Chris Pratt on new film Mercy: I asked to be locked into an executioner's chair Being locked barefoot in an executioner's chair sounds uncomfortable, but that is what Chris Pratt requested for his latest film, Mercy. More familiar as a wisecracking action hero in blockbusters like Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World, this role is quite a departure for him. He plays homicide detective Chris Raven, who's fighting for his life after being accused of murdering his wife. Raven is an alcoholic who wakes in the chair after a drinking binge, with just 90 minutes to convince an AI judge he's innocent, or he'll be executed immediately. The film is set in real time, so we see Raven defend his case - while enduring a crashing hangover.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leads the pack at this year's Game Awards with 12 nominations. The critically acclaimed role-playing game (RPG) is up for Game of the Year, as well as three entries in the best performance category. Other contenders for the top game prize this year are Death Stranding 2, Nintendo platformer Donkey Kong Bananza, indie games Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2, and medieval adventure Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. They will all compete at the event - the world's most-watched ceremony celebrating video games - on 11 December in Los Angeles, California. Organisers say there were 154 million livestreams in 2024, when platformer Astro Bot was named Game of the Year. What are the Game Awards?

The movie industry is associated with an elevated level of risk, which necessitates the use of automated tools to predict box-office revenue and facilitate human decision-making. In this study, we build a sophisticated multimodal neural network that predicts box offices by grounding crowdsourced descriptive keywords of each movie in the visual information of the movie posters, thereby enhancing the learned keyword representations, resulting in a substantial reduction of 14.5% in box-office prediction error. The advanced revenue prediction model enables the analysis of the commercial viability of "copycat movies," or movies with substantial similarity to successful movies released recently. We do so by computing the influence of copycat features in box-office prediction. We find a positive relationship between copycat status and movie revenue. However, this effect diminishes when the number of similar movies and the similarity of their content increase. Overall, our work develops sophisticated deep learning tools for studying the movie industry and provides valuable business insight.

In the 2023 blockbuster, Robots, Shailene Woodley and Jack Whitehall star as singletons who send robot'doubles' of themselves out on dates. While this might sound far-fetched, it could soon become a reality. Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech Summit, Herd, 34, claimed that daters could soon use an'AI dating concierge' to go out on hundreds of dates for them. 'If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your [AI] dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge,' she said. In the 2023 blockbuster, Robots, Shailene Woodley and Jack Whitehall star as singletons who send robot'doubles' of themselves out on dates.

A new top-grossing film that has received global recognition for its cinematic prowess is now being revered by the most successful director of the century. Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg recently proclaimed Dune: Part Two as a'visual epic' in a new interview, calling it'one of the most brilliant science-fiction films I've ever seen.' Spielberg said his favorite scene in the Blockbuster was watching Timothée Chalamet - who plays Paul Atreides - ride a sandworm. Spielberg has also lavished praise on Denis Villeneuve who directed both Dune films, saying Villeneuve's name will be added to the list of sci-fi filmmakers who have built incredible and unique worlds. 'You have made one of the most brilliant science fiction films I have ever seen,' adding that it'is truly a visual epic and it's also filled with deeply, deeply drawn characters,' Spielberg told Villeneuve in the Director's Cut podcast: Dune: Part Two cleared 82.5 million in its opening weekend, surpassing Oppenheimer which brought in 82.4 million. Since its release, the film has grossed nearly 240 million at the domestic box office and 570 million globally.

Steven Spielberg's wholesome sci-fi classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, became a cultural touchstone following its release in 1982. The film's hastily-developed (as in, "you have five weeks to get this to market") Atari 2600 tie-in game became a cultural touchstone for entirely different reasons. In his new book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, experimental game maker and assistant professor in design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Pippin Barr deconstructs the game design process using an octet of his own previous projects to shed light on specific aspects of how games could better be put together. In the excerpt below, Dr. Barr muses in what makes good cinema versus games and why the storytelling goals of those two mediums may not necessarily align. Excerpted from The Stuff Games Are Made Of by Pippin Barr.

Of all its characters, Nintendo is best represented by Kirby, a cutesy pink blob named after an intellectual property litigator. In 1983, John Kirby convinced a judge that Donkey Kong was not a trademark infringement of Universal Pictures' King Kong. The win helped pave the way for the company's wild success in the video game industry. Now, it is Nintendo that doles out the legal claims to protect its IP. The latest fan fixed in the hot glare of Nintendo's Sauronic eye also happens to be one of the most well-known.

Aliens, astronauts, time travel--you name it, there's a dazzling sci-fi film about it. That makes compiling a list of the best sci-fi nearly impossible. It's almost impossible to know where to start--or where to stop. To understand where sci-fi films came from, you need to head back to the dawn of the cinema age. Right at the beginning, Metropolis, released in 1927, used groundbreaking visuals to create a reference point for all future urban dystopias--it's no fluke, for example, that the aesthetic of Blade Runner bears more than a passing resemblance to Fritz Lang's prophetic city hellscape. Then along came War of the Worlds (1953), a gripping tale of alien invasion adapted from H. G. Wells' classic novel. In 1964, Dr. Strangelove did more than most films before or since to ossify the fear of a nuclear holocaust. Below is WIRED's ever-evolving selection of the sci-fi movies everyone should watch, from the obscure to the hugely influential. You may also enjoy our guides to the best sci-fi books of all time and the best space movies. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. When Alfonso Cuarón wrote the screenplay for Gravity, he wasn't setting out to make a film about space itself. Rather, he was interested in exploring the concepts of adversity and human resilience, with space as a secondary background. But it was hard for audiences to not be wowed by the visuals in this Oscar-winning film about two scientists (George Clooney and Sandra Bullock) who find themselves stranded in space, and what they must endure in order to get safely back to Earth.

On July 3rd, Tom Cruise will be sixty years old. The fact that he does not look it, at all, even in IMAX closeups so tight you can study the grain of his tooth enamel, adds a note of cognitive dissonance to "Top Gun: Maverick," the long-aborning sequel in which he's called back to mentor a squad of younger stick-jockeys who address him as Pops and Old-Timer until he wins their respect in the air. Even for a physical performer like Cruise, sixty is no longer an expiration date. Mick Jagger blew by that milestone in 2003, as did Sylvester Stallone in 2006, and, thanks presumably to healthy habits and/or medical technology dreamt of only by science fiction, they're both still out there, doing a version of the kind of thing they've always done. But the level of performance expected of a Rolling Stone or an Expendable is one thing, and the work that Tom Cruise appears to demand of himself is something else entirely.

Video game developers are champing at the bit ahead of an influx of money from some of the biggest technology companies in the world as they compete to build a "Netflix for games". At the centre of the contest are Microsoft and Sony, followed by less gaming-centric companies such as Apple, Amazon and Netflix who have all launched subscription services in an attempt to entice gamers on to their platforms. Microsoft has spent four years building up its flagship subscription, Xbox Game Pass, which offers unlimited access to more than 100 games for its Xbox family of consoles for a £10.99 monthly fee. In March, Sony announced plans to compete directly with Game Pass with a raft of changes to its PlayStation Plus service, which will eventually launch with 700 titles for £13.49 a month (or £99.99 a year), though largely focused on older titles. Alongside the two console manufacturers, a host of companies have launched similar services.