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Batman: Arkham Knight is already one of 2015’s most anticipated games. It looks like fever has climbed a few degrees. A listing on Amazon suggests the Harley Quinn DLC bonus may contain more than previously thought. “For the first time in the Arkham series take on the role of Joker’s psychotic side-kick Harley Quinn and wreak havoc inside the Blüdhaven Police Department,” the description read. “With this exclusive Story Pack experience events in the lead-up to Arkham Knight as you infiltrate Blüdhaven to rescue your partner in crime: Poison Ivy. Delve deep into Harley’s demented nature and utilize her devastating baseball bat to smash, crash and bash your way to a friend very much in need.” Gamestop already has the Red Hood story DLC as a pre-order exclusive and this Harley Quinn DLC looks to be available at other retailers. PlayStation owners will receive a console exclusive Scarecrow Nightmare DLC that was announced in December at PlayStation Experience in Las Vegas.

In addition to all that, today a new 8min gameplay video was released. While it doesn’t show much about the game we don’t already know, it does give clues to the Scarecrow’s plan and shows off how truly next-gen this title looks in action.

In the category of not-so-good Batman: Arkham Knight news, a statement was released officially pushing back the game’s release date from 6/2/15-6/23/15. While it’s only a three week delay, seeing new footage makes it feel like another three years. The move was most likely made to capitalize on a potential bump coming out of the industry trade show E3 in Los Angeles in early June. Which makes sense from a promotional stand point. Why have only one week in the spotlight before the show when you could be the first blockbuster game coming out of the biggest video game sales pitch in the world?

Batman: Arkham Knight and its DLC are in stores June 23 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Currently DC Comics digital is releasing a lead-in digital comic. Available every Friday, Batman: Arkham Knight the comic is written by Peter Tomasi and picks up right after the events of Joker’s demise in Arkham City.

Also coming from WB Interactive is Netherrealm’s Mortal Kombat X. This week the studio confirmed one of film’s most infamous game hunters, the Predator, would be a playable character in the game as part of the Kombat Pack DLC which includes additional fighters and alternate costumes. As long as we’re putting in Predator content a Danny Glover would be sweet. Regardless, the alien hunter is available as part of either the $99 special edition version of the game or the DLC can be purchased as a separate bundle for $30. It will be available when the game launches on April 14. Jason Voorhees was also previously teased and confirmed along with the returning Liu Kang.

Currently DC Comics is also publishing a lead-in digital comic book series titled: Mortal Kombat X. If the characters who appear in the book are any indication of who we’ll see when the game is released today could have been an announcement for the Outworld tyrant, Havik.

Telltale Games, the studio behind the game adaptations of Fables and The Walking Dead, have another franchise some of you might know. Their Game of Thrones episodic experience is set to release its third chapter titled The Sword in the Darkness. It’s available for download this Tuesday March 24 for PC owners, and PlayStation owners in the US. On March 25, Xbox owners everywhere and PS owners in the rest of the world will be able to access the next chapter in the Forresters’ story. Finally, March 26 will see iOS and Android devices get the game. Individually each episode cost $4.99 or season pass options are available on some platforms.

Check out the full trailer below to catch you up on events so far.

Currently the developer is also in the middle of their Tales From the Borderlands adaptation while getting set to release a new episodic story series based on the popular Minecraft. Telltale Games also teased follow ups to Walking Dead including a pre season 3 game much like The Walking Dead: 400 Days came before The Walking Dead: Season 2.

What are your thoughts on the latest Arkham Knight news? Have you played Telltale’s GOT? 

This icy force both foul and fair has a frozen heart worth mining.

Well, I had hoped to wait until May before updating my movie calendar, but then Bob Iger had to go and hold an annual shareholder’s meeting for Disney.

…which means that all sorts of stuff got announced, so here’s the latest.

NOTE:  My colleagues have noted the confusion over Warner Brothers’ superhero schedule.

To be clear: past Suicide Squad, WB/DC Entertainment has not matched announced movies with opening dates.

So, you will see a listing like:

and

That does not mean that there are two movies scheduled, only that DCE is planning movies, and has claimed dates.  Other news sites have linked titles to dates.  This has not been officially announced or confirmed by Warner Brothers, and until I see official confirmation, will continue to list the names and dates separately.  When do I expect to see that confirmation?  Either at a shareholder’s meeting, or sometime in July or August, just like last year.  Like last year, I expect Marvel, via D23, to make a bigger splash than DC, although DC could try to win Comic-Con this year, given Marvel Studio’s suspected absence.

Updates in BOLD.

Modern society requires a reliable and trustworthy Internet infrastructure. To achieve this goal, cybersecurity research has previously drawn from a multitude of disciplines, including engineering, mathematics, and social sciences, as well as the humanities. Cybersecurity is concerned with the study of the protection of information – stored and processed by computer-based systems – that might be vulnerable to unintended exposure and misuse.

The post How do we protect ourselves from cybercrime? appeared first on OUPblog.

For those excited about the upcoming Playstation Network debut of Powers, the live action adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming‘s superhero procedural, here’s an 8 minute featurette detailing how the production came to be and lots of new footage.

Powers, which stars Sharlto Copley and Susan Heyward, will be the Playstation Network’s first original series. It should make for a fascinating experiment for the network going forward, particularly to see how many viewers opt to pay the per-episode rate rather than get a Playstation Plus subscription.

Powers will be available on PSN starting March 10th.

When it rains, it pours as it comes to news of comics getting gobbled up for adaptation. Following the just announced Dreadstar television series deal, THR is now reporting that Sony has picked up the film rights to Scott McCloud‘s acclaimed graphic novel The Sculptor.

The film will be produced by Academy Award winner Scott Rudin (No Country for Old Men, The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Josh Bratman (Captain Phillips).

The Sculptor, McCloud first fictional comics work since 1998’s The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, has only been out via First Second for two weeks and has been incredibly well-received by the critical community. You can read Beat contributor Harper Harris‘ review here, as well as our interview with McCloud on the process of creating the nearly 500 page graphic novel.

Here’s the updated dance card for superhero movies, selected animated films, and geek-centric films.

Updates are in bold.

While we’re surely in for months and months of speculation about the new Marvel/Sony partnership re: Spider-Man, The Hollywood Reporter, who initially broke the big news last night, revealed a few new details regarding what the future of Marvel’s premiere superhero looks like.

Here are the pertinent details of note:

– It’s not really a surprise, but Amazing Spider-Man series director Marc Webb is out, and Sony, who has final casting say over who gets to play Spider-Man, is looking for an actor that is “much younger” than the 31 year old Andrew Garfield. I liked Garfield fine, even if his Peter was a bit too “cool” for my taste, but Webb wasn’t a great fit for the franchise. Sadly, the results bore that out, and some really bad scripts didn’t help.

– The two studios exchanged no actual cash in the deal, but Sony will retain 60% of the ticket sales, while Marvel hangs onto its merchandising rights. The latter, according to an unnamed source, is cited as the motivating factor for this entire deal on Sony’s side.

– Avi Arad, long-time Spider-Man producer, along with Matt Tolmach have been bumped into Executive Producer roles and will have “no real say in the creative direction of the franchise”. I can hear your sighs of relief.

The report also goes on to speculate about how this is likely the first step of Marvel getting the character back fully, which is quite possible, and even that Disney may purchase Sony outright should it ever become available. I’d initially label that as speculation run a bit too rampant, but this is Disney we’re talking about. I’ll never doubt their purchasing power again.

There’s also no word about Drew Goddard‘s status, he who was supposed to direct Sinister Six and left Daredevil to do so. The Wall Street Journal (via ComingSoon) was reporting that Sinister Six will simply be delayed, but given the status quo shift and Kevin Feige‘s creative involvement in the new Spider-Man series, that seems unlikely.

Fans have clamored for years for Spider-Man to return to the Marvel fold, especially after The Amazing Spider-Man series began to crash and burn for Sony by its second entry. And now, your wishes have come true.

A new Spider-Man is debuting, and it’ll be in a Marvel Studios picture per The Hollywood Reporter.

I’ll let that settle in for a second.

The terms of the deal are that a new, rebooted Spider-Man (that won’t be Andrew Garfield) will debut in an unnamed Marvel Studios picture, believed to be Captain America: Civil War. In turn, Marvel head-honcho Kevin Feige will team up with Sony’s Amy Pascal to produce a new Spider-Man film for Sony and provide a new direction for everyone’s favorite web-slinger. This new film will debut on July 28, 2017.

Here’s Feige on the new deal:

Marvel’s involvement will hopefully deliver the creative continuity and authenticity that fans demand from the MCU. I am equally excited for the opportunity to have Spider-Man appear in the MCU, something which both we at Marvel, and fans alike, have been looking forward to for years.

Tellingly, long-time Spider-Man producer Avi Arad‘s name is nowhere to be seen.

Also, due to the new Spider-Man film date taking the slot that Thor: Ragnarok was slotted in for, Marvel’s Phase 3 line-up shifts a bit with the new schedule as follows:

Thor: Ragnarok – Nov 3, 2017

Black Panther – July 6, 2018

Captain Marvel – Nov 2, 2018

Inhumans – July 12, 2019

It’s time to get those fantasy casting lists for Spidey together, Marvel Studios just got its biggest name back.

As per usual, the Entertainment side of things often seems to a be little slow post-New Comic Book Day, but a couple of headlines have hit the wire that are worth noting:

– It was probably an inevitability, but Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal announced that she will be stepping down from her post and taking on a production role within the studio. While this is surely in response to the devastating Sony hack (which unveiled some very candid emails between Pascal, producers, and top talent), Sony has been in need of a correction course given their struggles of late to launch big picture franchises and the mishandling of the Spider-Man films. Regardless, Pascal leaves a heck of a resume behind her, and I’m sad to see one of the top female creative forces in Hollywood vanish under these circumstances.

– Does the idea of a Robotech movie excite you? After about 8 years of development purgatory, the property may finally see the light of day again. Warner Bros has enlisted 300 screenwriter Michael Gordon to tackle the project and according to Deadline, they have their eyes set on Mama director Andy Muschietti.

– Or how about a live-action Astro Boy? Despite the fact that we had an animated feature in 2009 that barely made a dent in the box office, Animal Logic Entertainment is teaming up with Tezuka Productions to bring Osamu Tezuka‘s creation to life yet again. Here’s what producer Zareh Nalbandian said the studio is aiming for:

We’ve seen him as a manga, an anime and an animated movie but we’ve never seen him as a live-action movie or him as a superhero. We actually see him in the same league as an Iron Man.

– Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) had long wanted to cast Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) as Wonder Woman in a proposed adaptation of the DC Comics property. Obviously, Warner Bros went another direction entirely, but that hasn’t stopped Refn from working with the actress as he’s cast her in another of his films. This time they’ll be teaming up for The Neon Demon, his first outright horror film, and she’ll be joined by Keanu Reeves, Jena Malone, and Elle Fanning among others. Hopefully it’ll be more appealing to audiences than Only God Forgives, a film that I’m one of the lone defenders of.

– Last night, the Visual Effects Society held their big awards ceremony and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes took home the award for Outstanding Visual Effects while Birdman took home the award for Best Supporting Visual Effects. Big Hero 6 was the talk of the night though, taking 5 awards in total including the award for Outstanding Animation.

By Davey Nieves

The pantheon of PlayStation has a rich library of quality games, but few have impacted the art of storytelling like the UNCHARTED franchise. Developed by Naughty Dog, the studio behind The Last of Us, the UNCHARTED series is this era’s Indiana Jones. The series protagonist, fortune hunter Nathan Drake has achieved mascot like status for the PlayStation brand. With the success of previous entries The Art of The Last of Us and The Art of Naughty Dog, Dark Horse Comics and Naughty Dog are launching The Art of the UNCHARTED Trilogy in April 2015.

The three games which spanned the life of the PlayStation 3 console fill this book with never-before-seen art from Naughty Dog spanning UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune, UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves, and UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception, with insightful commentary from the games’ creators, this epic volume is an incredible opportunity to own a piece of UNCHARTED history.

“With each UNCHARTED game we make we strive to set a new bar for video game art, design, and tech,” said Erick Pangilinan, art director at Naughty Dog. Over the course of the last decade there hasn’t been a game developer that has raised the bar with each outing like Naughty Dog. Combine this with Dark Horse Comics eye for building gorgeous bookshelf prize collections and this feels like a book that could itself be a treasure in the game’s history.

No word yet on whether or not The Art of The UNCHARTED Trilogy will have any glimpses at the series highly anticipated fourth console installment Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End which is also set to release sometime in 2015 on the PlayStation 4.

Available in April, The Art of the UNCHARTED Trilogy retails for $39.99 and can be preordered now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.

Take this report with a grain of salt until something is officially announced, but if it pans out, this could be the moment Spidey-fans have waited for:

Latino Review (possible spoilers at the link) is reporting that Marvel and Sony have worked out a deal that would land the film rights for Spider-Man back with Marvel, or at least in a temporary fashion for the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 in 2018. They also state that current Spider-Man actor, Andrew Garfield, would be replaced in the role.

This isn’t the first time that the two studios have been reported to be in discussion regarding the character. Back during the development of the first Avengers film, Marvel and Sony discussed having Oscorp Tower appear in the skyline of Manhattan as a small Easter Egg in the Joss Whedon-directed team-up. The production time-table prevented that from coming to fruition, but per emails received in the recent Sony hack, Marvel and the Spider-Man franchise’s current home continued discussions.

What we do know, again from those emails, is that Sony was planning a “Spidey-summit” this month to discuss their future plans for the character. If that summit already occurred, it’s possible that a deal could have been hammered out with Marvel immediately following. Or this could be all a lot of noise. It’s difficult for me to imagine that Avi Arad could be shaken from Spider-Man terribly easily, and as Devin Faraci reports, Arad and Marvel head-honcho Kevin Feige do not work well together.

Regardless, the idea of the character under the auspices of Marvel Studios is a much more promising development for Peter Parker and his fans, given how The Amazing Spider-Man 2 turned out. On the other hand, how many times can we be teased with this possibility?

UPDATE: Sony has denied the rumor. The teasing continues.

Feeling a little overwhelmed by the vast movie slates announced by Sony, Marvel and WB? So are we, but here’s a chart helpfully put together by our own Tireless Torsten Adair that will help you plan out the next six years of your life even more. There are approximately 69 superhero, comic book and animated movies coming to you over that time, which works out to nearly 11.5 movies a year! At $12 a pop… well, let’s just say I hope they have matinees near you.

Throw in that there are now so many comic-book based TV shows on that I don’t even have room to record them all—Walking Dead, Arrow, Gotham, The Flash, Agents of Shield and Constantine—and…well, it is either a Golden Age or a Golden Glut.

Today we look at the work of Aurélien Predal, Cartoon Brew's Artist of the Day!

Over at Badass Digest, Devin Faraci looks at Amazing Spider-Man 2 and it’s slightly disappointing box office returns. Yes yes, it has made $630 million globally, so it is hardly After Earth 2, but someone either at Sony or in an attempt to embarrass Sony leaked that they were expecting to make $1 billion worldwide…and

The global box office is harder to track across all five films; the global marketplace has exploded in the 12 years since the first movie was released. What we can do is see that the reboot made $752 million globally, and that Sony was feeling so confident in this new film that they in-house projected it to reach one billion dollars, that new global magic supernumber. I remember when a movie making $100 million domestic was a big deal – now that’s an opening weekend! One billion bucks is where it is when it comes to these mega-franchises. 

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will not make one billion dollars.

I think they’re going to back off the expanded universe idea. There’s barely an appetite for Spider-Man, so what interest is there in his villains? I want only the best for Drew Goddard, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Sinister Six, previously scheduled to shoot in January, sort of fades away. Sony needs to focus on The Amazing Spider-Man 3 first, and any good ideas that could have gone into a Sinister Six movie should get folded into the third film. In fact it seems absolutely bizarre to me that there was going to be a Sinister Six before The Amazing Spider-Man 3, considering what a shitty job The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did setting them up.

It seems that Fox—which controls the X-men and Fantastic Four film franchises— and Sony—which controls Spider-Man—have come to an agreement to create their OWN variant earth-2 Marvel Cinematic Universe, starting with a cut scene at the end of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2. Foreign viewers are already tweeting about it. I’ve greyed out the relevant info below.

The “Amazing Spider-Man 2″ opens today overseas, and fans are already buzzing on Twitter over its end credits. The Sony Pictures release concludes with a teaser for the upcoming “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” a new sequence that has been added since “Spidey 2″ premiered in London last week.

The montage, which features a blue Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, is meant to mimic the coda scenes that conclude the Disney and Marvel Pictures juggernauts, including “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which introduce new characters.

And yes, it’s a Fox-controlled X-character.

But is this REALLY the start of a titanic cross studio promotion? According to Variety a more prosaic contract detail is the cause. It seems SPIDEY director Marc Webb had a deal with Fox Searchlight, who only let him out of it to make Spidey for Sony on the condition that the movie promote the X-men for free.

So don’t expect to see Spidey in the FF any time soon. That’s ONLY for the comics, folks.

Amazing Spider-Man 2 opens on May 2.

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Sony has reportedly signed a deal to bundle the entire Harry Potter series with its next generation e-book reader.

The Harry Potter series will be available from the Pottermore.com site from October. However, the Register reports that from November, a bundle will be released featuring all seven books in the series, a letter from J K Rowling, a Pottermore subscription and a themed carry case.

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Disney debuted the TV movie ‘Phineas and Ferb: Across The 2nd Dimension’ on Friday (and the flick — based on the TV series of the same title — drew in an impressive 7.6 million viewers! It’s the top cable movie of the year so... Read the rest of this post

Sony has listed its e-book readers as out of stock on its website, raising speculation it could be on the verge of launching a new digital device.

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Today we bring you our weekly sampler of the cool youth media and marketing gigs. If your company has an open position in the youth media or marketing space, we encourage you to join the Ypulse LinkedIn group, if you haven't yet, and post there... Read the rest of this post

Today we bring you another installment of Youth Media Movers and Shakers. We've culled through industry publications looking for the recent executive placements we think you should know about. If you have executive news that you want us to highlight... Read the rest of this post