Enlarge / Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri) are the Dead Boy Detectives, ghosts who solve paranormal mysteries. (credit: Netflix )

For those eagerly anticipating the second season of Netflix's stellar adaption of Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels, Dead Boy Detectives —the streaming plaform's new supernatural horror detective series—is a welcome return to that weird magical world. Co-showrunner Steve Yockey ( Supernatural ), who created the series, aptly describes it as "the Hardy Boys on acid." You've got vengeful witches, demons, psychic mediums, cursed masks, foul-mouthed parasitic sprites, talking cats—and, of course, the titular ghostly detectives, intent on spending their afterlife cracking all manner of mysterious paranormal cases.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Sandman fans first encountered the Dead Boys in the " Seasons of Mist " storyline, in which the ghost Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland meet for the first time in 1990. Edwin had been murdered at his boarding school in 1916 and spent decades in Hell. When Lucifer abandoned his domain, Hell was emptied, and Edwin was among the souls who returned to that boarding school. Charles was a living student whom Edwin tried to protect. Charles ultimately died and chose to join Edwin in his afterlife adventures. The characters reappeared in the Children's Crusade crossover series, in which they decided to become detectives.

Universal Studios has been going meta with its marketing for its forthcoming action comedy The Fall Guy . Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are the marquee stars; Gosling plays a Hollywood stuntman trying to make a movie with his estranged ex-girlfriend (Blunt). But it's the actual stuntmen standing in for Gosling during action sequences who get the spotlight in a new promotional video for the film.

As previously reported , The Fall Guy is directed by David Leitch, who also brought us the glorious John Wick (his uncredited directorial debut with Chad Stahelski ). It's a loose adaptation of the popular 1980s TV series of the same name starring Lee Majors. Per the official synopsis:

Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling stars as Colt Seavers, a battle-scarred stuntman who, having left the business a year earlier to focus on both his physical and mental health, is drafted back into service when the star of a mega-budget studio movie—being directed by his ex, Jody Moreno, played by Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt—goes missing. While the film’s ruthless producer (Hannah Waddingham), maneuvers to keep the disappearance of star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) a secret from the studio and the media, Colt performs the film’s most outrageous stunts while trying (with limited success) to charm his way back into Jody’s good graces. But as the mystery around the missing star deepens, Colt will find himself ensnared in a sinister, criminal plot that will push him to the edge of a fall more dangerous than any stunt.

In this incarnation, Gosling's Colt Seavers isn't a bounty hunter on the side; he's just a stuntman—a bit past his prime—who stumbles into solving a mystery. Blunt costars as Jody Moreno, Colt's ex-girlfriend and a former camera operator who finally gets the chance to direct her first film. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays movie star Tom Ryder, who goes missing mid-shoot. Stephanie Hsu plays Ryder's personal assistant, and Winston Duke plays Colt's stunt coordinator and BFF. Ted Lasso 's Hannah Waddingham appears as Gail, the producer of Jody's film. And OG Fall Guy Lee Majors (now in his 80s) is expected to have a cameo; perhaps he'll perform the theme song, "Unknown Stuntman," that he wrote and recorded for the original series.

We were already looking forward to the summer release of Deadpool and Wolverine, which will bring together Ryan Reynolds' R-rated antihero with Hugh Jackman's iconic X-Man. We're even more eager to see the film after Marvel dropped the official trailer, which is chock-full of off-color witticisms, meta-references, slo-mo action, and a generous sprinkling of F-bombs. (But no cocaine! Wade promised Feige! "They know all the slang terms. They have a list.")

"You’re talking about two massive movie stars in their most iconic roles,” Director Shawn Levy ( Free Guy ) told Screen Rant earlier this month. “It also gave me an opportunity. It’s the third Deadpool movie, but it’s not Deadpool 3 . It’s a different thing that’s very much Deadpool and Wolverine . And it’s not trying to copycat anything from the first two movies. They were awesome, but this is a two-hander character adventure.”

(Spoilers for Deadpool 2 below.)

Enlarge / A young prodigal tomboy returns home from war and finds herself framed for murder in Renegade Nell . (credit: Disney+)

Award-winning British TV writer Sally Wainwright is best known for the dramatic series Happy Valley (2014–2023) and Gentleman Jack (2019–2022), the latter produced jointly by BBC and HBO. Wainwright partnered with Disney+ for her latest series, the resolutely PG-13 Renegade Nell , which is a different beast altogether: a good old-fashioned, swashbuckling comic adventure with a supernatural twist, featuring a sassy cross-dressing heroine forced to turn to highway robbery to survive.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Set in 1705 during the reign of Queen Anne (Jodi May, Gentleman Jack ), the series stars Louisa Harland ( Derry Girls ) as Nell Jackson. Nell is a headstrong young woman with tomboy flair and a taste for adventure who returns home to her village of Tottenham after running off five years before to marry one Captain Jackson against her father's wishes. She's now widowed and possessed of occasional supernatural skills whenever someone threatens her, courtesy of a fairy sprite named Billy Blind (Nick Mohammed, aka Nathan from Ted Lasso ), who has been tasked to protect Nell. Nell's family thought she'd been killed on the battlefield alongside her husband, so her homecoming is a bit of a shock.

Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for his portrayal of a failed stand-up comedian struggling with mental illness in the 2019 film Joker , director Todd Phillips' controversial interpretation of the classic Batman villain. The honor was richly deserved. In my review , I called it a "masterful performance" that "transforms the narrative into something more than a competent-but-unremarkable tale of hard knocks driving a troubled man to violence." The film ended up topping $1 billion globally at the box office—the first R-rated movie to do so, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film ever.

Now Phoenix is reprising that role in Phillips' follow-up, Joker: Folie à Deux , costarring Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. It's hard to imagine Phillips matching his earlier achievement, but Warner Bros. released the first teaser last night, and quite frankly, the film looks fantastic.

(Spoilers for the 2019 film below.)

Enlarge / Legendary Pictures has confirmed that it plans to make Dune: Part Three with director Denis Villeneuve. (credit: YouTube/Warner Bros.)

Dune: Part Two is still raking in the moolah at the box office, and deservedly so. But judging by my various feeds, fans are already swooning over the prospect of director Denis Villeneuve extending his vision into a trilogy by adapting Frank Herbert's 1969 sequel, Dune Messiah , for the next installment. Will there be a Dune: Part Three ? Most signs currently point to yes, with a couple of caveats. Exactly how soon we'll be seeing a return to Arrakis depends a lot on Villeneuve.

Variety confirmed that Legendary Pictures is working with the director on developing Dune: Part Three , although it remains unclear from the wording of the plethora of news items whether the project has officially been greenlit. ("Development" can mean a lot of things.) Naturally, the studio is eager, as are we: the film is the biggest hit of 2024 thus far, with global earnings of $630 million (although the hotly anticipated Deadpool and Wolverine this summer might give it a run for its money).

That confirmation sent fresh frissons of excitement across the Internet, although Villeneuve had been talking about the prospect as far back as September 2021 . Those plans always depended on the success of Part Two , and that hurdle has obviously been cleared. By August 2023, the director was on record saying there were "words on paper" for a third film. And we learned just last month that composer Hans Zimmer was already working on the score for Dune: Part Three .

Heads up, Whovians! We've got a newly regenerated Fifteenth Doctor in Ncuti Gatwa and a new season of the long-running British sci-fi series Doctor Who on the way. Judging by the latest trailer, we're in for another wild ride of time-traveling hijinks, punctuated by an irresistibly charismatic Gatwa sporting some very colorful outfits with confident aplomb.

(Spoilers for most recent seasons and specials below.)

Look, I loved Jodie Whittaker's incarnation of the Doctor , but her tenure was hampered by the unavoidable fact that showrunner Chris Chibnall just didn't give her a lot of great material to work with. Among other issues, there was an unfortunate tendency toward didacticism and preachiness in the writing at the expense of genuine emotional resonance. While there were a number of notable episodes, and Chibnall gamely trotted out all the fan-favorite monsters and tropes, nothing ever fully captured the imagination in quite the same way as the show has always done at its best. Whittaker deserved better.

Enlarge (credit: iStock via Getty Images )

OpenAI has launched a charm offensive in Hollywood, holding meetings with major studios including Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros Discovery to showcase its video generation technology Sora and allay fears the artificial intelligence model will harm the movie industry.

Chief executive Sam Altman and chief operating officer Brad Lightcap gave presentations to executives from the film industry giants, said multiple people with knowledge of the meetings, which took place in recent days.

Altman and Lightcap showed off Sora, a new generative AI model that can create detailed videos from simple written prompts.

It's been a long wait for the second season of HBO's House of the Dragon , in which House Targaryen descends into civil war over the heir to the Iron Throne. It's set to premiere in June, and HBO is ramping up its marketing with a rather clever twist: not one official trailer, but two, each presenting the perspective of one side in the bloody conflict. And we get to choose which trailer we'd like to view—although if you're like us, you'll elect to watch both.

(Spoilers for the first season below.)

As I've written previously, HBO's House of the Dragon debuted in 2022 with a solid, promising pilot episode, and the remainder of the season lived up to that initial promise. The series is set about 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and chronicles the beginning of the end of House Targaryen's reign. The primary source material is Fire and Blood , a fictional history of the Targaryen kings written by George R.R. Martin. As book readers know, those events culminated in a civil war and the extinction of the dragons—at least until Daenerys Targaryen came along.