— Tesla It’s been a rollercoaster trying to follow the journey of Tesla’s $25,000 EV, and the company’s latest earnings call has thrown us for another loop. During Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call for 2024, Elon Musk explained that Tesla has accelerated the launch of its future vehicle lineup, which includes “more affordable models.” That may sound like he’s referencing the $25,000 model that was recently scrapped, but on closer inspection, we don’t think it will be. After all, an initial Reuters report and then one from Electrek corroborate that Musk had tabled this mass-produced, afforda ..read more

— Lais Borges/Inverse; Getty The Apple Watch had a lot of hopes pinned on it when it launched in 2015. Not only was the smartwatch the first proper device of the Tim Cook era at Apple, it was also an entirely new product category, suggesting the possibility of a post-iPhone future for a company that had come to be defined by it. Based on initial analyst predictions, Apple was expected to sell as many as 36 million units in the first year the smartwatch was available. When things were all said and done, Apple reportedly shipped less than half of that, only 11.6 million smartwatches. But even i ..read more

— Sony Pictures One thing has become increasingly clear about Saim Raimi’s Spider-Man movies: they don’t make ‘em like that anymore. That was certainly the feeling at the Spider-Man 2 screening at New York City’s AMC Empire, one of 467 locations where Sam Raimi’s 2004 superhero movie was re-released for a day. The crowd was buzzing with excitement to see the comic book masterpiece on the big screen again; one fan dressed as Spider-Man even got a few whoops and several shouts of “Do a flip!” That energy only grew stronger as the lights dimmed and the opening titles played. By the time Tobey Ma ..read more

— Robee Shepherd/Moment/Getty Images Video game researchers are attempting to preserve older games, but the Entertainment Software Association is refusing to sign on to their plan to make older games to be easier to access. Researchers were seeking an exemption to copyright law to make it easier to move out-of-print games to online archive for research and preservation purposes — and the ESA argued to block it. It’s still possible to move forward without the ESA’s help. The ESA’s comments came during a hearing with the U.S. Copyright Office over a proposed rule change that could allow researc ..read more

— Square Enix The Rising Tide gives Final Fantasy XVI fans one last adventure with Clive and company, and while it doesn’t change anything substantially in terms of lore and story, the same can’t be said for the game’s battle system. The DLC, as well as the game’s latest update, brings some massive changes to how battles play out, along with some much-needed quality-of-life improvements. The changes are drastic to the point where playing through FFXVI feels like a different, and better, experience than what was there at launch. Before diving into The Rising Tide, let’s cover FFXVI’s latest up ..read more

NASA’s Juno spacecraft recently spotted a glassy-smooth lava lake amid the volcanic hellscape of Jupiter’s moon Io. When Juno’s orbit swooped past Io last December, its cameras captured a mirrorlike reflection from a small patch of the moon’s surface. The strangely shiny landmark turns out to be a lava lake, covered with a thin crust of smooth, gleaming volcanic rock. The rock was probably something like obsidian, a natural glass that forms from cooling magma here on Earth. Known as Loki Patera, the lava lake stretches 127 miles long and is dotted with rocky islands, and its edges glow with h ..read more

— Lucasfilm The High Republic is the oddball of the Star Wars timeline, a whole separate era about the Jedi at their peak set centuries before the prequel trilogy. The prequel-to-the-prequel story has appeared in novels and comics, but now the upcoming Disney+ series The Acolyte is bringing it to the small screen. The Acolyte splits the difference between the novels and the prequel trilogy, as it’s set in the waning days of the High Republic, or about a century before The Phantom Menace. That makes it hard for characters from either side of the timeline to show up in The Acolyte, but an appea ..read more

— HBO With Fallout officially cleared for a second season, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy seem all-in on a new sci-fi world. That’s great for fans of the Amazon series, but for fans of the duo’s last collaboration, the ill-fated Westworld, chances of renewal are growing slim. Westworld ran for four seasons on HBO, but was canceled shortly after its last season wrapped and was later booted from the streaming platform. Season 4 ended on a more or less satisfactory note, but both Nolan and Joy have expressed interest in finishing the story they started. According to the creators, Westworld still ne ..read more

“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” This is the now-famous tagline of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film. Although the tagline was, of course, referring to the controversial subject matter of Vladimir Nabokov’s book, the same words could just as easily be applied to Amazon’s ambitious new video game adaptation: How did they ever make a TV series of Fallout? Although the world of Fallout may not be controversial, it is infinitely vast and, as such, practically unadaptable. Evolving over the course of nine games and more than two decades, Fallout sets the scene in a retro-futuristic world in w ..read more

— 20th Century Studios As the 1979 classic Alien returns to theaters to celebrate its 45th anniversary, and the forthcoming film Alien: Romulus plans to fill in the gaps between Alien and Aliens, the chest-bursting franchise is expanding as a TV franchise too. A new TV series from FX from showrunner Noah Hawley will serve as a a prequel to the entire Alien franchise — and it might just have shaken up the entire timeline once again. First comes the big question: Didn’t we already have an Alien prequel in 2012 with the Ridley Scott movie Prometheus? Didn’t Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) get impr ..read more