You'd think all the trailers for upcoming major films would have been released during San Diego Comic-Con last weekend. But Sony Pictures decided to wait until today to drop the trailer for Jumanji: Open World, director Jake Kasdan's sequel to his 2019 hit, Jumanji: The Next Level.

(Some spoilers for prior films in the franchise below but no major reveals.)

The original Jumanji film, released in 1995 and starring the late Robin Williams, was based on a 1981 children's book by Chris Van Allsburg. Critics were kinda meh on the movie, but audiences loved it, and it has since become something of a classic. The 2005 film Zathura was a standalone spinoff based on another van Allsburg book. While it didn't do nearly as well at the box office, it has held up well over the last 20 years and has its own small cadre of fans. There was also a forgettable animated TV series.

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Apple TV is fast eclipsing HBO as the go-to platform for prestige TV, especially science fiction, with standout fare like Slow Horses, Severance, Foundation, For All Mankind, Murderbot, Silo, Pluribus, and Widow's Bay, among others. Add the upcoming Neuromancer series to that list, an adaptation of William Gibson's hugely influential 1984 cyberpunk novel of the same name. The streaming platform released a short teaser during San Diego Comic-Con, and visually it looks fantastic, even based on one minute of footage.

Saturday's various SDCC panels also gave us a teaser for Prime Video's Carrie; trailers for Dark Matter S2 and Matchbox: The Movie; and a bit of Marvel casting news.

Fans of Gibson's book already know the Neuromancer story; we'll have to wait to see how closely the series will adhere to the novel. Per the official logline, the series "follows a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage with his partner, Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets." Callum Taylor, best known as Theseus Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts franchise, stars as Case, alongside Briana Middleton (The Inheritance) as Molly.

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It has been nearly five years since Ridley Scott first announced his plans for a TV spinoff of his sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner (1982) and the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049. It's finally here—or almost, anyway. Prime Video debuted the first teaser for the new 10-episode series, Blade Runner 2099, at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. We also got a teaser for the third season of Prime Video's Rings of Power and a new trailer for HBO's Lanterns.

Co-stars Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer (Euphoria) joined show runner Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) onstage for the big reveal, which also included an exclusive clip shown to the audience. Luisa told Entertainment Weekly that the series stays true to the original's "noir principles... and there's a mystery at the heart of the show that looks both forwards and backwards in terms of mythology." An uprising has occurred and the humans lost, which means they are now the hunted second-class citizens. "The show is really imagining what comes after us, and what does it mean to be human in a world where humanity is no longer relevant," said Luisa.

Per the official synopsis:

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Giovanni Kanter goes to at least one art museum whenever he visits a new city. That’s on top of his regular exploration of galleries in New York, where the 25-year-old ICU nurse lives and studies. He typically discovers new artists and gallery openings through word of mouth, though he has recently started curating his social media feed to serve relevant content (he’s currently in what he terms a “surrealism phase”).

He was raised on visual art; he's the son of painter Marianne Gargour and nephew of mixed-media artist Heather Hutchison and painter-printmaker Mark Thomas Kanter. His “exposure-oriented education” featured childhood visits to galleries and shows in and around Dallas, where he grew up, and in France, where he spent time with his grandparents.

But Kanter is an exception. Many other young people have a less immersive artistic education, perhaps shaped by occasional school trips or family visits to museums. If they haven’t internalized an instinct for what Kanter calls “moving through the art and absorbing it,” the museum experience is central to how they learn about and understand art.

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San Diego Comic-Con has kicked off strong, and we've got a couple of new trailers to show for it: the final trailer for Coyote vs. Acme, and the full trailer for director Zach Cregger's fresh take on Resident Evil. Some lucky folks were also treated to a screening of Resident Evil's first 18 minutes.

Coyote vs. Acme

We were thrilled when the first trailer for Coyote vs. Acme dropped in April. The film had been shelved for years and is finally getting the broad theatrical release it deserves thanks to Ketchup Entertainment, which acquired it from Warner Bros. The concept alone is sheer brilliance: Wile E. Coyote, after decades of ACME equipment failing him in his efforts to catch that darned Road Runner, decides to sue the corporation. It’s based on a well-known satirical piece by Ian Frazier (also titled “Coyote vs. Acme”) published in The New Yorker in 1990.

Per the official premise:

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The San Diego Comic-Con kicks off tomorrow, and DC Studios and Warner Brothers are setting the stage by dropping the first full trailer for Clayface, part of the DC Universe's "Gods and Monsters" arc.

The film started out as a Mike Flanagan project (he's the horror master who brought us The Haunting of Hill House, The Fall of the House of Usher, Midnight Mass, and Doctor Sleep, among other creepy delights). Flanagan said he was inspired by the 1992 "Feat of Clay" episode in Batman: The Animated Series, aspiring to create a film that combined body horror with a tragic thriller. DC Studios CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran loved Flanagan's pitch and brought the movie into their rebooted DCU.

Alas, Flanagan had to bow out of the project due to scheduling conflicts—he's a busy man these days—and James Watkins stepped in as director. But Gunn has said the final script retained Flanagan's original story, with Hossein Amini doing some rewrites. The film will feature the origin story of the Matt Hagen incarnation of Clayface, introduced to the DCU in the animated Creature Commandos series (Alan Tudyk voiced the character). Per the official premise:

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The Odyssey might be cleaning up at the box office at the moment, but in two weeks another mega-blockbuster hits theaters: Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings). Sony Pictures dropped one last trailer for this follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home, which is purportedly intended to launch a fresh trilogy of films with Tom Holland in the title role.

No Way Home ended on a pretty bleak note, with Peter Parker (Holland) asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya). Per the official synopsis:

It’s a Brand New Day for Peter Parker. Fighting crime full-time as Spider-Man in a world that doesn’t remember him—and the pressure of seeing his old friends move on without him—sparks a change in Peter he may not have the power to control. But that transformation might also be the only thing that can stop a shocking new threat to the city and those he loves–a powerful villain no one can even see. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker, but he hasn’t forgotten them.

Holland is reprising his role as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, along with Zendaya as MJ and Jacob Batalon as Peter’s former bestie Ned Leeds. The film also features Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle/Punisher, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk, Michael Mando as Mac Gargan/Scorpion (captured by Spider-Man in Homecoming), Marvin Jones III as albino crime lord Lonnie Lincoln/Tombstone, Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock/Daredevil (briefly Peter’s lawyer in No Way Home); Liza Colon-Zayas as detective Jean DeWolf; Eman Esfandi as MJ's new boyfriend; and Trammell Tillman as Bill Metzger of the Department of Damage Control (DODC) who is policing superpowered individuals.

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When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. It's one of the most famous natural disasters in human history, so naturally there have been countless documentaries about Pompeii (and at least one popular song). But only one features actor Tom Hiddleston taking on the role of a "time detective" to bring the people of Pompeii to vivid life. That would be National Geographic's new three-part docuseries, Pompeii: Out of Time.

The Marvel connection made Out of Time happen. Executive producer Kevin Wright was also a producer on the Disney+ series Loki, which included a scene where Hiddleston's Loki travels through time to visit Pompeii. Hiddleston also studied classics at Cambridge University and had visited the Pompeii archaeological site as a teenager, which the Marvel star attributes to indirectly influencing his career path into acting.

"There is just a passion to the way Tom tells stories that's infectious," Wright told Ars. "We knew that if we could capture that and put it into [the series], it might interest people who wouldn't normally want to watch a documentary about Pompeii. "

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With San Diego Comic-Con kicking off later this week, Marvel Studios has released the first official full trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, the penultimate film in the MCU's Phase Six and the end of the so-called "Multiverse Saga."

(Spoilers for prior relevant MCU films below.)

Marvel Studios originally planned to build its Phase Six Avengers arc (The Kang Dynasty) around Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror (and associated variants), introduced in Loki and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But then Majors was convicted of domestic violence, and Marvel fired the actor soon after. That meant the studio needed to retool its Phase Six plans, culminating in the announced return of the Russo brothers, who directed four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most successful films, which brought in more than $6 billion at the global box office.

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Kalshi is a high-tech prediction market that allows people to "forecast the future" (their term). It is about contracts and information, the company says, making its offerings more like a soybean futures contract than a round of blackjack or a pull on the one-armed bandit.

Still, prediction markets look a lot like betting if you squint, which is why states like New York have tried to regulate them under gambling laws. To head this off, Kalshi has sought federal protection under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Yes, this means regulation for Kalshi, but it also means the CFTC will sue states like Kentucky, Minnesota, Illinois, and Rhode Island, trying to pre-empt their laws in favor of a single national standard that the CFTC controls.

While this battle plays out, government insiders continue to generate insider trading stories after using their work knowledge to place bets "forecast the future" and make huge sums of money. The classic example, of course, was Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a US soldier who participated in planning the capture of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and then made $410,000 from that knowledge on the prediction site Polymarket. Van Dyke was arrested in April.

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Jurassic Park, while beloved as a film, has been the subject of snarky memes for the infamous line in which one of the characters declares, "This is a Unix system, I know this!" while using a computer with an unusual 3D file manager interface.

Despite the memes, the film's production team was meticulous in accurately sourcing the right PCs (and adjacent details) for the sets—not too much of a surprise, given writer Michael Crichton's background with computing and his obsessive attention to detail in the book the film is based on.

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New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who starred as Dr. Alan Grant in the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park and its 2022 sequel, Jurassic World Dominion, died on Monday in Sydney, Australia. He was 78.

While American audiences likely know Neill best for Jurassic Park, he had a long and varied career in film and television. His sheer versatility won him fans around the world. He played the grown Damien in Omen III: The Final Conflict; a Russian officer in The Hunt for Red October; and even made brief cameos (as an actor playing Odin in a theatrical troupe) in Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder. (The less said about 1997's space horror travesty, Event Horizon, the better, although it has its fans, and Neill made the most of his role.) Yet some of his best performances were in smaller, critically acclaimed independent films such as 1993's Oscar-winning The Piano.

On television, Neill earned his first Golden Globe nomination for the lead role in Reilly, Ace of Spies in the 1980s. He was nominated for both an Emmy and a second Golden Globe for playing the titular Arthurian wizard in the 1998 miniseries Merlin. He played Cardinal Wolsley in The Tudors, and was part of the ensemble cast in the (excellent) 2015 adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Neill was magnetic as the ruthless CI Major Chester Campbell in Peaky Blinders—an antagonist and romantic rival of Cillian Murphy's Tommy Shelby.

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When Warner Bros. showed new footage of its forthcoming satirical black comedy, Digger, at Cinemacon in April, industry insiders considered it a highlight of the event. The general public hasn't seen anything other than a title announcement and a teaser in May that largely provided a retrospective of star Tom Cruise's career, with just 30 seconds of footage from Digger tacked on at the end. But now we have the official trailer, and it certainly lives up to that earlier enthusiastic word of mouth. We're getting powerful Dr. Strangelove vibes, updated for our 21st-century times.

Digger is four-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu's (Birdman) first English-language film since 2015's The Revenant. The official logline is short and sweet: "The most powerful man in the world races to prove he's humanity's savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything." That disaster appears to be ecological in nature and involves a rapidly melting iceberg, as well as some nuclear waste.

Cruise is often at his best when he takes big creative swings and plays against type—the rage-fueled motivational speaker in Magnolia, for instance, or the over-the-top movie mogul in Tropic Thunder. He's almost unrecognizable in this new trailer as eccentric billionaire oil baron Digger Rockwell—wispy hair, potbelly, and all.

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The same question drives both the plot of Moana and decades of archaeological research: Why, after centuries of relative stability, did Polynesian voyagers suddenly begin settling islands thousands of kilometers away across the Pacific?

The latest Moana movie is a live-action adaptation of a Disney animated movie of the same name. While the films are fictional, they draw inspiration from the rich seafaring heritage of Polynesian peoples, whose ancestors undertook one of the greatest episodes of maritime exploration in human history.

New climate evidence may help us understand why they embarked on these voyages.

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We haven't seen much footage to date for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three, other than the broody and haunting extended teaser Warner Bros. dropped in March. But now we've got a shiny new trailer jam-packed with tantalizing hints of what to expect, and plenty of Easter eggs to delight avid book fans.

(Spoilers for first two films in the franchise below.)

As previously reported, in 2021’s Dune, we first met Frank Herbert’s iconic anti-hero, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). That film culminated in the brutal defeat of House Atreides by rival House Harkonnen, with Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), fleeing to the desert and taking refuge among the Fremen. Among them is Chani (Zendaya), whom Paul has been seeing in visions all along.

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Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. They don't need to use generative AI to cheat on exams; they could just learn the material. But they also tend to be competitive, ambitious, and overscheduled, so AI can look like an easy shortcut that makes more time in their lives for things that can't be done by a chatbot. When the pressure is on, which approach do they choose?

A new scandal at Brown University reveals that huge numbers of these students are likely to cheat.

Record scores

A recent survey of Princeton students found that 29.9 percent admitted to cheating with AI on at least one exam or assignment. But the situation at Brown gives us a better sense of what this kind of cheating looks like in one particular class—and just how much it may be substituting for actual learning. And we know all this because the blind economics professor at the center of it all, Roberto Serrano, is not letting it go.

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