him perfect to play the working-class, yet aggrieved, hero of King’s novel.
“The important thing with Ben Richards is not that he isn’t tough,” Wright explains. “He’s an out-of-work construction worker, and we make it clear in the movie that he’s worked some of the toughest, shittiest jobs and worked outside a lot. So he’s capable, but he’s still not John Wick He’s not a superhero. He’s a dad and he’s kind of flying by the seat of his pants in the show. He’s on his heels for a lot of the movie, and I thought Glen was just perfect for that.”
For Powell’s part, it was a veritable bucket list dream to work with the director of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
“He’s been one of my favorite filmmakers,” Powell says when we catch up with him on the road. “I made a list when I first moved out to Los Angeles, of the guys that I would just kill to work with, and Edgar Wright was at the top of that list.”
A few years back, Wright began following Powell on X, and the two eventually met for lunch in London. But it was after a second lunch in Los Angeles that the seeds for collaborating on The Running Man were sown.
“I ended up running into the heads of Paramount at that same restaurant,” Powell recalls. “And they said, ‘What do you want to do? Who do you want to work with?’ And I said, ‘I was just hanging with Edgar Wright, and I would kill to work with him.’ And they’re like, ‘Are you being serious? Do you know about The Running Man? He’s putting that together, so that very much could be a thing,’ and I was like ‘very cool, that’s great.’”
Powell says that Wright had been considering a few different actors for the role at the time, but had not yet made up his mind when the Top Gun: Maverick breakout decided to give the filmmaker a little nudge.
“I got down to the wire and sent him a really nice text just telling him why, if he hired me, there’d be no other actor that would ever work as hard and put his body on the line
more than I would,” Powell says. “I meant it. So he took a shot on me and hired me for this movie.”
Powell, while certainly sturdily built, is not exactly a Schwarzenegger—but Schwarzenegger was not exactly a Ben Richards either, who is described in the book as “scrawny” and ravaged by deprivation and poverty by the time he enrolls in the game.
“Ben Richards is a guy who has a very short fuse and is engaged with the world and everything that’s happening with it on that short fuse,” says Powell. “He’s a bit of an angry guy, and they’re looking at him like, ‘This guy has a
Edgar Wright seeks to return to the Stephen King source material for Running Man after reading the novel in the mid-1980s. Below, Lee Pace as one of the fearsome Hunters, professional killers that will pursue Ben Richards to the ends of the earth.
short temper and is angry with the world, therefore we can kind of take advantage of him and his situation and make sure that we get viewers riled up.’”
But Powell notes that his character, as in the book, begins to realize that while he’s initially playing the game for the sake of his family, his ability to stay alive also begins to awaken a downtrodden and submissive public from its stupor. “His daughter’s very sick, potentially days away from dying, and he’s put in a position in which he will do anything to save his daughter’s life. So he’s a guy who’s trying to protect his own and then realizes that his situation is not unique, that everybody is struggling to make ends meet and protect their own, and that by winning this game, by surviving, he can be a symbol and a beacon of change— not just for his daughter’s future, but everybody’s future.”
A WORLD JUST A FEW STEPS FROM OURS
Like The Long Walk, another recently released film adapted from a King/Bachman tale of dystopia, The Running Man feels eerily prescient for modern times. They both adapt novels that predicted TV dominating pop culture decades before the fact, the economic gap between the haves and the have-nots widening, and authoritarianism taking hold in the United States. Wright furthermore notes that both films will hopefully complement each other.
“Even since we shot the movie, it has become more and more timely,” Powell says. “It is unbelievable how Stephen
MAN-HUNTING MOVIE CLUB
THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932)
A man who writes about big game hunting is stranded on a remote island, where an evil count hunts humans for sport. Arguably the first movie in which humans are prey in a sadistic game, this thriller from the team that later made King Kong still packs a punch.
THE 10TH VICTIM
(1965)
Come for the ravishing Ursula Andress, stay to watch her go head-to-head in the deadly “Big Hunt” with Italian icon Marcello Mastroianni. This psychedelic blast of ’60s sci-fi weirdness has become a cult classic.
▲ ROLLERBALL (1975)
In a future world ruled by corporations, the masses are kept distracted by an ultra-violent combination of roller derby and hockey. But when a star player (James Caan) becomes a potential revolutionary figure, he must be ejected. Permanently.
BATTLE ROYALE (2000)
A group of junior high school students are forced to fight to the death by a totalitarian Japanese government in one of the most controversial movies of all time.
THE HUNGER GAMES (2012)
Twenty-four teenagers are chosen from a dozen districts in what used to be America to kill each other off in an annual reality show adored by the Capitol’s privileged. The definitive YA descendant of The Running Man.
King saw the future of 2025, the year that we are in right now, and how eerie it is to see where we are living and what it looks like, and how similar it is to all the events that are happening in this book. This movie is obviously just cinematic escapism, and it’s fun and people are going to absolutely see it as just a blast of a movie experience, but what is incredibly fun is watching Stephen King the clairvoyant, and how we get to portray that, because it comments on a lot of things happening in the world.”
Wright concurs with Powell’s remarks, pointing out the film has a satirical edge to it, even if it’s not an out-and-out overt comedy.
“What’s crazy about the book is that it’s a pretty chilling prediction of where we’re at,” he muses. “And that in itself is quite disturbing, that things are presented in a very kind of blunt way. I’m really happy with how it works in the movie because it doesn’t seem so fanciful, and that’s what’s disturbing about it.”
One aspect of King’s book that Wright finds especially interesting is how the author seemed to predict the
“I MADE A LIST WHEN I FIRST MOVED OUT TO LOS ANGELES, THE GUYS THAT I WOULD JUST KILL TO WORK WITH, AND EDGAR WRIGHT WAS AT THE TOP OF THAT LIST.”
— GLEN POWELL
pervasive growth of reality television and the extreme behavior it has engendered over the years.
“There has obviously been reality TV or forms of it going back to when the book was written,” the director says, “but I think since the book was written, there is so much TV that has swam in the same waters. And I think, also, people now are much more aware of how a TV show gets made and how manipulative reality TV is, and also how many lives are ruined in the process. Whether it’s Jerry Springer or Sally Jessy Raphael, or even American Idol or X Factor, or those other shows, they play fast and loose with the contestants’ lives and mental health. There have been lots of stories like that that bring the book into chilling relief.”
In keeping with the quasi-realistic nature of those aspects of the book, the world of The Running Man, while set ostensibly in 2025, is positioned a few minutes into the future and just to the left of the real world in terms of its technology and culture—albeit, Wright notes, the film also taps into current trends that find people going back to analog technology in some ways. Curiously, Wright also admits that he had forgotten the novel was set in 2025 until this project came along.
“I realized, ‘Oh, a film set in 2025 is going to come out in 2025, that’s sort of wild,’” he says. “We don’t say in the film
Colman Domingo plays Bobby Thompson, host of The Running Man TV show and a believer in killer entertainment.
Left, A rebellious Elton Parrakis (Michael Cera) helps Ben out of a jam. Right, Josh Brolin as Dan Killian, the malevolent producer of every episode of the sinister reality series.
what year it’s set in. What, hopefully, will be clear to viewers is that we’re in like an alternate 2025… There’s not much technology in the movie that doesn’t exist in some form now, but I think what tends to happen is that there is new technology out there that’s pretty advanced, but then it seems to fail when it gets to a consumer level. So our basic idea was that in the upper-class world, technological advancements have gotten better, and everywhere else, everything else has gotten worse.”
STEPHEN KING: STILL RUNNING
One thing that seems timeless is the work of Stephen King himself. Following The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, and The Long Walk, The Running Man is the fourth feature film based on a King story or novel to come out in 2025. Although The Running Man was published in 1982, King actually wrote it a decade earlier, two years before his first novel, Carrie, was published, at a time when he and his wife Tabitha were still struggling to make ends meet while they and their kids were living in a trailer in Maine. King has famously said that he wrote The Running Man in a single week, blasting through
the novel and perhaps projecting his anxieties—a fear that he could not provide for his wife and children, that he would be a failure—onto Ben Richards.
“What’s really special about The Running Man is that it was [written] at a very specific moment in Stephen King’s life,” Powell considers. “A moment in which he was sort of feeling angry and powerless, very much like the underdog that Ben Richards is, and so that voice, that man against the system, really comes out in this book in a way that I think is indicative of where Stephen King was at during that moment in time. But what is so crazy is how timely it feels to everything that’s happening right now. It feels like the ordinary person is trying to do right in the world, and sometimes it can feel really unrewarding, and you can feel powerless and like you don’t know where to look or who to trust. I think a lot of that is in this story.”
The Running Man opens in theaters on Nov. 14.
LIFE FINDS A WAY IN TEX AS
WE TOUR THE LABORATORIES AND HEADQUARTERS OF COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES, THE COMPANY THAT BROUGHT BACK THE DIRE WOLF AND SEEKS TO REVIVE A WOOLLY MAMMOTH NEXT.
By David Crow
Cutting-edge “nano film” tech allows visitors to learn about de-extinction while scientists see only tinted glass.
In a remote corner of a laboratory in Dallas, scientists stare intensely at a tinamou egg resting on the counter. The tinamou, for the record, is a plump and endangered bird found in Central and South America, that stands anywhere between six and 17 inches in height. It also remains the only living classified Palaeognathae with the ability to fly (other surviving relatives include the ostrich and emu). Yet it’s not strictly the creature’s living relatives that interest the scientists in the Avian Laboratory at Colossal Biosciences.
Rather, it’s the tinamou’s distant relation to the longextinct and massive 12-foot giant moa of New Zealand that has led Dr. Anna Keyte, the avian species director at Colossal, to explain why they’re taking blood samples from a turquoise egg on a warm Texan morning. Using razorthin microneedles, scientists seek to extract DNA from an unborn tinamou embryo in the hopes of studying the creature’s genome. Ultimately, they’ll contrast its similarities and differences with the genome found in ancient moa bones that were donated to the company by filmmaker Peter Jackson.
Colossal has done this type of research before with both ostrich and emu eggs. But while still considering the emu the best candidate to one day be a surrogate for a reborn (or reengineered) moa, the tinamou’s cellular embryo is proving the most promising for genetic editing. Perhaps on another morning, those same diminutive needles will insert a restored moa genome into another tinamou egg. In which case, like with the dire wolf before it (more on this later), life will have found a way—with a little help from 21st-century biogeneticists.
Not long ago, such a scene would be considered the stuff of science fiction; yet today it is just one of the wonders encountered during a curated tour of intrigues at Colossal’s new headquarters, which is expected to have its grand opening later this month. Nearly every room in the sprawling campus appears designed to evoke amazement and a childlike need to touch that which has been lost, forgotten, or mythologized. An overhead projector decorates one hallway intended for tours with the miniature footprints of a dodo at one moment and then a woolly mammoth’s massive gait in the next. A teacher doing an early tour ahead of her students this fall visibly could not resist the joy of stomping along in the mammoth’s wake.
All of this obviously has a ring of Michael Crichton and Jurassic Park about it, but that’s a comparison Colossal CEO Ben Lamm welcomes. The entrance to the offices and laboratories features a life-sized mammoth replica trapped in a model of glass-ice, keenly waiting to be shattered free; and the atrium in the building cheekily features a mosquito encased in a thin layer of amber (which, it should be noted, is not a good way to preserve DNA).
There is an obvious element of showmanship to Colossal, but it’s accompanied by cold, hard, scientific results. That became apparent around the world in April when the company revealed it had successfully bred three dire wolves with the same genetic code as the legendary beast of the Pleistocene epoch, a massive apex predator that died out with the last ice age around 10,000 years ago.
Some in the scientific community have debated whether a creature born from the edited genome of a gray wolf qualifies as the same species that vanished millennia past, but one does not need to be John Hammond to recognize the grandeur in proving irrefutably that the ancient dire wolf enjoyed a snow-white mane, and an appearance that would seem to give credence to the stories shared by Indigenous Americans and First Nation peoples about “the great wolf” of the North American plains.
“I’ve spent 15 years working in animal care and conservation, so I had similar experiences where there was a highly anticipated birth, and you’re tracking every moment of the development,” says Matt James, the chief animal officer at Colossal, who worked at both the Dallas and Miami zoos before coming aboard. “You get sucked into it and you get very weeded, and lose the perspective of everything going on around you. This felt like any other one of those experiences until Romulus was the first one to come out. When Romulus was born, and I saw that flash of
stark white—and remember wolves are typically born black—that was that ‘holy shit’ moment. ‘We’ve done it.’”
There is a burst of perhaps Mary Shelley-like excitement, but it’s swiftly followed by what James describes as a “sudden rush of urgent responsibility.” That responsibility is to the wolves that Colossal named Romulus and Remus—the first female of the dire wolf pack, Khaleesi, would be born later—but it is also a responsibility to a technology that Colossal intends to not only change de-extinction, but also to shift how we understand the nature of conservation itself.
In the four years since founding Colossal with George Church, a trailblazing geneticist and Harvard professor, one of the most surprising things to CEO Ben Lamm is how relatively quickly people accept the possibility of de-extinction, and that includes Lamm. Initially, the Texan entrepreneur did not reach out to Church to discuss mammoths or dire wolves. He was looking for background information on entering the field of synthetic biology and what he calls “directed evolution.” It was Church, when asked what he would invest in if money were no object, who flatly suggested, “I’d work to bring back the mammoth and other extinct species, and open-source those technologies for conservation.”
A quick dive into Church’s background confirmed this was not a spur-of-the-moment fantasy; the geneticist has been publicly arguing the possibility for decades on everything from 60 Minutes to The Colbert Report Furthermore, the deeper Lamm explored the terrain of biotechnology, the more unsolicited recommendations he got for working with Church.
“I reached out to people in ancient DNA; I reached out to people in [comparative biology]; and I reached out to people in genetic engineering,” Lamm recalls. “They’re like, ‘It’s gonna be expensive, it’s gonna be really hard,’ but the general consensus was that it was possible, and all of them would end every conversation with ‘you should really talk to George Church, because he’s the one that has figured this out.’”
Barely half a decade later, Lamm seems well situated from following that advice and his own instincts. A millennial mogul with a history in satellite and early A.I. investment, Lamm is as happy to talk about his own personal memories of Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond in Jurassic Park, or how the dire wolf artwork in his conference room deliberately evokes 1980s rock album covers, as he is the nitty-gritty of gene-editing tech.
But it is that nitty-gritty that’s allowed for monumental breakthroughs this year, beginning with the revelation that Colossal engineered mice with the fur and fat compositions of a woolly mammoth, and those beloved dire wolves. Debates about the applications of de-extinction will continue, yet what the CEO is perhaps right to insist on is how overlooked the conservation element of Colossal’s mission tends to be.
“We’re doing more conservation projects than de-
extinction projects,” says Lamm, “but no one seems to—I shouldn’t say care—but it’s never a focus.” While the dire wolves might have broken TikTok, the fact that Colossal has also seemingly discovered a way to clone greater biodiversity for endangered red wolf populations tends to get buried (though the publishing of a scientific paper early next year is expected to greatly impact the conversation around that). Meanwhile, the company is also poised to make further headway in developing an mRNA vaccine to protect African and Asian elephants from Elephant
Scientists study DNA genomes used to clone endangered and extinct species.
Romulus and Remus were born in October 2024, confirming that dire wolves were white.
Endotheliotropic Herpesvirus (EEHV), a hemorrhagic disease which has an 80 percent fatality rate among Asian elephants.
“When I joined Colossal, there were three projects that I was really passionate about from my history of losing elephants in human care, and one of them was EEHV,” James tells us. “We went and found [virologist Paul Ling], and it took us 13 months from the moment we invested in the project to the moment when we had the first trial. That’s an incredible representation of the scale and pace at
which Colossal can work, and that’s been one of the most meaningful projects for me because I personally lost elephants to EEHV.”
It is also a glimpse of the future Colossal wants to offer. Lamm says he thinks he’s failed, or only half-succeeded, if he doesn’t deliver on the promise of wonder that comes with de-extinction (which includes having a woolly mammoth calf by 2028), but the legacy of Colossal is intended to be more than just a Pleistocene nature preserve becoming a possibility one day.
“We have 60 partners using our technologies,” Lamm says, “but I’d love for that to be hundreds of organizations and thousands of people using our technologies and making a difference from a conservation perspective.”
“THERE IS NO FEELING THAT YOU CAN REALLY REPLICATE LIKE BEING THERE AT THE BIRTH OF THOSE DIRE WOLVES. THAT IS AN ADDICTION THAT I WILL PROBABLY HAVE FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.”
James puts it more bluntly when describing his hopes for how de-extinction technology will help the natural world.
“It’s that Colossal has commoditized and democratized technology and these strategies for conservation to a point where now it’s an entire field,” James says. “It’s that we’ve changed the economics of conservation to make it profitable to be invested in the preservation of nature; that we’ve changed the way technology is deployed in order to protect species on the brink of extinction, and there are 15 or 20 species that have been restored from extinction and are making meaningful changes to ecosystems in the wild.”
Still, like John Hammond attending to the birth of his velociraptors, neither James, Lamm, nor anyone else at Colossal appears unaffected by the wonderment of innovations that they can see and touch.
“If there is a birth or a hatching that is happening, you can expect that I will force my way in and be there for every single one,” James laughs. “There is no feeling that you can really replicate like being there at the birth of those dire wolves. That is an addiction that I will probably have for the rest of my life.”
Colossal CEO Ben Lamm co-founded the company in 2021.
CREATORS ANDY AND BARBARA MUSCHIETTI, AND STARS JOVAN ADEPO AND CHRIS CHALK REVEAL WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN EVIL RETURNS TO MAINE IN THE STEPHEN KING HBO SERIES, IT: WELCOME TO DERRY.
BY MAX EVRY
“The pressure that Barbara and Andy, and now HBO, have signed up for is immense,” says actor Chris Chalk ahead of the premiere
It: Welcome to Derry. “They made over a billion dollars, so now you have to make something good.”
“They” refers to brother-sister filmmaking duo Andy and Barbara Muschietti, whose landmark movie duology, an adaptation of Stephen King’s It, generated huge box office revenue alongside enough Pennywise the Dancing Clown merchandise to shake a red balloon at. Even with those two films encompassing over 300 minutes of screentime, there was still more material to mine from King’s lengthy tome. Hence, the upcoming eight-part HBO prequel series, It: Welcome to Derry, which follows a flurry of new (and
familiar) characters as they navigate an already turbulent 1962 setting with the added hiccup of evil entity
Pennywise stalking the title town. The show feels just as cinematic (and gory) as the hit films… as it should, since Andy Muschietti himself directed multiple episodes, including the pilot.
“They did the films and felt very close to the material, as did [showrunners] Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane,” says series lead Jovan Adepo. “They care for the IP and for the universe of It and Derry, but they weren’t ever too precious. As long as we weren’t trying to pull something out of a hat that makes no sense being in the IP, for the most part, they were like, ‘That fucking rocks. Try it. Let’s go for it.’”
Adepo (Babylon) plays Leroy Hanlon, a career military officer who is also the eventual grandfather of Losers Club member Mike Hanlon, while Taylour Paige (Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F) plays his concerned wife Charlotte. Chris Chalk (Gotham) takes on the role of Dick Hallorann from King’s
parallel novel The Shining, who is also featured in It. All three thespians, who share the screen with an equally talented group of child actors, have to navigate a complex, multi-narrative of mysterious goings-on in the town of Derry—including murders and top-secret military ops—that all point back to Pennywise.
“What I like about Stephen King’s work is there are so many different communities experiencing the same thing, which allows so many different points of entry,” says Chalk. “This show is a side note but really shines because there are 12 different kinds of people here, and 12 ways to experience this entity that you hadn’t seen in the previous two versions.”
ADAPTING THE KING AGAIN
The cast is deeply reverential to the source material. Paige refers to its author as “one of the greatest minds of all time,” while Adepo had already appeared as Larry Underwood in the 2020 miniseries version of King’s The Stand.
“Both experiences were really great ones,” Adepo says.
“Both filmed in Canada, the first one being in Vancouver. I
had a blast filming in Vancouver, such a lovely city, and the same for Toronto… my first time in that part of Canada.”
For the Muschietti siblings, it was a bit of a homecoming in more ways than one, since they were returning to the same Toronto locales where they shot the two It movies, including the town of Port Hope, which doubles for the ominous Derry once again.
“They loved us because we bought a lot of muffins and coffee there,” says Barbara. “We had a lot of hotel rooms there. The day after the show opens, we’re gonna go to the Capitol Theatre and show them the first episode.”
In 2016, this author got to visit the set of the first It movie, while Sophia Lillis, as Beverly, dangled from wires in the dank sewer set built at Pinewood Toronto. Barbara said at the time that their first Pennywise movie “winks to the ’50s fears but is a little less naive.” After all, that version of King’s book was reset to the ’80s. By contrast, the original book took place in 1958. So a certain cultural naivete became one of the key elements the filmmakers sought to reincorporate into the early 1960s setting of the show.
“The thing that connects me a lot with this era is it’s 1958 when the Losers are kids,” Andy says. “In many ways, this season is more similar to the experience of the kids in the book than the film was. Stephen King was a kid in that era, so it’s not a coincidence that the book is filled with his own personal experiences growing up.
“People were scared of different things. In the ’60s, we were closer to ’50s B-movies about radioactive monsters. Pretty understandable, being in the middle of the Cold War. People were terrified of a nuclear attack, and kids were subjected to all these atomic bomb drills. There’s a character in the show, Bert the Turtle, who is a real mascot created around those times to be a friendly figure in this warning PSA for schools.”
While the new show is built out from interstitial material from the original 1986 It, these extrapolations are also pulled from the Civil Rights era itself. A palpable racial tension is a constant for the three Black leads in early episodes, a horror on top of the other horror happening beneath the town’s surface. This includes the local Black projectionist at the movie theater having several gruesome murders falsely pinned on him.
“There’s zero naivete in this show in terms of the intensity of the experiences that the characters go through,” Andy insists. “Among all the complexities of social and political stuff in the ’50s, it was a simpler life… for some people. But it’s not toned down. It’s actually more gruesome than any of the movies. Because we have more screen time, we could explore more characters, more fears, and different scares.”
Adepo believes that, no matter how outlandish the entity’s supernatural antics get, it is important that they ground the setting in realism.
“Everything else is how it should have been in the ’60s,” Adepo elaborates. “If we were doing this and pretending that racism didn’t exist in the ’60s, that would turn into a stylized type of thing. That’s just not what we’re building. I don’t think Stephen King ever shied away from what was real.”
SHINING ON
“The fun thing about dealing with race and terror is racism is terror,” says Chalk, whose Hallorann uses his psychic talents to navigate racial confrontations. “What happens when an entity that doesn’t care about anything other than your fleshy parts comes into the equation?”
Adds Andy, “There are a lot of scares that are related to things that were happening culturally and socially in America, and segregation is one of them. And racism. It’s all true to the book. We’re not inventing anything, we’re just expanding it and throwing light on events and behaviors.”
Leroy is determined to shield his family from unpleasantness when he moves them from Louisiana to Derry, where his new assignment is. Unfortunately, racism rears its head immediately when he arrives at the base and is confronted by a bigoted white soldier. He deliberately internalizes all of this.
Says Paige, “Leroy is trying to take care of his family, but it has put a lot of strain on us, moving a lot. It’s put a strain on him being able to connect emotionally to his son, because there’s a lot of rigidity in his character. Jovan actually comes from a military family.”
Not only does Adepo hail from a military background, but he has also portrayed soldierly characters in films including Fences and Overlord
“There’s this element of military men being structured, which is something that I can relate to because my father was in the military, and that’s definitely how he kept his household,” he says. “I’ve played that type of character quite a few times. For this character, it was important for him to put that part of his life in a safe package so it doesn’t seep all the way into his more domesticated life.”
“There’s so much pressure on men to perform, to provide,” Paige notes. “And then you’re talking 1962, right? He’s African American. He’s representing our country. Everything is survival. Your marriage gets put in the hierarchy of needs, and the hierarchy of what you have to present when you go in there every day. Charlotte feels the brunt of that. Charlotte has this intuition that something’s off.”
As for Chalk, stepping into the shoes of previous actors who portrayed Dick Hallorann was a big deal. Those who embodied the elder version of the psychic character who came to Danny Torrance’s aid include Scatman Crothers (The Shining), Melvin Van Peebles (The Shining TV miniseries), and Carl Lumbly in the more recent Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep. Chalk’s younger iteration may surprise fans with his swagger, along with how deftly he uses his shine to navigate a hostile world.
“They’ll be surprised about quite a bit, because there’s an age gap between the Doctor Sleep and The Shining version versus this version,” Chalk explains of embodying Hallorann. “That’s the freedom of being able to play him so much younger, at an early stage of his shining, while still honoring Scatman and the legacy that Stephen King established. I tend to play people at younger stages of their life, like Gotham… and playing Lucius Fox, and having Morgan Freeman. I study a little bit, then do my own thing.”
An early episode features Hallorann and two other enlisted men getting kicked out of a local dive, which foreshadows an important Pennywise-centric event from the original book involving a Black-owned bar in Derry known as the Black Spot. Muschietti tried unsuccessfully to incorporate this scene in both It movies.
“That scene is basically the cause and effect of the Black Spot,” Andy reveals. “It’s the seed for why these colored airmen have to find a place of their own. Dick is working for the military in a very specific secret mission, and he asks them something in return for his fellows.”
“For Black officers who are serving their country, to be displaced by townies is part of the additional terror,” says Chalk. “Everybody’s being terrorized, then the real monster comes. It does lead us to find a place to go that can be just ours, where we can feel safe, which, on a certain level, is what everybody in Derry has an awareness of. That this entity is looking for them. I do think we did a good job of acknowledging the reality. Without that reality, how can we believe in the clown?”
Clockwise from left: (L-R) Hannah Storey, Maya McNair, Matilda Lawler and Maya Misaljevic as local school girls; Chris Chalk plays a young Dick Hallorann; Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård) is an ever-present threat in Derry.
RETURN OF THE CLOWN
Speaking of the clown, actor/executive producer Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise (returning from the films) does not appear in his iconic jovial form early on, although the entity makes his presence known in other horrifying ways.
“It’s not every day that Bill shows up on set,” explains Andy of the new show. “It’s always something very special when Bill appears as Pennywise. You can feel it because he walks on stage, and there’s this atmosphere that is super special. He is imposing. He is Pennywise.”
This evokes my own memories of being creeped out on set in 2016, watching Skarsgård decked out as Pennywise, even when he was simply chatting and laughing with the Muschiettis and drinking a cup of coffee between takes. Does the cast or crew still get weirded out by the character, or is he too much of an icon now?
“I think people do… I still do,” Barbara admits. “Especially when he’s standing up. I’m tall, but when he’s standing up,
he freaks me out. It’s so funny because we’re generally having a very normal conversation about kids or pizza, and he’s terrifying. I have to remind him, ‘You are freaking me out, buddy.’ We tried especially in the first movie to keep the kids away from Bill so that their impressions would be on camera, but it didn’t work. They loved hanging out with him.”
While Pennywise will make a full comeback in future episodes, fans can look forward to many other Stephen King references peppered throughout Welcome to Derry, including familiar-looking cans of Calumet Baking Powder from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
“You’ll see some callbacks,” confirms Chalk, whose character stocked that Native American-fronted baking powder in the 1980 film. “The Jamie Travis-directed episode really was focused on honoring some visuals with Hallorann from The Shining that we know deep in our souls.”
Explains Andy, “It’s all over the series. For fans of The Shining, the bigger easter egg happens in the last episode. It’s beyond our desire to create easter eggs. When you’re telling a story about Derry in the ’60s, it’s almost inevitable to connect events, places and people with other stuff from Stephen King. ‘So and so is sent to prison. What is the closest prison to Derry? It’s Shawshank.’ Dodging that would be weird, and it becomes an easter egg.”
While there may be references to The Shining, it’s how Chalk’s Hallorann is using said shine to move his way up the ladder that acts as an intriguing development.
“Dick Hallorann has the longest long game that there is,” says Chalk. “He is a lot of steps ahead of most people. Then there are moments when he’s like, ‘Oh no, whoops.’ His confidence in his long game might be his Achilles heel.”
Adepo and Chalk were friends and colleagues before they were cast together for It: Welcome to Derry, having appeared together in When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series on the Central Park Five.
“We have a very complex arc of a relationship,” Adepo says of Leroy and Dick. “There may or may not be a bit of friction. My character is someone who leads by the book, ‘A plus B equals C,’ and Hallorann can be like, ‘Well, what if we skip the first two, go straight to C and D?’ I’m like, ‘No, that’s not fucking right.’ It makes for a dynamic of friction and fluidity with [Hallorann].”
While Andy Muschietti is a visual whiz of Spielbergian proportions, as proven in the It films, he also has a sensitivity for performance that his actors appreciate. For one tense scene between Leroy and Dick, Andy convinced his crew to give Adepo and Chalk eight hours of virtual silence so they could really dig into the conflict between the characters.
“I cried so much afterwards,” Chalk says. “Not because of the weight of the scene, but because Jovan and I both felt so held. ‘We’re not just props, we’re real people.’ Andy, to make that adjustment in such an important scene at the last minute, he’ll be in the annals of heroism for me.”
“Andy loves directing, he loves actors, he loves story, he loves Stephen King,” concludes Paige. “If it were up to him, we’d probably shoot 24 hours a day.”
It: Welcome To Derry premieres on Oct. 26 on HBO.
Reina Hardesty
Genre fans may recognize Reina Hardesty from The CW’s Arrowverse, but the 29-year-old Southern California native is on a hot streak lately, landing the lead in Netflix horror breakout It’s What’s Inside and starring alongside Daniel Dae Kim in Butterfly. Horror or physically demanding action, Hardesty has a knack for completing the mission.
Star struck
Ten s tars of tomorrow in the Den of Geek s t udio today.
Over the years, Den of Geek has done more than add only a magazine beneath its umbrella; it’s also become an event destination at film festivals and comic cons (including the one you might be reading this at right now!). In the process, we’ve had the opportunity to speak face-to-face with some of the biggest stars of the past decade and, we suspect, some of the biggest in the decade to come….
Jacob Tremblay
Once the heart-rending soul opposite Brie Larson in Room and the voice of the titular character in Pixar’s Luca, Tremblay is transitioning to young adult roles. He had a brief but poignant turn in Mike Flanagan and Stephen King’s tearjerker The Life of Chuck, and is next seen opposite Peter Dinklage in the new The Toxic Avenger.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICK MORGULIS AND BEN TRIVETT
WORDS BY ALEC BOJALAD, DAVID CROW, AND CHRIS LONGO
Molly Gordon
If you’re looking to make a charming coming-ofage comedy, adding Molly Gordon to the mix is a surefire way to supercharge your cast. Whether it’s Booksmart, Good Boys, Shiva Baby, or Theater Camp, the latter of which she co-wrote and co-directed, Gordon has consistently excelled. While her on-screen chemistry with co-star Jeremy Allen White anchored the emotional core of the most compelling season of FX’s The Bear, it’s her tour de force lead performance in Sophie Brooks’ latest feature, Oh, Hi!, that has us eager to see her career continue to evolve.
Cailee Spaeny
It’s a Cailee Spaeny world, and we’re just living in it. After starring back-to-backto-back in Alien: Romulus, Civil War, and as Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla Presley, Spaeny is continuing her winning streak by appearing opposite Daniel Craig in the next Benoit Blanc movie, Wake Up Dead Man. Furthermore, rumors suggest she will reteam with writer-director Alex Garland for the new Elden Ring movie.
Mckenna Grace
After years of playing younger versions of stars including Margot Robbie and Brie Larson, Mckenna Grace is making star-tracks of her own. Already the young face of the next generation of spectral investigation in the last couple of Ghostbusters flicks, Grace can next be seen as District 12 tribute Maysilee Donner in 2026’s The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping
David Jonsson
of the breakouts of
One
HBO’s Industry, David Jonsson is turning up across the industry, from his haunting work in Alien: Romulus to breaking hearts in Stephen King dystopian epic, The Long Walk. Watch this space.
Rachel Zegler
Don’t cry for Rachel Zegler. A musical prodigy who was cast by Steven Spielberg at age 18 to lead the poignant West Side Story remake, she went on to bring Hunger Games fans to tears in The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. These days, she’s earning raves and awards chatter for her Eva Perón in Evita on the West End.
Meghann Fahy
One of the White Lotus guests to break big, Meghann Fahy played Daphne Sullivan in the season where they went Italiano, but she’s since become a go-to talent for giving grit to streaming glitz. Look no further than her Emmy-nominated turn in Sirens, but don’t miss out on the thriller fun of her Blumhouse vehicle, Drop
Isabela Merced
The former Nickelodeon child actor has come into her own as a star of TV and film. Known a few years ago as the live-action Dora the Explorer, Merced these days is making waves for canceling genocide as Hawkgirl in Superman and for anchoring The Last of Us’ second season. She is also reprising both roles in Peacemaker and TLOU season three.
Ayo Edebiri
Is Ayo Edebiri on top of the world right now? Yes, chef. Even if it weren’t for her breakout turn as ascendant sous chef Syd Adamu on FX’s beloved The Bear, Edebiri would still be a rising talent. Seasoned in comedy writing (What We Do in the Shadows, Bottoms), voice acting (Big Mouth, Inside Out 2), and good old-fashioned movie-starrin’ (Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt), there may not be enough hyphenates in the world for this honorary Irishwoman.
