Our live radio broadcasts are currently on hiatus while we work on improvements to Sanitarium.FM's core services. For further information, visit our Discord.
At the the same time, Fox takes ‘Assassin’s Creed‘ off the summer 2015 calendar, while shifting ‘The Fantastic Four’ and ‘Paper Towns’
Twentieth Century Fox and Marvel Comics’ are moving ahead with their long-gestating X-Men spinoff Deadpool.
On Thursday, the studio announced that the movie will hit theaters Feb. 12, 2016. Tim Miller is set to direct the film, with Ryan Reynolds long rumored to star, although no deal is set. Bets are that he will.
The beloved Marvel character Deadpool, a.k.a. Wade Wilson, is a talkative mercenary with a host of powers, including the ability to heal at a fast rate. Reynolds played Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, while Scott Adkins played the character of Deadpool after Wilson had transformed.
News of Deadpool’s release comes weeks after test footage of the project leaked briefly online. The sequence, featuring Reynolds, was shot several years ago, but nevertheless sparked intense conversation on social media.
In an recent interview, Reynolds commented on the leak, suggested it helped move the process along. “The movie has been in a state of limbo for a while. There was such an overpowering reaction to the footage, you sort of feel like, ‘Oh, so we weren’t crazy for our reasons for loving this character, for loving this role.’ It’s interesting to see the power of the Internet. It’s awe-inspiring, actually,” the actor told the Niagara Falls Review. “And it’s neat that Twitter and Facebook and Instagram can move mountains when used in the right way.”
Reynolds, whose turn as the superhero Green Lantern failed, has been linked to a potential Deadpool solo movie for years, even before he debuted as the character in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. His interest in the property dates back to 2003.
Fox made other key changes to its release slate, including taking New Regency’s Assassin’s Creed off the 2015 summer calendar.
The adaptation of the Ubisoft video game, starring Michael Fassbender, was set to open Aug. 7, but won’t be ready in time, according to insiders. The script has gone through several rewrites, while the production itself has grappled with scheduling issues. Fox insiders say Assassin’s Creed will now hit theaters in 2016.
As a result, The Fantastic Four reboot will move from June 19, 2015, to the Aug. 7 spot, while YA film adaptation Paper Towns — based on the book by John Green — will move up from July 31, 2015 to June 19, the same corridor Fox used to release YA blockbuster The Fault In Our Stars, also based on a Green novel.
Fox is taking a cue from Disney and Marvel in relocating Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four to August, where Guardians of the Galaxy prospered this summer. For years, August was considered a dumping ground. If anything, Guardians proved that August has the benefit of being less crowded when it comes to tentpoles.
For those of you who follow Mojang a bit closer than your casual Minecraft player, you might remember that Mojang is an indie games developer. That means, even if you’ve got a hit on your hands and continue to support it, you still need to invest some time in developing some new properties.
Mojang or more precisely Notch was working on another game besides Minecraft. 0x10c was to be a game to follow on Minecraft’s footsteps, to hopefully gain some spotlight from its older brother and gain its own slightly different audience. At least that was the plan. Development stalled some time around early 2013 and in August of that same year Notch confirmed that the game project was dead in the water. However it seems that some elements of that game had been finished.
C418, better known as the composer of the tunes you hear in Minecraft, has released two tracks through Twitter to his Bandcamp for players to listen to. They’re short but they’re not bad. The low bitrate sound is intentional too, as C418 wanted that to be the identifier for the game. Little music, lots of drone.
I think now is a good time to release the 0x10c music. You can pay for it if you want. https://t.co/aFfAm8qIqK
Talking about Notch’s recent departure from Mojang, C418 echoed what had been said by Notch then, adding that he couldn’t have taken the strain any longer without snapping.
“Do you know that feeling that you have had a great day, but then some guy on twitter that you don’t even know tells you you’re the worst thing that ever happened to this planet? … That feeling also happens with Markus, except it’s amplified times two million.”
He has said though that he is going to continue to work with Mojang on Minecraft for as long as possible.
Blizzard may not expect World of Warcraft to grow again in the future, but that doesn’t mean it’s giving up on the game. In fact, Tom Chilton, lead game designer at Blizzard, says the studio has actually expanded the game’s development team over the past couple of years.
It’s inevitable that a game as long-lived as World of Warcraft will lose players, and new players aren’t as likely to stick with it over the long term as those from ten years ago, according to Chilton. That, and the sheer volume of new content that’s been added to the game over the past decade, has led Blizzard to change its approach to creating new expansions.
“The game can only get so complicated before it starts to collapse under its own weight, and becomes very cumbersome to do anything new with,” he told MCV. “So we are always trying to simplify the game, while at the same time add new things so that the total complexity does not get completely out of control. And you could already argue that the complexity of WoW is already huge. That can be overwhelming to new people coming in.”
The World of Warcraft development team has actually expanded from 150 employees to 220, he explained, which will be good for the game in the long run. But it’s also one of the reasons the Warlords of Draenor expansion took so long to come to fruition.
“By growing by 50 per cent, you don’t get people in off the street who can make content exactly in the way that we would want. There’s an acclimatization process,” Chilton said. “That has resulted in slowing us down. But in the long-term we are now positioned to release expansions more frequently.”
The truth is that even though World of Warcraft’s numbers have tumbled precipitously over the past few years, 6.8 million subscribers is the kind of user base most MMOs would kill to have. Sustained, long-term growth may not be on the table anymore, but it’s clear that the game is going to be around for a long time yet.
10 weeks ago myself and the team from the station held a 48 hour charity event on Twitch in aid of GamesAid, a fantastic charity that is close to my heart.
Over the weekend we managed to raise just £236 of the £1500 we had hoped to raise via our Just Giving page and through a combined use of the station radio stream and Twitch streaming, we had some great shows and some fantastic input from our fans
The stand out moments we have kept on Youtube here:
During the weekend we played LOADs of great games, both PC and console based. (and got very little sleep that weekend too)
But thank you to all the team and the fans for chipping in, plus to the great guys over at Subterranean Games for joining us and talking about War for the Overworld
DCAU mastermind Bruce Timm will executive producer a new digital Justice League cartoon for Machinima to debut in spring of 2015. Titled Justice League: Gods and Monsters Chronicles, it will be be co-produced by his Batman: The Animated Series partner Alan Burnett.
Originally announced as another DC direct-to-home video animated movie, Gods and Monsters Chronicles will now be a three-part digital series; according to Comic Book Resources it’s an original story by Timm which has nothing to do with the 2001 Justice League comic of the same name. Most tellingly (via Variety):
“Chronicles” is said to revolve around a newly conceived reality in the DC universe where Justice League members Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are much darker versions of the superheroes that people know.
I can’t be upset at the idea of any Bruce Timm-led DC animation, but does it really need to be darker? I swear, if DC continues this trend, eventually we’re going to get a Justice League that spends all its time murdering hoboes.
